David C. Banks

Dear Commons Community,

David C. Banks, a longtime New York City educator who rose to prominence after creating a network of public all-boys schools, has been chosen by Mayor-elect Eric Adams to be the next chancellor of New York City’s public school system, according to several people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Banks, the founder of the Eagle Academy for Young Men and a close friend and key adviser to Mr. Adams, will take over the system as it struggles to emerge from the wreckage of the pandemic, which disrupted learning for more than 18 months and strained the mental health of many of its roughly one million students.

Mr. Adams will formally announce his selection of Mr. Banks today during an appearance at Public School 161, the elementary school in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn that Mr. Banks attended as a child.  As reported by The New York Times.

“I want to help transform the lives of so many of our children, but particularly Black and brown children who have struggled the most in this system,” Mr. Banks said in an interview. “They need people to be bold on their behalf.”

Mr. Banks said his first priorities would include expanding early childhood education options for the city’s youngest children, improving career pathways for older students, and combating students’ trauma.

Without sweeping changes, Mr. Banks said, “you’re just going to play around in the margins.”

The chancellorship, which Mr. Banks has eyed for years and comes with oversight of a roughly $38 billion annual operating budget, is arguably the second-most influential education job in America, after the federal education secretary.

Mr. Banks, 59, comes to the role with crucial advantages, some of which his recent predecessors have lacked and which could help him become the most powerful city schools chancellor in more than a decade, since Joel I. Klein brought major, often disruptive, change to a system that had seen little of it for years.

A native New Yorker who has taught in and led several schools in the city, Mr. Banks now runs the foundation that provides support for the Eagle schools, and has the sort of deep knowledge of the city’s byzantine educational bureaucracy that can take years for an outsider to master.

He created the Eagle Academy schools to address an urgent problem he saw as an educator: boys of color struggled academically and often faced harsh discipline that left them feeling isolated from school and sometimes drawn to gangs. Teachers — many of them white women — often didn’t know how to help. The city had tried and largely failed for years to find solutions.

The Eagle schools, which are unionized district schools that serve low-income Black and Latino boys in grades six through twelve, boast higher graduation rates than many of their neighboring schools and are known for their strong focus on structure and community.

While some of the schools have low standardized test scores, they are broadly viewed by many educators, as well as senior members of both the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, as a bright spot in the city’s halting efforts to improve schools for its most vulnerable students.

As a charismatic evangelist for his schools, Mr. Banks has become one of the most politically connected educators in the city. He has close ties not only to elected officials, but to the leaders of the city’s business and philanthropic power centers, some of whom he has recruited to mentor Eagle students on Saturdays.

Mr. Banks will also have the benefit of a larger operating budget than his recent predecessors, because of significant funding increases from the federal government aimed at pandemic recovery and a recent settlement agreement after New York was found to be underfunding its neediest schools.

While Mayor Bill de Blasio was known to micromanage his commissioners, Mr. Adams has signaled that he will give his more leeway. That may be particularly true for Mr. Banks, a friend of three decades who enjoys a position at the center of the mayor-elect’s inner circle.

Indeed, his selection as chancellor had seemed highly likely since June, when it became clear that Mr. Adams was likely to win the Democratic nomination. As Mr. Adams delivered a triumphant speech on primary night, Mr. Banks stood beaming by his side.

Despite all of those advantages, it’s not yet clear how Mr. Banks’s success building the Eagle network will translate to the extraordinarily difficult task of running a vast system of 1,600 schools, many of which lack the strong leadership, fund-raising prowess and political support that Eagle enjoys.

While it is extremely difficult to create new schools, it can be even harder to improve schools that educate the most vulnerable children in the system and have been struggling for decades.

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Mr. Adams has said he plans to focus on shoring up services for children with disabilities and offering more opportunities for early childhood education, but he has not yet provided a detailed plan for how to improve the system, putting more pressure on Mr. Banks to lay out his vision early.

The school system is grappling with profound challenges.

Enrollment has dropped by over 50,000 children since fall 2019. Roughly 100,000 public school students are homeless, and New York has struggled for years to meet their needs. The city’s school system is among the most racially segregated in the country. Many dozens of schools are still extremely low-performing, and some of the city’s 200,000 students with disabilities are not receiving all of their support services, a longstanding issue exacerbated by the pandemic.

