Isak

Detroit's False Choice

 

 

Spoiler: it was never a choice between saving the city's art or its pensioners.

I write about this for Next City:

It has become commonplace for cities in crisis to see philanthropists, non-profits and other private organizations filling the void, performing the vital tasks that City Hall can no longer do itself. An especially powerful example was revealed this week in Detroit, which is currently negotiating the terms of the largest municipal bankruptcy in history.

In an unprecedented “grand bargain,” nine local and national foundations committed $330 million in a deal to save the Detroit Institute of Arts from being mined to satisfy creditors of the city, which is about $18.5 billion in debt. The money will also ease the expected pension cuts facing Detroit’s retirees. (The pension funds are underfunded by about $3.5 billion.)

This is not just an outpouring of money. The deal is a breakthrough, crafted quietly through mediation in the last two months. As part of the terms, it will shift the museum from city ownership to the control of an independent non-profit, a move intended to protect the institution from future municipal money woes.

This is radical stuff. As the New York Times points out, the plan is “a first both in the foundation world, which has not been a source of money to shore up public-sector pensions in the past, and in municipal bankruptcy cases, experts said.” It also proves the lie that Detroit’s fiscal woes meant that the city had to choose between its art or its workers. That’s a painful and false binary that obscured the rest of the city’s 100,000-plus creditors. (From the point of view of Wall Street, this facelessness was useful.)

What to make of it all?

... and then I get it the false binary of art vs. pensioners, as well as the tricky ground of shifting public functions to private hands, and why this deal is not yet the final word.

Of course, a few hours after publishing, some big news on the "grand bargain" came out. See here and here for more on this radical and fluid proposal.

Safe Ground

 

In my first piece for Al Jazeera America, I wrote about a scary day at the beach, the precarity of freelancing, and all these wild emotions I've felt about getting health insurance for the first time in nearly four years. This is the first piece in a long time that caused me to cry while writing it.

From the opening:

On a warm afternoon in July three years ago, I played in the water at the beach on Belle Isle in Detroit. It was a spontaneous stop after a day of dancing, eating and the energetic company of my friend and his two great kids. Perhaps the buoyantly unfurling day was to blame for my inflated sense of my acrobatic abilities, as I found myself doing a backflip into the water. It was only four feet deep. My head hit earth. My legs crumpled. My scalp cracked and bled. I needed help tottering to shore. If not for persistent efforts to keep me talking, I would have promptly passed out on a beach towel.

For the next 40 minutes, my friend asked me questions. What is the name of this flower? Who is the president? Words came slowly. I kept sliding into the dangerous black sleep that slunk at the edges of my mind. A police officer asked if he could call an ambulance. When I said no, he urged us to go to a hospital ourselves. This was my head that we were talking about. “The brain, it’s the main computer,” he said, several times. “You don’t want to take any chances.”

He was right. But did I go to a doctor? No. I did not.

Instead, I went home. While I laid on my futon, my friend trawled the Internet for articles on how to treat head injuries. He didn’t let me sleep for more than 20 or so minutes at a time.

The next morning, I got up, brushed my hair and got on with the day.

There was no willful pride in this. No stubborn sense of immunity. I didn’t go to a doctor because I didn’t have health insurance. Medical costs frightened me more than my bleeding, concussed head did.

Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories

 

“You should smell a rat when people talk about reading as a ‘leisure activity.’”

Jeanette Winterson said this at a talk in April, which I attended with pen and notebook in hand. But I was too rapt to take notes. In dismissing those of us who speak of reading as a ‘hobby,’ something we wish we had time for or that we save for vacations, Winterson referenced Malala, the 14-year-old shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating for literacy for girls. There are scores of assaults and oppressive laws designed to keep books from certain groups of people. “If people are risking their lives to read,” Winterson said, “then there is something of importance in the act of reading that the rest of us have forgotten.”

True story. My wish to you, then, is a year of purposeful and urgent and heart-opening reading. Choose Books: A Gift Guide for People Who Care About Stories (PDF) is in its fifth edition. Rather than offering it for the holidays, I’m now launching it with the new year, in hopes that it will guide choices for you and yours throughout 2014.

Books, after all, last longer and matter more than, say, necklaces or sweaters, while rarely costing more than about sixteen dollars. Your intentional choice of books, purchased from indie booksellers and publishers, supports a vibrant and dynamic literary culture at a time when the book world is struggling, and literacy is horrifically low. Your choices matter.

