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Most Americans take clean drinking water for granted as a convenience of modern life. The United States has one of the world's safest drinking water supplies, but new challenges constantly emerge.

For example, on May 6 researchers at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University reported that 43 states have sites where water is contaminated with toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS. And many farm workers in California's Central Valley have to buy bottled water because their tap water contains unsafe levels of arsenic and agricultural chemicals that have been linked to elevated risks of infant death and cancer in adults.

As a scientist specializing in water quality, I believe water providers and regulators can't afford to be complacent. So I was distressed to hear EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler tout the quality of drinking water in the U.S. in an interview on March 20, 2019. "I want to make sure the American public understands 92 percent of the water everyday meets all the EPA requirements for safe drinking water," Wheeler said.

Let's do the math on that. Nationwide, 327 million Americans each drink two to eight glasses of water on average every day. If 8% of that supply doesn't meet EPA standards, that's up to 209 million unsafe glasses of water per day, or 2.3 billion gallons of water - enough to fill a quarter of a million bathtubs. In short, high compliance numbers do not mean everything is fine.

Aging and underfunded

For more than 40 years the Safe Drinking Water Act has provided a consistent set of national standards for monitoring and managing contaminants to ensure the safety of water. The Environmental Protection Agency develops these standards and works with states and water utilities to ensure that drinking water supplies conform to them. Thanks to rules implemented under the Safe Drinking Water Act in the 1980s waterborne disease declined in the United States but in recent decades has crept back up.

The EPA also provides funding to states and communities to monitor and test water supplies. This support is essential as the agency develops new standards and monitoring approaches for emerging contaminants, such as PFAS. However, the EPA's annual appropriations budget for water infrastructure has been virtually flat since 2000.

There are more than 151,000 public water systems in the United States serving residential communities, schools, office buildings, hospitals and other sites. It is especially challenging for small communities to fund infrastructure upgrades and monitor water quality. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the U.S. drinking water delivery system a D on its most recent infrastructure report card, based on the high number of leaks and the presence of both legacy contaminants like lead and new threats like PFAS.

Millions of violations every year

Nationwide, the fraction of all water systems in compliance with health standards has hovered between 90% and 93% since 2013. However, some key sources are doing less well. For example, at schools and daycare facilities compliance was only 90% on average from 2014 to 2019, and appears to have declined in the past several years.

And some regions are better-served than others. EPA data for the first quarter of 2019 show that the percentage of water systems in compliance ranged from 84% to 95%. The fractions of populations with access to water that met all national standards varied even more, ranging from 60% to 95%. EPA Regions 2 (New York and New Jersey) and 6 (New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Arkansas) had the poorest compliance records. In Region 2, nearly 12 million people were served by a system in violation of at least one federal regulation.

EPA

Sickened by tap water

What are the most common violations? Of the 10,083 systems that were in violation of a federal standard in 2015, 72% were based on the Total Coliform Rule or other microbial violations. This means that bacteria were found in the water, and that there was a potential for waterborne disease due to fecal contamination or inadequate treatment.

Researchers have estimated that as many as 32 million cases of waterborne disease occur nationwide every year. The most recent summary from the Centers for Disease Control of actual reported problems in community water systems found 42 outbreaks in 2013 and 2014, with 1,006 cases of illness, 124 hospitalizations and 13 deaths. For the water industry these events represent failures to fulfill its core mission, much like plane crashes for the aviation industry.

Climate change is producing more intense storms and flooding, which is significantly affecting water quality. Extreme precipitation and floods wash contaminants from sewage and animal manure into water supplies. It is clear that rainfall is associated with widespread transport of fecal contamination from humans and animals into rivers and lakes.

Grade: Incomplete

No other industry would accept an 8% failure rate, and I do not believe U.S. water professionals see that figure as acceptable. In my view, the first step is to put more resources into water supply monitoring and diagnostics that can detect emerging pathogens, such as protozoa and viruses.

Early work on the occurrence in water supplies of Cryptosporidium, a microscopic parasite that can cause gastrointestinal illness, eventually led to new rules for drinking water monitoring and treatment. Today, water utilities could identify whether fecal pollution was coming from humans or animals using new technologies and this would allow them to target impaired waterways before outbreaks occurred.

Another valuable step would be funding pilot and demonstration plants that could demonstrate new treatment systems' potential to reduce waterborne disease risks. For example, in Ohio a consortium of cities, consulting engineers and universities is assessing new treatment systems for combined sewer and stormwater discharges. Creating more such facilities would support innovation and adoption of promising new strategies.

Finally, I believe water providers and regulators should reaffirm their commitment to providing safe water whenever Americans turn on a tap or take a shower. A perfect score may be unattainable today, but even a 1% rise in compliance would make numerous Americans' lives safer and healthier. And investments in new water infrastructure can make 99.999% compliance achievable.

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The US drinking water supply is mostly safe, but that's not good enough

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Most Americans take clean drinking water for granted as a convenience of modern life. The United States has one of the world's safest drinking water supplies, but new challenges constantly emerge. For example, on May 6 researchers at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University reported that 43 states have sites where water is contaminated with toxic fluorinated compounds known as PFAS.

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America's Infant Mortality Crisis - Fault Lines

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David Ikard: The real story of Rosa Parks -- and why we need to confront myths about black history

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Black history taught in US schools is often watered-down, riddled with inaccuracies and stripped of its context and rich, full-bodied historical figures. Equipped with the real story of Rosa Parks, professor David Ikard highlights how making the realities of race more benign and digestible harms us all -- and emphasizes the power and importance of historical accuracy.

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Tonight the Tony Award is widely expected to belong to "Hamilton," the musical based on his life story. Mo Rocca tells us all about the hottest and most talked-about show on Broadway: (An earlier version of this story was originally broadcast on March 8, 2015.)
"How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore
And a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot
In the Caribbean, by Providence impoverished, to squalor
Grow up to be a hero and a scholar?"

When Lin-Manuel Miranda sings about the drive of the "young, scrappy and hungry" immigrant, he's not singing about just any immigrant. He's singing about the man on the 10-dollar bill -- Alexander Hamilton, the revolutionary, visionary, and youngest of the founding fathers.

"This is a guy who, on the strength of his writing, pulled himself from poverty into the revolution that helped create our nation, and caught beef with every other founding father," said Miranda. "I mean, there's great drama; there's a great love story; there is incredible political intrigue."

In other words, a life made for the stage.

When we first met Miranda, "Hamilton" -- the musical he wrote and stars in -- was still off-Broadway, at New York's Public Theater. Now it's a smash on Broadway, winner of a Grammy and a Pulitzer, and nominated for a record-breaking 16 Tony Awards.

And it's no exaggeration to say it's a cultural phenomenon.

The show tells the story of Hamilton's life, and death at the hand of Vice President Aaron Burr (played by Leslie Odom Jr.). And it's put to music that's as energetic as the man and the times he lived through.

"We take it as a given that hip hop music is the music of the revolution," said Miranda.

"Hey, yo, I'm just like my country
I'm young, scrappy and hungry
And I'm not throwing away my shot."

For Miranda, an urban sound made perfect sense for Hamilton's story.

"Is that because of the energy?" Rocca asked.

"It's because of the energy," said Miranda. "It's because the hip hop narrative is of writing your way out of your circumstances.

"I joked to someone else, I think all my favorite hip hop songs are really good musical theater 'I want' songs. I wanna get somewhere else. I wanna get my corner of the sky."

That certainly describes Alexander Hamilton. Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean and abandoned by his father, Hamilton was just 22 when he served as General Washington's aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War, and 34 when he became the country's first Secretary of the Treasury.

"I think that this is a classic immigrant story in terms of someone recognizing the opportunities in this brand new, turbulent, wide-open society," said Ron Chernow, who wrote the Hamilton biography that inspired Miranda.

"He's kind of the ultimate immigrant," said Rocca.

"He's the ultimate immigrant, and he's the original immigrant!" laughed Cernow. "I daresay he made the greatest contribution of any immigrant in the history of the United States."

Miranda's own parents came to New York from Puerto Rico.

"My father came here the same age as Hamilton," said Miranda. "He'd already graduated college by 18, and he came with a full ride for NYU's post-doc psychology program. Didn't speak English, and learned it here while he was studying. And writing this story has helped me understand him."

Much has been made of the fact that the cast of "Hamilton" neither sounds nor looks like the founding fathers. It is, said Miranda, "the story of America then told by America now. It looks like America now."

Phillipa Soo (left, of "Smash") plays Hamilton's wife, Eliza Schuyler. Eliza's sister, Anjelica, is played by Renee Elise Goldsberry (right, of "One Life to Live").

"My father, I told him that I was doing this, and he was like, ' Who are you playing?'" said Goldsberry. "And I said Angelica Schuyler. And then a couple days later, he was like, ' How are you playing Angelica Schuyler? Doing a little research and I'm a little confused!'"

This was a time when the political could get extremely personal. Here's Hamilton (who favored more federal power) debating Thomas Jefferson (who favored states' rights):

"If we assume the debts, the union gets
A new line of credit -- a financial diuretic
How do you not get it?
If we're aggressive and competitive
The union gets a boost. You'd rather give it a sedative?"

"The rap battles are, 'I think the country should be like this. You think the country should be like that. And if you win, our country goes to ruin.' It's incredible verbal dexterity that we get to employ," said Miranda.

"So it makes perfect sense that Hamilton and Jefferson are arguing about the role of the federal government in the form of a rap smackdown," said Rocca.

"Sixty seconds for Jefferson, sixty seconds for Hamilton. Cabinet response determines the winner!"

After Hamilton was slain by Aaron Burr in their 1804 duel, Alexander Hamilton was mourned as a hero, his life's journey as improbable as the musical written about him.

"The way I hold a $10 bill is different now because, like, that's my dude!" said Miranda.

For more info:

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Tonight the Tony Award is widely expected to belong to "Hamilton," the musical based on his life story. Mo Rocca tells us all about the hottest and most talked-about show on Broadway: (An earlier version of this story was originally broadcast on March 8, 2015.)

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DIY Hustlers: Six Young Entrepreneurs Turning Passion Into Business

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DIY Hustlers: Six Young Entrepreneurs Turning Passion Into Business

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DIY Generation: Young Hustlers | Newsbeat Documentaries

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U.S. Suicide Rates Are the Highest They've Been Since World War II

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U.S. suicide rates are the highest they've been since World War II, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analysis.

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Slavery in Louisiana: The Whitney Plantation Museum

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Slavery in Louisiana: The Whitney Plantation Museum

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The section of Louisiana's serpentine River Road that tracks along the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is known as "Plantation Alley." The restored antebellum mansions along the route draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

The newest attraction aims to give visitors a realistic look at life in the pre-Civil War South. Don't expect hoop skirts and mint juleps, but stark relics that tell the story of a dark period in American history, through the eyes of the enslaved.

From the entrance, Whitney Plantation in Wallace, La., resembles the other plantations, with majestic oaks framing the front walk to the French-Creole style "big house."

But before you can see the late-18th century home, furnished with period finery, a tour guide introduces you to the slaves who built it, and everything else, on this former sugar cane plantation.

The names of the 356 people enslaved on the plantation are etched in granite slabs on the Wall of Honor.

"It's overwhelming to see such names," says Avis Alexander Jessie of nearby Vacherie, La. She wonders if a name etched here - Alexandre, born 1851 - could be a relation. "Our ancestor's name could be on this."

She says the museum makes her think in a more personal way about the human toll of slavery. "The father was left behind. The kids were gone. These people raped these women," Jessie says. "It's just hard to think that your great-great-great grandfather or grandmother was into all of this."

In recent years, some of the popular antebellum plantations here have started to incorporate displays about slavery. But the Whitney is the first to design the visitor's entire experience around that history.

"What was the life of a slave from cradle to the tomb? You come here, you will learn about it," says Ibrahima Seck, academic director at Whitney Plantation.

A history professor from Senegal, Seck has written a book, Bouki Fait Gombo, about this plantation, founded by a German immigrant, Ambrose Haydel, in the 1700s.

Seck says Haydel bought his first slaves at the New Orleans slave market and the family had one of the largest slave forces in Louisiana.

Seck used household inventories to piece together biographical details of the slaves. They were recorded in the same way the plantation kept track of farm implements and other physical assets.

Vieux Gabrielle, a domestic in the big house, was born around 1790. "He was from the Congo, from Central Africa," Seck says. "In the inventories, they call him Vieux Gabrielle, which meant Old Gabrielle, because he lived on this plantation for about 50 years under four different masters."

Standing in front of the Wall of Honor, Seck says the names pay tribute to those whose work was never acknowledged while they were living.

"I imagine them coming at night here and saying, 'You see - my name is here! My name is here!" Seck says. "This is a way of taking these people back to life."

John Cummings, who is white, owns the Whitney. He's been working to create the slavery museum since the 1990s, when he bought the 1,700-acre property from a petrochemical firm. A New Orleans trial lawyer, he's spent millions on artifacts, research and restoration.

"Let's hope with the cutting of this ribbon, we cut ties with everything that's evil and we can start again," Cummings said as he opened the property to the public late last year.

On a tour of the grounds in a golf cart, we pass the working blacksmith shop, a high-roofed French Creole mule barn and slave quarters. Not all the buildings are original to the Whitney; Cummings has moved in property from other historic sites, including slave cabins, a rusty steel jail and an African-American church founded by freed slaves.

Some preservationists question taking artifacts from their original setting, but Cummings isn't concerned. He says the goal is to re-create an authentic slave experience.

"I may be doing something wrong. I may be taking wrong steps," he says. "I think it's important to take a step. If you're going to lead, you gotta lead."

He's commissioned stark artwork, including realistic statues of slave children. In months to come, there will be busts of beheaded slaves mounted on posts, as they were after a 19th century slave revolt.

"What we're trying to do is to start the dialogue again as if it was 1865," Cummings says.

Cummings says he was inspired to turn the Whitney into a slavery museum after reading the slave narratives collected by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. He says Americans have a hard time talking honestly about the legacy of slavery.

"If we can demonstrate that there is a hangover from slavery, they will then understand exactly what happened, and what obligation we [have] as a nation," he says. "Maybe not as individuals - we didn't own slaves. But as a nation, what is it that we can do to right some of the wrongs?"

Felton Hurst and his family, from New Orleans, were among the first visitors to the new museum.

"Really, it's amazing," Hurst says. "I love it." His wife, Marilyn, is from Wallace and grew up hearing stories about the plantation.

"A lot of people who were sharecroppers here in my family ... worked the plantation," she says. "So I'm kind of glad to be here. It's very neat."

Their daughter Alea Hurst, 28, says "it sort of feels to me a gift and a curse." She's struck by the small size of the slave quarters - two-room wooden shacks that would house two families, eating, sleeping and living all in the same tight space.

"It's a gift because I'm here to experience what happened then," says Alea Hurst. "But the curse is what happened in the past."

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New Museum Depicts 'The Life Of A Slave From Cradle To The Tomb'

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The section of Louisiana's serpentine River Road that tracks along the Mississippi between New Orleans and Baton Rouge is known as "Plantation Alley." The restored antebellum mansions along the route draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. The newest attraction aims to give visitors a realistic look at life in the pre-Civil War South.

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Poverty and the Fight for a Living Wage in America

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Poverty and the Fight for a Living Wage in America

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Can video games help improve hand-eye coordination? Can they help train your brain and improve your cognitive abilities? WIRED Senior Editor Peter Rubin tests his skills against a pro sports gamer to find out if gaming can improve your brain and body.

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Tech Effects: How Video Games Impact You

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Can video games help improve hand-eye coordination? Can they help train your brain and improve your cognitive abilities? WIRED Senior Editor Peter Rubin tests his skills against a pro sports gamer to find out if gaming can improve your brain and body.

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Many smartphone users get 80 or more notifications a day. WIRED's Lauren Goode examines how all those notifications are affecting us, what to do about them, and how we even ended up with so many in the first place.

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Many smartphone users get 80 or more notifications a day. WIRED's Lauren Goode examines how all those notifications are affecting us, what to do about them, and how we even ended up with so many in the first place.

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Building the Alaska Highway | Article

Race and the Army During World War II

When the U.S. military decided to assign three African American engineering regiments to the Alaska Highway project, it departed from its usual segregationist policies. Since the Civil War, African American and white units had been kept separate, with African American units serving under the command of white officers.

African American troops line up, National Archives

Racist Era
The military's view toward African Americans during World War II reflected that of the wider American culture. According to a report commissioned by the Army War College, African Americans were "careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive" and "unmoral and untruthful." Commanding officers were instructed to "handle" their African American subordinates "with praise and by ridicule." The accepted viewpoint of the day was that African American soldiers were not equally capable as -- and would require more intensive leadership than -- their white counterparts. Furthermore, the military believed black soldiers were unsuited to serve as officers.

Tight Control
Stereotyping and discrimination meant that most African American soldiers were never placed in active combat roles; they were assigned mostly to labor-intensive service positions with little responsibility. They were often issued less equipment and fewer supplies than their white counterparts. On the Alaska Highway project, the military took steps to position African American troops away from towns and cities in order to control the reactions of locals.

Pearl Harbor Hero
During the Second World War, however, African Americans found opportunities to defy these biases. One such example occurred on December 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese. Serviceman Dorie Miller dragged his commanding officer to safety and, bereft of any formal combat training, manned a machine gun, shooting down several Japanese planes. Miller was awarded the Navy Cross for his bravery on May 27, 1942, becoming one of the first recognized heroes of World War II.

Tuskeegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen broke through another of the military's barriers. During World War II, the United States Air Force began training African Americans to be pilots. The Division of Aeronautics of Tuskegee Institute, the school once led by Booker T. Washington in Tuskegee, Alabama, ran the training. By war's end, nearly 1,000 African Americans had graduated from the Tuskegee Institute program; half of these graduates saw combat.

Battle of the Bulge
Combat brought another opportunity to African American soldiers between December 1944 and January 1945, when the U.S. Army desegregated its units for the first and only time during World War II, at the Battle of the Bulge. Roughly 2,500 African Americans fought alongside white soldiers to repel the Germans in a wintry, miserable sequence of weeks. In the aftermath of the battle, the integration effort was well received, and the African American soldiers were evaluated as having done "well."

Official Recognition
By the end of the war, more than 695,000 African Americans were serving in the U.S. military. African American soldiers constantly felt the need to prove themselves, to gain respect at home. "There was a real belief that by shedding one's blood, one could achieve first-class citizenship," explained historian Alvin Schexnider. The integration of the forces during the Battle of the Bulge and the employment of African American engineers on the construction of the Alaska Highway, among other events, helped prove African Americans' abilities, leading eventually to President Truman's depression of the military in 1948.

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Race and the Army During World War II | American Experience | PBS

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When the U.S. military decided to assign three African American engineering regiments to the Alaska Highway project, it departed from its usual segregationist policies.

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The Great Migration: Black Americans Move North 

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The Great Migration: Black Americans Move North 

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Sound Smart: The Great Migration | History

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Vaccinations: Why Deadly Diseases Are Returning

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Vaccinations: Why Deadly Diseases Are Returning

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Diseases that were largely eradicated in the United States a generation ago-whooping cough, measles, mumps-are returning, in part because nervous parents are skipping their children's shots. NOVA takes viewers around the world to track epidemics, explore the science behind vaccinations, hear from parents wrestling with vaccine-related questions, and shed light on the risks of opting out.

Aired: 09/10/14

Expires: 12/31/20

Rating: TV-PG

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Vaccines-Calling the Shots | Season 41 Episode 14 | NOVA

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Diseases that were largely eradicated in the United States a generation ago-whooping cough, measles, mumps-are returning, in part because nervous parents are skipping their children's shots. NOVA takes viewers around the world to track epidemics, explore the science behind vaccinations, hear from parents wrestling with vaccine-related questions, and shed light on the risks of opting out.

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How Mistakes Lead To Scientific Discovery 

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How Mistakes Lead To Scientific Discovery 

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Transcript of "The secret to scientific discoveries? Making mistakes"

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TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: Phil Plait was on a Hubble Space Telescope team of astronomers who thought they may have captured the first direct photo of an exoplanet ever taken. But did the evidence actually support that? Follow along as Plait shows how science progresses -- through a robust amount of making and correcting errors.

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How Simple Ideas Lead To Scientific Discoveries

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How Simple Ideas Lead To Scientific Discoveries

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Adam Savage: How simple ideas lead to scientific discoveries

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Adam Savage walks through two spectacular examples of profound scientific discoveries that came from simple, creative methods anyone could have followed -- Eratosthenes' calculation of the Earth's circumference around 200 BC and Hippolyte Fizeau's measurement of the speed of light in 1849.

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What is the cost of India's deadly air pollution?

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Counting the cost of air pollution in India and protests in Hong Kong. Plus, Norway's response to climate change.

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How Phone Apps Are Helping People Survive Natural Disasters

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How Phone Apps Are Helping People Survive Natural Disasters

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The number of disasters worldwide has quadrupled since 1970. In 2018 alone, there were over 3,100 floods, storms and other extreme events according to the World Disasters Report. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found that between 1998 and 2017 a staggering 91% of all major recorded events were climate-related disasters.

Climate change and global warming intensifies extreme weather events, and these events are further exacerbated by human actions. In 2004, the Tropical Storm Janine hit Haiti and killed over 800 people - the severity of the destruction caused by a combination of deforestation and flooding that happens when there is not enough vegetation to assist soil in absorbing rainwater.

Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that recent hurricanes - such as Katrina, Irma, and Maria - rained 5 to 10 percent more water due to the warmer atmosphere. In the past year, northern California experienced wildfires with increasing intensity destroying homes and lives, fueled by high temperatures and extended periods of drought.

From 2005 to 2015, extreme weather events have caused an staggering $1.4 trillion in damages and have affected 1.7 billion people worldwide, putting global economies and communities at risk. However the damages caused and people affected by disasters are not evenly distributed across the globe.

Disasters not only disproportionately affect vulnerable communities living in areas with less infrastructure, safety networks, and access to resources, but they also widen economic inequality. Vulnerable communities with less political power and financial resources are less able to recover after disasters, often receive less federal relief, and experience more mortality and economic losses.
How can mobile apps help?
With natural disasters the "new normal" around the world, mobile technologies have become an important lifeline before, during and after catastrophic events.

A new breed of mobile disaster apps are being developed and deployed, complementing and improving the way federal and local agencies prepare for and deal with emergencies. Although having mixed user reviews, these applications demonstrate the potential of mobile technology in minimizing casualties, and improving recovery efforts during disasters. For example:

The American Red Cross offers a suite of apps for emergencies, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes, providing location-specific information, alerts and support during disasters

FEMA Mobile App launched in 2016 by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) provides weather updates, alerts, real-time safety tips and directions to local resources like shelters

Ready-for-Wildfire app launched in 2016 by CAL Fire, the agency charged with preparing and responding to Californian wildfires, provides checklists to prepare for and evacuate from wildfires, as well as wildfire alerts

I-REACT app launched in 2018 and funded by the European Commission, provides a free disaster-resilience app to help citizens prepare for floods, fires and extreme weather events

Meena Palaniappan, the founder of a technology startup Atma Connect, is an environmental engineer who came to using mobile phones in disasters through a circuitous path. While working on water and climate change in India, she noticed how mobile phones were becoming ubiquitous, yet technology for social good projects were rarely reaching large scale. The first app Atma Connect launched in 2014 was a neighborhood peer-to-peer water price sharing platform.

Meena Palaniappan (2nd from the right), CEO and Founder of Atma Connect, conducts human centered ... [+]
Atma Connect

Users immediately asked for the app to broaden its focus, and during flooding in Jakarta in 2015 people used the AtmaGo mobile app to share safe routes through the city, the location of government shelters, and to warn locals to watch out for signs of waterborne diseases in children. AtmaGo's social network has now reached over 2.5 million people in Indonesia who are using it to prepare for, respond to and even prevent the next disaster.

After a 7.5 magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Sulawesi, Indonesia on September 28, 2018, causing more than 1,700 deaths and displacing over 70,000 people from their homes, local residents turned to their mobile phones and AtmaGo to alert and support friends, family and neighbors. Ella Naila offered her home as a temporary command center on AtmaGo to host almost 50 humanitarian workers. Thousands saw posts about how to get food, water and healthcare.

"With climate related disasters on the rise, the time to focus on resilience is now. What is incredible is the role social media like AtmaGo is playing in reducing mortality and morbidity from disasters, and helping communities organize garbage clean-ups and tree and mangrove plantings that reduce the severity of disasters", says Deon Nel, CEO of the Global Resilience Partnership.

Social connectedness is a surprisingly undervalued tool for resilience to disasters. Communities with robust social networks have been shown to have fewer deaths and bounce back quicker from disasters. For example, during 2011's Tsunami in Japan communities with more ties, interaction and shared norms worked effectively to provide help to kin, family and neighbors. "Being connected to your neighbors is a powerful resilience tool that is underutilized. We are trying to change that", says Palaniappan.

In an age of increasing disasters, weather events are affecting large numbers of people, in remote and dangerous areas, who need resources fast and efficiently. Mobile technology can connect survivors with aid, map crisis situations and send early warnings to those who are usually missed. "Technology has been playing a powerful role in preparedness and recovery from disasters," says Peter Tavernise, Executive Director of the Cisco Foundation. "After a disaster, communication is one of the most important needs, and mobile apps and network communications are helping to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of response, ensuring people get their vital needs met in the days immediately after disasters hit."
So what?
Although mobile apps should not replace old fashion communication, they are an increasingly important in protecting vulnerable communities during climate disasters, which are increasing in frequency and severity. Mobile apps can enhance connections among communities helping to minimize the impacts, damages and fatalities from natural disasters.

In 2019, estimates show that the number of mobile phone users worldwide will approach 5 billion. Even though differing levels of mobile access and literacy can make it difficult to coordinate efforts using mobile technology alone, mobile communication is fast proving to be an effective and efficient way to reach, inform and connect human beings when a disaster inevitably comes.

According to Daniel P. Aldrich Professor at Northeastern University, "resilience - the ability to recover from shocks, including natural disasters - comes from our connections to others, and not from physical infrastructure or disaster kits". But it take efforts for us to make these connections, whether in-person or digitally. Ultimately the connections you create with your neighbors may just be what saves your life, or the life of others.

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A Surprising Solution To Surviving Natural Disasters: Mobile Apps

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The number of disasters worldwide has quadrupled since 1970. In 2018 alone, there were over 3,100 floods, storms and other extreme events according to the World Disasters Report. The United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction found that between 1998 and 2017 a staggering 91% of all major recorded events were climate-related disasters.

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Zipcode Destiny: How Where You're Born Affects Your Educational Outcomes

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Zipcode Destiny: How Where You're Born Affects Your Educational Outcomes

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The stories we tell about ourselves - stories of success and stories of failure - often have their beginnings in the distant past. Sometimes, they start in our childhoods. Sometimes, before we were even born.

This idea may sound poetic, but when it comes to economic mobility, there's evidence to back it up. Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard, is responsible for some of the most powerful evidence, drawing on data from many millions of Americans.

Raj has found that early variables in your life, from the quality of your kindergarten teacher to the neighborhood you grew up in, can have lasting effects. And those effects often result in dramatically divergent outcomes in different parts of the country.

"People ask... is the American dream alive or not today? And I actually think the question itself is sort of ill-posed," Raj says. "The term 'the American Dream' --really we should think of it as 'the Iowa Dream' or 'the Atlanta Dream' or 'the California Dream' because there's so much variation within this country."

Today we ask some questions that carry big implications: can you put an economic value on a great kindergarten teacher? How is it that two children living just a few blocks from each other can have radically different chances in life? What gives Salt Lake City an edge over Cleveland when it comes to offering people better prospects than their parents? The state of your American Dream, this week on Hidden Brain.
Additional Reading: The Opportunity Atlas
"How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence From Project STAR," Raj Chetty, et. al.

"The Impacts of Neighborhoods on Intergenerational Mobility I: Childhood Exposure Effects" by Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren

"Mobility Report Cards: The Role of Colleges in Intergenerational Mobility" by Raj Chetty, et. al.

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There's a core belief embedded in the story of the United States - the American Dream. Today we look at the state of that dream as we revisit our 2018 conversation with economist Raj Chetty. We'll ask some questions that carry big implications: can you put an economic value on a great kindergarten teacher?

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7 Kids, 1 Apartment: What Poverty Means To One Teen

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7 Kids, 1 Apartment: What Poverty Means To One Teen

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Jairo Gomez is 17 years old and lives in a tiny apartment in New York City with eight other family members. He has grown up in poverty, like one-third of all kids in the city. With WNYC's program Radio Rookies, Gomez tells the story of how poverty has held him back, and how he's trying to overcome it.

There are nine of us in my family, and we live in a one-bedroom apartment. I share a bunk bed with my sister Judy.

"It's just so stuffed," Judy says. "We don't have enough space for seven kids."

I've seen articles posted on Facebook about how unlikely it is to get out of poverty, how poor people usually stay poor. If I don't get an education, I'll be stuck like my parents.

On the floor we have two mattresses side by side, where three of my other sisters sleep. You have to step toe to heel to get out of the room.

"All we actually need is like a big closet," Judy laughs.

My mom, step-dad and the two youngest ones sleep in the living room.

My mom cleans other people's houses. When she gets home, she keeps on cleaning and takes care of my sisters and brother.

I used to think of my family as middle class, but after my parents split up, my mom had four more kids.

"The truth is I haven't looked it up in the dictionary, the word 'poor,' " says my mom, who speaks only Spanish. "To me, poor is when you don't have enough for soup or a roll of toilet paper."

During my freshman year in high school, I wore ripped jeans, and my sneakers had holes in them. It was kind of embarrassing, but I still didn't think I was poor.

I asked my mom to do the math, and she said right now, my family makes $30,000 a year. According to the federal government, we're $15,000 below the poverty line.

That kind of scares me. I've seen articles posted on Facebook about how unlikely it is to get out of poverty, how poor people usually stay poor. If I don't get an education, I'll be stuck like my parents.

But I haven't always been able to make school my priority. When I was younger, I felt like a robot. All I did was go home and help baby-sit and clean. I never had that freedom before - to be able to hang out and skate with my friends. So in ninth grade, I started cutting every day.

Then, when I was in the 10th grade, for the second time my mom started asking me if I could stay home from school to watch the kids. If I said no, most of the money she would make would go to a baby sitter.

I failed every class that year. That made me finally realize that if I ever wanted to graduate, I needed to be in school. I switched to a transfer school, and my first trimester, I got perfect attendance. I told my mom I wasn't going to take care of the little ones anymore.

"At first I felt annoyed, like, 'How could this kid dare to say that to me?' " my mom says, "when I feel that I try my best to give what's necessary. But then I thought about it, and I thought, 'Maybe I'm not doing my job right. I'm not providing enough.' "

Hearing her say that makes me feel selfish, especially since now my sisters are stuck at home every day.

"Sometimes I wish, like, yeah, you would stay home and, like, help," Judy says.

Judy is 14. She and my older sister, Sarahi, who is in college, are always home baby-sitting, cleaning up after my little sisters and helping feed them.

"I don't want to put this all on Mom," Judy says.

Sometimes I feel like I blame my mom too much for having more kids than she could afford. She's always telling us we're lucky because we'll have each other to go to. But when we still had two of our sisters in diapers, and the pregnancy tests came out positive again and again, Judy, Sarahi and I were like, "I'm not washing the bottles this time."

I asked my mom why she had so many of us.

"With each pregnancy, I accepted it and let it happen," she says. "And I felt happy, but I never thought, 'This son I'm gonna have, I'm gonna educate and motivate to become a doctor, or this daughter I'm going to have I'm gonna motivate to become a lawyer.'

"The job of the mother is to feed and clothe them, to give them love, when maybe I didn't have time to give them each enough love," she adds.

It gets me mad that my mom works so hard. And there are people out there who are just born into it. They make money like nothing. They don't have to clean houses, wake up early, drain themselves.

I know I should be thinking about going to college when I graduate if I don't want that life, but I'd have to stay at home to afford it. Nine of us in a one-bedroom apartment, no privacy, one bathroom and toys everywhere. I don't know if I can make myself do it.

Now I'm working 13-hour shifts, making food deliveries on a bike. Honestly, I'd rather do that and earn money for my own place. We're told, "If you work hard, you'll get results." But for my family, there haven't been any results - just survival.

Produced by Courtney Stein and edited by Kaari Pitkin for All Things Considered.

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7 Kids, 1 Apartment: What Poverty Means To This Teen

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Jairo Gomez knows the importance of school, but his home life leaves him struggling to stay focused. "If I don't get an education, I'll be stuck like my parents."

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Three Men Who Escaped Poverty Help Young People Do the Same

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Three Men Who Escaped Poverty Help Young People Do the Same

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Paul Collins-Hackett sits in Albany's Youth Opportunity Office trying to guide a teenage boy through the ins and outs of getting a job.

"This is the part that I don't shut up about," he instructs the young man. "If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late. If you're late, you might as well not show up."

The young man nods his head in agreement. Collins-Hackett is a little like a big brother - encouraging but direct.

When the teen mentions why he wants the job - to help his mother pay her bills so "we're not getting kicked out of houses all the time and moving around a lot" - Collins-Hackett leans in even closer.

"I completely respect that struggle," he tells the teen. "My father passed away when I was 3 and my mother's blind. So I've always been superpoor and having to help out with bills and stuff like that. So the fact that you have all those people that you're helping and you're just rising to the occasion? Go, brother. However I can help, let me know, please."

A recent study found that teens growing up in Albany's poorest neighborhoods face some of the toughest conditions in the country: crime, inadequate housing, missing parents.

So several adults - people, such as Collins-Hackett, who work for the city and nonprofits in the area - have been using what they learned from their own struggles growing up to help these kids survive and, hopefully, thrive. These efforts by individuals can sometimes have an outsized impact in that fight against poverty.

Collins-Hackett's boss, Jonathan Jones, is another one of these mentors. He credits his single mother's persistence for getting him where he is today: the city's commissioner of recreation, youth and workforce services.

"I've been part of every government program you can think of," he says, adding that his mother pushed him to take advantage of every academic opportunity he could.

Now, Jones points to a mural on the wall of the office he runs. It was painted by a teen whom he mentored, a 17-year-old gang member.

"This is him walking up his steps in order to become me, or a person in a suit," Jones says.

The mural depicts a young man - his pants hanging below his bottom - leaving behind a gun, a knife and a needle, and heading up the stairs toward a man with his arm extended. At the top, the word "success" is painted in bright orange, surrounded by pictures of a house, a car, a diploma and symbols for the phrase "peace of mind."

Does Jones know where the young man is now?

"Nobody knows," he says, but he's not too bothered by that. " 'Cause I know I had an impact. He won't forget this," says Jones, adding that you have to do what you can and hope for the best.

Research shows there are many factors that can help break the cycle of poverty: good schools, access to health care, safer neighborhoods. But there's no magic solution. Sometimes, it's just a combination of things or an encounter with the right person or having the experience.

While Jones had a strong mother pushing him along, Justin Gaddy had very little adult supervision growing up.

"I was really deep into violence, you know, that was my thing," he says from his office a few blocks away from Jones' office. Gaddy got so deep into gangs and guns that in his late teens, he was convicted on federal racketeering charges and faced the possibility of life in prison.

But he got a lucky break. When he was sentenced, he got only six years.

"That made me think, somebody's on my side," Gaddy says. It was just the nudge he needed to start turning his life around. Now, years later, he's an outreach worker for an anti-violence group called SNUG, which stands for Should Never Use Guns. Gaddy tries to stop neighborhood teens from making the same mistakes he did.

Like Collins-Hackett and Jones, Gaddy thinks it's crucial that the kids he deals with recognize that he knows exactly what they're going through.

"Like I went through the same thing," he says. "I say, 'Look at me now.' I would have never thought I'd be where I'm at right now. I got here by taking this route, and this is how we can help you."

In SNUG's case, this means redirecting them from the streets into sports, jobs and other activities.

All three men realize they can't help everyone. But they know from their own experiences that those kids they do help might someday succeed and inspire somebody else.

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'Somebody's On My Side': 3 Men Who Escaped Poverty Help Others Find A Way Out

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Paul Collins-Hackett sits in Albany's Youth Opportunity Office trying to guide a teenage boy through the ins and outs of getting a job. "This is the part that I don't shut up about," he instructs the young man. "If you're early, you're on time. If you're on time, you're late.

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The United States does not stack up favorably when compared to other nations with advanced economies when it comes to childhood poverty worldwide, according to a new report, which considered factors such as the lack of access to quality food, high adolescent birth rates and a child dropping out of school.

Out of 175 nations, the U.S. ranks 36 th - far behind Singapore, Slovenia, Norway, Sweden and Finland, which round out the top five - and just behind Bahrain and Belarus in the report produced by the advocacy group Save the Children.

"We are just above Russia, Kuwait and Bosnia," says president and CEO Carolyn Miles. "So I wouldn't say that the United States is doing terribly well as far as childhoods."

The report looks at so-called childhood enders or "events that rob children of their childhood and prevent them from reaching their full potential," including things like displacement due to war, gender bias, child labor and child mortality.

There are three childhood disruptors that account for why the U.S. ranking is relatively low, says Miles, "One was our infant mortality rate, which is by global standards, pretty high. The second was the teen pregnancy rate, which, although it's getting better in the United States, it's still, again, globally quite high," Miles says.

