Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg had a column yesterday calling out President Trump for using anti-Semitism in his attacks on four congresswomen of color.  Here is an excerpt (the full column is below).

“Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

It’s true that Omar has said things that were freighted with anti-Semitism, for which she has expressed regret. But it is grotesque to argue that that excuses racism against her, or that Trump’s taunts have anything to do with protecting Jews. This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu “your prime minister,” suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week.”

Great column,  Ms. Goldberg!

Tony

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New York Times

Defenders of a Racist President Use Jews as Human Shields

(Trump’s bigoted attack on four congresswomen of color has nothing to do with fighting anti-Semitism.)

Michelle Goldberg

July 20, 2019

Sebastian Gorka, a onetime adviser to Donald Trump, wore a medal from the Vitezi Rend, a Hungarian group historically aligned with Nazism, to one of Trump’s inaugural balls. Gorka was reportedly a member of the group, whose founder, the Hungarian autocrat Miklos Horthy, once said, “For all my life, I have been an anti-Semite.”

Max Berger is a Jewish social justice activist who has long been deeply involved in Jewish communal life. He’s the co-founder of IfNotNow, a group of American Jews devoted to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and recently joined Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign.

In a tweet this month, one of these men tarred the other as an anti-Semite. If you’ve been following the increasingly bizarre turn that American discussion of anti-Semitism has taken, you can probably guess which one.

That’s right, it was Gorka who called Berger an anti-Semite, for having once joined in an internet in-joke about a nonexistent group called “Friends of Hamas.” (Gorka’s tweet appears to have since been deleted.) It wasn’t the only time this month that Gorka accused a Jew of Jew-hating; he’s also charged the anti-Trump conservative writer Anne Applebaum with “standing with the anti-Semites,” demanding that she explain “how you justify this to the community.”

If this were just Gorka, you could dismiss it as trolling. But his tweets were only a particularly brazen example of how right-wing gentiles are wrapping themselves in a smarmy philo-Semitism to attack the left, even when that means attacking either individual Jews or the political interests of most Jewish Americans.

Such Christian appropriation of the fight against anti-Semitism reached its grim nadir this week. As Trump’s racist invective against Ilhan Omar and three other freshman Democratic congresswomen has dominated the news, the president’s defenders have used Jews as human shields, pretending that hatred of the quartet is rooted in abhorrence of anti-Semitism. On Tuesday, an evangelical outfit called Proclaiming Justice to the Nations accused the Anti-Defamation League — the Anti-Defamation League! — of siding with anti-Semites after the ADL called out Trump’s racism. The group even had the audacity to hurl a Hebrew denunciation — “lashon hara,” or “evil tongue” — at the Jewish civil rights organization.

Republicans are only a short step away from such shamelessness when they try to deflect from the president’s racism by accusing his foes of anti-Semitism. “Montanans are sick and tired of listening to anti-American, anti-Semite, radical Democrats trash our country and our ideals,” Senator Steve Daines of Montana tweeted on Monday, proclaiming his solidarity with Trump.

It’s true that Omar has said things that were freighted with anti-Semitism, for which she has expressed regret. But it is grotesque to argue that that excuses racism against her, or that Trump’s taunts have anything to do with protecting Jews. This is a president who regularly deploys anti-Semitic tropes and whose ex-wife said that he slept with a volume of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. When speaking to American Jews, he’s called Israel “your country” and Benjamin Netanyahu “your prime minister,” suggesting that in his mind, we don’t fully belong here any more than Omar does.

When the right presents Trump as an enemy of anti-Semitism, it goes beyond hypocrisy. Jews have thrived here as they have in few other places in the world because America at least aspires to be a multiethnic democracy, not an ethnostate. If Trump succeeds in making citizenship racialized and contingent, that’s an existential threat to American Jews.