Choosing to give books translates into a choice of being an active and engaged participant in a thriving literary culture. And it's not as if this is done out of charity: there are so many wonderful books out there, dynamic and strange and absorbing books, books suited to different personalities and tastes. To play bookish matchmaker is a great delight: it is why each year, I spend many hours putting this guide together for you. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t know that it helps connect the right story with the right person.

Choose Books because you really can make a difference. Choose Books because it is joyful. And, as Winterson emphasized, Choose Books because reading—not as a hobby, but as a fierce and fundamental act—is life-saving. I hope this gift guide—updated, revised, all-around wonderful!—is a useful and pleasurable navigation tool.

Here's what you can look forward to:

• Many hundreds of new, thoughtful, and original book recommendations, including those featured in expansive profiles and those recommended for particular groups of readers—like, say, history buffs, insomniacs, mystery-lovers, people struggling with great, sports fans, and wannabe cooks.
• Honed: While last year’s Choose Books crept up to ninety (90!) pages, this year’s version pares down some of the extremities to focus sharply on what matters most: books. (Don’t worry, the fourth edition—with its recommendations of top magazine gift subscriptions and best literary orgs for your gift donations, is still available, if you prefer it!)
• An updated feature on the top book—yes, book!—subscriptions from extraordinary publishers and booksellers
• An expanded feature on the best books to pair with a movie: that is, books that should be given along with their film adaptations (which you should watch alongside the gift recipient, of course).

As always, this is not a list of personal favorites. Choose Books is outward-looking, featuring outstanding books of different styles for different tastes and ages. These are contemporary titles and classics, authored by both esteemed and emerging writers, and released by both small and large publishers.

This guide can also help you navigate the year’s birthdays, holidays, ceremonies, and ‘thinking of you' surprises. I hope it is something of a friend to you. This 77-page gift guide is free and accessible, my gift to you.

If you find it worthwhile, however, I'd appreciate it if you'd consider pitching in a donation. 

 

 

And finally, I'd love your recommendations. What's missing in this gift guide? What books have you given to others that they've loved? I want to hear all your stories.

 

About the Image: Reading Room in the New York City library

Burning: Art in Detroit

 

 

My first story for NBC News is a dark one. I feel the stakes of this one, and won't pretend I didn't cry during the reporting. Here's how it opens:

The air on Heidelberg Street reeked of smoke one recent morning. Char and ash darkened the snowy sidewalks. But the color remained: shocks of red and yellow and blue that polka-dot this blighted east side neighborhood, making it one of the city’s leading tourist attractions.

For 27 years, The Heidelberg Project, founded by artist and Detroit native Tyree Guyton, has arranged found objects — tires, televisions, toys — with artful grandeur, transforming vacant homes and lots along more than two blocks into an outdoor art museum unlike any other. “It’s true to the city,” said executive director Jenenne Whitfield. “Detroit is a city of originality.”

But The Heidelberg Project is under attack.

Eight arsons since May — the most recent on December 8 — resulted in four of the seven main Heidelberg houses being burned to the ground. One of them, known as the War Room House, was the former home of Motown legend Wilson Pickett. There is a $30,000 reward for information that leads to the conviction of anyone responsible for the fires, but to date, there are no suspects.

The Heidelberg staff is mystified as to why they are targeted. Lisa Rodriguez, chief curator, takes a philosophical look: “Throughout history, art has always had that impact: Someone has to remove it, steal it, vandalize it. So while the fires are a horrifying and terrifying thing…that art was burned down because of how powerful it is. That’s a big statement.”

Rodriguez added that while her first concerns are for public safety and for the culprit to take responsibility, she feels empathy for whatever pain may be behind the fires. “I mean, you can throw a rock through a window and make your statement. But to burn it flat, you must be really hurt.”

And elsewhere in the story:

Meanwhile, the remains of burned houses linger: blackened foundations, steps that lead nowhere, and ominous circles of yellow police tape.

“We have what we believe is a new canvas. It requires a new vision,” said Whitfield.

It also requires help: The arsons are an ongoing threat. Detroit, which is in the midst of America’s largest-ever municipal bankruptcy, struggles to protect its citizens. Fire is one of the most infamous hazards, as chronicled in the new documentary Burn; even a four-minute response time from firefighters wasn’t enough to save the most recent Heidelberg house that was set alight.

