Shahidha Bari

Dear Commons Community,

Shahidha Bari has an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education this morning commenting on “what we have lost in a year of virtual teaching.”  She is a professor of fashion cultures and histories at London College of Fashion at the University of the Arts London, and the author of Dressed: A Philosophy of Clothes. Her basic premise is that our professional identities have suffered but so have our students.  She opens the op-ed with:

“Like everyone else, I’ve been busy coming to grips with our brave new Covid-19 world, figuring out how to navigate online teaching and socially distanced campuses. Will the changes that we’ve been compelled to make over the last year have lasting effects on college and university life? It’s tempting to hope our adaptations are only temporary, but the nature of our profession may have been transformed while we were busy getting through the year.”

She goes to comment on what she has experienced and makes the point that while we may have lost something, we have learned a great deal about teaching and learning in virtual environments, all of which may be beneficial as we move forward even in our traditional face-to-face classes.

Below is her entire piece.

Tony

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The Chronicle of Higher Education

What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching

Shahidha Bari

February 7, 2021

Late in 2020, I learned that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who have discovered the “Touch-Up My Appearance” setting on Zoom video calls and the rest of us — languishing in ignorance, unhappily bathed in harsh blue laptop light. If you weren’t already aware of the soft-focus feature on Zoom, you might like to know that it has the “flattering” effect of blending your edges and correcting your complexion until you are rendered a smooth and poreless avatar, unrecognizable to yourself and your loved ones. I came to learn of it pathetically late in the game, although to be fair there’s been a lot to learn lately.

Like everyone else, I’ve been busy coming to grips with our brave new Covid-19 world, figuring out how to navigate online teaching and socially distanced campuses. Will the changes that we’ve been compelled to make over the last year have lasting effects on college and university life? It’s tempting to hope our adaptations are only temporary, but the nature of our profession may have been transformed while we were busy getting through the year.

Take, for instance, what you’ve been wearing to work. In 2017, I wrote about academic fashion for The Chronicle Review, lightly mocking our profession’s pretensions and pointing out how what we wear signals status anxiety, income inequality, and other pitfalls of academic life. Who knew that I’d spend most of the last semester delivering seminars from my living room, barefoot and with a (mostly) clean sweater hastily paired with sweatpants? I certainly could not have predicted that my students would join me in London from time zones in Paris, Hong Kong, and Sydney, very often logging in from their childhood bedrooms. It’s astonishing how quickly you become accustomed to seeing students bundled in robes or lounging in polka-dot onesies.

I don’t blame them. There’s a lot to be said for comfort dressing during quarantine, in the sense of not only being comfortable but also wearing the kinds of garments that might give us comfort, solace, or support when we’re under duress. But the lapsed dress codes of our online teaching platforms seem to indicate something else: a tacit agreement that in these unprecedented circumstances we can allow ourselves to let go a little. Professors are forgiven for pulling on yesterday’s shirt for today’s seminar. On Zoom and Teams we roll up our grubby sleeves, push up our glasses, and collectively exhale as we try, together, simply to keep life going. And perhaps we need to continue to allow this slack — this being kind to ourselves — in workplaces that have been hectic, high pressured, and unhappy not just for the last year but for decades now.

The result of all this has been a humanization of our work. Consider the virtual department meeting: We log on from home, variously wrangling poor internet connectivity, home-schooled children, over-affectionate pets, and the mail carrier who seems to be continually banging on the door. Suddenly we see many of our colleagues as we haven’t before. And there’s a lesson in our comically housebound “professional” gatherings that isn’t simply about how we should harness technology for productivity “going forward.” What we learn instead is that the veil between work and life has been rent. No, you will never be able to unsee the sight of Professor X in his tartan boxer shorts when he gets up to answer the door midmeeting — regrettably, that is now burned into your retinas. But you might also better understand the world from which he comes, the human errors of which he is capable, and the ordinary joys, obligations, and suffering to which we are all subject.

Individually, we have always known this. We’ve always wiped the baby spit-up from our blouses as we dashed out the door, hurriedly paid the electricity bill on our lunch break, and ducked out of meetings to have time to grab a half-gallon of milk on the way home. We’ve always brought work home, grading on weekends and writing on vacations. In short, in academe work and home have never been separable. And so the shattering of our “professional” appearances isn’t some dramatic revelation but instead a blow to a collective fiction we cherish about academic conduct. Where does that collective fiction come from? Perhaps we’ve generated it ourselves — a mythmaking that begins in graduate school and accelerates as our aspirations to work in an apparently dignified and noble profession deepen. But this self-mythologizing can be unforgiving. Before the pandemic, in our more self-serious moments, we pictured ourselves smartly dressed, striding purposefully across a manicured campus lawn, trailed by worshipful students — or else monastically secluded in book-lined offices, dedicated to deep thought. Now our dreams are more modest.

Occasionally, though, we lived up to those mental images. To my mind, dressing up was part of that fiction. The simple act of putting on shoes and packing a book bag would serve to apportion my day, convincing myself I was in “professorial mode.” These rituals are not superficial. We know now how undifferentiated life can feel without the usual accoutrements. Do you remember how a tie and collar could stiffen your neck and straighten your spine, beckoning from your body the rectitude required for work? Our clothes tell us we are at work; without such cues, we might find ourselves slumping into indolence.

But the pandemic is an opportunity to shift the conversation from individual efforts to achieve a professional identity to institutional efforts to aid us in that. In lieu of self-care, the conversation could now turn to our university’s duty of care toward us, its labor force. What does it mean to properly achieve a work-life balance? Why do we hide our suffering and stress in the masquerade of seemingly effortless academic accomplishment? How could our employers have ever believed that we are simply brains and not bodies, too often tired from overwork and hungry because we didn’t have time to grab a proper lunch?

Other things have changed as well. Crucially, it seems to me, our relationship with students has been recalibrated by the mediated nature of online teaching. It’s been a challenge adapting course materials and teaching practices to virtual media, and yet I’ve found students to be patient and understanding about my relative incompetence. “You’re on mute,” they bellow, theatrically cupping their ears. “Have you tried switching it on and off again?” they type encouragingly, as the PowerPoint freezes. Teaching itself has become a more collaborative practice, in which students take the book learning I offer and give it form, color, and shape on virtual whiteboards they liberally pepper with images, commentary, hyperlinks, and yes, emojis.

The challenge is how to avoid producing just another video that makes their eyes glaze over (this, after all, is a generation of habitual screen watchers). We encourage their engagement with chats and commentaries and other ingenious mechanisms. And behind those efforts is a new acceptance of the inadequacies of the lecture format and the unquestioned power dynamics by which silent, note-taking students dutifully ingest our words. The formalities of the student-teacher relationships we grew used to may be no more. A certain mystique is lost, I concede, when your students see your overfed cat trample your keyboard and knock over your chipped Bart Simpson mug. And it’s simply impossible to exit a Zoom lecture gracefully. Believe me, I’ve tried. After I painstakingly perorate on Plato, a virtual red-velvet curtain should fall with flourish at the designated moment and cue the applause. Instead, we mumble, “that’s it,” and awkwardly fumble for the mouse before the screen freezes on our half-gaping mouths.

