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On the Roots of New England Cooking

By James C. O’Connell,

Author of Dining Out in Boston

Most New Englanders assume that traditional regional cooking has been around since colonial times. Yet it was not until the twentieth century, that restaurants explicitly featured these dishes. Earlier menus did not make a fuss about serving specialties like “New England clam chowder” or “Boston cream pie.” The widespread celebration of New England cooking started with the Colonial Revival movement in the early 1900s. The movement championed the Puritan and Revolutionary Era heritage of New England, particularly through preserving historic buildings and designing decorative arts in a Colonial Revival style.

New England restaurants started to feature “Yankee” pot roast, “Boston” baked beans, and “New England” boiled dinner. The dining ritual of Thanksgiving dinner became entrenched. It was a simple meal of roast turkey and the homely accompaniments of dressing, potatoes, and root vegetables. Cranberry sauce became the traditional fruit relish. The feast concluded with an array of pies, those all-purpose dishes from colonial days. Thanksgiving embodied Pilgrim frugality, which self-reliant Americans adopted as they carved out civilization from the frontier.

In America’s Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking, Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald observed: “In foods as in so many other cultural expressions, the domineering, once-dominant Yankees, through their own unique blend of myth and magic—brilliantly disguised as an aversion to myth and a disavowal of magic—attempted to create normative America out of plain, frugal New England.” New England cooking conveyed a sense of romance connected with the Pilgrims and the Minutemen.

It is telling that lowly baked beans became such an iconic food. Boston was nicknamed “Beantown,” and the National League baseball franchise between 1883 and 1906 was known as the “Beaneaters.” Baked beans were subsistence food going back to England and medieval cookery. During Puritan times, beans were baked on Saturday to be eaten after church on the Sabbath, when the hearth was cold. Pieces of salted meat were added to the bean stew. By the nineteenth century, salt fat pork was added to white pea beans, and, by the last quarter of the century, molasses became an ingredient. A traditional accompaniment of baked beans was brown bread. Boston brown bread was made from rye and cornmeal steamed in a pudding tin. By the mid-nineteenth century, molasses and, sometimes, raisins, were added. In another generation, brown bread and baked beans had become iconic foods.

It took awhile for Indian pudding and corn bread to become New England standbys. When the Puritans arrived, they brought with them a predilection for wheat and rye. Rye was easy to grow in New England, but wheat was not. The Puritans considered cornmeal an inferior grain, but corn grew easily and was versatile, so the colonists eventually adopted it. Cornmeal (which often was called simply “Indian” or “Injun”) was made into a pudding, mixed with milk and, later, molasses, berries, or raisins. In the colonial era, puddings were eaten as the main course at breakfast, lunch, and dinner and only became a restaurant dessert in the nineteenth century.

It is surprising that Indian pudding has persisted at traditional New England restaurants into the twenty-first century while other traditional desserts, like corn starch pudding, hasty pudding, and Tipsey cake, have disappeared. Corn bread (which many think of as a Southern dish) was a traditional food item, which evolved into a regional specialty. It is still served in such landmark restaurants as Durgin-Park and Jacob Wirth.

Yankee pot roast also became a specialty in the early twentieth century. Boiled beef or beef à la mode (stewed rump or round of beef with a dressing or larded with pork or bacon fat) were popular nineteenth-century preparations. After 1900, the cut of beef became “Yankee pot roast.” Corned beef also became a favorite dish, replacing salt pork, which was regarded as less healthful. In many quarters, this dish is called “New England boiled dinner,” and it comes with potatoes, carrots, and turnips. This provenance explains how Irish corned beef and cabbage has little to do with the old country, but was adopted by the Irish, who found it made an economical and satisfying meal when they settled here in the mid-nineteenth century.

Seafood that is celebrated in contemporary Boston did not originally hold the spotlight. Although oysters were wildly popular, clams, lobsters, and white finfish were not. Fish-eating was looked down upon as a Roman Catholic practice. The poorest quality cod ended up feeding the black slaves of the Caribbean.

Chowder, which was a thick mix of fish, clams, salt pork, and potatoes, was prepared at home, but not much in restaurants. After 1900, milk was added, creating “New England” chowder. It became a Friday restaurant dish, when Catholic abstinence and Yankee chauvinism enshrined chowder as a regional staple. By the 1920s, clam chowder achieved primacy over fish chowder, probably because canned clams were more convenient to incorporate into chowder than varieties of finfish.

Lobsters took a long time to become a delicacy. Since colonial times, lobsters had been cheap and abundant. They were considered inferior food and were often served to prisoners. Sometimes lobsters were incorporated into pies, stews, fricassees, and salads. When canning was introduced in the late nineteenth century, lobster meat became available in tins. During the twentieth century, lobsters became upscale food served broiled, stuffed, thermidor, or à la Newburg.

Culinary historians Waverley Root and Richard de Rochemont, in Eating in America: A History, argued that Boston’s seafood dishes had culinary merit: “A unique quality of the historic restaurants of Boston is that almost all of them were dedicated to the New England cuisine, in contrast to New York’s famous eating places, which kowtowed to the prestige of French cooking. Valid gastronomic traditions are almost invariably built around foods locally available, and this was the case for Boston, whose seafood has always been important on its restaurant menus.”

As interest in New England cooking grew, Durgin-Park and the Union Oyster House, which had been ordinary eateries in the nineteenth century, became major tourist destinations. Lucius Beebe, bon vivant and café society columnist for the New York Herald Tribune and Gourmet Magazine ranked Durgin-Park among the country’s leading restaurants. In Boston and the Boston Legend (1935), he maintained that:

Durgin and Park’s is not a restaurant; it is a dining-room in the old New England manner. … You do not dine in the gourmet’s sense there, but you feed magnificently. The bill of fare is long: there are about 15 cuts of steak, and the food simple. An impressive baked potato, buttered and salted to perfection, and a kind of hot tea cake—the specialty of the house—come with every order whether a patron indicates them or not. Usually he indicates a preference for more.

The eatery’s main clientele were food market men, quite different from today’s tourist customers. Durgin-Park opened at 4:00 AM and served pie for breakfast. It closed by 8:00 PM. According to Beebe, “patrons sit at long boards as in an ordinary, and in the center of the room the cooks do things with meat and fish and vegetables directly under the professional and highly critical gaze of experienced dealers in these very commodities.” Beebe played up the reputation of the waitresses as incorrigible characters: “The waitresses are great blowsy girls, all good teeth, smiles and affability, with notions of their own as to what patrons ought to eat and ideas of table service that would make the hair of a French waiter captain stand up on his head. Durgin’s is old New England eating at its worst and best.”

Lucius Beebe also waxed eloquent about the Union Oyster House, comparing it to Paris’s Tour D’Argent. He maintained that “the Union Oyster House has been a cathedral, or more properly speaking, a chapel of seafood, its high altar the oyster bar, its acolytes and priests the white-coated experts who deftly render available and edible its Cotuits and Little Necks, its worshippers the patrons whose mouths water and whose nostrils quiver at the salt odor of lobster broiling on a coal fire in its kitchens.” The house specialties were raw oysters, lobster stew, and clam chowder.

The reason that Beebe and others liked Durgin-Park and the Union Oyster House so much was that the food and ambience had been virtually unchanged for over a century. The Durgin-Park waitstaff offered a colorful, rough-and-tumble style of service. Before the Civil War, Boston was full of oyster houses, but, by the 1920s, the Union Oyster House was about the only one left.

As travel accounts and guidebooks about Boston proliferated, the reputation of the local food increased. In 1959, Chinese travel writer Chiang Yee, in The Silent Traveller in Boston, wrote that “Boston is perhaps the only city in America to have its name attached to a number of foods,” referring to Boston baked beans, cod, clam chowder and fish chowder. Chiang Yee made the rounds of the city’s most famous restaurants. He described the long queue at Durgin-Park, where he was served “a big plate with two huge slices of roast beef and many other things on it. By the time I had eaten the first slice my eagerness for food was damped.” A “buxom” waitress observed his waning interest in the food, saying: “‘What’s the matter, young man? Can’t you finish your plateful? If you can’t, you should not have come here to waste your money; if you don’t like the food, we want to know why. We don’t like people who don’t like our food.’” She laughed at her joke, then foisted upon him a strawberry shortcake. Chiang Yee went on to eat lobster at the Union Oyster House, where he wore a paper bib imprinted with the image of a red lobster. He sampled roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at Locke-Ober and Parker House rolls and sautéed codfish tongues and cheeks at the Parker House.

The Colonial Revival celebration of traditional New England cooking gave birth to a multitude of neo-traditional inns across New England. These inns were redecorated to fit the aesthetics of the 1920s and 1930s, which cleaned up the designs of centuries past. Most country inns had been shabby hostelries, but they were redesigned to appear like the sort of inn where George Washington might have slept.

Author Mary Harrod Northend romanticized operating twentieth-century inns in We Visit Old Inns (1925): “Here and there around the room were gate-legged, square and rood tables, each one of the old-time tavern type, surrounded by Windsor chairs. Following the custom of olden days, homespun linen covered every table, while maids costumed in aprons and caps of the seventeenth century moved gracefully back and forth as they set the table for our coming repast… The supper was delicious, and how we enjoyed the old-fashioned food served as it was in our ancestors’ time!”

Traditional New England inns were tremendously popular between the 1920s and 1960s. They were special occasion, white tablecloth restaurants, where diners dressed up. Guidebook pioneer Duncan Hines loved the inns around Boston. In his 1941 guidebook, he recommended more than a dozen of them, praising their décor as much as their food. One of the exemplars was the Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury. Howe’s Tavern in Sudbury claimed to be the oldest operating inn in America, having been opened in 1716. In 1863, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gave Howe’s Tavern a new prominence when he set his poetry collection “Tales of a Wayside Inn” there. Henry Ford acquired the historic inn in 1923. Longfellow’s Wayside Inn still serves such Colonial Revival dishes as “Traditional” Yankee pot roast, roast turkey with cornbread and sausage stuffing and giblet gravy, deep dish apple pie, and “Homemade” Indian pudding.

