A massive pipeline fire broke out last week outside of Houston, generating billowing black clouds of smoke that hovered over the industrialized suburb of Deer Park for multiple days. That fire began after an SUV hit a 20-inch-wide natural gas pipeline owned by Energy Transfer. The resulting explosion and fire killed the SUV driver, forced evacuations, and left hundreds of homes without power for nearly two days during a week of near-constant 90-degree heat. 

Energy Transfer, a corporate energy infrastructure giant, delayed issuing a response, including waiting more than three hours before confirming that it owned the exploded valve, misstating the amount of people injured by the fire, and seemingly refusing to answer questions from the public and the press. Unfortunately, this is par for the course for the company, also behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, and its infamous Executive Chairman (and ex-CEO) Kelcy Warren. 

Energy Transfer is one of the Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Texas, and Warren is its extremely politically connected co-founder. Warren is also one of the most generous donors in the Texas (and national) conservative political scene, and has funneled huge donations to politicians like Governor Greg Abbott, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. Warren’s investments, unfortunately, seem to have paid off. In 2021, Energy Transfer and its execs profiteered $2.4 billion off of the February collapse of Texas’ electric grid, which resulted in the deaths of at least 246 Texans. Governor Abbott subsequently, and successfully, steered scrutiny away from Energy Transfer and other energy companies who were either responsible for or profited from the crash. Mere months later, Warren sent Abbott’s campaign a million-dollar check.

Warren and other Energy Transfer leaders and lawyers now seem poised to manipulate the system in favor of the pipeline company once again, this time in the federal courts. 

Prior to the recent raging pipeline fire in Texas, Energy Transfer was behind a very different disaster unfolding at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal agency that often acts as a watchdog for labor unions and regularly fields and reviews complaints from union members nationwide. In 2022, an unidentified employee of Energy Transfer’s subsidiary La Grange Acquisition filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging that it had retaliated against him for complaining about unsafe working conditions, including “radioactive material and hazardous dust in work areas.” The NLRB opened an administrative case, investigating those claims and the subsequent allegation that he was fired in part for filing the complaint.

In 2024, Energy Transfer sued the NLRB, seeking to halt the administrative proceedings and joining SpaceX, Amazon, and other corporations in basically arguing that the board’s foundational structure is unconstitutional. That argument threatens the basic function of the NLRB (and other agencies like it) and could have sweeping consequences for its ability to conduct investigations or engage in basic enforcement actions for violations of labor rules and regulations. 

That suit ultimately landed in front of Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown of the Southern District of Texas—a Trump appointee—who issued a preliminary injunction against the NLRB’s investigation into Energy Transfer in order to allow the company’s suit against the NLRB to proceed. 

Though the NLRB has nearly 90 years of case law supporting its structure and administrative court reviews, Brown’s ruling cited instead a recent Fifth Circuit ruling, Jarkesy v. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which held that the SEC’s structure and enforcement procedures were unconstitutional. In July of this year, the Supreme Court partially affirmed Jarkesy, but remained silent on the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the (un)constitutionality of the SEC’s administrative law judges, a structure that the commission shares with the NLRB—and many other federal agencies. 

When the Supreme Court does not affirm nor reject an aspect of a ruling issued by a lower court, the lower court’s ruling is functionally left in place, which now poses a serious threat to the basic functionality of the SEC and other federal regulatory agencies that are mandated to act as watchdogs over unscrupulous corporations and in defense of the public interest. Contradictory rulings on the issue from other federal judges have highlighted the conflicting precedents that have allowed the Fifth Circuit to activate an issue that had been deemed settled for decades. 

The crux of SCOTUS’s Jarkesy ruling doesn’t clearly apply to the NLRB’s powers or proceedings—the case addresses an entirely different agency with different powers and authorities. Even so, Brown was the second Texas-based federal judge to cite the Fifth Circuit’s Jarkesy decision in a ruling against the NLRB, thereby playing his part in right-wing attempts to render the agency—along with the rest of the federal regulatory administration—nonexistent. Brown’s judicial overreach is unsurprising for a lifetime appointee who has been described by civil rights leaders as a right-wing “ideological extremist.” 

Of course, Brown’s apparently eager weaponization of his court to aid Energy Transfer’s corporate interests may also be contextualized, or perhaps motivated, by the prior relationships Brown has to Energy Transfer, its proxies, and its execs. 

Before becoming a federal judge in 2019, Brown served as an elected member of the Supreme Court of Texas.

During Brown’s 2018 reelection bid, Kelcy Warren gave Brown’s campaign $6,250, making Warren Brown’s third largest individual contributor overall, according to information compiled by TransparencyUSA.org. In 2014, during his first successful campaign for the seat, Brown’s campaign received $25,000 from the Texas Oil & Gas Association (TXOGA). The company’s Vice President of Government Affairs currently serves on TXOGA’s Board of Directors. 

Energy Transfer was represented before Brown’s court by Amber Michelle Rogers, a partner at Hunton Andrews Kurth, LLP. Hunton Andrews Kurth’s PAC donated a whopping $43,000 to Brown’s various judicial campaigns, making the firm’s PAC one of Brown’s top five biggest donors, per FollowTheMoney.org. 

When the company filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court supporting the court’s affirmation of the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Jarkesy, it was represented by attorneys for Vinson & Elkins LLP. Vinson & Elkins’s PAC appears to be the third all-time biggest donor to Brown’s campaigns, contributing $63,500 over the course of his state judicial campaigns, according to data posted on FollowTheMoney.org.

Warren is also a member of the Horatio Alger Association, which has lavished gifts on Associate Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the New York Times.

The significant financial interconnections between Energy Transfer, the lawyers representing the pipeline company, and Brown’s past campaigns are incredibly concerning. 28 U.S. Code § 455(a) establishes that a judge “shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” That same statute later dictates that, “He shall also disqualify himself” if he knows that he “has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be substantially affected by the outcome of the proceeding.” 

At minimum, the prior connections between Energy Transfer, its lawyers, and Judge Brown raise questions about Brown’s impartiality in this case. 

Yet, judicial ethics are largely predicated on self-reporting and enforcement standards, and Brown does not seem particularly concerned with the strictures of such a practice. An NPR investigation just this year found that he, along with two other Southern District of Texas judges, had failed to file a required form disclosing his attendance of a privately funded seminar. 

The case is far from settled, and it will now be heard by the Fifth Circuit with the NLRB’s appeal of Brown’s earlier ruling. What happens next is yet to be seen, but with the foundation of the government agency that historically has protected labor union members’ rights in the hands of a notoriously partisan court that previously attacked it, the outlook is not promising. 

The post A Texas Pipeline Giant Is Backing a Regulatory Disaster appeared first on The Texas Observer.

Ex-Hurricane, now Tropical Storm Helene is causing a historic flood event this morning all across the Southeast. I count no less than 10 flash flood emergencies as I write this between Georgia and the Carolinas. These include Atlanta, Charlotte, and Asheville.

I don’t recall the last time I saw 10 flash flood emergencies at once. Suffice to say it can probably be counted on one hand or less.

A “high” risk (level 4/4) for flooding remains in effect today in western North Carolina. It’s surrounded by a moderate risk. all the way into extreme southern West Virginia. A second area of moderate risk exists just west of Nashville. High risks correlate strongly to the worst flooding outcomes in terms of damage and loss of life, so much like yesterday and overnight, this will be a rough stretch.

Conditions should improve in Atlanta today, but the damage is done. Asheville remains at risk, as do locations up through Roanoke through Virginia.

Meanwhile, winds continue gusting in excess of 50 and 60 mph all across South Carolina with even some 70 mph gusts too in North Carolina. Power outages are up to about 3.5 million between Florida and Virginia. Those numbers may continue to increase a bit more. The hope is that the low pressure center of Helene will slowly lose identity and weaken by later today and tonight. Flooding risks should drop off heading into tomorrow, though isolated flooding will be possible north and west of the hardest hit areas, perhaps into southern Indiana or Kentucky.

I have not had time to dig through reports from the Florida coast, but I know that it will take time for the worst surge reports to emerge. It always does. And we will almost certainly see the NHC forecasts of 15 to 20 feet verify. The Tampa area broke all their surge records yesterday by a wide margin. This was far and away the worst modern storm to hit the northern west coast and Big Bend area of Florida. More on this to come.

Other news and notes

We’ve neglected other things this week for obvious reasons. Here’s just a quick rundown of what else is happening. More to come on this.

• Tropical Storm Isaac formed and was upgraded to a hurricane today. It is headed out to sea.

• Invest 98L, also in the deep, open Atlantic has a good chance to be upgraded to a depression or Tropical Storm Joyce later today. It is no threat to land.

• The NHC dropped an area of interest yesterday in the Caribbean in a very similar spot to where Helene was conceived. It has a 30% chance of developing over the next week.

• This Caribbean or Yucatan area does not currently have the same degree of model support we saw at this point from Helene for something high-end. However, there is a substantial signal for something in the region next week. We’ll have more on this later in the weekend. For now, don’t worry about it but check back in for updates.

We will post again later today with an update on Helene and anything else of note.

The following guest post from audio preservation expert George Blood is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Thomas Edison produces the first machine that can record and playback sound in 1877. The flat disc is first patented in 1888. The concept is very simple: a sound wave is captured on the record as a physical wave in the disc, most often shellac (the shell of the lac beetle). Most discs spin at approximately 78 rpm, hence the name 78s. Other speeds, such as 80, 90 and 100 rpm are not uncommon. In addition to speed, the equalization and stylus size varies – either to improve the sound or to dodge someone else’s patent. In the 1950s they slowly give way to the LP or microgroove record, though in some parts of the world they remain common well into the 1960s.

Why is it important to preserve 78rpm discs?

The cultural record of the 20th century is different from all other periods of human history by the presence of audiovisual recordings. Prior to 1877, there was no way to record the sound of a nursery rhyme being read at bedtime, a musical or theatrical performance, or the world around us. During the ensuing 147 years, formats came and went as technology and preferences changed. Yet for nearly half that time, 78rpm discs were the way we learned about each other and entertained the world. It was a time when the world became a much smaller place. The invention of the automobile and the airplane, the expansion of the railroads, the telephone and radio, to the dawn of the space age, 78s were there. Through 78s, we could hear traditional music from Hawaii long before it was a state. American popular music – jazz, fox trot, big bands, even the Beatles – spread out across the globe, well ahead of Hollywood, and long before television. A thousand people might attend a concert, a theater performance, a speech, or a dramatic reading by Charles Dickens. With the 78, it became possible for those experiences to be shared and repeated, and spread far and wide, not once and done.