It’s at the moment when the screen goes blank and I’m left alone in my living room that I feel a pang. I remember all the other teaching, like when a timid student corners you at the end of a class or an eager one catches you in the corridor. Our work happens in spontaneous encounters — you remember that there’s a book about exactly the thing this student is describing and it’s right here, so you hand it over directly. There’s something heartbreaking about the silent corridors and empty classrooms of the last year. The university may not always be pretty or well maintained, but it is designed to enable encounters between thinking beings in a real place and time.

Teaching is about an attunement to actual bodies in actual space. It’s in the way we read the room for responsiveness or reluctance, adapting when we sense incomprehension, clarifying when we find confusion. It’s also about rearranging desks, sharing marked-up essays, and peering into lab equipment. Our bodies teach as well: When we stand in front of students, explaining abstract ideas and responding to their curiosity, we are presenting them with an idea of how to be a grown-up person. Things might have changed, but surely some things are still sacred to us, still worth trying to hold onto — if we ever have the chance to return to normality.

I hope that some of the changes brought about by the pandemic will have lasting consequences for academic life. But there are fundamentals that we must not lose. I think of all the discarded coffee cups that litter our lecture halls, the coats that dangle on the backs of chairs in seminar rooms, the way that students elbow for room in studios and determinedly clutter all available table space, the security officers who wait patiently at entrances while we rummage for our passes, the books that need returning, and the office plants that need watering. And I remember that colleges and universities really are meant for the meeting of minds.

Dana Bash Interviewing Asa Hutchinson

Dear Commons Community,

Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson said yesterday he will not back Donald Trump if the former president runs for the White House in 2024, saying “it’s time” to move on to different voices in the Republican Party.

“No, I wouldn’t,” Hutchinson said when asked by Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union” whether he would ever support Trump again. “He’s going to have a voice, as former presidents do. But there’s many voices in the party.”

Trump “should not define our future. We have got to define it for ourself,” the Republican governor added.

Hutchinson had said after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, which led to Trump’s impeachment by the House, that he wanted Trump’s administration to end. But Hutchinson did not join calls for Trump to resign and said impeachment wasn’t a practical option. The Senate acquitted Trump of inciting the attack.

Hutchinson’s interview aired days after his nephew, Arkansas state Sen. Jim Hendren, announced that he’s leaving the GOP, citing Trump’s rhetoric and the riot at the Capitol by Trump’s supporters. Trump had stoked a campaign of spreading debunked conspiracy theories and false violent rhetoric that the 2020 election was stolen from him in the weeks before the insurrection.

Since he left office on Jan. 20, Trump has kept a relatively low profile in Palm Beach, Florida. He plans to make his first post-presidential appearance at a conservative gathering in Florida, giving a speech next Sunday that is expected to address the future of the GOP.

On Sunday, Hutchinson praised Trump’s family, including Trump’s daughter Ivanka, and said he also respected his nephew’s decision to continue his political career as an independent. But Hutchinson said the Republican Party will have a “good future” if it sticks to core conservative principles rather than “personalities.” He said the GOP will need to work in particular on galvanizing certain segments of voters as Trump did, such as blue-collar workers.

“I have worked with Ivanka and others, and they love America. But I would not support him,” Hutchinson said.

“We have got to respond to the people that like Trump. We have got to respond and identify with the issues that gave him the first election and gave him support throughout his presidency … but we just got to handle it in a different way with different personalities,” he said.

Good advice for Republicans!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Democrats came out of the 2020 election elated that Joe Biden won the presidency and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock won the Georgia runoff US Senate elections.  The Democrats now control both Houses of Congress and the presidency.  However, there is a real concern among the Democrats that their control of the House of Representatives and the US Senate may be short-lived in light of losses in the down-ballot contests. There is particular concern about the party’s losses in House districts with large minority populations, including in Florida, Texas and California.  Alexander Burns has a featured article (see below) in the New York Times this morning entitled,  Democrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?  He is raising legitimate concerns for the Democrats as they prepare for 2022.

His concerns are well-founded!

Tony

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New York Times

Democrats Beat Trump in 2020. Now They’re Asking: What Went Wrong?

Disappointed by down-ballot losses, Democratic interest groups are joining forces to conduct an autopsy of the election results. Republicans do not yet seem willing to reckon with the G.O.P.’s major defeats.

By Alexander Burns

February 21, 2021

Democrats emerged from the 2020 election with full control of the federal government and a pile of lingering questions. In private, party leaders and strategists have been wrestling with a quandary: Why was President Biden’s convincing victory over Donald J. Trump not accompanied by broad Democratic gains down ballot?

With that puzzle in mind, a cluster of Democratic advocacy groups has quietly launched a review of the party’s performance in the 2020 election with an eye toward shaping Democrats’ approach to next year’s midterm campaign, seven people familiar with the effort said.

There is particular concern among the Democratic sponsors of the initiative about the party’s losses in House districts with large minority populations, including in Florida, Texas and California, people briefed on the initiative said. The review is probing tactical and strategic choices across the map, including Democratic messaging on the economy and the coronavirus pandemic, as well as organizational decisions like eschewing in-person canvassing.

Democrats had anticipated they would be able to expand their majority in the House, pushing into historically red areas of the Sun Belt where Mr. Trump’s unpopularity had destabilized the G.O.P. coalition. Instead, Republicans took 14 Democratic-held House seats, including a dozen that Democrats had captured in an anti-Trump wave election just two years earlier.

The results stunned strategists in both parties, raising questions about the reliability of campaign polling and seemingly underscoring Democratic vulnerabilities in rural areas and right-of-center suburbs. Democrats also lost several contested Senate races by unexpectedly wide margins, even as they narrowly took control of the chamber.

Strategists involved in the Democratic self-review have begun interviewing elected officials and campaign consultants and reaching out to lawmakers and former candidates in major House and Senate races where the party either won or lost narrowly.

Four major groups are backing the effort, spanning a range of Democratic-leaning interests: Third Way, a centrist think tank; End Citizens United, a clean-government group; the Latino Victory Fund; and Collective PAC, an organization that supports Black Democratic candidates.

They are said to be working with at least three influential bodies within the House Democratic caucus: the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and the New Democrat Coalition, a group of centrist lawmakers. The groups have retained a Democratic consulting firm, 270 Strategies, to conduct interviews and analyze electoral data.

Democrats are feeling considerable pressure to refine their political playbook ahead of the 2022 congressional elections, when the party will be defending minuscule House and Senate majorities without a presidential race to drive turnout on either side.