"And then the third was the number of children that are actually victims of homicide in the United States."

In total, the report estimates more than 1.2 billion children worldwide are at risk of missing out on childhood.

Though, the report does say there is welcome news when comparing numbers last year to this year.

"The index finds the overall situation for children appears more favorable in 95 of 175 countries." In 40 other countries, however, "conditions appear considerably worse."

Poverty in the U.S.

Included in the report is a U.S. component that focuses on rural poverty in America, which the report calls "an emergency."

According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly a quarter of children growing up in rural America were poor in 2016, compared to slightly more than 20 percent in urban areas.

It was a southwestern state, Arizona, according to the report, that had the highest rural child rate of any state, with 36 percent.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the report found the highest concentrations of child poverty, overall, in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia and on Native American reservations.

Looking at poverty, regardless of geography, research released last year from progressive-leaning Center on Budget Policy Priorities found that child poverty in the United States fell to a record low in 2016, to 15.6 percent. That's down from 28.4 percent in 1967.

"The robust progress against child poverty is largely an unheralded development. So is the role of government programs in driving this progress," the authors of the report wrote at the time of its release.

Danilo Trisi, one of those authors, says the drop in child poverty was due in large part to the federal safety net programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, formerly known as food stamps, and the earned income tax credit help low-income families make ends meet.

"At the same time, the U.S. doesn't do as much as other countries to protect children from poverty," Trisi says.

When child poverty is compared across wealthy countries and before taking into account government assistance programs, he says, there's not that much difference between child poverty in the U.S. and child poverty in the well-off nations.

"But because those countries have a stronger safety net, fewer children [in those countries] live in poverty."

In recent months, Save the Children and other western charity organizations have been the subject of sexual misconduct allegations. As NPR reported in April, Sir Alan Parker resigned his post as chair of Save the Children International. The move came on the heels of "accusations of inappropriate behavior leveled against former leadership."

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Report: Rural Poverty In America Is 'An Emergency'

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A report by Save the Children finds the U.S. ranks 36 out of 175 nations when it comes to child poverty. Within the U.S., nearly a quarter of children growing up in rural America were poor in 2016.

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As Temperatures Rise, Poor Often Feel It Most

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As Temperatures Rise, Poor Often Feel It Most

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When Shakira Franklin drives from West Baltimore to her job near the city's Inner Harbor, she can feel the summer heat ease up like a fist loosening its grip.

"I can actually feel me riding out of the heat. When I get to a certain place when I'm on my way, I'll turn off my air and I'll roll my windows down," says Franklin. "It just seems like the sun is beaming down on this neighborhood."

Franklin isn't imagining that. Her neighborhood, Franklin Square, is hotter than about two-thirds of the other neighborhoods in Baltimore - about 6 degrees hotter than the city's coolest neighborhood. It's also in one of the city's poorest communities, with more than one-third of residents living in poverty.

Across Baltimore, the hottest areas tend to be the poorest and that pattern is not unusual. In dozens of major U.S. cities, low-income neighborhoods are more likely to be hotter than their wealthier counterparts, according to a joint investigation by NPR and the University of Maryland's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism.

Those exposed to that extra heat are often a city's most vulnerable: the poorest and, our data show, disproportionately people of color. And living day after day in an environment that's literally hotter isn't just uncomfortable, it can have dire and sometimes deadly health consequences - a fact we found reflected in Baltimore's soaring rates of emergency calls when the heat index spiked to dangerous levels.

According to a Howard Center analysis of U.S. census data and air temperature data obtained from Portland State University and the Science Museum of Virginia, the hottest neighborhoods in Baltimore can differ by as much as 10 degrees from the coolest.

And Baltimore is not an extreme case. NPR analyzed 97 of the most populous U.S. cities using the median household income from U.S. Census Bureau data and thermal satellite images from NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey. In more than three-quarters of those cities, we found that where it's hotter, it also tends to be poorer. And at least 69 had an even stronger relationship than Baltimore, the first city we mapped.

This means that as the planet warms, the urban poor in dozens of large U.S. cities will actually experience more heat than the wealthy, simply by virtue of where they live. And not only will more people get sick from rising temperatures in the future, we found they likely already are.
"Before I knew it, I was gasping for air"
In the summer of 2018 in Baltimore, when the heat index reached 103 degrees - the threshold deemed dangerous by the National Weather Service - EMS calls increased dramatically citywide for potentially fatal heat stroke. But calls increased for chronic conditions too: EMS calls for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD) increased by nearly 70%. Calls for respiratory distress increased by 20%. Calls for cardiac arrest rose by 80%. And those for high blood pressure more than doubled. Other conditions also spiked: psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, and dehydration, among others.

The heat affected residents citywide, but even when controlling for income by looking only at the patterns of Medicaid patients, there were differences across the city. From 2013 to 2018, Medicaid patients in Baltimore's hottest areas visited the hospital at higher rates than Medicaid patients in the city's coolest areas. The low-income patients in the city's hot spots visited more often with several conditions, including asthma, COPD and heart disease, according to hospital inpatient and emergency room admissions data from Maryland's Health Services Cost Review Commission.

In the Franklin Square neighborhood of West Baltimore, Shakira Franklin knows the link between heat and health all too well. She says her asthma is triggered by heat.

On a Saturday in July, Franklin says she was making the same drive she often makes from her home to the city's harbor. A heat wave was gripping the city, with temperatures reaching 100 degrees and above. Franklin says she normally tries to stay inside on days like that, but she had to get to work. That's when she had her first asthma attack in nearly five years.

"Before I knew it, I was gasping for air. It doesn't even take me 10 minutes to get from home to my other job. Just like that," says Franklin, who says an attack feels like drinking water through a pinched straw.

"Your windpipe is that straw and that water is the breaths you can take," Franklin says. "You're trying to bring your air through as much as you can."

Doctors in emergency departments near Baltimore's hotter neighborhoods say they prepare each summer for an increase in heat-related conditions.

"A lot of times the heat played a factor in making a chronic condition acutely worse," says Dr. Amit Chandra, chief of emergency medicine at the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus. He says that's especially true for cardiovascular conditions.

"The worse your circulatory system is, the worse you are at getting cool," says Chandra, who is also a faculty member at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. A weak or damaged heart might struggle to pump extra blood to the skin so heat can radiate off the body. Even sweating, which also gets rid of heat by evaporation, can put stress on the heart.

Respiratory conditions can become aggravated too, in part, because heat can actually worsen air quality and because conditions like asthma and COPD can be triggered by high heat and humidity.

Chandra says even looking at patients' medical records wouldn't necessarily tell the full story of how heat could be harming their health.

"We wouldn't diagnose them at the end of the day with heat exhaustion or heat stroke necessarily unless their temperature went up," Chandra says. "So there's probably quite a few folks that are affected by the heat, and we're not really tracking or measuring."

Regardless of where they live, people in poverty are more vulnerable to many chronic conditions, including some made worse by heat, like asthma and heart disease.

"Our patients are plagued by poverty, substance abuse and unfortunately some of the patients don't have great access to health care," says Dr. Reginald Brown, chair of emergency medicine at Bon Secours Hospital Baltimore in West Baltimore and a faculty member at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

"As far as the impact [of heat] to our patients, it's just another thing that complicates their lives," he added.
The urban heat island
Cities in general tend to be hotter than their natural surroundings, thanks to a phenomenon known as the urban heat island.

"If you have less green cover, you will almost always have higher temperatures, and greater exposure to heat," says Brian Stone, director of the urban climate lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Trees provide shade, but they also cool the environment down through the evaporation of water from their leaves - a process similar to how humans sweat to cool down.

"When you pave over an area, particularly if it had green plants, you have interrupted that cycle," Stone says. "Not only have you sealed the surface, you have put a lid on it, so evaporation cannot happen."

Pavement - particularly if it's black - absorbs heat and holds it in. At night, a city of more than 1 million people can be as much as 22 degrees warmer than its surroundings. Even the buildings themselves, Stone says, can create a sort of canyon that traps heat.

Given these elements, Stone says it makes sense that many low-income areas are hotter than richer areas.

"Lower-income parts of the city tend to have less green cover," Stone says. "That's something that we see across a lot of cities."

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It's also not unusual, Stone says, for poorer areas to be located near "undesirable land uses" such as nearby highways or industrial areas, which create even more heat.

The pattern of who lives closer to those sources of heat is not just a matter of poor versus rich, it is also often a matter of black and brown versus white. Nationwide, many of the low-income communities NPR found to be hotter - often with fewer trees, more concrete and closer to highways and factories - are also communities of color.

"It wasn't just a coincidence that communities of color end up in some of the most undesirable places," says Miya Yoshitani, executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network, which focuses on environmental justice issues affecting working-class Asian and Pacific Islander immigrant and refugee communities.

Yoshitani explains that policies like redlining - a practice, beginning in the 1930s and banned by the Fair Housing Act in 1968, in which neighborhoods were marked high risk for mortgage lenders in large part based on their racial makeup - forced people of color into less desirable areas. In Baltimore, the city's hottest neighborhoods, many of which are predominantly African American, still line up fairly consistently with the neighborhoods marked "hazardous" on a 1937 map created by the Home Owners' Loan Corp.

"People of color, African American communities, indigenous communities in the beginning and then immigrant communities as they came to the United States were not given a choice about where they could live, where they could raise their families, where they could work," Yoshitani says. "Those choices were made for them and that legacy continues today."
"They can't escape it"
In the majority of the cities NPR mapped, poverty was linked to heat, adding a second layer of risk to an already at-risk population. This is not only because poverty itself is a health hazard, but because poverty is also tied to other factors that can make it harder to get cool.

"People with money, of course, can do that a lot better than people with less money," says Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

He says no one is immune to climate change, but wealthier people can more easily control their exposure to heat by using air conditioning - which on its own contributes to climate change - or even by moving to a cooler part of the city.

"On the other hand, the folks with less money, they're going to be in their one home. And they're going to have to deal with the conditions in their one home," Benjamin says. "If they're going to be in an area where it's real hot, they're going to have to find other ways to adapt, but they can't escape it."

The urban poor, already often in hotter environments and already at higher risk for health problems, will have a harder time escaping climate change.

"It is the most significant public health problem that we have. It's going to be here for a long time. And it's getting worse," Benjamin says.
"This is ours"
There are strategies to cool down a city: investing in public transit, designing roofs that reflect sunlight, and planting more trees, among others.

In Baltimore, the city is working to combat urban heat. The government has installed cool roofs, turned vacant lots into community green space and strategically planted and maintained trees in low-income neighborhoods, among other initiatives. But the city's own arborist told the Howard Center that Baltimore is not on track to meet its goal of increasing the tree canopy to 40% by 2037.

"We're doing a lot with a little," says Anne Draddy, the city's sustainability coordinator.

The neighborhood where Shakira Franklin lives has increased its tree canopy over time. But by 2015, it still was among the city's lowest. Franklin says she's not optimistic the city will be able to cool down her neighborhood anytime soon.

"The city has a lot of responsibility. And I think that we would be close to the bottom of the list to be honest," she says.

There's a grassy vacant lot near her apartment where Franklin often takes a break from her job as a landscaping crew supervisor at Bon Secours Community Works, a nearby community organization owned by Bon Secours Health System.

It's one of the few places in the neighborhood with a lot of shade - mainly from a large tree Franklin calls the mother shade. She helped come up with the idea to build a free splash park in the lot for residents to cool down in the heat. Now Bon Secours is taking on the project.

"This was me taking my stand," Franklin says. "I didn't sit around and wait for everybody to say, 'Well, who's going to redo the park?' "

Daniel Greenspan, an architectural fellow working on the project, says they're about halfway to their current fundraising goal - with plans to buy the lot from the city.

On a hot Saturday this summer, Bon Secours and the neighborhood's community association threw a party in the lot. Children ran through streams of water from a pop-up fountain, while adults discussed and voted on potential designs for the new park.

"Our kids, they deserve it," says Franklin, who has two children. "I just feel like it's a long time coming to just have something to say that we built this here for us. This is ours."

Franklin says the park would become a refuge for people who can't escape the heat - and it will indeed be a place to cool off in this neighborhood. But worldwide, heat waves are getting hotter and more frequent, and the past five years have been the hottest ever recorded.

Methodology
To determine the link between heat and income in U.S. cities, NPR used NASA/U.S. Geological Survey satellite imagery and U.S. Census American Community Survey data. An The software also downloaded thermal imagery for each city from NASA's Landsat 8 satellite, looking for days since 2011 in June, July and August when there was less than 4% cloud cover. NPR reviewed each of the satellite images and removed images that contained clouds or other obscuring features over the city of interest. In cases when there were multiple clear images of a city, we used the thermal reading that showed a greater contrast between the warm and cool parts of the area of interest. In cases where there were no acceptable images, we manually searched for additional satellite images and found acceptable images from Landsat 8 for every city except for Hialeah and Miami, Fla., and Honolulu, which are frequently covered by clouds. For each city, NPR aligned the satellite surface temperature data with the census tracts. For each census tract, the software trimmed the geography to only what is contained within the city of interest's boundaries, then removed any lakes, rivers, ocean, etc. It calculated a median temperature reading for each census tract. When all of the tracts in a city were completed, it calculated a correlation coefficient (R) of the tracts to find the relationship between income and heat. The satellite data measure temperature at a surface, such as the ground or a rooftop. We used this measurement rather than ambient temperature, which measures the air about 2 meters above the ground. Measuring air is a more accurate measure of how people experience heat, but satellite data are more widely available than air temperature data. Using that data allowed us to provide a more complete snapshot of temperature trends across many cities. View NPR's full data and code on Github. To determine the relationship between heat and poverty in Baltimore, the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism used block-by-block temperature data showing variations in Baltimore's urban heat island captured by researchers at Portland State University and the Science Museum of Virginia on Aug. 29, 2018. For each "community statistical area" in Baltimore, the Howard Center computed a median temperature and joined it to a U.S. Census American Community Survey data set with the poverty rate for each area and then calculated the correlation coefficient (R). NPR's Nora Eckert and Nick Underwood; and the Howard Center's Sean Mussenden, Roxanne Ready and Theresa Diffendal contributed to this report. open-source computer program developed by NPR downloaded median household income data for census tracts in the 100 most populated American cities, as well as geographic boundaries for census tracts. NPR combined these data with TIGER/Line shapefiles of the cities.

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As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most

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When Shakira Franklin drives from West Baltimore to her job near the city's Inner Harbor, she can feel the summer heat ease up like a fist loosening its grip. "I can actually feel me riding out of the heat.

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Why Poor Neighborhoods Suffer From More Environmental Problems

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Why Poor Neighborhoods Suffer From More Environmental Problems

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A strange convergence led to this essay. While driving, the song "One In Ten" by UB40 cycled on my playlist. It is one of my favorite songs and chronicles the perspective of a person living in poverty. The song prompted me to think about recent pushback to a proposed waste station by residents in the county where I reside. Residents of the relatively affluent segment of the county slated to host the facility put forth spirited resistance. This is not surprising and certainly illustrates natural instincts of people to say "not in my backyard" or "it will harm my property values." People instinctively protect their own interests. However, the unfortunate truth is that some segments of our society are better positioned to mobilize, gather legal resources, and articulate their opposition. The "One in Ten" that UB40 were singing about are often not so fortunate, and this has led to a disproportionate number of waste facilities, petrochemical factories, and hazardous dumping in low-income or marginalized communities. This is why the field of environmental justice (EJ) evolved. What is environment justice?

To answer the question, I must start with Dr. Robert Bullard, Distinguished Professor at Texas Southern University. He is considered by many (and me) to be the father of the environmental justice movement. Bullard's website provides an appropriate definition:

Environmental justice embraces the principle that all people and communities have a right to equal protection and equal enforcement of environmental laws and regulations....Today, zip code is still the most potent predictor of an individual's health and well-being. Individuals who physically live on the "wrong side of the tracks" are subjected to elevated environmental health threats and more than their fair share of preventable diseases....Reducing environmental, health, economic and racial disparities is a major priority of the Environmental Justice Movement.

While I have long been familiar with Professor Bullard, my first hand experience with environmental justice issues came from a collaboration with my colleague Professor Nik Heynen at the University of Georgia. Heynen, who studies political ecology and environmental justice issues, asked me to collect air quality data in a small community located in Gainesville, Georgia. Through this effort, I became aware of the Newtown Florist Club (NFC). This excerpt from the Southern Changes website at Emory University notes:

Following a deadly tornado that ripped through Gainesville in 1936, segregated housing for black residents was built on a landfill beside the railroad tracks. Industrial development burgeoned in close proximity. Formed by women of Newtown in the 1950s, the Florist Club started with members caring for the sick and buying flowers for community funerals. Through the turbulent 1960s and 70s, the Florist Club members became vocal leaders for civil rights and community improvement. By early 1990, members of the Club realized that many in the community had been dying from the same kinds of cancer and from lupus. Suspicious, they began canvassing the neighborhood, taking family histories and piecing together a puzzle that remains unsolved.

The story of the Newtown Florist Club is one of many around the nation. These facts and statistics paint a picture of the scope of the environmental justice problem:

Mustafa Ali, one of the founders of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Environmental Justice, resigned in 2017 after his budget was essentially "zeroed" out. In his resignation letter to then EPA Administrator Scott Pruit, Ali said:

I would be remiss if I did not point that while we have made great strides in protecting air, water, and land for most of our citizens, there are still many disproportionate environmental impacts occurring in our most vulnerable communities. Communities of color, low-income communities and indigenous populations are still struggling to receive equal protection under the law. These communities both rural and urban often live in areas with toxic levels of air pollution, crumbling or non-existent water and sewer infrastructure, lead in the drinking water, brownfield from vacant former industrial and commercial sites, Superfund and other hazardous waste sites......

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan became a high profile example of an environmental justice issue. It is as much a story about poverty and race as it is water quality. The sad reality is that for every Flint, there is a Newtown Florist Club fighting to be heard also.

The residents in Gwinnett can claim victory. The request for the waste facility was withdrawn. I resonate with a desire not to have such facilities in our "own backyards." However, I also hope that the facility or future "undesirable" infrastructure that supports all of our lifestyles does not end up in a marginalized community that has no resources to fight back.

... Read More

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'Not In My Backyard' - Environmental Justice 101

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A strange convergence led to this essay. While driving, the song "One In Ten" by UB40 cycled on my playlist. It is one of my favorite songs and chronicles the perspective of a person living in poverty. The song prompted me to think about recent pushback to a proposed waste station by residents in the county where I reside.

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Child poverty in the U.S. could be cut in half over the next 10 years with a few simple steps, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The cost would be high - at least $90 billion a year. But the National Academies report warns that the price of not doing anything would be far greater.

The group estimates that current levels of child poverty cost the U.S. between $800 billion and $1.1 trillion a year, due to lower productivity when poor children become adults and increased costs due to higher crime and poor health. Individual children also suffer, because they face lower educational achievement, maltreatment and other obstacles related to growing up poor. In the end, the panel says, the whole country pays the price.

"Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are the foundation of any well-functioning and prosperous society, yet in this regard the future of the United States is not as secure as it could be," says the report, which was released after a two-year study commissioned by Congress. It was conducted by a nonpartisan panel of poverty experts, primarily academics.

To fix the problem, the panel suggests two possible packages. The first would expand existing programs that encourage work but also provide direct assistance. This would include increasing the earned income tax credit and child and dependent care tax credits for working families, and expanding housing vouchers and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, also known as food stamps.

The panel says that these changes would cost about $90.7 billion a year but would bring about 400,000 people into the workforce and cut the childhood poverty rate in half within 10 years.

The second suggestion is to expand the earned income and child care tax credits, raise the minimum wage and eliminate restrictions on immigrant families' access to government aid. The package also would provide a $2,700 yearly allowance for each child. This package would cost $109 billion a year but create some 600,000 jobs, while also cutting the child poverty rate in half.

The panel estimates that in 2015, 9.6 million children - or 13 percent - lived in poverty. Two million of those children were in "deep poverty," which means their families had resources that fell below half the poverty line. In 2015, that line was $26,000 for a family of four.

The poverty rate for children in immigrant families was twice as high as for those living in nonimmigrant families - 21 percent compared with 10 percent. Poverty among black and Hispanic children also was more than twice as high as for non-Hispanic white children, according to the National Academies calculations.

The big question is whether Congress will accept the panel's suggestions. The trend in recent years has been to cut or limit government assistance for the poor, and the Trump administration has indicated that its next budget will call for steep cuts in domestic spending.

The panel also found that some conservative initiatives intended to reduce child poverty - such as programs to promote marriage and family planning - showed little evidence of working. It also found that programs requiring aid recipients to work did not seem to reduce child poverty either. In fact, the report concludes, "It appears that work requirements are at least as likely to increase as to decrease poverty."

The Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pushed for mandatory work requirements in a number of aid programs, including Medicaid, SNAP and housing assistance.

Marla Dean, executive director of Bright Beginnings, a program in Washington designed to help homeless children and families achieve self-sufficiency, testified before the panel. She says, at the very least, the report could help shape the future debate over how to reduce child poverty by providing rigorous academic research on what does and doesn't work. But she's also realistic about the prospects of achieving a lot when the country is so divided politically.

"It is an opportunity [for] hope," she says, "and that's what I think this report offers is hope."

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Report: Child Poverty Could Be Cut In Half Over 10 Years, At A Hefty Price

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Child poverty in the U.S. could be cut in half over the next 10 years with a few simple steps, according to a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The cost would be high - at least $90 billion a year.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday became the latest governor to place a statewide moratorium on executions - part of what appears to be a nationwide trend of states moving away from the death penalty, especially in the West, experts say.

Newsom, a Democrat, has called the death penalty a "failure" that discriminates against minorities and people from poor communities who cannot afford expensive legal representation.

President Donald Trump voiced opposition to the move on Twitter, citing an argument made by opponents who say Newsom's move goes against a 2016 ballot measure Californians narrowly approved to streamline and speed up the legal process in death penalty cases by limiting appeals and expanding the pool of lawyers who are authorized to take on the cases.

Nevertheless, Newsom's decision appears.

Here is where states stand now, and how the nation is shifting.

Where is the death penalty legal?

Capital punishment has been abolished entirely in 20 states. Another four, including California, have moratoriums in place.

Michigan was the first state to get rid of the death penalty in 1846, and Washington became the most recent state to abolish capital punishment when the state Supreme Court struck down the law last year.

Though capital punishment isn't outlawed in most states, Texas far outpaces all other states in the number of executions it has conducted in the last 50 years. Since 1976, Texas has executed 560 people, according to The Marshall Project.

Virginia and Oklahoma have conducted the second and third-highest number of executions at 113 and 112, respectively. But even those states are performing fewer executions today than they have in the past.

People can also be given the death penalty for federal crimes, but that is more rare. The most recent federal execution took place in 2003, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, a group that gathers and disseminates data relating to the death penalty.

How moratoriums are used

Moratoriums have traditionally been used as a way to pause the debate surrounding the death penalty and study the issue more deeply. In the past, states have created task forces or commissioned reports that they then use as fodder for reforms or for banning the practice altogether.

From 1967 to 1977, there was a nationwide de facto moratorium on the death penalty at the state level as the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on the issue. In 1972, the court ruled the death penalty, as it was being used by the states and the federal government, was unconstitutional.

"When one third of any policy is at a dead halt, that is a strong indicator that there are very serious problems."

But states soon changed their laws to comply with the ruling and in 1977, Utah became the first state to reimplement the policy with the execution of Gary Gilmore.

More recently, governors have begun to issue moratoriums on their own, without direction from the courts. In 2000, then-Gov. George Ryan, R-Ill., temporarily halt executions in the state. The governors of Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington later followed suit.

Eleven years after a moratorium was implemented in Illinois, the state legislature abolished the practice entirely in 2011. Bruce Rauner, a Republican who served one term as governor starting in 2015, proposed reinstituting the death penalty last year, but his plan has not gained traction.

In Washington state, the moratorium continued until the state Supreme Court struck down the death penalty law last year, calling it "arbitrary and racially biased." The court's opinion cited a number of reports that analyzed who was most likely to be sentenced to death.

With California's decision, about a third of all death row prisoners are now in states with moratoriums.

"When one third of any policy is at a dead halt, that is a strong indicator that there are very serious problems," said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

Who receives the death penalty?

In California, as well as other states, there has been an increased focus in recent years on who is most affected by the death penalty.

The perpetrator is more likely to receive the death penalty in cases that involve a victim who is white. Three-quarters of the victims in all death penalty cases nationwide are white; when looking at all murder cases nationally, that number is 50 percent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Minorities also disproportionately receive the death penalty. In 2016, 42 percent of prisoners on death row were black, according to a Department of Justice report, though African Americans make up about 13 percent of the total U.S. population. Of the 20 people executed nationwide in 2016, 18 were white and 2 were black.

However, nearly 95 percent of prosecutors in states where the death penalty is legal are white, according to an analysis from the Death Penalty Information Center. Ninety-eight percent of prisoners given the death penalty are male.

United Nations human rights experts have also argued that the death penalty disproportionately affects people from poorer communities because they are more likely to be targeted by police and less likely to be able to afford legal defense.

Death row cases can also clog up the prison system. California, for example, has 740 people on death row, more than twice as much as any other state. But California has only carried out 13 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978 after the nationwide moratorium.

Dunham said part of the reason for the relatively low number of executions compared to the number of people on death row is the state's shortage of public defenders who are trained for capital murder cases.

What do Americans think of the death penalty?

Public support for the death penalty has waned significantly in recent decades, according to the Pew Research Center.

In 1996, 18 percent of American opposed the death penalty for people convicted of murder, and 78 percent were in favor of it. Now, 39 percent oppose it, while 54 percent support it.

A recent Gallup poll also found about 49 percent of Americans think the death penalty is "applied fairly," compared to 45 percent who think it is applied unfairly. About 29 percent of Americans say it is applied too often. A higher proportion - 37 percent - think it is not applied enough.

However, support for the death penalty has increased slightly in the last two years, after reaching a four-decade low in 2016.

The issue is also increasingly partisan. In 2018, 77 percent of Republicans were in favor of the death penalty, compared to just 35 percent of Democrats. In 1996, the gap was much smaller, said Jocelyn Kiley, an associate director of research at Pew. Eighty-seven percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats supported the death penalty at that time.

Men are also more likely than women to favor the death penalty, as are older Americans compared to those younger than 30 years old.

What's causing the decline in executions?

Even in states where the death penalty is still legal, lawmakers have taken steps to change who can be given the death penalty and how executions are conducted.

While some states have taken steps to encourage prosecutors to seek the death penalty for crimes against law enforcement, many other changes have made the death penalty more restrictive.

A few years ago, states began seeing a shortage of lethal injection drugs because companies and governments in Europe did not want to be associated with executions. States began using alternatives, leading to botched executions. The publicity-and public backlash-surrounding those executions led to some states passing laws that restrict which drugs can be used.

Alabama recently changed its law to prevent judges from overriding a jury and issuing the death penalty.

And while a majority of the public still supports the death penalty as an option in some instances, both judges and Americans sitting on juries appear to be less willing to recommend the death penalty in specific cases. In 2018, only 41 death sentences were given out - the fourth year with fewer than 50 sentences issued, and only a fraction of the more than 300 death penalty sentences given during the peak in the 1990s.

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How states are slowly getting rid of the death penalty

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday became the latest governor to place a statewide moratorium on executions - part of what appears to be a nationwide trend of states moving away from the death penalty, especially in the West, experts say.

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The Death Penalty in the USA | Nick McKeown | TEDxLosGatosHighSchool

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Ray Krone is the 100 th inmate exonerated from death row since it was reinstated in 1976.

He spent more than 10 years in jail, and two of those years on death row with all of its restrictions, humiliations, and isolation - as an innocent man.

'When we put someone to death, we're saying that we don't believe in Christian orthodoxy.'

As an honorably discharged military veteran and a postal worker with no prior record, his conviction was a surprise to him and his family. Prosecutors in Krone's case argued that a bite mark on the victim's chest belonged to him. It was later found that the first expert to study the bite mark said it was not a match. DNA evidence exonerated Krone, who for 10 years had maintained his innocence.

"Before I was sent to death row I didn't have much of an opinion on it," Krone told Sojourners. "Now I know that if they can put me on death row they can put anyone there."

Krone now works with Witness to Innocence alongside Sister Helen Prejean and other death penalty abolitionists.

This week, Sojourners and Death Penalty Action, are organizing a virtual teach in about present-day death penalty abolitionists, and joining the Abolitionist Action Committee for a vigil and fast at the Supreme Court building from June 29 to July 2. These two events, focusing on biblical principles, aim to educate the public about why the death penalty is an inherently flawed approach to justice.

"The more you know about it the less you like it," said Abraham Bonowitz, co-director of Death Penalty Action. "We want to show people how the death penalty has failed us as a public policy."

The death penalty has taken many forms in the United States justice system. Its controversial existence has spanned centuries oscillating between support and resistance.

Since 1976, there have been 1,455 executions in the U.S; 2,902 people sit on death row today.

Although studies show that support for the death penalty is decreasing, 49 percent of Americans are still in favor of capital punishment.

For Christians, interpretations of what the Bible says about capital punishment vary significantly. But many Christian leaders - from mainline Protestants and Catholics to evangelicals - take a strong stance against capital punishment.

"When we put someone to death, we're saying that we don't believe in Christian orthodoxy - we believe in the orthodoxy of violence," Jeff Hood, author of The Execution of God: Encountering the Death Penalty, told Sojourners.

Hood, a Dallas-based activist, pastor, and anti-death penalty activist, works with people on death row in Texas. He believes state-sanctioned killing - and Christian support for it - is a "perversion of Christianity and the message of Jesus," and calls those who have been executed "martyrs of violence and martyrs of our heresy."

Mark Osler, a legal scholar and former federal prosecutor agrees with Hood's assessment - and his belief about the ineffectiveness of the death penalty stems from his direct experience.

"Within the Christian faith there is such potential to do work on the death penalty because at the center of the faith is a wrongful execution," said Osler, author of Jesus on Death Row: The Trial of Jesus and American Capital Punishment.

'The death penalty has failed us as a public policy.'

Osler recalled the moment he began to realize how Jesus' story directly affects death penalty action: while taking communion at a Baptist church in Waco, Texas.

"I realized this is the last meal of someone who is about to be executed," Osler said. "The same way the accused murderer is bad, to Christians, Jesus is unbelievably good - and we don't put ourselves in his place."

Heather Beaudoin, the evangelical outreach specialist for Equal Justice USA, said the No. 1 argument she hears in favor of the death penalty is that some people deserve to be executed because of the heinousness of their crime. But, she said, a person's access to representation has a bigger impact on likelihood of death penalty sentence than the brutality of the crime.

"It's not the worst of the worst who are sentenced to the death penalty - it's people who can't afford an attorney," Beaudoin said. "If you're able to hire your own attorney you're most likely not going to be sentenced to death."

Studies from numerous organizations and universities have found that race and poverty play a significant role in whether a person is sentenced to death. In a Seattle Journal for Social Justice's article titled "Race, Poverty, the Death Penalty, and the Responsibility of the Legal Profession," the author says it's clear that justice depends on how much money a person has.

Death penalty abolitionists say that the death penalty is barbaric and discriminatory - especially to black people. The Equal Justice Initiative calls the death penalty a "direct descendant of lynching," arguing that the U.S.'s death penalty laws are defined by bias disproportionately targeting black people who were accused of committing crimes against white people. The Equal Justice Initiative explicitly says:

While African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation's population, 42 percent of of those on death row are black, and 35 percent of those executed since 1976 have been black. And 75 percent of the murder victims in death penalty rulings are white - even though only about 50 percent of murder victims are white.

Race can also determine a person's support for the death penalty: 71 percent of white people support it, while only 44 percent of black people do. If we break down statistics by religion and race, we find that 66 percent of white mainline protestants and 63 percent of white Catholics favor the death penalty. And two of the largest U.S. evangelical denominations, the Southern Baptist Convention and the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod - teach that the death penalty is an acceptable form of punishment.

Of course we find instances of state-sanctioned death as punishment for crime as far back as the Old Testament and the Code of Hammurabi in 18th century B.C. Babylon. The fledgling United States initially took its lead from British rules about capital punishment. A 1972 Supreme Court case ruled that, as written, death penalty laws were cruel and unusual punishment - but the abolition was short-lived. A 1976 case upheld a newly written death penalty law and capital punishment has been deemed constitutional ever since.

Many argue the death penalty is based on outdated beliefs and that capital punishment is does not deter crime.

Osler argues that the purpose of the death penalty is two-fold - one is to fulfill society's sense of retribution, and the second is to deter people from making similar decisions. But, there's a catch. According to Osler, we as a society are terrible at exacting retribution and deterrence doesn't work.

"Vengeance isn't ours; it's God's. And when we're acting out of that sense of vengeance we so often get it wrong," Osler said.

For Bonowitz, there is hope.

"The death penalty is in its final gasps," Bonowitz said.

"We might not all see that, but those of us on the inside of this struggle can see that."

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Meet the Christians Working to Abolish the Death Penalty

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Ray Krone is the 100 th inmate exonerated from death row since it was reinstated in 1976. He spent more than 10 years in jail, and two of those years on death row with all of its restrictions, humiliations, and isolation - as an innocent man.

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Podcast About a Famous Artwork by an African American Artist That Portrays Black History

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Podcast About a Famous Artwork by an African American Artist That Portrays Black History

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BBC Radio 3

Listen, download, subscribe

Bryan Stevenson on Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series

Art critic Alastair Sooke, in the company of some of the leading creatives of our age, continues his deep dive into the stunning works in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, whilst exploring what it really means "to see" art. Today's edition features the choice of American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. He has chosen The Migration Series, a set of paintings by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence. Depicting the migration of African Americans to the northern United States from the South that began in the 1910s, this a moving piece for Bryan Stevenson - but what does a civil rights lawyer see in the work that others might not? Producer: Tom Alban. Main Image: Jacob Lawrence, And the migrants kept coming, 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18" (30.5 x 45.7 cm). Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. Museum of Modern Art, NY, 28.1942.30. © 2019 Jacob Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Bryan Stevenson on Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series - Podcast Episode Links - Plink

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Art critic Alastair Sooke, in the company of some of the leading creatives of our age, continues his deep dive into the stunning works in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, whilst exploring what it really means "to see" art. Today's edition features the choice of American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson.

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TEDxObserver - Peter Lovatt - Psychologist and dancer

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Students Advocate for Courses in Black History

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Students Advocate for Courses in Black History

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there's a movement to get more schools to teach black history and it's being led by teens - cnn

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There's a movement to get more schools to teach Black history and it's being led by teens

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Before a fateful trip to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, Alana Mitchell said she didn't feel like she was Black enough to own African American history as her own.

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When Eugene Burnett saw the neat tract houses of Levittown, New York, he knew he wanted to buy one. It was 1949, and he was ready to settle down in a larger home with his family. The newly established Long Island suburb seemed like the perfect place to begin their postwar life-one that, he hoped, would be improved with the help of the GI Bill, a piece of sweeping legislation aimed at helping World War II veterans like Burnett prosper after the war.

But when he spoke with a salesman about buying the house using a GI Bill-guaranteed mortgage, the door to suburban life in Levittown slammed firmly in his face. The suburb wasn't open to Black residents.

"It was as though it wasn't real,"Burnett's wife, Bernice, recalled. "Look at this house! Can you imagine having this? And then for them to tell me because of the color of my skin that I can't be part of it?"

The Burnetts weren't the only Black Americans for whom the promise of the GI Bill turned out to be an illusion. Though the bill helped white Americans prosper and accumulate wealth in the postwar years, it didn't deliver on that promise for veterans of color. In fact, the wide disparity in the bill's implementation ended up helping drive growing gaps in wealth, education and civil rights between white and Black Americans.

While the GI Bill's language did not specifically exclude African-American veterans from its benefits, it was structured in a way that ultimately shut doors for the 1.2 million Black veterans who had bravely served their country during World War II, in segregated ranks.

Fear of Black Advancement

When lawmakers began drafting the GI Bill in 1944, some Southern Democrats feared that returning Black veterans would use public sympathy for veterans to advocate against Jim Crow laws. To make sure the GI Bill largely benefited white people, the southern Democrats drew on tactics they had previously used to ensure that the New Deal helped as few Black people as possible.

During the drafting of the law, the chair of the House Veterans Committee, Mississippi Congressman John Rankin, played hardball and insisted that the program be administered by individual states instead of the federal government. He got his way. Rankin was known for his virulent racism: He defended segregation, opposed interracial marriage, and had even proposed legislation to confine, then deport, every person with Japanese heritage during World War II.

When the bill came to a committee vote, he stonewalled in an attempt to gut another provision that entitled all veterans to $20 a week of unemployment compensation for a year. Rankin knew this would represent a significant gain for Black Southerners, so he refused to cast a critical proxy vote in protest. The American Legion ended up tracking down the Congressman who had left his proxy vote with Rankin and flying him to Washington to break the deadlock.

Roosevelt signed the Servicemen's Readjustment Act into law on June 22, 1944, only weeks after the D-Day offensive began. It ushered into law sweeping benefits for veterans, including college tuition, low-cost home loans, and unemployment insurance.

The GI Bill's Effect on Black Veterans

From the start, Black veterans had trouble securing the GI Bill's benefits. Some could not access benefits because they had not been given an honorable discharge-and a much larger number of Black veterans were discharged dishonorably than their white counterparts.

