Dear Commons Community,

James Levine, the guiding maestro of the Metropolitan Opera for more than 40 years and one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors died on March 9^th.  He was 77.  Here is an excerpt from a New York Times obituary  written by music critic Anthony Tommasini.

“Mr. Levine was a widely beloved maestro who for decades helped define the Met, the nation’s largest performing arts organization, expanding its repertory and burnishing its world-class orchestra. And his work extended well beyond that company. For seven years, starting in 2004, he was the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, earning high praise during his initial seasons for revitalizing that esteemed ensemble, championing contemporary music and commissioning major works by living composers.

Mr. Levine also served as music director of the Munich Philharmonic for five years (1999-2004). He had long associations with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, as music director of its Ravinia Festival for more than 20 years.

His final years as a maestro were dogged by health crises, including a cancerous growth on his kidney and surgery to repair a rotator cuff after he tripped on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston in 2006. The problems forced Mr. Levine to miss weeks, even months, of performances. In March 2011, facing reality, he resigned the Boston post.

Despite the stark break with the Met Opera, it is at that institution where Mr. Levine’s musical legacy will be mainly defined. He had a 47-year association with the house and served in various positions of artistic leadership there. “No artist in the 137-year history of the Met had as profound an impact as James Levine,” Peter Gelb, the company’s general manager, said in a statement. “He raised the Met’s musical standards to new and greater heights during a tenure that spanned five decades.”

Most conductors of Mr. Levine’s generation maintained international careers, jetting from one appearance to another and not getting tied down for too long at any one post. Mr. Levine’s commitment to the Met was a throwback to the era of conductors like his mentor George Szell, who was the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra for 24 years.

From the beginning, his association with the Met seemed an ideal match of musician, art form and institution. A few weeks before turning 29, he made his debut in Puccini’s “Tosca” on June 5, 1971, a matinee for which he had had no stage rehearsals with the starry cast, headed by Grace Bumbry as Tosca and Franco Corelli as Cavaradossi. Reviewing the performance, Allen Hughes of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Levine “may be one of the Metropolitan’s best podium acquisitions in some time.”

Mr. Levine was named the company’s principal conductor, the first person to hold that post, for the 1973-74 season. The next year, with the departure of Rafael Kubelik, who had a brief and uneasy tenure as music director, Mr. Levine took over that title, beginning with the 1976-77 season, and settled in for what turned out to be 2,552 performances — far more than any other conductor in its history — as well as the creation of an extensive catalog of recordings and videos, including some landmark Met productions. He confidently led both early Mozart and thorny Schoenberg, and he brought works like Berg’s “Wozzeck” from the outskirts to the center of the company’s repertory.

At 5 feet 10 inches, with a round face, unkempt curly mane and portly build, Mr. Levine did not cut the figure of a charismatic maestro. His father used to nudge him to lose weight, cut his hair and get contact lenses, but Mr. Levine balked.

“I said that I would make myself so much the opposite of the great profile that I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I’m engaged because I’m a musician, and not because the ladies are swooning in the first balcony,” he said in a 1983 Time magazine cover article. Indeed, Mr. Levine expanded the public’s perception of what a conductor should be and, through dozens of “Live From the Met” broadcasts on public television, became one of the most recognized classical musicians of his time, even sharing the screen with Mickey Mouse in Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.”

He was neither a podium acrobat like Leonard Bernstein nor a grim-faced technician like Szell. His movements were nimble but never attention-grabbing. He encouraged orchestra players to watch his face, which beamed with pleasure when things were going right and signaled an alert when called for. “Give me some eyes” was his frequent request.”

My wife, Elaine and I have enjoyed many of his performances  at the Met for decades.  I attended a lecture of his once during which he said “good music does not need words… music alone was enough to communicate emotion and beauty between those with talent and those with the ability to appreciate it.”

We will miss him!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A new report by the U.S. intelligence community yesterday says Russia sought to help former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Russian President Vladimir Putin authorized “influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process and exacerbating socio-political divisions in the U.S,” says the report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.  As reported by NPR and Reuters.

“The unclassified document is the most comprehensive look the intelligence community has released regarding foreign efforts to meddle in the 2020 election.

But the central message is the same one the intelligence community has been delivering since last August: Russia wanted Trump to win, though its effort was not on the same scale as in the 2016 election.

U.S. election officials have repeatedly described last year’s balloting as secure and free of fraud. The intelligence community says in its finding that there was no fraud from abroad either.

“We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the report says.