Dan Sena, a former executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said there was a recognition in the party that despite Mr. Biden’s victory the 2020 cycle had not been an unalloyed Democratic success story.

“I think people know that there was good and bad coming out of ’20 and there is a desire to look under the hood,” Mr. Sena said.

Among the party’s goals, Mr. Sena said, should be studying their gains in Georgia and looking for other areas where population growth and demographic change might furnish the party with strong electoral targets in 2022.

“There were a series of factors that really made Georgia work this cycle,” he said. “How do you begin to find places like Georgia?”

Matt Bennett, senior vice president of Third Way, confirmed in a statement that the four-way project was aimed at positioning Democrats for the midterm elections.

“With narrow Democratic majorities in Congress and the Republican Party in the thrall of Trump-supporting seditionists, the stakes have never been higher,” he said. “Our organizations will provide Democrats with a detailed picture of what happened in 2020 — with a wide range of input from voices across the party — so they are fully prepared to take on the G.O.P. in 2022.”

In addition to the outside review, some of the traditional party committees are said to be taking narrower steps to scrutinize the 2020 results. Concerned about a drop-off in support with Latino men, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee conducted focus groups in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas earlier this year, one person familiar with the study said. It is not clear precisely what conclusions emerged from the exercise.

So far there is no equivalent process underway on the Republican side, party officials said, citing the general lack of appetite among G.O.P. leaders for grappling openly with Mr. Trump’s impact on the party and the wreckage he inflicted in key regions of the country.

As a candidate for re-election, Mr. Trump slumped in the Democratic-leaning Upper Midwest — giving up his most important breakthroughs of 2016 — and lost to Mr. Biden in Georgia and Arizona, two traditionally red states where the G.O.P. has suffered an abrupt decline in recent years. The party lost all four Senate seats from those states during Mr. Trump’s presidency, three of them in the 2020 cycle.

But Mr. Trump and his political retainers have so far responded with fury to critics of his stewardship of the party, and there is no apparent desire to tempt his wrath with a comprehensive analysis that would be likely to yield unflattering results. One unofficial review, conducted by Mr. Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, concluded that Mr. Trump had shed significant support because of his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, with particularly damaging losses among white voters.

In the past, Democratic attempts at self-scrutiny have tended to yield somewhat mushy conclusions aimed at avoiding controversy across the party’s multifarious coalition.

The Democratic Party briefly appeared headed for a public reckoning in November, as the party absorbed its setbacks in the House and its failure to unseat several Republican senators whom Democrats had seen as ripe for defeat.

A group of centrist House members blamed left-wing rhetoric about democratic socialism and defunding the police for their losses in a number of conservative-leaning suburbs and rural districts. Days after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia said the party should renounce the word “socialism,” drawing pushback from progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

That airing of differences did not last long: Democrats quickly closed ranks in response to Mr. Trump’s attacks on the 2020 election, and party unity hardened after the Jan. 5 runoff elections in Georgia and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. But there are still significant internal disagreements about campaign strategy.

It has been eight years since either political party conducted a wide-ranging self-assessment that recommended thorough changes in structure and strategy. After the 2012 election, when Republicans lost the presidential race and gave up seats in both chambers of Congress, the Republican National Committee empaneled a task force that called for major changes to the party organization.

The so-called 2012 autopsy also recommended that the G.O.P. embrace the cause of immigration reform, warning that the party faced a bleak demographic future if it did not improve its position with communities of color. That recommendation was effectively discarded after House Republicans blocked a bipartisan immigration deal passed by the Senate, and then fully obliterated by Mr. Trump’s presidential candidacy.

Henry Barbour, a member of the R.N.C. who co-authored the committee’s post-2012 analysis, said it would be wise for both parties to consider their political positioning after the 2020 election. He said Democrats had succeeded in the election by running against Mr. Trump but that the party’s leftward shift had alienated otherwise winnable voters, including some Black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities that shifted incrementally toward Mr. Trump.

“They’re running off a lot of middle-class Americans who work hard for a living out in the heartland, or in big cities or suburbs,” Mr. Barbour said. “Part of that is because Democrats have run too far to the left.”

Mr. Barbour said Republicans, too, should take a cleareyed look at their 2020 performance. Mr. Trump, he said, had not done enough to expand his appeal beyond a large and loyal minority of voters.

“The Republican Party has got to do better than that,” he said. “We’re not just a party of one president.”

In addition to the four-way review on the Democratic side, there are several narrower projects underway focused on addressing deficiencies in polling.

Democratic and Republican officials alike found serious shortcomings in their survey research, especially polling in House races that failed to anticipate how close Republicans would come to retaking the majority. Both parties emerged from the campaign feeling that they had significantly misjudged the landscape of competitive House races, with Democrats losing seats unexpectedly and Republicans perhaps having missed a chance to capture the chamber as a result.

The chief Republican and Democratic super PACs focused on House races — the Congressional Leadership Fund and House Majority PAC — are both in the process of studying their 2020 polling and debating changes for the 2022 campaign, people familiar with their efforts said.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican group, is said to be undertaking a somewhat more extensive review of its spending and messaging, though it is not expected to issue any kind of larger diagnosis for the party. “We would be foolish not to take a serious look at what worked, what didn’t work and how you can evolve and advance,” said Dan Conston, the group’s president.

Several of the largest Democratic polling companies are also conferring regularly with each other in an effort to address gaps in the 2020 research. Two people involved in the conversations said there was general agreement that the industry had to update its practices before 2022 to assure Democratic leaders that they would not be caught by surprise again.

Anna Greenberg, a Democratic pollster involved in reviewing research from the last cycle, said that the party was only now digging more deeply into the results of the 2020 election because the last few months had been dominated by other crises.

Several Democratic and Republican strategists cautioned that both parties faced a challenge in formulating a plan for 2022: It had been more than a decade, she said, since a midterm campaign had not been dominated by a larger-than-life presidential personality. Based on the experience of the 2020 campaign, it is not clear that Mr. Biden is destined to become such a polarizing figure.

“It’s hard to know what an election’s like without an Obama or a Trump,” Ms. Greenberg said, “just normal, regular, ordinary people running.”

Dear Commons Community,

Across the country, we are seeing a disturbing wave of anti-Asian violence in recent weeks, including robberies, burglaries and assaults targeting older Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals.

Here in New York, Noel Quintana, who is 61and Filipino American, was slashed in the face during a subway confrontation. In San Francisco, 84-year-old Thai American Vicha Ratanapakdee died from injuries after he was pushed to the sidewalk. In San Jose, Calif., a 64-year old Vietnamese American woman was robbed of $1,000 in cash.  And in Oakland, Calif., a 91-year-old man was shoved to the ground in a string of more than 20 robberies and assaults reported to the city’s Chinatown community leaders ahead of the Lunar New Year. 

We need to support our Asian American colleagues amid the recent wave of anti-Asian violence.  Here is a call to assist Asian Americans courtesy of CNBC.