Veterans who did qualify could not find facilities that delivered on the bill's promise. Black veterans in a vocational training program at a segregated high school in Indianapolis were unable to participate in activities related to plumbing, electricity and printing because adequate equipment was only available to white students.

Simple intimidation kept others from enjoying GI Bill benefits. In 1947, for example, a crowd hurled rocks at Black veterans as they moved into a Chicago housing development. Thousands of Black veterans were attacked in the years following World War II and some were singled out and lynched.

Though Rankin had lost the battle to exclude Black men from VA unemployment insurance, it was doled out inequitably. Men who applied for unemployment benefits were kicked out of the program if any other work was available to them, even work that provided less than subsistence wages. Southern postmasters were even accused of refusing to deliver the forms Black veterans needed to fill out to receive their unemployment benefits.

Black veterans and civil rights groups protested their treatment, calling for protections like Black involvement in the VA and non-discriminatory loans, but the racial disparities in the implementation of the GI Bill had already been set into motion. As the years went on, white veterans flowed into newly created suburbs, where they began amassing wealth in skilled positions. But Black veterans lacked those options. The majority of skilled jobs were given to white workers.

A White Post-War Housing Boom-And Redlining in Black Neighborhoods

The postwar housing boom almost entirely excluded Black Americans, most of whom remained in cities that received less and less investment from businesses and banks.

Though the GI Bill guaranteed low-interest mortgages and other loans, they were not administered by the VA itself. Thus, the VA could cosign, but not actually guarantee the loans. This gave white-run financial institutions free rein to refuse mortgages and loans to Black people.

Redlining-a decades-old practice of marking maps by race to characterize the risks of lending money and providing insurance-made purchasing a home even more difficult for Black veterans. Lenders froze out poorer neighborhoods, ensuring that loan assistance and insurance would be denied. And new white suburbs often came with overtly racist covenants that denied entry to Black people.

In 1947, only 2 of the more than 3,200 VA-guaranteed home loans in 13 Mississippi cities went to Black borrowers. "These impediments were not confined to the South," notes historian Ira Katznelson. "In New York and the northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the GI bill supported home purchases by non-whites."

Failure to Receive GI Bill Education Benefits

Black veterans in search of the education they had been guaranteed fared no better. Many Black men returning home from the war didn't even try to take advantage of the bill's educational benefits-they could not afford to spend time in school instead of working. But those who did were at a considerable disadvantage compared to their white counterparts. Public education provided poor preparation for Black students, and many lacked much educational attainment at all due to poverty and social pressures.

As veteran applications flooded universities, Black students often found themselves left out. Northern universities dragged their feet when it came to admitting Black students and Southern colleges barred Black students entirely. And the VA itself encouraged Black veterans to apply for vocational training instead of university admission and arbitrarily denied educational benefits to some students.

Those students who did try to attend college found doors closed at every turn. A full 95 percent of Black veterans were shunted off to Black colleges-institutions that were underfunded and overwhelmed by the influx of new students. Most were unaccredited, and with a massive influx of applicants, they had to turn away tens of thousands of veterans.

"Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically," writes historian Hilary Herbold, "the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of Black veterans from earning a college degree."

The GI Bill and the Racial Wealth Gap

The original GI Bill ended in July 1956. By that time, nearly 8 million World War II veterans had received education or training, and 4.3 million home loans worth $33 billion had been handed out. But most Black veterans had been left behind. As employment, college attendance and wealth surged for whites, disparities with their Black counterparts not only continued but widened. There was, writes Katznelson, "no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill."

Today, a stark wealth gap between Black and white Americans persists. The median income for white households in 2019 was $76,057, according to the U.S. Census. For Black households, it was $46,073.

Fact Check

We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! HISTORY reviews and updates its content regularly to ensure it is complete and accurate.

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How the GI Bill's Promise Was Denied to a Million Black WWII Veterans | HISTORY

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The sweeping bill following World War II promised prosperity to veterans. So why didn't Black Americans benefit?

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Learn how to provide affordable housing for all.

What is affordable housing?

Why should affordable housing be a concern?

What are the facts about affordable housing?

What types of affordable housing exist?

How do affordable housing programs take shape in practice?

How can we create affordable housing?

In their video about the affordable housing crisis, the Urban Land Institute discusses the 20 million working families in the United States who are forced to pay more than half of their total income for housing each month. We know that access to quality affordable housing is a worldwide issue and a crucial aspect in the development of sustainable communities (see Sustainable Development Goal #11: Sustainable Cities and Communities). As housing prices rise, families and individuals in our communities struggle to find and keep places to live, and access to health care, education, and employment is put at risk.

This section of the Community Tool Box discusses affordable housing as a community issue. It first offers reasons why we might be concerned about the situation, supplies some current facts, and describes some types of affordable housing that are available. The bulk of the section, though, is meant to be practical -- it lists many specific actions you and other community members can take to help create affordable housing where you live. Examples are provided, and further resources are cited.

What is affordable housing?

The U.S. Government defines affordable housing as housing that consumes 30 percent or less of a household's income. Using that definition, millions of people in the United States do not have affordable housing; and that number is presently growing.

Why should affordable housing be a concern?

For many Americans, affordable housing may hardly be a concern at all. Homeowners may not think much about renters. Renters living comfortably may not think much about those barely making ends meet. It's a natural human tendency to pay most attention to issues which are immediate and which affect us personally; affordable housing issues may not qualify on either count. The problems of those without affordable housing may not seem imminent.

However, there are several reasons to be concerned about affordable housing. First of all, every person should be able to afford a decent place to live. In times of prosperity, and when the income gap between rich and poor appears to be increasing, low-income individuals are particularly at risk. Greater wealth for the majority unavoidably puts upward pressure on housing prices, squeezing those with less income. So when affordable housing no longer exists we may feel some moral responsibility to help create it. A community, government, or other organization can take steps to stimulate or mandate affordable housing.

Without affordable housing, our communities will become less diverse. We may lose the opportunity to interact with people who may be in different economic or cultural circumstances, to learn from them and to enjoy their company. The community can become richer, and community life ultimately more satisfying when affordable housing is integrated into a community, bringing people of various socio-economic backgrounds together.

Data also links the lack of affordable housing to a variety of negative social outcomes. Substandard housing contributes to childhood health problems, such as asthma, anemia, viral infections, stunted growth, and other health problems, sometimes leading to expensive hospitalizations. Poorly-housed children in these situations are significantly more likely to have behavioral problems and to fall behind housing-stable students in school. When children are forced to move from school to school their academic success is at risk.

What are the facts about affordable housing?

Despite recent economic prosperity for many Americans, affordable housing in the United States is scarce and growing scarcer. Some facts are documented in a report titled "Rental Housing Assistance -- The Worsening Crisis," published in 2000 by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and in the "Recent Research Results" newsletter from the HUD. According to these documents:

"Despite continued economic expansion, worst case housing needs have reached an all-time high of 5.4 million families, increasing by 4 percent between 1995 and 1997." [Families with worst case needs are defined as having incomes below 50 percent of the local median, paying more than half of income for rent, or living in severely substandard housing.]"Families with worst case housing needs are working harder than ever."

"Housing that is affordable to the lowest income Americans continues to shrink." The number of rental units affordable to extremely low-income Americans decreased by 5 percent between 1991 and 1997.

"The concentration of worst case housing needs among the poorest families continues to rise."

"Worst case housing needs increased dramatically in minority households during the 1990s."

"Poor families living in the suburbs most frequently face worst case needs."

"[Households with worst case needs] represent 5 percent of the Nation's population and a disturbing one-sixth of all U.S. renters. Without Federal, state, or local housing assistance, these renting families face severe financial pressures -- many are merely a paycheck or unexpected medical bill away from homelessness."

Affordable housing, however, is not only a compelling concern of the very poor. One need not be poor at all to realize that housing costs are high, or that the housing choices open to people with low to moderate incomes are often limited at best. The need for affordable housing is a significant concern at various economic levels.

What types of affordable housing exist?

People live in a very wide range of housing settings; virtually all these settings can be made affordable. Without going into great detail, some types of affordable housing include:

Newly built housing developments, in which the entire development is specifically planned to be affordable. (One variety of this type, but not the only one, is government -assisted public housing.) These developments can range from individual houses to apartments to single-room-occupancy facilities.

Newly built affordable housing units, as part of a mixed-income development. These units can also take the form of individual houses or apartments.

Existing housing units, renovated or converted from their previous use, so as to become affordable.

Existing and already-affordable housing units, neither renovated nor converted, but which are intentionally maintained and conserved so that they will remain affordable.

There are also specialized types of affordable housing, such as:

Co-housing, or congregate housing, where residents have separate bedrooms, but share common areas such as kitchens or yard spaces.

Transitional housing, designed for temporary use by people who are recovering from physical or emotional problems. This type of housing, which may also involve shared space, is often accompanied by support services nearby or on site.

Categorical housing - that is, housing for members of certain social groups. Seniors are one of the most common of these groups, but specialized housing has also been constructed for the disabled, for victims of domestic violence, for people living with AIDS, for grandparents serving as parents, and college students. If a specific group has particular housing needs, customized housing can be created to meet them.

The financial arrangements for affordable housing can vary as much as the physical housing itself. The financing to build the housing can come from federal, state, or local government, from quasi-public housing corporations or partnerships, from social agencies, or from purely private developers. Banks can supply loans on varied terms. On the other side, residents of affordable housing units may be partly or fully subsidized by direct government or private subsidies, vouchers, or loans. They may also contribute their own labor or services in return for a reduction in rent.

Some specific funding mechanisms are described within this section. And many combinations of the above financing methods are also possible.

How do affordable housing programs take shape in practice?

Below are just a few cases in point:

Cooperative housing

"Cooperative" here usually means cooperation between residents and a larger housing organization. An example of a nonprofit cooperative housing development is the Homestead Housing Center (HHC) in St. Paul, Minnesota. HHC develops housing cooperatives for seniors. HHC started 12 new senior housing co-ops in the rural, upper Midwest, often in towns with less than 10,000 people. The co-ops allow seniors to retain the advantages of home ownership (tax deductions and equity accumulation) as well as control over budget and monthly living costs. HHC provides development, design, and organizational services and offers partnering opportunities with local sponsors who provide matching funds for community development.

Another cooperative housing example is the Qumbya Cooperative in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois. Qumbya (pronounced like the famous song sung at summer camps in the U.S.) maintains two houses: Bowers House (houses 22 people) and Haymarket House (houses 13 people). Members buy a share in the organization, which is returned to them upon leaving the cooperative. Members work on assigned chores, take turns cooking for the house, attend weekly house meetings, and participate in quarterly maintenance chores.

Community land trust (CLT)

Community land trusts are nonprofit organizations that purchase or otherwise protect land and make it available for community purposes. A successful affordable housing example is the Burlington Community Land Trust (BCLT) in Vermont. This project involved the Sarah Cole House in the "Hill" section of the city, which includes many large 19th century homes built by lumber barons and merchants. The Hill had changed dramatically over the past two decades as old homes were converted to college offices, dorms, fraternity houses, apartments, and rooming houses. The changes brought noise, traffic, lack of parking, and poor maintenance to many of the homes.

The local Community and Economic Development Office encouraged the BCLT to develop and manage a single-room occupancy project to serve homeless, low-income, and single women (women at risk of losing their housing). The Sarah Cole House was chosen for the project because of its history as an owner-occupied rooming house. Despite having resident owners, the building had fallen into disrepair. Neighbors first objected to the development as another assault on the neighborhood and protested to the local zoning board. BCLT responded with an appropriate site plan, staffing plan, and house rules. Opposition was dropped and the zoning was approved. After BCLT rehabilitated the house and grounds, area residents expressed satisfaction with the neighborhood improvement.

Community development corporation (CDC)

Community development corporations are nonprofit multi-purpose economic development organizations which serve primarily low-to-moderate-income people and which commonly become involved in local housing issues. One good example is Tenants to Homeowners, Inc. in Lawrence, Kansas. This CDC promotes low-income housing by providing home ownership programs and credit counseling to help people qualify for mortgages. The organization acquires properties to sell to moderate and low-income people and renovate or build homes to sell to people not qualifying for traditional loans. Tenants become homeowners through education, communication, home improvement, and creative financing.

An example of a faith-based nonprofit CDC is Habitat for Humanity International. Founded in 1976 in Americus, Georgia, Habitat has built or rehabilitated more than 80,000 affordable homes for more than 400,000 people around the world through volunteer labor and donations of money and materials. There are nearly 1,900 Habitat affiliates in 64 countries, including the U.S.

Habitat builds and rehabilitates houses with the help of homeowner partner families. The houses are sold to families at no profit and financed with no-interest loans. The families provide a down payment and monthly mortgage payments and invest hundreds of hours of their own labor, "sweat equity," in building their and other Habitat houses. Habitat doesn't get government funding, but involves government through gifts of land, houses for rehabilitation, and infrastructure for streets, utilities, and administrative expenses.

How can we create affordable housing?

Creating affordable housing is a challenging task, more challenging than many of the topics we have considered in the Community Tool Box.

Three reasons may help explain why:

Creating affordable housing goes beyond the communication, organizational, and interpersonal skills we have emphasized in this website. Those skills may be relevant here, but so are others. Affordable housing frequently means that new homes are going to be built. So while the affordable housing advocate may need to be excellent at human relations, that advocate may sometimes also need to have at least a passing familiarity with zoning, building code, sewage systems, energy codes, rebates and incentives, and material costs.

Creating affordable housing often involves multiple constituencies and multiple social institutions. More is required than simply persuading or satisfying a few people or groups, or even the public at large. Affordable housing activities may need advocates to set the process in motion; developers to acquire the land; architects to design the homes; banks to finance them; local governments to approve the plans; businesses to sell the building materials; construction workers to do the actual building; building inspectors to monitor the construction; agents to sell the homes; and buyers to buy them. To understate the case, the creation of actual affordable housing units takes more than the efforts of a citizen or single group of citizens; it requires highly skilled coordination among many people.

Many of these constituencies have financial as well as ideological interests. The developers, landlords, bankers, businesses, and construction workers all need some income from their work, enough income to justify their time spent. While community workers can sometimes serve without pay, builders and bankers rarely do. Their legitimate financial needs must be satisfied, just as the needs of the buyer or renter of the finished home.

So creating affordable housing is challenging indeed. It is a complex and multilevel problem. But the advantage of multilevel problems is that there are multilevel solutions. The flip side of the challenge is that there are many entry points into the problem, many actions to create affordable housing that one can take.

The material below focuses on actions to help create affordable housing that can be taken on different levels and by different groups. They represent a variety of ideas that have been successful in other communities, and could be successful in yours too.

We emphasize that there are many strategies for creating affordable housing, many pathways that can be taken. Google the phrase "creating affordable housing" and you will get millions of hits. We cannot begin to describe all of them here, nor all the housing possibilities, but we can highlight the main action categories.

The task for you as reader is to select those actions that are most appropriate for your own community setting, for your group, and for you personally. There is no one best answer here. Your own answer will depend upon your own time availability and interests, as well as the other resources available in your community.

Many of these actions, especially those on a citizen level, can be taken by people without specific expertise in the housing field. Expertise helps, but an essential co-requisite is caring about creating affordable housing in one's community, and being willing to put in the effort to help make it happen.

The actions below are arranged by category (citizen, local government, social agency, etc.), depending upon who might be most likely to be the primary initiator. Certain actions might be most appropriate for a citizen to take, others for local government or nongovernmental organizations. But we stress that these distinctions, while generally accurate, are loose and approximate. Some duplication and overlap exist. Many of the actions below can be taken by many different kinds of actors, and the listing below is simply a rough guide.

Action steps for citizens
Getting started:

Study the types of affordable housing that are possible, as well as successful examples of affordable housing programs in other communities. Such advance study will be helpful to you in knowing your options and shaping your thinking about what might work best where you live.

Get involved with an affordable housing group in your own community.

If no such group exists, start one yourself. Get together with people you know who care about the issue, recruit others, make plans, and take action.

Join forces with other groups in your community -- or representatives of those groups -- whose work is related to affordable housing issues. Use their support and expertise to help you advance your cause. These groups might include:

Affirmative action committees

Community development corporations (especially)

Fair housing committees

Human rights committees

Minority group organizations

Other anti-poverty or advocacy groups in your home area

Working together with other people, even a few others, will strengthen your effectiveness and sustain your own energy.

Once you have connected with the right people, you and your group might consider advocating for specific local affordable housing actions, such as:

Survey or meet with prospective residents of affordable housing in your community to learn more about their particular housing needs and preferences. (First, seek out and read any relevant prior studies.) Affordable housing should conform to resident needs and preferences, so it's important to know what they are.

Survey or meet with neighbors or neighborhood groups to learn their views about what affordable housing might work best in their neighborhood, and how they might support it.

Consult with housing experts to learn their opinions. Those opinions are not directives, but they should generally be considered.

Set affordable housing targets for your community. For example, X% of the housing units in your community should be affordable. Then challenge other sectors of the community (e.g., government, agencies, bankers) to meet those targets.

Encourage or require developers of new housing to set aside a fixed percentage of units as affordable housing units.

Encourage or require developers to contribute fees (sometimes known as "linkage fees") to a local affordable housing fund.

Influence local government to provide grants and loans for affordable housing construction.

Change local zoning regulations to facilitate affordable housing construction or renovation. These changes might include allowing higher housing densities in certain areas, or allowing residential construction in areas previously designated for other functions.

Put pressure on developers and building owners to keep rents of new housing affordable for the majority. While developers are entitled to fair profits for their work, profits should not be so high as to exclude all but the wealthier residents, or wealthy newcomers, from living there.

Support the creation of group homes and similar facilities in residential neighborhoods when they are appropriately sited.

Contrary to what some believe, not all neighborhoods reflexively oppose group homes. On a residential street in one suburban neighborhood, the Salvation Army proposed opening a 20-unit single-room-occupancy facility for former alcohol and drug abusers. Initial neighborhood reaction was mixed; but the Salvation Army worked closely with a neighborhood advisory committee and heeded its advice. The facility opened without organized opposition, and has been problem-free ever since.

Action steps for keeping existing housing affordable:

Consider rent control provisions or ordinances for your community

Ensure that residential property taxes are reasonable in relation to other forms of available local taxation

Educate current renters in tenants' rights, so that they will not be subject to unfair rent increases, nor other tactics that might lead to their displacement

Form tenants organizations, where tenants can advocate directly and freely for their own interests

Make sure that both existing and planned affordable housing opportunities are well publicized and reach the right people

To make these changes, community support will always be desired, and local government help may often be required.
Action steps for local government

Stimulate local government to adopt an affordable housing policy for the town, and/or to set up its own affordable housing committee.

Undertake campaigns to persuade local government officials to act upon the affordable housing initiatives you are supporting

Encourage local government to adopt (a) formal human rights policies, and also (b) written policies which encourage diversity within the town, including members of all races, ethnic groups, and social classes. In some cases, these policies can have legal validity and be written into the town's by-laws. (See also local government actions just following.)

Also note: If local government is insufficiently responsive to your affordable housing initiatives, you may choose to run for local government office yourself.

In addition, it's also possible to get involved in private efforts to build homes directly. Members of Habitat for Humanity, a worldwide organization, often serve as volunteer construction workers. There are Habitat chapters in many communities, possibly including your own. A similar national organization, emphasizing youth involvement, is YouthBuild. Church groups, AmeriCorps volunteers, and student interns frequently get involved in these efforts as well. In other programs, neighborhood residents themselves help one another with home repairs.

Action steps for local government officials:

Create a local Affordable Housing Committee, with the goal of creating more affordable housing in your community. Ideally this committee should have: (a) paid town-funded staffing; (b) a realistic budget; (c) representation from a wide variety of community members (including low-income and minority community members); and (d) clear affordable housing targets and goals that are regularly reviewed and adjusted.

Advocate for and facilitate passage of local legislation mandating (for example) developer fees for a local affordable housing fund, affordable housing funding set -asides, inclusionary zoning changes, and other actions previously mentioned.

Consider creating a real estate tax increment fund. (This refers to situations where new development in a community increases overall property values, and therefore property tax revenues. Some or all of the increase can be earmarked for affordable housing.)

Help secure voter approval of bonds to pay for local affordable housing projects.

Consider the imposition or redirection of other taxes, fees, or interest payments that could go to support affordable housing, such as:

Real estate transfer taxes
Taxes on windfall profits from real estate sales, such as those resulting from the sale of previously price-controlled units

Local sales taxes

Taxes on business gross receipts

Hotel taxes

Restaurant taxes

Utility taxes

Document recording fees

Fees in cases where previously affordable housing is demolished, or converted into less affordable units.

Fees paid by developers to increase the density of their projects

Interest on application deposits

Interest from real estate escrow amounts

Interest on title escrow amounts

Interest from tenant security deposits

Interest and penalties paid on delinquent property taxes

Provide local tax credits and tax incentives for affordable housing development where possible.

For current residents, provide fair and well-publicized abatement procedures for those having difficulty paying property taxes.

Create volunteer programs where citizens may provide community service in exchange for a certain amount of property tax reduction.

Several communities in Massachusetts operate these programs, which are usually designed for senior citizens. In one model, town government offices make service jobs open to retired seniors, who can earn up to a $500 tax rebate. Early reports on these programs have been highly favorable.

Advocate for and facilitate passage of local anti-discrimination laws and other human rights standards that will create a climate more favorable to affordable housing construction and preservation. When such laws and standards already exist, strengthen them as might be needed, and/or create or monitor structures to ensure appropriate enforcement.

In larger communities, begin a program through which abandoned properties, and also properties the city acquires through bankruptcy or foreclosure, are converted into affordable housing units.

In rare cases, consider using the legal ability a community might have to take land by eminent domain; in such cases, local government or its designee can acquire targeted land from previous owners for specified purposes and compensate these owners at fair market value.

The Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative is a major case in point. Operating in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Boston, the Initiative persuaded the City to use its eminent domain powers to acquire a sizable amount of neighborhood acreage, which was then in fact converted into affordable housing units.

Vigorously pursue available opportunities for state and federal grants for affordable housing programs, in conjunction with local social service agencies and housing partnerships.

Action steps for a social service agency

Some communities already have agencies or other organizations whose primary mission is the creation and maintenance of affordable housing. When those agencies exist, guide your own agency in working together with them and offering specific support as feasible. When such groups don't exist, join other agencies in your community to create a coalition that will advocate for the construction and maintenance of affordable housing. This coalition, or partnership, can have a more powerful impact than any one agency acting alone; it can also lead to the formation of a new organization specifically dedicated to affordable housing issues.

Agencies can also take affordable housing actions over and above new housing development:

Create a centralized listing of affordable housing opportunities in your area. This listing should be accurate, up-to-date, and as comprehensive as possible; ideally, it should be computerized. Such a listing can best be created both through inter -agency collaboration and through cooperation with local realtors and landlords.

Contact sources vigorously to locate affordable housing units and to update your list.

Publicize that listing extensively, and make it available in both electronic and print copies at multiple sites, especially those that would naturally attract prospective affordable housing tenants.

Create a parallel listing of prospective tenants who are interested in affordable housing opportunities when they arise. Prospective tenants should be able to register to get on the list without charge.

Publicize that listing to real estate offices, rental agencies, and landlords associations throughout the community.

Monitor and evaluate the consequences and overall effectiveness of affordable housing referrals made or received.

Ensure that current tenants of affordable housing units know their rights, such as protection from unlawful rent increases, threats, pressures, or evictions. (See item 17.)

Publicize information relating to those rights. This can include door-to-door distribution of flyers, creation and distribution of more detailed manuals, and provision of well-advertised information, referral, and direct assistance services for both current and prospective residents with housing problems or concerns.

Provide educational sessions and programs for tenants on affordable housing issues.

Make those sessions and programs available to the entire community.

Sponsor forums and workshops on those issues for community leaders.

Offer technical support and consultation to tenants organizations. (See also item 18 on formation of such organizations.)

Advocate for local rent control and other local protective legislation when that might be important.

Design and implement homeowner assistance programs, including counseling and training, for prospective buyers of affordable housing properties.

Provide support services to complement affordable housing already in place.

Residents of affordable housing units can often benefit from other services such as job training, personal counseling, health services, child care, or transportation as well. If those supportive services are available and easily accessible -- sometimes they can be delivered right on site -- residents are more likely to be more satisfied with the living situations, to utilize their abilities more fully, and to make greater community contributions. (Note also that such services need not be delivered by an agency directly; sometimes, neighbors can provide support services themselves, in particular if they are trained to do so.)

Action steps for a religious institution

Churches, synagogues, or temples can act on affordable housing issues much in the same way as social service agencies. They generally begin with two strong advantages: nonprofit status and community credibility, so, at the least they can:

Become involved with affordable housing opportunities for their parishioners, and for the larger community.

Join the local housing partnership if there is one, or join together with other churches in the community to form an inter-faith housing partnership. (See also previous examples under social service agencies.)

The Greater Boston Interfaith Organization, a coalition of 87 religious groups, recently started a petition campaign to get 100,000 signatures to convince the state legislature to create a $65 million housing trust fund. While the outcome is as yet unknown, this type of action is an example of what a mobilized faith-based community can undertake.

Action steps as a community planner

Many community planners, both urban and suburban, are incorporating new urbanist planning principles into their work. These principles emphasize mixed use, higher densities, common public spaces, and less reliance on automobiles. Such principles may easily be adapted for affordable housing creation.
Planners can:

Design some previously undeveloped areas of the community for mixed residential and commercial use. (This may allow for more residential units compared to areas designated for commercial use alone.)

Design or re-design some residential areas to have increased housing densities (e.g., "cluster design").

Action steps as a banker or lender

Make, publicize, and uphold anti-redlining and anti-discrimination commitments - i.e., commitments not to deny mortgages, loans, and other banking services to potential residents of affordable housing, nor to discriminate in lending on the basis of race, ethnicity, disability, or neighborhood

Provide loans to affordable housing developments at favored rates

Consider adopting policies to turn over foreclosed properties to housing organizations for affordable housing use

Train other community members in financial skills and practices that will most likely result in local affordable housing production

Action steps as a landlord or building manager

Set aside a percentage of housing units you own or control to be affordable housing units

Monitor rents in affordable housing units you may already own or control, with a guideline that rent increases should not exceed the rate of inflation

Action steps as a real estate agent

Make a commitment to advocate for the construction and preservation of affordable housing units in your community

Make a similar commitment to seeking out any affordable housing units in your community and publicizing their availability to segments of the community that might need them

Devote a dedicated percentage of your agency's time to both of the above actions

Persuade developers in your area to set aside affordable housing units, and to keep rents in existing units affordable

Join forces with other real estate agencies in your community to take similar actions to those above

Work together with local government and other local agencies or housing partnerships to do the same

Action steps as a business owner or manager

Do businesses have a stake in affordable housing for the community? Yes, they do. A prosperous business needs good employees. New employees must be attracted to the community as well as be able to afford living there. Similarly, current employees who are renters must be able to afford to stay where they are, and not be squeezed out of their homes by rising rents. Wise business owners will therefore take steps to ensure the preservation of affordable housing in the community, by supporting some of the actions listed above.
More specifically, a business owner or manager can also:

Become involved in affordable housing partnerships that may exist

Encourage other businesses to do the same

Advocate for tax advantages for new affordable housing construction

Help in the financing of new affordable housing opportunities

Build affordable housing directly

Action step for a union leader

Consider offering a percentage of union member time below the prevailing wage rate for affordable housing construction

Action steps for a foundation official or other granting agency

Consider increasing the degree to which your foundation or granting agency is involved in affordable housing concerns

Work together with other leaders in your area to stimulate promising new affordable housing approaches

Make direct awards for innovative affordable housing programs in your grant -making area (these may be loans, matching grants, or 100% grants, as appropriate)

Action steps on the state level
For state governments:

Place affordable housing high on the list of state government priorities and policy initiatives

Allocate sufficient funds in the state budget to subsidize affordable housing for state residents

Allocate sufficient funds in the state budget to subsidize promising affordable housing initiatives

Make grants to selected affordable housing initiatives

Provide low-cost or no-cost loans for such initiatives

Base local aid allocation upon the amount or percentage of new local affordable housing units, or upon related indicators of progress, in a given community

Pass anti-snob zoning legislation, providing for possible state override of local zoning ordinances in communities where the affordable housing supply falls below a designated percentage

Actively pursue federal housing grant programs for affordable housing initiatives

Provide tax credits and tax incentives for new affordable housing construction, or other affordable housing set-asides meeting designated standards

Allow state income tax credits for individual contributions to affordable housing programs

Allow voluntary affordable housing tax check-offs on state income tax forms

Pass legislation to stimulate or implement regarding affordable housing initiatives previously mentioned - e.g., affordable housing requirements in new developments, requiring developer fees for affordable housing, changing zoning requirements, rent control

Establish a statewide toll-free telephone number (or numbers) to provide information on affordable housing programs - including state and federal affordable housing initiatives - and also to respond to citizen affordable housing concerns

Maintain state taxation policies which do not disproportionately rely on property taxes, thus providing greater affordability for prospective new homebuyers, and also ensuring that retired people can continue to live in their own homes

More specifically: Pass "circuit-breaker" legislation, capping the percentage of income a resident must pay for property taxes

For other statewide groups:

Work together with foundations and corporations to form statewide affordable housing partnerships

Work with local housing partnerships and other local initiatives to support affordable housing initiatives in individual communities

Create a statewide organization of local housing partnerships, community development corporations, and/or local affordable housing initiatives. These organizations can engage in advocacy, information sharing, and collaborative program development.

Provide technical assistance and consultation to such initiatives

Action steps on the federal level

While all the participants previously mentioned can do much to create affordable housing, the federal role in stimulating housing development is paramount. The U.S. government, primarily through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) spends billions of dollars on affordable housing programs each year. No other group or organization in the United States, and perhaps worldwide, has equivalent resources at its disposal.

The federal budget cutbacks of the mid-1990s reduced HUD's relative impact. Only in the past several years has its budgetary authority resumed increases more proportional to need. Though the role of the federal government in housing assistance can be debated, many would argue that the federal contribution is inadequate as it is. Space does not permit full discussion of this particular point; but we might note HUD's own position in its 2000 report on rental housing assistance previously cited:
"A bold expansion in Federal assistance for affordable housing is needed to help fulfill the Nation's commitment to its neediest citizens for a decent and affordable home in a suitable living environment." (p. 53)
Which suggests that citizens and all of the other groups mentioned can:
Advocate for appropriate federal housing action
In Summary

What are some of the key factors to remember that are linked to affordable housing success? We can highlight a few:

Money. Some funding to build, renovate, maintain, and finance affordable housing is essential. The federal government is and will presumably remain the largest single funding source. But state and local governments, foundations, businesses, and bankers, as creators or holders of wealth, also have significant roles to play in generating, leveraging, and targeting needed dollars.
Sometimes creative thinking about funding sources can yield positive results. As the Center for Community Change notes: "People are often surprised there is something they can tap into. We can usually come up with something -- funds that no one knew about. The key is finding a new source of money, not stealing a source."

Creativity. Creative thought deserves a paragraph of its own. For while money is a key factor, creativity comes into play in generating and using money most effectively. It takes creativity to think of and implement an affordable housing project specifically for child care providers, just for example, or to partially subsidize inner-city loft space to lure artists downtown, or to develop affordable housing in trailer parks. Creativity also means finding new uses for assets a community already has -- abandoned motels, surplus warehouse space, empty vacation cabins, or whatever other real estate a community has to offer. If you and your colleagues can sit down and think about creative housing options in your own community, you will have taken a large step forward.

Partnership. As we have mentioned, affordable housing is a complex issue, typically requiring the coordinated efforts of many actors. This coordination can best come about through formal or informal partnership among those concerned. In such partnerships, the members plan, act, evaluate, and share successes together. From a recent article: "... the best affordable housing being created today involves partnerships between community organizations, local governments, corporate and lending institutions, and the philanthropic and religious communities." In other words, partnerships generally are more effective than individuals or groups acting alone. (quote from Faith Schantz, Home Makers, The Neighborhood Works, October/November, 1995, p. 17.)

Commitment. But finally, all the money, creativity, and partnership one could imagine will count for little if the commitment to create affordable housing is not in ample supply. As in most successful community actions, commitment is a precondition for success. And as in most life situations, commitment comes from within. This applies to all the groups we have discussed in this section -- citizens, local officials, social service agencies, churches, planners, bankers, lenders, landlords, Realtors, businesses, unions, foundations, and state representatives, as well as others. All have responsibility for finding the needed commitment and the accompanying political will, within themselves.

When commitment has been located and activated, joined with necessary funding, and in creative partnership, the prospects of ensuring affordable housing for all people will be that much brighter.

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Section 3. Providing Affordable Housing for All

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Learn how to provide affordable housing for all. What is affordable housing? Why should affordable housing be a concern? What are the facts about affordable housing? What types of affordable housing exist? How do affordable housing programs take shape in practice? How can we create affordable housing?

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Why Cities Are Vulnerable to Natural Disasters

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Why Cities Are Vulnerable to Natural Disasters

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As cities continue to grow in population and commercial importance, it is more crucial than ever to understand their vulnerability to natural threats.

With urban populations projected to reach 6.4 billion by 2050, more people and economic value are being focused into more precarious urban environments than ever before. At the same time, we are seeing the extreme events associated with climate change becoming more frequent and more severe, putting cities at greater risk. Ensuring the safety of our cities is a priority we cannot afford to ignore.

Professor Cassidy Johnson, supported by the AXA Research Fund, is researching Metrics and Measurements for Urban Resilience. This highlights how accumulating and analysing urban data could make a real difference as we strive to overcome overpopulation and build resilient and liveable cities for future generations. Her research also demonstrates the importance of awareness for inspiring good decision-making at every level, from government leadership to everyday actions by people in the streets.

This is the first of five short films with the AXA Research Fund to inspire understanding of the natural hazards faced by urban areas, and the ways in which we are working to minimize their impact and make the world's cities safer.

Other films in this series cover flooding, air pollution, earthquakes, and the role of insurance in the resilience of cities.

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The Urban Sprawl and Future Urban Landscape

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As cities continue to grow in population and commercial importance, it is more crucial than ever to understand their vulnerability to natural threats. With urban populations projected to reach 6.4 billion by 2050, more people and economic value are being focused into more precarious urban environments than ever before.

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Every student should design an App: Heidi Hayes Jacob, the TEDx talk

Posted by Jonathan Martin under Uncategorized
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This is a very worthwhile 15 minutes for those interested in the question of how curriculum should be changing, and also, for those attending ISAS Teacher Conference in a few weeks, this offers a nice sneak preview to one of the event's most exciting presenters.

What Year are you preparing your students for? Tests from the 70s and 80s are just the same as they are now; Most schools are preparing students for 1991.

Instead of the oral report, one of the low points of civilization, let's do video podcasts.

Media Literacy, Global Literacy, Digital Literacy: What are these things, really? Let's think more carefully about these terms and how to teach them.

Let's ask students to do assessments: What does a quality blog look like? Have students define the standard and ask students meet it.

What is a quality podcast? Don't just make a wiki, determine what is a quality wiki.

I think every student should design an app: I can't think of a better thing for them to do.

My new mantra: Get time out of the way, move aside, think about all the connections that are possible, and what I am looking for is Future Schools Now!

Jacob has a strong and ambitious vision, and she wants to support teachers: one step at a time. Revamp just one curricular unit or area each year, and before too long, we will alll be well underway. Focus on the new critical literacies, elevate consistently students' consciousness about what is quality and how we know it, and engage students and strengthen their skills by use of powerful Web 2.0 communication and creation tools.

I love the message that students should design apps: we have a few doing that at St. Gregory, but not every student- not yet. It is something we, like so many other schools, are moving toward and ought to be moving toward more swiftly.

There are so many great things students can be doing and creating in this day and age, and let's take inspirational figures like Jacobs to keep asking ourselves: how can we make learning more engaging, more meaningful, more connected, and more preparatory for our times?

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Every student should design an App: Heidi Hayes Jacob, the TEDx talk

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This is a very worthwhile 15 minutes for those interested in the question of how curriculum should be changing, and also, for those attending ISAS Teacher Conference in a few weeks, this offers a nice sneak preview to one of the event's most exciting presenters. What Year are you preparing your students for?

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America's History of Racism: Telling the Truth

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America's History of Racism: Telling the Truth

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If one set out to crown a symbolic epicenter for the 400-odd year odyssey of white supremacy in the US, they would be hard-pressed to do better than Montgomery, Alabama.

It was at the statehouse in Montgomery that Jefferson Davis was first inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in a bid to preserve the institution of slavery and in defense of the inferiority of the black race. It was here too, nearly a century later, that Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat, and a young Martin Luther King launched his first direct action campaign: the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

Indeed the official city seal tells some of this story in ironic juxtaposition, nesting its claim as "Cradle of the Confederacy" inside that of "Birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement".

But there's a deeper racial history here too, one that often gets buried in favor of the hagiography of leaders and legends like Davis, Parks and King. Montgomery was also for a time the central hub of the domestic US slave trade, and that's part of why writer and activist Bryan Stevenson thinks is a perfect place for a "new kind of museum" entitled From Slavery to Mass Incarceration that will trace the history of racial capital through generations and simultaneously shine a light on the legacy of US racial terrorism.