Trump and his accomplices are simultaneously assaulting the political foundation of Jewish life in America and claiming they’re doing it on the Jews’ behalf. As the Montana Association of Rabbis wrote in an open letter to Daines on Wednesday, “We refuse to allow the real threat of anti-Semitism to be weaponized and exploited by those who themselves share a large part of the responsibility for the rise of white nationalist and anti-Semitic violence in this country.”

It’s worth thinking about how we got to a point where anti-Semitism can be exploited as it has been this week. What we’re seeing is the absurd but logical endpoint of efforts to conflate anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism with opposition to Israel’s right-wing government. Only if these concepts are interchangeable can Jewish critics of Israel be the perpetrators of anti-Semitism and gentiles who play footsie with fascism be allies of the Jewish people. Only if these concepts are the same can an evangelical group claim that Jews are being anti-Jewish when they protest Trump, because Trump loves Israel.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street, puts part of the blame for this rhetorical derangement at the feet of the American Jewish establishment. Its leaders made an alliance of convenience with right-wing Christian Zionists, who support the state of Israel as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy and a bulwark of Western values in the Middle East, but care little about pluralism in the United States.

The Jewish leaders, said Ben-Ami, “made a deal with the devil. And what they’ve done is they’ve laid down in bed with white nationalists and racists and bigots.” Now white nationalists and racists and bigots — and those politically aligned with them — feel entitled to use their backing of Israel as an alibi when their leader indulges in racist incitement.

“When they start asking people to go back where they came from, that’s the first line of attack on the Jewish people over centuries,” said Ben-Ami. It’s terrifying enough to have a president who says such things. It’s an almost incalculable insult for Trump and his enablers to act as if he’s helping the Jews when he adopts the language of the pogrom.

Dear Commons Community,

To commemorate today’s 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon, the New York Times has set up an augmented reality website.  It is filled with text, photos, motion, and video that captures well the event.

Take a look!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

German Chancellor Angela Merkel rebuked President Donald Trump’s racist attacks on progressive Democratic congresswomen, adding her voice to several other world leaders who’ve spoken out.

“I firmly distance myself from that, and I feel solidarity with the women who have been attacked,” Merkel said yesterday during a news conference, according to NBC News.

Trump has been targeting the four lawmakers in racist attacks since last Sunday ― Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, known collectively as “the Squad.”

His vitriol crested at a campaign rally Wednesday in Greenville, North Carolina, where Trump fans chanted “Send her back!” in response to the president’s diatribe against Omar, who came to the U.S. as a child. 

Merkel pointed out that U.S. power is rooted in diversity.

“I want to say clearly that from my perspective, the strength of America lies in the fact that it’s a country in which people of quite different nationalities have contributed to the strength of the American people,” she said. “And so when I hear there are things or statements that run counter to that, I have to speak.”

Trump has had a tense relationship with Merkel as president. In May, she told Harvard University graduates to “tear down walls of ignorance and narrow-mindedness,” in what appeared to be a rebuke of Trump’s policies and rhetoric.

Several other world leaders have spoken against Trump’s comments this week.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chided the president.

“I think Canadians, and indeed people around the world, know exactly what I think of those comments,” Trudeau said, according to The Globe and Mail. “That is not how we do things in Canada. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian.”

British Prime Minister Theresa May also criticized Trump’s statements, calling the language “completely unacceptable,” Time magazine reported.

Boris Johnson and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, who are competing to succeed May as prime minister, echoed her sentiments in their debate Monday, though neither was willing to call Trump’s comments racist.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this week, Pearson announced that it would be going all digital in its textbook division and eliminating traditional paper copy.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“If the road to textbook domination was once paved with paper, Pearson is betting the future will be digital. The publisher announced this week that it would transition to a digital-first model, wherein future textbook releases would be updated in digital formats on a continuing basis, rather than updating print titles every three years, as it had previously done.

The move comes at a time of uncertainty for Pearson. The publisher has more than 1,500 American titles but must compete with McGraw-Hill, which is slated to merge with Cengage, combining two of the country’s three largest textbook-publishing giants.