Historic inns clustered in other Revolutionary Era towns west of Boston. Hartwell Farm on Route 2A (The Battle Road) in Lincoln was located in a seventeenth-century farmhouse, conjuring up memories of the beginnings of the American Revolution. Concord’s Colonial Inn was built as a house in 1716. By 1900, it was known as the Colonial Inn and was trading on its revolutionary associations. Seiler’s 1775 House was located in Lexington in the farm house of Benjamin Wellington, the first militiaman to be captured by the British during the military action.

One of the most famous New England inns was the Toll House Inn in Whitman. In 1930, Kenneth and Ruth Wakefield opened a restaurant and inn in a colonial house on the road between Boston and New Bedford. Duncan Hines called the Toll House one of his favorite places to eat. The Toll House served featured codfish soufflé, haddock a la king, and broiled live lobster. Meat dishes were straightforward mixed grill, roast beef, and baked ham in cider.

Ruth Wakefield was particularly good at making desserts. Her cookbook included recipes for 29 cakes, 38 puddings, 28 pies, and 18 candies. Duncan Hines favored the Indian pudding: “It makes my mouth water to think of the baked Injun Porridge as it is prepared at Toll House, Whitman, Massachusetts. That’s the kind of dessert that makes a fellow wish for hollow legs.” Of course, Ruth Wakefield’s most famous creation was the Toll House cookie. In 1937, Ruth invented the chocolate chip cookie by adding a chopped semi-sweet Nestlé chocolate bar to butter cookies.

During the 1950s, the Toll House Inn was wildly popular, serving 1,500-2,000 customers every weekend. Thanksgiving dinner became such a tradition that diners had to make reservations by mid-May.

The heyday of Colonial Revival inns specializing in New England food lasted until about 1970. After that, some inns became “gourmet” and added French or Italian dishes. Only a few, such as the Wayside Inn in Sudbury and the Publick House in Sturbridge, maintained the classic New England dishes like chicken pot pie, Yankee pot roast, and Indian pudding. Today, regional cooking has morphed into something more creative, where chefs seek to provide an innovative spin to New England foodstuffs and cooking styles.

James C. O’Connell is the author of Dining Out in Boston

#Yankee pot roast #Wayside Inn #Union Oyster House #Toll House cookie #Thanksgiving #Pilgrim #oysters #New England cooking #lobster #Indian pudding #cornbread #colonial revival #cod #clams #Boston #baked beans

Theo Epstein: The New and Improved Billy Beane

By Sheldon Hirsch, author of the forthcoming Hot Hands, Draft Hype, and DiMaggio's Streak: Debunking America's Favorite Sports Myths (April 2017)

Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane received national acclaim in Michael Lewis’s 2003 best-selling book (and eventual movie) Moneyball. Lewis presented Beane as a modern-day David slaying Goliath, defeating financially advantaged teams with his creativity and a “cache of numbers” as his slingshot. However, Beane’s overachieving A’s never got over the hump: they never won a World Series, they lost seven of eight post-season series (and a wild card game), and they recently took a turn for the worse with consecutive last place division finishes in 2015 and 2016.

Into that void in the young-genius-winning-it-all genre stepped Yale graduate Theo Epstein. Epstein won the World Series as general manager of the Boston Red Sox in 2004 (ending an 86-year Boston drought) and 2007, and again this year as president of operations for the Chicago Cubs (the team’s first in 108 years). Epstein’s no David; quite the opposite, as his Red Sox and Cubs teams had deep pockets — haves rather than have-nots — and he exploited their wealth to good use. But those titles, particularly the Cubs’ win this season, do not happen without creative thinking on the executive level.

To begin with, Epstein (and others) recognized major errors of Beane and the earlier sabermetricians, specifically their de-emphasis of baserunning and defense. The Cubs were probably the best defensive team in baseball this season, shining in the infield, in right field with Jason Heyward, and (later in the season) with athletic, cannon-armed Willson Contreras behind the plate. Furthermore, manager Joe Maddon often chose his lineup based on the hitting distribution charts of both the opposition and his starting pitcher; for example, he moved super-defender Javier Baez around the infield depending on where the data suggested most grounders would be hit.

The Cubs also ran aggressively throughout the postseason, stealing 11 bases and winning game seven in the World Series with three outstanding running plays: Kris Bryant brazenly tagged up and scored on a short fly to center; later on he scored from first on a double, and in the tenth inning, Alfred Almora advanced to second on a long fly to center.

But the most creative thing Epstein did was to invert the historical thinking about constructing a baseball team. For more than 100 years, baseball has been governed by mantras like “pitching is 90 per cent of the game” or “good pitching stops good hitting.” Yet when Epstein took over a 91-game losing Cubs team in October 2011, he concentrated on acquiring field players rather than pitchers. He used his first round draft picks on outfielder Almora (2012), likely MVP third baseman Bryant (2013), slugging catcher/outfielder Kyle Schwarber (2014), and promising minor leaguer Ian Happ (2015). He signed outfielder Jorge Soler and shortstop Gleyber Torres as free agents. He even traded away pitchers for hitters: the promising Andrew Cashner for eventual all-star first baseman Anthony Rizzo and two solid starters (Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammels) for a minor league shortstop prospect, Addison Russell (another 2016 all-star).

One reason for Epstein’s emphasis on field players in the early stages of rebuilding is the epidemic of arm injuries — particularly elbow injury that requires Tommy John surgery — that plagues modern day pitchers. Their fragile health makes them, in Moneyball parlance, overvalued as high draftees. Field players less commonly suffer career-ending or career-diminishing injuries, and therefore, relative to pitchers, are undervalued as youngsters.

Of course, Epstein knew that he’d eventually need a good pitching staff to win the World Series; here, two factors came into play. First, good luck: in two trades of seemingly zero distinction he acquired Jake Arrieta, a sub-.500 pitcher over three seasons with an ERA of almost 5.50, and minor-leaguer Kyle Hendricks, an unrenowned 39thround draft pick. Both became superstars with the Cubs; Arrieta won the 2015 Cy Young Award and Hendricks led the national league in ERA in 2016.

Second, after acquiring most of his promising young field players he unleashed the Cubs’ wealth, bolstering his starting rotation with highly rated free agent pitchers Jon Lester and John Lackey. That required a Steinbrennian-level investment of 187 million dollars for the two of them (plus another 240 million dollars for free agent position players Ben Zobrist and Heyward), but those acquisitions also owed to the solid foundation Epstein had built on the field. Lester and Lackey (and others) would not have joined the Cubs if they did not see a good chance at a World Series ring. Epstein sold them on the alluring idea that they’d be among the final pieces in the puzzle.

Finally, the depth Epstein had built on the field allowed him to complete his staff by trading prospects Torres and Billy McKinney (and in a roundabout way, Starlin Castro) for stud closer Aroldis Chapman.

Best of all, Epstein has the Cubs set to compete at a high level for perhaps the next ten years. Remarkably, they have six young players already near or at all-star level: the entire infield, Schwarber, and possibly Contreras. Among the starting pitchers, only Lackey (38 years old) and possibly Lester (32) will need to be replaced in the near future. And Epstein can probably do that easily on the free agent market: just as he attracted Lester and Lackey, he has “built it. . . . and they will come.”

Sheldon Hirsch is the author of the forthcoming Hot Hands, Draft Hype, and DiMaggio's Streak: Debunking America's Favorite Sports Myths

(April 2017)

#World Series #Theo Epstein #Sheldon Hirsch #sabermetrics #Moneyball #MLB draft #MLB #Major League Baseball #Chicago Cubs #Billy Beane #base running

What It Means To Be Boston Strong

By Dave Wedge

Co-author of Boston Strong

When Boston was attacked by a pair of jihadist brothers in April 2013, it marked the first time since 9/11 that terrorists struck us right in our collective American hearts.

The Boston Marathon is a time-honored city tradition that marks the beginning of spring. It is often the first nice day after a long winter — as it was on April 15th, 2013 — and is annually the first time that Bostonians get out and celebrate sport and life. The Red Sox play in the morning and the world’s elite runners race through our streets, as cafes, shops, and restaurants bustle with tourists and locals excited just to be alive.

So when the Tsarnaev brothers left their bombs on Boylston Street and unleashed a horrific reign of terror unlike any ever imagined in Boston, we all took it personally. And that includes myself and my co-author, Casey Sherman.

Casey and I came of age covering news in Boston, I as a veteran reporter at the Boston Herald and Casey as a field producer for WBZ-TV news. We have both lived and worked in this city for our entire lives. Casey is a graduate of Boston University and I am a proud alum of Boston College. Both are right on Commonwealth Avenue, and students from both of our alma maters were celebrating right along with everyone else that dark day. In fact, several alumni from both of our beloved schools were severely wounded that day, including BU student Lingzi Lu, who lost her life there on Boylston Street.

BC alums Patrick and Jessica Downes were also among those at the finish line that day. The young Cambridge couple each lost their left leg below the knee in the blast, while Jessica has since had her other leg amputated after months of agonizing attempts to save it. The couple exhibit the resilience and spirit of those impacted by the cowardly attacks. Undeterred by their “new normal,” they both finished the 2014 marathon on hand cycles, while Patrick ran the entire 26.2 mile course this past April on a running blade.

When Casey and I talk about “Boston Strong,” this is what we are talking about.