The incidents come more than a year after many Asian Americans began experiencing Covid-related racism fueled by xenophobia, as well as former President Trump’s repeated use of a racist description of the coronavirus. Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition documenting and addressing anti-Asian discrimination during the pandemic, received over 2,800 firsthand accounts of anti-Asian hate between March 19 and Dec. 31, 2020.

The violence has already discouraged some parents from sending kids back to school for in-person learning, and kept Asian American residents and their allies on high alert.

Yet despite increasing calls for public awareness and action, many advocates say employers aren’t doing enough provide support for AAPI employees who may be impacted by the news, or to recognize their own anti-Asian discrimination within the workplace.

To be sure, widespread workplace discussions of racial discrimination are relatively new, following decades where shying away from race, politics and religion at work were the norm. But as many people saw following racial justice movements in the summer of 2020, employees expect their organizational leaders to speak up on the issue.

“First and foremost, you should absolutely have these conversations with your employees,” says consultant and author Kim Tran. “I don’t think enough people have conversations about what’s happening in real life and how that impacts your ability to do your job.”

Furthermore, inclusive workplaces have a responsibility to acknowledge the the recent wave of anti-Asian violence and the racial trauma employees may be feeling, adds Michelle Kim, CEO of the diversity training provider Awaken.

Tran and Kim spoke with CNBC Make It to offer tips for leaders and peers to better support their Asian American colleagues right now.

Confronting the trauma of anti-Asian violence

One reason why more people aren’t speaking up on the news, whether they’re Asian American or not, may be due to a continued erasure of AAPI discrimination in the U.S. through what’s known as the model minority myth, which holds the economic advancement of some Asian American individuals as a measure that AAPIs as a whole don’t experience racism.

“Part of the myth is that we stay quiet, we’re apolitical, that issues we’re experiencing are not valid or are not attached to our race,” Kim says. “There’s a continual investment in upholding this myth, and we need to question who benefits from it, because it’s not us or other marginalized people.”

Whether related to perceived cultural norms or otherwise, some Asian Americans may feel the need to power through the normal routines of their day despite the many challenges of living through a pandemic, and on top of increased violence targeted toward people who look like them and their families.

To Asian Americans feeling this way, Kim says, “I really hope people are able to take the space and time they need to process what they’re feeling, and to not minimize or invalidate that for themselves.

“My wish for them is to be able to create space to grieve and process trauma,” she continues, “and do that in community so they’re not alone — if they can to reach out to people, even if it’s coworkers, friends, on social media or getting involved with grassroots organizations — be in community with other people who understand your pain.”

Tran adds that Asian Americans concerned about the news and how it’s impacting them should check in with themselves first: “Sometimes there are days I feel like this can power me through the work I do, because I do work on equity and racial justice. And sometimes I just want some space around it and to take a day off. You have to be your own judge when it comes to stuff like that.”

If your workplace has practices around taking time for yourself, like mental health days or flexibility to extend deadlines or rearrange meetings, consider using those resources.

If you feel taking time to prioritize your wellbeing could impact your job performance, you may want to bring that up with a manager. Doing this may feel uncomfortable, so Tran suggests connecting your needs to your organization’s commitments to values like equity and belonging.

“This is something that explicitly creates diversity and inclusion — if there’s space for employees to say, ‘Hey, it’s Lunar New Year, and there’s an uptick in increased anti-Asian violence, and I’m not doing well,’” Tran says. “Organizations should be able to provide that space.”

What colleagues can do to support their AAPI peers

Non-Asian American friends and colleagues can show support by checking in with AAPI peers, showing they’re aware of the news, demonstrating care for their wellbeing and offering specific forms of help.

Asking someone an open-ended question — “how are you feeling?” or “is there anything I can do for you?” — can create an emotional burden for the recipient in their response.

Instead, as a coworker, you might acknowledge that the news is distressing, and then offer to take a meeting off their plate, extend a deadline or pitch in on a project, Tran says. Let the person impacted dictate how they want to do their work, she adds, and at the same time be explicit in your offer of support based on what they need.

What leaders can do

The simplest thing managers and organizational leaders can do for their Asian American employees is to use their privilege to acknowledge the recent news of anti-Asian violence, and give space for impacted individuals to process, grieve and heal.

Given the current crisis, Kim says, “I think that’s an important space that people are craving right now, a sense of community and being seen, and not being gaslighted for feeling traumatized or reacting to the trauma we’re seeing unfold.”

With that said, both Tran and Kim stress the need to turn to people knowledgeable about the experience of being Asian in America — and the ongoing history of activism within the AAPI community — to facilitate a discussion in a productive way.

This may mean hiring and bringing in outside resources.

“In talking to other diversity, equity and inclusion leaders,” Kim says, “what I’m noticing is a vast majority don’t know how to talk about issues around Asians of America in a nuanced and complex way. There’s such a lack of existing knowledge and practice around how we talk about this.” She adds that unless leaders have been active in studying the history of and being involved in conversations about the Asian experience in America, “most people end up focusing on race as a very Black and white issue.”

Tran adds that, if you lead a workplace that rarely discusses racial discrimination, especially as it relates to anti-Asian racism, to give advance notice that you’re hoping to open a forum for that discussion, and to also bring in the right resources to facilitate it.

How workplaces can address anti-Asian discrimination

Workplaces can also use this time to examine how anti-Asian discrimination in the U.S., which dates back to the 1800s, permeates in the modern workforce, such as in hiring (AAPIs are overrepresented in low-wage service work), pay inequities (AAPIs have the highest income inequality of any racial or ethnic group) and promotions practices (white-collar AAPIs are the least likely demographic to be promoted into leadership).

Indeed, a company’s offerings — from pay and paid leave, to health coverage and even office geography — can impact workers’ financial security beyond the workplace, particularly for marginalized individuals. “Things provided by the workplace are so interconnected with our identities,” Kim says, “it would be a gross misunderstanding if companies think they have no place or a responsibility to have these conversations.

“Anything concerning marginalization has a place to be discussed in the workplace, because the workplace repeats all the same patterns we see in society at large,” she adds.

What everyone can do to be an ally

There are plenty of ways to get involved in taking a stand against anti-Asian racism.

In response to recent incidents, Chinatown coalitions have formed foot patrols to aid elderly residents during outings. Organizers view it as a community-led response to violence and an alternative to increased policing, which some say would disproportionately harm Black and undocumented residents. A simple internet search can get you connected to volunteer efforts, Tran says.

Additionally, Chinatown businesses nationwide have been hit disproportionately hard during the pandemic between decreased foot traffic and rising anti-Asian xenophobia. Supporting your local Chinatown’s restaurants, supermarkets and other shops can help these ethnic enclaves and their residents, who are statistically more likely to be living in poverty, get by.

“Get involved, and if you can’t, send money,” Tran says. This list from New York magazine shares 45 ways to donate in support of Asian communities.