This leaves the community to fight for itself, and to protect this symbol of community resilience. The Heidelberg Project, which is managed as a nonprofit with 12 staff members and an expansive corps of volunteers, has resorted to crowdfunding on IndieGoGo for complete security of the neighborhood in a campaign called “Art from the Ashes.” The security system, involving improved patrolling, lighting and surveillance cameras, will cost a little over $50,000.

Money raised beyond that will help repair the home of a neighbor that was damaged by the second fire. Even further funds will help replace the House of Soul, one of Heidelberg’s famed art pieces. It was a two-story house with more than 2,000 records attached to it. When it burned, melted and cracked discs were strewn across the block.

The Heidelberg Project is Detroit’s third most popular tourist destination, behind the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Visitors come from 140 countries and 49 states, as well as from across the city, according to guest book records kept by the Heidelberg Project.

“We’re an art project in the heart of a war zone, so to speak, and people are coming from all over world,” said Whitfield.

Fun fact: I visited The Heidelberg Project during one of my earliest visits in Detroit, and the first visit that was neither a show nor a baseball game. It was on a field trip with my Art of the African Diaspora class my junior year of college. I don't think I closed my jaw the whole time; I'd seen nothing like this, ever. It is extraordinary.

Human Nature: How Instant Replay Moved Off The Television and Into the Rulebook

I got to talk with the oddball inventor of instant replay, Roger Staubach, Terry Brennan, Rollie Stichweh, and, um, my dad for a story I'm proud to finally share with you. Even Lucille Ball and Lee Harvey Oswald make cameos.

Here's how my article for Pacific Standard opens:

All Tony Verna wants is a little credit.

It’s been 50 years, for god’s sake. Verna may be living a plush life in Palm Desert, California, alongside a shelf packed with Emmys. But trophies don’t matter if no one knows what you did to earn them.

“What should it say on my tombstone?” Verna says, sighing loudly. “‘Son of Italian immigrants. Invented Instant Replay.’”

Sure, a concept isn’t something you can patent. If it were, Verna would be cashing in. “Who can imagine getting royalties on that?” he asks. But more important than money is recognition: It wouldn’t hurt if more people knew what Verna did as a 30-year-old CBS underling, when Army met Navy 50 years ago this month. Sitting in a clunky television truck outside the 1963 football game, Verna patched together the first-ever use of instant replay. He gave little warning to co-workers, network announcers, or his boss, and he only managed to replay a single clip—featuring the losing team, no less.

“Well, my wife thinks it’s impressive,” Verna tells me.

With that lone clip, however, Verna helped football become the most popular—and lucrative—televised sport in America. No longer is at-home fandom a matter of squinting into snowy black-and-white screens to catch game-day bulletins. It’s a fantastic, layered, and multi-angled experience—12 cameras per nationally televised college game, 24 for national championships, 44 for Super Bowls. Broadcasting is now so advanced, stadiums struggle to keep up. These days, you often see the game better when you are not there.

Instant replay even transformed how we think about the physical game. We expect a level of precision that once would have seemed obnoxious. In bounds or out? Holding or not? It’s not enough anymore to get the gist. We analyze replays as if they were the Zapruder film. Everyone is an expert.

This isn’t just about football. In the second MLB rule change since it lowered the pitcher’s mound, and only the third since deadball, managers will challenge calls with replay review next season. NBA officials use replay for buzzer-beating shots. Soccer is conspicuous for not using replay. FIFA’s general secretary said, “football’s human element must be retained. It mirrors life itself and we have to protect it.” Instant replay, then, cuts at the heart of a game. It’s an astounding legacy for a mere trick of television.

So, there’s no doubt: Tony Verna changed history. Too bad no one knows his name.

He’s learned to tick off his own accomplishments. In his South Philadelphia accent, Verna will name all the people who have called him a legend. He’ll casually mention reporters who found their way to him. (“Sweden’s coming to see me,” he says, meaning a journalist.) He’ll brag about living on the Pacific Coast Highway, where Doris Day and Stuart Whitman were his next-door neighbors, and he’ll tell you about how once, Ted Turner, “a longtime friend of mine,” flew him to Atlanta and offered him $700,000 for a year’s work. “I was worth more than all the announcers put together,” Verna says.