Trump and his supporters have offered a slew of unsubstantiated claims about election fraud by foreign countries, such as Venezuela.

During the campaign, Trump played down reports by the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was seeking to assist him. He made the counter-claim that China was making a major push to support Biden.

But Trump offered no evidence, and the intelligence report says China chose not to get directly involved in the U.S. election.

“We assess that China considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election,” the report says. “China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling.”

In the wake of Russia’s 2016 election interference, the U.S. intelligence community dramatically increased its efforts to prevent a repeat.

U.S. officials say the Russians did not operate on the same scale, and were not able to hack sensitive campaign emails or wage a widespread social media campaign.

Still, the Russians attempted to influence the election on other fronts.

“A key element of Moscow’s strategy this election cycle was its use of proxies linked to Russian intelligence to push influence narratives — including misleading or unsubstantiated allegations against President Biden — U.S. media organizations, U.S. officials, and prominent U.S. individuals, including some close to former President Trump and his administration,” report says.

The report named Ukrainian legislator Andrii Derkach as someone who “played a prominent role in Russia’s election influence activities. Derkach has ties to Russian officials as well as Russia’s intelligence services.”

The U.S. Treasury Department placed sanctions on Derkach last year.

Derkach has had contact in recent years with Trump’s former personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who in turn spread unsubstantiated claims about Biden’s work in Ukraine when Biden was vice president under President Barack Obama.

The intelligence report also says that Iran’s leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei authorized an influence campaign to harm Trump, though the operations cited did not suggest they had any significant impact.

“We assess that Iran primarily relied on cyber tools and methods to conduct its covert operations because they are low cost, deniable, scalable, and do not depend on physical access to the United States,” the report notes.”

Of course Putin would support a person like Trump for president whose daily rhetoric undermined democratic principles and bred dissension.

Tony

Jim Clyburn and Ron Johnson

Dear Commons Community,

Representative  Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) commented yesterday on  Sen. Ron Johnson’s  references to Black Lives Matter in the wake of the  U.S. Capitol riot on January 6th.

Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, during an interview on CNN with anchor Don Lemon said:

“I heard it the way he meant it…You know, the moment he said or prefaced his last statement, ‘I know I’m going to get in trouble for this,’ then went on to say it, said to me he knew exactly what he was saying, he knew why he was saying it, he knew exactly how the reactions would be. He just didn’t care.”

“The guy is a racist,” Clyburn added. “This is not the first time he has indicated such.”

Johnson has on multiple occasions defended the Jan. 6 insurrectionists and downplayed their storming of the Capitol. He told a conservative radio host last week that he was not frightened by the pro-Trump mob ― which was largely white ― and called them “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement [and] would never do anything to break a law.” 

More than 300 people have been charged with federal offenses linked to the insurrection, including the assault of police officers. A Capitol Police officer was among the five deaths stemming from the attack.

But if it had been members of Black Lives Matter and Antifa marching on the Capitol that day, Johnson said he would have been “concerned.”

After receiving backlash, Johnson insisted his comments had nothing to do with race and were “completely innocuous.” He wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal claiming the left was trying to silence him and manipulate his meaning.

The hashtag #ResignRon trended on Twitter yesterday after progressive PAC MeidasTouch released a video about the senator’s comments and called on him to resign.

Clyburn has it right.  Johnson is a racist and does not deserve to be in the U.S. Senate.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

According to a letter from the House of Representatives Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, about one in four of its members has not been vaccinated against Covid-19 .  As reported by NBC News.

The letter reveals the number of vaccinated House members. Members of Congress have had access to the vaccine since it was first approved in December and some opted to have their doses administered on camera.

Inoculations by House members mirrors current public polling on the vaccine. A recent NPR-PBS-Marist poll found about 25 percent of Americans are skeptical about getting the shot, including 47 percent of supporters of former President Donald Trump. Public health experts and political strategist are developing methods to convince Republicans, who continue to tell pollsters they won’t get the vaccine, to receive shots.

In his letter, McCarthy, however, argued that with 75 percent of the chamber vaccinated, the rate is high enough that the House should return to regular business, including opening the Capitol for tours and ending proxy voting, which allows members to cast without being present in Washington. Democrats, however, say more members need to be vaccinated.

McCarthy sent the letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last week asking what her plan is to reopen the House and noting “it’s time that we return to regular order.

He states in the letter that “roughly 75 percent of House members have been fully vaccinated, or will be by the end of this week.” And House GOP Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., also mentioned that 75 percent of the chamber is vaccinated during his floor debate last week with Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md.