Asian American communities have a long history of organizing to end racism targeted toward AAPIs as well as Black, Indigenous, LGBTQIA, immigrant, low-income and other marginalized communities. Kim suggests learning about this history — this five-part PBS special is a good place to start — and supporting the ongoing work of advocacy groups, including Asian Americans Advancing Justice, AAPI Women Lead, Stop AAPI Hate and countless others.

“I’d love to see people get engaged for the long haul, not just in this moment of crisis,” Kim says. “We see it all the time, even with the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, people pay attention when there’s a traumatic event, but after the news cycle is over you have to keep asking: What are you going to do to continue your commitment to being anti-racist?”

“Anti-Asian violence in the U.S. stems back to the 1800s,” Tran adds, “so this isn’t new and this isn’t going anywhere until we make big changes to how we experience things like housing and economic precarity. I want all of us to be in the struggle for racial justice and equity together — that’s the only way we’ll see things shift and change.”

Tony

People protested outside the home of Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, on Thursday.Credit…Marie D. De Jesús/Houston Chronicle, via Associated Press

Dear Commons Community,

Ted Cruz’s latest  getaway to Cancún, Mexico during the Texas power emergency was the latest episode in a political career that has left Mr. Cruz reviled by Democrats and more than a few Republicans.

On Monday, Senator Ted Cruz urged his constituents to “stay home,” warning that winter weather beating down on Texas could be deadly. On Tuesday, he offered a shrug emoji and pronounced the situation “not good.” Then, on Wednesday, he decamped for a Ritz-Carlton resort in sun-drenched Cancún, escaping with his family from their freezing house.

And on Thursday, many Americans who had been battered by a deadly winter storm, on top of a nearly yearlong pandemic, finally found a reason to come together and lift their voices in a united chorus of rage.  As reported by the New York Times.

“FlyinTed, a homage to Donald J. Trump’s “Lyin’ Ted” nickname, began trending on Twitter. TMZ, the celebrity website, published photographs showing a Patagonia-fleece-clad Mr. Cruz waiting for his flight, hanging out in the United Club lounge and reading his phone from a seat in economy plus. The Texas Monthly, which bills itself as “the national magazine of Texas,” offered a list of curses to mutter against Mr. Cruz.

For a politician long reviled not just by Democrats but also by many of his Republican colleagues in Washington, Mr. Cruz is now the landslide winner for the title of the least sympathetic politician in America. After leaving freezing Texans to melt snow for water while he traveled to go work at the beach, Mr. Cruz offered little more than the classic political cliché — time with family — as an explanation, citing his daughters’ desire to go to Cancún as the reason for his trip. Even his dog became a player in the drama after a report that the Cruz family had left the aptly named Snowflake behind with a security guard, stirring fresh outrage on social media.

“He’s a person that people enjoy disliking,” said Bill Miller, a veteran Texas lobbyist and political consultant who has worked with members of both parties. “And now he’s been mortally wounded. It’s like he bailed out on the state at its most weakened moment. It’s an indefensible action.”

While Mr. Cruz is hardly the first politician to face blowback after paying his way out of hardship, the junior senator from Texas presents a uniquely rich target. The conservative firebrand has spent much of his career gleefully pointing out the perceived hypocrisies of both political opponents and Republican allies — a personality trait that set off a national wave of schadenfreude as the country watched Mr. Cruz flip-flopping over his tropical getaway on Thursday.

Throughout his political career, Mr. Cruz has united politicians from former President George W. Bush to Senator Rand Paul in mutual distaste. “Lucifer in the flesh,” John Boehner, the former House speaker, said of Mr. Cruz in 2016. Even Satanists could not abide the comparison; a spokesman for the Satanic Temple quickly released a statement saying that the group wanted “nothing to do” with politicians like Mr. Cruz.

If Mr. Cruz didn’t engender much good will to begin with, given his haranguing style and often hollow theatrics, he has shown how even the most experienced, ambitious politicians can undercut themselves with a truly rookie move. Recent polling in Texas shows his approval rating among Republicans in the state around 76 percent. He won’t face voters for re-election until 2024, giving him plenty of time to rehabilitate his image.

But the trip was a surprisingly tone-deaf misstep for a politician known to have big ambitions. Mr. Cruz, who already ran for president once in 2016, is widely viewed as wanting to mount a second bid. And as every politician from the president to a small-town mayor knows, few events wreak havoc on a political reputation faster than a natural disaster.

“He’s a smart, sharp, clever, ambitious guy, but what he did today was a brain-dead moment,” Mr. Miller said. “He will be reminded of it for the rest of his life from everyone.”

Mr. Cruz came to Washington in 2013, a Tea Party-crowned hero determined to upend the staid Senate with conservative opposition that would soon become a bastion of the party. His first showdown came just two months later, when he forced a government shutdown with a 21-hour Senate speech in which he theatrically read “Green Eggs and Ham.”

The move ended rather anticlimactically when the Senate voted to take up a budget bill that failed to elicit concessions from Democrats. His effort made him a hero among conservatives but was the start of frustration toward him among Republican Party leaders, who viewed his efforts as impractical and potentially self-damaging.

Yet Mr. Cruz saw political benefits in running against his own party, even if his tactics largely failed to accomplish much policy change. He slammed fellow Republicans as insiders; accused Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, of lying; and flirted with conservative groups that were raising money to primary some of his colleagues.

His opportunism often enraged fellow Republicans. After voting against federal aid for Hurricane Sandy, Mr. Cruz lobbied Congress five years later for billions of dollars as Texas cleaned up from Hurricane Harvey.

“Senator Cruz was playing politics in 2012, trying to make himself look like the biggest conservative in the world,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said in 2017. “What I said at the time, both to him and to everyone else, was if you represent a coastal state, don’t do this, because your day is going to come.”

In the end, it was another man who would successfully leverage Mr. Cruz’s firebrand tactics into the presidency. After a 2016 primary campaign in which he called Mr. Trump a “pathological liar,” a “serial philanderer,” an “utterly amoral” conspiracy-monger and a peerless narcissist, Mr. Cruz embarked on a major reputational repair campaign aimed at wooing back the new president and the conservative base that supported him.

Mr. Cruz’s ability to seemingly set aside some deeply personal insults — Mr. Trump suggested Mr. Cruz’s wife was unattractive and insinuated without evidence that his father had been involved in the John F. Kennedy assassination — became further evidence for his critics of the senator’s shameless political posturing. This year, he led the charge to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss, loudly promoting his baseless claims of fraud and perpetuating conservative fantasies about a stolen election. Last week, he defended the former president’s speech at his rally before the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, saying his words were not an impeachable offense.

“Until Donald Trump came along, this guy was the biggest performer in conservative politics,” said Julián Castro, the former mayor of San Antonio and housing secretary. “He was the one that was trying to position himself as the id of the conservative moment.”