A digital-first strategy not only would cut costs at a time of increased competition, industry experts said, but it would also help clamp down on the challenge posed by websites like Amazon and Chegg, which have undercut publishers by reselling textbooks at significantly lower prices.

“This is less of an inflection and more of a milestone in a transition that’s been underway for a long time,” said Gates Bryant, a partner at Tyton Partners, an investment-banking and strategic-consulting firm focused on the education market.

Bryant said the continuous-update schedule would ensure content is up to date for faculty and students, with less confusion over which edition to buy. But some observers worry that, on the ground, the change will do little to make materials more affordable for students. Kaitlyn Vitez, director of the Make Higher Education Affordable Campaign at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, said the move doubles down on a model that gives Pearson more opportunities to charge students for access to digital platforms requiring costly access codes.

Textbook costs have already grown exorbitant. According to the College Board, the average college student should budget more than $1,200 per year for textbooks and supplies, creating a barrier to entry for lower-income students. With about 80 percent of the market dominated by just five companies, prices on textbooks rose 1,041 percent — more than triple the rate of inflation — from 1977 to 2015, according to NBC’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.

Pearson announced its average e-book price would be $40, with a $70 price point for the “full suite of digital-learning tools.” The company has also transitioned into providing online programs such as MyLab and Mastering, platforms for professors to host homework assignments and administer courses.

Mike Hale, vice president of North American education for VitalSource, a leading distributor of digital course materials, pointed to the resale market as one reason for publishers to raise prices. Pearson, for example, would put money and resources into producing a textbook, print it, make money on that first sale, then see revenue cycles continue in the secondary market without them.

“So they shorten the edition cycle, and they jack up the price just to keep the lights on,” Hale said. “By moving to digital, they remove the need to do that short revision cycle.”

To an extent, the move to digital would help cut off access to secondary markets. Digital textbooks would update, and courses could incorporate access codes built into the platform, effectively rendering older textbooks outdated. For Pearson and other publishers, that’s good business. But in the eyes of advocates for affordable education, it’s a cause for concern.

“We know that today’s students increasingly use social media and technology in the classroom,” Vitez said, “but that doesn’t mean that they don’t want the flexibility of print options.”

Even with Pearson promising more affordable e-books in the short term, “we have no guarantees that prices are going to stay at that rate,” she said.

A key component of Pearson’s digital-first strategy is its partnerships with colleges, in which textbook prices are baked into tuition or student fees (at lower-than-market prices). Called inclusive-access programs, the partnerships obligate students to pay for access to short-term, expiring platforms that host homework assignments and other course materials, with the ability to opt out.

Those who do opt out, Hale said, lose access to the online textbooks and course materials.

Pearson, Hale said, “is going all in on inclusive access, as is every other publisher.”

In theory, it hopes to eliminate an issue Vitez cited from a U.S. PIRG study: 65 percent of students reported skipping a book purchase because of cost, even though 94 percent said they knew the move would affect their grade. The hope is that students have access to all course materials on Day 1.”

Whether we like it or not, Pearson is paving the way for higher education’s digital future.  And it won’t just be textbooks.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Major gifts to community colleges have been growing sharply during the past ten years (see graphic above). The Chronicle of Philanthropy is reporting that big gifts to community colleges have grown from a single donation of only $2.5 million in 2009 to contributions totaling $53.1 million last year.  And things are looking good so far for 2019, with $27 million already given or pledged as of May.  As reported:

“Over all, U.S. philanthropists have given more than $271 million to community colleges since 2009.

Wealthy donors are giving more million-dollar gifts to two-year institutions for a multitude of reasons, said Martha Parham, senior vice president for public relations for the American Association of Community Colleges and a former community-college fundraiser.

More rich donors are becoming attracted to the work-force education they provide as well as job-skills training in trucking, fire science, dental hygiene, accounting, technology, “green skills” jobs, and other programs.

The soaring cost of tuition at four-year institutions likely also plays a role.

Community colleges saw a burst of interest from big donors in the mid-2000s, peaking at $30.6 million in 2007 before declining precipitously over the next two years, during the recession.