The period of 78s doesn’t just parallel other historical developments. The sounds on 78s document cultural norms, performance practices, tastes, and the interests of people who, after centuries of drudgery and lives spent in the fields and hard labor, finally had free time. My mother liked to remind me that nothing tells you more about a person than what makes them laugh. The comedy routines and lyrics give us a window into a time when groups of people were preyed upon, disparaged, and disrespected in stereotypes and bigotry, which shines a mirror on how we can still do better to our fellow beings. We hear the buoyant sounds of the roaring ‘20s, a happy, hopeful time, of liberation and greed. Music borne of the heavy hand of oppression and poverty that conveys gospel, blues, and gives us jazz—all quintessentially American. On 78s, we can hear and learn of the other peoples of the world: of ragas and gamalans, performers who do not traverse great oceans, the cultures of foreign lands we could only read about. We can feel the despondency of the Great Depression in the songs that empathize with the struggles of a nation. Through 78s we can hear firsthand accounts of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the angry, vile speeches of dictators, the songs that inspired a once divided nation to pull together in a common cause against evil, to fight for peace for our time, for days that will live in infamy. Bursting out of the war to end all wars, big bands, swing, then rock n’ roll. It makes one long to hear Bach play the organ, Mozart play the piano, Paganini play the violin, or Orpheus beg for the turn of Euridice, and know, that if we preserved these 78rpm recordings, future generations will understand our joys and pains, to have a window, through sound, into the arc of history, the slow advance of progress of the human condition.

To remember half of recorded history, it is important to preserve 78rpm discs.

About the author

George Blood is an expert in the audio and video preservation industry.

The following interview with African folklore scholars Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

Crafting and sharing folktales by word or performance is a long-standing tradition on the African continent. No one owned the stories. They were community treasures passed down through the generations.

Over time, many disappeared. The few stories that were written down enjoyed a broader audience once published. As those books were harder to find or out of print, digitized versions kept some folktales alive.

Laura Gibbs and Helen Nde are among researchers of African folktales who rely on digital collections to do their work. They maintain that digital preservation is essential for these rare cultural artifacts to remain accessible to the public.

Much of the transmission of African stories through performance has been lost. “That’s a culture that has either completely vanished or is vanishing,” said Nde, who immigrated from Cameroon to the United States.

In her forthcoming book on African folklore by Watkins Publishing (March 2025), Nde said 70% of her references were from sources she found through the Internet Archive. The Atlanta-based folklorist uses material either in the public domain or available through controlled digital lending (CDL) for her research. She also turns to the online collection to inform writing for her educational platform, Mythological Africans.

Many books produced on the African continent by smaller publishing houses are now out of print or very expensive. Nde said without access to a library that carries these folktales, they can be forgotten.

“What’s tragic is that quite often those books that are so hard to get are the books that are written by people from within the culture, or African scholars,” Nde said. “They speak the languages and in some cases, remember the traditional ways the stories are told. They understand the stories in ways that people from outside the cultures cannot.”

“I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these [African folklore] texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

Helen Nde, author

These authors can fill in gaps from researchers with a different perspective than those who documented the stories from outside, she said, adding that’s why digital preservation is so important. While many African folklore texts are in the public domain in the United States, much of the anthropological and historical texts with commentary from both African and non-African scholars that provide the necessary context for these folktales are not, Nde said. “In many instances, these important auxiliary texts are out of print, which means access via the Internet Archive is the best way scholars not located in the West might ever be able to access them,” Nde said. “I cannot emphasize enough how important it is that these texts be not only preserved, but made accessible. With the recent ruling in the publishers’ lawsuit, I fear researchers, journalists, writers and other people on or from the African continent who investigate and curate knowledge for the public have lost a valuable tool for countering false narratives.”

For Gibbs, online access to digitized books is critical to the volunteer work she does since retiring from teaching mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma. She compiled A Reader’s Guide to African Folktales at the Internet Archive, a curated bibliography of hundreds of folktale books that she has shared with the public through the Internet Archive.

“For me doing my work, the Internet Archive is my library,” said Gibbs, who lives in Austin, Texas. “There are books at the Internet Archive that I can’t get at my local library or even in my local university library.  Some of these books are really obscure. There just physically aren’t that many copies out there.”

Being able to check out one digital title at a time through controlled digital lending opened up new possibilities. In her research, she can use the search function with the title of a book, name of an illustrator or some other kind of detail. Now in her digital research, she can use the search function to perform work that she couldn’t do with physical books, such as keyword searches, with speed and precision. The collection also has been helpful in her recent project at Wikipedia to fill in information on African oral literature, such as proverbs and folktales.

“Digital preservation is not only preservation, it’s also transformation. Because when things have been digitized, you can share them in different ways, explore them in different ways, connect them in different ways,” Gibbs said. “So, I connect different versions of the stories to one another, and then I can help readers connect to all those different versions of the stories. But now, because of the publishers’ lawsuit, many important African folktale collections and reference works are no longer available for borrowing at the Archive.”

What would it mean to lose digital access to these folktales?  “It would be the end of my work,” said Gibbs. “My whole goal is to make the African folktales at the Archive more accessible to readers around the world by providing bibliographies, indexes, and summaries of the stories. But now the publishers are shutting down that public access.” 

“The stories were embodied in the traditional storytellers and in their communities, and the continuity of that tradition over time has been so disrupted,” Gibbs said. “The loss is just staggering. The stories that were recorded are just a tiny fraction of the thousands of stories in the hundreds of different African languages…We can’t afford to let this kind of loss happen again in the digital world.”

Gibbs adds that just as museums are repatriating artifacts from colonized countries, the original stories of African countries need to be made available to their communities. “Digital libraries like the Internet Archive are a crucial way to make these stories available to African readers.”

Preservation of African folklore is not just important for research purposes, but also for self-exploration and reflection. When examining African folklore, Nde often asks: “What can these stories tell me about myself?” she said. “Speaking from my own experience, African folktales are an underexplored resource for understanding the cultural history of African peoples,” Nde said. “Mythology and folklore are how people make sense of themselves as people on this planet.”

In a significant step forward for digital preservation, Google Search is now making it easier than ever to access the past. Starting today, users everywhere can view archived versions of webpages directly through Google Search, with a simple link to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

How It Works

To access this new feature, conduct a search on Google as usual. Next to each search result, you’ll find three dots—clicking on these will bring up the “About this Result” panel. Within this panel, select “More About This Page” to reveal a link to the Wayback Machine page for that website.

Through this direct link, you’ll be able to view previous versions of a webpage via the Wayback Machine, offering a snapshot of how it appeared at different points in time. 

A Commitment to Preservation

At the Internet Archive, our mission is to provide, “Universal Access to All Knowledge.” The Wayback Machine, one of our best-known services, provides access to billions of archived webpages, ensuring that the digital record remains accessible for future generations.

As Mark Graham, director of the Wayback Machine, explains:

“The web is aging, and with it, countless URLs now lead to digital ghosts. Businesses fold, governments shift, disasters strike, and content management systems evolve—all erasing swaths of online history. Sometimes, creators themselves hit delete, or bow to political pressure. Enter the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: for more than 25 years, it’s been preserving snapshots of the public web. This digital time capsule transforms our “now-only” browsing into a journey through internet history. And now, it’s just a click away from Google search results, opening a portal to a fuller, richer web—one that remembers what others have forgotten.”

This collaboration with Google underscores the importance of web archiving and expands the reach of the Wayback Machine, making it even easier for users to access and explore archived content. However, the link to archived webpages will not be available in instances where the rights holder has opted out of having their site archived or if the webpage violates content policies.

For more information about the Wayback Machine and how you can explore the web’s history, visit https://web.archive.org/.

Hurricane Helene is about to make landfall by midnight, likely in Taylor County, FL, just south of Perry in the Big Bend as at least a 140 mph category 4 monster of a storm. There are too many superlatives to cover right now between the surge and wind and flooding and tornadoes. But suffice to say that Helene is en route to retirement in all likelihood.

Historic water level values have all been met or broken in Tampa Bay.

Widespread rain is causing flash flooding all over the Southeast that will worsen overnight.

Tornado Watches blanket much of the Southeast and numerous tornado warnings have occurred today. And an extreme wind warning is in effect just east of Tallahassee, the rarest of warnings reserved for only the mightiest of landfalling hurricanes. Helene joins that club shortly.

There have been no changes of note to the storm track, but the potential for stronger winds inland has expanded somewhat through the day today, and the wind risk map now looks like this:

This is likely to cause significant, long-duration power outages in Georgia and the Carolinas in addition to the anticipated widespread, severe, potentially catastrophic flash flooding. This includes the Atlanta metro. Charge your phones now if you have not already.

We’ll continue to watch this tonight and have a complete update later or in the morning.

On Sept 4, 2024, the US Court of Appeals in New York affirmed the lower court ruling in the lawsuit filed against us by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House. While the Internet Archive is disappointed by this opinion—it was never the Internet Archive’s intention to get into a lawsuit over lending digitized books—we respect the outcome. 

To date, we have removed over 500,000 books from lending on archive.org (and therefore also openlibrary.org). While we are reviewing all available options, this judicial opinion will lead to the removal of many more books from lending. It is important for the Internet Archive and all libraries to continue to have a healthy relationship with publishers and authors.

Please be assured that millions of digitized books will still be available to those with print disabilities, small sections will be available for those linking into them from Wikipedia and through interlibrary loan, books will continue to be preserved for the long term, and other protected library uses will continue to inform digital learners everywhere.

The Internet Archive is also increasing its investment in digital books from publishers willing to sell ebooks that libraries can own and lend. While this is currently from a small number of publishers, the number is growing and we see it as a future for the long term sustainability of authors, publishers, and libraries. Encouragingly, the Independent Publishers Group recently endorsed selling ebooks to libraries. The growing number of libraries purchasing and owning digital books brings fair compensation to authors and publishers, along with permanent preservation and access to author’s works for communities everywhere.

We respect the opinion of the courts and, while we are saddened by how this setback affects our patrons and the future of all libraries, the Internet Archive remains strong and committed to our mission of Universal Access to All Knowledge. Thank you for your help and support.