Boston Strong is Michelle L’Heureux, a Maine girl who was at Marathon Sports watching her boyfriend run his 10th marathon when the blast tore open her arm and eviscerated her lower hamstring. A lifelong skier and equestrian, her heart was broken when she was told by doctors that she’d likely never have the strength to ride horses or ski again. Not only has she since returned to both activities, she too has run the Boston Marathon, as well as the Paris Marathon.

And we’re happy to report that Michelle and her fiancé Brian welcomed their first child, Sebastien, into this world just a couple weeks ago.

Boston Strong is also the incredible family of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier, who was executed by the brothers as he sat in his squad car on the Cambridge campus. Sean was a hero who never wanted anything more in life than to help people. Well, despite his vibrant young life being unfairly cut short by the brothers’ cowardice, his family carries on his spirit, raising money for scholarships to help other aspiring young officers achieve their goals and keep us safe, just as Sean did.

When Patriots Day, the new film starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Pete Berg, hits the screen next month, you’ll see many more amazing stories of heroism, resilience, and sacrifice. Many you’ll recognize from the pages of our book, Boston Strong: A City’s Triumph Over Tragedy. Others you’ll be hearing for the first time. Casey and I were proud to be able to tell the stories in our book, and are equally proud of the filmmakers’ commitment to honoring those impacted by the attacks. We are extremely proud to be part of this important film.

These stories are important to share. We are a culture of storytellers, and the incredible tales of those who survived the bombings, as well as those who helped lead us out of the darkness of those days, are essential to pass down from generation to generation. Just as past generations were raised on stories of the heroes of World War I, Pearl Harbor, Vietnam and the civil rights movement, so too will future generations be inspired by the heroes of the current War on Terror, including those right here in Boston.

Casey and I open our book with a re-enactment of the opening salvo of the Revolutionary War at the Battle of Lexington. This pivotal battle helped launch American Independence and gave birth to the holiday we now all know as Patriots’ Day. The film title is apropos, as what happened here in Boston in 2013 — on Patriots’ Day — was another stark example of how Bostonians have historically fought back and won against foreign invaders, often against staggering odds. Whether it’s the Red Coats storming a village or two Chechen brothers attacking us on Boylston Street, Bostonians will defend our land and each other.

And that, is Boston Strong.

Dave Wedge is an author, journalist, communications strategist and award-winning former reporter for the Boston Herald.

#Patriots' Day #Patriots Day #Mark Wahlberg #marathon #Boston marathon #Boston bombing #Boston

The Darkness Before The Dynasty, Part I

By Jerry Thornton

Author of From Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots

Anyone who writes a book should be prepared to answer one question about it:

“Why?”

Even the simplest book is a lot of work, involving long hours of writing and rewriting, edits and re-edits. You need at least a decent reason for deciding to take that on.

So allow me to ask and answer my own question. Why did I write From Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots? Because I've always wanted to read this book — and since the universe was taking its sweet time getting around to it, I wrote it myself.

These are the stories I grew up on as the youngest of five in a Patriots-first household outside of Boston. Not the ones about the 21st century Patriots, that model sports franchise that has not only dominated on the field for an unprecedented span of years, but has owned the headlines as well. As pro football has taken center stage in American pop culture, the Patriots have dominated the news cycle with scandals, controversies, and celebrity status like no other team.

And yet, for the first four decades of their existence, they were the polar opposite. Laughingstocks on the field and off. A downtrodden, mismanaged, amateurish operation that was perpetually on the brink of ruin. For ten years they didn't have a stadium to call their own. When they finally built one, it was an obsolete dump surrounded by a dirt parking lot that looked like the surface of Mars.

Unlike the current Patriots, the controversies of the early teams were never about trying to gain a competitive advantage and win championships. There were power struggles. Lawsuits. There was the time they drafted a player not knowing he was getting a knee operation, then almost drafted a dead man. When they met with success, it immediately came crashing down around them. Like the time a very successful coach had secretly taken a job to coach elsewhere and was caught using team resources to work for his new employer. Then 18 years later, history repeated itself with another great coach doing the exact same thing. In between, they went to a Super Bowl, only to have a major drug scandal tear the locker room apart the very next day.

And what finally turned the Patriots around were the dual rock-bottoms of a financially ruinous Michael Jackson concert tour and a player sexually harrassing a female reporter. Through a series of bold moves by people of vision, the franchise was saved, competent leaders were brought in and an era of unimaginable success began. But not without dozens of coincidences small (an unconscious player saved a game), large (a franchise quarterback was replaced due to a near-fatal injury) and monumental (9/11), without which the Patriots may never have won a championship.

Now they have four. And counting. Which represents the most remarkable turnaround of any franchise in the history of North American sports. And I'm happy to be the one to tell it. Somebody had to, after all.

Jerry Thornton is co-host of WEEI Sports Radio Network's Dale and Holley with Thornton Show, creator of WEEI.com's Thornography blog, stand up comic, and author of Darkness to Dynasty: The First 40 Years of the New England Patriots. Jerry has worked everywhere from Barstool Sports to HBO's “Reverse of the Curse of the Bambino,” from the parking lots of Foxboro to the comedy clubs of New England. The one man who was right about Deflategate from Minute One, he's written a million pro football pieces and he's rocked them all.

#Tom Brady #Superbowl #Patiots #NFL #New England Patriots #Jerry Thornton #Deflategate #Brady

Domestic Terror Attacks: Are Our Trauma Systems Ready?

By Catherine Musemeche M.D.

Author of Hurt: The Inspired, Untold Story of Trauma Care

Houston, New York, Orlando, Dallas — every week a new domestic terror incident elbows its way into our lives and reminds us yet again that injury is woven into the fabric of American history, from the battlefields of the Civil War to the mass shootings that plague our society today. The question is, how prepared are we to deal with the current wave of civilian casualties in a country that has no national system of trauma care?

As it turns out, the answer to this question hinges in part on where a trauma victim lives. While trauma care has greatly improved over the last half century, the U.S. still does not have a national system of trauma care ensuring that every citizen has access to the care they need within “the golden hour,” the timeframe in which patient survival is critical. Our system of trauma care is regional and the quality of care varies greatly from one locale to another.

Many trauma centers have closed because they were not financially viable and there are no laws that mandate that a certain number stay open. A 2014 study by the University of California, San Francisco found that after three trauma centers in California closed, patients who had to travel farther were 21 percent more likely to die in the hospital than those who did not have to travel long distances.

Distance is not the only barrier to top-notch trauma care. The uninsured and minorities have worse trauma outcomes than white patients and those who have health insurance.[1]

Even without the additional impact of the 288 mass shootings that have occurred in 2016 to date[2], an epidemic of trauma is raging: forty-two million emergency room visits, 2.8 million hospital admissions, 200,000 lives lost, an economic burden of $671 billion dollars, the number one cause of death from ages one to forty-four, and the fourth leading cause of death. The annual cost of injury in the United States every year is staggering, yet federal funding for trauma research registers at a paltry ten cents within the context of years of potential lives lost, compared to HIV funding of $3.51 and cancer of $1.65. By this measure of burden of disease, injuries come in last in NIH funding and, while the Department of Defense chips in more funding for specific trauma-related research projects, these dollars tend to fade when wars wind down and other national priorities gain the spotlight.

The 1966 National Academy of Sciences report Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society put forth a number of recommendations aimed at shoring up our nation’s response to injury. While some of the recommendations from this now fifty-year-old report have been instituted (safety standards for cars, minimal standards for ambulance personnel and equipment and improved communication between emergency personnel in the field and hospitals), others have been ignored.

We still do not have a National Institute of Trauma dedicated to “the research of shock, trauma and emergency medical conditions” as recommended — and so far there has been no systematized approach to training our citizens in basic and advanced first aid. These are gaping holes in our safety net, particularly in the event of mass casualties when first responders are overextended or in rural areas where EMS may be precious hours away.

We find ourselves at a critical juncture in trauma care as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down and domestic terrorism ramps up. Military physicians and others gained valuable knowledge and techniques through treating the injuries of our brave servicemen and women over the past decade, information that could not be gathered any other way. Those life-saving experiences must not only be preserved for future generations of military physicians to draw on, but must also be transferred to the care of the civilian population.

This country is in the midst of a wave of domestic terrorism — a threat to public safety that is not likely to dissipate any time soon, and will undoubtedly add significantly to the massive human and economic costs of trauma. Now is the time to revisit the concept of a National Institute of Trauma, finish building the framework for a national system of trauma care, and start training all Americans in the basics of aiding the injured.

Catherine Musemeche is a pediatric surgeon and the author of Hurt: The Inspired, Untold Story of Trauma Care (University Press of New England, 2016). She lives in Austin, Texas.

[1] Haider, A.H., Weygandt, P.L., Bentley, J.M. et al: “Disparities in Trauma Care and Outcomes in the United States: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, Volume 74(5), 2295-1205. 2013.

[2] Gun Violence, http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/.

#trauma care #surgery #National Institute of Trauma #Hurt #hospitals #EMS #domestic terrorism #Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society

Poison, Prison, and Pennsylvania Courts: How a Veteran Reporter Dove Deep into a Fascinating Murder

By Paula Reed Ward,

Author of Death By Cyanide: The Murder of Dr. Autumn Klein

Throughout my 20-year career as a police and courts reporter, I have covered every kind of case imaginable. But the death of Autumn Klein by cyanide in 2013 was my very first poisoning.

The story itself — a 41-year-old neurologist allegedly killed by her husband — was fascinating. Add to it that she was killed by poison, which almost wasn't detected, and it became unforgettable.

But then I learned about who Autumn was. The kind of doctor. Mother. Friend. I knew that I couldn't let the case go by without writing a book about it. I wanted to make sure the world didn't forget her.

Doing the reporting and research for the book was all-engrossing. I spent months tracking down Autumn's college roommates and classmates. I read medical journals to learn about her specialties. I talked to her colleagues and professors. And to her family.