Mr. Banks and Mr. Adams will face urgent decisions as soon as they take over, including how and whether to admit students into gifted and talented classes, after Mr. de Blasio announced this fall that he intended to end the programs entirely, and whether to implement a vaccine mandate for students.

Mr. Banks has already begun to build out his cabinet. Daniel Weisberg, who served as the lead labor strategist for schools under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and now runs an organization focused on teacher training and quality, will serve as Mr. Banks’s first deputy. And Mr. Banks has recruited Kenita Lloyd, the chief operating officer of the Eagle Academy Foundation, to be deputy chancellor for family engagement.

The Eagle schools embody elements of both traditional and progressive education models that Mr. Banks has sought to prove should not be contradictory. They employ many male teachers of color — a rarity in many city schools — and encourage students to have frequent discussions about racial identity and cultural pride.

Boys are required to wear jackets and ties, follow a strict discipline code and attend a longer school day than many other public school students, which has left some with the mistaken impression that the schools are charters.

Despite the schools’ positive qualities, some have struggled with performance, particularly in the middle school years when students are new to Eagle. Three of the five Eagle schools in New York have posted middle school test scores that have led to them being ranked some of the lowest-performing schools in the state, which has raised questions about what other support the schools’ at-risk students might need.

The first Eagle school was created in 2004 in the Bronx, the first public single-sex school to open in New York City in roughly 30 years, under Mr. Bloomberg’s initiative to replace some of the city’s long-troubled high schools with smaller schools. There is now a school in each borough and one in Newark, N.J.

Before founding the Eagle Academy, Mr. Banks helped create the Bronx School for Law, Government and Justice, a prototype for the small schools initiative.

Allies said they believed Mr. Banks could revive that initiative and some others that Mr. Bloomberg created, which were considered largely successful and which Mr. de Blasio paused or ignored, including one to create partnerships with the private sector, without alienating Black and Latino parents as the billionaire Mr. Bloomberg did.

The next chancellor grew up mainly in Southeast Queens, the son of a police officer and a secretary who demanded good grades from their three sons. Mr. Banks earned his law degree from St. John’s in Queens and worked for the city’s law department and the state attorney general before becoming a public school teacher in Crown Heights.

Mr. Banks’s former Southeast Queens neighbors and current allies include not just Mr. Adams, but also Dennis M. Walcott, a former city schools chancellor, and Meisha Porter, the current one, who Mr. Banks selected as his successor at Bronx Law. Ms. Porter helped orchestrate the largely successful reopening of schools this fall.

Mr. Banks, a gregarious person who broadcasts his enthusiasm by speaking at a near-shouting pitch, spoke excitedly in the interview about the public school teachers who inspired him as a child. But he promised to take bolder action than some of his predecessors to shepherd weak teachers out of the system.

That pledge is unlikely to boost his popularity with the United Federation of Teachers, which endorsed one of Mr. Adams’s rivals during the primary.

Mr. Banks, like the incoming mayor, is supportive of charters.

“These are the communities that I’ve worked in, and these families are desperate for quality seats, quality schools,” he said. “And if the traditional public schools were offering that, you wouldn’t see such a mass rush to the charter schools.”

But, he added, “I’m being asked to be the chancellor for the traditional public school system, and I’ve got to create that as a place where people really want to be.”

That same logic drives his stance on integration. Mr. Banks said he supported integration efforts generally, but that his experience at Eagle showed that many families of color were not necessarily clamoring for integrated schools, just good ones.

Mr. Banks’s views defy neat ideological definition. He has been a consistent critic of what he considers the overreliance on suspensions in schools and is skeptical of using standardized test scores to judge individual students and schools.

Mr. Banks was an early adopter of a culturally responsive curriculum that has only recently become a national lightning rod. Mr. Banks helped Scholastic curate a collection of books focused on Black and Latino boys. As chancellor, he said, “I would make sure all kids get that kind of exposure.”

The Eagle schools have risen to prominence with the help of Mr. Adams, who also relies on the counsel of Mr. Banks’s family. Sheena Wright, Mr. Banks’s partner, who runs the nonprofit United Way of New York City, is leading Mr. Adams’s transition team.

And Mr. Banks’s brother, Philip, a former N.Y.P.D. chief of department who resigned from his post in 2014 amid a corruption scandal early in Mr. de Blasio’s tenure, is being considered for a senior role in the Adams administration. Philip Banks was never charged with a crime.