Mr. Castro added, “He comes off as fake and he comes off as much more concerned about himself than anyone else.”

Texas Democrats like Mr. Castro saw fresh opportunities in the trip to Cancún, quickly calling for Mr. Cruz’s resignation. Republican officials in the state, many sitting in their own cold homes, largely stayed silent.

“Candidly, I haven’t been following people’s vacation plans,” Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.

The trip is “something that he has to answer to his constituents about,” Allen West, the chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, told The Associated Press. “I’m here trying to take care of my family and look after my friends and others that are still without power.”

But in his moment of crisis, Mr. Cruz’s four-year campaign to reclaim his position as a darling of conservatives appeared to be paying off, as several of Mr. Trump’s allies rushed to his defense. Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican, said the senator shouldn’t have apologized, and the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. complained that people were trying to “cancel Cancún Cruz” — a defense wrapped in a classically Trumpian insulting nickname.

Sean Hannity, the Fox News host and a friend of Mr. Trump’s, cast the trip as akin to Mr. Cruz’s dropping his daughters off at soccer practice — never mind that this outing involved a plane flight to a $309-per-night resort.

“Now, you went and you took your daughters to Cancún and you came back,” Mr. Hannity told Mr. Cruz in a Thursday night interview. “I think you can be a father and be the senator of Texas all at the same time and make a round-trip, quick drop-off, quick trip, and come home.”

And the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro eagerly dismissed what he said was a Democratic insistence on “performative” politics during a power crisis — a curious defense of Mr. Cruz, who announced the selection of a running mate, Carly Fiorina, six days before dropping out of the presidential primary race in 2016.

Congressional aides and members of Congress say there’s quite a lot that a senator can do to help in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, including coordinating relief efforts, pressuring the federal government for additional resources and disseminating crucial public safety information.

“After Katrina, I actually set up more offices and moved staff down from Jackson to work,” said Trent Lott, the Republican former majority leader and senator from Mississippi. “You do extra things after a disaster.”

When it came to explaining his visit to a Mexican resort, Mr. Cruz showed unusual restraint. After pictures circulated online of him boarding a flight, aides said the trip was a previously planned vacation. Then, his office said he was simply escorting his daughters down to Cancún to join friends — like any “good dad” in the midst of an enormous meltdown of basic societal infrastructure — and had always planned to return on Thursday.

After nearly a day of uncharacteristic silence, Mr. Cruz returned home on Thursday, bearing a Texas flag mask, a suspiciously large suitcase and a classic political excuse.

“It was obviously a mistake and in hindsight I wouldn’t have done it. I was trying to be a dad,” he told reporters on Thursday, a striking admission from a politician who built his career on ceding little ground. “From the moment I sat on the plane, I began really second-guessing that decision.”

For others in his home state, there was little to guess about the incident.

“Nothing brings Texans together quite like the opportunity to rip Ted Cruz.” Gene Wu, a Democratic state representative in Texas, wrote on Twitter.

What a guy?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Life expectancy in the United States dropped a staggering one year during the first half of 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic caused its first wave of deaths, health officials are reporting.

Minorities suffered the biggest impact, with Black Americans losing nearly three years and Hispanics, nearly two years, according to preliminary estimates Thursday from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“This is a huge decline,” said Robert Anderson, who oversees the numbers for the CDC. “You have to go back to World War II, the 1940s, to find a decline like this.”

Other health experts say it shows the profound impact of COVID-19, not just on deaths directly due to infection but also from heart disease, cancer and other conditions.

“What is really quite striking in these numbers is that they only reflect the first half of the year … I would expect that these numbers would only get worse,” said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a health equity researcher and dean at the University of California, San Francisco.

This is the first time the CDC has reported on life expectancy from early, partial records; more death certificates from that period may yet come in. It’s already known that 2020 was the deadliest year in U.S. history, with deaths topping 3 million for the first time.

Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. In the first half of last year, that was 77.8 years for Americans overall, down one year from 78.8 in 2019. For males it was 75.1 years and for females, 80.5 years.

As a group, Hispanics in the U.S. have had the most longevity and still do. Black people now lag white people by six years in life expectancy, reversing a trend that had been bringing their numbers closer since 1993.

Between 2019 and the first half of 2020, life expectancy decreased 2.7 years for Black people, to 72. It dropped 1.9 years for Hispanics, to 79.9, and 0.8 years for white people, to 78. The preliminary report did not analyze trends for Asian or Native Americans.

“Black and Hispanic communities throughout the United States have borne the brunt of this pandemic,” Bibbins-Domingo said.

They’re more likely to be in frontline, low-wage jobs and living in crowded environments where it’s easier for the virus to spread, and “there are stark, pre-existing health disparities in other conditions” that raise their risk of dying of COVID-19, she said.

More needs to be done to distribute vaccines equitably, to improve working conditions and better protect minorities from infection, and to include them in economic relief measures, she said.

Dr. Otis Brawley, a cancer specialist and public health professor at Johns Hopkins University, agreed.

“The focus really needs to be broad spread of getting every American adequate care. And health care needs to be defined as prevention as well as treatment,” he said.

Overall, the drop in life expectancy is more evidence of “our mishandling of the pandemic,” Brawley said.

“We have been devastated by the coronavirus more so than any other country. We are 4% of the world’s population, more than 20% of the world’s coronavirus deaths,” he said.

Not enough use of masks, early reliance on drugs such as hydroxychloroquine, “which turned out to be worthless,” and other missteps meant many Americans died needlessly, Brawley said.

“Going forward, we need to practice the very basics” such as hand-washing, physical distancing and vaccinating as soon as possible to get prevention back on track, he said

This pandemic just keeps on giving more and more bad news!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning describing the National Education Equity Lab that provides funding and resources for underprivileged high schoolers from around the country to enroll in credit-bearing college courses at elite schools around the country.  For example, the Equity Lab enrolled more than 300 11th and 12th graders from high-poverty high schools in 11 cities across the country in a Harvard course, “Poetry in America: The City From Whitman to Hip-Hop,” taught by Professor Elisa New. The high schoolers met the same rigorous standards of the course created for Harvard’s admitted students — they listened to lectures, took quizzes and completed essays, they were graded by the same standards, and earned credit for completing the course.  Here is an excerpt from the article.

“When Di’Zhon Chase’s teacher told her that she might be able to enroll in a Harvard University class, she was skeptical — and not just because the Ivy League school was more than 2,000 miles from her hometown, Gallup, N.M.

“Harvard isn’t part of the conversation — you don’t even hear that word in Gallup,” Ms. Chase said. “It isn’t something that adults expect out of us. I don’t think it’s because they don’t believe in us; it’s just so much is stacked against us.”