That must have been the best — and most difficult — part. Autumn's cousin and best friend, Sharon, spent countless hours with me on the phone, sharing the cherished stories of their childhood. Then she spent hours more with me in person.

Autumn's mother Lois, too, spent nearly six hours with me. She told about her daughter — the kind of child she was and the kind of woman she blossomed into. She also told me about her own relationship with Autumn's husband, Bob Ferrante. She didn't like the idea of her daughter marrying a man 23 years older, but she would also never get in the way of true love. It wasn't her decision to make, Lois said. As we talked that day — and as Lois showed me photographs taken throughout Autumn's life — I couldn't help but feel a deep sadness for her and her husband, Bill. But this sadness also gave me the resolve to know that writing a book about their daughter was the right thing to do.

Then there was the challenge of getting Bob's side of the story. Although I knew all along that my main purpose for the book was telling the world about Autumn, it was essential — to me — to be fair, and represent both sides. As a newspaper reporter, my career has been spent trying my best to be impartial. That wasn't going to change here.

So, I set out to get Bob to talk to me. By that point, of course, he was in our local jail (and later, state prison). I sent him a letter. I contacted his attorney. Over weeks of discussions, they finally permitted me to send Bob written questions. I did. And he sent me pages and pages of written answers back. It was a gold mine of detail — about his and Autumn's relationship. His childhood. Raising his two adult children from his first marriage. And how much he missed the young daughter he and Autumn had.

I also spoke with him twice by phone from prison. During our interviews, I didn’t ask Bob tough questions, like “did you do it?” or “why would you do those Google searches?” I knew I wouldn't have some Perry Mason moment where he shouted, “You got me! I did it.” He denied committing the crime at trial; I wasn't going to trick him into confessing. So, what was most important to me was trying to tell Bob's story — just like I was telling Autumn's. I wanted to know about his life, his family, his education and career. And about prison.

He shared those things with me. And I included them all.

Bob recently lost his first round of appeals and will soon file with the Pennsylvania Superior Court. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

In the meantime, I will keep covering the case and the people involved. And keep writing the stories that come through the courthouse each day. Like I always have, I will strive to make sure that everyone's side gets told, and that every story is representative of the person it was written about.

Death By Cyanide: The Murder of Dr. Autumn Klein

#True crime #Pittsburgh #Paula Reed Ward #Murder #journalism #Death By Cyanide #cyanide #Autumn Klein

A Kitchen is a Place to Do Things

By Pamela Heyne

Author of In Julia's Kitchen: Practical and Convivial Kitchen Design Inspired by Julia Child; Jim Scherer, coauthor.

I met my coauthor Jim Scherer in 1989 when I was interviewing Julia Child for a possible book on kitchen design. Julia suggested I hire Jim to do the photo shoot. My book idea then was to photograph and discuss twenty kitchens of noted food authorities, but the research was daunting in those pre-Google days, and I had found Julia’s address simply because she was in the Smith Alumnae directory — we were both Smithies. My interview with Julia ultimately turned into an article in Washingtonian Magazine, which felt apropos as Julia had been a long-time Georgetown resident. The majority of Jim’s photographs then languished in files. At the time I would go on to write a second book on mirrors, Mirror By Design; parallel to my interest in kitchen design, I had come to appreciate mirrors’ versatility as a means of enhancing space and views, and providing clean energy. More on that later.

I recently revisited the Julia Child book because I felt that we — Americans — could use some of her unique inspiration today. In the last twenty-five years our American kitchens have become ever more open, which is not always compatible with serious cooks. Meals are often eaten on barstools or in front of the TV, and open kitchens also inevitably encourage snacking, which contributes to our national obesity epidemic…and some designs are so abstract they barely register as kitchens. “Julia hated those kitchens — a kitchen is a place to do things!” according to her longtime friend Pat Pratt.

Julia’s Cambridge kitchen, which is now a permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, was both comfortable for cooking and welcoming to friends. Guests generally ate at the wooden kitchen table, which was usually covered with yellow oilcloth. Jim Scherer, who collaborated with Julia for nearly thirty years, often ate at that table; in the book he shares his charming culinary memories. Also, the photographs Jim took of Julia’s kitchen in 1989 show what it was like as a true working space, what was on her counter, and even what books she was reading. And his photographs backstage at the TV show “Julia Child & Company” demonstrate her sense of conviviality even there, as she often ate with staff after the show. Julia’s French vacation home La Pitchoune also gets attention. The small stucco house, nestled in hills near Nice, has a diminuitive, but very practical, kitchen with implements mounted on pegboard and a butcher block counter. Meals there were often taken on the flower-rimmed patio. (Under new ownership, it is a vacation and cooking destination.)

In the second half of the book I highlight a series of “simpatico” kitchens, including some floor plans. These kitchens share Julia’s attitude about practicality and conviviality, and yet they look quite different from her kitchens. Some are separate rooms like her kitchens were. Others might be more open. Importantly, all these kitchens emphasize a dining table. Additionally, climate change, not an issue in Julia’s time, now impacts our choices for materials and appliances. As an architect, I discuss how we might now use an induction cooktop rather than an energy intensive range, as Julia did.

One of my favorite “simpatico” kitchens is owned by Claudine Pepin (Jacques Pepin’s daughter) and her husband, Rollie Wesen, a professional chef. The kitchen is practical with compact counter space and equipment hung on rustic walls. Their dining table, an heirloom from Claudine’s family, is just steps away in the dining room, where most of the family’s meals are taken.

Some of our most memorable occasions often occur around a dining table. I enjoy entertaining, and on the home front have always emphasized the family meal. In 2002 my husband Carl Widell and I adopted two Russian sisters, age 7 and 9. We always sat down to meals, sometimes in the family room, sometimes in the dining room. Now the sisters are successful young women. Both are excellent cooks and advocates for the family meal.

Sometimes I set the dining table with mirrored placemats and candles — a festive look. Some might wonder how I can be interested in mirrors and Julia Child. My answer: they both add sparkle to our lives.

In Julia's Kitchen: Practical and Convivial Kitchen Design Inspired by Julia Child

#photography #kitchens #Julia Child #inspiration #gourmet #foodie #design #cooking

From White Coat to Book Jacket

By Bruce J. Hillman, MD

Author of A Plague on All Our Houses

A friend once theorized that what success I’d enjoyed during my academic medical career had occurred by dint of my being in the right place at the right time. I bridled at his comment. Hadn’t hard work and creativity played some role? As I thought about it, however, to some extent, I had to agree. It wasn’t all dumb luck. Rather, I had benefited from a combination of serendipity and the insight to recognize an opportunity when one presented itself.

It was this interaction of chance and recognition that led to my becoming a published author. Most of the innumerable work-related emails I receive each day are of little interest. I delete them based on just the few words in the subject line. One day, roughly a decade ago, my index finger had been poised over the delete key and begun its descent, when I hesitated.

The institution was offering a two-hour enrichment program on creative writing during an upcoming workday morning. I signed up. At the end of the session, the associate Dean leading the group read a provocative sentence and asked that we write a paragraph about that sentence as the beginning of a novel. A week later, Sharon called to say that she’d read what I’d written and liked it. For several years, she had participated in a monthly critique group of six women. They had decided that their writing might be advantaged by the insights of a representative of the opposite gender. Did I want to audition? I wrote a story I titled “The Lemon,” about an experience during my medical internship. The group took me in. They saw something in my writing that was worthwhile. Over several years, they taught me a great deal about what was “good writing.”

Perhaps more important than their expertise was their encouragement. I was hooked. I needed to write. My first book was The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: How Medical Imaging is Changing Health Care (Oxford University Press, 2010), intended to inform the lay public about medical imaging. During a lecture tour that circumnavigated the globe, I wrote the better part of a medical murder mystery and finished it when I got home. It was at this point that my ambition ran afoul of the practical realities of publishing. I submitted my work to a long list of agents. Only a couple of them showed any preliminary interest, and their interest was short-lived. No agent, no book. One night, a college classmate interviewed me for a profile on the class website. He was a published author. He referred me to an agent who had recently rejected his work but whom he felt might be interested in mine.

Claire Gerus took a look at my novel. She no longer represented writers of fiction, but she liked my writing. If I ever had an idea for a nonfiction book, I should give her a call. As it happened I did. Claire guided me through the development of a creative nonfiction book proposal for The Man Who Stalked Einstein: How Nazi Scientist Philipp Lenard Changed the Course of History, which she sold to Lyons Press. I was on my way. Einsteinwas published in April, 2015.

As I worked with the publisher to edit Einstein, I began to consider what story I might like to address next. I considered several options related to my profession of radiology — “martyrs” whose investigations led to their death of overexposure before the lethality of radiation was understood. Some aspect of the life of Marie Curie. The upshot of atomic bomb testing in the Pacific. Then, I recalled a day I’d spent with a medical school classmate, Michael Gottlieb, in his Los Angeles AIDS practice. I contacted him. Over the course of several phone calls, I realize that Gottlieb had lived an extraordinary story. We discussed conditions under which I would undertake to write a very personal history of his 1981 discovery of AIDS and what followed over the ensuing seven years during which he was employed as an academic physician at UCLA. The goal would be to write an honest account of his story — including the views of both his supporters and antagonists.

What I learned offered all the makings of a terrific creative nonfiction story: an important but little written about moment in history; conflict between Gottlieb and his bosses and colleagues; a hint of Hollywood glitter; a fast-moving dramatic arc; and a climax that would entertain readers and provide important life lessons. The result is A Plague on All Our Houses: Medical Intrigue, Hollywood, and the Discovery of AIDS, published by the ForeEdge Press imprint of the University Press of New England.

The murder mystery still sits in my computer.