Even with the recent renewed interest in giving to community colleges, their haul remains modest compared with the largess showered on universities. For example, four-year colleges and universities have received a total of $2 billion from wealthy donors so far in 2019.

Still, as university tuition costs rise and community colleges become more attractive to some students, donors are taking notice. Community colleges today serve 41 percent of all undergraduates in the country, and they do so at about one-third the cost of a four-year public institution for in-state students, according to Parham. However, many community colleges are facing cuts in state support, so community-college fundraisers and leaders are working harder to raise money from private donors.

“Community colleges are feeling the same state funding challenges as other state entities, so our presidents have become much more focused on fundraising,” said Parham. “It’s become more a part of what they’re expected to do and a necessary skill set for them to have now.”

While community-college leaders are competing with universities to attract the attention of wealthy donors, the unique role the colleges play in work-force education has been touted in recent years by both the Obama and Trump administrations as a path to increasing the number of graduates to shore up the U.S. work force in the coming years, Parham noted. Some high-net-worth donors are responding.

In March, the Denver banker Donald Sturm and his wife, Susan, pledged $10 million to Arapahoe Community College to create the Sturm Collaboration Campus at Castle Rock, an effort to provide a combination of educational and work-force programs in a variety of fields.

The college is working closely with Colorado State University, the Douglas County School District, and the town of Castle Rock, Colo., to create programs in cybersecurity, secure software development, business, accounting, entrepreneurship, and health care. Students’ schedules will be designed to make it easier to work while they attend college.

Sturm is not an Arapahoe alumnus. He earned degrees at City College of New York, New York University, and Denver University College of Law. While he and his wife gave a few small gifts to Colorado community colleges over the years, Sturm said that until now, the couple primarily directed their multimillion-dollar donations to large institutions. The potential to help so many types of students in collaborative programs at Arapahoe was an exciting prospect.

Sturm said he first learned about the effort when Arapahoe officials approached him about buying land he owned for the new campus and was immediately attracted to it because it could serve so many types of students and provide a pipeline to job-skills training or higher education to students in the Douglas County, Colo., school system.

“It kind of lets anybody and everybody who wants to go to school to learn something go there,” said Sturm. “You can learn a trade; you can work toward a four-year program through the collaboration with Colorado State. So it’s a major undertaking and a major opportunity to affect a lot of lives positively, and that’s really what we want to do.”

A similar impulse, but one solely focused on work-force training, inspired members of the band Metallica to give $1 million late last year through the group’s All Within My Hands Foundation to launch Metallica Scholars, a program aimed at supporting community-college students who want to pursue careers in a traditional trade or direct their studies toward other types of applied-learning programs.

“This isn’t necessarily for someone who needs a two-year degree; it’s for somebody who needs maybe three or six months of training to get some kind of certificate in welding or some other trade and provide them with the support they need,” said Edward Frank, a Bay Area technology entrepreneur who leads the All Within My Hands Foundation, which has $2.7 million is assets, according to its most recent tax forms.

Working with the American Association of Community Colleges, the Metallica Scholars program is distributing $100,000 apiece to 10 community colleges and providing assistance to more than 1,000 students, Frank said. The band is considering whether to expand the program over time, he added, and hopes to get its fans and local businesses to support the effort.

The band members, who have directed most of their charitable giving to food banks in the cities and towns where they perform, see the program as a way to deepen their support beyond basic needs and use their foundation to help people improve their lives long-term, said Frank, a member of the National Academy of Engineering who helped the group develop the program.

“Our core idea is let’s try and do something related to sustainable communities and do our part to help people get good jobs and the training they need to work in local industry,” said Frank. “We hope this helps people who may be earning minimum wage double or triple their income as a result of getting the skills training they need.”