“There’s a strong desire to get back to a regular floor schedule here on the floor where we are conducting our business, we have the ability to interact with each other as colleagues, it is a much different experience than when people have to trickle in, trickle out,” Scalise said.

Hoyer shot back, “It would be a lot simpler if every member had been vaccinated.”

The Office of the Attending Physician sent a message to members Friday encouraging lawmakers to receive the vaccine and to continue practice social distancing and hand washing.

As a side note, Donald Trump yesterday encouraged viewers of Fox News Prime Time to take the vaccine.

Tony

Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article this morning entitled, Who Is Making Sure the A.I. Machines Aren’t Racist?  Written by technology correspondent Cade Metz, it comments that the big thinkers of tech say A.I. is the future. It will underpin everything from search engines and email to the software that drives our cars, directs the policing of our streets and helps create our vaccines. But it is being built in a way that replicates the biases of the almost entirely male, predominantly white work force making it.

Metz raises issues with technology companies such as Google and Amazon that are the leaders in A.I. development.  He reflects on the cases of Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who were building a group inside Google dedicated to “ethical A.I.”   Dr. Mitchell had previously worked in the research lab at Microsoft. She had grabbed attention when she told Bloomberg News in 2016 that A.I. suffered from a “sea of dudes” problem. She estimated that she had worked with hundreds of men over the previous five years and about 10 women.  Gebru’s and Mitchell’s  work was hailed as groundbreaking at a time that the A.I. industry needed minders and people with different perspectives.  Both Gebru and Mitchell were recently fired by Google.

The article goes on to raise ethical questions regarding A.I.  that continue to linger and are not going away!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coca-Cola and Home Depot, two major corporations based in Georgia, have come out against the Republican-led effort to restrict access to voting in the state, The Washington Post reported yesterday.

These and other major corporations in Georgia have been under pressure from civil liberties groups to stand against legislation advancing in the Georgia General Assembly that would make it harder for people to vote, disproportionately so for racial and low-income minority groups.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce issued a statement to CNBC that expressed its “concern and opposition” to provisions in two bills, SB 241 and HB 531, that restrict voter access.

Coca-Cola and Home Depot representatives told The Washington Post their companies were “aligned” with the chamber’s statement. 

Voting rights advocates have called for stronger action from the chamber’s member companies, which include Coca-Cola, Home Depot, Aflac, UPS, Southern Co. and Delta Air Lines.

Groups including Black Voters Matter, the New Georgia Project Action Fund and the Georgia NAACP have ratcheted up the pressure for those businesses to take an explicit and public stance against the measures and stop donations to Republicans sponsoring the legislation. 

Other companies have issued guarded statements that did not dissent against the legislation but stated their general support for election integrity and accessibility.

A Delta representative told the Post that it backed an “election system that promotes broad voter participation, equal access to the polls, and fair, secure elections processes.” UPS and Aflac endorsed fair and secure elections in statements to CNBC.

The two bills would institute sweeping changes to voter access, including stopping no-excuse mail-in voting, curtailing early voting on Sundays, limiting access to drop boxes and restricting early voting hours. Record turnout, including from Black voters, saw the state flip blue in the 2020 presidential election and in January’s two Senate runoffs.

They’re among more than 250 pieces of legislation proposed in 43 states that would restrict voting.

Former Georgia lawmaker Stacey Abrams, a leading Democratic voting rights activist, has called the efforts to restrict voter access racist and “a redux of Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”

“We know that the only thing that precipitated these changes, it’s not that there was the question of security,” she said Sunday on CNN, referring to false Republican claims of electoral fraud. “And so the only connection that we can find is that more people of color voted, and it changed the outcome of elections in a direction that Republicans do not like.”

She said during a call with other activists Tuesday that business leaders should take an unequivocal stance on the matter, according to CNBC.

“There should be no silence from the business community when anyone in power is trying to strip away the right to vote from the people,” she said. “There should be a hue and cry.”

Georgia corporations have taken an active side on legislation in the past but for the most part have kept their silence in political debates.

Corporate America needs to take similar stands in states around the country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York City’s Independent Budget Office has a brief report entitled, Were Black and Hispanic Kindergarteners Under-Represented and Racially Segregated in Gifted & Talented Programs in 2018-2019?  It presents stark numbers that illustrate the disparity in access to these programs among major groups in the City.  The chart above says it all.  Here is an excerpt from the study.