Bruce J. Hillman, MD, is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Radiology at the University of Virginia and Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American College of Radiology. He is the author of A Plague on All Our Houses: Medical Intrigue, Hollywood, and the Discovery of AIDs (ForeEdge Press, 2016)

#writing #serendipity #publishing #medicine #Hollywood #HIV #AIDS

Zingers, The Clubhouse Turn, and “The Intelligence of a Macaroon’’: Chuck McCutcheon’s Presidential Debate Primer

By Chuck McCutcheon

Coauthor of Dog Whistles, Walk-Backs, and Washington Handshakes and Doubletalk

Presidential debates feature many, many words — way too many for some people. But the language of the debates, and the media/political world’s reaction to them, leans on a surprisingly small handful of stock expressions and phrases.

One maxim for politicians – especially in debates – is that you don’t always answer the question that you were asked; you respond to the one that you want asked. So get ready to hear “The question we should be asking…,” in the manner of Democrat John Edwards in 2007, when he was queried about whether he considered Russia a friend or a foe. After a perfunctory nonanswer, he honed in on what he wanted to talk about: “I think the question we should be asking ourselves is, how does America change the underlying dynamic of what’s happening in the world?

… I think for that to occur, the world has to see America as a force for good again, which is why I talked about leading an effort to make primary-school education available to 100 million children in the world who don’t have it.”

This pivot happens so often in debates that there’s a name for it: the “clubhouse turn.” Northeastern University journalism professor Alan Schroeder, author of several books on presidential debates, traces the phrase’s origin to Michael Sheehan, a debate coach for Bill Clinton and other Democrats. “‘Clubhouse turn’ strikes me as a particularly appropriate metaphor to apply to debates, since this is a genre with other parallels to horse racing,” Schroeder said.

Another debate maxim is to trivialize unwanted topics by seeking to regain the rhetorical high ground. Hence the popularity of the term “distraction from the real issues.” Lobbyist Jim Manley, a former spokesman for Democratic Senators Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid, calls it “a tried-and-true way to help yourselves get out of the hole and on the offensive.”

Debaters may despise their opponents, but the trick is to avoid seeming petty. That means invoking “with all due respect …” as a preface to leveling criticism, with the perfunctory pretense of appearing fair-minded. It’s the political version of the Southern phrase “bless your heart.” As humorist Dave Barry once wrote in his mock language column: “It is correctly used to ‘soften the blow’ when you wish to criticize someone in a diplomatic and nonjudgmental manner, as in: ‘With all due respect, you are much worse than Hitler,’ or ‘No disrespect intended, but you have the intelligence of a macaroon.’’’

Debates are mostly remembered for their “zingers,” the supposedly spontaneous clever one-liners that can shift momentum toward the candidates who utter them. Former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas is probably best remembered for telling Republican Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” In the Internet age, though, it can be difficult to get in a well-executed zinger, as journalists are constantly watching for scripted talking points.

Also a typical part of any debate is the “hypothetical,” the common reporters’ tactic for trying to get politicians to say something newsworthy. Most politicians, in general, duck legitimate questions by dismissing them as hypothetical. “They even seem to want credit for maintaining high standards by keeping this virus from corrupting the political discussion,” political journalist Michael Kinsley once wrote. But in debates, they’re often inescapable. The last round of GOP gatherings is still noteworthy for the 2011 question that asked candidates whether they would reject a hypothetical deal that cut $10 from the budget deficit for every $1 in tax increases; every candidate raised their hand.

Of course, debate observers will obsess over whether any candidate’s performance is so momentous that it’s a “game-changer.” That phrase’s now-common usage irks some academics looking for less simplistic explanations of how elections are decided.

“When it’s used to label events, it’s used very freely, generally with no empirical basis,” said Bethany Albertson, a University of Texas political scientist who studies political attitudes and persuasion. “I guess pundits are incentivized to use the language because it makes whatever happened sound hugely important, but there’s no check on its use.”

More from Chuck McCutcheon

#zingers #you're no Jack Kennedy #Trump #presidential election #Politics #political jargon #Lloyd Bensen #language #doubletalk #debates #Dave Barry #Dan Quayle #Clinton #beltway jargon

The Opioid Abuse Crisis: An Opportunity for Public Policy

By David Nagel, MD

author of Needless Suffering: How Society Fails Those With Chronic Pain

“Those are rare who fall without becoming degraded; there is a point, moreover, at which the unfortunate and the infamous are associated and confounded in a single word, a fatal word, Les Misérables.”

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables, Vol III, Book VIII, Chapter V

Jean Valjean still ranks as one of the great characters of literature. As the protagonist of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, Valjean finds a way to triumph over the evil of his fellow man — and in so doing he becomes a true hero, one who takes the gifts he has been born with, develops them, and then uses them to help all those around him better the world.

Idealistic French literature? Maybe. But there’s nothing completely abstract about this story; it happens every day in our country, just in a different form. In 1862 Hugo wrote: “So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the midst of civilization, artificially creates a hell on earth…so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, there should be a need for books such as this.”

Are we any different? I love my country, but we are not without sin. We lament our past injustices to Native Americans, African Americans, women, homosexuals, Jews, and others. We seek to fix the sins of the past, but there are others still who remain persecuted — and our social policies of the last hundred years have made an unnecessary living hell for both those who experience chronic pain and those who suffer from addiction. Currently, 35-40 million Americans suffer from what has been referred to as “high impact” chronic pain. Two and a half million Americans suffer from some form of “opioid abuse disorder.” For most of the past century they have all been treated like criminals, imprisoned by an ignorant system lacking mercy and falling decidedly short of justice. The social policies designed to help those addicted only harm those in pain, and what is needed is a change in perception — a cultural transformation, even — to de-stigmatize the stigmatized.

State and federal authorities’ stance towards opioid use and abuse has harmed many pain patients. I see the results every day in my office. The reality is that our options for treating pain are limited, and opioids are an important tool in this battle. So, the question needs to be posed to these authorities: if you are limiting access to opioids, what steps are you willing to take to help develop other options for care? This is not a new question, and perhaps it will receive greater emphasis as a result of the opioid crisis. It has been my observation that in colloquial terms, pain management and opioid prescription are too often viewed inter-changeably. It is also alarming that the needs of treating and preventing opioid abuse supersedes that of those who suffer from chronic pain, even though the ratio of those who suffer from high impact chronic pain to those who abuse prescription and non-prescription opioids approaches 20:1.

But hope is on the horizon.

The National Pain Strategy is an extraordinary document that seeks to correct these problems. It acknowledges the issue of opioid abuse, points out the deficiencies in our ability to care for those who suffer, and offers a six point strategy for remedying these deficiencies by addressing: 1) population research, 2) prevention and care of chronic pain, 3) disparities, 4) service delivery and payment, 5) professional education and training, and 6) public education and communication.

What is also exciting is that for the first time in my career, patient advocate groups are standing up for their rights. The Chronic Pain Advocacy Task Force has outlined four core beliefs which are being accepted by other groups including the National Pain Strategy. Moreover, the creation of state policies for medical cannabis is a direct challenge to failed federal drug guidelines. Cannabis and cannabinoids have great potential as therapeutic agents for pain, and at least 15 percent of pain sufferers risk government reprisal by illegally obtaining them for self-medication.

Much is happening — finally — but much still needs to change. Pain patients are treated as pariahs by doctors, who often refuse to care for them. They are treated like criminals in a court system that views them as guilty until proven innocent. They are discriminated against in a workplace that sees them as a potential risk, or even just an extra cost. They are the targets of unsavory snake oil salesmen both in medical and non-medical settings. The list goes on.

In my book Needless Suffering: How Society Fails Those with Chronic Pain, I outline sixteen social institutions and how the behavior of each adversely affects the lives of those who suffer from chronic pain. More importantly, I offer solutions for these pervasive social and medical problems. My goal is to broaden the social discussion on chronic pain beyond just opioids and return a sense of dignity to those who suffer. As both a doctor and an author, I would like to see an end to the legion of Valjeans who suffer needlessly as a result of myopic policies. In doing so, I hope, like Valjean’s bishop savior, to provide mercy to the needy and a sense of hope to the hopeless.

I welcome you to join this journey.

#public policy #opioids #medicine #chronic pain

On Fishing and the Meaning of Everything

by Marcelo Gleiser author of The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything The boy inserted his fishing rod into a plastic pipe secured deep in the sand. The surf was low and the sun was already setting behind his back. Gone were the girls in scant bikinis and the muscular guys playing volleyball. Copacabana beach lay bare in front of him, a perfect, golden horseshoe. Here and there, older fishermen tried their luck along the beach, retired men in their sixties and seventies with little to do, their skin leathered from years under the tropical sun, beer bellies bursting out of their shorts. They all knew the persistent eleven-year-old who would come three or four times a week to the same spot with devout discipline. The routine was always the same: he’d string three hooks to the end of the line and carefully load each with a small piece of sardine. Then he would run to the water with the rod behind his back and cast the line as far as he could beyond the breaking surf. After placing the rod into the pipe, he’d sit down on the sand and wait. He paid little attention to the older men. Entranced, he shifted his gaze back and forth from the distant horizon to the tip of the rod. He didn’t know then why he had to fish. But he knew he did. Alone. Usually, he’d go home stinking of bait and empty-handed, or at best with a meager catch of a small catfish or a cocoroca, a bony relative of the sergeant fish common off the beaches of Rio. His older brothers would smirk, clamping their noses, amused at the boy’s stubbornness. But not on that day. Two large silvery shadows darted fifty feet away, high on a wave. The boy retrieved his line quickly, hooked some fresh bait, and cast right behind where he had spotted the pair.