But back in Philadelphia, Tony Verna was just trying to stage a good show. “I didn’t invent instant replay to improve officiating, or anything like that,” Verna told me. “I invented it for a better telecast.” Had CBS realized this was a historic game, the network might’ve stayed its usual practice of erasing and reusing videotape. They didn’t. No recording of the full television broadcast of the 1963 Army-Navy game exists.

What to Know About Detroit's Bankruptcy

 

 

I wrote about this pivotal moment in Pacific Standard, drawing from the remarkable on-the-ground reporting by the folks at the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press -- who are truly doing holy work in chronicling one of the most important American stories of our generation.

Here's an excerpt from my #2 in my take:

(Dissenters) suggest that the city should first sell its assets—such as artwork in the extraordinary Detroit Institute of Arts—to pay down debt before cutting contracts and benefits. Last week, the city’s largest creditors asked (Judge Steven) Rhodes to order an independent evaluation of the DIA’s prized collection, in addition to the appraisal by Christie’s, the auction house, commissioned by the city. Both moves were strenuously objected to by the museum, its peer institutions, and many thousands of supporters in Detroit and beyond. As Philip Kennicott put it in the Washington Post, Detroit is compelling many of us to make a Platonic case for why “the nurturing of the mind and the care of the soul aren’t secondary or tertiary niceties, they are at least equally important to the other basic needs the city meets,” and that makes art an essential civic asset.

The asset-selling argument contrasts with the plan (Emergency Manager Kevyn) Orr put forward in June, which rather radically prioritized paying city services over paying unsecured creditors, who were offered settlements of about 10 cents on the dollar. There are likely to be common threads between that plan and the post-ruling restructuring plan that the city will put forward this month.

For his part, Rhodes noted today that a one-time infusion of cash by selling the DIA’s assets would not fix things for Detroit in the long-term and, instead, would only delay failure.

I also spoke about the national implications of Detroit's bankruptcy on WBAL Radio in Baltimore. Listen to our conversation on Maryland's News Now here.

A Rockefeller Center for Detroit?

 

I wrote it up for Architect Magazine:

For the firm's first-ever project in Detroit, SHoP Architects is aiming for nothing less than a Rockefeller Center for the Motor City. Detroit billionaire Dan Gilbert is giving the New York team the opportunity to build just that for an historic two-acre downtown site on Woodward Avenue.

“We’re interested in making a building that’s both a catalyst for Detroit’s revival and an iconic addition to the cityscape,” said SHoP principal Gregg Pasquarelli, AIA. “We want it to be a big civic presence.”

Besting top-level firms in a global competition, SHoP was hired by Rock Ventures, part of Gilbert’s family of companies and a major engine for reshaping Detroit. Rock Ventures owns or controls more than 8 million square feet in forty downtown Detroit properties and has invested more than $1.3 billion in developing them. For the mixed-use project, SHoP Architects is partnering with Detroit’s Hamilton Anderson Associates (HAA), whose past projects in the city including the North Terminal at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the Wayne State University Welcome Center, and the Detroit School of Arts. Jeff Cohen, CEO of the real estate arm of Rock Ventures, celebrated the two firms for being “known urban catalysts.”

In this site, Pasquarelli says, he sees an echo of the Rockefeller Center—how it was built during the Depression but intended as a “grand civic gesture,” a signature gift to a city during hard times that promises a vibrant urban life in the future.

“A successful investigation creates its own beat.”

The investigative reporting team at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is one of the best you'll find anywhere. Since it was organized in 2006, it won two Pulitzer Prizes. (The paper also won a third for explanatory reporting with a piece edited by a watchdog team member.) It regularly inspires celebratory notice from the likes of AJR, Nieman Watchdog, and Nieman Lab.  And its revolutionary reporting has helped the paper achieve one of the highest rates of market penetration in the country.

“You’ve got to do stories that matter and you’ve got to have impact," is how the mandate goes. But I got curious about the second part of that: impact. It's a slippery concept. I dug into it in a piece for the Columbia Journalism Review. An excerpt:

... reporters anywhere can spend weeks or months grinding out investigative stories on worthy subjects. But once published, how do you measure what influence they had—which stories are effective, which fall flat, and why? How does one of the most celebrated investigative newsrooms in the country measure impact—and how does it achieve it?