“There were 81 schools that offered Gifted & Talented instruction in the 2018-2019 school year, including five schools that were part of the citywide Gifted & Talented program and provided only Gifted & Talented instruction to eligible students (those with the highest scores). For the purposes of this analysis, each of the 78 schools offering Gifted & Talented instruction in kindergarten is referred to as a program. IBO used classroom-level data for the kindergarten class of 2018-2019 to look at the extent of under-representation of Black and Hispanic students across all Gifted & Talented programs compared with the citywide kindergarten class. We also looked at the demographic composition of individual Gifted & Talented programs to see if there was evidence of segregation by race.

“The under-representation of Black and Hispanic students in Gifted & Talented programs in New York City public schools has been well documented. Admission to the programs had been based on a competitive test, but for next school year the Department of Education will use a lottery to select kindergarten students from among those recommended by their pre-k teachers or whose parents signed their children up for interviews. The education department has also said it will not use entrance exams for 4-year-olds in the future. A recently filed lawsuit charges the city’s admission processes for Gifted & Talented programs and selective schools worsens racial inequality in the school system…

…Overall, half of the Gifted & Talented programs (39 of 78) did not include any Black students, and another 12 programs had only one Black student. Likewise, 16 programs did not have any Hispanic students and another 22 programs included a single Hispanic student. By comparison, only 18 programs had one or no Asian students and only 14 programs had one or no white students…”

Something has to be done!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

As we have had to cope with the pandemic during the past year,  many of our friends and colleagues who live in New York City escaped to the suburbs and beyond.  They left for vacation places at beaches, on the lakes, and in the mountains to wait out the COVID-19 storm.  Now that the vaccine has arrived, these folks are finding their way back to the City.   Luke Winkie has an article in today’s New York Times entitled,  They Escaped During the Pandemic – Now They Must Pay (see below), that is a good-natured look on how to exact retribution on those who fled.

Fun reading as we approach the spring!

Tony

——————————————————————————–

New York Times

They Escaped During the Pandemic – Now They Must Pay.

By Luke Winkie

Mr. Winkie is a writer who has contributed to Vox, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. He has lived in Brooklyn throughout the pandemic.

March 11, 2021

This article is part of The Week Our Reality Broke, a series reflecting on a year of living with the coronavirus pandemic and how it has affected American society.

My social circle started disintegrating in the spring. One by one, friends, acquaintances and colleagues melted away from their tiny Brooklyn apartments and materialized somewhere else in the country. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Their escapes went largely unannounced — nobody plans a going-away party in the heat of a pandemic — so I pieced together the puzzle through their social media feeds. Plenty of them had perfect rationalizations; nobody holds any animosity for immunocompromised people who felt safer in the suburbs or those who needed to take shelter after losing their job.

But other decampments looked far more conspicuous. Their Instagram Stories no longer bore any evidence of the New York I shared with them. Now they were uploading from bucolic log cabins, undisclosed upstate getaways and the two-story houses of wherever “back home” happened to be. (A long way from the Morgan Avenue L train stop, that’s for sure.)

Meanwhile, I lingered in the Crown Heights one-bedroom I share with my girlfriend, as the cacophony of ambulance sirens wailed outside our windows. By the end of summer, it felt like we were the only ones left in the city.

They say you become a New Yorker after 10 years. I moved here in 2016, but I think 2020 should count for extra credit. Nobody will forget the febrile months of March and April, as we learned that our city would represent the first battlefield in America’s Covid outbreak. Life quickly resembled a volatile petri dish; every possibility seemed to be on the table. Would I soon be lying on a makeshift cot in the Javits Center? Or on a medical frigate docked at the Manhattan Cruise Terminal?

We made a trip to the local supermarket and bought up several rations of dried black beans that still sit unopened in the upper recesses of our cupboards. The iconic cash-only steakhouse Peter Luger opened exclusively for delivery and takeout. Chaos reigned. People fled.

And now, we’re somehow at the first anniversary of the stay-at-home order. The pandemic has worsened beyond recognition, even as we’ve grown more accustomed to living with it. But with the vaccination rollout, a new presidential administration and a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel, many of those defectors have started coming home. New York is slowly building back the 5 percent of its population it lost last spring, though the exact number of returning inhabitants is difficult to determine.

It’s strange to watch those same friends, acquaintances and colleagues who abandoned ship orbit back to the city. We see them returning to those same tiny Brooklyn apartments as if nobody noticed their calendar-length disappearance — as if we did not witness the taunting patio cookouts that filled their paper trail while we spent 365 consecutive days counting the dots in the ceiling. I believe I speak for all pandemic-weathered New York City residents when I say that we cannot let these transplants off so easy. This indiscretion shall not stand.