Marcelo Gleiser

For ten minutes, nothing happened. Discouraged, the boy started to retrieve the line. Suddenly, he felt a strong tug. The bamboo rod bent in half with a fury he had never seen before. His arms turned rubbery. “It’s a shark!” he yelled. “It’s a shark!” Two older fishermen nearby dropped their rods and came closer. It had been years since someone had caught a shark there. The boy ran to the water’s edge, holding on to the rod with all his might, trying to reel line in. But he could hardly turn the handle. “It’s gonna snap! The line is gonna snap!” shouted one of the men. “Give up some line, boy! Let the fish run!” The boy, trembling head to toe, released the reel’s lock. Line swished out as the fish tried to regain control of his destiny. The mighty predator had become prey to an even mightier predator, a stunned eleven-year-old boy. After some ten minutes of give and take, the boy finally reeled the fish ashore. It wasn’t a shark. But it was big, bigger than anything he had ever caught or seen anyone catch at Copacabana beach. Silvery, flat on the sides with a large yellow tail fin; probably a young albacore, weighting about eight pounds, a beautiful creature to behold. The older men circled the boy, amazed at the sight. Bursting with pride, the boy collected his equipment and tried to shove the fish headfirst into his bag. It wouldn’t fit. The V-shaped tail stuck out as he walked the two blocks back home, pretending not to notice the looks of amazement from the passersby. He opened the door to his apartment and placed the fish on the kitchen counter. The cook, a large black woman in her fifties, came running in. “Lindaura, look what I caught for dinner tonight!” the boy said. “Grandpa is coming, right?” The cook eyed the fish with incredulity. “You caught this down by the beach?” The boy beamed. “I did. And no one helped me either. I wanna see who’s gonna make fun of my fishing now.” It took me over thirty years to reconnect with that boy. Life took me adrift and I forgot all about that young boy and his big fish. My head turned upward to the Universe, and I became a theoretical physicist, interested in questions that, not long ago, wouldn’t have been considered scientific: How did the Universe come to be? What about all the matter that makes up stars, planets, and people? And life? Can we ever hope to understand how inanimate atoms first joined together to become living things, and then thinking brains? And if life took hold here, could it exist elsewhere? Could there be other thinking beings out there in the immensity of the cosmos? Even as a teenager, I marveled at the fact that such fundamental questions about existence could be answered in rational ways, without invoking supernatural agency. At the very least we could try to answer them, if not in their entirety, at least in part. The value, I realized, was in the trying, in being a participant in this continuous process of discovery we call science. I now understand that those long afternoons of fishing and contemplation were a prelude to what was about to come. After all, fishing teaches us to be patient, tolerant, humble—key qualities needed in research. How often do fishermen go to the water with their rods, dreaming of the day’s catch, only to come home empty-handed? Likewise, how often do scientists passionately explore an idea for days, weeks, months, years even, only to be forced to accept that it leads nowhere? Notwithstanding the frequent failures, and just as in fishing, they keep coming back, even if the odds for success are pretty low. The thrill is in beating the odds, occasionally landing a big fish or an idea that reveals something new about the world. In fishing and in science we flirt with the elusive. We stare at the water, and sometimes we see a fish stir underneath the surface or even jump, betraying its presence. But the watery world is not our own, and we can only conjecture about what really goes on down there, polarized lenses and all. The line and the hook are our probes into this other realm, which we perceive only very imperfectly. “Nature loves to hide,” the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote some twenty-five centuries back. We see very little of what really goes on around us. Science is our probe into invisible realms, be it the world of the very small, of bacteria, of atoms, of elementary particles, or the world of the very large, of stars, galaxies, and even the Universe as a whole. We see these through our tools of exploration—our reality amplifiers—the telescopes, the microscopes, and the many other instruments of detection, the rod and line of the natural scientist. If we are persistent, once in a while we see Nature stir, even jump, revealing the simple beauty of the unexpected. This is an excerpt from The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher’s Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything.

#theoretical physics #nature #Marcelo Gleiser #Heraclitus #fly fishing

In Search of the Soviet Spies with Two Lives

by Barnes Carr author of Operation Whisper: The Capture of Soviet Spies Morris and Lona Cohen The subject of my book, Operation Whisper, came to me on a morning that seemed to have been modeled from childhood memories, moist and green, smelling of jasmine and wild onions. I was sitting under the big oak in my backyard in New Orleans, drinking coffee and searching the paper for something interesting. But it was a slow news day. I was about to move on to the sports section when I noticed a story buried at the bottom of an inside page. A famous spy for the Soviets had died in a KGB nursing home in Moscow. His name was Morris Cohen, eighty-four years old, born in the Bronx. There was something odd about this. I knew that Americans had spied for the Russians, but how many had actually got on a plane and defected to the workers’ paradise? And just how famous was he? The story went on to say that Morris and his wife Lona had run a Soviet spy network in the United States and Canada during World War II. They stole atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project and put Russia on a fast track to building its own nuclear arsenal. The Cohens, and not the Rosenbergs, had delivered a complete diagram of the first A-bomb to Moscow. That, I had to admit, was an impressive set of bona fides, as they say in the trade.

Morris and Lona Cohen

The story also said that Morris had worked as a sports writer for the Memphis Press-Scimitar before the war. That’s when I sat up. I had worked as a reporter for the Press-Scimitar. It was my first major-market journalism job. A Russian spy was an alumnus of the Press-Scimitar? I put the paper down. Was that why some people used to call us Reds on the Press-Scimitar? I poured another cup and read on. Morris had served in an international brigade in Spain and fought against Franco’s army, the obituary said. He was wounded in battle and recruited for spying while recuperating in a hospital. I put the paper down. The Cohens sounded like a good subject for a feature story or an essay in a historical journal. I obtained a copy of their FBI file, which included interviews with people who had known them in America at different times in their lives. I began mining sources at libraries, archives, museums, and additional government offices. I found that the Cohens, after leaving America, went on to atomic spying in England. But when I started checking British sources, I hit a wall. Nobody had ever heard of the Cohens. What was I doing wrong? My course was finally corrected by a helpful soul in the morgue (library) of the Sunday Times. “Who?” he said. “Morris and Lona Cohen,” I replied. “Famous spies for the Soviets.” “In Britain? Never heard of them.” “It was the Portland spy case.” “Oh! You mean Peter and Helen Kroger. Bloody Yanks.” Things really opened up after that. I collected British news stories about the Cohens, and memoirs and reminiscences written by the spies they worked with, and the spy catchers who caught them. I contacted people who had known them, and located some good published interviews, including one conducted by KGB historians. The Cohens and their London spy ring were finally captured in a joint effort by the FBI, CIA, RCMP, MI5, and Scotland Yard. When I found that out, I knew there was a book in all this. The roll-up was called Operation Whisper. The case featured all the elements of a Hitchcock thriller: chases, blackmail, threats of assassination, secret drops, secret meets, secret knocks, secret codes. Nocturnal beach landings and shots in the dark were included, along with a double-agent femme fatale. The Scotland Yard detective who arrested them was called Moonraker. I especially liked that. One thing I noticed early on was that Americans who had written about the Cohens offered little information about their later work as the Krogers in England. And British writers who wrote about the Krogers seemed to care little about their previous incarnations as Americans. Thus, in my book I have tried to bring together a narrative history of the Cohens’ “two lives” on both sides of the Atlantic. Equally, I’ve described how police and security agents in the United States, Canada, and Britain systematically tracked down the Cohens, clue by clue. Writers often concentrate on the political ideology of spy cases and ignore the work of the spy catchers. But in a chase, I think the role of the hound is just as thrilling as that of the hare. In the course of my research I learned a lot about spying, about the Spanish Civil War, the two world wars, and some truly fascinating characters I would like to have had a drink with. At times, the well ran dry. Other times, there was a flood. That’s why I like research. But most of all, I like the writing. I don’t agree with what the Cohens did. But I do think they led intriguing lives. I’ve always believed that contradictions in character are the things that make people interesting. You’ll find plenty of those in Operation Whisper.

#soviet spies #peter and helen kroger #operation whisper #morris and lona cohen #manhattan project #ForeEdge #cold war #barnes carr

10 Simple Solutions to Better Hand Hygiene

Did you know today, May 5th, is World Hand Hygiene Day? The World Health Organization (WHO) is the force behind an awareness campaign to make sure we're all practicing responsible hand hygiene. It just so happens that this week, through our ForeEdge imprint, we've also released The Hand Book: Surviving in a Germ-Filled World, by Miryam Z. Wahrman—yes, a handbook to understanding the critical importance of maintaining clean hands in your daily life, with advice on best hand hygiene practices. So what better time to share some of Wahrman's helpful tips? And some may seem like common sense, but often the most obvious are the easiest habits to break. Here are ten things you can and should be doing to keep those hands clean and yourself and others germ-free: 1. Don’t shake hands, do the fist bump. If you do shake hands, be sure to wash up or use alcohol-based hand rub before touching your face or eating. 2. Keep your washing-up areas stocked with plenty of soap and clean cloth towels or paper towels. This is equally as important at home as it is at work.

3. Always keep a bottle of alcohol-based hand rub handy, at work or on the road. 4. If you are a parent of small children, or a caretaker for a family member, keep your charge’s hands clean. 5. Teach your children from the earliest ages to keep their hands clean, in particular, to wash after coming home from school, the playground, or other activities, and before eating. 6. If you are a supervisor at work, develop and encourage hygiene policies for your employees. Your initiative may be as modest or subtle as making sure there is soap and paper towels in the bathrooms and hand rub available in the office. 7. If you work in health care, be vigilant about hand hygiene, cooperate with hygiene policies, and take the initiative to be a role model for others.