"It all begins with enslavement and the ideology of white supremacy and what follows is lynching, segregation and many of the issues that we're dealing with today," Stevenson told the Guardian.

The museum itself will be situated at the site of a building that once warehoused enslaved people before they could be sold at auction in the town square. "They used it for livestock, cotton and enslaved people," Stevenson said.

Montgomery was the first deep south city to be connected to the upper south by rail and this, coupled with waterway access via the Alabama river, made it a vital artery of the domestic slave trade throughout the 19th century.

One fact of slavery that often gets overlooked, in part because of the unimaginable horrors of the middle passage, is that by 1808 the US had banned the international importation of enslaved people. The trade was then, for the next half-century, utterly dominated by domestic commerce. As technology advanced, the slow and expensive practice of transporting human chattel by marching them hundreds of miles, shackled, was gradually replaced by more efficient water and rail passages.

"By 1860, warehouses, slave depots, and slave pens had sprung up all over the city of Montgomery. We had more slave pens, depots and warehouses than banks, hotels or commercial establishments," said Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative which is headquartered in Montgomery and is spearheading the project.

That's part of the legacy Stevenson hopes the museum can capture, ushering visitors through a dungeon-type space populated with holographic apparitions of enslaved people awaiting sale. Guests will hear readings of real slave narratives by those caught in this purgatory before moving into a space that redirects their attention to the racial terrorism of lynching that pervaded the decades after the civil war and reconstruction.

That part of the museum builds off an exhibition EJI premiered at the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year, and connects to a whole second site being developed a few blocks away as a six-acre national lynching memorial slated to open in mid-2018. The memorial will honor the lives of more than 4,000 black Americans lynched from 1877 to 1950, whose names will be engraved on duplicate sets of more than 800 columns, two for each county in the US where a lynching was recorded.

One set is to remain in Montgomery. The organizers are also asking that counties claim the facsimile columns and install them at the one of the original lynching sites, like a dandelion shedding spores of memoriam across the nation. Roughly 25% of US counties recorded at least one act of targeted racial mob violence over the span of less than 75 years.

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Artist rendering of the Memorial to Peace and Justice, which will contain two sets of columns inscribed with the names of more than 4,000 lynching victims. In total there will be more than 800 columns, one for each US county with a known lynching. Photograph: Courtesy EJI

This was part of the impetus for the museum and the memorial project according to Stevenson, and it takes on extra salience amid the national uproar about the place of monuments, specifically Confederate ones, in public space.

"There are 59 markers and monuments to the Confederacy in [Montgomery], but yet a few years ago you couldn't find hardly a word about slavery. The imbalance between this preoccupation with 19th-century history but the silence about enslavement was desperately problematic," Stevenson said. "I just began to realize how acculturated we are to silence about this era."

Stevenson is a veteran civil rights attorney and social justice advocate, and founded EJI in 1989 as a legal defense organization to represent clients they deem as mistreated by the criminal justice system. Since then the organization has grown to do more and more public education work while Stevenson's profile has grown thanks to a popular TED talk and his bestselling 2014 memoir Just Mercy.

Even if the counties that host lynching sites don't choose to take a piece of the exhibit in Montgomery, a piece of them will be on display at the memorial. EJI has gathered jars of earth from lynching sites and will put them on display in the space.

"We will have 280 jars in the museum and they're intended to bring you closer to this legacy by seeing lynching made tangible, and the same is true for what we're doing on mass incarceration and segregation," Stevenson said.

The museum space, beyond slavery and lynching will also cover the rise of lend-lease, the practice by which many formerly enslaved blacks were resubjugated. Many southern municipalities adopted nuisance laws that could legally detain blacks for no crime at all, and sentence them to hard labor as punishment. This, EJI argues, draws a direct line to the explosive rise in the US prison population through the later part of the 20th century that has become known as Mass Incarceration, and how it has preyed on communities of color.

This arc, from slavery through these more modern iterations of racial inequality speaks to the museum's core mission. Rather than a focus on historical artifacts, Stevenson said the project intends to walk visitors through a comprehensive narrative of US racism. Drawing inspiration from the Apartheid Museum in South Africa, which is similarly conceived, Stevenson said that the museum starts with a point of view, and one that he believes is necessary to amplify if the nation is ever to push meaningfully past its foundational racist demons.

"I do think our nation is a nation that needs truth and reconciliation, and incidents like Charleston and Charlottesville just reinforce that," Stevenson said, but added that truth and reconciliation is not simultaneous, it's sequential.

"You have to tell the truth before you can get to reconciliation, and culturally we have done a terrible job of truth telling in this country about our history of racial inequality. I see these projects as an effort to respond to the absence of truth and the silence that has haunted us - black, white and other - for too long."
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'America has done a terrible job of telling the truth about racism'

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If one set out to crown a symbolic epicenter for the 400-odd year odyssey of white supremacy in the US, they would be hard-pressed to do better than Montgomery, Alabama. It was at the statehouse in Montgomery that Jefferson Davis was first inaugurated as the president of the Confederacy in a bid to preserve the institution of slavery and in defense of the inferiority of the black race.

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Football As Core of American Popular Culture

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Football As Core of American Popular Culture

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Football as core of 'American popular culture'

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Bob Costas, Frank Deford, Mike Pesca join the Up with Steve panel to discuss why football has become America's national pastime and the sport's powerful role in American culture.

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Microsoft's long-term partner, the NFL, is one of the biggest stages in the world for athletes and coaches. And it was on that stage that the brand found this generation's next big game-changer, Katie Sowers: a woman of many inspiring firsts. And as an Offensive Assistant Coach for the San Francisco 49ers, she will be making history February 2nd as the first woman ever to coach in the Super Bowl.

Her story is inspiring for the next generation of girls, women and anyone who desires to lead. But unlike Jackie Robinson, Billie Jean King, and other game-changing leaders in sports, not all people know the Katie Sowers story. Yet.

I'm not trying to be the best female coach. I'm trying to be the best coach.
Katie Sowers, Offensive Assistant Coach, San Francisco 49ers

When it comes to the mindset she brings to the field every day, Katie says it's less about who she is and more about what she is capable of achieving. "I'm not here to be the token female. I'm here to help us win and create the best team possible."

It's that kind of dedication and passion for the game she recalls having even as a young child. "I remember loving football from day one. I would walk home every day, and all I'd want to do is play football." Any time she wrote in her journal, it was about football. In one entry, she says, "When I grow up, I want to be on a real football team." Though at that time, it was still just a dream she never dared assume could be a reality. "It never crossed my mind that I could play, because I just didn't think girls could." That was until she began playing for the West Michigan Mayhem in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

From there, her career kicked into high gear. She began playing for the indomitable U.S. Women's football team. A team that would go on to win the 2013 IFAF (International Federation of American Football) Women's World Championship, holding most of their opponents to a score of zero. Then after a position as a scout intern with the Atlanta Falcons in 2016, Katie went on to become the second woman in history to hold a coaching position in the NFL. She is the 1st female coach on the San Francisco 49ers.

Being a female is just one of my differences. Every single coach on our staff is different. Not one has the same personality or background.
Katie Sowers

Currently in her fourth year with the team, Katie considers her gender as only part of her story. And for Katie, who is also the first openly LGBT coach in the league, what makes her different is one of her biggest assets as a coach. "You need the ability to relate to people, to know what drives them and know what moves them. Coaching is about getting people to move in the same direction." And when it comes to getting people to move in that direction, Katie uses all the tools available to her, from her personal experience on the field to the technology she uses. "When I see a play I love, I will grab my Surface and write it down."

Now, even as Katie is about to make a historic achievement for equality in Super Bowl LIV, she still has set her sights on making history yet again. "I would love to be a head coach. That's my goal." The only question that remains, is society ready to move forward? "I've been told people aren't ready for it. And I do think society has a lot of change that needs to be made in terms of the way we see women. But all it takes is one, and then they open the door for so many others." And that's a story that can moves all of us forward.

Celebrating innovation in culture

Explore Microsoft In Culture and meet people who are influencing our culture-through music, art, fashion, sports, technology, and beyond-and changing the world for good.

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Katie Sowers is more than a female coach | Microsoft In Culture

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Microsoft's long-term partner, the NFL, is one of the biggest stages in the world for athletes and coaches. And it was on that stage that the brand found this generation's next big game-changer, Katie Sowers: a woman of many inspiring firsts.

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League of Denial: Full Documentary of NFL's Concussion Crisis

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League of Denial: Full Documentary of NFL's Concussion Crisis

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League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

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High School Football Injuries Have Lasting Impact

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High School Football Injuries Have Lasting Impact

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Pennsylvania is one of three states where high school football enrollment is not in decline.

(Ashland) - Athletic Director Jim Gross was in his office when he realized something was wrong.

It was October 25, a Friday night, and the North Schuylkill Spartans were hosting the Pottsville Crimson Tide with a league championship on the line. As Gross had done many times, at halftime he took the cash from ticket sales to his office for safekeeping.

Taking a moment to warm up before heading back out to the field, Gross turned on a livestream of the game only to find it was no longer being broadcast. He sent a message to the scorekeeper, who said the Spartans' quarterback, senior Jaden Leiby, had been injured, and it looked bad.

Later on video, Gross saw what happened. Leiby, who also played defense, lunged to tackle an opposing player. As the opponent ran forward, Leiby hit head-first into his thigh.

"Jaden just fell back and never made an attempt to get up," Gross said. "I get emotional thinking about it."

Leiby was taken by ambulance to a nearby field, where a helicopter flew him to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest. There, doctors found the 18-year-old's neck was broken. Leiby went into emergency surgery.

It wasn't the only severe injury at a high school football game that night in Pennsylvania. In York County, Kennard-Dale senior lineman Patrick Maloney was hit near the end of a game against Eastern York. Maloney walked off the field, but soon collapsed on the sidelines. He was flown to Penn State Hershey Medical Center in critical condition.

Community support was swift and overwhelming. Schools held fundraisers. Opposing teams paid tribute. People tweeted and posted hashtags and photos.

News traveled fast. New Jersey lawmaker Adam Taliaferro, a former Penn State player who recovered from a severe spinal injury, offered support and encouragement. At North Schuylkill, Gross received care packages for Leiby from the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Ravens.

Everyone agreed: The players' injuries were tragedies. Whether to see those and other injuries experienced every year by athletes as unavoidable, or a call to action to make changes to youth and high school football, is a discussion that has been playing out in youth leagues, courtrooms and some state legislatures across the country.

According to a recent New York Times report, high school participation in tackle football has fallen more than 10 percent since 2009. Enrollment in Ohio dropped 27 percent, while New York saw a 28 percent drop.

Pennsylvania is one of three states, along with Mississippi and Alabama, that bucked that trend. Pennsylvania enrollment increased 2 percent during the same period.

There are many reasons that fewer children are playing football, but the big one is the increasing concern over chronic traumatic encephalopathy, said Chris Nowinski, a former Harvard University football player and former WWE professional wrestler who heads the Concussion Legacy Foundation. The degenerative brain disorder, which affects mood, behavior and thinking, was identified in the brains of deceased National Football League players in 2005, sending shockwaves through the NFL.

Nowinski, a behavioral neuroscientist, said repeated hits to the head, such as those common in football, can lead to the disorder, also called CTE. Every year a person plays the game, the risk for developing CTE increases by 30 percent.

Nowinski is pushing to ban tackle football for children under 12 and to limit the total number of years a person can play the support, efforts that would help to prevent CTE, he said.

He's not alone. Six states have considered outright bans on youth football. None have passed, though California enacted a law that limits the duration of full contact practice, bans off-season full contact practice, and requires a medical professional and an observer with the authority to remove injured players to be present at all games.

Nowinski said safety measures like these are good steps, but they fail to address high school, where the most severe injuries often happen, and they fail to prevent repeated head hits that he says are a fundamental part of the game. And many improvements, such as better helmets and training, don't always make their way to the youth and high school levels.

"It's important to appreciate that you could start in high school and play in college and make it to the pros and only play nine years," Nowinski said. "And there are children today who play from age 5 to 14 and play nine years, and our evidence today shows that they're equally at risk for CTE."

In other cases, people are taking legal actions. Last month in Lancaster County, the parent of one former youth football player sued her son's coaches for letting him play after getting kicked in the head during a game, according to a recent LNP report.

That family isn't alone. Class and individual suits against youth leagues have been on the rise since 2016, according to American Bar Association Journal.

These measures show changing attitudes toward what is an acceptable level of risk in a game where the frequency of head and neck injuries dwarfs that of other sports.

High school football players suffer 34 concussions per 100,000 plays, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, also included in the NYT report. That's twice the rate of hockey players and three times that of soccer players. Injuries to the knees, hands and ankles are also far more common in football compared to other sports, the research states.

Still, severe injuries are exceedingly rare, said Dr. Robert Harbaugh, professor and chair of the neurosurgery department at Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center, where Maloney is being treated for complications from his brain injury.

Compared to years past, the game has never been safer, Harbaugh said. The former Red Lion High School and Lebanon Valley College player can remember when someone could have a concussion during the first half of a game, "and if you could count fingers, you might go back the second half."

These days, concussion protocols are keeping players safer, said Harbaugh, who served on the NFL's head, neck and spine committee. He pointed to annual surveys from the National Center of Sport Injury Research, which he said show that safety measures are working. He noted that two deaths last year were directly tied to high school football, with another four football-related deaths caused by underlying heart conditions.

"But when you think that there's millions of people playing football, that's an awfully low risk," Harbaugh said. "But if it happens to you, it's just tragic."

Harbaugh himself had three concussions, as well as a career-ending knee injury that bothers him to this day.

If he could go back, he said, he wouldn't hesitate to endure those injuries again.

"I think I learned so many good lessons from playing football that it was certainly worth the injuries," he said. "And it's the spirit of being part of a team."

In Ashland, Gross remembered the team spirit of youth football and high school basketball. Gross's football career ended at age 12 with a fractured hip that doctors said would bother him later in life. Now at age 47, he's about to take time off for hip replacement surgery.

To understand football in Schuylkill County, you have to understand the people and the region, he said. He described it as a blue collar area, pointing out that coal mining used to be the predominant source of jobs.

For Ashland and surrounding towns, high school football brings the community together after a week of hard work, he said. "Your friends are there. Your neighbors are there. You're getting your supper there. Friday nights, a good majority of that town is going to be at that football game."

He said Jaden's injury is the worst he's seen in more than a decade at his job, but it's no reason to change the way football is played.

"Playing this sport has so many benefits for them," Gross said. "Being active, being involved, skills that you can use in the real world."

Still, Jaden's recovery is uncertain. The community will rally around him, Gross said. And long after the media attention fades, he will get whatever help he needs.

Gross hopes that safety measures will continue to improve, and noted that the school continues to change to respond to the growing science about concussions.

"I think it's a dangerous sport," Gross said. "But...I hope it comes out the right way and doesn't make me sound cruel, I mean, Jaden's injury is unfortunate, but I don't think it changes the way anyone feels about football."

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High school football injuries can have lifelong consequences. For many families in Pennsylvania, the sport is worth the risk | WITF

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(Ashland) - Athletic Director Jim Gross was in his office when he realized something was wrong. It was October 25, a Friday night, and the North Schuylkill Spartans were hosting the Pottsville Crimson Tide with a league championship on the line.

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Poor Students More Likely To Play Football

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Poor Students More Likely To Play Football

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Fears of brain injuries has deterred many parents and their children from choosing to play football.

After years of publicity about how dangerous football can be, football enrollment has declined 6.6 percent in the past decade, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Those who still play the sport are increasingly low-income students.

Over the past five years in Illinois, the proportion of high school football rosters filled by low-income boys rose nearly 25 percent - even as the number of players in the state has fallen by 14.8 percent over the same period, according to a story out this week from HBO's Real Sports.

This doesn't surprise Albert Samaha, a BuzzFeed News investigative reporter and author of "Never Ran, Never Will: Boyhood and Football in a Changing American Inner City."

Samaha spent two seasons embedded with the Mo Better Jaguar football program in Brownsville, a small Brooklyn neighborhood overburdened with poverty and crime. The program is for children ages 7-13, who are all aware of the risks of playing football, but play anyway.

"The reason that football is so valuable to them is the fact that it's still the sport that that's the most popular in America, that is getting the most money from high schools and colleges in America," Samaha said in an interview with NPR's Michel Martin on All Things Considered. "At a time when the educational gap continues to widen between low income, particularly black and brown kids, and higher income white kids, football offers a path to upward mobility that is not really available through any other extracurricular activity."

Many of the 10, 11, and 12-year olds who Samaha reported on told him that they were playing football not just for the chance of getting a college scholarship, but also for the chance to get financial aid for top private high schools in New York City.

Their hopes were reinforced by private high school coaches who attended Mo Better Jaguar football games and told the boys that if they played well enough, they could get a scholarship, and with that scholarship, avoid the student debt and poverty that so many in generations before them faced.

"Kids feel pressured to play football, it's rooted in the problem of education," Samaha said.

So why do so many low-income students choose football, and not a different, less dangerous, sport? Why not try for a baseball scholarship? Or soccer?

It's a numbers game.

The odds of getting a college scholarship for a man playing football at a NCAA or NAIA school is 43:1, according to MarketWatch, and football offers far more athletic scholarships at NCAA and NAIA schools than any other sport, numbering close to 26,000 per year.

At the high school level, schools are investing big money into football as well. One high school in Katy, Texas, just outside of Houston, recently spent over 70 million dollars on a new state-of-the-art football stadium.

"As long as the money is going into this activity this is where the opportunities are going to be," Samaha said.

Additionally, unlike some sports, football has a relatively low barrier of entry of participation, because there are so many positions that rely on differing capabilities.

"Football unlike other sports doesn't require you to be a certain size or certain height," Samaha said. "You can sort of play it whether you're overweight whether you're underweight. It's sort of the most in some ways meritocratic of all the sports available for these opportunities."

But with the opportunity to achieve affordable higher education, playing football also brings the risk of long-term brain damage.

A report by the Journal of the American Medical Association, published in 2017, showed that in a study of 111 brains of deceased former National Football League players, 110 had evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

CTE has been linked with repeated blows to the head, and can result in behavioral changes and cognitive decline.

Some of the behavioral side effects include difficulty with impulse control, aggression, emotional volatility and rage behavior. Extensive signs of CTE has been found in the brains of former NFL stars such as former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez, who hung himself in a prison cell while serving a life sentence for murder.

It's not just NFL players though. The same study showed that in the 202 brains examined across all levels of play, nearly 88 percent of all the brains, 177, had CTE.

Low-income students who choose to play football know about these risks, Samaha said, but have factored it into a bigger risk assessment calculation. For them, playing football is still worth the risk, because they're trying to avoid other dangers.

"It's a luxury to worry about these long-term, sort of abstract damages to these kids and their parents," Samaha said. "The risks are all around them - the risks of not going to high school, the risks of not making it into college, or the risks of of falling into kind of the street path that they'd seen other people around them fall into."

Football is their ticket out. But Samaha argues that America needs to reckon with the broader ethical implications of the sport.

"America's dual commitments to football and racial oppression have meant that the danger of the sport will increasingly fall on the shoulders of low income black and brown kids," Samaha said.

Meanwhile, he says, the money from the sport is mainly going to white coaches and white owners.

Samaha likened the disparity between the people who participate in football and the people who benefit to a "gladiatorial dichotomy."

Meanwhile, there has been no real decline in viewership for the sport. A 2017 Gallup poll showed that football still leads as America's favorite sport, with 37 percent of U.S. adults choosing it as their favorite sport to watch.

Millions are expected to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, including Samaha.

"I feel guilty about it but I watch every Sunday," he said. "I don't know how to reckon with that."

Sunday night, as millions look on, the players will inevitably clash in tangled lines of bodies on the field, perhaps risking a lot for a few yards - risking more to win.

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Poor Students More Likely To Play Football, Despite Brain Injury Concerns

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Fears of brain injuries has deterred many parents and their children from choosing to play football. After years of publicity about how dangerous football can be, football enrollment has declined 6.6 percent in the past decade, according to data from the National Federation of State High School Associations.

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America's Affordable Housing Crisis: More Demand, Less Supply

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America's Affordable Housing Crisis: More Demand, Less Supply

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More and more Americans are struggling to make rent. Each year, an estimated 2.5 million people across the country are evicted.

Today, in a joint investigation called Poverty, Politics and Profit, FRONTLINE and NPR join forces to examine the crisis in affordable housing, exploring why so few people are getting the help they need, and whether government programs designed to aid low-income Americans with rent are working as they should.

One of those programs, called the low-income housing tax credit, relies on partnerships between the federal government and the private sector. The IRS gives billions in tax credits to the states, who then award the credits to developers. The developers sell them for cash to investors, mostly banks, and then use that money to help build apartment buildings. And because taxpayer money pays for most of it, they can charge the lower rents required.

The program, which has cost about $8 billion annually in recent years, is often described by supporters as a win-win: Low-income people get quality affordable housing and the private sector makes money. But in Poverty, Politics, and Profit, NPR and FRONTLINE crunch the numbers - and find that the program is costing taxpayers more in tax credits, but producing fewer units.

In the above excerpt from tonight's documentary, produced by FRONTLINE's Rick Young and his team, follow Laura Sullivan of NPR as she tries to find out why.

Then for more on the story, listen to All Things Considered today and watch FRONTLINE tonight. From exploring why those who receive Section 8 vouchers often struggle to find housing, to examining charges that developers have stolen money meant to house low-income people, to delving into the legacy of segregation in government housing programs, Poverty, Politics and Profit is a probing exploration of a system in crisis.
Watch Poverty, Politics and Profit starting Tuesday, May 9 at 10 p.m. EST/9 p.m. CST on FRONTLINE (check local PBS listings), and listen May 9 on NPR's All Things Considered.

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In America's Affordable Housing Crisis, More Demand but Less Supply

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More and more Americans are struggling to make rent. Each year, an estimated 2.5 million people across the country are evicted. Today, in a joint investigation called Poverty, Politics and Profit , FRONTLINE and NPR join forces to examine the crisis in affordable housing, exploring why so few people are getting the help they need, and whether government programs designed to aid low-income Americans with rent are working as they should.

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Benefits of Arts Education: New Evidence 

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Benefits of Arts Education: New Evidence 

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New evidence of the benefits of arts education | Brookings

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New findings provide strong evidence that arts educational experiences can produce significant positive impacts on academic and social development for students.

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Sarah Choo Jing is known for her interdisciplinary approach to photography, video and installation. Her work depicts identifiable moments and characters within contemporary urban society suggesting a plethora of private and often solitary narratives. The artist is concerned with the gaze of the flaneur, voyeurism and the uncanny.

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Are Vouchers the Solution to Public Education

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Are Vouchers the Solution to Public Education

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The Obama administration had plans to overhaul the nation's education system when they took office, but budget battles, health care, and other priorities took center stage. Now, it appears that education will quickly be moving to the forefront as the current year's test scores from around the country show that the large majority of schools in the United States are missing their mark and headed for failure. With the No Child Left Behind Act created by the Bush administration now headed to the chopping block, the quality of education in this country is set to get another look by Congress this spring.

What is the No Child Left Behind Act?

According to a report at the Washington Post, the No Child Left Behind Act was a signature educational initiative that originated with President George W. Bush in 2001. The goal of the legislation, which received bipartisan support at the time of signing, was to require schools to bring 100 percent of their students to proficiency in math and reading by the year 2014. Proficiency would be evaluated through annual exams given to students in third through eighth grade and one additional test during high school.

Reforming the No Child Left Behind Act has been a focus of the Obama administration because the current president would like to revamp the structure of the legislation to make it more appropriate to the current state of schools today. Part of the changes President Obama would like to make include loosening the accountability rules for schools that are performing well while cracking down harder on those that do not make the grade.

President Obama would also like to shift the purpose of the legislation beyond simply looking at test scores each year to actually monitoring the progress school is making toward producing more students who fall within math and reading guidelines.

This year, No Child Left Behind will come to the forefront of the congressional agenda if the number of failing schools predicted by Education Secretary Arne Duncan is correct. According to an article in the New York Times, Duncan has told Congress that more than 80,000 of the nation's 100,000 public schools will receive failing grades this year under the act. The numbers are based on an analysis of testing trends and the current state of the act's pass-fail system used to rate schools.

Duncan has proposed that the dire 82 percent of failing schools in the country is an indication that the No Child Left Behind Act is not working the way it was originally intended. According to the Los Angeles Times, Duncan told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, "No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now. This law has created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed. We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk."

Duncan is referring to the fact that No Child Left Behind is considered idealistic by the standards of many education experts today. It does not take into account the challenges of states that have diverse populations in terms of race and income level. The law also could demoralize schools with so many achieving a failing grade, which could, in turn, lower property values and misleads parents about the quality of education in their areas.

Schools Unable to Perform to Expectations

During the years since the No Child Left Behind Act was signed into law, schools have been failing to meet minimum requirements toward this goal in larger and larger numbers. During the 2006-2007 school year, 28 percent of schools failed to meet their proficiency goals. In the past academic year, that number rose to 37 percent. Some education officials were predicting that the law was nearing a tipping point, where the majority of schools would be unable to meet their goals, despite the hard work put in to do so.

Still, the huge jump to 82 percent of schools for this academic year is a surprise. Some school officials and members of Congress have even expressed skepticism over the predictions. Jack Jennings, president of the Center on Education Policy, told Education Week, "I hope they're right. They're dealing with their credibility." He has asked the department to draft a technical paper explaining its calculations in more detail.

Others have been much quicker to criticize and question the data. Charles Barone, the director of federal legislation for Democrats for Education Reform, told Education Week that the number was highly misleading. Barone added, "I think they're going to regret this. While I understand their frustration in trying to pass the law, I think it's only going to hurt them. They're creating an atmosphere of fear."

The changes President Obama would like to see the No Child Education Act include a replacement of the 2014 proficiency deadline with a goal to have all students ready for college or the workforce by 2020. He would also like to shift the focus in problematic school districts to improvements in student performance rather than simply rating by test scores. However, schools that fall into the bottom five percent of the ranking system would still face the requirement to follow one of the Education Department's turnaround models to bring about the necessary improvements for the benefit of their students.

Questions? Contact us on Twitter. @publicschoolreview

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Why 82% of Public Schools are Failing | PublicSchoolReview.com

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Education Secretary Arne Duncan estimated that 82% of this country's public schools are not passing the test in educating our children. Learn about the remnants of the No Child Left Behind Act and how the Obama administration plans to raise the bar on standards of education in this country.

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The Concept of "Race" Is a Lie, Scientists Say

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The Concept of "Race" Is a Lie, Scientists Say

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The plague of racism has, in many ways, been increasing in the last few years. Whether one looks at Hungary, Germany, Myanmar, India or Brazil, racists are becoming more visible and getting elected to public office.

Then there were the horrors of the slaughters in New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

In the United States, the president has denounced Mexicans as drug dealers and rapists, described some poor nations as, "shithole countries," and failed to reject an endorsement from a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. He even went so far as to call at least some neo-Nazis, "very fine people." One might be forgiven for thinking that what his campaign slogan really meant was "Make America White Again."

Hate crimes in the U.S. rose in 2017 for the third consecutive year, and they are increasing in Canada too -up 47 percent in the latter in 2017, primarily targeting Muslims but also attacking Jews and people of color.

In combating this increase in racism, there are two primary aspects to consider. The first is that the very idea of "race" is a lie: as the American Society of Human Genetics, the largest professional organization of scientists in the field, explained in an essay:

"The science of genetics demonstrates that humans cannot be divided into biologically distinct subcategories"; and it "challenges the traditional concept of different races of humans as biologically separate and distinct. This is validated by many decades of research." In other words, "race itself is a social construct," with no biological basis.

In 2014, more than 130 leading population geneticists condemned the idea that genetic differences account for the economic, political, social and behavioral diversity around the world. In fact, said a 2018 article in Scientific American,there is a "broad scientific consensus that when it comes to genes there is just as much diversity within racial and ethnic groups as there is across them." And the Human Genome Project has confirmed that the genomes found around the globe are 99.9 percent identical in every person. Hence, the very idea of different "races" is nonsense.

A second problem, as cognitive scientist George Lakoff has shown, is that simply using the word "race," even when criticizing racism, actually reinforces the false belief that human beings belong to fundamentally different groups. That's because the more a word is used, the more that certain brain circuits are activated and the stronger that metaphor becomes.

The use of colors to describe ethnic groups also supports racism. That's why it is not acceptable anymore to refer to Asians as "yellow," to Latin Americans as "brown," or to Native Americans as "red." However, many people, including academics and journalists, still use "black" to describe people of primarily recent African origin.

Of course, there are minor differences between various ethnic groups: behavioral, physical, linguistic and so on, and most of those differences are due to one's culture and experiences. As Einstein observed, "the personality that finally emerges is largely formed by the environment" that people experience during development, by the structure of the society in which they grow up, "by the tradition of that society, and by its appraisal of particular types of behavior."

In fact, the idea that all of humanity can be divided into four or five (or however many) racial groups is relatively new. Ancient Greeks, for example, never thought of themselves as "white." As Tim Whitmarsh noted in Aeon in 2018, "Greeks simply didn't think of the world as starkly divided along racial lines into black and white: that's a strange aberration of the modern, Western world, a product of many different historical forces, but in particular the transatlantic slave trade and the cruder aspects of 19th-century racial theory."

The truth is that Greek legends portray themselves and their heroes as multiethnic in origin. The Egyptian Danaus became king of Argos, and his daughter, Hypermestra, was an ancestor of the greatest of all Greek heroes, Herakles (Hercules). Perseus, who slew the Gorgon Medusa, married an Ethiopian woman, Andromeda, and their children established the most powerful of all the Bronze Age Greek kingdoms, Mycenae.

Another example of this nonracial perspective is found in the Histories of Herodotus, who, in the 5th century B.C., wrote that the purpose of his book was to, "preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks " [emphasis added]. The so-called Father of History" also said that Ethiopians "are reputed to be the tallest and most beautiful of all peoples."

This portrait of Africans is not unique. Historian Peter Farb notes in his 1978 book Humankind that "Greek art, literature, and mythology often portrayed dark-skinned people with respect." And then there are the remains found in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in southwest England of the individual known as "Cheddar Man." DNA from his skeleton, dated to around 7,100 B.C., suggests that he had blue eyes, dark curly hair and "dark to black" skin pigmentation. Cheddar Man shares a genetic profile with several other individuals found in Spain, Hungary and Luxembourg.

Cheddar Man's forebears likely originated in the Middle East. Later, the ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge traveled west across the Mediterranean from Asia Minor, bringing farming with them and reaching Britain about 4,000 B.C.

The truth is that we are all one human family that had its origins in Africa. Amazingly, research by statistician Joseph Chang at Yale found that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today lived just 3,600 years ago. In other words, if you could trace your ancestry back less than 150 generations, you would find at least one person who is the father or mother of us all. And the further back in time one looks, the more common ancestors we would find. Chang concludes:

"Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who labored to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu."

The burden of proof lies, therefore, with those who cling to the notion that there are such things as "races." They would have to first provide a scientific definition, based on significant differences in human genomes, of what "race" means; and second, clearly demonstrate that there are enough of these differences between different ethnic groups to justify dividing people into separate "races." This is an impossible task.

In the final analysis, it is our experiences and our culture, not our DNA, that account for most of our differences.

So, while ethnicity is real, and there are indeed minor differences between ethnic groups, there is no such thing as "race"-only racism. And the consequences of racism-from the slave trade to the European genocide of First Nations in the "New World" to Nazi Germany to today's refugees-are horrific.

Even Ronald Reagan understood that, "if suddenly there was a threat to this world from some other species, from another planet," the consequence would be this: "We'd forget all the little local differences that we have between our countries, and we would find out once and for all that we really are all human beings here on this Earth together."

We are facing real existential threats, and we shouldn't wait for an alien invasion before we focus less on our minor differences and more on what we all have in common.

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The Concept of “Race” Is a Lie

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The plague of racism has, in many ways, been increasing in the last few years. Whether one looks at Hungary, Germany, Myanmar, India or Brazil, racists are becoming more visible and getting elected to public office. Then there were the horrors of the slaughters in New Zealand and Sri Lanka.

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The Challenging Politics of Climate Change

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The Challenging Politics of Climate Change

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"We don't really worry about climate change because it's too overwhelming and we're already in too deep. It's like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you're like, 'OK, I've got to pay this dude back.' But if you owe your bookie $1 million dollars, you're like, 'I guess I'm just going to die.'" ⁠- Colin Jost, Saturday Night Live, 10/13/18
The above quote is from a Saturday Night Live skit on the weekend following release of a report from the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report was one of the most dramatic ones yet, predicting that some of the most severe social and economic damage from the rise in global temperatures could come as soon at 2040. And yet, two comedians, Colin Jost and Michael Che, summed up the difficult (and perhaps impossible) politics of the issue in less than three minutes. You don't have to be a climate denier to be, in the end, indifferent to the issue.

As the climate crisis becomes more serious and more obvious, Americans remain resistant to decisive and comprehensive action on climate change. In "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming," David Wallace-Wells paints a frightening picture of the coming environmental apocalypse. Whole parts of the globe will become too hot for human habitation and those left behind will die of heat. Diseases will increase and mutate. Food shortages will become chronic as we fail to move agriculture from one climate to another. Whole countries like Bangladesh and parts of other countries like Miami will be underwater. Shortages of fresh water will affect humans and agriculture. The oceans will die, the air will get dirtier. "But," as Wallace-Wells argues, "what lies between us and extinction is horrifying enough." ¹ That's because, as climate change takes its toll on Earth's physical planet, it will also cause social, economic, and political chaos as refugees flee areas that can no longer sustain them. If this prediction seems a bit extreme, all we have to do is look at recent weather events that keep breaking records to confront the possibility that the threat from climate change may indeed be existential.

public opinion on the climate crisis

Yet, in spite of the evidence at hand, climate change remains the toughest, most intractable political issue we, as a society, have ever faced. This is not to say that there hasn't been progress. In the United States, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions has held steady since 1990-even though our economy and our population has grown. ² But globally, greenhouse gases have increased since then, bringing humanity very close to the dangerous levels of global warming that were predicted. ³ As scientific evidence about the causes of climate change has mounted and as a consensus has evolved in the scientific community, the public has remained divided and large, important parts of the political class have been indifferent. For instance, although 2017 was a year of 16 different billion-dollar natural disasters, ⁴ according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the percentage of voters who were "very concerned" about climate change stayed within the 40% range-where it has been rather stubbornly stuck for the past two years. ⁵ The following chart shows Gallup public opinion polling for the past two decades. ⁶ During this period, but especially in the most recent decade, about a third to almost half of the public believes that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated.

Dramatic and unprecedented natural disasters have had little effect on the public. Following blizzards and an unusually frigid winter in 2015, only 37% of Americans said climate change would pose a serious threat to them in their lifetimes. ⁷ After Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma in 2017, concern about climate change increased by 7 points among Republicans and 2 points among Democrats. ⁸ But in the next year, an August 2018 poll taken shortly after the California wildfires showed concern among Republicans down to 44% and up to 79% among Democrats. ⁹ In a YouGov poll in the summer of 2019-during record heat waves in the U.S. and Europe-only 42% of the public said that they were very concerned and only 22% of Republicans said that they were" very concerned about climate change." ¹⁰

If natural disasters don't affect attitudes toward climate change, partisanship does. The following chart from Pew Research shows the gulf that exists between Democrats and Republicans on this issue. ¹¹

The partisan divide began in the late 1990s and has increased over time. In 1997, nearly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans said that the effects of global warming have already begun. Ten years later, the gap was 34%: 76% of Democrats said the effects had already begun, and only 42% of Republicans agreed.

Republican resistance on this issue is one but not the only reason why, in the face of mounting evidence, the public remains lukewarm on this existential issue. The dire warnings, the scientific consensus, and the death toll from unprecedented climate events have failed to move the public very much. For two years now, the number of Americans who say they are "very concerned" about climate change fails to reach 50%, as a look at polling from Quinnipiac illustrates. ¹²

An even more telling piece of evidence on public indifference to climate change comes from 30 years of open-ended polling conducted by Gallup. Open-ended polling is especially interesting since it elicits an unprompted response from the individual. Between 1989 and 2019, Gallup has asked "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?" Jobs, the economy, and health care are often at the top of the list. "Environment/pollution" is not often mentioned. In fact, over a 30-year period, it was mentioned by anywhere from less than 0.5% to 8% of the public. In the most recent 2019 poll (August), "the government/poor leadership" was mentioned by 22% of the public, and "immigration" by 18%. "Environment/pollution/climate change" garnered only 3% of the public. And in some earlier polls, climate change is not even mentioned by a significant portion of the public (although people could be including that within the term environment.) ¹³

Why can't we get our heads around this?

Given the severity of the climate crisis and the potential for existential damage to the human race and planet, the lack of intensity around the issue is simultaneously incomprehensible and totally understandable. So let's look at the latter. The explanations fall into at least four categories: complexity; jurisdiction and accountability; collective action and trust; and imagination.

Complexity

Complexity is the death knell of many modern public policy problems and solutions. And complexity is inherent in climate change. The causes of global warming are varied, including carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. As the climate warms, it affects glaciers, sea levels, water supply, rainfall, evaporation, wind, and a host of other natural phenomenon that affect weather patterns. Unlike an earlier generation of environmental problems, it is hard to see the connections between coal plants in one part of the world and hurricanes in another. In contrast, when the water in your river smells and turns a disgusting color and dead fish float on top of it, no sophisticated scientific training is required to understand the link between what's happening in the river and the chemical plant dumping things into it. The first generation of the environmental movement had an easier time making the connection between cause and effect.