The following guest post from film archivist Mark O’Brien is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age.

In 1999, I was working in information technology at a school district in rural upstate New York, and dreaming of writing angst-ridden, sample-laden music that might help people understand what it felt like to be me. Autism was not well-understood when I was a child, and I was simply left to try to pretend to be normal. One day I walked into the school’s library and saw an entire wall of shelves being emptied. The district was getting rid of old educational multimedia, most of it filmstrips.

Filmstrips were like slideshows, but on a continuous strip of 35mm film, published equally by independent publishers and juggernauts like Coronet, Jam Handy, Disney, and Hanna-Barbera. By the 1960s, most had soundtracks on record or cassette. A beep or bell sound on the recording told the projectionist to move the filmstrip forward one frame. Today, most people incorrectly call 16mm motion pictures “filmstrips,” but they were in fact a separate and distinct thing all of their own.

Instinctively aware that the records and tapes probably contained cheesy, anachronistic material that could also be manipulated in the music I dreamed of making, and also aware that no one else had probably thought to dig through filmstrip soundtracks, I quickly pled my case to the librarian, and she let me take them all home.

I gleefully digitized all the records and tapes over the next few months. At the time, I had a good turntable and cassette deck, a professional audio interface, and experience working with audio. I got a couple of filmstrip projectors too, and hosted a few get-togethers with friends where we laughed at the filmstrips’ authoritarian, buttoned-down nature, the out-of-time fashions and styles, and the failed attempts to try to seem cool to a high-school-aged audience. We pretended we were on Mystery Science Theater 3000, chastising the images on the screen. While everyone else was simply throwing filmstrips away, I had discovered a cultural artifact and viewing experience that aligned perfectly with the subversive zeitgeist of the 90s.

Sample film from the Uncommon Ephemera collection at Internet Archive

While I began to dream of some way to digitize the film and, perhaps, put it together with the audio in a pre-YouTube world (“Maybe I could learn Macromedia Flash!” I thought. Spoiler alert: I couldn’t.) — I had neither the money nor the smarts to get it done. I hung onto the filmstrips for a few years and, feeling like a failure, finally threw them and the soundtracks away. Due to my ignorance and storage space constraints, the only thing left of those soundtracks are MP3s. These two atrocities – saving only MP3s instead of lossless audio, and throwing away the filmstrips, most of which I still haven’t found again – haunt me to this day.

Fast forward to 2018. After a long bout of fatigue, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. I got the offending gland removed, but the fatigue did not abate. Still in rural upstate New York, I only had access to doctors who would say “your bloodwork looks correct, it’s not my problem.” I had no choice but to learn to live with the fatigue and, paradoxically, scramble to find something that could financially sustain me and accommodate my medically required non-traditional schedule.

I forget now, but something made me look into filmstrips again. Surely, between 1999 and 2019 someone had taken up this cause and I wouldn’t need to, right? In fact, just the opposite was true, and it shocked me: no one was saving them. I bought some on eBay and started to experiment.

I also continued to do research — wait, what do you mean 35mm film scanners cost $700,000?! No wonder these things aren’t getting saved! Still, I wondered if there was some way I could do it on equipment I could afford. I was hopeful maybe I could scan them somehow, put them together in a video editor and post them to YouTube and people would enjoy them, and maybe they would support me through Patreon.

Learn more about Mark O’Brien & Uncommon Ephemera
– Uncommon Ephemera website: https://uncommonephemera.org/
– Internet Archive collection: https://archive.org/details/uncommonephemera

But I quickly realized this wasn’t preservation as much as it was triage. Most filmstrips were printed on Eastmancolor, a film stock which is now notorious for self-destruction. First, the cyan and yellow dyes fade, destroying fine detail and leaving the film an intense shade of red. Then, the binder chemical that holds the dye layers in place begins to disintegrate. Once this happens, the dye layers move and smear, destroying the images on the film. The speed at which this happens is dependent on the environmental conditions in which the film was stored. All Eastmancolor film is now red, most of it can no longer be properly color-corrected, a lot of it is in the beginning stages of binder breakdown (called “vinegar syndrome”), and some filmstrips are already physically lost.

Realizing this wasn’t traditional preservation, and researching the methods by which a small number of others had saved a small number of filmstrips, I came to an uncomfortable decision: the only way to get this done with limited economic resources was to use a flatbed scanner that accepted 35mm negatives, and carefully cut them to fit in the scanner’s film negative adapter. I’ve heard this makes “real” preservationists wince, but they had thirty-plus years to digitize the format on the right equipment. If I do not do this work now, these filmstrips, containing K-12 and university educational media, business and industry training films, presentations for religious organizations, and sales films used by insurance companies, Amway, and other organizations would be completely unviewable in less than a decade.

With my obsessive-compulsiveness on full alert, I began learning how to make high-quality scans, and developed a process in a video editor to make the filmstrips behave like they did when viewed on a projector, with their characteristic visible movement of the film between frames. In 2019 I was still a long way from being a good preservationist; some of the filmstrips I digitized at the beginning were still discarded after I got a good scan. Today, I try to keep everything just in case.

I left YouTube for a while in 2022, when Scholastic, one of the largest children’s book publishers on earth, tried to get my channel deleted. Turns out they bought the assets of a defunct filmstrip publisher whose work I was trying to save. So not only had no one preserved these things, but a corporation hoarding bankruptcy assets now threatened the very point of preservation in the first place: making history available for viewing. That’s when I moved my primary home to the Internet Archive, who have been unequivocally wonderful to me.

“Sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place.”

Mark O’Brien, film archivist

Without filmstrips, our memory of American culture in the 20th century would be severely lacking. They provide historical perspective, cultural context, and reflect the successes and failures of our education system. They are original sources, unaffected by the space constraints and biases of historians and content aggregators. And they’re fun, full of anachronism, awkward photography, non-theistic proselytizing, and so much incredible hand-drawn artwork that runs the gamut from gorgeous to insane to psychedelic to “my three-year-old drew this.” I feel they could be equally attractive to historians and meme makers, squares and cool kids, the religious and nonreligious, fans of education and fans of comedy.

For this essay, I was asked to explain why preserving filmstrips is important. And that’s why I’ve told you this story; sadly, what I’ve learned is that preserving filmstrips isn’t important to practically anyone, including institutions whose job is to preserve film, and even the publishers who produced the filmstrips in the first place. As an independent and self-taught archivist, it’s disheartening when I have an interaction with people who admonish me about my credentials (I don’t have any), my affiliation with a university (I flunked out of one once, does that count?), or my methods, borne out of necessity and urgency. It’s heartbreaking when people on a “lost media” subreddit flame me for saving “lost media no one cares about,” or when universities and institutions dismiss what I do while simultaneously beating their chests about the important work they’re doing. And it’s ignorantly classist when someone suggests I just wait until I have $700,000 to scan them “correctly.” (I assure you, there will be no Eastmancolor film left on the planet in preservable condition by the time that money comes around.)

While I continue to improve my processes, I am regularly disappointed at how much of what I do isn’t actual preservation: it turns out to be mostly raising awareness, setting boundaries, scraping for a dozen YouTube views here and there, and shouting into the void that is social media — none of which I am particularly good at, having what is effectively a social learning disability which challenges my ability to be an effective communicator.

However, pressing questions remain: how do I convince people it’s not only important, but urgent to save whatever of this format is still out there? How do I get help instead of gatekeeping from other archives and institutions? How do I compensate preservationists who help for their time? How do I compete for attention and financial support on platforms that thrive on viral, rage-bait, and us-versus-them content? Can one person, working as hard as he can on something important but not popular, ever do enough, in an age of content creators with a hundred employees and millions of followers, to even be seen?

I hope these words reach some people, but I’m acutely aware of just how many thousands it takes to truly spread the word about something in the modern age. I have more than 2,000 filmstrips left to scan, most from a few generous donors, and I estimate that’s about ten years of full-time work. Most are printed on Eastmancolor. It will probably take longer to save them than they have left. I am saving as many as I can, but I fear unless I find a way to more effectively communicate the urgency of it all, I won’t be able to save them all. I think it would be shameful if those things got in the way of saving filmstrips, a critical and cool part of our past.

About the author

Mark O’Brien lives in upstate New York with his wife, who you can follow on X at @MrsEphemera, and their cat Charlie, who they got at a yard sale.

The following guest post from Dee Bowers (they/them), Archives Manager at the Brooklyn Public Library Center for Brooklyn History, is part of a series written by members of the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories and underrepresented voices.

Some say as many as one in seven Americans have family roots in Brooklyn, and I expect the newly digitized Brooklyn city directories now available through the Internet Archive will get heavy use from genealogists, historians, authors, journalists, students, and even artists to trace connections to the diverse and ever-changing borough.

What is now the Center for Brooklyn History first joined the Internet Archive’s Community Webs program in 2017 as part of the original cohort. This program gave us the tools and training we needed to save over 2TB of web-based Brooklyn history content, including over 1,000 individual URLs. We also host our digitized high school newspapers and audiovisual material on the Internet Archive.

In addition to helping us preserve this web-based content, Community Webs has now also made it possible to increase access to our physical collections through digitization. As part of the Collaborative Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections project, made possible by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, we were able to partner with the Internet Archive to digitize 236 microfiche sheets of Brooklyn city directories. 

These directories show the movement, growth, and changing nature of immigrant populations in Brooklyn in the early to mid 19th century and help document the immigrant experience by providing data on the residency and, in some cases, ethnicities of Brooklynites over time. We knew that expanding digital access would be extremely useful to the many researchers who use our online resources, especially since our number one research topic is genealogy. The project is also directly in line with our mission:

“Democratize access to Brooklyn’s history and be dedicated to expanding and diversifying representation of the history of the borough by unifying resources and expertise, and broadening reach and impact.“

By increasing the visibility of these collections through digitization and freely available public access, researchers and historians will have a richer, more accessible view into the diversity of American history. The history of Brooklyn is extraordinarily diverse but, like many archives, our collections don’t always tell the fullness of those stories. By expanding access to our city directories, we provide insight into earlier residents of Brooklyn and enable diverse communities to trace their Brooklyn roots to a greater degree.

Here’s an example of how the directories look in the Internet Archive. In this screenshot above, they include content outside of just directory listings. In this case, there’s a chronological listing of “memoranda” – notable moments in Brooklyn history – including “June 11, 1812 – News received in Brooklyn, of the declaration of war between the United States and Great Britain.”