Community colleges are a uniquely American education treasure serving students with the greatest needs.  It is good to see philanthropists recognizing the value of their contribution.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last night, Elaine and I saw the documentary, Pavarotti, directed by Ron Howard.  It is a treat for opera lovers especially those who had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Pavarotti when he was in his prime. The documentary salutes Pavarotti and shows him as a man who came from modest beginnings to capture the entire musical world.  There are tantalizing snippets of his life as a singer, husband, father, lover, and philanthropist as well as mostly excerpts from his most famous arias. There are tributes from his family and opera stars such as Placido Domingo, Angela Gheorghiu, and Jose Carreras, The movie closes with his death from pancreatic cancer followed by his complete rendition of Nessum Dorma that will moisten many  eyes.  Below is a review that appeared in Variety.

If you enjoy opera, Pavarotti is a must-see!

Tony

————————–

Variety

Film Review: ‘Pavarotti’

Ron Howard’s ebullient documentary salutes the operatic legend Luciano Pavarotti for the genius he was, and the simple man he (maybe) was.

By Owen Gleiberman

Watching a documentary about a famous and beloved artist, I’ll sometimes be suffused with a childlike desire to see his or her life flow forward in one long uninterrupted river of happiness and achievement, with no slumps or setbacks, no peccadilloes, no dark side. It never works out that way, of course. If it did, the subject wouldn’t be human.

Yet for a great long stretch of “Pavarotti,” Ron Howard’s ebullient and elegantly straightforward documentary about the most celebrated operatic singer of the second half of the 20th century, it’s easy to get swept up into the fantasy that Luciano Pavarotti, in his robust and rotund smiling-tenor-of-the-masses way, was at once a supreme performer and an exemplary person, relatively simple in his success. The son of a baker in the Italian comune of Modena (capital city of sports-car makers and balsamic vinegar), Pavarotti liked to describe himself as a “peasant.” And even when he became the biggest rock star of classical music on the planet, he never stopped seeing himself as an ordinary man touched with an extraordinary gift.

Howard lets you feel that that’s who Pavarotti actually was. Yet fame has a way of complicating even simple men, and “Pavarotti” is content to leave most of those complications on the cutting-room floor. Howard’s film, the third documentary that he has made about musical icons (after “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years” and the Jay-Z film “Made in America”), is built around a massive archive of photographs and performance footage that allows us to relive Pavarotti’s career — or, if you don’t know much about him (which younger viewers won’t), to taste the unprecedented quality it carried. In bringing opera to “the people,” he bridged the high and the low in a way that already looks like a nostalgic vestige of a time gone by.

There was a precedent, of course: the life and career of Enrico Caruso, the Italian tenor who bestrode the opera houses of Europe and the U.S., with a fame comparable to that of Chaplin or Houdini, up until his death in 1921. The difference is that the media age was able to broadcast Pavarotti’s image to the entire world — and, of course, to make his recordings ubiquitous. The movie opens with home video footage of Pavarotti, in the mid-’90s, boating down the Amazon River, as if there wasn’t a corner of the globe that he didn’t want to reach. By that point, he’d grown used to serenading crowds of 200,000, and when he led the Three Tenors concert at the Baths of Caracalla in Rome on July 7, 1990, it was supposed to be a highbrows-in-tuxes-meet-the-World-Cup one-off, but it turned into that unlikely thing, the first classical-music supergroup. The movie catches the three of them trying to one-up each other onstage; it’s a gorgeous friendly showdown.

When Pavarotti started out, he was a grade-school teacher who wasn’t at all sure if he could make it as a professional singer. Yet from the moment of his debut, singing the role of Rodolfo in “La Bohème” at the Teatro Municipale in 1961, he hypnotized audiences with the heavenly power of his voice. We hear that recording, and see footage of many of his early performances, when he still looked like a matinee idol — with swept-back locks and a diamond-hard glare, he resembled Armand Assante. But it wasn’t long before he began to acquire the look of a non-ironic Jack Black: a figure of flesh with eyes that burned blissfully. Pavarotti loved life and radiated it, even if most of the characters he played on stage died before the opera was over. In an orgy of doom like “Tosca,” his life force only underscored the tragedy.