Evidence for this comes from approximately three decades of polling on the environment by Gallup. In the chart below, most of the polls took place between 1989 and 2019. ¹⁴ Note that, over time, the most worrisome environmental problems are visible pollution problems. Water, soil, and ocean and beach pollution are at the top. These are things average people can see and smell. Global warming or climate change is toward the bottom. These numbers change somewhat over time and understandably so, which is why data is included from 2019 where available. People are more worried about climate change than they used to be. Nonetheless, the complexity of the issue compared to the more straightforward cause-and-effect characteristics of other environmental issues is a major impediment to political action.

Environmental issue Range of the public who worried about this "a great deal" (from ~1989 to ~2019)Median percentage Public who worried about this "a great deal" in 2019

When former Vice President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the prize was for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change." Through his books, his famous slide show, and his 2006 movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore made it his mission to explain the scientific processes that make global warming so dangerous. But the inherent complexity of cause and effect in climate change makes it a topic in need of continuous education.

Jurisdiction and accountability

The second major impediment to political action stems from problems of jurisdiction and accountability. From the beginning, modern government has relied upon the concept of jurisdiction-"territory within which a court or government agency may properly exercise its power." ¹⁵ And implicit in the concept of jurisdiction is geography. But two of the stickiest problems of the 21 st century-climate change and cybersecurity-are challenging because it is so difficult to nail down jurisdiction. When we are able to establish jurisdiction we are able to establish rules, laws, and accountability for adherence to the law-the three bedrock principles of modern democratic governance. In the absence of jurisdiction, everyone is accountable and therefore no one is accountable.

When a cybercrime or cyberattack occurs, we have trouble with jurisdiction. If the perpetrator of a cyberattack on an electrical grid is a Russian living in Tirana, Albania, who routes attacks through France and Canada, who can prosecute the individual? (Assuming, that is, that we can even find them.) Similarly, if coal plants in China and cattle ranching in Australia increase their outputs of greenhouse gases in one year and there are droughts in Africa and floods in Europe the next, who is responsible?

We currently attribute greenhouse gas emissions to individual countries under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and we attribute greenhouse gases to their sources within the United States via the Environmental Protections Agency's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. But attribution without enforcement mechanisms is only half the battle-if that. Nationally and internationally there is no legal architecture that allows us to reward and/or punish those who decrease or increase their greenhouse gas emissions. Even the Paris Agreement-which President Trump pulled the U.S. out of-is only a set of pledges from individual countries. Measurement is a first step toward accountability, and measurement needs constant improvement. But measurement in the absence of accountability is meaningless, especially in situations where many people are skeptical of cause and effect.

The Toxic Release Inventory was established by Congress in 1982 as an amendment to the Superfund Bill. Over the years, the steady flow of information about the release of hazardous chemicals into the environment has had many positive effects on regulators, environmentalists, and industrialists. ¹⁶ Studies have shown that "facilities reduce emissions by an additional 4.28% on average, and their use of source reduction increases by 3.07% on average when the relative assessed hazard level of a chemical increases compared to when it decreases." ¹⁷

But the Toxic Release Inventory has one advantage that the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program does not. The effects of dangerous chemicals on a population are generally fairly clear and obvious: dirty water, dirty air, difficulty breathing, unusual rates of cancer, etc. The cause and effect is often undeniable as the many lawyers who have represented communities and won their cases against large polluters can attest. Greenhouse gas emissions affect people thousands of miles away from their source and make it easier to believe that it wasn't the fossil fuels at all, just the weather pattern or an act of God. Hence, the linkage between jurisdiction and accountability is weak.

Collective action and trust

Our increasingly hot summers drive the demand for air conditioning. However, air conditioning adds to the heat outside. Scientists estimate that under a realistic set of circumstances, "waste heat from air conditioners exacerbated the heat island effect, the phenomenon in which densely packed cities experience higher temperatures than similarly situated rural areas." ¹⁸ Air conditioning could add as much as 1 degree Celsius (nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit) to the heat of a city. Which one of us, however, would voluntarily turn off their air conditioning knowing full well that hundreds of thousands of other "free riders" would not?

"It is the lack of trust in government that may be one of the foundational barriers to effective environmental action."

This is just one simplified version of the collective action problem. People may understand that they should act in a certain way for the greater good, but as individuals, they are loathe to turn off their air conditioning or stop flying places for vacations-knowing that others will not be joining them. This is why government is the most frequent solution to collective action problems. Combating climate change requires collective action on many fronts, and it requires collective action both nationally and internationally. But this is extremely difficult in democracies like the U.S., which face strong individualist traditions in the culture along with a lack of trust in government.

In fact, it is the lack of trust in government that may be one of the foundational barriers to effective environmental action. Writing in the journal Global Environmental Change, E. Keith Smith and Adam Mayer looked at 35 different countries. They found that a lack of trust in institutions blunts the public's risk perceptions and therefore their willingness to support behaviors or policies to address climate change. ¹⁹

Their findings make intuitive sense especially in the American context. If you are skeptical about government in general, you are skeptical about your government telling you that you need to do something about climate change; you are even more skeptical about an international body like the United Nations telling you that climate change is a very serious problem. Below is a graph showing the moving average over time of Americans who say they can trust the government in Washington to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time." ²⁰

Imagination

The final piece to the puzzle of why the political salience of climate change seems so out of step with the physical proof and urgency of the issue may have to do with the realm of imagination. As every journalist knows, it is important to be able to tell a story, and as every teacher knows, we learn best through stories. And novelists and screenwriters are the most effective and powerful storytellers we have in society. And yet, in an intriguing book called "The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable," the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that climate change is even more absent in the world of fiction than it is in nonfiction.

To see that this is so, we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal, and the New York Times Review of Books. When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a noel or short story to the genre of science fiction. ²¹

The absence of climate change from novels means that it is also absent from movies and television-the great powerful purveyors of stories in our time. One can't underestimate the power of fiction in shaping society's attitudes. Some older Americans can remember how the 1958 novel "Exodus," by Leon Uris, and the subsequent 1960 movie by the same name impacted a generation of non-Jewish Americans to be supportive of Israel. Or how the 2000 movie "Erin Brockovich," based on a true story of a young woman who takes on an energy corporation, helped popularize the environmental justice movement.

Ghosh's contribution to our understanding of this issue is not so much in his sections on politics as it is on his insight that fiction in our age is unable to deal with events that are so improbable and so removed from the agency of the individual that they cannot be written about in any realistic way.

All of which brings us back to our two Saturday Night Live comedians.

Conclusion

We have trouble imagining the potential devastation of climate change. We have trouble trusting governments to lead us into much needed collective action. We have trouble defining the links between jurisdiction and accountability. And we have trouble understanding the causality in the first place.

How can we fix this? And can we fix this in time to avoid the most severe consequences of climate change?

Some people, recognizing the political problem, hope for a technological fix such as carbon capture or some other geoengineering fix. The problem with technological fixes is that they are remote and may very well not be effective in time to stave off massive amounts of social and economic disruption. On the other hand, early-1950s America faced what seemed to be an endlessly heartbreaking polio epidemic; in less than a decade, however, a vaccine was developed and the epidemic ended. Given the technological miracles seen in our lifetime, we should not dismiss a technological solution, and we should invest heavily in one with both public and private dollars.

A second imperative is to increase basic scientific literacy so that the burden of pedagogy does not fall on folks like Al Gore alone. Some of this is already happening with the attention given to STEM training in education. But it is clear that climate change is only one of many complex scientific issues that average citizens will be called upon to understand and act on in the future. A renewed focus on scientific literacy may need to be implemented throughout America's schools.

Which brings us to the storytellers. Just as Al Gore won an Emmy for a movie on climate change, the creative elements in our society need to help explain what's at stake. They will find a receptive audience in the younger generation. As evidenced by their activism on this issue-this past week, millions marched in countries around the world to protest inaction around climate change-young people are especially concerned with the environment. ²² The millennial generation is a very large one, and they have so far shown themselves to be civic minded and environmentally engaged.

"Awareness without the ability to hold corporations, countries, and individuals accountable will not result in major action on environmental issues. But measurement and accountability without an understanding of the connections between a warmer planet and dangerous climate changes will not result in major action either."

A third imperative is to strengthen the link between jurisdiction and accountability. Nationally and internationally, we need to be able to reward and punish private and public actors for their environmental actions. The condemnation of Brazil's government for deforestation and fires in the Amazon was largely without consequences. Until there are penalties for things like greenhouse gas emissions, they will not be reduced in sufficient amounts.

Because this issue poses the ultimate collective action problem, it requires governmental action, such as treaties, taxes, and regulations, for starters. But very few citizens in our country are going to support governmental action without first trusting government to get it right. We need to restore trust in government. It has been on a steady downward slide since the George W. Bush administration. Unless we restore trust in government, we are not likely to achieve significant collective action.

Of course, all these things must proceed hand in hand. Awareness without the ability to hold corporations, countries, and individuals accountable will not result in major action on environmental issues. But measurement and accountability without an understanding of the connections between a warmer planet and dangerous climate changes will not result in major action either. Above all, we need to restore-through government and other means-our trust in collective action.

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The challenging politics of climate change

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"We don't really worry about climate change because it's too overwhelming and we're already in too deep. It's like if you owe your bookie $1,000, you're like, 'OK, I've got to pay this dude back.'

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Last year's report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded the alarm: The world has until 2030 to implement "rapid and far-reaching" changes to our energy, infrastructure and industrial systems to avoid 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which could be catastrophic. But the scale of the challenge can appear so overwhelming that it's hard to know where to start. The Post asked activists, politicians and researchers for climate policy ideas that offer hope. Radical change from one state, or even the whole United States, won't address climate change on its own, but taking these actions could help start the planet down a path toward a better future.

11 policy ideas to protect the planet

Set local emissions goals

Be smart about your air conditioner

Encourage electric vehicles

Be smart about nuclear power

Make it easier to live without cars

Prevent wasted food - the right way

Incentivize carbon farming

Curb the effects of meat and dairy

Adopt a carbon tax

Open electric markets to competition

Pass a Green New Deal

Illustrations by Tom Toles/The Washington Post

Set local emissions goals

By Peter Buckland and Brandi Robinson

In June 2017, the Ferguson Township Board of Supervisors passed a resolution recognizing the risk and threats of failing to draw down carbon emissions. As a local government in Pennsylvania, the third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter in the United States despite having a right to a clean environment guaranteed in its state constitution, we knew we had to act. Our resolution calls for carbon neutrality as soon as feasible but no later than 2050.

Passing the resolution provided the opportunity and, arguably, the imperative to integrate emissions impacts into all township decision-making. By setting such a goal at the local level, governments can figure out what solutions fit their community's needs and work within their state's legislative landscape. For Ferguson Township, this has meant 100 percent wind power, designing a LEED Gold public works building, working on zoning changes to incentivize green building, low-impact stormwater infrastructure, and working with local school kids, teachers and families to plant trees.

Ferguson Township also created a Climate Action Committee that has conducted a municipal-wide greenhouse-gas inventory. Inventorying emissions establishes a credible baseline from which we can measure our progress. But equally important and less easily quantifiable benefits lie beyond this policy's tangible and predictable outcomes. Effective climate action plans require that residents, public officials, businesses and other stakeholders cultivate trusting working relationships with one another. The policy directive created the inspiration and framework for change, but all of us in Ferguson Township must embrace it and take action to achieve results.

Be smart about your air conditioner

By Durwood Zaelke

Air conditioners have a high impact on the climate, both in the energy and refrigerants they use - super greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons. HFCs are short-lived pollutants, but they have an impact on global warming that's hundreds to thousands of times more potent than that of carbon dioxide by mass. Yet as the world gets hotter, air-conditioner demand is growing, with experts projecting we'll have 4.5 billion units by 2050, up from about 1.2 billion today. Some states, including California, are taking action to address this problem now.

Globally, a phasedown of HFC refrigerants could avoid up to 0.5 degree Celsius of warming by 2100; the Montreal Protocol now requires countries to reduce the use of these chemicals starting in January. Parallel efforts to improve the efficiency of air conditioners can double this climate benefit, with the potential to avoid up to a full degree Celsius by the end of the century.

In addition to buying only super-efficient air conditioners - which over the lifetime of the unit will save you money and reduce climate impacts and air pollutants - you can encourage your state legislators to follow the model of California, which requires a 40 percent reduction in HFCs by 2030. Its latest efforts further prohibit refrigerants with high global warming potential in new air conditioners and commits to supporting other states to adopt similar prohibitions. New York, Maryland and Connecticut have followed suit, and other states can, too. You can also encourage your legislators to require the highest energy efficiency standards for air conditioners, and to use their buying power to insist on only the most efficient equipment.

Encourage electric vehicles

By Constantine Samaras

Americans are driving more miles in the same old cars, and because we use fuels made from oil to power most of our transportation system, moving people and goods around is the largest source of U.S. carbon emissions. Because we use little oil to make electricity, and the power grid is getting cleaner as natural gas and renewables replace coal, electrifying as much of the transportation sector as possible could speed up an energy transition.

There is a federal tax credit of up to $7,500 to get people to buy electric cars, but it is starting to phase out for some types of cars. Combined with incentives in some states, these tax credits have been helpful, but electric vehicles still make up only a few percent of all vehicle sales. Getting more electric vehicles on the road requires expanded federal tax credits and making them available for buyers when they're at the car dealership, rather than in their tax returns the following year. This would help more low- and middle-income car buyers make the jump to electric. The federal government could also once again offer tax credits or direct infrastructure grants to local governments and firms to build a robust charging-station network so that these new electric car owners have a place to plug in.

State and local policymakers can mirror these efforts but can also accelerate transportation electrification in other ways. There are more than 8 million fleet vehicles in the United States; governments could electrify a majority of their vehicles and induce businesses to follow their lead. State and local governments could also experiment with electric-only delivery zones and use other innovative incentives to encourage electrification of freight, shared hailed vehicles and, eventually, automated vehicles.

Creating a transportation system where we can move around without oil is going to be challenging. But we'll get cars that are more fun to drive, cleaner air and a climate we can recognize.

Be smart about nuclear power

By Steve Clemmer

My organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, recently released an analysis offering a sensible way for the United States to help combat climate change: Keep safely operating nuclear plants running until they can be replaced by other low-carbon technologies.

Our report found that more than a third of the nation's 60 plants operating at the end of 2017 - 22 percent of U.S. nuclear power capacity - are either unprofitable or slated to close within the next 10 years. Unless federal and state governments adopt new policies, these and other economically marginal plants will likely be replaced primarily by natural gas. If that happens, the U.S. electric power sector's carbon emissions could increase as much as 6 percent by 2035.

To help preserve existing nuclear power - and boost investments in renewables and energy efficiency - the federal government and states should establish a carbon price or a low-carbon electricity standard. These policies would help level the playing field for low-carbon technologies by incorporating the cost of climate-change-related damage into the price of fossil fuels.

Absent those measures, some states are providing subsidies to prevent uneconomical plants from closing abruptly. States considering that approach should limit their subsidies and adjust them over time to protect consumers, and provide them only to plants that meet or exceed the most stringent federal safety standards. Subsidies also should go hand in hand with increased investments in renewables and energy efficiency as part of a broader strategy to reduce carbon emissions.

Finally, the 60-year operating licenses for most reactors in the United States are scheduled to expire between 2030 and 2050. Nuclear plant owners should be required to develop worker and community transition plans to prepare for their facilities' eventual retirement and decommissioning.

Make it easier to live without cars

By Emiko Atherton

We have a suite of simple tools that can help us dramatically curb emissions from transportation: building and redesigning our streets to make it safer and more convenient for people to walk and bike more and drive less - what we call Complete Streets policies. In fact, there's no way we'll be able to sufficiently reduce our emissions without doing this. As long as we design our streets only for cars, we are designing a high-carbon future.

Walking or biking could substitute for 41 percent of short car trips, saving nearly 5 percent of carbon dioxide emissions from car travel. So why don't we walk and bike more? We certainly want to. A recent survey by the National Association of Realtors found that a majority of Americans would prefer to live in walkable communities with transit service. But we drive because our streets have been designed for our vehicles, not us. And walking is not just unpleasant on auto-oriented roads; it's often deadly. While traffic fatalities overall have been decreasing, pedestrian fatalities are increasing, up to nearly 6,000 people in 2017.

Complete Streets policies are commitments by government to design our streets to make cycling, walking, riding transit and driving safe, comfortable, reliable and affordable. That includes better lighting and crosswalks for pedestrians, protected bike lanes for bicyclists, and good shelters and signage for people waiting for the bus.

According to the 2017 National Household Travel Survey, almost 50 percent of all car trips taken were three miles or less; more than 20 percent were a mile or less. The potential climate benefits of shifting even a portion of those trips to lower-carbon modes are undeniable. Complete Streets policies are an important part of a climate change strategy. Residents can urge their city councils or state legislatures to pass Complete Streets legislation, improving safety and making more zero-emissions trips easier for everyone to take.

Prevent wasted food - the right way

By Roni Neff

When Project Drawdown ranked the 80 most impactful climate change solutions, No. 3 was addressing waste of food. In the United States, we waste up to 40 percent of our food supply - enough nutritional value to feed millions. The United Nations estimates that if wasted food was a country, its greenhouse-gas emissions would rank third globally. That's in part because of the food system's outsize climate impact: It accounts for an estimated 19 percent to 29 percent of global anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions.

The United States and many states and localities have signed onto a global target of halving wasted food by 2030. So-called food waste bans, policies restricting food from going to landfills, can help get there. Five states (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Vermont) and multiple municipalities and international locations have such bans or mandatory food recycling. Others incentivize reduced landfilling with "pay as you throw" approaches.

The climate change evidence piles up. So does the denial.

These policies can lead to increased food recycling (composting or anaerobic digestion) and related infrastructure. But while preferable to leaving food to release methane in landfills, recycling can't make up for the emissions that went into the food's production, processing, distribution, heating and cooling. Recycling can even be perceived as a justification for discarding good food.

Among food waste mitigation strategies, by far, the greater climate benefit per ton comes from avoiding unnecessary food production. Accordingly, waste-ban policies should be considered incomplete unless they promote waste prevention and donation as the preferred approaches. California, for instance, has passed a bill requiring that, by 2025, at least 20 percent of edible food that would otherwise be disposed instead be recovered to eat.

Halving waste of food is an audacious target, but it's achievable. Food waste bans can dramatically ramp up the prevention, recovery and recycling of food. Most ban policies are fairly new, and more research is needed, but thus far it appears that, approached right, they can be a win-win-win-win-win for waste mitigation, jobs, economic activity, food insecurity and, of course, the climate.

Incentivize carbon farming

By Didi Barrett

The agricultural industry is a leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions globally. Practices that improve soil health will play a critical role in our efforts to combat climate change by reducing the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and states can help by passing legislation that incentivizes carbon farming.

Carbon farming refers to climate-smart agricultural practices that reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by sequestering, or storing, carbon in the soil instead of promoting its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Carbon farming improves soil health and productivity, thereby maximizing crop yields. It also increases soil resilience and reduces the need for pesticides.

Carbon-farming strategies include planting cover crops that increase water retention and soil nutrients and keep weeds down; using no-till approaches that limit aeration of surface soils and reduce erosion; and planting diverse perennial forages with deeper root systems for grazing animals. Longer root systems increase organic matter (carbon-based molecules) in the soil. These practices could have a huge impact on our emissions: Project Drawdown estimates that widespread adoption of these types of practices could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 23.2 gigatons by 2050.

In New York, I introduced the Carbon Farming Act, a first-of-its-kind bill that would give farmers a financial incentive for implementing climate-smart practices. This legislation creates a tax credit for farmers to continue these practices and to encourage others to begin them, because policies that reward - rather than punish through carbon penalties, for example - will ultimately be more effective and equitable.

Farmers, who are responsible for producing the fresh food we put on our tables and depend on weather for their livelihoods, could make significant contributions to helping us reach emission reduction goals. Incentivizing carbon-farming practices will ensure that agriculture's future is both economically and environmentally sustainable.

Curb the effects of meat and dairy

By Juliette Majot

We must begin regulating the factory-farm model of livestock production to step up the fight on climate change. A 2018 report from the Institute for Agriculture & Trade Policy and GRAIN analyzed the greenhouse-gas emissions of the world's 35 biggest meat and dairy conglomerates and found that the top 20 emitted more greenhouse gases in 2016 than several Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member countries did.

The mass production of ruminant animals produces untenable amounts of climate-warming methane. The conversion of large swaths of land into feed grain monocultures to raise ever-growing numbers of animals emits the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, as synthetic fertilizers leach into soils and water. Additionally, this land-use change releases precious carbon stocks from soils into the atmosphere.

Now is the time to call the meat and dairy conglomerates to account. Let's start by curbing both over-production and emissions by securing a moratorium on new factory farms, a.k.a. CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations). Predominantly located in low-income communities and, often, communities of color, these major polluters of air and water are already facing tenacious public opposition. From North Carolina, to Wisconsin and Iowa, to California and Oregon, communities are calling on their local and state governments to step up and better regulate these polluters.

Then, let's stop funneling taxpayer money to these big corporations through various farm-bill programs, such as the guaranteed loan program that often backs the construction and expansion of CAFOs. Instead, we should start investing in a just transition to agricultural systems that lift up rural communities by supporting farmers practicing sustainable grazing practices, expanding the infrastructure for the growing grass-fed beef and dairy markets, and enforcing fair market and fair contract rules for the livestock industry. That will improve the quality of our food, air, soil, water and climate.

Adopt a carbon tax

By Carlos Curbelo

Warming temperatures, rising sea levels and more extreme weather caused by greenhouse emissions have the potential to adversely affect the health of every American and the strength of our economy, consequently imposing substantial costs on us and future generations.

We must recognize these costs to our nation and world. We have a responsibility to promote policies that reduce greenhouse gases while maintaining economic growth and supporting innovation. We will need new ways to produce goods, transport ourselves and power our economy across various sectors.

The best way to inspire such a wide-ranging, meaningful change, at the pace that we need it, is putting a price on carbon. When carefully crafted, a carbon price can strengthen our economy, reduce emissions and encourage innovation.

That was my goal in drafting the Market Choice Act, a bill that would repeal the federal gas and aviation fuel taxes and swap them for a tax on carbon emissions at the source. Revenue raised would then be used to robustly fund our nation's infrastructure, help coastal communities adapt to the immediate effects of climate change and give low-income Americans and displaced workers assistance in the transition. Analysis from Columbia University indicates this legislation would exceed the emissions goals of the Paris agreement and President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan. The plan would also maintain American manufacturing competitiveness and provide regulatory certainty to allow for long-term investments in cleaner energy projects, so long as emissions goals are being met.

Economic prosperity and being good stewards of our environment are not mutually exclusive. By reducing our emissions, we ensure the protection of our economy, infrastructure and the general welfare of all Americans.

Open electric markets to competition

By Josiah Neeley

Throughout much of the country, consumers have no choice when it comes to buying electricity. Local utilities are given monopoly privileges with oversight from state regulatory bodies. This system wasn't set up to keep the nation's electricity system dirty, but it often functions that way. Over the past decade, market-driven declines in the price of renewable energy and natural gas have led to the closure of many coal power plants. But because electric rates in monopoly systems are set based on what's needed for utilities to recover their costs, the utility companies have less incentive to retire uneconomical plants.

Introducing competition to the electric market changes that. Instead of a centrally planned organization deciding which types of power to use, electricity generators must compete with each other to provide reliable power at the lowest cost. Generators thus have strong incentives to switch to cleaner fuels when they become cheaper. It's no mere coincidence that the state with the most wind generation - Texas - also has the most free electric market in the nation. Competition can even improve the performance of fossil-fuel plants. Between 1991 and 2005, states with electrical competition saw a 6 percent reduction in carbon-dioxide emissions from existing coal plants, due to improved fuel efficiency.

Electric competition has also made providers more responsive to the growing consumer demand for clean energy. The number of "green choice" customers in states with retail competition increased by 142 percent from 2010 to 2012.

Introducing more competition into the electric system would help speed the transition to cleaner energy. And even where states might not be ready to embrace full restructuring, smaller steps can still help. Some states have considered creating an exemption to the typical monopoly restrictions for customers who want to buy 100 percent renewable electricity on the open market. Reducing emissions from the power sector is a critical part of the response to climate change, and electric competition needs to be a part of that conversation.

Pass a Green New Deal

By Varshini Prakash

We don't have a moment to waste. To address the full scope of the climate crisis, we need massive government action to overhaul our economy away from fossil fuels to clean energy. We need a Green New Deal - a broad and ambitious package of policies and investments that would put millions of Americans to work transforming our economy away from fossil fuels by 2030, restoring the American landscape and ensuring that everyone has clean air and water, all in ways that prioritize justice and equity and grow the economy.

Specifically, we could transition 100 percent of our electricity generation to renewable sources; build a national, energy-efficient, "smart" grid; upgrade every residential and industrial building for state-of-the-art energy efficiency, comfort and safety; and transition the manufacturing, agriculture and transportation industries away from coal, oil and gas. A Green New Deal would also invest in projects to capture climate-damaging gases already in the atmosphere and make the United States an undisputed global leader in green technology, ensuring that the advances we make can be shared with the global community.

While the Green New Deal would require a scale of government action not seen since the Great Depression and World War II, this type of job-creating policy is extremely popular and could ensure economic security to millions of Americans for the first time in decades, especially people of color and poor or middle-class Americans who have been left out of the economic gains of the past four decades. We can solve the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced and protect our air, water and land for future generations.

Young people have a right to good jobs and a livable future. The Green New Deal is a winning plan for both.
Editing by Anna Walsh. Illustrations by Tom Toles. Copy editing by Lydia Rebac.

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Opinion: Here are 11 climate change policies to fight for in 2019

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More competitive electric markets, a Green New Deal, carbon farming and other ideas that could help slow global warming.

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1918 Flu Pandemic: Deadliest Plague of the 20th Century

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1918 Flu Pandemic: Deadliest Plague of the 20th Century

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Deadliest Plague of the 20th Century: Flu of 1918

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Racism In America: 158 Resources To Understand It

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Racism In America: 158 Resources To Understand It

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158 Resources for Understanding Systemic Racism in America

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These articles, videos, podcasts and websites from the Smithsonian chronicle the history of anti-black violence and inequality in the United States

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Red Cross workers make anti-influenza masks for soldiers, Boston, Massachusetts. (National Archives Identifier 45499341)

Online Exhibit
The Deadly Virus: The Influenza Epidemic of 1918
A selection of photographs and documents from the National Archives' nationwide holdings tell the story of the 1918 influenza pandemic.

Photographs

(Click image to view gallery)

Additional Photographs

Author Lecture

Dr. Jeremy Brown, Director of Emergency Care Research, National Institutes of Health, spoke about his book Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the Deadliest Disease in History, at the National Archives in Washington, DC, on March 5, 2019.

Archival Film

Nurses make bandages for flu epidemic (stock newsreel footage from CBS)

Blogs and Social Media Posts

Forward with Roosevelt: One of the Millions: FDR and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1920

Text Message: The "Spanish Flu" Pandemic of 1918-1919: A Death in Philadelphia

Pieces of History: Influenza Epidemic 1918-"Wear a mask and save your life"

Pieces of History: Gesundheit!

Unwritten Record: The 1918 Influenza Pandemic

Today's Document: Precautions Against Influenza

Tumblr: 1918 to COVID-19

Tumblr: Influenza Epidemic 1918-"Wear a mask and save your life"

For Educators

Influenza Directive from DC re: treatment and procedures , 9/26/1918

Influenza Prophylaxis Memo from Third Naval District Medical Officer

Documents Related to the Flu Pandemic of 1918

Memo Re: Sanitary Precautions, 9/12/1918

Additional primary sources and educational resources from DocsTeach

At the Presidential Libraries

Truman Library: Letter from Harry to Bess, referencing the influenza epidemic, and expressing relief that Bess has recovered from it.

Ford Library: Remarks Upon the Signing of National Swine Flu Immunization Program of 1976

Ford Library: President Asks Congress for $135 Million for Swine Flu VaccineFord Library: Fact Sheet on Swine Influenza Immunization Program

George W. Bush Library: Pandemic Flu: Preparing and Protecting against Avian Influenza

Barack Obama Library: Declaration of Nat'l Emergency - 2009 H1N1 Influenza Pandemic

Barack Obama Library: Press Briefing On Swine Influenza
National Archives COVID-19 Updates
Posts Related to COVID-19

AOTUS Blog: National Archives Operations During COVID-19: Mission Critical Functions Continue

AOTUS Blog: National Archives Donates Protective Gear for COVID-19 Response

National Archives News: National Personnel Records Center Continues Serving Veterans During COVID-19 Pandemic

National Archives News: National Archives Donates Protective Gear for COVID-19 Response

Office of the Federal Register: COVID-19 Procedures

Press Release: Information on NHPRC and COVID-19

Records Management: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Records Management During the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Red Cross workers make anti-influenza masks for soldiers, Boston, Massachusetts. (National Archives Identifier 45499341) Before COVID-19, the most severe pandemic in recent history was the 1918 influenza virus, often called "the Spanish Flu." The virus infected roughly 500 million people-one-third of the world's population-and caused 50 million deaths worldwide (double the number of deaths in World War I).

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U.S.: Toxic Waters: Polluted Harbors | The New York Times

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NASA, NOAA Analyses Reveal 2019 Second Warmest Year on Record

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According to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Earth's global surface temperatures in 2019 were the second warmest since modern recordkeeping began in 1880.

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Teens today face bigger health risks than a generation ago. Learn the facts about top teen health issues to help your child navigate this time safely.

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Since our earliest civilizations, transportation has been vital for connecting cultures, sharing knowledge, and building prosperous societies. For example, ancient Rome became an empire thanks to its roads and bridges.

Those goals are no different today. We rely on transportation to move people and products in the most efficient and safest ways. With new tools and technologies, engineers continue to improve existing transportation systems, some of which were invented centuries ago.

Here are seven examples of these recent engineering innovations:

1. Smart Bicycles

The first bicycle was built in 1817. Although the base design is still fairly standard, engineers continue to experiment with new designs and materials, including high-tech electronic controls.

Researchers in China have developed an autonomous bicycle that can respond to voice commands due to a neuromorphic chip. This chip includes hundreds of thousands of sensors that help the bike recognize voice commands, avoid obstacles, and maintain balance.

However, designing a more functional bike doesn't need to be that complicated. For example, a mechanical engineer, Ross Evans, founded Xtracycle to turn bikes into versatile cargo vehicles by adding a platform behind the rider that can be used to transport belongings, materials, and other objects.

2. Maglev Trains

Top news for trains is China's new maglev train that is designed to carry passengers at speeds up to 370 mph, more than 150 mph faster than the world's fastest passenger trains now in operation.

Developed by the China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation, the train will utilize electromagnets to levitate just above the track and provide forward propulsion, eliminating the friction caused by metal wheels on conventional trains, as well as the wear and tear and related maintenance expenses.

These maglev (short for "magnetic levitation") trains also produce less noise and vibration, making life easier for people living near train tracks, as well as passengers and crew members.

3. Multi-Directional Elevators

German elevator manufacturer Thyssen Krupp is developing the world's first rope-less and sideways-moving elevator system.

Instead of the traditional cabin moving up and down a vertical shaft, the new system consists of multiple cabins that operate on an electromagnetic track. Using the principles of magnetic levitation, the cabins move up one shaft, travel horizontally, and descend another shaft, creating a continuous loop.

Sophisticated switches help guide the cars and are mounted with carbon-fiber bearings-called slings-that allow them to change direction. The new system also requires fewer and smaller shafts compared to conventional cable-operated elevators, increasing a building's usable area by up to 25 percent.

4. Next-Generation Lithium-Ion Batteries

Many, if not most, major automobile manufacturers have invested in electric-powered or hybrid vehicles. Even with the higher cost and limited range, consumers buy electric vehicles because they are less expensive to operate and better for the environment.

However, the limitations of lithium-ion batteries (energy density, safety) must be overcome before electric cars gain significant market share. So, researchers are looking at ways to improve battery structure and electrode chemistry for batteries to hold more charge for a longer time.

Further Reading: Making the Next-Generation Lithium-Ion Batteries Safer, Longer-Lasting

For example, silicon nanoparticles can outperform the commonly used carbon graphite electrode and can boost energy density by around 20 percent, promising longer-lasting batteries.

5. Safer Autonomous Navigation

Rapid advances in computer technologies have accelerated the design and production of autonomous cars. Safety remains a top concern-most of these vehicles can navigate and monitor the environment on their own, but still require a human driver.

A new study at the University of Cambridge found that when driverless cars communicate with each other on the road and drive cooperatively, they create safer driving conditions by sharing obstacles alerts with each other and creating openings for other cars that need to switch lanes, improving traffic flow by up to 45 percent.

"For autonomous cars to be safely used on real roads, we need to know how they will interact with each other to improve safety and traffic flow," said lead author Amanda Prorok. "Our design allows for a wide range of practical, low-cost experiments to be carried out on autonomous cars."

6. Enhanced Drones

Drone technology continues to advance rapidly, especially research and development on durable and lightweight materials, payload capacities, battery power, quieter operation, georeferencing tools, and sophisticated yet easy-to-use software that monitor flights in real-time and analyzes flight data.

These enhanced capabilities expand the ways drones can be used. For example, researchers at the American Academy of Pediatrics found that using drones may be the best approach for responding to medical emergency scenarios, especially in crowded cities with congested traffic.

According to Mark Hanna, the study's author and a Pediatric Fellow at SUNY Downstate, drones equipped with two-way communication and possible life-saving interventions "could save lives by responding to emergency conditions such as acute anaphylaxis, opiate overdose, asthma, cardiac arrest, and sarin poisoning."

7. Hypersonic Air Travel

It has been 16 years since the Concorde Supersonic airliner took its last flight, flying faster than the speed of sound (Mach 1, or 770 mph). Now, a new generation of aviation companies hopes to be flying passengers at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 (3,800 mph), or even higher, sometime in the near future. Such aircraft would complete the transatlantic New York City to London journey in about two hours.

To that end, Reaction Engines, a British firm, has successfully tested an engine cooling system that could support aircraft flying at Mach 3.3, with the ultimate goal of reaching Mach 5. The pre-cooler lowers temperatures by passing super-hot air over thousands of tiny coolant-filled tubes.

"This is very exciting," said Jeffrey Hoffman, an aerospace engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). "But there's a long way to go before we're flying hypersonic vehicles from the surface of the Earth up into orbit. They're trying something very new, pushing materials to extreme limits, and there's a lot of unknowns in there. We just have to wait and see."

Mark Crawford is a technology writer based in Corrales, N.M.

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7 Top Trends in Advanced Transportation Technology - ASME

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Since our earliest civilizations, transportation has been vital for connecting cultures, sharing knowledge, and building prosperous societies. For example, ancient Rome became an empire thanks to its roads and bridges. Those goals are no different today. We rely on transportation to move people and products in the most efficient and safest ways.

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Biomedical engineering is a rapidly evolving, cross-disciplinary field that involves medicine, biology, chemistry, engineering, nanotechnology, and computer science. Bioengineers are at the forefront of scientific discovery, creating innovative medical devices, vaccines, disease management products, robots, and algorithms that improve human health around the world.

Below are ten of the hottest bioengineering R&D trends happening in 2020.

1. Tissue Engineering

Living tissue can be made from biologically active cells, which are deposited on biodegradable scaffolds in controlled conditions. A popular deposition method is bioprinting-a process very similar to 3D printing, but that uses "bioinks" consisting of human cells instead of plastic.

The cells are printed in thin layers that accumulate into living tissue or body parts that can be implanted. Researchers at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine have used a special 3D printer to create tissues that thrive when implanted in rodents.

2. Transdermal Patches

Transdermal patches have come a long way since their use as a method to break nicotine addiction. Improvements in the structure, materials, and delivery mechanisms have enabled a greater variety of applications.

For example, scientists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore have created a transdermal patch filled with drugs that help fight obesity. Instead of taken orally or through injection, these compounds are released through hundreds of biodegradable microneedles in the patch that barely penetrate the skin. As the needles dissolve, the drugs are slowly released into the body.

Sensors, wires, and electronics that are flexible, waterproof, and stretchable can be 3D-printed or woven into the fabric. Wearable technologies are becoming more multifunctional and can monitor multiple health parameters, such as pulse rate and blood pressure, which can also be transmitted in real-time to a medical facility.

Find Out More in the Infographic: What Is Bioengineering?

Smart clothing controls body temperatures by using special polymers and humidity-responsive vents that open when needed. It has been proposed that individualized temperature control through clothing could reduce a building's heating and cooling costs by up to 15 percent.

4. Robotic Surgeons and Rehabilitation

Robot manufacturers are making multifunctional robots to assist surgeons in the operating room. Driven by input from doctors, these robotic devices help them manipulate instruments with high precision in ways they could not do alone. This is especially true for minimally invasive surgeries.

Robots are also extremely helpful to people who have suffered strokes or brain injuries, to relearn motor tasks. For example, the Lokomat is a gait training system that utilizes a robotic exoskeleton and a treadmill to help patients regain basic walking functions. It also allows the therapist to control the walking speed and how much support the robotic legs give to the patient.