Mr. Banks’s other political allies include Hillary Clinton, a crucial supporter of the Eagle Academy from her time as New York’s junior senator. A group of Eagle students recited “Invictus,” a poem by William Ernest Henley, at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia where Mrs. Clinton won the party’s nomination for president.

It’s the same poem that Eagle students recite each morning, often raising their voices to shout the final line: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.”

Mr. Banks is a good choice.  Lots of experience, has had successes, and knows New York City schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York prides itself on being resilient and able to handle setbacks and crises with determination and resolve.  However, the current shortage of cream cheese in our delis for our morning bagel is catastrophic and will test our mettle.  The video above includes an interview with a deli owner who says as a last resort – “there is always butter.”  Never!

Tony

Colbert’s Comments about Nunes come at about the 12:00 mark.

Dear Commons Community,

Gil Hodges. Bettmann/CORBIS

Dear Commons Community,

Almost fifty years after his death, Gil Hodges, a U.S. Marine, All-Star first baseman and World Series-winning manager, was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday.

In his 35th appearance on a ballot for Cooperstown, the former Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers star and managerial force behind the 1969 Miracle Mets obtained the necessary 75 percent of the vote Sunday by the Golden Days Era committee for enshrinement into the Hall of Fame.

Hodges, who received 12 of 16 votes (75 percent), joined Jim Kaat, Minnie Minoso and Tony Oliva as selections by the committee. Bud Fowler and Buck O’Neil were chosen by the Early Baseball Era committee. As reported by The New York Post.

In 18 major league seasons, Hodges hit 370 homers and amassed 1,274 RBIs and 1,921 hits. An eight-time National League All-Star selection, he won three straight Gold Gloves at first base beginning in 1957, when the award was first instituted. He played for World Series-winning teams in Brooklyn (1955) and Los Angeles (1959). During Hodges’ peak seasons (1949-59), only teammate Duke Snider amassed more homers and RBIs. Hodges retired with the third-highest home run total by a right-handed hitter, behind only Jimmie Foxx and Willie Mays.

A World War II hero, Hodges was awarded a Bronze Star at Okinawa.

“Gil stood out as not only one of the game’s finest first basemen but also as a great American and an exemplary human being, someone many of us were in awe in of because of his spiritual strength,” former Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully recently wrote in support of Hodges’ candidacy.

Hodges’ managerial career began with the Washington Senators in 1963. Though Washington endured five losing seasons under his watch, the Mets thought highly enough of him to send the Senators pitcher Bill Denehy and $100,000 for the rights to hire Hodges following the 1967 season.

With Hodges in charge, the Mets went from worst-to-first, finishing 100-62 in 1969 before defeating the Orioles in five games in the World Series for the first of only two championships in franchise history. The ’69 Mets included Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman and Nolan Ryan.

“He taught us how to win, how to be gentlemen and to respect the game and respect each other, respect the opponents,” Koosman told The Post.

Hodges was 47 years old when he suffered a fatal heart attack before the start of the 1972 season. The Mets subsequently retired his No. 14. Hodges’ survivors include his 95-year-old wife Joan.

“We would have been a powerhouse for many years if Gil had stayed on with us and not passed away,” Koosman said.

Hodges began appearing on the BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot for the 1969 election but never neared the 75 percent of the vote threshold needed for enshrinement. He reached his highest total, 63.4 percent, in his final year on the ballot in 1983.

After his removal from the writers’ ballot, he became a regular consideration by the various committees formed to consider players who may have been overlooked by the BBWAA. Hodges appeared on 12 of 16 (75 percent) of the ballots cast by the veterans’ committee in 1993, but his election to the Hall of Fame was overturned by a technicality. Roy Campanella had cast a vote for Hodges that was discarded because the Hall of Fame catcher (who was hospitalized) hadn’t attended the meeting.

Before this latest vote, Hodges had last appeared on a Hall of Fame ballot in December 2014, when he received “less than four” of the necessary 16 votes for enshrinement.

“We’ve all been rooting for years and trying to persuade the committee to elect him,” Koosman said. “I’m just so proud of him making it and happy for the whole family.”