The question doesn’t have a simple answer. Ellen Gabler, an investigative reporter and assistant editor, is part of the team that spent the last five months immersed in “Deadly Delays,” the newborn screening story. To some extent, all that work is an act of faith—that the information, once public, will create change, even if she can’t see what it is. “I’m not sure there is any true test for tracing the impact,” Gabler told me via email. “There are lots of ways to effect change: raising awareness, holding people accountable, changing laws—although that’s not always the best measure of success.”

[...]

(But) accountability reporting, at its best, is pivotal.

“This is about real people. We’re not doing this for fun,” (reporter Raquel) Rutledge said. “People are struggling in the world, sometimes needlessly. If we can bring justice and make the world just a bit better, that’s important. This is the kind of work that improves people’s lives.”

That’s the optimism that the Journal Sentinel’s brand of investigative reporting hinges on: Solutions exist. To measure the impact of a story is to measure whether or not the community has moved closer to finding them.

How a College Newspaper Covered the Kennedy Assassination

 

 

It wasn't long after President Kennedy announced the debut of the Peace Corps in a middle-of-the-night speech to University of Michigan students that those same young people found themselves tasked with covering Kennedy's death. Here's how young reporters working for the Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper (of which I am a proud alum) covered one of the most pivotal stories of their generation.

---

By Anna Clark
Alumnus Magazine

 

One of the trickiest parts was to find type that was large enough.

Fifty years ago this fall, the college students that staffed The Michigan Daily printed one of the paper’s all-time biggest headlines.

‘JFK Killed.’

The big block letters took up a full half-page of the special-edition broadsheet printed on Friday, November 22, 1963. A thick black border solemnly wrapped around the page.

It was one of the most significant news stories of the century, and it hit home for the young reporters in Ann Arbor, who scrambled to report it.

John Weiler, a news reporter studying zoology, was walking toward English class when somebody said Kennedy had been shot. Unsure what to do next, he continued to his lecture, where the teacher “spent an hour talking about what a terrible president he was.” As soon as class ended. Weiler “hightailed it to the Daily, because I wanted to know what was happening.” The news that the president had died came in shortly later over the flash – that is, the Teletype wire service at the Daily offices that provided news from, for example, Washington, D.C. and Dallas, Texas.

Mike Block, an associate sports editor, was a senior chemistry major. On that Friday in November, Block was, as usual, in the lab. “Someone came in with the news,” he said. “People knew he’d been shot and it was serious, but he hadn’t died yet.”

Everyone dropped what they were doing and left the lab hauntingly empty. “It’s hard to get interested in physical chemistry when something like that happens,” Block said.

Like Weiler, he ran right across campus to the Daily, where the usually playful office on Maynard Street was silent. “Everybody was numb,” he said.” They didn’t know what to say or do.” Kennedy, after all, was extremely popular at Michigan. Despite the memory of the student Republican group who had protested the night Kennedy was elected (“They were chanting something about us becoming a second-class country”), Block recalled that it was his freshmen year when the young president made his famous speech on the steps of the Michigan Union, announcing the creation of the Peace Corps. He estimated that ninety percent of the Daily editorial staff was pro-Kennedy. The campus atmosphere was one of “stunned disbelief. Not just disbelief, but almost a refusal to believe.”

Perhaps it was the sense of responsibility to the Ann Arbor community, or simply their ethic as emerging journalists, but the Daily staff shook off its collective gloom on November 22 and hurried into action: they were determined to release a special edition, rather than wait for the next day’s regular paper.

They put together the one-sheet extra. Weiler said “one of the things that was hard to do was to find type size big enough (for the headline), and make words that would fit. We had to figure out how to do it.” The staff did just that, and then hand-delivered the papers around campus and along State Street. This extra edition was free – at a time when the Daily charged seven cents for a copy of its regular daily paper.

“Oh my gosh, there were typos,” Block said of the special edition. “We were in a real hurry.” A mistake in the first run forced the staff to run it through the press again, taking the better part of the afternoon. Weiler said he still has a proof copy of that edition, swiped from the Daily’s in-house press.

By stepping up to the news story that reverberated around the globe, The Daily was building on its strong reputation as a reliable source of news, Block remembered. “You didn’t see a lot of people reading The Ann Arbor News; the Daily was where people got information,” he said. It wasn’t just students reading the student newspaper, but also faculty and Ann Arbor community members.