Researchers are hard at work designing nano-sized robots that are small enough to enter the bloodstream and perform certain tasks, such as kill cancer cells.

Nanorobot designs include DNA-based structures containing cancer-fighting drugs that bind only with a specific protein found on cancer tumors. After attachment, the robot releases its drug into the tumor.

By delivering the pharmaceutical agents exactly where they are needed, the body is not overloaded with toxicity, and the side effects are fewer or less intense, improving the patient experience.

VR is an especially valuable tool in the medical field because of how it can present the detailed data taken from 3D medical images. The data can create an incredibly detailed 3D view of a patient's body, or area of medical concern-for example, the cardiovascular system.

Related Video: How Does a Robotic Cane Work?

The model can be examined from all angles and points of interest in order to determine the best way to perform a procedure. Surgeons can even practice a complex procedure multiple times before performing it.

VR is also a critical teaching tool-medical students, for example, could perform virtual dissections instead of using cadavers.

Researchers continue to look for new ways to selectively deliver drugs to specific target areas, thereby avoiding damage to healthy cells and tissue. One unique approach is microbubbles, which are very tiny, micron-sized particles filled with gas.

"Microbubbles loaded with drugs can be injected into the body, and they will distribute everywhere, but I can then disrupt the microbubbles by an ultrasound beam and the drug will be delivered specifically where the drug is needed," said Beata Chertok, assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering at University of Michigan. Microbubbles can also be treated with a substance that will make them adhere to tumors without the need for ultrasound.

8. Prime Editing

This new gene-editing technique builds on successes of base editing and CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Prime editing rewrites DNA by only cutting a single strand to add, remove, or replace base pairs. This method allows researchers to edit more types of genetic mutations than existing genome-editing approaches, including CRISPR-Cas9.

Further Reading: CRISPR Tech to Detect Ebola

To date, the method has only been tested with human and mouse cells.

"Potential impacts include being able to directly correct a much larger fraction of the mutations that cause genetic diseases and being able to introduce DNA changes into crops that result in healthier or more sustainable foods," said David Liu, director of the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

Chip technologies allow the construction of microscale models that simulate human physiology outside of the body. Organs-on-chips are used to study the behavior of tissues and organs in tiny, but fully functional, sample sizes to better understand tissue behavior, disease progression, and pharmaceutical interactions.

For example, inflammation processes can be studied to determine how inflammation is triggered and its value as an early-warning indicator for underlying medical conditions, including autoimmune responses. Other physiological processes studied on chips include thrombosis, mechanical loading on joints, and aging.

Bioreactors are systems that support biologically active organisms and their by-products. Smaller bioreactors are easier to manage and require lesser sample volumes. Advances in microfluidic fabrication capabilities now make it possible to design microscale bioreactors that can incorporate enzymes or other biocatalysts, as well as precision extraction systems, to produce highly pure products.

These systems provide economic high-throughput screening, using only small amounts of reagents, compared to conventional bench-scale reactors. As 3D printing becomes more refined, it should be possible to manufacture miniature bioreactors with more unusual flow paths or specially designed culture chambers.

Miniaturization, material innovations, personalized medicine, and additive manufacturing are key engineering trends that biomedical researchers are eager to incorporate into their designs. These technologies, in fact, open up a vast array of new design options that were not possible using conventional manufacturing methods.

These R&D advances are also happening at an ever-increasing rate-bioengineers must keep pace with disruptive technology and innovations to make the best products and maintain or boost their market share and brand reputation.

Mark Crawford is a technology writer based in Corrales, N.M.

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10 Top Trends in Bioengineering in 2020 - ASME

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Biomedical engineering is a rapidly evolving, cross-disciplinary field that involves medicine, biology, chemistry, engineering, nanotechnology, and computer science. Bioengineers are at the forefront of scientific discovery, creating innovative medical devices, vaccines, disease management products, robots, and algorithms that improve human health around the world. Below are ten of the hottest bioengineering R&D trends happening in 2020.

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This week, we celebrate the first Engineering Week of the 2020's and let's use this new decade as an opportunity to look forward. But instead of focusing on individual technologies-robots, additive manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and artitificial intelligence-let's consider the top seven implications of some of these advances over the next ten years.

1. Autonomy Everywhere

Artificial intelligence is likely to define the coming decade. It has already begun to increase its footprint in engineering software, where generative design applications automatically optimize CAD designs to best fit the functional definition of a part-including how it will be manufactured. There is more to come.

Software vendors are also developing AI systems to advise engineers on materials selection and compliance. Meanwhile, robotic process automation (RPA) software enables bots to blast through such clerical engineering chores like auditing change orders, managing bills of materials, and searching for opportunities to standardize parts among multiple products.

AI shows up increasingly in autonomous systems. These include vehicles and drones, as well as robots that route parts in factories and warehouses (and which may one day replace conveyor belts), and robots that deliver drugs and supplies in hospitals. AI makes possible a vast range of sophisticated products that respond autonomously to their environment or spoken commands.

Over the next decade, AI will get smarter, faster, and far more accurate. But first, it must overcome an imposing barrier: trust. It will take most of the decade before anyone trusts a highway full of autonomous cars or a multimillion-dollar factory that makes its own decisions without human backup.

2. More and Better Big Data

Everyone has heard the term "big data" by now, but most applications run on a relative trickle of data limited to a machine, a factory, or feedback from a fleet of products in the field. That is changing rapidly, thanks to the growing proliferation of internet of things (IoT) sensors that make it easier and easier to collect real-time information. Add to those 5G wireless networks, which promise to not only boost data transmission speeds by factors of five to 100, but have much lower latency rates than existing 4G networks.

Further Reading: 7 Top Trends in Transportation Technology

Higher speeds and low latency make it possible to do things in real time that are unthinkable now. They could enable applications to track the location of autonomous vehicles and control their speed and location to optimize citywide traffic. Or they could optimize the utilization of factory equipment and tasks over a wireless network.

They also make it possible to collect information from products in the field and compare them with digital twins. In factories, this would enable producers to monitor equipment to optimize output or forecast maintenance shutdowns. In the field, it will let engineers quantify how their designs fail to improve lifespan in the future. It is increasingly likely that over the next decade, engineers and marketers will increasingly differentiate their products by the smart use of data they collect.

3. Plug-and-Play World

Today, technologies like AI, IoT, big data, 5G, autonomous robots, and blockchain are stand-alone solutions. It is no small task to ensure a variety of IoT sensors can speak with a manufacturing execution system, which is in turn able to talk with a cloud-based data analytics package. That leaves producers with two choices: They can either find a vendor who packages all these capabilities together, though this may lock them into a single and often expensive proprietary system. Or, if they want to mix and match best-of-class applications, they must pay programmers to integrate devices and software, so data formats are compatible up and down the system.

This is going to change, and large engineering and manufacturing software companies are preparing for it. We are seeing a push towards greater standardization, increased interoperability, and faster deployments. These changes will bring down costs for larger companies to create systems that span their entire enterprise-and make it possible for smaller firms with fewer resources to deploy the full range of Industry 4.0 technologies.

4. More Complex Products

People want more out of their products and information technology delivers those capabilities. Automobiles are the best example of this trend. Look beyond consumer features, such as voice-controlled phones and music systems or internet hubs, and consider safety systems.

Today's cars routinely take over braking when a car starts to skid or comes too close to the vehicle in front of it. They warn drivers when they stray from their lane or if another vehicle is in their blind spot. Some feature fully autonomous highway driving, while others can park themselves. If they think a crash is likely, they may even tighten seat belts and readjust seat position.

Further Reading: Top 10 Bioengineering Trends for 2020

This trend will spread to other products-robots, manufacturing equipment, design software, consumer products-as we create systems to translate human intent into action. Such intuitively obvious systems will seem simple to users, but present steep challenges for engineers. Those who build them must ensure they are safe for all use cases, and then find ways to test these increasingly complex products.

5. Old Industries Are New Again

"Disruption" is an overused term that can cause brain shutdown, but information technology gives engineers a way to make once-staid products new again. Take, for example, automotive. Ten years ago, who would have imagined that an upstart company like Tesla would be selling upwards of 100,000 cars per quarter and have a stock valuation higher than Toyota, Daimler, or GM? Or that fast-moving private companies like Space X, Blue Origin, Relativity Space and others would challenge established giants like Lockheed, Orbital, and Arianespace in launch vehicles?

In many cases, these new companies have combined new business models with new technologies, such as batteries powerful enough to power a vehicle and 3D printing to radically reduce part count in rockets.

There are reasons to believe this trend is just getting started. Take, for example, autonomous robots.

Today, startups can start with a shopping cart full of off-the-shelf sensors and mechanical parts, add drop-in AI robot operating system (ROS), sensing, and mapping software, and they are ready to begin development. This explains why there are now literally hundreds of companies launching autonomous robots for niche applications ranging from heat exchanger cleaning to hospital drug dispensing. Look for even more disruption-and opportunities-in other fields as AI gets cheaper and more standardized.

6. Resilient Systems

Complexity is inherently unstable. That makes sense, because the more degrees of freedom in a system, the greater the chance that something will go wrong. This applies equally to global supply chains, factory complexes, telecommunications systems, and the electrical grid, which is growing even more complicated as it stretches to accommodate such intermittent sources of green power as solar and wind.

Two factors compound these inherent instabilities. The first is a changing climate that makes severe weather events more likely. This puts infrastructure and all types of facilities at risk from flooding and wind damage. The second is the breakdown of the trade treaties and alliances that threatens global supply chains. Engineers will increasingly have to take the potential for disruption into their plans.

7. A Changing Profession

Engineers have traditionally been personally responsible for the projects they worked on. Today, as products have grown more complex engineers increasingly work on multidisciplinary teams.

Further Reading: IoT 2020 Trends for Everyday Consumer Products

Mechanical engineers must collaborate with electrical and electronic engineers to add embedded capabilities, manufacturing engineers to optimize design for production, and professionals in purchasing and marketing to ensure the product meets cost, service, and functional goals. This is making design more democratic, but it may also erode an engineer's sense of personal responsibility.

The profession will need to address this in the coming decade.

All this is taking place against a backdrop of post-recession companies still running very lean engineering teams. During the recession, companies reduced staff and many moved engineering work to less costly nations overseas. That is not likely to reverse. Instead, during the new decade, corporations are likely to supplement their engineers with AI-driven software tools to seek greater productivity. While today's engineers are increasingly pressed, younger engineers are also in a position to take big strides in responsibilities and salaries as the Baby Boomers retire.

Alan S. Brown is senior editor.

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7 Biggest Trends for Engineering in the 2020s - ASME

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This week, we celebrate the first Engineering Week of the 2020's and let's use this new decade as an opportunity to look forward. But instead of focusing on individual technologies-robots, additive manufacturing, Industry 4.0, and artitificial intelligence-let's consider the top seven implications of some of these advances over the next ten years.

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7 Exciting Engineering Trends to Keep an Eye on in 2020

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Here are 7 interesting trends to keep an eye on in 2020.

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These stories about mathematics and mathematicians made an impression on the mathematics community and the general public due to their coverage by media outlets, and their human interest.

Uhlenbeck is the first woman to be awarded the Abel Prize

Media worldwide covered the 2019 Abel Prize, with particular attention to Karen Uhlenbeck being the first woman recipient of the Abel Prize. she received the prize "for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." See Math in the Media for links to extensive stories in both scientific journals and general news media, including The New York Times, Science, Nature, Quanta Magazine, NPR, New Scientist, CNN, Smithsonian, The Guardian, The Hindu, New Yorker Magazine, and Chronicle of Higher Education. See also Tony Philips' Take on the news coverage in his April column, followed by his Take posted in May, "Karen Uhlenbeck and 'The Bubble-Verse'," which begins, " The New York Times revisited the Abel Prize winner with a big spread on page one of their Science section.
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Gerrymandering

How to fix gerrymandering? Listen to mathematicians. Mathematicians Manil Suri and Karen Saxe, who is Head of the AMS Office of Government Relations, delved into the issues, the search for answers, how math should be used, and getting the Supreme Court to overcome skepticism, in a piece published in The Conversation. Read more from that piece and see links to access the piece picked up by other sources-- Salon, PBS News Hour, and San Francisco Chronicle.
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Turing in the news

" Alan Turing was an outstanding mathematician whose work has had an enormous impact on how we live today," said Bank of England governor Mark Carney as he revealed that the Bank of England's new £50 note bears the image of Turing. Turing was recognized in this way for breaking Adolf Hitler's Enigma code system in World War II. Media worldwide covered this, and the fact that Turing had died an outcast because of his homosexuality. See a round-up of sources on Math in the Media ( BBC, Nature, NPR, CNN Business, Time, Washington Post, among others). (Image ©The Governor and Company of the Bank of England 2019)
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Bride and groom invite math to their wedding

A bride and groom who are mathematicians and math enthusiasts informed their wedding guests that they needed to solve math problems to learn their seating assignment at the reception. This story went viral on social media and was covered on tv news, in newspapers and blogs. Some people thought the task was belittling of guests, and others thought the idea was very clever. Read about the media coverage on Math in the Media and also "On the mathematical wedding controversy," by Rachel Crowell on the AMS Blog on Math Blogs.
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The sum of 3 cubes

"For 64 years, mathematicians have been on a quest to discover whether the number 33 can be expressed as the sum of three cubes, as in 33 = x 3 + y ³ + z ³. Recently, Andrew Booker, a mathematician at the University of Bristol in England, announced the first solution to that equation...." Rachel Crowell summarizes the mathematics and the media coverage on Quanta, Live Science, and Newsweek.
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'Hidden Figures' receive recognitions

In June 2019 the street outside NASA's headquarters in Washington DC was renamed Hidden Figures Way in honor of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who were featured in the book and film Hidden Figures, about their time and contributions at NASA's Langley Research Center. Margot Lee Shetterly (pictured on the right in the photo), author of the Hidden Figures book that inspired the 2016 film, spoke at the renaming ceremony, where she was joined by family members of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson; NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine (left), U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (second from left) and DC Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (third from left). Christine Darden, one of NASA's human computers from the Apollo era, also attended. Read Rachel Crowell's summary and links to media coverage by NBC4 Washington, The Guardian, and USA Today, among other sources.(Image: NASA.) In December, Congress passed a bill awarding its Gold Medal to Katherine Johnson, Dr. Christine Darden, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson for their work at NASA Langley. Hear Darden talk about her work at NASA in the Mathematical Moment "Winning the Race."
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On black mathematicians and inequality

Mathematicians Edray Goins (Pomona College, president of the National Association of Mathematicians), Nathaniel Whitaker (U Mass Amherst), and Michael Young (Iowa State University) shared their experiences of bias and isolation, and the culture that accounts for the near-invisibility of black mathematicians, in a piece in Colorlines. See also, Tony Phillips' Take on the story, "A Black Scholar's Lonely Trek At the Top of the Math World," on the front page of The New York Times.
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A couple figures out the lottery

How did a retired couple find lottery odds in their favor? (Apparently with little problem, using some math, as they explained on 60 Minutes.) Rachel Crowell summarized that and linked to subsequent coverage on CBS News and The Boston Globe.
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Mathematicians and blackboards

Do Not Erase, a book of Jessica Wynne's photographs of mathematicians' blackboards, came out in fall 2019. The mathematical work on the blackboards is beautiful. "In a way, the board is their instrument. It's how they work out problems. [Just how] a painter might do it through their canvas and a musician through an instrument," says Wynne. Tony Phillips' noted in his Take on Math in the Media that several photos were published in "When Theory Meets Chalk, Dust Flies," in The New York Times. (Photo: Dave Gabai's blackboard, photographed at Princeton by Jessica Wynne. Image from Do Not Erase, reproduced with permission on Math in the Media, Tony Phillips' Take.) Later, Fortune focused on how the works on the blackboards inspired photographer Wynne.
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Tributes and obits on influential mathematicians

There was prominent media coverage of influential mathematicians who passed away long ago and in 2019. Social media posts and Math in the Media made note of an article by Evelyn Lamb on the 100th anniversary of Julia Robinson's birth (December 8) and contributions. When Alan Turing's image was placed on Bank of England's new £50 note, The New York Times published an obituary for Alan Turing presented as part of their "Overlooked" series, covered by Tony Phillips. Obituaries were published and covered by Math in the Media for Elias M. Stein, Jean Bourgain (with a Take by Tony Phillips), and Sir Michael Atiyah. The New York Times also published obituaries, covered by Tony Phillips, of Goro Shimura, Mitchell Feigenbaum, and John Tate.
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Mathematicians in the news due to their new books

Mind and Matter: Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football," co-authored with Louisa Thomas. He and Thomas appeared on John Urschel, MIT, gave talks around the country and made appearances to promote and sign his new book, "The Today Show; he was interviewed on Science Friday; he and the book have been covered in The Boston Globe, Time, and NPR; and the book was reviewed in Publisher's Weekly.

Steven Strogatz, Cornell University, has published several best-selling books, and the newest one, Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe, has also drawn lots of attention in the media. He was interviewed in Scientific American and on CBC Radio and his book has been reviewed in Nature and in The Washington Post, among other media. (Photo courtesy of Cornell University.)
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Math Top in Regeneron Talent Search

Ana Humphrey, Alexandria, VA, won the top award in the Regeneron Science Talent Search. She won $250,000 "for her mathematical model to determine the possible locations of exoplanets--planets outside our solar system - that may have been missed by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope...." The exciting news of this prestigious award for high school students was picked up by media including NBC Washington and The Washington Post.
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A "simple" math equation

This math equation took Twitter by storm, kind of like how the "Is the dress white and gold, or blue and black?" photo went viral. Read Vanessa Rivera-Quinones' take, "Let's Talk About Viral Equations," on the AMS Blog on Math Blogs. Hint: Depending on the order of operations you apply to this equation you will end up with an answer of 16 or 1. Steven Strogatz wrote an article, "The Math Equation That Tried to Stump the Internet" (The New York Times, August 2, 2019) in which he explains, "Sometimes BODMAS is just PEMDAS by another name. And no, the answer is not 100." That article generated 954 comments.
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Pi Day Celebrations

Each year Pi Day (3-14) attracts media attention, with stories and radio segments on its history, puzzles, celebrations, games, and of course, baking (pies of course). See a round-up of this year's media coverage around the world.
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Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor

We also acknowledge some of the opinion pieces and letters to the editor that appeared in 2019: "OPINION: Six ways to nurture high-aptitude math students in under-resourced schools," by Jacob Castaneda, Hechinger Report, December 5, 2019; "Math Teachers Should Be More Like Football Coaches," by John Urschel, The New York Times, May 11, 2019; and "Stop Saying 'Exponential.' Sincerely, a Math Nerd." by Manil Suri, The New York Times, March 4, 2019.

More math in the media

See "The 10 Biggest Math Breakthroughs of 2019," by Dave Linkletter, Popular Mechanics, December 27, 2019. Mathematics (sensitivity conjecture and mathematical bees) made Discover Magazine's Top Stories in 2019 list. Editors of Quanta Magazine wrote: "For mathematicians and computer scientists, this was often a year of double takes and closer looks. Some reexamined foundational principles, while others found shockingly simple proofs, new techniques or unexpected insights in long-standing problems. Some of these advances have broad applications in physics and other scientific disciplines. Others are purely for the sake of gaining new knowledge (or just having fun), with little to no known practical use at this time." ("The Year in Math and Computer Science," by Bill Andrews, Quanta Magazine, December 23, 2019). The above viral math equation made #82 out of 100 of "The Most-Read New York Times Stories of 2019" (by Maggie Adams, Ari Isaacman Bevacqua and Umi Syam, The New York Times, December 24, 2019).

See also: Numberphile (popular videos on YouTube); "What's Going on in this Graph?" (graphs, maps, and charts--and an invitation to students to discuss them live--The New York Times); Global Math Week; Alex Bellos's Monday Puzzles in the science section of The Guardian), and My Favorite Theorem (interviews with mathematicians conducted by Evelyn Lamb and Kevin Knudson).

See Top Math Stories in the Media - 2018, and see AMS Math in the Media, your central source for news of mathematics and mathematicians, Tony Phillips' Take, links to reviews of math books, plays, films, and television, and summaries by past AMS-AAAS Media Fellows and the AMS Public Awareness Office. Also, follow @amermathsoc on Twitter for ongoing sharing of news.
--- Annette Emerson, AMS Public Awareness Officer

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These stories about mathematics and mathematicians made an impression on the mathematics community and the general public due to their coverage by media outlets, and their human interest. Media worldwide covered the 2019 Abel Prize, with particular attention to Karen Uhlenbeck being the first woman recipient of the Abel Prize.

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Animals Use Social Distancing To Avoid Disease

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Animals Use Social Distancing To Avoid Disease

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On a shallow reef in the Florida Keys, a young Caribbean spiny lobster returns from a night of foraging for tasty mollusks and enters its narrow den. Lobsters usually share these rocky crevices, and tonight a new one has wandered in. Something about the newcomer is not right, though. Chemicals in its urine smell different. These substances are produced when a lobster is infected with a contagious virus called Panulirus argus virus 1, and the healthy returning lobster seems alarmed. As hard as it is to find a den like this one, protected from predators, the young animal backs out, into open waters and away from the deadly virus.

The lobster's response to disease-seen in both field and laboratory experiments-is one we have become all too familiar with this year: social distancing. People's close interactions with family and friends have been cut off to reduce the spread of COVID-19. It has been extremely hard. And many have questioned the necessity. Yet despite how unnatural it may feel to us, social distancing is very much a part of the natural world. In addition to lobsters, animals as diverse as monkeys, fishes, insects and birds detect and distance themselves from sick members of their species.

This kind of behavior is common because it helps social animals survive. Although living in groups makes it easier for animals to capture prey, stay warm and avoid predators, it also leads to outbreaks of contagious diseases. (Just ask any human parent with a child in day care.) This heightened risk has favored the evolution of behaviors that help animals avoid infection. Animals that social distance during an outbreak are the ones most likely to stay alive. That, in turn, increases their chances to produce offspring that also practice social distancing when confronted with disease. These actions are what disease ecologists such as ourselves term " behavioral immunity." Wild animals do not have vaccines, but they can prevent disease by how they live and act.

Immunity through behavior does come with costs, though. Social distancing from other members of your species, even temporarily, means missing out on the numerous benefits that favored social living in the first place. For this reason, researchers have learned that complete shunning is just one approach animals take. Some social species stay together when members are infected but change certain grooming interactions, for example, whereas others, such as ants, limit encounters between individuals that play particular roles in the colony, all to lower the risk of infection.

Worth the Sacrifice

The ability of spiny lobsters to detect and avoid infected group mates has been key to their persistence in the face of Panulirus argus virus 1, which kills more than half of the juvenile lobsters it infects. Young lobsters are easy pickings for the virus because the animals are so social, at times denning in groups of up to 20. Safe homes in sponges, corals or rocky crevices along the ocean floor-and a mass of snapping claws-help the group of creatures defend against hungry predators such as triggerfish. Nevertheless, in the early 2000s researcher Don Behringer of the University of Florida and his colleagues noticed that some young lobsters were denning solo, even though it left them vulnerable. Most of these lonely lobsters, the researchers found, were infected with the contagious virus. These lobsters did not choose to den alone, the scientists suspected: they were being shunned. To confirm their hunch, the investigators placed several lobsters in aquarium tanks, allowing healthy crustaceans to choose an empty artificial den or one occupied by either a healthy or a diseased compatriot. In a 2006 article in Nature, the scientists reported that when disease was absent, healthy lobsters preferred being social and chose dens with a healthy lobster over empty ones. And lobsters strongly avoided the dens containing virus-infected lobsters, even though it meant they had to go it alone.

In a follow-up study published in 2013 in Marine Ecology Progress Series, Behringer and his colleague Joshua Anderson showed that healthy lobsters spot afflicted ones by using a sniff test. It turns out that infected lobsters have chemicals in their urine that serve as a danger signal to healthy group mates. When scientists used Krazy Glue to block the urine-releasing organs of infected lobsters, healthy animals no longer avoided the sick ones.

When lobsters detect an afflicted animal, they are willing to take considerable risks to stay disease-free. When Mark Butler of Old Dominion University and his colleagues tethered a sick lobster to the home den of healthy lobsters in the Florida Keys, they saw that healthy animals often abandoned safe havens for open waters, where they were at much higher risk of getting eaten. When Butler's team repeated the experiment with a tethered healthy lobster, there was no mass exodus. In their research, published in 2015 in PLOS One, the scientists used mathematical models to show that avoidance, while not without costs, prevents viral outbreaks that would otherwise devastate lobster populations.

Protect the Valuable and Vulnerable

Lobsters are far from the only animals that have found the benefits of social distancing sometimes outweigh the costs. Some other creatures, in fact, have developed ways to boost the payoff by practicing social distancing strategically, in ways that protect the most valuable or vulnerable in their group. The most impressive examples occur in social insects, where different members of a colony have distinct roles that affect the colony's survival.

In work led by Nathalie Stroeymeyt of the University of Bristol in England and published in 2018 in the journal Science, researchers used tiny digital tags to track the movements of common garden ant colonies during an outbreak of a lethal fungus, Metarhizium brunneum. The spores of this fungus are passed from ant to ant through physical contact; it takes one to two days for the spores to penetrate the ant's body and cause sickness, which is often fatal. The delay between exposure and sickness allowed Stroeymeyt and her colleagues to see whether ants changed their social behaviors in the 24 hours after they first detected fungal spores in their colony but before fungus-exposed ants showed signs of sickness.

To measure how ants respond when disease first invades their colony, the researchers applied fungal spores directly to a subset of the forager ants that regularly leave the colony. The foragers are most likely to inadvertently encounter fungal spores while out searching for food, so this approach mimicked the natural way this fungus would be introduced. The behavioral responses of ants in 11 fungus-treated colonies were then compared with the same number of control colonies, where foragers were dabbed with a harmless sterile solution. Ants in fungus-exposed colonies started rapid and strategic social distancing after treatment. Within 24 hours those forager ants self-isolated by spending more time away from the colony compared with control-treated foragers.

Healthy ants in fungus-treated colonies also strongly reduced their social interactions, but the way they did so depended on their roles. Uninfected foragers, which interact frequently with other foragers that might carry disease, kept their distance from the colony when disease was present. This prevents them from inadvertently putting the reproductively valuable colony members (the queen and "nurses" that care for the brood) at risk. The nurses also took action, moving the brood farther inside the nest and away from the foragers once the fungus was detected in the colony. The cues that the ants use to detect and rapidly respond to fungus exposure are still unknown, but this strategic social distancing was so effective that all queens and most nurses from the study colonies were still alive at the end of the experimental outbreaks.

Garden ants protect the most valuable members of their colony, but some birds use a different strategy, perhaps guided by the strength of their own immune responses and resistance to infection. Maxine Zylberberg and her colleagues placed house finches in three adjacent cages. Each central bird was flanked on one side by a healthy finch and on the other side by a finch that appeared sick. (It got an injection that made it act lethargic.) By observing the amount of time that the central bird spent on each side of its cage, the researchers showed that finches generally avoid birds that appear sick, but the degree of avoidance varied with the power of their own immune systems. Birds with higher bloodstream levels of antibodies and of one other protein that may signal broader immune activation showed less aversion. But birds with weaker levels of immunity avoided sick birds most strongly, the investigators reported in Biology Letters in 2013.

A similar pattern was detected in guppies affected by a contagious and debilitating worm called Gyrodactylus turnbulli. In work published in 2019 in Biology Letters, Jessica Stephenson of the University of Pittsburgh placed individual guppies that did not yet have worm infections in a central aquarium flanked by two tanks. One was empty, and one contained a group of three guppies that represented potential contagion risk. Many guppies preferred the side of the tank near other guppies, as expected for a social species. But some male guppies strongly avoided the side of the tank near the other fish, and these distancing guppies were later shown to be highly susceptible to worm infections. It makes sense that evolution would favor a strong expression of distancing behavior in those most at risk.

The Ties That Bind

Strategic social distancing sometimes means maintaining certain social ties even when they raise disease risk. Mandrills, highly social primates with strikingly colorful faces, illustrate this approach. This species can be found in groups of tens to hundreds of individuals in the tropical rain forests of equatorial Africa. Groups typically have a mix of extended family members that frequently groom one another; grooming improves hygiene and cements social bonds. But they adjust their grooming behaviors in particular ways to avoid contagious group mates, Clémence Poirotte and his colleagues noted in a report published in 2017 in Science Advances. The scientists observed the daily grooming interactions of free-ranging mandrills in a park in Gabon and periodically collected fecal samples to learn which animals were heavily infected with intestinal parasites. Other mandrills actively avoided grooming those individuals. The mandrills could detect infection status based on smell alone: mandrills presented with two bamboo stalks rubbed in feces strongly avoided a stalk rubbed with droppings from another mandrill that had lots of parasites.

And yet mandrills sometimes forgo social distancing in the face of contagion. In a follow-up study, also led by Poirotte, mandrills continued to groom certain close relatives that had high levels of parasites, even while distancing from other parasitized group members. In their 2020 publication in Biology Letters, the researchers said that maintaining strong and unconditional alliances with certain relatives can have numerous long-term benefits in nonhuman primates, just as in humans. In mandrills, females with the strongest social ties start breeding earlier and may have more offspring over their lifetimes. Such evolutionary gains associated with maintaining some social ties may be worth the risk of potential infection.

The social ties of some group-living animals may be so critical that avoidance will never be favored, even when group mates are obviously sick. For example, work led by Bonnie M. Fairbanks and published in 2015 in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology showed that banded mongooses do not avoid group members, even when they exhibit clear signs of disease. Banded mongooses are a highly social species native to sub-Saharan Africa and live in stable groups of up to 40 family members and nonrelatives. Group members engage in close physical interactions by resting on top of one another and taking turns grooming each other in a quid pro quo manner.

Kathleen A. Alexander of Virginia Tech, another author on the paper, first noted that many mongooses in her study area in Botswana get visibly sick with a novel form of tuberculosis that takes months to kill them. Fairbanks then spent months closely tracking six troops affected by this disease, observing all social interactions between troop members. Surprisingly, healthy mongooses continued to engage in close interactions with visibly sick troop members. In fact, they groomed them to the same extent that they groomed their healthy troop mates, even though sick mongooses were far less likely to reciprocate. Distancing from sick group members may simply not be sustainable in species where close cooperation with other individuals for hunting and defense can make the difference between life and death.

Following Nature's Lead

Like other animals, humans have a long evolutionary history with infectious diseases. Many of our own forms of behavioral immunity, such as feelings of disgust in dirty or crowded environments, are likely the results of this history. But modern humans, unlike other animals, have many advantages when plagues come to our doors. For instance, we can now communicate disease threats globally in an instant. This ability allows us to institute social distancing before disease appears in our local community-a tactic that has saved many lives. We have advanced digital communication platforms, from e-mail to group video chats, that allow us to keep our physical distance while maintaining some social connections. Other animals lose social ties with actual distance. But perhaps the biggest human advantage is the ability to develop sophisticated nonbehavioral tools, such as vaccines, that prevent disease without the need for costly behavioral changes. Vaccination allows us to maintain rich, interactive social lives despite contagious diseases such as polio and measles that would otherwise ravage us.

When it comes to stopping novel diseases like COVID-19, however, we are in much the same boat as other animals. Here, as in nature, tried-and-true behaviors such as social distancing are our best tools until vaccines or treatments can be developed. But just like other animals, we have to be strategic about it. Like mandrills and ants, we can maintain the most essential social interactions and distance farthest from those who are most vulnerable and who we could infect by accident. The success of spiny lobsters against a devastating virus in the Caribbean shows that short-term costs of social distancing, while severe, have long-term payoffs for survival. As unnatural as it may feel, we need only follow nature's lead.

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Animals Use Social Distancing to Avoid Disease

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On a shallow reef in the Florida Keys, a young Caribbean spiny lobster returns from a night of foraging for tasty mollusks and enters its narrow den. Lobsters usually share these rocky crevices, and tonight a new one has wandered in. Something about the newcomer is not right, though.

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Animals Change Migration Patterns Because of Climate Change

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Animals Change Migration Patterns Because of Climate Change

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Climate change is altering the migration routes of animals worldwide. Here's a look at new research on how two species have been affected.

First, mule deer. Every spring in Wyoming, vegetation first appears at lower altitudes before progressing up the mountainside. Migrating mule deer follow and forage on this green wave. But as a changing climate leads to more frequent and more severe droughts, the greenery is not as bountiful as it used to be.

For her Ph.D. research at the University of Wyoming, Ellen Aikens tracked mule deer as they surfed the green wave.

"The green-up lasted across the landscape for about half as long in drought years, in comparison to wet years. And also, the order of green-up along these routes were less sequential. So in essence, drought compresses and reshuffles the green wave and just makes it so that this foraging bonanza that deer depend on in their spring migration is really compressed in time."

And although the deer were able to keep up with the faster green wave, the nutritional value was lower-leaving the animals less prepared for the challenges of the year ahead.

Meanwhile in Europe, the population of Bewick's swans that spend the winter in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands is declining. But when researchers looked at the data more closely, they found an increase in the wintering population of swans in Germany. It turns out that since the 1970s, the swans' wintering habitat has shifted an average of 13 kilometers to the east each year.

"What we think is that the swans like to spend time in areas where it's five degrees Celsius. And this isotherm has shifted in the same rate as the swans shifted eastward. So that's a strong indication for us that the swans actually move with this temperature line."

Rascha Nuijten of the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. Her team also found that the swans were spending less time in their winter homes before flying back to the Russian tundra to breed.

Neither the mule deer nor the Bewick's swan is endangered, but the findings have broader importance for our understanding of the conservation of migratory animals.

"If you start thinking of protecting a certain plot of land, it's not just the current situation that is there. Nature is dynamic. And the species that are present now might not be present in 10 years' time-and not because we didn't protect it but maybe because these species are actually dynamic in their ways. And we need to include this resilience and the dynamics of nature into our legislation and management."

-Scott Hershberger

[ The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]

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Climate change is altering the migration routes of animals worldwide. Here's a look at new research on how two species have been affected. First, mule deer. Every spring in Wyoming, vegetation first appears at lower altitudes before progressing up the mountainside. Migrating mule deer follow and forage on this green wave.

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Inside the Coronavirus: What Scientists Know About the Pathogen Infecting the World

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Inside the Coronavirus: What Scientists Know About the Pathogen Infecting the World

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For all the mysteries that remain about the novel coronavirus and the COVID-19 disease it causes, scientists have generated an incredible amount of fine-grained knowledge in a surprisingly short time.

In the graphics that follow, Scientific American presents detailed explanations, current as of mid-June, into how SARS-CoV-2 sneaks inside human cells, makes copies of itself and bursts out to infiltrate many more cells, widening infection. We show how the immune system would normally attempt to neutralize virus particles and how CoV-2 can block that effort. We explain some of the virus's surprising abilities, such as its capacity to proofread new virus copies as they are being made to prevent mutations that could destroy them. And we show how drugs and vaccines might still be able to overcome the intruders. As virologists learn more, we will update these graphics on our Web site ( www.scientificamerican.com).

For a static version of this content as it appears in the July 2020 issue of Scientific American, please click here.

Swipe to advance through slides

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Accessory Genes Unusual, short bits of the genome called accessory genes are clustered with the structural protein genes. Researchers are not yet sure what they do. Several are thought to encode proteins that help the virus evade the immune system.

Editor: Mark Fischetti

Artist: Veronica Falconieri Hays

Consultant: Britt Glaunsinger, molecular virologist, University of California, Berkeley, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Graphics Editor: Jen Christiansen

Animation and Motion Graphics: Jeffery DelViscio

Design and Front-end Development: Jason Mischka

Sources: Lorenzo Casalino, Zied Gaieb and Rommie Amaro, U.C. San Diego (spike model with glycosylations);

"The Architecture of SARS-CoV-2 Transcriptome," by Dongwan Kim et al., in Cell, Vol 181, May 14, 2020 (genome)

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What scientists know about the inner workings of the pathogen that has infected the world

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Gut Microbes May Be Key to Solving Food Allergies

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Gut Microbes May Be Key to Solving Food Allergies

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As a child, Cathryn Nagler broke out in hives when she ate eggs. She reacted to penicillin. Working in labs after college, she developed a severe allergy to mice that caused wheezing, swelling and trouble breathing - twice landing her in the emergency room.

Today, Nagler is an immunologist the University of Chicago and is helping to pioneer an emerging research field: studying how bacteria in the gut can be harnessed to help people with food allergies.

It wasn't personal experience with allergies that inspired her interest. Rather, it was an odd observation she made as a doctoral student in the 1980s. She was studying mice whose immune systems go haywire and attack the collagen protein inside their joints, causing severe arthritis. Scientists could jump-start the disease by administering a shot of collagen under the skin. But, curiously, when Nagler later fed the creatures collagen using a tube that snaked down into their stomachs, it had the opposite effect: The mice got better.

Decades on, this concept, called oral immunotherapy, has come into use as a treatment for food allergies, which affect an estimated 32 million people in the United States, including about two schoolchildren per classroom. Over the last ten years or so, some allergists have begun treating food allergy patients with small, regular doses of the offending food (or products made from it) to calm allergic responses. The approach stands to grow in popularity with the approval in January of a standardized version-a set of daily capsules to treat peanut allergy- by the US Food and Drug Administration.