But in fall 2019, Ms. Chase joined a small group of students across the country in an experiment that sought to redefine what is possible for students who share her underprivileged background. Through an initiative started by a New York-based nonprofit, the National Education Equity Lab, hundreds of students are virtually rattling the gates of some of the nation’s most elite colleges by excelling in their credit-bearing courses before they leave high school.

The Equity Lab enrolled more than 300 11th and 12th graders from high-poverty high schools in 11 cities across the country in a Harvard course, “Poetry in America: The City From Whitman to Hip-Hop,” taught by a renowned professor, Elisa New. The high schoolers met the same rigorous standards of the course created for Harvard’s admitted students — they listened to lectures, took quizzes and completed essays, and they were graded by the same standards.

The goal of the pilot program was “reimagining and expanding the roles and responsibilities of universities,” and encouraging them to pursue star students from underprivileged backgrounds “with the same enthusiasm and success with which they identify top athletes,” said Leslie Cornfeld, the Equity Lab’s founder and chief executive.

For decades, programs such as QuestBridge have tried to connect promising underprivileged students to elite higher education, with some success, but the Equity Lab effort is less about matchmaking than challenging students academically, giving them confidence and preparing them for the rigors of competitive colleges.

The early results, Ms. Cornfeld said, are clear: “Our nation’s talent is evenly distributed; opportunity is not.”

In a sense, the experiment is calling out the higher-education elite, who have long maintained that the underrepresentation of students from underserved communities at their institutions is a problem of preparation that is beyond their control.

“All of these schools talk this game, ‘We want diversity, but we can’t find these kids,’ and this proves they can build a pipeline,” said Robert Balfanz, a research professor at the Center for the Social Organization of Schools at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education.

Of the students who completed the course in fall 2019 — 92 percent of whom were students of color, 84 percent of whom qualified for free lunch — 89 percent passed, earning four credits from Harvard Extension School that are widely accepted by other colleges. To date, 86 percent of such students have passed courses and earned credits offered by an ever-expanding consortium in the experiment, which now includes Yale, Cornell, Howard and Arizona State as well as the University of Connecticut.

Good use of virtual learning to expand higher education opportunities!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NASA’s science rover Perseverance streaked through the Martian atmosphere yesterday and landed safely on the floor of a vast crater, its first stop on a search for traces of ancient microbial life on the Red Planet.

Mission managers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles burst into applause and cheers as radio signals confirmed that the six-wheeled rover had survived its perilous descent and arrived within its target zone inside Jezero Crater, site of a long-vanished Martian lake bed.  As reported by Reuters.

The robotic vehicle sailed through space for nearly seven months, covering 293 million miles (472 million km) before piercing the Martian atmosphere at 12,000 miles per hour (19,000 km per hour) to begin its approach to touchdown on the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft’s self-guided descent and landing during a complex series of maneuvers that NASA dubbed “the seven minutes of terror” stands as the most elaborate and challenging feat in the annals of robotic spaceflight.

“It really is the beginning of a new era,” NASA’s associate administrator for science, Thomas Zurbuchen, said earlier in the day during NASA’s webcast of the event.

The landing represented the riskiest part of two-year, $2.7 billion endeavor whose primary aim is to search for possible fossilized signs of microbes that may have flourished on Mars some 3 billion years ago, when the fourth planet from the sun was warmer, wetter and potentially hospitable to life.

Scientists hope to find biosignatures embedded in samples of ancient sediments that Perseverance is designed to extract from Martian rock for future analysis back on Earth – the first such specimens ever collected by humankind from another planet.

Two subsequent Mars missions are planned to retrieve the samples and return them to NASA in the next decade.

Thursday’s landing came as a triumph for a pandemic-weary United States in the grips of economic dislocation caused by the COVID-19 public health crisis.

NASA scientists have described Perseverance as the most ambitious of nearly 20 U.S. missions to Mars dating back to the Mariner spacecraft’s 1965 fly-by.

Larger and packed with more instruments than the four Mars rovers preceding it, Perseverance is set to build on previous findings that liquid water once flowed on the Martian surface and that carbon and other minerals altered by water and considered precurors to the evolution of life were present.

Perseverance’s payload also includes demonstration projects that could help pave the way for eventual human exploration of Mars, including a device to convert the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere into pure oxygen.

The box-shaped tool, the first built to extract a natural resource of direct use to humans from an extraterrestrial environment, could prove invaluable for future human life support on Mars and for producing rocket propellant to fly astronauts home.

Another experimental prototype carried by Perseverance is a miniature helicopter designed to test the first powered, controlled flight of an aircraft on another planet. If successful, the 4-pound (1.8-kg) helicopter could lead to low-altitude aerial surveillance of distant worlds, officials said.

The daredevil nature of the rover’s descent to the Martian surface, at a site that NASA described as both tantalizing to scientists and especially hazardous for landing, was a momentous achievement in itself.

The multi-stage spacecraft carrying the rover soared into the top of Martian atmosphere at nearly 16 times the speed of sound on Earth, angled to produce aerodynamic lift while jet thrusters adjusted its trajectory.

A jarring, supersonic parachute inflation further slowed the descent, giving way to deployment of a rocket-powered “sky crane” vehicle that flew to a safe landing spot, lowered the rover on tethers, then flew off to crash a safe distance away.

Perseverance’s immediate predecessor, the rover Curiosity, landed in 2012 and remains in operation, as does the stationary lander InSight, which arrived in 2018 to study the deep interior of Mars.

Last week, separate probes launched by the United Arab Emirates and China reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.

Congratulations NASA and Perseverance!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Texas was totally unprepared for the horrific winter weather it has experienced in the past week.  A number of political leaders pointed fingers at power companies, the failure of solar wind turbines, and each other.  The Associated Press has a balanced account of why the power grid failed.  Here is the entire article written by David Koenig and Michael Liedtke.

DALLAS (AP) — The power outages tormenting Texas in uncharacteristically Arctic temperatures are exposing weaknesses in an electricity system designed when the weather’s seasonal shifts were more consistent and predictable — conditions that most experts believe no longer exist.

This isn’t just happening in Texas, of course. Utilities from Minnesota to Mississippi have imposed rolling blackouts to ease the strain on electrical grids buckling under high demand during the past few days. And power outages have become a rite of summer and autumn in California, partly to reduce the chances of deadly wildfires.

But the fact that more than 3 million bone-chilled Texans have lost their electricity in a state that takes pride in its energy independence underscores the gravity of a problem that is occurring in the U.S. with increasing frequency.

WHAT HAPPENED IN TEXAS?

Plunging temperatures caused Texans to turn up their heaters, including many inefficient electric ones. Demand spiked to levels normally seen only on the hottest summer days, when millions of air conditioners run at full tilt.

The state has a generating capacity of about 67,000 megawatts in the winter compared with a peak capacity of about 86,000 megawatts in the summer. The gap between the winter and summer supply reflects power plants going offline for maintenance during months when demand typically is less intense and there’s not as much energy coming from wind and solar sources.