Luckily for you, Mr. de Blasio, I’ve generated a few common-sense proposals that will allow us to get even.

First things first: City Hall should immediately impose a resettlement tax on all returning New Yorkers. The levy will be determined at the very moment they touch down at J.F.K., determined by both their income level and how flagrant their desertion was. (If someone spent the entirety of their exile on the crystal waters between Monaco and Sardinia, he can expect to pay up.) That money will be used to fund a public good ascertained, through a special election, by those of us who never left. I can imagine several issues on the ballot, but I’d cast my vote to finally retrofit the Great Depression-era tech powering our subway, ensuring that no man, woman or child will ever again wait 20 minutes for the M train.

Better yet, New York could mandate a Borough Swap for all returning exiles. It is no secret that a vast majority of escapees resided in the richest neighborhoods in the city — particularly the Upper East Side, SoHo and the West Village. I can think of no better punishment for those folks than some good old-fashioned Brooklyn living. The New York residents who braved Covid would be granted property rights over those empty brownstones for a full year, where they can finally experience a world-class Manhattan autumn in its natural state. In the meantime, the retreating gentry will take up residence in my building, which doesn’t have a doorman, but does have an entirely ineffective radiator and an exterminator who shows up once a month to try to keep the German cockroaches behind the dishwasher at bay.

Naturally, this policy will not extend to anyone who had a reasonable excuse for their abdication. Those who were caring for high-risk family members or who were left without employment because of the pandemic’s fallout shall be granted clemency. Same for those who left the city for a week or two at a time. If you didn’t file a change-of-address form, you’re good. Everyone else is under the gun. We saw the videos from the Joshua Tree ranch, OK? You can’t just march back in here as if you own the place.

Once sufficient contrition is expressed, exiles may return to their normal New York existences, so long as they promise to never vacate the city in its time of need ever again.

Perhaps you believe I am being too petty and I carry some lingering insecure resentment for sticking it out in a city famous for its cloistering living conditions at a time when everyone was stuck in their homes. Broadly speaking, you’d be absolutely correct.

I’m from San Diego originally, and it’s difficult for me to construct an argument that those sun-drenched beach lines wouldn’t have been a healthier place to spend these past 12 months than a second-floor walk-up with no rooftop, backyard or in-building washer/dryer. New Yorkers have a way of recontextualizing every one of their self-inflicted humiliations into misguided triumphs;

That said, I’ve never identified more with this place than I did in 2020. All the values I was taught about New York, from elementary school onward, came true last year: the solidarity, the saltiness, the stubborn resilience whenever outside voices declare the city dead and buried. I used to think that brand of civic pride was corny and facile, but then I spent a season marching through the wasteland between Bedford and Franklin Avenues, mask cutting into my cheeks, buying a few more cans of tomato soup while we waited to see what the future had in store.

It remains to be seen whether those returning to the city will ever possess the same spirit. I greatly anticipate my housewarming party, which was scheduled for the first week of April last year, because nothing sounds better than to sit, and talk, and drink with everyone I know who made it through this, too. The deserters escaped all the horror that comes with living in America’s largest population center in the middle of a generational crisis, but they’ll also miss out on the brilliant, unchaining joys of what comes afterward, this great unburdening of New York City. I almost feel bad for them. Almost.

Dear Commons Community,

I have always liked the switch to daylight saving time but this year I was looking forward to it more than ever. For  a year, the pandemic has kept me and my wife, Elaine, practicing social distancing and spending our time in our home away from the children, grandchildren, and friends. Last week, we got our first vaccination shot and we feel liberated a bit.  The lake outside our home thawed completely yesterday and we have seen our first cardinal of the spring.  Switching the clocks back an hour to get extra sunshine in the afternoon is just what we needed.  We are not alone in our feelings.  New York Times editorial board member, Binjamin Appelbaum, has an op-ed in today’s edition entitled, Learning to Love Daylight Saving Time.  Read it below.

Love it indeed!

Tony

———————————————————

New York Times

Learning to Love Daylight Saving Time

By Binyamin Appelbaum

Mr. Appelbaum is a member of the editorial board.

March 12, 2021

Americans in every state except Arizona and Hawaii will lose an hour of sleep this weekend as the nation ushers in daylight saving time, and you may join me in wondering why we’re torturing ourselves. Why do we use one time-keeping system for 34 weeks and a different system the other 18? Why not pick one and stick with it?