But oral immunotherapy has downsides. The regimen can be nerve-racking, since it involves daily consumption of food that could kill. It doesn't work for everyone and does little to fix the underlying disease. Success mostly means gaining the ability to safely eat several peanuts, for example, rather than reacting to a speck of peanut flour.

For some families, this modest gain is life-altering. Still, it is precarious: Patients must consume a bit of the food every day, or a few times a week, for the rest of their lives-or they could lose the protection.

So Nagler and several other researchers are working to find ways to treat food allergies more easily and durably. They're targeting what they believe is a root cause-imbalances in the community of beneficial bacteria, or microbiome, that lives in our guts-in the hopes of resetting the immune system.

Producing a microbiome-based treatment will be challenging, with many details to hash out, such as which microbes to provide and how best to deliver them. But the approach is gaining momentum. Last year, Nagler's team and another group in Boston reported an important step forward: They prevented severe allergic responses in allergy-prone mice by supplying gut microbes from healthy, non-allergic human babies. "The data are sound, and they are very encouraging," says pediatric allergist Jaclyn Bjelac of the Cleveland Clinic.

And in March, scientists reported finding large amounts of antibodies against peanut allergens in the stomach and gut of allergic patients, further supporting the idea that the gastrointestinal tract is a hotspot for food allergy regulation and treatment. Already, companies are testing several strategies.

It has long been a puzzle why one person tolerates a food while another is allergic but, as outlined in an article she coauthored in the Annual Review of Immunology, Nagler is convinced that the microbiome is key.

Birth of a hypothesis

Four years after finishing her graduate work, Nagler started running a lab at Harvard Medical School. She was studying inflammatory bowel disease, not food allergies, back then. But as research in the 1990s showed that inflammatory bowel disease was primarily caused by immune reactions against gut bacteria, she shifted her attention to the microbiome.

Then, in 2000, she came across an intriguing publication. It described a mouse model for peanut allergy that mimics key symptoms experienced by people. The mice scratch relentlessly. Their eyes and mouths get puffy. Some struggle to breathe-a life-threatening allergic response called anaphylaxis.

All of this happens after researchers feed the mice peanut powder. "That caught my eye," Nagler says. It ran counter to her earlier findings with the arthritic mice, where feeding collagen calmed the immune reaction. Why the difference?

The peanut-allergy mice, another report showed, had a genetic glitch that damages a receptor called TLR4 that sits in the membranes of immune cells and recognizes microbes. It looked as though the peanut-allergy mice lacked the normal cross talk that takes place between gut microbes and immune cells.

"That was my lightbulb moment," Nagler says. Perhaps the trillions of microbes that live in us suppress immune responses to food by stimulating the TLR4 receptor. And perhaps perturbations in that teeming microbiome alter the suppression and cause a rise in allergies.

The idea meshes with historical trends. As societies modernized, people moved to urban areas, had more babies by cesarean section, took more antibiotics and ate more processed, low-fiber foods-all of which shake up microbiomes. The timing of these lifestyle shifts parallels the observed increase in food and other types of allergies, whose steep rise over a generation points to some environmental cause.

In 2004, Nagler and her coworkers published a report showing that peanuts provoked anaphylaxis only in mice with a mutated TLR4 receptor, not in genetically related strains with a normal TLR4. The difference disappeared when the scientists wiped out populations of gut bacteria with antibiotics. Then, even normal mice became susceptible to food allergies, implying that bacteria are at the heart of the protection.

Nagler's lab has been working ever since to identify which bacteria are helpful, and to understand how they regulate allergic responses.

Early effects

In their work, Nagler's team focused on Clostridia and Bacteroides-two major groups of bacteria in the human gut. Working with mice bred in a germ-free environment and thus without any microbiome at all, the team found that Clostridia, but not Bacteroides, prevented food-allergic responses when introduced into the guts of the squeaky-clean mice.

There's a potential explanation: Mice colonized with Clostridia bacteria had more regulatory T cells, a type of cell that dampens immune responses. The Clostridia mice also produced more of a molecule called IL-22 that strengthens the intestinal lining. A new theory began to emerge: If protective microbes are missing, the gut barrier weakens, allowing food proteins to seep into the bloodstream and potentially trigger allergic responses.

This reasoning jibes well with the curious observation that top food allergens (certain proteins found in milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, soy, wheat, fish and shellfish) bear little biochemical resemblance to each other. What they do have in common is the ability to remain intact in the digestive tract, which normally breaks food into small pieces that the body absorbs as nutrients. "That seems to be what makes peanut the champion-its ability to resist degradation in the gut," Nagler says.

Studies have further solidified the link between gut bacteria and food allergies and suggest that the microbiome's impact comes early in life. Analyzing feces of healthy babies and those with egg or milk allergies, researchers showed that allergic and nonallergic infants had different communities of gut bacteria.

Another study tracked 226 children with milk allergy from infancy to age 8. The scientists found that certain bacteria, including Clostridia, were enriched in stool samples from 3- to 6-month-old infants who eventually outgrew their allergy, compared to those who remained allergic. The scientists didn't see the same difference between these groups in older babies, suggesting that allergy-protective microbes may only act early in life.

"All of this points to the concept of a window of opportunity in terms of prevention," says study leader Supinda Bunyavanich, a pediatric allergist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City.

Causal evidence

From birth, our immune systems get schooled in life-or-death choices. They learn to kill germs, tumors and dying cells. Much else in their surroundings they must learn to leave alone-nerve fibers, bone tissue, proteins from milk and cookies consumed at snack time. Mouse studies published in 2019 by Nagler's lab and another team argue convincingly that gut microbes cultivate this critical immune decision-making.

In one of the studies, Nagler and coworkers collected gut bacteria from the feces of healthy and milk-allergic babies and put those collections of microbes into the digestive tracts of germ-free mice. They found that gut bacteria from healthy babies protected mice against allergic responses to milk, whereas microbes from allergic infants didn't.

Using mathematical and computer science techniques to analyze the results, the team identified bacterial strains that were present in healthy but not allergic babies. They also examined gene activity in cells lining the intestines-certain gene patterns are characteristic of a healthy gut barrier-and looked for microbes whose presence correlated with a healthy barrier.

One Clostridia species, Anaerostipes caccae, popped out of both analyses. When the scientists transferred A. caccae alone into germ-free mice, it seemed to mimic the protection imparted by a full, healthy microbiome.

The other team, led by Rima Rachid and Talal Chatila at Boston Children's Hospital, took a similar approach using hyper-allergic mice, finding that the single species Subdoligranulum variabile and a set of Clostridia species prevented allergic responses. Regulatory T cells were key to the response and were spurred into action by the microbes.

These and other studies clearly show that the microbiome is important for preventing food allergies and inducing tolerance, says Carina Venter, a research dietician at the University of Colorado in Denver who is studying links between maternal diet during pregnancy, microbiomes of infants and risk for eczema and allergies. But, she says, "how that microbiome should look in terms of diversity and in terms of specific strains, we just don't know."

Trials and questions

The many unknowns leave a quandary for researchers hoping to develop better treatments for food allergies: Is it better to supply a full, healthy microbiome, or to replenish just a few helpful microbes? "I scratch my head every day thinking about this," Rachid says.

She's leading a clinical study to test the first possibility. In this small trial, adults with peanut allergies will swallow pills containing a full slate of gut bacteria from healthy donors pre-screened for safety by the nonprofit stool bank OpenBiome. The approach, known as fecal transplantation, is not FDA-approved but is increasingly used to treat severe intestinal disorders with the aim of fixing diseased microbiomes by infusing healthy, balanced ones.

Other trials are also underway. Using the protective strains identified by the Boston team, Pareto Bio of La Jolla, California, is developing a live microbial product to treat food allergies. Another company, Vedanta Biosciences of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is developing a probiotic capsule that contains a mix of Clostridia strains selected for their ability to induce regulatory T cells. Vedanta is testing the capsules as an add-on to oral immunotherapy in adults with peanut allergies.

A third company, Prota Therapeutics of Melbourne, Australia, is commercializing a similar strategy combining peanut oral immunotherapy with a probiotic-in their case, a Lactobacillus strain commonly prescribed for gastrointestinal problems.

Administering whole microbiomes from donors is not without risk: Four patients have been hospitalized, and one died, from serious infections linked to stool transplants. So some researchers think it may be better to use precisely defined species. Though this risks weakening the benefit, "you're less likely to induce unanticipated problems," says Wayne Shreffler, who directs the food allergy center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and is leading the Vedanta study.

But there's one challenge shared by all microbiome-modulating approaches: getting new microbes established when someone already has a microbiome in place, even an unhealthy one. Traditionally, patients receive antibiotics to help new bacteria gain a foothold. But maybe there's another way. A start-up that Nagler cofounded with University of Chicago biomolecular engineer Jeff Hubbell-ClostraBio-is developing a therapy that combines live bacteria with a key microbial metabolite, butyrate.

The chemical is known to enhance gut barrier function and may also have antimicrobial effects, which could help create a niche for the added microbes. ClostraBio plans to launch its first human trial by 2021, Nagler says.

Over the next few years, researchers will learn more about harnessing the microbiome to fight food allergies. It won't be easy. Genetics, diet, environmental exposures: All influence allergy risk. "It's a big puzzle," says Bunyavanich. The microbiome is only one piece of it-but she, Nagler and others are betting it will turn out to be a big one.

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, an independent journalistic endeavor from Annual Reviews. Sign up for the newsletter.

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Gut Microbes May Be Key to Solving Food Allergies

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As a child, Cathryn Nagler broke out in hives when she ate eggs. She reacted to penicillin. Working in labs after college, she developed a severe allergy to mice that caused wheezing, swelling and trouble breathing - twice landing her in the emergency room.

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From Hamsters to Baboons: The Animals Helping Scientists Understand the Coronavirus

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From Hamsters to Baboons: The Animals Helping Scientists Understand the Coronavirus

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Scientists are scrambling to learn how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, causes disease, as well as racing to develop treatments and, critically, a vaccine. The work relies heavily on a rarely acknowledged player: research animals. One of the most unusual things about SARS-CoV-2 is the wide range of disease severity it has in humans-from mild or asymptomatic infections to deadly ones. Creating animal models that reflect such clinical diversity will be important, albeit difficult. Creatures ranging from the humble laboratory mouse to hamsters and baboons are in the mix. We do not yet know which animals will prove most useful; different species may be best suited to answering different questions.

Reproducing serious disease is especially tricky, but studies of the coronaviruses that cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) have laid important groundwork. The go-to medical research animals are mice: they can be quickly bred and cheaply obtained, and researchers already have many tools for working with them. Unfortunately, these rodents-although not immune to infection-do not appear to suffer any ill effects from the new virus. The same was true for SARS, but two strategies proved effective: adapting mice to the virus or adapting the virus to mice.

Engineered Mice

In 2007 microbiologist Stanley Perlman of the University of Iowa and his colleagues genetically engineered mice to produce the human version of the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor that the original SARS virus used to latch onto cells. The disease was lethal to these "hACE2" mice. SARS-CoV-2 uses the same receptor, so hACE2 mice should likewise be vulnerable to the new virus, Perlman says. He has sent frozen mouse sperm samples to the Jackson Laboratory, which is breeding the animals and gearing up to distribute them to other labs around the world. "We should have enough for the scientific community to conduct its experiments by mid-June," says neuroscientist Cat Lutz, who directs the Jackson Laboratory's mouse repository-one of the largest in the U.S.

Virologist Kanta Subbarao, then at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and her colleagues took another route: they created a strain of the SARS virus that was lethal to ordinary mice. The researchers employed a technique called serial passage, which involves extracting virus from the lungs of an infected mouse, using it to inoculate another one and then repeating the process in additional mice. After 15 cycles, they created a SARS strain that was 100 percent lethal to mice. Studying the genetic mutations involved also enabled them to learn something about how the virus caused disease. Although hACE2 mice are very likely to be susceptible to the new coronavirus, they may exhibit much milder disease than they did with SARS. "The expectation is that SARS-CoV-2 will have to be adapted by [serial] passage in hACE2 mice," says Subbarao, now at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Australia. Researchers also have more prosaic tools at their disposal. "We can possibly manipulate [the viral] dose and route of administration to get a range of severity," Lutz says.

Perlman has not waited around to see how his hACE2 mouse strain responds to SARS-CoV-2. He used an unrelated virus as a "vector" to carry the human ACE2 gene into adult mouse cells, rendering them temporarily susceptible to the new coronavirus-an approach he pioneered while studying MERS. This method is faster than those that involve altering sperm or egg cells. The technique is useful for testing therapeutics given around the time an animal is infected. But it is not good for "pathogenesis" studies that attempt to help scientists understand how a virus enters cells and replicates or which cells that virus attacks. Perlman is also using gene editing to alter the mouse ACE2 receptor so SARS-CoV-2 can recognize it. Others are editing the virus's genome to allow it to attach to the mouse receptor. "They may well be able to use any mouse strain" to study COVID-19, Perlman says. "That would be a huge step forward."

Hamsters, Ferrets and Cats

Researchers are also looking beyond mice. Subbarao and her colleagues found hamsters were useful for studying SARS, so some researchers are using them again for COVID-19. A team at the University of Hong Kong showed that SARS-CoV-2 replicates in hamsters, producing some of the lung damage seen in humans. None of the animals died, but there were signs of illness, including weight loss. The hamsters produced antibodies. And blood serum from recovered animals that was given to others prior to infection lowered viral levels but did not significantly reduce the lung pathology.

Scientists often study respiratory diseases in ferrets, because their lung physiology is similar to that of humans. A team in South Korea found that ferrets infected with SARS-CoV-2 had an elevated temperature and mild lung disease. A paper published days later, however, showed that the virus replicated efficiently only in ferrets' upper respiratory tract rather than their lower one, which is not reflective of severe disease in humans. That study also found the virus was transmitted between cats in adjacent cages-suggesting transmission by respiratory droplets. So cats may be useful for examining how the virus spreads. Some animals are more difficult to work with than others, though. "A lot of the tools for studying the immune system that we have in mice aren't nearly as well developed for ferrets or hamsters," says pathologist David O'Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who is studying nonhuman primates as part of a large collaboration of researchers using various methods and putting all their data in an online portal called CoVen. "There's even less research on cats, so there are even fewer tools." Some animals are also more difficult to obtain or take care of or are costlier, but researchers need more information before ruling any species out. "In an emergency like this, where we don't have the luxury of time, we have to let the biology guide us," O'Connor says. "It may turn out these less conventional models are the best approach, in which case we're going to have to develop the expertise to study them."

Monkeys

Nonhuman primates are "the gold standard when it comes to testing vaccines and therapeutics," says virologist Barry Rockx of Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands. A preprint paper by virologist Chuan Qin of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College and her colleagues, posted online in March, found that the virus replicated in the noses, lungs and guts of rhesus macaques. The animals also lost weight and showed signs of pneumonia. The study grabbed attention because the researchers showed that recovered monkeys could not be reinfected. "That provided good news: that protective immune responses can be elicited by natural infection," O'Connor says, "though the durability still needs to be figured out." A U.S. team has also demonstrated in a preprint study that infected rhesus macaques given the antiviral remdesivir (which was recently approved for emergency use in treating COVID-19 patients) had milder symptoms and lung pathology.

One of the main factors influencing COVID-19 severity in humans is how old an individual is, so some researchers are studying animals at a range of ages. Rockx led a recent study using both young and old cynomolgus macaques-none of which displayed overt symptoms. "There are no clinical signs, but you do see lesions in the lung," he says. This animal model could be useful for testing whether drugs reduce the transmission of disease or have adverse effects, Rockx adds. He and his colleagues detected more virus lingering longer in older monkeys, but those animals' disease was not more severe. Meanwhile researchers at Texas Biomedical Research Institute (Texas Biomed) are studying rhesus macaques, baboons and marmosets simultaneously. "We're comparing multiple nonhuman primate species, to see if we can recapitulate the [range of disease] observed in humans," says Deepak Kaushal, director of Texas Biomed's Southwest National Primate Research Center. His team is also not seeing significant differences in severity with age.

Recall, though, that only a small fraction of people with COVID-19 become critically ill. And these studies used relatively small numbers of monkeys. These caveats illustrate a drawback of nonhuman primates: because of ethical and practical concerns, it is not possible to study large enough numbers of them to reveal all facets of the disease-or even to calculate meaningful statistics. But doing so is not the primary goal. O'Connor's studies involve injecting virus deep inside the lungs of cynomolgus macaques to elicit measurable disease. "We have lung disease that's quantifiable, which means we can measure a reduction in that as a readout for medical countermeasures," he says. The issue of severe disease becomes "academic," he adds, "because if you can't get the same readout consistently, you don't have a good system for testing vaccines and drugs." Nonhuman primates are subject to the highest ethical bar for research, however, so they are used sparingly.

The End Goal

A crucial advantage of animal studies is control. "With humans, you don't know when they get infected, what exactly happens," Perlman says. "You can understand disease much better in an experimentally infected animal, because you can manipulate parameters," such as exposure route, dose and time of infection. The same principle applies to generating efficacy and safety data. "You'll never have that sort of control in a clinical trial," O'Connor says. "That's where animal models are essential."

Existing vaccine strategies-partly based on those developed for SARS-have led to some candidates for a COVID-19 vaccine skipping the animal testing phase. "It's challenging in the COVID-19 era, because people don't want to wait," Perlman says. "For drugs, it's not a good idea to skip the animal steps. But for vaccines, they're really being skipped or minimized." The urgent need, the lack of well-established animal models and previous experience with some vaccine platforms have all sped up the time line. The fact that vaccine strategies have been tested in humans, even if for different pathogens, provides some reassurance about safety, but there is also a specter raised by previous animal studies: vaccines can sometimes enhance disease, including via a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement. If that problem were to occur with a COVID-19 vaccine, "you would want to know that," says Larry Schlesinger, president of Texas Biomed. Scientists also need to understand immune responses. Recent data from China suggests not everyone infected with the virus generates enough protective, or "neutralizing," antibodies to become immune. AndSARS-CoV-2 has not been around long enough for us to know how long people who may be protected remain so. "This has important implications for what a vaccine would look like," O'Connor says.

Just last week in , Qin and her colleagues published results from a study of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus vaccine candidate that produces neutralizing antibodies that bind to the virus's "spike" protein, which allows it to enter cells. The researchers showed that the vaccine, called PiCoVacc, generated immune responses that protected against several strains of the virus in mice, rats and rhesus macaques. Reassuringly, they saw no signs of antibody-dependent enhancement. And human trials are expected to begin later this year. If none of these initial attempts are successful, however, basic research may become critical. Better understanding may be required to pursue more sophisticated strategies. And to understand a virus, researchers need to study it in living organisms. "Everyone hopes the generic approaches we're already testing are going to be spectacularly successful," O'Connor says. Developing a vaccine "might be straightforward, but we have to prepare people for the possibility it might not be."
Read more about the coronavirus outbreak from Scientific American here. And read coverage from our international network of magazines here.

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From Hamsters to Baboons: The Animals Helping Scientists Understand the Coronavirus

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Scientists are scrambling to learn how the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, causes disease, as well as racing to develop treatments and, critically, a vaccine. The work relies heavily on a rarely acknowledged player: research animals. One of the most unusual things about SARS-CoV-2 is the wide range of disease severity it has in humans-from mild or asymptomatic infections to deadly ones.

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How America Became the World's Prison Capitol  

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How America Became the World's Prison Capitol  

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Podcast

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The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black. What are the origins of the U.S. criminal justice system and how did racism shape it? From the creation of the first penitentiaries in the 1800s, to the "tough-on-crime" prosecutors of the 1990s, how America created a culture of mass incarceration.
If you would like to read more on the topic, here's a list: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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The United States imprisons more people than any other country in the world, and a disproportionate number of those prisoners are Black. What are the origins of the U.S. criminal justice system and how did racism shape it?

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To find work you love, don't follow your passion | Benjamin Todd | TEDxYouth@Tallinn

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Microbiology - Bacteria Antibiotic Resistance

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How To Solve Antibiotic Resistance Crisis

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How To Solve Antibiotic Resistance Crisis

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How can we solve the antibiotic resistance crisis? - Gerry Wright

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Architect Michelle Kaufmann explains the convergence of technology and building design, and the importance of using software and data to create green, affordable homes for the global population.

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Catholic Relief Services: Videos on Human Trafficking

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Catholic Relief Services: Videos on Human Trafficking

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Human trafficking is modern-day slavery. With 21 million victims worldwide, there are more slaves today than at any time in history. ¹ Our Catholic faith calls on us to defend life and human dignity, to fight conditions that lead to the enslavement of human beings.
1"ILO Forced Labour, Human Trafficking and Slavery," last modified September 15, 2015, https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/forced-labour/lang--en/index.htm
Human Trafficking Stories

Shine a light on the invisible 21 million.

Answering the Gospel's call to care for those who are suffering, Catholic Relief Services is working to eradicate human trafficking with 145 projects worldwide. Led by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, we're pressing governments to strengthen and enforce anti-trafficking laws. We're raising awareness and educating people about human trafficking. And we're helping men, women and children reclaim their lives. We need your help.

Victims of human trafficking produce goods that are sold all over the world. So being a conscientious consumer is one of the best ways to combat human trafficking. Know the sources of the goods and services you purchase. Whenever possible, buy fairly or ethically traded products. And urge your elected leaders to oppose the Administration's proposed cuts to foreign aid. It's only 1% of our nation's budget, yet it does a world of good. The cuts would eliminate the Department of Labor's International Labor Bureau account, which funds programs that combat human trafficking.

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Turn on the light. Help stop human trafficking.

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Human trafficking is modern-day slavery. With 21 million victims worldwide, there are more slaves today than at any time in history. 1 Our Catholic faith calls on us to defend life and human dignity, to fight conditions that lead to the enslavement of human beings.

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AXA Research Fund - Building Resilient Cities

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AXA Research Fund - Building Resilient Cities

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The AXA Research Fund, in partnership with National Geographic have created a series of films looking at how AXA supported researchers are using their research to help to understand the impacts that natural and human-made hazards have on cities and how the data can help build resilient cities.

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20 Trailblazing Artists with Major Museum Shows in 2020

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20 Trailblazing Artists with Major Museum Shows in 2020

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20 Trailblazing Artists with Major Museum Shows in 2020

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We take a look at ambitious 2020 solo exhibitions at museums around the world, from Donald Judd at MoMA, to Zanele Muholi at the Tate, to Gego at Museo Jumex.

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BBC Radio 3

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Bryan Stevenson on Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series

Art critic Alastair Sooke, in the company of some of the leading creatives of our age, continues his deep dive into the stunning works in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, whilst exploring what it really means "to see" art. Today's edition features the choice of American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson. He has chosen The Migration Series, a set of paintings by African-American painter Jacob Lawrence. Depicting the migration of African Americans to the northern United States from the South that began in the 1910s, this a moving piece for Bryan Stevenson - but what does a civil rights lawyer see in the work that others might not? Producer: Tom Alban. Main Image: Jacob Lawrence, And the migrants kept coming, 1940-41. Casein tempera on hardboard, 12 x 18" (30.5 x 45.7 cm). Gift of Mrs. David M. Levy. Museum of Modern Art, NY, 28.1942.30. © 2019 Jacob Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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Bryan Stevenson on Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series - Podcast Episode Links - Plink

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Art critic Alastair Sooke, in the company of some of the leading creatives of our age, continues his deep dive into the stunning works in the Museum of Modern Art's collection, whilst exploring what it really means "to see" art. Today's edition features the choice of American lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson.

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How Street Artists Are Responding To Covid-19

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How Street Artists Are Responding To Covid-19

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As much of the world continues to shelter in place, those states and countries slowly easing restrictions are heading out into a world adorned with new art. Graffiti artists, street artists and muralists have been taking over public spaces during the pandemic, using their art forms to express beauty, support and dissent.

One of the newest pieces is in Milwaukee, a colorful, geometric mural by local artist Mauricio Ramirez that depicts a front-line medical worker in prayer. In Dublin, a neon-hued psychedelic coronavirus graces a wall, painted by SUBSET, an artist collective that focuses on social issues. In Berlin, there's a mural of Gollum from Lord of the Rings worshipping a roll of toilet paper. Even more coronavirus-inspired art can be found on walls in Russia, Italy, Spain, India, England, Sudan, Poland, Greece, Syria, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Smithsonian magazine spoke to Rafael Schacter-anthropologist and curator focusing on public and global art, senior teaching fellow in material culture at the University College London and author of The World Atlas of Street Art and Graffiti-about the current coronavirus art movement. Schacter addressed why the art is so important to our collective experience during this pandemic, and what it means for the art world in the future.
Why is this type of creativity needed right now, during this time of crisis?
The very concept of 'the public,' both in terms of people and in terms of space, is really being stretched right now. We're also in a time where scrutiny of public policy, discourse and debate is hugely important. One of the spaces where that debate can emerge, especially among those who are marginalized or less able to speak within the media, is the street. A lot of issues of public space that were issues before the crisis-like increasing privatization, surveillance, increasing marginalization, corporatization, housing-are coming forward with the crisis. And these are issues which are often discussed through the medium of the street.

The crisis is not a leveling one. This whole idea of the crisis targets everyone the same, it really doesn't. All our struggles are being exacerbated by the virus. Discourse emerges out of our ability to congregate, to protest, to come together. At a time where our ability to be in public is lessened, when the public space is being evaporated and displaced, it's even more important that we're able to have that space for debate. Yet we're in a situation where we can't be in that space. When one's voice needs to be heard in public and public becomes a danger itself, it's even more important that scrutiny and dissent is able to be articulated. Graffiti is a space where dissent can be articulated and discourse can be pronounced. And even though it's in many ways more difficult to produce because you can't be in the public space, the focus on it becomes ever sharper because everything else is so empty around it.
How is coronavirus street art and graffiti pushing forward the world conversation about art and the virus itself?
We're having to use the digital public sphere for sharing and viewing art for the most part. So on that side of things, perhaps this will be the moment where that shift really does take place. There will actually be more thought taken about the way we view art online. On a more a local scale, there's a lot of graffiti popping up about issues such as rent strikes and issues related to basic needs of survival. Plus, a lot of graffiti now is about 5G or conspiracy theories. Of course, that leads us to think about the people who fall into conspiracy theory thinking. When you're most powerless, it's the safest thing to have a conspiracy theory to make us feel better about understanding things. I'm noticing a lot of that kind of graffiti emerging.
Have you seen any parallels between graffiti and street art during the coronavirus and during other pivotal moments of history?
It's such an odd situation we're in now, where just being in a public space is more difficult than ever. Not only does that make it more difficult to produce graffiti because there's a more surveilled view of the public space, meaning you can't hide in plain sight, but also our ability to see it is lessened because we're all at home. The public is now in private so in many ways it's hard to parallel this with anything in the more recent frame. I think the rent strike graffiti, which is what I've seen most prominently, is something we've seen throughout politics of the last ten years. I saw some really interesting graffiti from Hong Kong recently. It said, 'There can be no return to normal, because normal was the problem in the first place.' That's very powerful. A lot of the most powerful work I've seen is coming out of that occupy, anti-austerity protest aesthetic. This is political graffiti. This is graffiti that is part of the debate around contemporary politics, but from a voice which is often unable to enter into more mainstream political debate.

What does art mean to the human experience?
Humans have been producing art before they were even human. We've found wonderful cave paintings, Neanderthal decorative art. There's an innate need to relate our experience, and I think a lot of art is also about relating with each other. It's about trying to transmit one's experience to others or create experiences together in a more classical ritual. The way we understand art now, in western history, is a tiny dot in the history of humankind's relationship with producing art. But an integral part of human existence is producing art. It will always be a necessity. There's this idea that it's only produced when you have all your other basic needs taken care of, but art is a basic need.
How do you feel that this current movement will be reflected in art in the future?
The one thing I hope is that we rethink digital public art [public art that is shared online through social media or other internet capabilities]. Rather than just being an addition to the existing practice, we can really try and start thinking about a way to use the digital public sphere to really engage the people that otherwise wouldn't be engaged by this kind of practice. There's a real possibility of creating new audiences.

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How Street Artists Around the World Are Reacting to Life With COVID-19

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As much of the world continues to shelter in place, those states and countries slowly easing restrictions are heading out into a world adorned with new art. Graffiti artists, street artists and muralists have been taking over public spaces during the pandemic, using their art forms to express beauty, support and dissent.

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A Study of Mental Health Pre and Post Covid-19

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A Study of Mental Health Pre and Post Covid-19

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Mental health before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: a longitudinal probability sample survey of the UK population

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By late April, 2020, mental health in the UK had deteriorated compared with pre-COVID-19 trends. Policies emphasising the needs of women, young people, and those with preschool aged children are likely to play an important part in preventing future mental illness.

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When 13 passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship arrived in Nebraska in mid-February, David Cates was determined to make their mandatory stay as pleasant as possible.

The passengers were among the first Americans known to be exposed to the coronavirus and had been ordered to remain isolated at a national quarantine center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center for at least two weeks, or until they no longer tested positive for the disease. Some would spend more than a month at the center before returning home.

As a psychologist and behavioral health consultant for the quarantine center, it was Cates' job to tend to their emotional well-being while they remained isolated from friends and family in the outside world. He convened a daily "town hall" meeting via teleconference so those in isolation could ask doctors questions about the virus, give nurses feedback on the food they were served, and talk to case workers about tracking down their luggage and booking flights home.

He also taught them coping techniques such as meditation, deep breathing and cultivating gratitude to help them build resilience.

Months later, he is still receiving thank-you notes.

"What we were doing was giving them as much control over their lives and environment as possible," Cates said. "If the story had ended there, it would have been great. Instead, we are in a global pandemic, and now we have to take care of everybody."

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As millions of Americans face their second month of stay-at-home orders, scientists and health officials increasingly fear that physical distancing could take a grave toll on our collective mental health.

suggests that people forced to live in quarantine conditions face a greater risk of anxiety, depression, anger, irritability, insomnia and post-traumatic stress symptoms. The longer a quarantine lasts, the worse its impact on psychological well-being.

"There is no doubt that restrictive stay-at-home measures have been quite isolating for people, and all the more for people who are already isolated and vulnerable," said Dr. Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program.

But stopping the virus must come first, he said.

"It is not easy, but it is something we must endure until we have in place other measures to suppress this disease," he said.

To help officials manage the mental health repercussions of long-term physical distancing, researchers at King's College London published a review of scientific studies on the psychological impacts of quarantine, including ones implemented to counter the spread of Ebola, SARS, MERS and H1N1 influenza.

The authors found that the key stressors that lead to psychological distress include boredom, frustration, inadequate supplies, limited information and financial loss, and that these effects can linger long after life returns to normal. For instance, one of the studies found that among hospital workers, being quarantined was a predictor of post-traumatic stress symptoms even three years after the isolation ended.

The findings suggest a few ways officials can mitigate the psychological impact of quarantine: Keep the isolation as short as possible, ensure those in quarantine know why they must stay isolated, thank them for their sacrifice, and make sure everyone has access to the supplies they need.

It is also essential that people can stay in touch with others. "An inability to do so is associated not just with immediate anxiety, butlonger-term distress," they wrote.

, a UCLA researcher who studies the physiological effects of loneliness, said actively seeking social connection is essential to staying not only emotionally healthy but physically healthy as people isolate from each other.

In his own work, he's found that feelings of loneliness trigger the body's immune system to increase its inflammatory response. That response is useful for fighting off bacterial infections, but it also creates what he calls a "fertilizer" for other diseases like cancer, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease. (As it happens, some patients with severe cases of COVID-19 suffer not just from the virus' attack on the lungs but from an overactive inflammatory response.)

This may explain why previous have found that people with strong social relationships are 50% more likely to be alive at the end of a study period compared to those with poor or insufficient social relationships. In fact, this research suggests that loneliness is as dangerous to your health as smoking, and even worse than obesity.

Cole said the connection between loneliness and inflammation may have developed thousands of years ago when being alone would have made our ancestors more vulnerable to an attack by a saber-toothed tiger or made it more difficult to recover from an accident, like being injured by a falling branch.

"This program in our body was set up for a world we no longer inhabit," he said.

The good news is that our current state of physical isolation does not have to lead to loneliness, he said.

"With social support, you can interrupt a lot of that threat-related physiology," he said. "Staying connected to purpose and meaning in your life is the single most powerful resilience against that impact."

Dr. Jay Buckey, a former NASA astronaut who now works at the Dartmouth Geisel College of Medicine, has spent the past decade developing an online tool to help people manage the psychological fallout from a different type of isolation: the stress, depression and interpersonal conflict that can occur on a long-term spaceflight.

"Living in isolation and confinement with a small number of people for a long time is a psychological challenge," he said.

That's something billions of people have been learning first-hand on Earth.

Buckey's experience with astronauts suggests that many of the issues that emerge in isolation are sharper versions of the problems we experience in daily life.

"Maybe you were already stressed about something, but you had outlets that were working for you, and now you are cut off from them," he said.

The tool he created, called , is designed to help users manage difficult emotions. Based on behavioral therapy, it helps people look clearly at how they are thinking about a situation and understand how that thinking influences the actions they take. (Though designed for astronauts, PATH is available for free to the Earth-bound public as well.)

Another analog for our current state can be found in the experience of those who spent time in the Antarctic with a small group of people for a long period, said Larry Palinkas, a professor at the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.

Palinkas' work on the mental health of polar trekkers and those who live in research stations has revealed that one of the hallmarks of adapting to isolation and confinement is a willingness to let go of control.

"You have to be flexible," he said. "If you are highly demanding of yourself and others, you are going to have a harder time."

He also found that people tend to be able to manage the first half of their isolation - whether it lasts for two weeks or two years - but when they reach the halfway point, their resolve dips.

"In the first half you conserve your emotional resources, engage in active forms of coping and you do well," he said. "In the second half, people often experience a letdown."

One of the profound challenges of our current situation is that no one knows when it will end. "The fear is that our emotional resources will become depleted and we will become physically and mentally exhausted," he said.

However, living through isolation can have a positive outcome as well, Palinkas said. It's known as salutogenesis, and it's the reward that comes from coping with stress and being more self-sufficient.

In one of his early studies, he found that Navy personnel assigned to the Arctic in the 1950s, '60s and '70s had fewer hospital admissions and mental health problems when they returned home.

"The idea is if you can survive an experience like this," he said, "it results in a sense of accomplishment and a feeling like, 'I can handle anything.'"

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Feeling drained by coronavirus quarantine? Science can explain why

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When 13 passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship arrived in Nebraska in mid-February, David Cates was determined to make their mandatory stay as pleasant as possible.

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This Man Is the Father of American Suburbs

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This Man Is the Father of American Suburbs

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This Man Is the Father of Modern American Suburbia

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Rise of the Suburban Neighborhood Post WWII

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Rise of the Suburban Neighborhood Post WWII

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Affirmative Action: Shifting Attitudes & Surprising Results

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Affirmative Action: Shifting Attitudes & Surprising Results

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This is a 3-part series.

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(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

See Part Two and Part Three of our three-part series on affirmative action.
The United States of America, by design, does not have a ruling class. We take pride in our national ethos of economic and social mobility, which makes it possible to rise from poverty and privation to positions of power. Bill Clinton's life story reflects that arc; so does Barack Obama's.

However, it is unlikely either man could have honed his innate talents without access to an excellent education. Clinton went to Georgetown, Oxford and Yale; Obama attended Columbia and Harvard. As both men were acutely aware, degrees from such prestigious institutions provide instant credibility and important contacts, providing a solid foundation for success.

Thus, the question of who gets admitted to America's top universities has an importance far beyond the relatively small number of students who get accepted or rejected in any given year. What's more, the competition for those slots - inherently limited in number - reflects an internal conflict we have yet to resolve. To remain a meritocracy, the best and brightest must be rewarded; but in a multiracial, multiethnic society, those classrooms ought to "to look like America," as President Clinton said of his cabinet.

This emotionally charged issue has been part of the national debate since the early days of the civil rights era, when President John F. Kennedy coined the term "affirmative action." In the 1960s, certain selective schools began giving preferential treatment to applicants from traditionally disadvantaged minority groups, justifying the approach as a way to compensate for long-standing societal discrimination.

Thirty years ago this month, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Bakke case - filed by a white man, Allan Bakke, who claimed he was excluded from a University of California medical school to make room for a less-qualified person of color - that race can be taken into account in admissions but only as one factor among many.

Racial quotas, which some schools had adopted, were out. That balance was reaffirmed by the court five years ago in the Grutter v. Bollinger decision, in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote: "In order to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry, it is necessary that the path to leadership be visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity."

O'Connor foresaw a time, perhaps a generation away, when America would be a truly color-blind society and such remedies would no longer be necessary. But a number of advocates contend that time has already arrived, and through either ballot-box initiatives or state legislation, they have succeeded in ending affirmative action at public universities in California, Florida, Michigan, Washington and, for a time, Texas.
Video: UC Regents eliminate affirmative action, 1995 ABC News report
This campaign hasn't swept across the country with the intensity some hoped for, or feared; public opinion on the issue seems conflicted, with support or opposition for affirmative action swinging depending on the precise wording of the question. Nevertheless, the effort to outlaw the practice is ongoing; the issue will be up before voters this November in Colorado and possibly Arizona and Nebraska as well. (It failed to qualify for the ballot in Missouri and Oklahoma.)