His rise, as the film captures, wasn’t meteoric so much as a steady glide to the top, then poking through the ceiling, then up and out to the stars. Yet perhaps because Pavarotti’s medium was classical music, rather than rock ‘n’ roll, when he began to edge into the terrain of superstardom, moving from the opera stage to solo recitals, where it was just him and his white handkerchief (a signature accessory he began to use because, without an operatic character to hide behind, he was nervous about what to do with his hands), he forged a connection to the audience that was humble and earthbound.

His high Cs could shake the rafters and leave your ears literally vibrating, yet those notes weren’t a stunt — they were the natural climax of his vocal stairway to heaven. The film explains that the tenor range is actually a constructed one, but Pavarotti made it sound more organic than anyone else did, and the man himself — warm and crinkly and rounded, with molto magnetism — was at one with his fans. On “The Tonight Show,” talking to Johnny Carson in the broken English that revealed his charmed sincerity, he came off as an actual person. On “Phil Donahue,” cooking his favorite spicy pasta for Phil back in the era when garlic was an exotic ingredient, he was an advertisement for the glories of appetite. The singing, the cooking, the grin, even the frizzy Euro-longhair comb-over: It was all part of how Pavarotti nailed the role (or maybe it was real) of an electrifying everyman who just happened to have a voice from God.

None of this meant that he didn’t have peccadilloes. He was married, with three daughters, and for a long time he presented himself as happy to be surrounded by them (at home, he said, all these females reduced him to “nothing,” which was fine by him). But when he went on a road tour with Madelyn Renee, a soprano he first met at Juilliard, they fell into a relationship, which more or less shatters the image of Pavarotti as the dogged Catholic homebody he claimed to be. And late in his life, when he met and married Nicolette Mantovani, who was 34 years his junior, and had a child with her, for the first time his life became a scandal, especially back in Modena. It didn’t help that Pavarotti, with greasepaint eyebrows and that belly and beard, had begun to look like Pagliacci. He’d become a character in his own tabloid opera.

The movie doesn’t deal with the fractious ripples the marriage caused in Pavarotti’s own family. Viewers are free to wag their fingers at the choices he made, but Howard adopts a no-muss-no-fuss tone of benevolent civility that feels like a legitimate way to go, keeping Pavarotti’s identity as a singer front and center. The domestic breakups are about wounds. The genius of Pavarotti’s voice is that it had the power to heal. The movie pays ample testament to how that voice, for 40 years, poured out of him, rapturous and tragic, soaring on wings of pure emotion, at times wracked with a spiritual pain that was surely his own, but always lifting his audience to the mountaintop of beauty, saying, “This is where I live. And you can too.”

Dear Commons Community,

France’s  Louvre Museum has scrubbed the Sackler family’s name from its walls, removing any  trace of its ties to the billionaire family that owns Purdue Pharma, the producer of the opioid OxyContin.   The decision came after protesters demanded that the name be taken down in light of the ongoing opioid crisis.  As reported in the news media.

The art philanthropist family’s name was removed from a major wing devoted to eastern antiquities over the past couple of weeks, the New York Times reported yesterday. This Paris museum’s wing had been known as the Sackler Wing of Oriental Antiquities since 1997.

A plaque honoring the family’s donations to the museum was also removed from the gallery’s entrance. Other mentions of the “Sackler Wing” throughout the museum were covered with tape, the Times reported.

There is also no mention of the Sackler Wing on the museum’s website.

A representative of the museum, confirmed the names’ removal in a statement to The Guardian.

“The Theresa and Mortimer Sackler foundation supported the refurbishment of rooms of Persian and Levantine art in the period 1996 to 1997. Since then, there has been no other donation from the Sackler family,” the statement read. “On 10 October 2003, the museum board decided to limit the duration period of named rooms to 20 years. This donation is more than 20 years old, the name-period is therefore legally closed and these rooms no longer carry the Sackler name.”