Weiler, too, remembers that the Daily was “well-respected” – though he’s amazed to think about what a different era it was for newspapers fifty years ago, before even the advent of color on the newsprint. (The first color photograph didn’t appear in the Daily until September 7, 1978.).

But in the wake of its Kennedy coverage, one point of criticism came through loud and clear: the big ads on the back page of the extra edition broadsheet. Underneath the news story of Kennedy’s death and Lyndon B. Johnson’s ascension to office, there was a large box urging readers to ‘Buy the 1964 Michigensian,’ and below that, an even larger box promoting the Daily’s subscription model. (“Subscriptions now $6.00, delivered.”) Some readers found these ads in poor taste for a paper specially made to issue same-day news on the assassination. In a letter published a few days later, community member Fred Katz wrote: “These ads took up almost. eight-tenths of the page. The inclusion of these or any other ads in this special extra edition strikes me as being in the poorest possible taste.”

While the extra edition took swift strategizing by the staff, it was the following editions where real reporting was called upon. One of the most significant stories on the Daily’s hands? Whether the Michigan-Ohio State football game, scheduled for the Saturday after Kennedy’s assassination would be canceled, postponed, or played. Weiler said that the uncertainty about the game “dominated the interests of many students.”

Block tackled the football story.

“We had to say something about the football game,” Block said. The stories that came through were a combination of the regular sort of football coverage – profiles of players, and the strengths and weakness of the teams – as well as features on the big question: would the game be played at all? Players, staff, and fans that had been planning on traveling to Columbus for the game were awaiting word.

But the Daily staff was getting mixed signals. Block said that student reporters were wearing out their fingers by dialing the phone and trying to get sources, acting from an ethic he suspects is still part of Daily life today – trying hard to get things right. But, on the day of the assassination of the president, “it was really hard to get information, both locally and nationally.”

The commissioners of the Big 10 were said to have left it to individual schools to decide whether to play football. While several Big 10 games were postponed or canceled, the Iowa-Notre Dame game was reportedly on, and Northwestern happened to have finished its season. The governor of Michigan, George Romney, weighed in and recommended that the games be postponed. After much hemming and hawing, the athletic directors at both Michigan and Michigan State finally decided to play their games, using the rationale that “it’s what JFK would have wanted.” (Block: “People say stuff like that. I don’t know where they get it.”)

“That’s all the information we had at deadline time,” Block said. After a debate in the sports department about what the headline should be for the article he wrote, they went with something simple for a front-page, above-the fold story:  ‘M’, ‘OSU’ Still Set To Play.

But after the paper went to press late Friday evening for the Saturday edition, the decision was reversed – the Michigan-Ohio State game would not be played after all, and instead be postponed for the following Saturday, just after Thanksgiving. It turned out the university’s board of regents hadn’t been consulted in the decision, and they finally called the game off.

The postponement cost Block his last chance to cover a Michigan-Ohio State game as a Daily reporter. But in the “Chips” column he wrote for the Sunday edition of the Daily, he argued that it was for the best (despite the confusing decision-making process). “What would’ve the game been like? Would we have felt like cheering? What was the point?” he said.

Perhaps it was for the best that Block stayed home in Ann Arbor: Ohio State ended up besting Michigan 14-10, leaving the Wolverines with a decidedly modest 3-4-2 record for 1963.

In news coverage for the days following Kennedy’s death, the Daily supplemented Associated Press wire stories on the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald and the closing of the stock market with a feature by Gail Evans, associate city editor, on University President Harlan Hatcher’s decision to continue classes, while canceling on-campus events, including performances by the Gilbert and Sullivan Society and blues singer John Hammond, Jr. Evans noted that the University was “preparing a letter of sympathy to Mrs. Kennedy.” She also took the temperature of the mood on campus.

Reaction around the University has been in keeping with the atmosphere of national morning. The … all-campus dance was canceled last night. The Michigan Union called off this afternoon’s jazz program and evening’s dance. The Lawyers’ Club also cancelled its social function scheduled for tonight. The International Student Association postponed a dinner for Sunday evening, which was to be covered for a national magazine. …

After the news of Kennedy’s death was made public yesterday, many University professors dismissed classes. Last night, however, President Hatcher noted the importance of “carrying on.” He said that the country has a new President in Lyndon B. Johnson and that it must continue to function.

Later reporting focused on which campus events would be rescheduled and which would not. Not all made it back to the stage: the Men’s Glee Club canceled its joint concert with Ohio State’s Glee Club, and refunded tickets.