My father was a die-hard Brooklyn Dodgers fan until the team moved to Los Angeles in 1958.  He never forgave Walter O-Malley, the team’s owner for the move.  In 1962, he became a New York Mets fan.  He suffered mightily with the Mets who lost consistently in the early 1960s but in 1969, to everyone’s amazement, the team won the World Series.  I never saw my father so happy.  He credited Manager Gil Hodges, the former Dodger, for the team winning the championship.  The weight of the Brooklyn Dodgers move to Los Angeles was finally lifted from his psyche.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

With the Omicron variant of the coronavirus having made landfall in the United States, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki  blamed Republicans in part for the rise in coronavirus cases.

“There are some forces against us,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki conceded at a Friday afternoon press briefing (see video above).  With only 60 percent of Americans vaccinated and Omicron likely able to break through natural immunity from a previous coronavirus infection, those rates could rise ever higher.

The president said earlier this week that new lockdowns are “off the table.” His battle plan for the months ahead, revealed on Thursday, reflects an inauspicious political scenario in which he has little room to maneuver without encountering an emboldened Republican opposition.

Democrats have recently pressed the president to more forcefully fight that opposition. He had done so earlier, when Republicans challenged federal health authorities on school-based mask recommendations in August and September, but his natural tendency is towards reconciliation, not attack.

Still, there were other signs this week that the administration is intent on taking the fight to Republicans. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the president’s top medical adviser, made stinging comments about Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, accusing him of complicity in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He also criticized the Fox News personality Lara Logan for comparing him to a Nazi death camp doctor — a day before making his first appearance on Fox News in a month and a half.

“Any politician does better when they have a clear adversary. Right now, the president doesn’t have one,” a Democratic strategist, Joel Payne, told The Hill. 

Psaki left little doubt that the forces she had in mind were the elements of the GOP aligned with former President Donald Trump, or else with the much smaller libertarian faction behind Sen. Rand Paul, R- Ky., which has a more principled opposition to vaccines and public health measures, even if it is one that experts say is misguided.

“For reasons I will never begin to understand,” Psaki said on Friday, “some members of the Republican Party have decided that their political platform is going to be running in favor of protecting people from getting vaccinated.”

This week, some senators threatened to shut down the federal government over vaccine mandates. Those mandates, meanwhile, have been put on hold in courts dominated by Republican-appointed jurists. The plan Biden introduced on Thursday had no new vaccination or masking mandates, leading some people to wonder if it was ambitious enough to meet the moment.

Many elected Republican officials at both the state and federal level do support vaccinations and pandemic-related safety measures. But they tend to be drowned out by louder, more prominent pro-Trump conservatives whose challenges to the Biden administration appear to be plainly motivated, in some instances, by political considerations.

“You know how divided our country can be,” Psaki said on Friday, seemingly acknowledging that reality.

An aide to the president sent Yahoo News a list of 17 different actions that Republicans at every level of government had taken, purportedly to undermine the president’s pandemic response. “Just a small sampling,” the subject line of the email read. The examples of Republican resistance ranged from the tiny Northern California hamlet of Oroville declaring itself a “constitutional republic” to Republican legislators in Pennsylvania trying to block vaccine requirements in the state (the effort was stymied by the state’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf).

“We know what works,” Psaki said on Friday. “And we know what’s standing in the way.”

Psaki has it right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the aftermath of the tragedy at Oxford High School on Tuesday, November 30th, legal experts are asking whether school officials should be held accountable.

Prior to the Shooting

School officials met with Mr. Crumbley, 15, and his parents, informing them that he needed to begin counseling within 48 hours. After his parents resisted bringing him home, administrators allowed him to stay in school.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Crumbley fatally shot four students, according to the prosecutor in Oakland County, Mich., who laid out that stunning series of events on Friday while announcing involuntary manslaughter charges against the parents.

Now, Oxford High School’s actions are also under a microscope, prompting questions about the school’s responsibility, and whether there could be legal repercussions for administrators. Asked if her office was looking into the conduct of school officials, Karen M. McDonald, the prosecutor, said, “The investigation is ongoing.”  Below is an excerpt of an analysis published yesterday in The New York Times.

“Catherine J. Ross, a law professor at George Washington University and expert on student rights, said she found the school’s reaction “astounding.”

It was well within the school’s rights to require Mr. Crumbley, who has since pleaded not guilty to murder and terrorism charges, to leave campus, Professor Ross said.

If the parents refused to take Mr. Crumbley home, it was the legal and ethical responsibility of the school, Professor Ross said, to “remove the student from the classroom and put them in a safe place — safe for other people and safe for themselves.”