The scrubbing follows major museums in Europe and New York City announcing in recent months that they will no longer accept donations from the family. This includes New York’s Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of the museums have said that they will not be removing the Sackler name or changing it, however, according to the Times.

The Louvre’s action also follows a July 1 protest at the Paris museum demanding that it remove the Sackler name. Protesters unfurled a large red-and-black banner reading, “Take down the Sackler name” before the iconic glass Louvre Pyramid. They also carried signs with statements such as “Shame on Sackler” in French.

News of the Louvre’s separation from the Sacklers came the same week that federal data revealed that drugmakers and distributors increased shipments of opioid painkillers to pharmacies across the U.S. from 2006 to 2012 as the nation’s addiction crisis intensified.

Over that seven-year period, there were more than 100,000 overdose deaths from the prescription drugs, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

According to a Forbes report, the highly addictive Purdue Pharma painkillers have generated a $13 billion net worth for the Sackler family.

Purdue Pharma in 2007 was hit with a $635 million federal fine for falsely claiming its most widely known drug, OxyContin, was not as addictive as earlier opioids.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In response to President Donald Trump telling four congresswomen to “go back” to their original countries, Democrats offered a resolution condemning the president’s words as racist. But the House descended into  chaos than expected yesterday as Republicans objected to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) calling Trump’s comments “racist” ― technically a violation of House rules ― and Democrats upheld House rules in one instance and ignored them in others.

If there was any doubt that Republicans are in lockstep with Trump, the contentious debate and vote Tuesday should put it to rest. The House voted 240-187 to denounce Trump’s statement as racist, with four Republicans ― Fred Upton of Michigan, Susan Brooks of Indiana, Will Hurd of Texas and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania ― joining all Democrats in support of the resolution. 

But the vote was only a small part of the mayhem on the House floor.

The resolution was a tightly worded document meant to castigate the president for his racist attack on Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). Democrats had already tortured themselves on the exact wording of the resolution, which carries the same force as a press release. There was an internal debate that spilled out on the floor Monday evening about whether Democrats should actually call Trump’s comments racist ― daring vulnerable Republicans to vote against the resolution ― or whether they should just refer to the tweets and try to divide Republicans as much as possible on the vote.

Ultimately, they went with calling the comments as most members saw it: racist, and they decided it was better to unite their own caucus rather than trying to divide Republicans.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Neuralink, a company in which Elon Musk has invested $100 million, detailed the first steps it has taken toward wiring brains to the Internet. Neuralink described a “sewing machine-like” robot that can implant ultrathin threads deep into the brain.  The company is hoping to begin working with human subjects as soon as the second quarter of next year.  As described in the New York Times:

“The company claims the system will eventually be capable of reading and writing vast amounts of information. But as with many of Mr. Musk’s other ventures, like spaceships or futuristic tunnels, one of the biggest challenges may be for his scientists to match his grand vision.

Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of the electric carmaker Tesla who has famously claimed that he “wants to die on Mars, just not on impact,” has a reputation for doing bold things, as well as making even bolder claims that stretch credulity.

Like artificial intelligence, the idea of inserting a device into the brain that would allow speedy communication between humans and computers veers quickly into science fantasy.

In his 1984 science-fiction novel “Neuromancer,” William Gibson posited the idea of something he called a “microsoft,” a small cartridge directly connected to the brain via a socket to provide a human user with instant knowledge, such as a new language.

In a briefing on Monday, Neuralink executives acknowledged they had a “long way to go” before they could begin to offer a commercial service. But they were ready to discuss their work publicly. Mr. Musk was not at the meeting.

A small processor sits on the surface of the skull and captures information from electrodes that sit along a tiny thread that might penetrate a number of centimeters into the brain.

 “We want this burden of stealth mode off of us so that we can keep building and do things like normal people, such as publish papers,” said Max Hodak, Neuralink’s president and one of the company’s founders.

Mr. Musk has been active in trying to help solve the engineering challenges that Neuralink faces, according to Shivon Zilis, project director at Neuralink. The company has received $158 million in funding and has 90 employees.