In an attempt to move beyond the sometimes-heated rhetoric, Miller-McCune.com is examining the current state of affirmative action in higher education in a three-part series. In this opening section, we will look at what has happened in states where the practice has been banned. In part II, we will explore whether affirmative action really helps the people it is designed to benefit. And in part III, we will examine the increasingly popular idea of reshaping affirmative action to promote class and racial diversity.

Despite its reputation for liberal politics, California was the first state to prohibit public universities from taking race into account during the admissions process. The state's voters in 1996 passed Proposition 209, a ballot measure that amended the state constitution to bar preferential treatment based on race or sex in public employment, education or contracting.

That same year, the 5th U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the Hopwood v. Texas case that it was unconstitutional for that state's public universities to consider race in their admissions process. Similar bans were enacted over the next several years in Washington state, Florida and Michigan. (The Texas decision was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 as part of the previously mentioned Grutter decision, and university officials there currently do take race into account when considering prospective students.)

The results have been quite dramatic among the top-ranked public schools in California, Florida and Texas, according to David Colburn, Charles Young and Victor Mellon of the University of Florida. Their research, published in the February 2008 issue of InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, looked at freshman enrollment patterns from 1995 to 2005 at the University of California's Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego campuses, plus the University of Texas, Austin and the University of Florida.

They found the percentage of African Americans enrolling as freshmen dropped steeply at the three top UC campuses. In 1995, 6.5 percent of incoming freshmen at UC Berkeley were African Americans; by 2005, that number had fallen to just under 3 percent. (During that decade, the number of freshman applicants jumped by just over 50 percent. The increase in African-American applicants was significantly lower - around 40 percent - suggesting at least some potential black students were discouraged from even applying.)

UCLA saw a similar decline in black freshmen, from 7.3 percent to just under 2.7 percent. The drop-off was much less pronounced in Florida, from 11.3 percent in 2000 to 9.4 percent in 2005. And at the University of Texas, which has expanded its student body over the past decade, the percentage of black freshmen actually increased a tiny bit, from 4.9 percent in 1995 to 5.05 percent in 2005.

As a control group, the researchers looked at five highly rated public universities in New York, Illinois, Maryland and Arizona - states where affirmative action programs remained in effect. "Their racial and ethnic diversity numbers remained relatively constant throughout the period 1990 to 2005," they report.

The differing minority enrollment rates in California, Florida and Texas reflect the divergent plans the three states devised to maintain diversity without using racial preferences. Each plan was structured so that a given percentage of top-ranked students from each of the state's high schools would be guaranteed college admission.

But the details varied considerably. The Texas plan covered the top 10 percent of graduates from each school and guaranteed admission to UT Austin, the pre-eminent state school. Florida covered the top 20 percent but only guaranteed admission to the state university system, not necessarily the flagship University of Florida.

The California system was the least generous of the three. It covered only the top 4 percent of students in each high school and guaranteed only they would get into one of the UC campuses. Most ended up in less-prestigious UC schools, such as those in Riverside or Santa Cruz.

"I think this is a real loss," said Colburn, who noted with dismay that UC San Diego had only 19 black males entering as freshmen in 2005, representing one-half of 1 percent of the class. "Is it a disaster? It's too early to tell. We've always felt that the more diverse our educational environments are, the better the learning experience for all the students."

Goodwin Liu, an assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley, expressed similar concerns. He noted the University of California system assesses applicants in a variety of ways, including grade-point average, SAT scores and life experiences, including adversities they have successfully overcome.

"What's weird right now is that every student who applies to the University of Califorina is allowed to talk about any aspects of their background except race," he said. "You can say (in your application) you grew up poor; you were an immigrant; you were raised in a single-parent household. But if you say you grew up African-American or Latino, the admissions office is not allowed to give any weight to it whatsoever. That strikes me as an odd form of discrimination - the idea this one characteristic is singled out for irrelevance.

"We're headed down a dangerous path," Liu added. "It presents real problems for UC Berkeley to have as unrepresentative a student population as it does, given the idea that the University of California is supposed to serve the people of the state. There's a disconnect between what you see on the campus and what the population of California has become."

Of course, California's population is becoming more Hispanic, while Hispanic freshmen enrollment is down at both UC Berkeley and UCLA. (It is level or slightly up at UC San Diego and at the Universities of Florida and Texas, according to Colburn's research.) In contrast, Asian enrollment is way up at all five schools - and white enrollment has declined on all five campuses.

"While the percent of whites as a proportion of the population had been declining in all three states, thus lending justification for the decline in the number of white students, this is an important trend," Colburn concluded. "For those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief it would advantage the admission of white students, the trend ... can hardly be satisfying."

Nevertheless, in the absence of affirmative action, whites and Asians dominate the elite campuses. And that makes a lot of educators uncomfortable.

"Fifty years from now, we could have a situation where only about a quarter of students enrolled in elite institutions are minorities, when 60 percent of the country is minority," said John Yun, an assistant professor of education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. "That's not implausible."

Certainly not to Liu, who finds the prospect unsettling.

"People say, 'Why don't we get rid of affirmative action and focus on the root of the problem: the tremendous racial disparity in (the quality level of) K-12 schools?'" he noted. "That would be a fine argument (for the elimination of affirmative action) if we had a serious social commitment to do that. But the fact is we don't, and I would suggest there isn't a lot of willpower to change that.

"The way we're headed, at least in California, is toward a two-tiered society that is stratified on the basis of race. That is just not a functional arrangement for a functional democracy."

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Affirmative Action: Shifting Attitudes, Surprising Results

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See Part Two and Part Three of our three-part series on affirmative action. The United States of America, by design, does not have a ruling class. We take pride in our national ethos of economic and social mobility, which makes it possible to rise from poverty and privation to positions of power.

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Affirmative Action: A Harvard Admissions Case

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Affirmative Action: A Harvard Admissions Case

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Affirmative Action is on trial. Harvard goes to court to defend itself against charges it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. We'll have the debate.

Max Larkin, multimedia reporter for Edify, WBUR's education vertical, who has been covering the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. Harvard trial. (@jmlarkin)

Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars (@NASorg), a nonprofit advocacy network of scholars and citizens that focuses on education, and has opposed racial preferences in admissions policies since its founding in 1988. Former provost of The King's College in New York City. Author of "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept."

Nicole Gon Ochi, supervising attorney at Asian Americans Advancing Justice (@AAAJ_AAJC) Los Angeles's Impact Litigation unit. Her law firm is representing students who are testifying in support of Harvard's admissions policy.

NPR: " What To Know About Affirmative Action As The Harvard Trial Begins" - "Does Harvard University discriminate against Asian-Americans in its admissions process?

"That's the question on trial in a Boston federal courtroom this week. At issue is whether Harvard unfairly discriminated against an Asian-American applicant who says the Ivy League school held him to higher standards than applicants of other races. This trial will also dissect a contentious political issue in higher education: affirmative action.

"But what exactly is affirmative action, and how did it become such a controversial issue?"

WBUR: " On First Day Of Trial, Harvard Dean Of Admissions Defends Process" - "

"Harvard University's longtime dean of admissions defended the school in federal court on Monday as a contentious trial over racial considerations in the admissions process began.

"Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in the case, is arguing that there's no explanation for the racial makeup of Harvard's first-year classes, except for racial balancing, which the Supreme Court has said is unlawful.

"Lawyers laid out their key arguments in opening statements."

New Yorker: " The Underlying Attack in the Harvard Admissions Lawsuit" - "A lawsuit claiming that Asian-American students were victims of illegal discrimination in the Harvard College admissions process goes to trial in Boston this week. The plaintiffs assert that Harvard uses what amounts to an unlawful quota system, which results in qualified Asian-Americans being denied admission, in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But, at its core, the lawsuit reflects the American conservative movement's legal and political assault on people of color, which has been endorsed and abetted by President Trump. The Trump Administration has sought to limit voting rights, backing voter-suppression efforts; it has demonized immigrants; the President himself has repeatedly targeted prominent African-Americans for abuse. The Trump Administration is also supporting the Harvard lawsuit."

Chronicle of Higher Education: " Harvard Admissions Trial Opens With Arguments Focused on Diversity" - "Harvard University defended its race-conscious admissions policy in a crowded courtroom in Boston on Monday, pushing back against claims that it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. It was the first day of a trial that has come to represent that latest front in the country's fight over affirmative action in college admissions.

"The university was accused of balancing its undergraduate classes to ensure that it had admitted its desired share of students of each race and ethnicity. Adam Mortara, a lawyer representing Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff, also said Harvard penalized Asian-American applicants by systematically giving them lower scores on a metric admissions officers use to measure personality."

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Harvard Admissions Trial Underway With Affirmative Action, Diversity Under Scrutiny

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Affirmative Action is on trial. Harvard goes to court to defend itself against charges it discriminates against Asian-American applicants. We'll have the debate. Max Larkin, multimedia reporter for Edify, WBUR's education vertical, who has been covering the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) v. Harvard trial.

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Eisenhower's Warning of "the Military Industrial Complex" Still Challenges the US

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Eisenhower's Warning of "the Military Industrial Complex" Still Challenges the US

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11-minute listen

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Before President Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," and even before President Kennedy told Americans to ask "what you can do for your country," President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined his own phrase about "the military-industrial complex."

That statement, spoken just days before Eisenhower left office in 1961, was his warning to the nation.

At the time, the United States was sitting atop a huge military establishment built from its participation in three major wars. This buildup led Eisenhower to caution against the misplacement of power and influence of the military.

Fifty years later, the United States is engaged in two wars abroad, and some say Eisenhower's warning still holds true.
A Call For An 'Alert And Knowledgeable Citizenry'
While some historians have written off Eisenhower's farewell address as an afterthought, his grandson, David Eisenhower, says it was a speech the president spent months crafting.

"He did know it was going to have an impact," David Eisenhower tells Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz.

David Eisenhower is the director of the Institute for Public Service at the Annenberg School of Communication and co-authored the book Going Home To Glory: A Memoir of Life with Dwight D. Eisenhower.

It was Eisenhower's somber words about the military that caught peoples' attention.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex," he said in his farewell address. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

Eisenhower's warning was all the more powerful coming from a five-star general.

"The feeling among Eisenhower's allies was that Eisenhower had said something that in one way or another would undermine the position of many political allies that he had," David Eisenhower says.

Those allies worried that Eisenhower's words would be used against them, particularly as the Vietnam War began. Had the president handed antiwar activists a slogan they could use to oppose the conflict? David Eisenhower contends his grandfather was not concerned with the political fallout.

"I have immersed myself professionally for many years in the Eisenhower papers," he says. "I know how his mind worked. I know what his habits of expression were. This is Dwight Eisenhower in the farewell address, and he speaks the truth."

Though most people remember Eisenhower's speech for its warning about the growing influence of the Pentagon, David Eisenhower says the president had another message.

"Eisenhower's farewell address, in the final analysis, is about internal threats posed by vested interests to the democratic process," he says. "But above all, it is addressed to citizens -- and about citizenship."

"Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals," Eisenhower said in his address.
An Unwelcome Warning
Eisenhower's message was spot-on, but came too late, says Andrew Bacevich, a retired career officer in the U.S. Army and professor of history and international relations at Boston University.

"I think we should view the speech as an admission of failure on the president's part," Bacevich tells Raz, "an acknowledgment that he was unable to curb tendencies that he had recognized, from the very outset of his presidency, were problematic."

During Eisenhower's presidency, defense spending accounted for 10 percent of gross domestic product, almost double today's percentage. But for Eisenhower to pull out the scissors and make cuts to the defense budget would have been declared anathema; the nation was prospering.

"In the 1950s, a guns-and-butter recipe seemingly had worked," Bacevich says. "We were safe and we were prosperous, so what was not to like?" That's not the case today, he says.

"We can no longer insist on having both guns and butter," Bacevich says. "We are compromising the possibility of sustaining genuine prosperity at home."

As Eisenhower warned, "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense, a theft. The cost of one modern, heavy bomber is this: a modern, brick school in more than 30 cities."

Just as Eisenhower had trouble convincing Congress to re-examine the role of the U.S. military five decades ago, Bacevich says America's leadership has similar difficulties today.

"Our political institutions demonstrate an unwillingness, or an inability, to really take on the big questions," Bacevich says. "And the American people - many of them distracted by all kinds of concerns, like having a job when there's almost 10-percent unemployment -- aren't paying attention."

Bacevich insists that its time for Americans to review the belief that the United States needs to maintain a global military presence to safeguard national security. "There was a time, I think, in the Eisenhower era, military presence abroad was useful," he says. No longer.

"Maintaining U.S. military forces in the so-called 'Greater Middle East' doesn't contribute to stability -- it contributes to instability," Bacevich says. "It increases anti-Americanism. So why persist in the belief that maintaining all these U.S. forces scattered around the globe are necessary?"

If Americans could challenge that assumption, Bacevich says, then maybe it would be possible to have "a different and more modest national security posture that will be more affordable -- and still keep the country safe."

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Eisenhower's Warning Still Challenges A Nation

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Before President Reagan urged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall," and even before President Kennedy told Americans to ask "what you can do for your country," President Dwight D. Eisenhower coined his own phrase about "the military-industrial complex." That statement, spoken just days before Eisenhower left office in 1961, was his warning to the nation.

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Former Marine Explores Challenges of Coming Home

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Former Marine Explores Challenges of Coming Home

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30-minute listen

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Fiction last week for his collection of short stories, "Redeployment," about Marines in the Iraq War and their difficulties adjusting to life back home. Add that award to the praise the book had already received. Journalist Dexter Filkins who covered the war in Iraq called "Redeployment" the best thing written so far on what the war did to people's souls. In the New Yorker, George Packer described "Redeployment" as the best literary work thus far written by a veteran of America's recent wars. Klay's fiction peels back every pretty falsehood and self-delusion in the encounter between veterans and the people for whom they supposedly fought. Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and served in the Marine Corps in Iraq's Anbar Province from January 2007 to February 2008 as a public affairs officer. After he was discharged, he went to Hunter College where he received an MFA. Phil Klay, welcome to FRESH AIR, and congratulations on the National Book Award. That's wonderful.

PHIL KLAY: Thank you so much.

GROSS: So let's start with a reading from your book. I'm going to ask you to read the opening of your story "Bodies."

KLAY: Sure. (Reading) For a long time, I was angry. I didn't want to talk about Iraq, so I wouldn't tell anybody I had been. And if people knew, if they pressed, I'd tell them lies. There was this Haji corpse, I'd say, lying in the sun. It'd been there for days. It was swollen with gases. The eyes were sockets, and we had to clean it off the streets. Then I'd look at my audience and size them up, see if they'd want me to keep going. You be surprised how many do. That's what I did, I'd say. I collected remains. U.S. forces mostly, but sometimes Iraqis, even insurgents. There are two ways to tell the story - funny or sad. Guys like it funny with lots of gore and a grin on your face when you get to the end. Girls like it sad with a thousand-yard stare out to the distances as you gaze on the horrors of war they can't quite see. Either way, it's the same story. This lieutenant colonel who's visiting the government center rolls up, sees two Marines maneuvering around a body bag and decides he'll go show what a regular guy he is and help.

GROSS: So that's an excerpt of the story "Bodies" by Phil Klay in his collection of stories "Redeployment." We should mention we find out on the next page that the person speaking works for mortuary affairs, so it is his job to deal with the remains of soldiers. You know, after reading that passage I was thinking, OK, so what Phil Klay is saying is that's it's really difficult to talk about what you see in war. And there's different ways you can tell it, and sometimes you just lie. And so now I'm talking to you, and you're a vet. And we both know what you've just written there. Do you know what I mean?

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: So it just makes me feel so - almost uncomfortable asking you about the war, about writing about it, about your own experiences, about putting you through that, about putting you on the spot about what it's like to always ask or not ask a veteran about what they've experienced.

KLAY: Don't feel uncomfortable. I mean, that's part of why I wrote the book, to have conversations about it. One of the things that he's dealing with is he went over and he experienced some very hard things, but he doesn't have the war stories like people imagine. And he doesn't feel about what he did - he doesn't feel the sort of unallied pride. He feels conflicted, and he doesn't know how to feel about what he's done. And what he's done doesn't fit comfortably into what people would expect. So he tells these stories where he knows how to get a reaction and how to fit into a particular type of narrative.

And it's also a way of keeping people at a distance. There's another veteran author, Michael Petrie, who talks about decoy stories which are the stories you tell about Iraq that are funny or interesting, but that are, in some way at an emotional level, removed from the things that are really important to you. And in many ways, that story is about that narrator trying to find a way to get out and find the right audience for the kind of stories of his deployment that really matter to him.

GROSS: You described this character in your short stories who worked in mortuary affairs in Iraq as not having the war stories people expect. And I suppose you don't have the war stories people expect because...

KLAY: No...

GROSS: Because you were a public affairs officer.

KLAY: Yeah, absolutely.

GROSS: In Anbar Province, which, I mean, that - Anbar Province has now - a lot of it's been taken over by ISIS. But...

KLAY: Yeah, which is an absolutely horrific tragedy. It was a very strange and very interesting job. I got to travel around Anbar Province, had a great group of Marines who worked for me who traveled around Anbar Province. I got to hang out with a lot of different types of Marines and soldiers and sailors. But, yeah, it was a staff job. So I was not - I was not kicking down doors. I was not in combat. And, you know, I went outside the wire from time to time. But it was for the most part a relatively safe job in a very dangerous place.

GROSS: What was your job as public affairs officer?

KLAY: So I had a group of Marines who worked for me who wrote stories and took photographs, and we organized interviews with press. We handled media embeds. I was an adviser to the general at Taqaddum, which was where I was based, which is a base just south of Habbaniya in between Ramadi and Fallujah.

GROSS: So when you were working with embedded journalists, what was it like for you? Because, you know, like, you're a writer. I'm sure you respect good journalism. And, you know, there are war reporters who are really like heroes to me because they're extraordinary writers and reporters and risk their lives to, you know, bring us the story. So I'm wondering what that relationship was like for you. And I don't know what kind of pressures are put on you by the military itself, you know, by the Marines to be very protective and not show certain things to reporters.

KLAY: I was interested in good journalism, right? If things aren't going well, it does the military no favors to have a press that is not reporting accurately on the situation - right? - because ultimately the American people are supposed to be holding our elected leaders accountable for the decisions that they're making and for the conduct of military policy. And they're not going to be able to do that without accurate information about what's going on - good or bad.

So I was less frustrated by, you know, good or bad press necessarily than press that I felt was unduly partisan or not interested in what was happening. And I met a lot of really good, good journalists and also very courageous journalists while I was over there. I think it's, you know - people talk about the media as this abstract entity, but, you know, there are good journalists and bad journalists.

GROSS: So you weren't in combat, but you did see the aftermath of combat.

KLAY: Yeah.

GROSS: And you wrote about that in a piece in The New York Times. And you write that most of the suffering that you'd seen didn't affect you as you thought it should have.

KLAY: Well, in that piece, I talk about a truck bomb that happened in I think the first month that we were overseas. A suicide truck bomber had exploded in a crowd of families going to mosque, and Marines brought the wounded onto base. Very early in the night, I was carrying a stretcher with a young, Iraqi kid. It was the first time I'd ever seen anybody, let alone a child, who had those kind of injuries. Bombs do very, very bad things to human bodies. It's incredibly shocking to see. And I remember thinking that I would never forget that child's face, and then by the end of the night, I couldn't have picked him out of a lineup. I'd seen far, far too many injured people. The surgeons were doing surgery on the floor because the wounded had swamped the trauma tables.

And, you know, in that sort of environment it's just - it's very shocking. And you look for a thing that you can do. There's a long line of Marines and soldiers waiting to give blood; the medical personnel were, you know, working frantically; other people were helping with stretchers or bring supplies or doing whatever it is they can do. And you sort of settle in to the routine. You do what you can do. You do your job. It's a little bit too much to take in, and then you think about it later.

GROSS: You write in that article when you tried to describe death that you witnessed, the telling tends to decay into a kind of pornographic voyeuristic experience. You seem to really have this push-pull of, like, wanting to tell, but at the same time not wanting - not wanting what? What scares you about telling stories like that?

KLAY: Well, it's why you're telling them, right? Are you telling them for the voyeuristic shock in the way that the narrator of "Bodies" is telling that, you know, lie to just kind of provide a particular type of shock? I mean, there's a kind of fascination with war, right? For about half a year, I taught middle school students, and when they found out that I was a veteran, they were all like, oh, did you kill anybody? You know, and then I said, no. And we talked a little bit more about why that might be a sensitive question. And I've been asked that question by plenty of adults, too.

GROSS: If you've killed somebody?

KLAY: Yeah, with a lot less excuse than a sixth-grader. And, you know, I've talked to veterans who say that's the most obscene question you can ask somebody.

GROSS: So why is that the most obscene question?

KLAY: Because as another veteran who had actually seen a lot of combat put it, he said it's not so much the question that offends me, it's the people asking it don't seem to respect the moral seriousness of the question. And so for me writing more stories - writing more stories where there's a lot of shocking things happening where people are dealing with the aftermath of having seen or witnessed or been party to a lot of just really horrific things - why are you telling the story? What are you trying to do with telling the story? And what's the outcome, right? Are you enthralled to a particular kind of spectacle? Are you trying to really work your way through the really grave issues at the heart of the conversations that we need to have about war?

GROSS: Let me just ask you while we're talking about experiences at war what it was like for you to have a desk job, but watching your fellow Marines go out of the wire every day. And you did a lot of traveling, so you were exposed to your share of IEDs - I mean, to the possibility of IEDs. Your job was pretty dangerous even though it was a desk job, but when you watched men that you knew well go out every day, what did you feel about that?

KLAY: Well, you know, that you always feel - it's not just while I was there - right? - because, I mean, there's always somebody who's risking more, who has given more. And that continues when you leave the Marine Corps, particularly during these wars because it's a small, all-volunteer military. So, you know, I got out and yet the people that I knew were continuing to go over.

Every once in a while I'd find out about something that had happened to one of them. And you feel guilty about the fact that you didn't choose to do the harder thing, and you feel respect for those who did. I knew a Marine who had had - a friend of his died saving his life. And he volunteered to go to Afghanistan - this is when Obama was increasing troop presence in Afghanistan. Everybody knew that was where the fighting was. And I remember asking that Marine, you know, why he was doing it. He basically explained that he knew what it was like to lose somebody and then have to go out the next day go on patrol and continue to do your job and continue to look out for the Marines around you. And he said, look, these guys are going to be going through a tough deployment. I think that I could - I can help them. And, you know, he went to Afghanistan, and he died midway through his deployment in an IED blast. And so if you know somebody like that and instead of making that kind of very serious choice, you've chosen to, you know, go live in New York, it's something that you think about. I'll put it that way.

GROSS: Well, I think what you're describing is also survivor's guilt. It sounds like you'd feel guilty no matter what because you're here to talk about it.

KLAY: Yeah. I think a lot of veterans feel that way, even guys who have been through a tremendous amount of danger feel that way. You know, there's that feeling, and then there's what you do about it. I think - and it's not just - it's not just, I think, the guilt that people feel towards the, you know, Marines around them. But there's also the feelings that people have in relation to the amount of suffering that's happening in Iraq right now. And, you know, what do we do about that? There are, you know, veterans working with the, you know, Iraqi Refugees Assistance Project or - I mean, there's a whole variety of ways that people sort of answer the questions of, you know, what I do in relation to some of the things that have happened?

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Phil Klay and last week he won the National Book Award for Fiction for his first book, a collection of short stories called "Redeployment." And the stories are all about the war in Iraq and the experiences of veterans when they come home. Let's take a short break, then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. And if you're just joining us, my guest is Phil Klay. Last week, he won the National Book Award for fiction for his collection "Redeployment." It's a collection of stories about people fighting in Iraq and about those people when they come home as veterans and what their lives are like. So I want you to read the opening story "Redeployment" - it's actually the title story of your now National Book Award-winning collection of short stories. So do you want to introduce it for us or just start reading?

KLAY: Sure, it's actually the first story that I started writing. And it's told from the perspective of an infantryman who served in the Second Battle of Fallujah, which was in very intense urban combat. (Reading) We shot dogs. Not by accident; we did it on purpose, and we called it Operation Scooby. I'm a dog person, and so I thought about that a lot. First time was instinct. I hear O'Leary go, Jesus. And there's a skinny, brown dog lapping up blood the same way he'd lap up water from a bowl. It wasn't American blood, but still there's that dog lapping it up. And that's the last straw, I guess. And then it's open season on dogs. At the time, you don't think about it. You're thinking about, who's in that house? What's he armed with? How's he going to kill you, your buddies? You're going block by block, fighting with rifles good to 550 meters, and you're killing people at five in a concrete box.

GROSS: So that opening sentence of that story, we shot dogs, that's the first line that you wrote when you started writing about Iraq. So why is that the first thing that came to you?

KLAY: It was an entry point for me. I had known a couple of Marines who'd actually talked about the experience of watching dogs eat human corpses in the Second Battle Fallujah. And one of them had talked to me about Operation Scooby. And it seemed to crystallize something for me, or at least that sort of the strangeness of the actions that people take in a war zone, the actions that make a certain kind of sense in a war zone and then how those same states of being, those same actions, how those feel when you come back to America. And that story is about that character's return, right when he gets back and, you know, sees his wife and comes home to his own dog who he loves very much.

GROSS: Yes, and this is going to be my one spoiler in this interview, so I apologize. But I really want to talk about this with you. When this soldier comes home, and his own dog is old and very sick and the dog's body has lot of tumors in it. And he and his girlfriend agree it's time to put the dog down. And she's expecting to take the dog to the vet and have the vet put him down. But the soldier says, no. This is on me.

KLAY: A Marine. The Marine says...

GROSS: Oh, I'm sorry. So the Marine says, no, this is on me. And the Marine takes the dog in his car, drives down a dirt road by a stream, takes his automatic weapon and shoots his dog quickly three times because that's the way the dog's going to feel the least pain because the bullets come quickly. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about that, like, why you wrote that ending and what you were thinking and what - what you think it says about this Marine's state of mind.

KLAY: Well, he's not the sort of guy to let somebody do something hard for him. His wife is very cautiously trying to push back and push him out of whatever place that he's in when he gets home. And she doesn't think it's a good idea, but she lets him do it. And, you know, for him it's this sort of strange act of love for the dog. And it's also related to some of the things that he did overseas. And so it's a kind of complicated moment for him.

GROSS: Well, I was thinking he might be thinking, like, how can he take the dog to the vet and have the vet put the dog down when he's shot dogs in Iraq? Do you see that at all as him just taking responsibility, or do you see it as atonement or a symptom of a kind moral injury from having shot dogs in Iraq?

KLAY: I think there's probably a little bit of all of those things that go into it, right? And the, you know - the last line is, I couldn't remember what I was going to do with the body, right?

GROSS: This is the body of the dog after he shoots it.

KLAY: The body of the dog.

GROSS: Yeah, he realizes he hasn't completely thought this through. What happens after you shoot your dog?

KLAY: Yeah, so it doesn't close the circle on any of those things.

GROSS: Phil Klay will be back in the second half of the show. He won the National Book Award for fiction last week for his collection of short stories "Redeployment." I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(MUSIC)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross back with Phil Klay. He won the National Book Award for Fiction last week for his collection of short stories, "Redeployment." It's written from the point of view of Marines in Iraq and veterans adjusting to life back home. Klay served in Iraq in 2007 and early 2008. "Redeployment" is his first book.

So there's another short excerpt from one of the stories in "Redeployment" that I'd like you to read. And this is from a story called "Prayer In The Furnace." And this story is written from the point of view of a chaplain in Iraq. Do you want to just set up the reading before I ask you to read it?

KLAY: Sure. So he's had a Marine come to him and give a sort of confession, and basically this Marine has intimated that his unit has perhaps - might've killed civilians, right? And he is having difficulty getting any traction in getting the command to look into this. It's a unit that's in an extremely violent section of Ramadi. This particular unit has very bad, very aggressive leadership. And he is struggling with figuring out what he's supposed to do, how he's supposed to minister to these men, what his responsibilities are as a priest as an officer in the military. And while all these things are going on, more people from the battalion keep dying. (Reading) Not long after Sepian's (ph) death, one of the Divine Office's morning prayers was Psalm 1:44 - blessed be the Lord, my help, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war. Kneeling against my rack in my spare little trailer, I faltered. I turned back to the previous prayer from Daniel - today there is no prince, no profit, no leader, no Holocaust, no sacrifice, no offering, no incense, no first fruits offered to you - no way to obtain your mercy. I stopped reading and tried to pray with my own words. I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew he would not. I asked him to bring abuses to light. I knew he would not. I asked him finally, for grace. When I turned back to the Divine Office, I read the words with empty disengagement.

GROSS: Why did you want to write from the point of view of a chaplain in Iraq?

KLAY: Well, I mean, in one level it just - it was fascinating to me, right? It was a way in to look at all these moral and spiritual issues that war raises. And so a chaplain seemed to be the perfect entry point for talking about the kind of impossible situation these Marines are in. He's at a staff level, so it allowed me to look a little bit at the structure of the command and how in a bad command - how that filters down to the lowest level and the things that happen at the lowest level. And also I've - you know, I've always been a fan of a lot of, you know, the great Catholic literature - Flannery O'Connor, Francois Mauriac, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh. And, you know - you know, I was educated by Jesuits, so that probably has something to do with it.

GROSS: You know, when - in the reading that you did in the story about the chaplain, he starts praying in his own words and then he says, I asked God to protect the battalion from further harm. I knew he would not. In another one of your stories, a soldier asked a chaplain, why should I pray? It won't protect me. And the chaplain said, that's not what prayer is for. It will not protect you. It's for your soul.

KLAY: Right.

GROSS: And he says Jesus only promises we don't suffer alone. And...

KLAY: Yeah.

GROSS: I was wondering if a chaplain had told you that or if that's what you were thinking yourself?

KLAY: That's what I was thinking myself. Sometimes people talk about it - it seems like it's a lot of the best, most courageous Marines are soldiers who end up being the ones who die. And, you know, it's not. There are so many things that are not in your control. And so what do you do? What is the purpose of religion in those circumstances where you know that, you know, you can pray as much as you'd like, but your turn could come, and that it won't, you know - won't protect you from physical harm? It's very much for him about - I mean, ultimately, you know, what is the chaplain? He thinks are the more important things. And how do you reach across within the context of a very violent place, a very terrible place within this sort of isolated, angry suffering that some of the people feel lost in? And how do you find a kind of crack to reach out in commune with another individual?

GROSS: This is a very personal question, but I was wondering if you had religious faith before or during or after serving in Iraq and if you prayed while you were there?

KLAY: I did. I did pray while I was there. I said - Jesuit-educated. So, yeah, I'm a Catholic.

GROSS: So just, you know, another question about prayer - did you feel any more certain of the presence or absence of God while you were, you know, facing some pretty awful things? And even though you were a public relations officer and weren't in combat, yourself, you saw terrible injuries. It was still an awfully dangerous place to be in Anbar Province whether you were officially in combat or not.

KLAY: When it comes to, you know, religion and the tradition of Catholic thought, it's something that I think very much helps you - helps you ask the right kinds of questions about these issues, right? There's a type of religious sentiment that is very certain of the answers and very certain about what should be proselytized. And there's another type of religious tradition, which is really much more about, you know, doubt and working your way towards more and more difficult questions, and I think that that's the tradition that appeals to me.

GROSS: You write once - that once you came home after war had become unpopular, and at that point, people at assumed that you had post-traumatic stress syndrome and that you are worthy of pity - they felt sorry for you. Did you face that a lot, and how did that make you feel?

KLAY: You know, I - it's not just me, but other people. At a certain point, I realized that it had happened a lot. You know, I had a guy tell me in a bar that all Iraq veterans were going to snap after 10 years, and since I've been back for three, I had seven left. You know, so I better make them good years. And it didn't affect me. I always kind of brushed it off. And earlier on in the war, particularly when the wars were more popular, I tended to get more of the kind of, oh, you must be a super badass kind of reaction. And it's strange, particularly, because it often doesn't seem that they're talking about actual post-traumatic stress. I have friends with post-traumatic stress - friends with post-traumatic stress who are, you know, highly successful, capable people. But it's a popular trope about the war, and it seems to be something that you can use as a placeholder. And it started to bother me because I think that pity is not really the right way to go about it. And, you know, I was talking to a veteran, who actually did have post-traumatic stress, and he said, you know, the people are only interested in the worst things that ever happened to me.

But it wasn't all bad, you know? They never want to ask about the people that I loved in my unit or, you know, what have you. So, for me, it was more about whether we're talking about veterans and thinking about them as having, probably, a symptom of whatever we want to project on them or, you know, whether we're thinking about the experience in a broader sense. The - Elizabeth Samet, who teaches at West Point, talks about how it's easier to pathologize veterans than examine our own relationship to violence, and I think that that's, you know - that's a good point worth thinking about.

GROSS: When you say our own, do you mean, like, those of us who are asking the questions at us?

KLAY: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, this is - we feel comfortable about the wars that we as a nation have undertaken, and there are not a lot of veterans. And I think, you know, the individual experience of the veteran always kind of gets conflated with our feeling about the wars more broadly. And I think that's often insufficient.

GROSS: So I'd like to close this interview with another reading from your book. And it's actually like the last paragraph or two. And so I need you to set it up, but, I mean, it could probably stand on its own, but just kind of put it a little bit in context for us.

KLAY: So this character is an artillery man, and he's spent his time on a forward operating base. So very safe, but he has just for the first time - him and the eight other Marines who work on his gun, they've fired a round out at the first, you know, human targets they've ever fired at. And because it's a - it's a howitzer that they've fired, you know, the round goes off far, far away, strikes people that they never see, and they never see the aftermath of it. And he's thinking about, you know, did I kill someone? And what does that mean? And he's thinking about that, and thinking about all the, you know, the bodies of the dead that he doesn't see. And then he's walking through base, and he's recalling seeing a couple of Navy corpsmen carrying the body of a fallen Marine to be taken back home. And they'd all stood at attention because that's what you do when you see that. (Reading) Everyone's standing on the road as the body went past. It been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It had been an image of death from another world, but now I know where that corpse was headed - to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would've gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ, and as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still just as we had in Fallujah. And they would've put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen where the silence, the stillness would end.

GROSS: Thank you for reading that. And congratulations on the National Book Award win.

KLAY: Thank you.

GROSS: And thank you so much for talking with us.

KLAY: Thank you.

GROSS: Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Fiction last week for his collection of short stories "Redeployment." Coming up, David Edelstein reviews the new film "The Imitation Game" starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing who broke the Germans' Enigma code during World War II. This is FRESH AIR.

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In 'Redeployment,' Former Marine Explores The Challenges Of Coming Home

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TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest Phil Klay won the National Book Award for Fiction last week for his collection of short stories, "Redeployment," about Marines in the Iraq War and their difficulties adjusting to life back home. Add that award to the praise the book had already received.

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Judge Rules All-Male Military Draft Unconstitutional 

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Judge Rules All-Male Military Draft Unconstitutional 

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A federal judge in Texas has ruled the all-male military draft is unconstitutional because women now serve in combat roles. The judge called the male-only draft discriminatory.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

A judge says women must register for the draft the same as men. The military has not drafted troops since 1973, when it became an all-volunteer force. But men who turn 18 have to sign up for the draft just in case, and that is the system the judge says women must join. NPR's Shannon Van Sant reports.

SHANNON VAN SANT, BYLINE: A Texas court ruled the all-male military draft unconstitutional. Harry Crouch is president of the National Coalition for Men, an advocacy group which, along with two other men, brought the case.

HARRY CROUCH: We simply believe that people should be treated equally and have - if they have equal opportunity, they should have equal responsibility. If you're a young man, and you don't register for the draft, there are serious consequences.

VAN SANT: Men who fail to register can be denied public benefits such as employment in the federal government and access to student loans. Marc Angelucci represents the plaintiffs.

MARC ANGELUCCI: We have valued male work more than female work, but we've valued female lives more than male lives.

VAN SANT: He believes the process needs reform.

ANGELUCCI: If women are allowed in the - combat, which they now are, then they should be registering for the draft, or else we should have no draft at all.

VAN SANT: The Commission on Military, National and Public Service is studying the program. Joe Heck, the commission's chairman, says they have found a generational divide. Older Americans tend to feel women should not have to register or serve, while younger Americans say a draft should include women.

JOE HECK: In that age group, both male and female say women should have to register. It's a matter of equality. Now that women can serve in all military occupational specialties, they should register for selective service just like the males do.

VAN SANT: Twenty-eight-year-old activist Aditi Juneja says she was surprised when she was not required to sign up.

ADITI JUNEJA: I think if there is a duty that we do as citizens of this country, whether that's voting or paying taxes, that should be distributed equally amongst all of us.

VAN SANT: The National Commission says it will release recommendations for the future of the program next year. Shannon Van Sant, NPR News, Washington.

(SOUNDBITE OF EDAMAME FEAT. EMANCIPATOR'S "PASSIM")

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All-Male Military Draft Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules

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A federal judge in Texas has ruled the all-male military draft is unconstitutional because women now serve in combat roles. The judge called the male-only draft discriminatory. STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: A judge says women must register for the draft the same as men. The military has not drafted troops since 1973, when it became an all-volunteer force.

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Women in Art: Activism and Resistance - A Virtual Tour

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Women in Art: Activism and Resistance - A Virtual Tour