The editorial page of the Daily on Saturday, November 23 carried the first wave of a deluge of letters to the editor from the community that reflected the intensity of feeling. James La Palm, a graduate, wrote: “If you continue to live your life as you did yesterday, it will happen again … You have an obligation to change a world capable of such an act by changing your own life first.” Isaac Adalemo, ’65, wrote in to condemn the killing on behalf of the International Students Association. The letter from George A. White, ’65, suggested that, “(Kennedy’s) death symbolizes our own because he was alive in the place that we weren’t and never will be – inside.”

By Sunday, November 24, the Daily could report that the University was to join in on the National Day of Mourning on Monday– closing all classes, departments, and libraries for the day, and holding a memorial service in Hill Auditorium. Hatcher, it seemed, modified his earlier stance after Johnson asked the country to “pause in respect for the deceased chief executive.” Evans further reported that the St. Mary’s Student Chapel was holding an all-campus requiem mass for the president. In a box notice on the front page, the Daily alerted readers that it, too, was joining in on the day of mourning by closing its office and not producing a Monday edition.

One unusually creative entry in the Daily’s coverage came from former editor-in-chief Tom Hayden – or Thomas Hayden, as his byline read. Just a year before, Hayden was the principal author of the Port Huron Statement, the founding document of Students for a Democratic Society. He was the president of the SDS chapter in Ann Arbor. As a young reporter, he filed stories for the 1960 Democratic National Convention from Los Angeles, where Kennedy was nominated. Less than week after Kennedy’s death, on Wednesday, November 27, Hayden --  now a sociology graduate student at the University -- reviewed a play by Bertolt Brecht, written through the lens of the national tragedy. He was not much of a fan of the performance.

“Brecht on Brecht” was performed in a mournful Hill Aud. audience Monday night, and must be considered ultimately in its relation to the macabre assassinations of John Kennedy and Lee Oswald.

{…}

(Brecht) would attack an order which quietly assassinates meaning and new possibilities wherever they are dangerous to the current social system. (This performance’s) distortion of Brecht is part of the American tendency to smother conflict for the sake of an artificial consensus, a process which generates the very parodies of protest – crime, suicide, fantasy, delinquency – that occur in Dallas and, in less spectacular ways, daily in this society.

{…}

Why can’t we face matters just as they are, see the real Brecht as he was? Would not a society capable of that be freer of the poisons which illusions release?

Hayden, it turned out, learned of the Kennedy shooting while traveling on a plane to Minnesota for a student conference. The rumor on the flight, he told me, “was that the Cubans had done it.” When the plane landed, the pilot announced the president’s death to passengers. “A kid behind me in a Goldwater button, I’m not kidding, jumped up and celebrated,” Hayden said. Feeling “stricken and confused,” Hayden got on the next flight back to Michigan, where he holed up with friends to reflect and write about “what to do, how to act.”

Block graduated from the university the following spring. In a curious twist, his commencement speaker was President Lyndon B. Johnson. Just six months into office, and barely six more away from what would be a landslide presidential election, Johnson used his 1964 commencement speech to first announce his ‘Great Society’ reforms—namely, the pursuit of racial justice and the elimination of poverty. The following fall, Michigan football would break its four-game losing streak to Ohio State, on its way to winning the 1964 Rose Bowl.

Back on campus, Weiler returned to the day-to-day reporting for the Daily. “School newspapers fit a real niche,” he said. “It can’t be replicated.

How Houston Solved Its Horrific Rape Kit Problem

 

Valerie Neumann’s 21st birthday started out at a bowling alley in Erlanger, Ky. A friend of a friend bought her a celebratory drink… and then another, and then another. Later that night, as Neumann tells the story, she got sick and passed out. She woke up to find that acquaintance touching her. He did not stop when she told him no.

“When I woke up the next morning, my panties and the sweatpants were down around my ankles and my bra was undone,” Neumann told CBS in 2009. She immediately reported the rape — but three years later, there was still no arrest. The suspect’s attorney claimed he and Neumann never had sex, even though Neumann’s exam found “evidence of forced sexual penetration.” Her examiners completed a rape kit, taking samples of fluids and clothing to gather DNA evidence. The suspect provided a sample. But because Neumann’s rape kit was never tested, there is no confirmation of the suspect’s crime. He continued to walk free.