In recent years, 15 states, beginning with Florida in 2018, have passed laws or resolutions to stay on summer time throughout the year, if federal law is changed to allow it. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida has gone one step further, introducing legislation to put the entire country, except Arizona and Hawaii, on perpetual daylight saving time.

My first instinct was enthusiasm for more evening sunshine and an end to springing forward and falling back. But the longer I looked at the idea, the less I liked it. There are interesting arguments for going all in on daylight saving time and, in my view, even better arguments for saying goodbye to daylight saving time. But our current split system, for all its frustrations, remains the best answer for the United States.

This column is about a problem we shouldn’t fix.

Daylight saving time is a way to align the hours of daylight with the hours that people are awake. In winter, people generally rise in the dark and go to bed in the dark. But in summer, the sun rises before most people do, and that is something of a waste.

Benjamin Franklin is often honored for originating the concept of daylight saving time in a 1784 letter in which he proposed that Parisians should rise with the sun in summer rather than staying in bed until noon. Franklin estimated this would save 64 million pounds of candles, because people who rose earlier would go to sleep earlier, too.

A better candidate for the honor is William Willett, a British businessman who proposed in a 1907 essay, “Waste of Daylight,” that changing the clocks would be easier than changing human behavior. “Everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used,” Willett wrote.

Willett wanted to golf in the evening. George Hudson, a New Zealand entomologist who independently proposed the idea, wanted to hunt for bugs. When Germany became the first nation to establish daylight saving time, in 1916, the official rationale was a version of Franklin’s old argument that adjusting time would save money, by reducing the use of artificial lighting. But the popularity of daylight saving time, which gradually spread around the world over the following decades, has always rested on Willett’s insight that people enjoy the sunshine.

The United States formalized six months of summer time in 1966. States were allowed to opt out, but only Arizona, Hawaii and Indiana did so. Congress extended daylight saving time in 1986 and again in 2005, so that it now runs from the middle of March until early November.

Mr. Rubio wants to include the rest of the year, too. That would be too much of a good thing.

Proponents of perpetual summer time make some reasonable arguments against springing forward and falling back: It’s annoying. It’s particularly painful for parents with small children. It’s even deadly: Studies show that the annual shift to daylight saving time causes a brief but reliable increase in heart attacks, strokes and workplace injuries.

There is also a basketful of studies purporting to show that summer time is better than standard time: Evening sunshine is said to save electricity, encourage consumer spending, avert automobile accidents and even deter some kinds of crime.

The estimated benefits, however, range from modest to dubious. When Indiana moved onto daylight saving time in 2006, researchers concluded that reductions in the use of artificial light were offset by increases in air conditioning. Moreover, it’s hardly clear the calculus would be the same in the winter, when evening light would come at the expense of morning sunshine. Fewer auto accidents in the evening might come at the expense of more in the morning.

The argument against permanent summer time is easily summarized: In the winter, the sun would not rise much before 9 a.m. in major cities, including Indianapolis and Seattle. The effect would be even more extreme in the northwestern corners of each time zone. In northwestern Michigan, for example, sunrise would arrive as late as 9:42 a.m.

The country tried permanent summer time before and did not like it. It was adopted as an energy-saving measure during World War I and World War II. Each time, it was quickly abandoned after the war. In 1974, Congress moved the United States onto summer time for two years to conserve oil. Clocks were moved forward on Jan. 7, 1974; people started their days in darkness and an angry backlash began. In the fall, standard time was restored.

Russia adopted permanent daylight saving time in 2011. The morning darkness in northern Russia was not popular. Three years later, the country switched to permanent standard time.

Some scientists think we’d be better off keeping standard time, too.

A growing body of research shows that messing with the natural rhythm of daily life takes a significant toll on human health. Hours are not arbitrary lines in the temporal sands. Late sunrises delay chemical changes that get the body up and going in the morning; late sunsets delay the chemical changes that prepare the body for sleep.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has endorsed the abolition of daylight saving time, arguing that it is “less aligned with human circadian biology.”

But we make all sorts of choices that aren’t optimal for our health, and the popularity of daylight saving time is a reasonable argument against abolition.

A 2019 AP poll found that less than a third of Americans want to keep the current system, but there’s no consensus about what would be better. That’s the nub: We have a choice of three imperfect alternatives. And eight months of daylight saving time, for all its flaws, delivers the best available compromise: sunshine on summer evenings, and on winter mornings.

When the alarm clock rings on Sunday morning, grin and bear it.