But planning for this winter didn’t imagine temperatures cold enough to freeze natural gas supply lines and stop wind turbines from spinning. By Wednesday, 46,000 megawatts of power were offline statewide — 28,000 from natural gas, coal and nuclear plants and 18,000 from wind and solar, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state’s power grid.

“Every one of our sources of power supply underperformed,” Daniel Cohan, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, tweeted. “Every one of them is vulnerable to extreme weather and climate events in different ways. None of them were adequately weatherized or prepared for a full realm of weather and conditions.”

The staggering imbalance between Texas’ energy supply and demand also caused prices to skyrocket from roughly $20 per megawatt hour to $9,000 per megawatt hour in the state’s freewheeling wholesale power market.

That raised questions whether some power generators who buy in the wholesale market may have had a profit motive to avoid buying more natural gas and simply shut down instead.

“We can’t speculate on people’s motivations in that way,” said Bill Magness, CEO of ERCOT. He added he had been told by generators that they were doing everything possible to provide power.

WHY WASN’T THE STATE PREPARED?

Gas-fired plants and wind turbines can be protected against winter weather — it’s done routinely in colder, northern states. The issue arose in Texas after a 2011 freeze that also led to power-plant shutdowns and blackouts. A national electric-industry group developed winterization guidelines for operators to follow, but they are strictly voluntary and also require expensive investments in equipment and other necessary measures.

An ERCOT official, Dan Woodfin, said plant upgrades after 2011 limited shutdowns during a similar cold snap in 2018, but this week’s weather was “more extreme.”

Ed Hirs, an energy fellow at the University of Houston, rejected ERCOT’s claim that this week’s freeze was unforeseeable.

“That’s nonsense,” he said. “Every eight to 10 years we have really bad winters. This is not a surprise.”

In California, regulators last week ordered the state’s three major utilities to increase their power supply and potentially make plant improvements to avoid another supply shortage like the one that cropped up in California six months ago and resulted in rolling blackouts affecting about 500,000 people for a few hours at a time.

“One big difference is that leadership in California recognizes that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in Texas,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor of business administration and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley who has been studying power supply issues for more than 20 years.

WHY THE NEED FOR ROLLING BLACKOUTS?

Grid operators say rolling blackouts are a last resort when power demand overwhelms supply and threatens to create a wider collapse of the whole power system.

Usually, utilities black out certain blocks or zones before cutting off power to another area, then another. Often areas with hospitals, fire stations, water-treatment plants and other key facilities are spared.

By rolling the blackouts, no neighborhoods are supposed to go an unfairly long period of time without power, but that was not always the case this week in Texas. Some areas never lost power, while others were blacked out for 12 hours or longer as temperatures dipped into the single digits.

WHEN DO THEY OCCUR?

Rolling blackouts are usually triggered when reserves fall below a certain level. In Texas, as in California last August, grid operators tell utilities to reduce load on the entire system, and it is up to the utilities to decide how to do that.

In Texas this week, grid operators and utilities knew about the dire weather forecast for at least a week. Last weekend they issued appeals for power conservation, and ERCOT tweeted that residents should “unplug the fancy new appliances you bought during the pandemic and only used once.”

The lighthearted attempts at humor were lost on residents, few if any of whom were told in advance when their homes would lose power. Once the outages started, some utilities were unable to provide information about how long they might last.

WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REDUCE ROLLING BLACKOUTS?

Start with the obvious steps: When power companies or grid operators warn about trouble coming, turn down your thermostat and avoid using major appliances. Of course, those steps are sometimes easier said than done, especially during record-breaking temperatures.

Like in other places, Texans might be more willing to adjust their thermostats a few more notches if regulators imposed a system that required households to pay higher prices during periods of peak demand and lower rates at other times.

“People turn up their furnaces now because there isn’t a financial incentive for them not to do it,” Borenstein said.

Experts also say more fundamental — and costly — changes must be made. Generators must insulate pipelines and other equipment. Investments in electricity storage and distribution would help. Tougher building codes would make homes in places like Texas better insulated against the cold.

Texas, which has a grid largely disconnected from others to avoid federal regulation, may have to rethink the go-it-alone strategy. There could be pressure for the state to require power generators to keep more plants in reserve for times of peak demand, a step it has so far resisted.

“The system as we built it is not performing to the standards we would like to see,” said Joshua Rhodes, an energy researcher at the University of Texas in Austin. “We need to do a better job. If that involves paying more for energy to have more reliability, that’s a conversation we’re going to have to have.”

At the time of this writing, Texas was bracing for another winter storm!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The former Trump Plaza casino was imploded yesterday after falling into such disrepair that chunks of the building began peeling off and crashing to the ground.

A series of loud explosions rocked the building around 9 a.m., and it started to collapse almost like a wave from back to front until it went straight down in a giant cloud of dust that enveloped the beach and Boardwalk. Overall, it took the structure less than 20 seconds to collapse. As reported by the Associated Press.

“I got chills,” Mayor Marty Small said. “This is a historic moment. It was exciting.”

He estimated the remaining pile of rubble is about eight stories tall, and would be removed by June 10. Some of it could be used by environmentalists interested in building an artificial fishing reef off the coast of Atlantic City.

The removal of the one-time jewel of former President Donald Trump’s casino empire clears the way for a prime development opportunity on the middle of the Boardwalk, where the Plaza used to market itself as “Atlantic City’s centerpiece.”

Though the former president built it, the building is now owned by a different billionaire, Carl Icahn, who acquired the two remaining Trump casinos in 2016 from the last of their many bankruptcies.

Opened in 1984, when Trump was a real estate developer in his pre-politics days, Trump Plaza was for a time the most successful casino in Atlantic City. It was the place to be when mega-events such as a Mike Tyson boxing match or a Rolling Stones concert was held next door in Boardwalk Hall.

But things began to sour for Trump Plaza when Donald Trump opened the nearby Trump Taj Mahal in 1990, with crushing debt loads that led the company to pour most of its resources — and cash — into the shiny new hotel and casino.

“The moment that the Taj Mahal opened up, it began a decline for the Plaza,” McDevitt said. “In order to make sure the Taj Mahal was successful, they shipped all the high rollers from Trump Plaza and Trump’s Castle to the Taj, and they really didn’t invest in the Plaza much.”

The Trump Taj Mahal, one of the casinos acquired by Icahn, has since reopened under new ownership as the Hard Rock.

Trump Plaza was the last of four Atlantic City casinos to close in 2014, victims of an oversaturated casino market both in the New Jersey city and in the larger northeast. There were 12 casinos at the start of 2014; there now are nine.

By the time it closed, Trump Plaza was the poorest-performing casino in Atlantic City, taking in as much money from gamblers in 8 1/2 months as the market-leading Borgata did every two weeks.

Short-term plans call for the site to be paved to provide new parking while a permanent development project is considered.

May the Trump Plaza rest in peace!

Tony