8. According to the WHO, 61% of health workers do not clean their hands at right moment. So if you are a patient, politely ask your health worker to wash hands and don gloves. If you are advocating for a family member who is being treated, you should do the same. This is not the time to be bashful or worry about insulting someone. 9. If possible, when buying prepared food, be aware of how your food is handled and ask the food handler to wash hands or don gloves. 10. Learn about local health codes, and advocate for them. Encourage your legislators to develop policies, codes, and laws to further protect consumers. For more information about World Hand Hygiene Day and how you can spread the word (not the germs), visit the WHO's website. And to learn even more, including how ancient cultures dealt with disease and hygiene and how scientific developments led to the germ theory, pick up Miryam Wahrman's The Hand Book: Surviving a Germ-Filled World, available now!

#World Health Organization #Miryam Wahrman #ForeEdge #SafeSurgicalHands #HandHygiene Day

An American Woman in the City of Violins

Carleen Hutchins measuring the thickness of a violin plate, ca. 1960. Images courtesy of Hutchins estate.

by Quincy Whitney author of American Luthier: Carleen Hutchins—the Art & Science of the Violin Cremona, Italy, October 1997. Standing in Piazza Lodi, I felt a mixture of excitement and frustration at the realization that my husband Eli and I had clearly reached a dead-end. We had veered off the beaten path of an itinerary we had planned for an anniversary trip to Italy in order to take in the City of Violins, at the suggestion of Carleen Hutchins, whom I had met just a month before. We were now evidently quite lost. I met Carleen because of a stranger sitting next to me at the New Hampshire Humanities Council annual dinner who, upon hearing that I was a Boston Globe arts reporter covering New Hampshire, said I should contact a violinmaker who summered up on Lake Winnipesaukee. Nevertheless, when I took up her lead, the most significant interview I ever conducted was almost the fish that got away. When I phoned Hutchins to ask for an interview, she turned me down flat. In fourteen years, I had never come across an artist, educator, historian, or scholar who did not want free publicity. I soon discovered that Carleen Hutchins seldom did the predictable thing. Taken aback by her refusal, I hung on the phone, contemplating my next move. Suddenly, Hutchins blurted out: “What’s your angle?” No one had ever asked me about “my angle” before. With no time for a clever comeback, the first thing that came to mind was the truth—I told her I was fascinated by stories where science and art overlap. Bingo. The door opened. “That’s exactly what I do,” Hutchins said. “When do we talk?”

Two weeks after my feature appeared in the Globe in August 1997, Hutchins phoned to ask if I would consider writing her biography. Tired of weekly deadlines and intrigued by the idea of a larger project, I still wondered if everything she had told me could possibly be true, as her story seemed too remarkable to be real. Just a month later in October 1997, a serendipitous trip to Italy cast away all doubt. When Hutchins found out that my husband and I were going to Italy, she asked if we would mind visiting Cremona, “City of Violins” and the birthplace of Antonio Stradivari, as she was bent on tracking down an old friend who had moved his workshop—Maestro Francesco Bissolotti. “Bisso,” as Carleen called him, was one of two master luthiers who in 1937 had founded the city’s prestigious violinmaking school in honor of the two hundredth anniversary of Stradivari’s death. Hutchins wanted to send him Research Papers in Violin Acoustics 1975–1993, the definitive collection she had just finished editing. Now here we stood in Piazza Lodi. After hiking up the stairs to Bisso’s abandoned workshop, which held no clue as to a forwarding address, we had reached an impasse. As we sat in our rental car, ready to pull away, two students crossed the piazza, one carrying what looked to be a violin case. I approached the student who had stopped at a pay phone on the edge of the piazza, and in my struggling Italian, I said, “Bissolotti.” “Bisso?” he said suddenly in broken English as he hung up the phone. “We have never met Maestro Bissolotti, but we have come to Cremona today to buy a viola!” The four of us meandered down a cobblestone street as if feeling our way in the dark, until two Japanese gentlemen appeared out of nowhere, asking, “Bisso?” We followed them to an archway leading to a small courtyard, through an open wrought iron gate, into a smaller courtyard, where we found ourselves pulling the knocker on an old door covered with peeling green paint. We were ushered into the outer room of the workshop of “Bisso,” a short man with a mustache and winning smile, who immediately began speaking Italian to the student bent on purchasing a viola. Bisso knew not a word of English, but when I presented a letter signed by Hutchins, his face lit up. He motioned for one of his apprentices, Lorenzo Cassi, to accompany us on a tour of the Palazzo Comunale. When I asked Lorenzo if he knew of Hutchins, he replied: “I have never met her, but we have read every paper she has ever written!”

Carleen Hutchins, ca. 1990.

To find the Collezione Civica in the Palazzo Comunale, one need only look for the tall bell tower in the heart of Cremona. Inside the galleries, glass display cases house the earliest known violin, made in 1566 by Andrea Amati—the undisputed father of the violin—along with a 1615 viola made by Amati’s son Girolamo, a 1689 Giuseppe Guarneri violin, and a 1715 Stradivarius violin. On the day we visited, in the corridor just outside the violin galleries, we passed From Tree to Violin, a month-long exhibition created by the violinmaking school. Had we visited two weeks later, we would have missed it. The very last exhibit panel was devoted to Carleen Maley Hutchins. Here in the City of Violins, keeping company with the most celebrated names in the violin world—all of them Italian men—was a living American female violinmaker, a woman who had taught herself acoustics by carving violins. I was immediately intrigued. Why had I never heard of this female luthier who had asked me to tell her story? In the midst of our conversations, Hutchins would get phone calls from luthiers in Australia or China, physicists and museum curators in England and Scotland, a dendrochronologist in Paris, a luthier in Belgium, members of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in Russia, a conductor in California, a faculty member at Juilliard. It became clear Hutchins had developed an international community around violin acoustics and she had created a new family of violins—yet she seemed to be a hidden treasure. The preceding is excerpted from the introduction in American Luthier.

#violinmaking #Violin Octet #Stradivari #Quincy Whitney #ForeEdge #Carleen Hutchins #American Luthier

5 Cool Artifacts Unearth Boston's Rich Past

Volunteers for the City Archaeology Program excavating a site in Boston.

As the city archaeologist of Boston, Joseph Bagley's job includes managing more than one million artifacts excavated from dozens of sites throughout the city and conducting digs, often with volunteers, on small projects on city-owned land. Between what resides in the archives and what still remains unrecovered, he would tell you there's no shortage of fascinating discoveries deep in the soil of Boston history. So when Bagley decided to write a book about some of his favorite finds, the hard part was narrowing it down to the few dozen that could adequately represent this place over the ages, from as early as the first human inhabitants thousands of years ago. Painstakingly, he did just that, and the result is A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts, complete with photos and essays on each artifact, due out in April from UPNE. Here Bagley selects five of those 50 objects that begin to tell Boston's fascinating story:

Neville Point 7500–5500 BP | Boston Common

Found on Boston Common during a 1986 archaeological survey before installation of lighting throughout the park, this 5,500–7,500-year-old native spear point base is the oldest artifact found in downtown Boston. It was made from stone harvested from outcrops found only in the Blue Hills area south of Boston. While the oldest man-made object found in downtown Boston (so far), the earliest evidence for people in the area around Boston goes back 12,000 years. This stone tool is older than the Pyramids in Egypt and Stonehenge. Cat Skeleton 1714–1750 | Three Cranes Tavern, Charlestown

This intact cat skeleton was found buried in a bowl under the entrance of the Three Cranes Tavern in the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston. It dates to around the turn of the 18th century when witchcraft hysteria was peaking in and around Boston, and appears to be similar to other caches of cats in thresholds and hearths as a means to deter vermin and witchcraft from the home. Whizzer Circa 1750 | Faneuil Hall, Downtown

This whizzer toy, which would produce a buzzing sound when spun on a loop of string through the two central holes, was hammered from a lead musket ball. Thomas Apthorp was the son of Charles Apthorp, a major merchant and slave dealer in Boston who had a shop near Town Dock near present-day Faneuil Hall, where this artifact was excavated. The Apthorps were the wealthiest family in Boston in the early to mid 18th century. After Charles' death Thomas became the pay master for the British troops, who were at the time encamped on Boston Common. As a Tory, Thomas fled the city with the British on Evacuation Day in 1776. Shell-Edge Pearlware 1819–1830 | African Meeting House, Beacon Hill

While this type of ceramic is one of the most common artifacts one will ever find on an archaeological site in Boston, this plate in particular was part of a large matching set of dishes that were encountered during excavations behind the 1806 African Meeting House on Beacon Hill. The oldest standing Black church in America, the church also had apartments in the basement where Domingo Williams lived. As a free black man, Domingo ran his own business and became a popular very popular event caterer and organizer for Boston's white upper class. Despite his freedom he and others in the Black community faced broad discrimination in Boston. Based on the number of similar dishes, archaeologists believe this plate is part of Domingo's catering set, which was used throughout the City for parties, but also for community events at the African Meeting House back yard. Red Sox Pin 1912 | Dillaway-Thomas House, Roxbury

This 1912 pin was issued to members of the Boston Red Sox fan club the year Fenway Park opened. Parts have broken off in the past, but it consists of a baseball face with eyes and a mouth, crossed-bat arms, and a chest made from an umpire's pads. The pin was found in the yard of the Dillaway-Thomas house in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.

A History of Boston in 50 Artifacts by Joseph Bagley is available for purchase now. Follow the City of Boston Archaeology Program's ongoing projects on Facebook.