One example of research that can be conducted with these directories is finding out more about early Black Brooklynites. Slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, so the earliest days of post-enslavement Brooklyn are represented in the digitized directories.

By searching the text of the directories using keywords, I picked out an individual to learn more about, Rev. William J. Hodges, who lived on Broadway in Brooklyn in 1857. By cross-referencing with our digitized newspapers, I was able to find out more about him and his abolitionist activism in Brooklyn and beyond. It turns out he was not born in Brooklyn, nor did he reside there very long, but he did make an impact during his time there, as he founded the Colored Political Association of Kings County (which is the modern-day borough of Brooklyn).

If not for the digitized city directories, I doubt I ever would have learned of Rev. Hodges and his time in Brooklyn. I hope that many more stories like these will emerge once researchers start digging into these directories.

The directories also contain items like this – an advertisement showing this architect and builder’s office on Schermerhorn Street in Downtown Brooklyn. This part of Brooklyn looks very different now, and this insight into what it looked like pre-photography is invaluable, particularly for people conducting house, building, and neighborhood research.

The directories are linked on our Search Our Collections page. We also have a tutorial for using the digitized directories. Additionally, we have several related research guides which assist researchers in exploring various topics. These materials are in the public domain, and we hope they will be used for a broad spectrum of applications, from family research to demographic research to writing to artwork. We are grateful to Community Webs, the Internet Archive, and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission for making this material available and searchable online and allowing us to expand access across the borough, city, and beyond.

Browse the Brooklyn City Directories on archive.org.

VANCOUVER, B.C. – His parents may have bought him Google’s newest flagship smartphone to take the sting out of their impending divorce, but 11-year-old Andy Liske is using the phone’s state-of-the-art generative AI camera software to ensure he never has to think about how much his parents hate each other ever again. “I cried for […]

The post New Pixel camera can make your parents look like they’re in love again appeared first on The Beaverton.

The state of Missouri executed Marcellus Williams shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a delay, forging ahead despite forensics experts determining that he was not the source of DNA found on the knife used in the murder. What do you think?

The post Missouri Executes Man Despite Questions About Evidence appeared first on The Onion.

NEW YORK—Erratically waving a pistol as he declared himself a mayor with nothing left to lose, a panicked Eric Adams took multiple hostages Thursday at New York City Hall, according to reports from inside the building. “I don’t want to hurt any of you, but I also need everybody to be smart and not try to be a hero,” said the federally indicted mayor, the adrenaline reportedly coursing through his veins as he donned a bomb-laden vest and told his terrified hostages to stack more furniture in front of the doors if they didn’t want him to “blow [them] all to kingdom come.” “Good, now everybody lie down in the center of the room, hands on your head. Do it slow! No sudden movements! You, in the red jacket, get up. You’re gonna go outside and tell them that for all these municipal employees to walk out of here in one piece, I need a helicopter with enough fuel to get me to the Turkish embassy. And…and a couple vegan pizzas too, the kind you can only find here in wonderful New York City. Don’t test me, motherfuckers! I’m a man at his wits’ end!” At press time, the NYPD confirmed to reporters that they had safely killed everyone in the building.

The post Panicked Eric Adams Takes City Hall Employees Hostage appeared first on The Onion.

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

I’m off this week. Here are some past letters that I’m making new again, rather than leaving them to wilt in the archives.

1. My coworker’s food restrictions mean that I’ll be the one restricted

My company is based mainly in two cities. Every so often, we all meet up in one city or another and go out to eat, paid for by the company. It’s usually a really nice evening, and viewed as a real treat. We’ve always had to be a little careful where we book, because a couple of employees need gluten-free food. But both cities have fantastic restaurants with lots of options — not the kind of places with 30 different menu options and only one gluten-free. So it’s never been much of an issue.

Now we have a new employee who has particular religious dietary requirements. He offered to do the research to find a restaurant which would suit everyone in his city. Great, I thought. Except the only restaurants which he claims will work are ones which serve curry. Curry is — literally — the only thing I cannot eat. I’ve tried so many times, and been sick so many times, that now I can barely tolerate the smell.

His response was, “Well, there will be a non-curry option for you.” Yes, there will. But in most places, it’s plain, dull, uninteresting food. When I’ve tried this in the past, I’ve been served unseasoned chicken lumps and potato, or egg omelettes and chips. I don’t want to be sitting eating that when previously we had lovely evenings with steaks, Italian, or Chinese food, and it was a real treat.

I feel as though I’m being penalized for someone else’s needs — that something I previously enjoyed is essentially being taken away. Frankly, I’d rather not attend at all as I feel that I’m being made into the exception when my own needs should be the easiest of all to meet. It’s literally one dish I need to avoid.

The other employee won’t accept my looking for an alternative restaurant, as he says I don’t know enough about his needs to find one. Is there any way at all to push back on this?

If this is more than preference for you, and the smell of the restaurant will actually make you sick, that needs to be accommodated. It doesn’t make sense to put him in charge of picking a place that meets everyone’s needs if he’s not in fact willing to do that.

But if this is just an issue of preference — you can eat there but you’d prefer somewhere with food you like better — and if it’s really true that he can’t eat anywhere else in the city, then this is just part of the deal with business meals; sometimes you’re going to be stuck with food you’re not thrilled about. I know that sucks when the food has previously been a big part of the appeal, but if he truly can’t eat anywhere else, it’s more important that he be included than that the food be awesome. Unfortunately, because he’s refusing to share information about his needs, he’s making it impossible for you to suggest other options, and that’s not reasonable.

If you haven’t already, I’d first take a look at the menu at the place he picked to make sure you’re right that it’s not somewhere you could happily eat. But if that is indeed the case, it’s reasonable to say, “Unfortunately that restaurant would be difficult for me, so can we discuss other options?”

But if he refuses to share information about what would make a restaurant work for him, it’s worth talking to whoever organizes these evenings about what other options there might be. In the end, it might turn out that this is it — but since it does impact other people, he should be willing to have a dialogue about it.

– 2018

2. Is it better to send the perfect application or apply right away?

I’d be very grateful for your take on a recent job application problem I had: I saw a really exciting job opening at my current company, for which you had to apply via the company’s application site. I only saw the opening on Friday afternoon and didn’t have the chance to look at it properly until the weekend. It said the deadline was the Monday and it had the standard application format on this website, which includes the option of uploading a portfolio. It didn’t seem to be compulsory for this job, but it’s the kind of job for which my portfolio would be relevant, and I thought since I was a stretch for the job (they seemed to want more experience than I had), it would be best to do everything I could to help my application.

Unfortunately the best and most recent samples of my work are work I did at my current job, which I didn’t have at home. I decided to write a draft cover letter and CV, bring the samples home from work on Monday so I could scan and upload them in the evening, and gamble that the job opening would still be open. Unfortunately when I got home it had closed. Out of interest, do you think I did the right thing? Is it better to send a weaker application (in this case, without an up-to-date portfolio) while the opening is still there, or only apply if your application is perfect?

There’s no good answer here, other than “send in a good application as soon as you reasonably can” — which is what you tried to do. Sometimes the timing just won’t work in your favor, and it’s impossible to fully guard against that. You could have taken only an hour, and it still could have closed before you applied if you happened to have bad timing. The main thing is not to delay because of obsessive perfectionism or procrastination. In your case, though, you weren’t doing that.

The one thing I would do differently is, if you know you’re job searching or are likely to be job searching reasonably soon, have everything you need ready to go. You never know when something will pop up that you want to apply for, and ideally you wouldn’t be starting from scratch at that point in getting materials together.

– 2018

3. Should I admit to using internet blocking software?

I recently installed a blocking software on my work computer that allows me limited minutes per day on a custom list of time-wasting websites, a decision which – coupled with a few other changes – has massively upped my work day productivity and organization.

My manager has asked what I’ve done that’s had such a big impact on my organization. I feel a bit conflicted about talking about this software – mostly because I feel I shouldn’t admit that, up until now, I’ve had real problems with procrastinating online! Would you suggest keeping it vague, or should I be honest about a useful tool I’ve found to help me address a problem my boss told me head on I needed to fix?

Ooooh. Yeah, this is likely to come across as “I was wasting so much time before that you were seeing it reflected in my work” and that’s not a great thing to say to your manager, even if it’s now behind you. You mentioned you made a few other changes too, so I might just explain those and not focus on this one.

– 2018

4. Saying that you have to talk over a job offer with your spouse

What are your thoughts on telling a potential employer, “I will need to talk this over with my husband/wife” when considering a job offer? Does it sound too dependent or is it just honest?

It’s pretty common to say “I’d like a few days to think it over and talk with my spouse.”

That said, there’s no need to say it. People without spouses also ask for time to think over offers. It’s fine to simply say, “I’d like to take a few days to think this over. Could I get back to you by Friday?”

– 2016

WINDSOR, ON — A stoned man attending Catholic mass this past weekend appeared to particularly enjoy the Communion wafers on offer. Jon Talbot, 34, popped an edible prior to attending mass with his family for the first time since leaving home at 18. Like many new gummy users before him, Talbot experienced a spiritual awakening. […]

The post Stoned guy at mass really enjoying Body of Christ appeared first on The Beaverton.

5-Day Uncertainty Track last updated Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:47:23 GMT


Wind Speed Probabilities last updated Thu, 26 Sep 2024 20:47:23 GMT

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

My mom, who I have written about here before, died peacefully yesterday.

Diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer two years ago, she’s been struggling with abdominal pain since June, and it had worsened in the last few weeks. She was ready to go, and was relieved that she was able to use legalized Medical Aid in Dying (prescription medication that lets you die peacefully) to keep her suffering to a minimum. She had fought for years to get terminally ill people access to Medical Aid in Dying, long before she knew she would need to use it herself, and my family is deeply grateful for the peace and control it brought her.

She died exactly the way she wanted to, on her own terms, on a day she picked, with my sister and me at her side.

Below is something I wrote for her six years ago on Mother’s Day. I hope it tells you something about who she was.

 

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Here are some things about my mom:

* She is an extrovert’s extrovert, but somehow ended up with two introverted daughters. She makes up for this by talking to random strangers as much as possible when we are out in public. Whenever she travels (which is frequent), she comes back with detailed stories about the lives of all the strangers she met.

* Her need to talk is so strong that she once called me from the woods during a silent yoga retreat.