Dear Commons Community,

In these waning days of winter, if  you are looking for a serious but sad memoir, I highly recommend Tove Ditlevsen’s  The Copenhagen Trilogy.  I did not know anything about Ms. Ditlevsen, one of Denmark’s most celebrated poets and writers, until I read a New York Times review (see below) this past February and decided to take a chance.  I was not at all disappointed in following her life which has twists, turns and in adulthood, a good deal of sorrow. The book is actually  three memoirs:  childhood, youth, and dependency.  The first two parts focus on her growing up in working-class Copenhagen after World War I in the 1920s and early 1930s.  Her parents give her no encouragement to pursue her love of poetry  and instead she is pushed to find a man that will make a good husband.  After working at a number of low-paying jobs, she connects with an editor who helps her develop her talent.  While successful as a writer, she finds little happiness in her personal life. She has four failed marriages and develops a drug habit that darkens everything she does.  She writes:

“Then time ceases to be relevant.  An hour could be a year, and a year could be an hour.  It all depends on how much is in the syringe….I pay no attention to the seasons passing.”

She committed suicide at the age of 58.

Incredible story!

Tony

——————————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

Beyond the Cruel Facts of Her Life Are Truths That Cut Deep

By Megan O’Grady

Published Jan. 26, 2021, Updated Feb. 1, 2021

THE COPENHAGEN TRILOGY
Childhood, Youth, Dependency
By Tove Ditlevsen

“I know every person has their own truth,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in “Childhood,” the first volume of her beautiful and fearless memoirs. “Fortunately, things are set up so that you can keep quiet about the truths in your heart; but the cruel, gray facts are written in the school records and in the history of the world.”

That the Danish author (1917-76) was famous in her own country by her 20s, writing a major body of work that includes 11 books of poetry, seven novels and four story collections, doesn’t mean that expressing those truths came easily. The facts of her early life in a rough corner of Copenhagen’s Vesterbro district were gray and often cruel enough: Hitler was rising to power, her father lost his job, Ditlevsen’s education ended with middle school. Her comely, mercurial mother mocked her desire to be a poet, telling her that “everything written in books is a lie.” The best she could hope for was marriage to “a stable skilled worker who comes right home with his weekly paycheck and doesn’t drink.”

But as the author-to-be went about her housework, “long, mysterious words began to crawl across my soul like a protective membrane. … When these light waves of words streamed through me, I knew that my mother couldn’t do anything else to me because she had stopped being important to me. My mother knew it, too, and her eyes would fill with cold hostility.”

Ditlevsen’s memoirs, now published in a single volume titled “The Copenhagen Trilogy,” originally appeared in Danish as separate books: “Childhood” and “Youth” in 1967; the astonishing third, “Dependency,” in 1971. Read together, they form a particular kind of masterpiece, one that helps fill a particular kind of void. The trilogy arrives like something found deep in an ancestor’s bureau drawer, a secret stashed away amid the socks and sachets and photos of dead lovers. The surprise isn’t just its ink-damp immediacy and vitality — the chapters have the quality of just-written diary entries, fluidly translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman — but that it exists at all. It’s a bit like discovering that Lila and Lenú, the fictional heroines of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, were real. Ditlevesen’s Istedgade Street is every bit as pungent (and perilous) as Ferrante’s stradone.

Why, exactly, it has taken so long for Ditlevsen to come to the wider attention of Anglophone readers is a question that summons a certain deja vu. We ask it whenever singular voices are “discovered,” such as the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector, or the brilliant Hungarian novelist Magda Szabo, or the prolific American short story author Lucia Berlin. The very framing of the question — “discovered” by whom? — points to the degree of whim and bias at play when the literary establishment considers which writers to translate, whom to grant cultural authority and a place in the collective consciousness.

One thinks also of Edna O’Brien, or Jean Rhys, women who craved a different scale of existence than what the history of the world had countenanced, never mind the stakes for gifted, sensitive girls with no money. Like O’Brien and Rhys, Ditlevsen wanted love, children, art, a home — “to be the painting and the painter,” as the portraitist Alice Neel put it — and paid a price in radical isolation, though she was rarely alone, her doomed vivacity a siren song for certain men. She died by her own hand at 58, and fell out of favor as a “popular” writer, that descriptor employed to dispatch successful women from critical history. But a younger generation of writers, including Dorthe Nors, who has described Ditlevsen as “the Billie Holiday of poetry” for the accessibility of her complexity, has found in her the kind of literary foremother she might have longed for herself — a woman who traveled to the edges of all the rocky outcroppings and reported back with a rueful honesty and a bracing lack of vanity.