#UPNE #Joseph Bagley #Boston history #Boston archaeology

All About the McDuffies?: The Geopolitics of Jacksonian Bank Notes

by Christopher C. Apap author of The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic It is tough in an election year not to pay attention to state and local politics—indeed, as we once more revisit the way that Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primaries set the tone for the national conversation, we are reminded how local debates shape not only America’s idea of the nation, but the idea of America abroad. This is no new occurrence. My book, The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic, is an exploration of the complexity of local, national, and at times global identities during the 1820s and 30s. And while primary season is now one way that individual states shape their identities today, I am reminded of a different form of localized identity-formation from the period that I study: currency. We now think of American currency as a nationalizing force, and, whether it is how we think of the Almighty Dollar or how Sean Combs has argued that it is “All about the Benjamins,” we know what American money looks like. Yet national bank notes were instituted only in 1862. Before that, hundreds of state-chartered banks around the nation printed their own notes that could be redeemed at those banks for “specie,” or the hard money of gold and silver. Some of these early notes were simple and quite utilitarian in design, but by the 1820s and 30s, the thriving engraving business would mean that banks could issue complex notes which would be considerably harder to counterfeit. The engraving industry went bust with the Panic of 1837 (for which fans of Hudson River painter Asher Durand, who made a very good living engraving banknotes before turning to art as a more full-time occupation, are thankful), but for nearly two decades, bank notes often reflected complex local identities. I first discovered this when, during a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusetts, I heeded the advice of Paul Erickson and delved into the crates of antebellum banknotes in the AAS archives. I discovered paper currencies that reflected a pointed and often quite political form of self-fashioning.

Take, for example, the currency of the Portsmouth-based New Hampshire Union Bank, whose five-dollar note was printed with a rich tableau across its top. At the left-hand edge, we have images of state houses, churches, and farmhouses, with agricultural workers in the foreground representing the state’s general national image: as an agricultural center. However, the right-hand side of the image suggests a different aspiration to broader commercial interests with the images of a bustling port with ships at sail. In the center, the common representation of America, Columbia, presides, flanked by the representations of other goddesses. To her left, holding an anchor, is perhaps a representation of the goddess Fortune, who is often understood to patronize sea-journeys and trade; to her right is likely Ceres, goddess of agriculture, with what appears to be plowing instruments and a sheaf of grain. If geography textbooks of the day tended to minimize New Hampshire’s commercial impact, what this banknote seems to suggest is that its agriculture acumen could and should be turned to trade interests that would benefit the state and the nation. Or, at the very least, the bank note suggests that the President and Directors of the New Hampshire Union Bank hoped that this would be the case.

The Farmers and Exchange Bank of Charlestown, South Carolina, can be understood in similar ways. At the top center of their ten-dollar note is a fleet of trading vessels that underscore its position as one of the chief southern ports of Jacksonian America, and the bottom right depicts an agricultural scene that reflects not only the centrality of cotton to their economy, but makes the state’s dependence on slave labor a centerpiece of that depiction. If one is tempted to overlook what John C. Calhoun had termed South Carolina’s “peculiar institutions” on the note, or to minimize it as a mere attempt at honest representation, the portrait at the lower left might cause them to think otherwise. It pictures Representative George McDuffie, who was not merely a delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and, a year after this note is dated, the governor of South Carolina, but who also was, with Calhoun and Robert Hayne, one of the more vocal proponents of Nullification (the argument that states had the right to reject, or nullify, federal laws that negatively affected that state; Nullification was the philosophical precursor to secession). McDuffie would in fact powerfully and repeatedly argue that national tariffs had a direct and deleterious effect on South Carolina’s economy. How interesting, then, that this Charlestown bank would choose McDuffie to symbolize its exchange value; it is hard not to read the bank note as a political statement in favor of Nullification, state’s rights, and the defiance of South Carolina in the face of Andrew Jackson and the nation as a whole.

This latter example is a striking reminder of how, even and especially in the 1820s and 30s, bank notes could be fundamentally and intrinsically political: they could be the vehicles through which states articulated their own identities locally and, to the extent that they might circulate more widely, nationally as well. And while our politics today is deeply implicated in money as well, it is the primary races which are capturing the national imagination at the moment. But it is worth remembering the different ways that states like New Hampshire and South Carolina presented themselves to each other and the rest of the nation nearly two centuries ago; they are a reminder of how acts of self-definition often reflect broader political debates and aspirations. Christopher C. Apap teaches English literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, and is the author of The Genius of Place: The Geographic Imagination in the Early Republic.

#The Genius of Place #primary season #early America #Christopher C. Apap

Why the Grateful Dead Will Always Matter

Grateful Dead at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, Oct. 9, 1980. Photo by Chris Stone.

Last summer, after fifty years, the band with which the tie-dye shirt became synonymous, the group that helped to define an era (or certainly its vibe), the Grateful Dead performed a series of shows as a whole group (with Jerry smiling down in the form of a rainbow) for the last time. But like many of the concert-goers who couldn't bring themselves to leave after the final notes of the final "Fare Thee Well," the Dead won't soon fade from time or memory. In 2016, an offshoot of the band, called Dead & Company, is expected to tour, and a Dead tribute album seems to be in the works. And just released from ForeEdge, a lovesong to all things Dead, titled Why the Grateful Dead Matter, by Michael Benson, dives deep—as deep as any Dead guitar riff—into this timeless band's enduring legacy. Here’s a taste. by Michael Benson author of Why the Grateful Dead Matter Light the song, and pass it around. Don’t bogart. Let it shine, let it shine, stoke it on a Palo Alto stage, until that fire reaches the mountain in Concord, the magnolia fields down by the river, becomes a conflagration of the heart stretched from South Colorado to the West Texas town of El Paso, the twilight purple plain of Wichita, all the way to Europe and the Pyramids of Egypt under a lunar eclipse. Stoke it until it envelops the Earth with an accelerando of Peace. And that’s the Grateful Dead, not just a band that played songs, sold records, and gave concerts, but a band of sorcerers, conjurers of a rare and different tune, music with a heartbeat and breath, with the perfect tension between dissonance and resonance, suspension and completion, a cynosure for the huddled masses, tie-dyed angel music for spinning the sacred dance of life as a falling leaf at the jubilee, a rolling away of the dew, a movement and groove that gets into the fiber of your skull, spreads like ripples on still water, grows roses along a trellis of bones, messes with the gears of your body clock until you’re on a long, strange pilgrimage jonesing to find the 45-minute Sugaree, waving that flag, driving that train, holding away the despair with a cloak of space and drums, lightening the load until you get up and fly away. You don’t have to take my word for it. The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell (his book The Power of Myth is required reading in college sociology courses) went to a Dead show and said the music was the antidote to the Damoclean sword of nuclear war.

Jerry Garcia, performing with the Dead, May 10, 1980, in New Haven, CT.

Why does the Dead still matter? Why will they always matter? Sure, because of the genius music, years of trippy listening pleasure—Jerry Garcia’s beam-me-up-Scottie leads and achingly sad vocals, Phil Lesh’s intricate bass lines weaving in and out of everything including the sound system, Bobby Weir’s strong masculine vocals and truly weird and wonderful second-chair guitar, the growling blues of Pigpen, the musicality and lightness of Keith and Donna Godchaux, and the Apocalypse Now rhythm section, the devils, Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart, all of whom we’ll be on a first name basis with from now on—but there’s a rebel bad boy social component as well. Their first fans thought they were bikers. The band matters because through it the counterculture lived on—ironic because the musicians were more piratical than political. They never turned a show into an anti-war demonstration. Although they were against all violence, their vision of show biz didn’t involve causes. They just didn’t like to follow rules and were constantly trying to get away with shit. But it didn’t matter. The counterculture burbled urgently from deep fissures in the earth beneath the San Andreas Fault and the Dead were swept away in the movement despite their apathy. They were too close to the crack to avoid the deep rifts in society. America came out of World War II a militaristic animal, intoxicated by its own might, its ability to push enemies around, to purge the world of evil. But the following generation, the kids coming of age in the 1960s, saw military solutions in a different light. The war in Vietnam had no real purpose; it had sprung up like a malignant weed through the cracks in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, a crossfire disguised as a magic bullet that burned Camelot to the ground. While America was spoon-fed Oswald pabulum, an undigested buzz of coup cabal grew into an electronic feedback wail—Dylan at Newport—and radicalized the American folkie-bohemian.

Bob Weir, performing with the Dead, Dec. 31, 1976.

Anti-Nam protests evolved smoothly from the pre-existing Cold War academic beatnik movement to “Ban the Bomb.” Like the war before it in Korea, Vietnam was a Civil War, a North fighting a South, and there seemed no cause for the U.S. to intervene. What was it all about, anyway? Profit? They said it was about the “Domino Theory”: if North Vietnam—and it’s Red Chinese backers—were allowed to conquer South Vietnam, the other small countries of southeastern Asia would fall as well. To many, the theory seemed weak—who cared who owned the jungle? Eisenhower had warned of the military-industrial complex, which would one day come slouching toward Bethlehem. War without reason was a symptom of the behemoth. The younger generation believed that war existed only to make a few men rich, while sacrificing the lives of American boys who didn’t have the connections to avoid the draft. American involvement in Vietnam was light until the so-called “Gulf of Tonkin” incident, in which it was reported that a North Vietnamese ship fired across the bow of an American ship, an act of aggression used by LBJ, sworn in on Air Force One on a terrible day in Dallas, as an excuse to escalate hostilities to the jangly tune of billions of dollars and more than 50,000 American lives. Finally, CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, “The Most Trusted Man in America,” said on the six o’clock news that the war was unwinnable. In order to show their dissatisfaction with the world the adults were creating, the youth of America grew their hair long, a fashion that began as Beatles-esque but eventually became anti-military. Youths began to take mind-altering drugs, which they were told by Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey and so many others, would expand their consciousness. Like Jack Kerouac and the beatniks before them, they worshipped the road, all the roads that led to the next Dead show, psychic roads that led to enlightenment. It was the birth of a movement, initially a fad of psychedelia, from which the Dead were the last survivors.

This has been excerpted from Why the Grateful Dead Matter, by Michael Benson.

#Phil Lesh #Mickey Hart #Keith Godchaux #Jerry Garcia #Grateful Dead #ForeEdge #Donna Godchaux #Bob Weir #Bill Kreutzmann

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