* She thinks that yoga is the cure for all ills. Whenever I get sick — even if it’s just a cold — she tells me I need to do yoga. When I once pointed out that she’d had the exact same cold as me a few weeks earlier, despite daily yoga, she denied ever getting a cold and changed the subject.

* Some of my happiest childhood memories are of watching “Dallas” with her and heatedly discussing JR Ewing and Cliff Barnes. In retrospect, it wasn’t an appropriate show for an eight-year-old, but it was our Friday night thing and we were super into it. We were also heavily into Benson.

* She becomes a superhero when someone is ill or injured. She was never an especially demonstrably affectionate mom — she is too no-nonsense for that — but when you are sick, she tends to you like you are a baby kitten.

* Years after divorcing my dad in a not especially amicable split, she was sometimes found driving him to chemotherapy appointments.

* When I was about 12, I told her that I figured adults stopped having sex around 26 years old, because after that point they’d be too old and gross. About a decade later, when my then-boyfriend turned 26, she sent him a sympathy card. She is still immensely pleased with herself for this.

* She was once convinced she had shingles and was Very Upset about it, but it turned out to be a bug bite.

* She’s normally very careful not to give me unsolicited advice (I think as a reaction to having parents who gave her waaayyyy too much), but every once in a while she feels strongly about something and swoops in to tell me to do something. She’s nearly always right (aside from the yoga). Most of the really excellent advice I’ve received in my life has come from her.

* Things she has never pressured me to do: get married, have a wedding, have kids. Things she did pressure me to do: buy property, invest money, return library books.

* She is an excellent grandmother. She is constantly flying across the country to see my nieces, who love her.

* She likes to cook extravagant things, like a baked Alaska, just to see if she can, but she’s also unflappable about food issues. When I went vegan in my 20s and my vegan friends all had families who were varying degrees of unsupportive, my mom calmly started holding vegan Thanksgiving dinners. When my sister went kosher, my mom found kosher stores and restaurants. When my sister’s diet then got really complicated for medical reasons, my mom learned the 500 new rules my sister had to follow, hunted down obscure ingredients and recipes, made sure they were all kosher on top of it, and to this day calmly juggles myriad people’s varying dietary preferences without seeming in the least put out. I think she actually likes it.

* She stayed in a bad marriage for years because she thought it would be better for my sister and me. She was wrong — so, so wrong — but she sacrificed years of her life because she thought it would be good for us.

* She taught me to speak up when something is wrong in the world — whether it’s an unjust law or a silly company policy — and she has always supported me in doing that, even when she didn’t like what I said.

* She isn’t one to tell you she loves you, but if you pay attention, she’s saying it.

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I miss her and love her. I will be taking some time off so content will be re-runs until I’m back.

Probabilistic Storm Surge Graphics last updated Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:40:02 GMT

Today's links

• When prophecy fails, election polling edition: Again? Bullwinkle, that trick NEVER works.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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When prophecy fails, election polling edition (permalink)

In Canto 20 of Inferno, Dante confronts a pit where the sinners have had their heads twisted around backwards; they trudge, naked and weeping, through puddles of cooling tears. Virgil informs him that these are the fortunetellers, who tried to look forwards in life and now must look backwards forever.

In a completely unrelated subject, how about those election pollsters, huh?

Writing for The American Prospect, historian Rick Perlstein takes a hard look at characteristic failure modes of election polling and ponders their meaning:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-09-25-polling-imperilment/

Apart from the pre-election polling chaos we're living through today, Perlstein's main inspiration is W Joseph Campbell 2024 University of California Press book, Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in US Presidential Elections:

https://www.ucpress.edu/books/lost-in-a-gallup/paper

In Campbell's telling, US election polling follows a century-old pattern: pollsters discover a new technique that works spookily well..for a while. While the new polling technique works, the pollster is hailed a supernaturally insightful fortune-teller.

In 1932, the Raleigh News and Observer was so impressed with polling by The Literary Digest that they proposed replacing elections with Digest's poll. The Digest's innovation was sending out 20,000,000 postcards advertising subscriptions and asking about presidential preferences. This worked perfectly for three elections – 1924, 1928, and 1932. But in 1936, the Digest blew it, calling the election for Alf Landon over FDR.

The Digest was dethroned, and new soothsayers were appointed: George Gallup, Elmo Roper and Archibald Crossler, who replaced the Digest's high-volume polling with a new kind of poll, one that sought out a representative slice of the population (as Perlstein says, this seems "so obvious in retrospect, you wonder how nobody thought of it before").

Representative polling worked so well that, three elections later, the pollsters declared that they could predict the election so well from early on that there was no reason to keep polling voters. They'd just declare the winner after the early polls were in and take the rest of the election off.

That was in 1948 – you know, 1948, the "Dewey Defeats Truman" election?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Defeats_Truman

If this sounds familiar, perhaps you – like Perlstein – are reminded of the 2016 election, where Fivethirtyeight and Nate Silver called the election for Hillary Clinton, and we took them at their word because they'd developed a new, incredibly accurate polling technique that had aced the previous two elections.

Silver's innovation? Aggregating state polls, weighting them by accuracy, and then producing a kind of meta-poll that combined their conclusions.

When Silver's prophecy failed in 2016, he offered the same excuse that Gallup gave in 1948: when voters are truly undecided, you can't predict how they'll vote, because they don't know how they'll vote.

Which, you know, okay, sure, that's right. But if you know that the election can't be called, if you know that undecided voters are feeding noise into the system whenever you poll them, then why report the polls at all? If all the polling fluctuation is undecided voters flopping around, not making up their mind, then the fact that candidate X is up 5 points with undecided means nothing.

As the finance industry disclaimer has it, "past performance is no guarantee of future results." But, as Perlstein says, "past performance is all a pollster has to go on." When Nate Silver weights his model in favor of a given poll, it's based on that poll's historical accuracy, not its future accuracy, because its future accuracy can't be determined until it's in the past. Like Dante's fortune-tellers, pollsters have to look backwards even as they march forwards.

Of course, it doesn't help that in some cases, Silver was just bad at assessing polls for accuracy, like when he put polls from the far-right "shock pollster" Trafalgar Group into the highly reliable bucket. Since 2016, Trafalgar has specialized in releasing garbage polls that announce that MAGA weirdos are way ahead, and because they always say that, they were far more accurate than the Clinton-predicting competition in 2016 when they proclaimed that Trump had it in the bag. For Silver, this warranted an "A-" on reliability, and that is partially to blame for how bad Silver's 2020 predictions were, when Republicans got pasted, but Trafalgar continued to predict a Democratic wipeout. Silver's methodology has a huge flaw: because Trafalgar's prediction history began in 2016, that single data-point made them look pretty darned reliable, even though their method was to just keep saying the same thing, over and over:

https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-art-of-losing-a-fivethirtyeight

Pollsters who get lucky with a temporarily reliable methodology inevitably get cocky and start cutting corners. After all, polling is expensive, so discontinuing the polls once you think you have an answer is a way to increase the enterprise's profitability. But, of course, pollsters can only make money so long as they're somewhat reliable, which leads to a whole subindustry of excuse-making when this cost-cutting bites them in the ass. In 1948, George Gallup blamed his failures on the audience, who failed to grasp the "difference between forecasting an election and picking the winner of a horse race." In 2016, Silver declared that he'd been right because he'd given Trump a 28.6% chance of winning.

This isn't an entirely worthless excuse. If you predict that Clinton's victory is 71.4% in the bag, you are saying that Trump might win. But pollsters want to eat their cake and have it, too: when they're right, they trumpet their predictive accuracy, without any of the caveats they are so insistent upon when they blow it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jDlo7YfUxc

There's always some excuse when it comes to the polls: in 1952, George Gallup called the election a tossup, but it went for Eisenhower in a landslide. He took out a full-page NYT ad, trumpeting that he was right, actually, because he wasn't accounting for undecided voters.

Polling is ultimately a form of empiricism-washing. The pollster may be counting up poll responses, but that doesn't make the prediction any less qualitative. Sure, the pollster counts responses, but who they ask, and what they do with those responses, is purely subjective. They're making guesses (or wishes) about which people are likely to vote, and what it means when someone tells you they're undecided. This is at least as much an ideological project as it is a scientific one:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-09-23-polling-whiplash/

But for all that polling is ideological, it's a very thin ideology. When it comes to serious political deliberation, questions like "who is likely to vote" and "what does 'undecided' mean" are a lot less important than, "what are the candidates promising to do?" and "what are the candidates likely to do?"

But – as Perlstein writes – the only kind of election journalism that is consistently, adequately funded is poll coverage. As a 1949 critic put it, this isn't the "pulse of democracy," it's "its baby talk."

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Firefox tracks you with “privacy preserving” feature https://noyb.eu/en/firefox-tracks-you-privacy-preserving-feature

• EFF to Federal Trial Court: Section 230’s Little-Known Third Immunity for User-Empowerment Tools Covers Unfollow Everything 2.0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/09/eff-federal-trial-court-section-230s-little-known-third-immunity-user-empowerment

• Calif. Governor vetoes bill requiring opt-out signals for sale of user data https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/calif-gov-vetoes-attempt-to-require-new-privacy-option-in-browsers-and-oses/

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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago D&D camp, circa 1982 https://web.archive.org/web/20091001142940/http://rpg.brouhaha.us/?p=925

#10yrsago Why #gamergate is bullshit https://www.cracked.com/blog/7-ways-gamergate-debate-has-made-world-worse

#10yrsago Eric Holder: creator of the “Too Big to Jail” bankster https://memex.craphound.com/2014/09/26/eric-holder-creator-of-the-too-big-to-jail-bankster/

#5yrsago The DoJ’s corporate “diversion” program is supposed to change bad corporate culture, but really, it enables repeat offenders https://www.citizen.org/article/soft-on-corporate-crime-deferred-and-non-prosecution-repeat-offender-report/

#5yrsago After the passage of the EU Copyright Directive, Google nukes Google News France https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/google-to-change-french-news-results-under-copyright-rules

#5yrsago Sleuths discover the source of $28m in dark money lobbying in favor of emergency room “surprise bills”: private equity firms that own doctors’ practices https://hcrenewal.blogspot.com/2019/09/who-advocates-for-surprise-medical.html

#5yrsago Wework, Uber, Lyft, Netflix, Bird, Amazon: late-stage capitalism is all about money-losing predatory pricing aimed at creating monopolies https://web.archive.org/web/20190927033958/https://www.businessinsider.com/wework-is-a-prime-example-of-counterfeit-capitalism-2019-9