It seems right, then, that Ditlevsen’s own mother figures so prominently early in these memoirs, her love for her daughter perceptible, if barely, through the twisted scrim of her own thwartedness. Young Tove can already read and write on her first day of school, and the principal rebukes her mother for teaching her too early. “My mother moves a little bit away from me and says faintly, ‘She learned it by herself, it’s not our fault,’” Ditlevsen writes. “I look up at her and understand many things at once. She is smaller than other adult women, younger than other mothers, and there’s a world outside my street that she fears. And whenever we both fear it together, she will stab me in the back.” Her mother’s hands, she notes with distaste, smell of dish soap.

Ditlevsen’s faceted truths tend to cut in more than one way — a jab in the heart, a slash to the throat. The confirmation party her mother throws to usher her, at 14, into the working ranks is another set piece of tenderly wrapped horror. The trap of filial piety isn’t lost on Ditlevsen, but escaping a fate of low expectations and lower-paying jobs is never as simple as recognizing their cruel, gray facts. At first, she plays this for bruising comedy, recounting a stint as a nanny to a small boy who tells her, “You have to do everything I say or else I’ll shoot you.” When she finally earns enough money to rent that essential room of her own in which to write, it is in a flophouse run by a blowsy Nazi who blasts Hitler’s speeches on the radio but complains about the clatter of Ditlevsen’s typewriter.

By her early 20s, Ditlevsen has married her first editor, a stout, impotent man three decades her senior who prints her work in his small literary journal, a spin on the “stable skilled worker” her mother imagined as her destiny. (Ditlevsen publishes her first book of poetry, “Girl Soul,” in 1939, her truth-telling landing her a devoted readership.) But nothing in her memoirs’ first two volumes quite prepares you for what’s to come. Her third marriage, to a sociopathic doctor who injects her regularly with Demerol — “the name sounds like birdsong” — nearly kills her. It does kill, for years, her urge to write, the protective membrane of words that has accompanied her since childhood dissolving into chemical oblivion. So unsparingly abject is her rendering of addiction — I frequently found myself having to pause, finger in book, and take a breath — that an episode involving Evelyn Waugh, whom she charms at a literary party before being dragged off humiliatingly by her lunatic husband, has an almost leavening effect.

In the annihilated aftermath of her third divorce, the words return, and Ditlevsen publishes, in 1968, her great novel, “The Faces.” Republished in Britain this year, it captures the dissociated mental state of a children’s author, Lise, who hallucinates voices and faces, the latter — disembodied, floating, often those of children — inspiring the book’s singular prose. “Some of them, especially girls, had had to live out their mother’s childhood while their own lay hidden in a secret drawer,” Lise explains. “Their voices would break out of them like pus from a sore, and the sound would frighten them, just like when they discovered that someone had been reading their diary, even though it was locked up among the junk and old toys from the time they had worn the discarded face of a 4-year-old. That face would stare up at them from among the tops and crippled dolls with innocent, astonished glass eyes.”

As the paranoid Lise grows convinced that her husband is plotting to induce her to commit suicide, the voices ratchet up, accusing her of various offenses: of being an inattentive wife, an inconstant mother, a solipsistic writer. “You’ve never seen anything but yourself in the whole world,” she envisions her beloved daughter, Hanne, admonishing her. That madness can be more incisive than the rational is the novel’s resonant irony, one that still lands. So, of course, does the crime of female subjectivity, of believing oneself a worthy literary subject, capacious enough to contain multitudes.

A half-century later, all of it — her extraordinary clarity and imperfect femininity, her unstinting account of the struggle to reconcile art and life — still lands. The construct of memoir (and its stylish young cousin, autofiction) involves the organizing filter of retrospection, lending the impression that life is a continuous narrative reel of action and consequence, of meanings to be universalized. Ditlevsen’s refusal to present her failings as steps on the path to some mythical plane of self-awareness reminds me of how potent the form can be when stripped of that pretense. Only at the conclusion of her memoirs, where we find her as she was when she wrote them — clinging to scraps of herself, a stranger to her children, gingerly returning to the page, the hunger lingering in her veins — did I really understand what occasioned these rare and indelible texts: the desire to be rid, finally, of her shame. Ditlevsen’s voice, diffident and funny, dead-on about her own mistakes, is a welcome addition to that canon of women who showed us their secret faces so that we might wear our own.