Authorities told Neumann that they couldn’t test her kit because it was too expensive, according to RAINN, where Neumann is now part of the speaker’s bureau. When CBS asked about it, prosecutors claimed that Neumann’s case was too “unwinnable” in court to warrant testing. Neumann came away, she said, feeling that “they didn’t do their job to protect me and to protect everyone else.”

To date, there are more than 400,000 untested rape kits across the country ... It didn’t happen overnight. The lack of public resources in the face of rapidly progressing forensic science, combined with the challenges of investigating sexual assault crimes, has led to piles of untested biological evidence in cities around the country.

In 2009 and 2010, this all came to a head when investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, human rights organizations and local advocates outed police departments for sitting on hundreds of thousands of untested kits. Cities across the country found themselves labeled with horrifying numbers. Los Angeles had a backlog of 12,669 untested kits. Detroit discovered 10,000. In Illinois, Human Rights Watch found that about 80 percent of rape kits were never examined. In Memphis, about 8,000 untested kits still molder in storage.

There were 16,000 in Houston, a city that had just elected its second female and first openly gay mayor, Annise Parker. Empowered by stats from the Justice Department and bits of knowledge gleaned from Law & Order: SVU, residents began demanding that police and political leaders deal with the untested kits, some them decades old, that were sitting idly in the property room of Houston’s police department. ...

Parker decided to take on the challenge. Now, as she begins her third and final term, Houston touts itself as one of the few cities in the country to have adequately met — and eliminated — its backlog of untested kits. “My hope is other cities around the state can learn from our approach,” Parker said at a recent news conference.

Cities well beyond Texas should also take notice. How, exactly, was Houston able to sort through thousands of untested kits, more of which came in every day?

 

From my new story in Next City. This is the first of an ongoing examination of the unexpectedly progressive momentum in Houston, changing the landscape of a city whose name has long evoked big oil and minimal urban planning.

"What kind of city would produce a president's assassin?"

 

From my new book review in The Christian Science Monitor:

As the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s death looms, a raft of books exploring the tragedy in Dallas are hitting their publication dates. Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis aim to make their title, Dallas 1963, distinct from the rest by turning their attention from the assassination itself to the toxic political climate of Dallas. What kind of city would produce a president’s assassin?

To answer that provoking question, the authors – both Texans – paint a series of detailed portraits of the agitators in Dallas who, they argue, created the poisonous far-right milieu behind one of the American century’s most catastrophic events. Among them are W.A. Criswall, the hot-headed pastor of the world’s largest Baptist congregation who preaches segregation. There is H.L. Hunt, the billionaire oil baron who self-publishes a book meant to inspire Americans toward the promise of a land where the wealthy have more votes than anyone else, and the bottom forty percent of taxpayers have no votes at all. And there is Ted Dealey, the obsessive publisher of the Dallas Morning News whose ferocious anti-Kennedy fervor bled into the paper’s pages as well as in a tirade to the president’s face at a media luncheon. Of course, Kennedy would later be killed in Dealey Plaza, named for the publisher’s father.

Paced month-by-month, the authors move from Kennedy’s election toward the moment of the first shot that exploded into the presidential motorcade. As a collection of richly imagined vignettes moving against the ticking clock, "Dallas 1963" builds momentum on the borrowed suspense that comes from the reader's knowing how this book will end. Appropriately or not, a sense of inevitability foreshadows all that came before.

The authors comb through the anti-communist paranoia that reached fever pitch in a city that despised Texan Lyndon B. Johnson as a traitor. A fierce contingent of the John Birch Society took hold in Dallas during the Kennedy administration, as did an emergent National Indignation Conference (which, when it expanded countrywide, actually called itself the “National National Indignation Conference.") Jack Ruby ran a soft-core strip club that catered to the Dallas elite that had a glad-handing network of power driving the city. They saw Kennedy as – in Dealey’s words – not a “man on horseback” leading the nation but a man “riding Caroline’s tricycle.” They charged rhetoric-inflamed citizens to drop the usual politenesses and behave in a mob-like manner, as when the leading citizens of Dallas angrily swarmed Johnson and his wife in 1960. The morning of Kennedy’s assassination, the Birchers had run a mocking full-page ad in Dealey’s News, and printed “wanted for treason” fliers featuring a mock mug-shot of Kennedy.