#5yrsago Bruce Sterling on Boris Johnson’s bizarre, cyberpunk dystopia address to the UN https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2019/09/visionary-high-points-recent-boris-johnson-speech-united-nations/

#5yrsago Christopher Brown talking legal thrillers, dystopia, and science fiction https://narrativespecies.wordpress.com/2019/09/25/christopher-brown-rule-of-capture/

#1yrago Brian Merchant's "Blood In the Machine" https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

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Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Was There Ever an Old, Good Internet? David Graeber Institute (Remote), Oct 3
  https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUsduuprjgpG9C4SAenCK4jOsawnkxDrY_-#/registration

• “Come distruggere il capitalismo della sorveglianza” (Pisa/Remote), Oct 12
  https://www.internetfestival.it/programma/come-distruggere-il-capitalismo-della-sorveglianza/

• SOSS Fusion (Atlanta), Oct 22
  https://sossfusion2024.sched.com/speaker/cory_doctorow.1qm5qfgn

• TusCon (Tucson), Nov 8-10
  https://tusconscificon.com/

• International Cooperative Alliance (New Delhi), Nov 24
  https://icanewdelhi2024.coop/welcome/pages/Programme

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Recent appearances (permalink)

• Rethink: Is the internet getting worse?
  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0022z9r

• Annie's Book Stop Of Worcester
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYM3WOPOMC0

• DEF CON 32 – Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

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Latest books (permalink)

• The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (the-bezzle.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3062/Available_Feb_20th%3A_The_Bezzle_HB.html#/).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

• "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

• "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

• "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

• "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

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Upcoming books (permalink)

• Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025

• Unauthorized Bread: a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

• Enshittification: a nonfiction book about platform decay for Farrar, Straus, Giroux. September 26ths's progress: 761 words (54547 words total).

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

• Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025

Latest podcast: Anti-cheat, gamers, and the Crowdstrike disaster https://craphound.com/news/2024/09/15/anti-cheat-gamers-and-the-crowdstrike-disaster/

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Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

Abby Rapoport has the rare distinction of having served as a Texas Observer staff writer, publisher, and board chair. Perhaps equally rare, she can claim a first appearance in the Observer’s pages at the tender age of “2 years and 9 months.” 

In September 1987, Bernard Rapoport—Abby’s grandfather and a man once described by Molly Ivins as “the only Jewish, socialist insurance millionaire in Waco”—penned a short essay about taking his granddaughters to an “animal safari” in which he lamented the high cost of admission and the pernicious effects of poverty in America. The piece was ostensibly an advertisement for Bernard’s insurance company, though he often used the space to share essays by himself or others. He was long “the Observer’s principal advertiser and financial mainstay,” as founding editor Ronnie Dugger wrote in 1996, and by all accounts the publication would have died long ago without his support and that of his wife, Audre. After the Observer became a nonprofit in the ’90s, Bernard served on the board until his death in 2012, and the family has continued its financial support.

Abby—today the publisher of Stranger’s Guide, an award-winning travel magazine—was raised in Virginia, but she chose to go into the field of Texas muckraking journalism herself. After editing her college newspaper, she did stints at Texas Monthly and the newly founded Texas Tribune before coming to the Observer, where she covered education and politics from 2010 to 2012. Her father, Ronald, also served on the Observer’s board (for a brief time, three Rapoports appeared on the masthead). In 2016, Abby returned as a board member and soon, in a moment of organizational and financial peril for the publication, stepped in to steer the ship as acting publisher. The Observer spoke with her about family history, rural reporting in the blog era, and hope.

TO: You first appeared in one of our issues before you were forming memories. Do you have a first memory of the Observer?

Well, I remember Molly [Ivins] from a pretty young age, because I would spend a few weeks a year with my grandparents in Waco. And they wouldn’t adjust their lives for it. They were a weird blend of completely besotted with me but also we just went with their schedules. So most nights there was a political dinner or a meeting. So I remember we would go to Austin a lot, when my grandfather was chairman of the board of regents of [the University of Texas], and we would see Molly and [former Observer editor] Lou Dubose. Those memories are really strong.

Did Molly’s personality come across to a kid your age?

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. I mean, she was larger than life. She was this crazy storyteller, she swore a lot, which my grandparents didn’t swear. And it was a funny thing because we’d see political figures a lot. We’d see labor figures. We’d see business figures. But Molly was from this sort of messy, wild journalism world which my grandparents didn’t really fit.

Your grandfather lived to see Texas pass into total Republican control. Do you get the sense he kept hope about Texas politics?

He was like the world’s most optimistic person. He always saw possibility, and I think a lot of that had to do with his own experiences, and, even though Democrats were in power, the causes he most cared about were always uphill battles. And, you know, there were always these tremendous points of pride for him like the University of Texas. That it was public and great, and the feeling he had that there was a path forward for a kid like him, immigrant parents and poor and didn’t come from an English-speaking home. His parents spoke Yiddish and Spanish [he was raised in San Antonio] and Russian. He was a tremendous believer in education being accessible to anyone, and that it was a place where you could have radical beliefs and different kinds of thinkers. And I think watching this sort of assault on higher ed [by Republicans today] would have been particularly painful for him.

How did you decide to go into practicing journalism yourself?

I always liked journalism, in part because I was raised in a pretty Southern home where there was an emphasis on politeness, and I felt like journalism was where you got to ask nosy questions, and I liked that.

Then I ended up, in college in Iowa, co-editor-in-chief [of the Scarlet & Black Grinnell College student paper] in 2008. And it was like the first internet journalism election where suddenly news was breaking on the internet before it was getting in the paper. And we had this little college newspaper website and we could actually write stuff that people read. And I just loved it. I loved the rush.

A couple years later, you found your way to the Observer as a writer. What was your time here like?

It was crazy. But it was fun. It was an exciting time because it was the first big transition of the Observer away from being sort of a newsprint, newspaper magazine. It was moving to monthly. And online we each had our own blog with our name on it. So the Observer was sort of experimenting with multimedia, new formats, and new ways of telling stories. 

Also there was too much work and not enough people, so the expectations were crazy. But I was with people who were amazing, Forrest [Wilder], Dave [Mann], and Melissa [del Bosque] were all such pros. It was quite intimidating, but I was allowed to, like, just leave [on reporting trips], and what I discovered was that if you showed up in rural Texas, even if you were coming from a liberal magazine, just showing up there meant a lot to people. And then the [legislative] session was amazing. But it was also ridiculous.

So you went through that whirlwind, then to The American Prospect as a writer, then you came back to join the board and later be acting publisher. What motivated you to help the Observer in these other ways?

I’d become increasingly interested in the business side of journalism. And then, [my daughter] Bina had just turned one when I joined the board, and my grandmother [Audre] had just died, so I think there was something really meaningful about going back to this place that held this promise and hope that certainly my grandparents had and, I’m being all mushy, but it was a weird time. The rise of Trump. I found out I was pregnant with [my younger daughter] Tova like two days before the 2016 election. 

It felt natural to join the board. It felt a little more scary to come in as acting publisher, but, I mean, I tried to hire people and we were not successful. It was a pretty scary time at the Observer, so I didn’t have a good vision for what would happen if I said no. And it felt so important.

The Observer made it through that time, and a couple years later you started Stranger’s Guide. It’s a fairly different kind of publication. What led you to it?

I’ve always tried to do things I’m interested in and learn new things. But also, I really think place is such a critical piece of storytelling. Place provides the contours and the constraints of every story. When the Observer‘s at its best, Texas is almost this character in it. It’s like, what is this weird, messy state we all love in spite of ourselves, right? And we want it to be better because we see its possibility. And I felt that perspective was sort of missing, particularly internationally. It’s so important for there to be space for people to tell their own stories and define these complicated places. So in some ways, it’s really different, and in some ways it’s very related.

Things look pretty bleak right now for this weird, messy state. We’re still here at the Observer plugging away at this idea that investigative journalism, and stories that kind of bind together the progressive community in Texas, will play some part in some change at some point. Basically, do you still see a path forward?

Going back to the earlier part of the conversation, I was raised in this family whose story is pretty improbable. This Russian-Jewish communist who winds up in San Antonio, it’s a very weird thing. I think you just gotta keep moving forward and see possibility—and stories are critical to imagination, and to have a different future you have to imagine it. 

The thing that’s always been special about Texas, I think, is that there has been this strong sense of community, even though people are from very different places with different perspectives. It means something to be Texan, regardless of what part of the state you’re from. And I think the great hope of a place like the Observer is, can we question our myths, can we rewrite and challenge ourselves, but also maintain that sense of possibility and of us being bound together? And, you know, this is where I’ve kind of put my chips. So I’m hoping that’s true.

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This interview, which is part of the Observer’s 70th anniversary coverage, has been edited for length and clarity. Support for our 70th anniversary interview series has been provided by KOOP Radio in Austin, which permitted its studios to be used for recordings.

The post ‘This Weird, Messy State We All Love in Spite of Ourselves’ appeared first on The Texas Observer.

The University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) has announced the opening of The Crow Museum of Asian Art’s second location, as the anchor space for a 12-acre cultural district.

The district, named the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum, has a multiphase plan that also includes the construction of a performance hall and music building, a grand plaza, and a parking structure. This first building that is now open to the public will be known as the UT Dallas Art Museums and will be home to The Crow Museum of Asian Art as well as other galleries, and a conservation studio. It is a two-story, 57,000-square-foot building designed by the Morphosis architectural firm. This secondary location for the Crow Museum more than doubles the organization’s current gallery space at its downtown Dallas Arts District location. 

In a press release, Dr. Inga H. Musselman, the UT Dallas Provost, Vice President for Academic Affairs, and the Cecil H. Green Distinguished Chair of Academic Leadership, commented, “This complex, like our entire campus, will be a place of learning and growth. I envision students walking through the museums during their class breaks or taking notes about pieces of art that are displayed here. The performance hall and music building will provide even more opportunities for students.”

The new Crow Museum on the UT Dallas campus is the first major art museum to be built north of I-635. This location puts the museum in close proximity to Collin County and the north Dallas County suburbs. The museum’s inaugural exhibition, Ancient Echoes, Modern Voices: The Crow Collection Goes Beyond, is intended to introduce the permanent collection to new audiences. The show will span eight galleries and present hundreds of artworks, including textiles, ceramics, sculptures, paintings, and an immersive multimedia installation. The additional four galleries will showcase UT Dallas’ Latin American art collection, which includes donations from The Roger Horchow Family Collection and The Laura and Dan Boeckman Collection of Latin American Folk Art.