While the most fantastical visions for a brain-computer may be a long way off, Mr. Musk may have found a potential medical use.

Mr. Hodak shared Mr. Musk’s optimism that Neuralink technology might one day — relatively soon — help humans with an array of ailments, like helping amputees regain mobility or helping people hear, speak and see.

The company says surgeons would have to drill holes through the skull to implant the threads. But in the future, they hope to use a laser beam to pierce the skull with a series of tiny holes.

“One of the big bottlenecks is that a mechanical drill couples vibration through the skull, which is unpleasant, whereas a laser drill, you wouldn’t feel,” Mr. Hodak said.

They plan to work with neurosurgeons at Stanford University and possibly other institutions to conduct early experiments. Jaimie Henderson, a professor of neurosurgery at Stanford and a specialist in the treatment of epilepsy and the use of a treatment known as Deep Brain Stimulation, is an adviser to Neuralink, according to Mr. Hodak.

In a demonstration at a Neuralink research lab on Monday, the company showed a system connected to a laboratory rat reading information from 1,500 electrodes — 15 times better than current systems embedded in humans. That’s enough for scientific research or medical applications.

Independent scientists cautioned that results from laboratory animals might not translate into human success and that human trials would be required to determine the technology’s promise.

Recently, the most advanced data for animal studies has come from the Belgian company Imec and its Neuropixels technology, which has a device capable of gathering data from thousands of separate brains cells at once.

The threads would be inserted into the brain by a robotic system that works in a manner akin to a sewing machine. A needle would grab each thread by a small loop and then be inserted into the brain by the robot.CreditNeuralink

One of Neuralink’s distinguishing techniques is that it places flexible threads of electrodes in proximity to neurons, the tiny cells that are the basic building blocks of the brain.

The ability to capture information from a large number of cells and then send it wirelessly to a computer for later analysis is believed to be an important step to improving basic understanding of the brain.

The threads are placed using thin needles, and a so-called computer-vision system helps avoid blood vessels on the surface of the brain. The technique being used by Neuralink involves inserting a bundle of threads that are each about a quarter of the diameter of a human hair.  The flexible threads are actually thin sandwiches of a cellophane-like material that insulates conductive wires that link a series of minute electrodes, or sensors, much like a strand of pearls.

They can be inserted in different locations and to different depths, depending on the experiment or application. Medical research and therapy may focus on different parts of the brain, such as centers for speech, vision, hearing or motion.

The flexibility of the Neuralink threads would be an advance, said Terry Sejnowski, the Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, Calif.

However, he noted that the Neuralink researchers still needed to prove that the insulation of their threads could survive for long periods in a brain’s environment, which has a salt solution that deteriorates many plastics.

Neuralink is certain to have plenty of competition.

Over the past decade, the Pentagon has financed research both for basic brain sciences and to develop robotic control systems that would permit brain control of prosthetic devices.

Researchers with funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already have been able to create interfaces allowing quadriplegics to independently manipulate robot arms to perform manual tasks like drinking.

The Pentagon has financed a variety of techniques, including approaches that use light rather than embedded electrodes to capture data.”

This is all very futuristic but the issue is not whether it will happen but when!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is making available a searchable website that provides data on the compensation packages of more than 1,400 chief college executives.  As described at the website:

“The Chronicle‘s executive-compensation package includes the latest data on more than 1,400 chief executives at more than 600 private colleges from 2008-16 and nearly 250 public universities and systems from 2010-18.

These data show the total compensation received by chief executives in two sectors: (1) public college and university systems, from the 2010-11 through the 2016-17 fiscal years, and in the 2018 calendar year; and (2) private colleges, from 2008 through 2016.

Information about presidents’ tenures and prior employment were obtained from college websites, newspaper archives, or university offices. Photographs were obtained from university websites.”

The graphic above shows the compensation for the top ten executives.  William H. McRaven, Chancellor of  the University of Texas System, is listed with the highest total compensation at $2,578,609.

Very interesting data!

Tony