Alongside the opening of the new building, UT Dallas has broken ground on the second phase of the project, a two-story 680-seat performance hall and music building. The space will include an outdoor performance area, rehearsal rooms, practice rooms, teaching studios, a percussion studio, a recording studio, administrative offices, classrooms, a multifunctional lobby space, study spaces, and a student lounge. The building is expected to open in Fall 2026.

The museum offers free admission and will be available for field trips and other educational programs for school children. Learn more about The Crow Museum of Asian Art at UT Dallas via the museum’s website and learn more about the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Jr. Athenaeum via the university’s website.

The post The Crow Museum of Asian Art Opens UT Dallas Location appeared first on Glasstire.

Glasstire counts down the top five art events in Texas.

For last week’s picks, please go here.

1. 2024 Texas Biennial: The Last Sky
Blaffer Art Museum (Houston)
September 27, 2024 – March 9, 2025
Opening September 27, 6-8 p.m.

From the Blaffer Museum:

“Texas is constructed territory, therefore unstable borders and occupations shape communities and their participants. Systems and structures rise and fall. The collapse produces dust and dirt, yielding material histories written in detritus and debris. In its eighth iteration, the 2024 Texas Biennial, The Last Sky, looks to the still-lingering dust to ask: What happens after the last line in the sand is drawn?

Through a collaborative and non-hierarchical approach, Erika Mei Chua Holum, Ashley DeHoyos Sauder, and Coka Treviño co-organized the eighth iteration of the Texas Biennial through friendship, reciprocity, and mutual support. With trifold dreams and visions, the co-curators selected works and artist projects through the 2024 Texas Biennial Open Call.”

2. Eileen Maxson: Parent Trap
Keijsers Koning (Dallas)
August 24 – September 28, 2024

From Keijsers Koning:

“Parent Trap is a three-channel video installation where Maxson puts her parents through a polygraph exam. Blurring the lines between experimental documentary, family banter, and the American Zeitgeist, in this unscripted, anti-avoiding-the-topic-family-stress test, Maxson and her parents use the absurdity of the situation to engage in serious dialogue across generational, political, and ideological divides. The installation, presented on three distinct screens, each dedicated to one true-life character, immerses the viewer in the dynamic of this table conversation.”

3. Moll Brau’s: Solo exhibition Deliverance
Martha’s Contemporary (Austin)
September 14 – October 5, 2024

From Martha’s:

“What does it mean to be delivered? One may be delivered by a god, delivered by a mother. It seems to entail a springing forth from nothing — as Athena did from Zeus’ head — but the delivery in childbirth happens at the end of pregnancy, not the beginning, an emergence that occurs after forty long weeks of gestation, the mother, delivered too — from pregnancy — in the process.

In her solo show Deliverance, Moll Brau exhibits work related to the gestation and birth of her daughter, showing images that came to her during her pregnancy — her first. The visions and imagined landscapes evoke Brau’s feelings of transition, liberation, dread, and salvation.”

4. Sarah Fox: The Woman Under the Water
Mercury Project (San Antonio)
September 6 – 28, 2024

From Mercury Project:

“Artist Statement: This body of work explores fairy tales, ecology, and healing. Humans have lost our connection to the Earth we are a part of, a Mother that has valuable knowledge to share with us.

My studio practice for the last few years has started with almost daily walks along the San Antonio River. I found myself getting to know her, her cycles, the wildness she displayed before a rainstorm, the hum of new bugs in the spring, her sparse silence on cold days… I could hear her screaming during last summer’s 110 degree days. Yet, she continues — her long hair strung with trash and algae after a heavy rain. Those that feel her irritation, endlessly comb out the bottles, cigarette butts and Styrofoam trying to comfort her.”

5. Miki Rodriguez: Transitions
Laredo Center for the Arts
September 6 – November 1, 2024

From Laredo Center for the Arts:

“I am drawn to discarded materials, throw-ways, and unnecessary one-use objects. They are telling of human life. I consider who these materials belonged to and why they were discarded. These materials reflect human identities. A glimpse of someone’s private story is reflected in a broken key that used to open a door, a piece of costume jewelry is reminiscent of someone’s mother, and a torn child’s t-shirt that has an image of SpongeBob SquarePants speaks of innocence. I am striving for the exclusive use of materials and objects that reflect humanity’s existence. I look for the story because within this story is mine and yours.”

The post Top Five: September 26, 2024 appeared first on Glasstire.

The post Food Used As Napkin appeared first on The Onion.

This week marks Banned Books Week, an annual effort promoted by the American Library Association to bring awareness to literary censorship. In recognition of the event, The Onion takes a look at the history of book bans in the United States.

1788: The forward-thinking founding fathers preemptively crack down on socialist subversion by banning The Communist Manifesto 60 years before its publication.

1891: The state of Missouri bans all books that could clue children in to the fact that Missouri pretty much sucks.

1920: James Joyce’s Ulysses banned for graphic depictions of Irish people.

1942: L’Étranger is unabashedly published in French. 

1989: Iowa Gov. Ruhollah Khomeini bans Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. 

1996: Librarians are pressured to take Harry Potter books off the shelves due to the nation having a bad gut feeling about J.K. Rowling.

2005: Kama Sutra banned from the house following dad’s back injury.

2011: Americans from all across the political spectrum agree that banning Fifty Shades Of Grey is fine.

2024: The New York Times releases “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century” to help streamline book-banning efforts.

2189: The AI Senate threatens to wipe the skull drive of anyone allegedly distributing ancient human knowledge archives.

The post Timeline Of Book Bans In The U.S. appeared first on The Onion.

In brief: Houston’s second cool front of the season has arrived and it will take our temperatures down a little bit. Long-time residents will know the primary benefit of September fronts is that they knock down humidity levels, rather than temperatures. And we should see drier-than-normal air through the weekend despite warm days. Enjoy!

Is this Fall Day?

Typically, we designate the day after Houston’s first nighttime temperature of 65 degrees, or lower, as Fall Day. The coolest night of the season, so far, came on September 9, when low temperatures reached 67 degrees at Bush Intercontinental Airport. Low temperatures there tonight will get close, so there’s a chance that Friday will be Fall Day.

A few readers have asked whether we are going to have another Fall Day celebration this year. The answer is no, because we’re going to wait a year so that we might have a bigger event in 2025. Why? Because that will be the 10th anniversary of this website. I know, I can’t believe it either. If you have ideas for the celebration, let us know in the comments below. We’re working with our partner Reliant to do something special. Speaking of Reliant, be sure and stay tuned for a message from them at the end of the post.

Thursday

Skies will be sunny today, with a northerly wind at 10 to 15 mph, which may occasionally gust up to 20 mph or a bit higher. Those winds are bringing in drier air that will help dewpoints drop into the 50s later this morning or by the afternoon hours. Drier air warms more quickly, so air temperatures are likely to get into the upper 80s. But it will feel noticeably drier, and temperatures will cool more quickly this evening as the Sun sets. Lows tonight will drop into the upper 60s in Houston, and low 60s for most outlying areas away from the coast. It’s going to be delightful, and I can’t wait.

Friday

Another day with nice, dry air and plenty of sunshine. Expect highs to reach about 90 degrees as a result. Winds will be less, probably about 10 mph. Lows on Friday night will likely be a degree or two warmer than Thursday night. Still pleasant. (Note: Tomorrow’s post may be an hour or so late due primarily to my desire to take a long run with the drier air in the morning. It won’t matter, since the forecast for the next several days is not going to change much. In fact, you can pretty much ignore us tomorrow and that wouldn’t hurt my feelings.)

Saturday and Sunday

Expect plenty of sunshine, with highs in the low 90s. The dry air is going to modify somewhat, but we’re still going to see fairly low humidity levels all things considered. Low temperatures will reach about 70 degrees. There are zero weather concerns this weekend beyond the potential for a sunburn.

Next week

The first half of next week will see continued sunny weather, with high temperatures mainly in the low 90s. Dewpoints will recover into the 60s, so the air will feel more humid, but it’s likely going to be less humid than typical summer conditions in Houston. Nighttime temperatures will probably reach the low 70s. Some chance of a front, with our next real shot of rainfall, arrives by Thursday or Friday, but that part of the forecast remains hazy.

Tropics

Hurricane Helene is on the way to likely become a major hurricane today before striking the northern coast of Florida tonight. It is similar to Hurricane Ike in that, due to its large size, Helene is likely to pack a broad and very damaging storm surge. Another factor with this storm is the potential for heavy rainfall far inland, in such areas as northern Georgia and western North Carolina. We’ll continue tracking the system on The Eyewall.

A note from our partner, Reliant

At Reliant, our commitment to making a positive impact on the communities we serve is as strong as our Texas roots. Through our Choose to Give program, we empower our customers to join us in that commitment and help us support Texas nonprofits one kilowatt at a time.

When customers enroll in a Choose to Give plan, we provide a $100 contribution up front, in
addition to 5 percent of the customer’s annual energy charges to the nonprofit – providing both immediate and ongoing funding.

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To learn more about supporting pediatric cancer care through the Choose to Give plan, visit
reliant.com/texaschildrens.

(11 PM ET update): The 11 PM ET advisory is out with few changes. No forecast changes have been made, and no intensity changes have been made.

Helene is still organizing, and it seems that the size of Helene is acting to keep that intensification steady for now. As the system hits the ultra warm water in the Gulf and a more favorable environment internally, it will likely strengthen at a steady, faster pace tomorrow before making landfall tomorrow night.

There have been no notable changes to the surge or rainfall forecasts unfortunately. We’ll have an update in the morning.

Previous post follows…

Changes since this morning

• Storm surge forecasts have been increased on the Florida coast with a surge as high as 20 feet expected between Carrabelle and the Suwannee River.
• Helene is expected to be a category 4 storm at landfall.
• The high risk of flooding has been expanded tomorrow in both the Carolinas and in Georgia/Florida.
• Tropical Storm Warnings are now posted for the rest of Georgia, all of South Carolina, and portions of western North Carolina and Tennessee.
• Helene is likely to be the modern storm of record for Florida’s Big Bend Region and possibly some other areas.

This blog is committed to no-hype because of storms like Helene. This one merits your full attention and full preparedness if you are anywhere in the area that will be affected by the storm. This includes all of Florida except the far western Panhandle, all of Georgia, eastern Alabama, almost all of South Carolina, western North Carolina, and Tennessee. We cannot stress this enough. Follow the advice of local officials. This is almost certainly going to be a major storm, and most of the data suggests that this will be a catastrophic storm in several places.

There’s no way we can cover all the elements of this storm, but we’ll try.

Storm surge

The storm surge forecast is, frankly, hideous. The forecast surge values, should they verify, will be worse than any modern storm has brought to the area between Tampa Bay and Apalachee Bay.

The surge will be worse than Idalia all across the Big Bend Region, Apalachee Bay, the Nature Coast, and Tampa Bay. It will probably be the new benchmark for modern storms in this region. The surge will drop off dramatically to the west of where the center comes ashore, so folks in Panama City and Mexico Beach will only see a minor surge from this, with a huge escalation near and to the east of where the eye comes ashore. If these forecasts verify, this will be unsurvivable type surge in the region east of Carrabelle through about Cedar Key. I cannot stress enough how serious the storm surge from Helene may be.

Wind

Obviously with a cat 4 hurricane expected, there will be catastrophic wind at the immediate coast. But with Helene’s acceleration north, the wind will spread far inland.

We expect hurricane force winds to get deep into Georgia. The exact track will be critical in determining if Tallahassee sees catastrophic damaging winds or something more manageable. It will be close. It will probably be less close in Valdosta, GA which could see gusts in excess of 100 mph. Those winds will slowly decelerate deeper into Georgia, but hurricane force winds could get as far north as Macon. Strong tropical storm winds will impact metro Atlanta, especially on the south side and perhaps creeping close to Athens. Tropical storm force winds will be an issue deep into South Carolina and western North Carolina, as well as eastern Tennessee. There will be widespread wind damage and widespread, likely significant power disruption. This is a very bad looking storm.

Rain & flooding

We continue to see a high risk of excessive rain leading to flash flooding, possibly catastrophic flash flooding in two areas tomorrow. First is where Helene comes ashore in Florida, which will see substantial rain — what you would expect from a landfalling category 4 storm.

The storm will dump heavy rain and produce widespread flash flooding across Georgia, eastern Alabama and portions of South Carolina as well. But when the storm interacts with the Appalachians, that’s when severe flooding issues could creep up. The high risk was expanded south into metro Atlanta, especially north and east of the city. And it continues through Asheville, NC, including much of Upstate South Carolina north and west of Greenville-Spartanburg. Portions of the Smokeys will also be impacted.

The interaction of terrain with a hurricane can produce copious amounts of rain leading to destructive flooding and landslides, and that’s the concern in Appalachia. Again, I cannot stress enough how serious an event this may be in those areas. It’s a much different hazard than storm surge but extremely dangerous just the same.

Tornadoes

Isolated tornadoes are likely anywhere east of Helene’s center, so be aware of that risk in the Florida Peninsula, the Jacksonville area, and much of eastern Georgia and the Carolinas.

Again, we strongly encourage you to follow local officials, follow local media, and do everything possible to get out of harm’s way. This is not a storm you want to roll the dice on. We’ll update this post later this evening with any relevant new info. Look for a full post again in the morning.

HARTFORD, CT—Telling her to close her eyes and turn inward as he gently guided her positioning, local yoga teacher Vincent Diaz reportedly placed his hand on the small of student Ellie Cruz’s back Thursday, but in the parking lot. “It’s okay to get a little tense, but don’t resist too much because that’s how you hurt yourself,” said the instructor who gently whispered to Cruz as he gripped her thighs just 10 yards from the strip mall’s nail salon. “Just lose yourself in your heavy breathing, focus on that and just let what needs to happen, happen. It’s okay to sweat, it just shows that it’s working. You’re a natural, Ellie, but you really should be doing this more regularly so you get more comfortable. It gets better with experience.” At press time, Cruz received a request for $150 from her yoga teacher for providing a private lesson.

The post Yoga Teacher Puts Hand On Small Of Student’s Back, But In Parking Lot appeared first on The Onion.

5-Day Uncertainty Track last updated Thu, 26 Sep 2024 14:56:01 GMT


Wind Speed Probabilities last updated Thu, 26 Sep 2024 15:23:16 GMT

(6:50 PM ET Update): Helene is now a category 4 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of at least 130 mph. Helene is pretty clearing undergoing a rapid intensification cycle at present, and the only question at this point is if it will level off before it makes landfall. The track continues to wobble a bit, perhaps on the right side of the specific track, but in general, the forecast remains steady.

For Tallahassee, it remains really a question of whether it’s really bad or terribly bad. So, neither outcome is great. Looking at satellite imagery this evening, the west side of this thing is no picnic either. Yes, the “dirty” side is living up to its name, but the thunderstorms in the northwest quadrant are going to cause significant wind and rain, and even if this tracks east of Tallahassee, it’s going to be a really bad night.

Landfall is expected later this evening, probably close to midnight.

Rainfall will continue to lead to severe flooding well north of where Helene comes ashore. Flood warnings extend in broken fashion from just west of Tallahassee through Atlanta to Charlotte, into far southwest Virginia. Catastrophic flooding remains a strong possibility in the mountains.

Water levels continue to rise on the Florida coast, and the expected catastrophic storm surge north of Tampa through Apalachee Bay will proceed apace in the coming hours. Avoid the coast, do not go see it, it will be deadly. More to come later this evening.

(2:45 PM ET Update): Hurricane Helene is now a 120 mph major hurricane.

(11:25 AM ET Update): The 11 AM ET advisory is out with Helene up to 105 mph. Its structure and organization have improved since earlier. The track forecast has not shifted much in the new advisory, but it’s noteworthy that there have been a few wobbles to the east side of the track forecast.

Wobbles are normal with hurricanes of this size and intensity. The question is whether or not they fundamentally alter the track, particularly at this angle of approach. For most folks in the path of Helene, this has minimal impact on the end result. But for a place like Tallahassee, ending up on the west side of the storm would be immeasurably less impactful than the east side. Still bad to be sure, but not quite as bad as it could be otherwise. This would also impact the western fringe of the surge forecast a bit too. So it’s something to monitor through the day today if you have interests in Tallahassee or along Apalachee Bay.

Whatever the case, nothing has appreciably changed, and a major hurricane is still expected at landfall tonight around Midnight, give or take.

Tropical Storm and Hurricane warnings still extend almost absurdly far inland, but they will almost certainly verify.

A couple other notes: We already have additional numerous flash flood warnings near Tallahassee, between Macon and Augusta, just north of Greenville, SC, south of Asheville, near Johnson City, TN, and up into Virginia. The inland flooding component will continue to worsen as the day continues.

Tornado warnings have been numerous, and we currently have 3 warnings as I write this in Georgia and South Carolina. This system has the potential to be a prolific tornado producer from Florida into southeast Georgia, South Carolina, and parts of North Carolina. Please ensure you have a way to receive warnings, even if you’re 250 miles from the center of the storm.

Previous post follows…

What’s changed since last night

• No meaningful change to the forecast intensity, track, or impacts into Florida.
• A slight nudge east in the track in North Georgia.
• Helene is now a category 2 storm

Larger storms tend to be a little more unruly in terms of how they organize. Helene meets that bill today. Reports of “concentric eyewalls” in the storm, almost as if the system is trying to figure out how large it wants to be.

We’ve seen bursts of thunderstorms wax and wane near the center, but we’re currently in an uptick. Recent reports from NOAA flights into Helene suggest surface winds have increased to close to 100 mph. We’ll see what the new advisory shows just after I publish this. (Editor’s note: It has. Now a cat 2 with 100 mph winds). Basically, Helene continues to intensify, and there’s no reason to think the dire forecasts we and everyone else discussed yesterday have changed.

The surge forecast is basically unchanged from last night, with a 15 to 20 foot, unsurvivable peak surge in Apalachee Bay and the Big Bend.

Tampa Bay continues to see a 5 to 8 foot surge, which will be some of the worst surge experienced in modern times there.

The track of Helene is virtually unchanged as well. The most likely landfall point is between Apalachicola and Steinhatchee right now. There remains at least some risk that wobbling of the track could force it closer to Cedar Key in an extreme scenario. I would not rule that out, but I would be absolutely preparing for the worst between Apalachicola and Homosassa and for very bad outcomes south of there to Tampa Bay. Landfall should occur late this evening.

A Tornado Watch is in effect for most of the Florida Peninsula today.

That watch goes til 8 PM ET, and additional watches could be required to the north later today. Isolated tornadoes seem to already be a bit of a threat and this should escalate some through the day and into tonight.

The heavy rainfall threat continues to look very, very bad for both areas near landfall and interior locations in the Appalachians in North Carolina, Upstate South Carolina, and North Georgia.

After heavy rain yesterday, we continue to see the risk for 10 to 16 inches of additional rainfall with the storm today, tonight, and early Friday before things slowly ease up a little tomorrow. Catastrophic interior flooding, especially in that high risk area northeast of Atlanta remains a high likelihood.

Real quick tangent here. One of the reasons Helene is going to be such a monster storm as it comes inland is because it’s essentially “phasing” with a massive upper cutoff low over the mid-South. A cutoff low is a storm system in the upper atmosphere that has essentially cut itself off from the jet stream. When this happens, the system tends to just meander around until something changes to kick it out. In this situation, you can see the animation below with the big upper low north of Memphis, and then Helene surging in on the right side of the image.

This complex merger is something we don’t usually think of with a hurricane. Hurricane Sandy was a good example of this happening with tropical systems and showed why its winds and size caused so much damage despite “not technically being a hurricane” when it hit New Jersey in 2012. The whole process extends the life cycle of the winds of the hurricane and it’s why tropical storm warnings extend so far inland. The rain element is related as well. With Helene being pulled northeast, then suddenly hooking back northwest “into” the upper low, it will continue to produce rain on the windward side of the Appalachians, leading to additional rain tomorrow and further flooding.

Anyway, that explains some of what’s going on behind the scenes with Helene after it moves inland. We’ll update this post with any notable changes throughout the day.

Throughout the nearly two-week murder trial, prosecutors attempted to pin the murders of Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas on Goines, who led a drug raid at the couple's Harding Street home back in 2019.