School officials have defended their actions. In a videotaped statement posted online on Thursday, the superintendent of Oxford Community Schools, Tim Throne, said that Mr. Crumbley had no disciplinary history. “No discipline was warranted,” Mr. Throne said. “There are no discipline records at the high school.”

But Ms. McDonald suggested there were unanswered questions.

When asked whether the school staff should have reported Mr. Crumbley right away to law enforcement, she said: “Any individual who had the opportunity to stop this tragedy should have done so. The question is what did they know and when did they know it.”

Chris Dorn, a school safety consultant with the nonprofit Safe Havens International, said it was advisable for schools to call law enforcement if there was suspicion that a student might be armed.

Mr. Dorn has conducted investigations into lapses that led to past school shootings, finding that administrators sometimes worry that calling the police will violate a student’s rights. Other times, they have simply failed to take a threat seriously enough.

“Part of it is that people are just generally non-confrontational,” Mr. Dorn said. “School staff are often slow to recognize danger because it’s not part of their everyday.”

While Oxford High School conducted active shooter drills several times per year, “There is a lot of focus on responding to the active shooter, but not necessarily on the prevention for them,” he added.

It is historically very challenging to hold a school district legally responsible for a shooting, said Chuck Vergon, a professor of education law at Youngstown State University.

A majority of past school shooting cases featured some kind of warning in advance of potential violence, he said. But it is difficult in most state courts to meet the required standard of proving gross negligence on the part of school officials — that they acted in “wanton and willful disregard” for the safety or well-being of others, he said. “That standard has usually shielded school officials in most school shooting cases from civil liability.”

But the Oxford school system will most likely face years of litigation over the shooting, if recent history is any guide.

“I definitely think that there’s going to be a lawsuit,” said Mike Kelly, a lawyer in Northville, Mich., who specializes in representing students who face school expulsion — including one student who recently faced expulsion by another Michigan district for having a hunting rifle in the car he parked on school grounds.

“There is some culpability and responsibility here on the part of the school,” Mr. Kelly said.

In one notable case, when a substitute teacher was told of a threat but failed to take action, the insurance company for Marysville School District in Washington paid $18 million to the families of four dead students, as well as to one student who was injured.

While school district settlements are not rare, victims’ families face obstacles.

In 2018, a judge in Connecticut threw out claims filed by the parents of two victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, in which 20 first graders and six adults were killed. The judge concluded the school district was immune from such lawsuits.

This year, schools in Broward County, Fla., reached a $25 million settlement with both survivors and families of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which left 17 people dead and another 17 wounded. The settlement followed a court decision capping the school system’s liability at $300,000 had the victims won at trial.

In the Michigan shooting, a potential lawsuit would probably turn on the question of whether the school took strong enough action to protect students after a teacher happened to see Mr. Crumbley’s disturbing drawing, which included a gun, a person who had been shot and a plea for help.

The fact that Mr. Crumbley was said to have no disciplinary record creates what Mr. Kelly called “a gray area” and could become pivotal in any lawsuit claiming the school was culpable because it failed to remove him from campus.

Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, said school officials should have searched Mr. Crumbley’s bag for weapons.

But she said that the steps to prevent gun violence begin far before someone brings a weapon onto school grounds. Ultimately it is lawmakers, not school officials, she argued, who have the power to prevent shootings by passing secure gun storage laws or red flag laws, which allow the police to temporarily confiscate firearms from people who are deemed by a judge to be a danger to themselves or others.

“You’re putting educators in an impossible position because they don’t really have the tools to proactively prevent guns from coming into the school,” Ms. Watts said.

As indicated in the Times analysis above, it is likely that the school district and officials will face a lot of litigation in this matter.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading The Amur River: Between Russia and China, a new book by Colin Thubron, acclaimed British travel writer and author.  Thubron has received a number of literary awards during his career for his chronicles including the Ness Award and the Lawrence of Arabia Memorial Medal.  I decided to read The Amur River (or Heilong Jiang in Chinese) because I had never heard of this 1,700 mile river, the tenth longest in the world.  It also has served as a natural boundary between Russia and China for centuries.  The book met my expectations as Thubron documents well his  travels by horse, sailing on a poacher’s sloop, and riding on the Trans-Siberian Railway.  The villages and towns he visits especially those on the Russian side are hardscrabble communities eking out their existence as best they can.  The Chinese side on the other hand, has adopted modern enterprise and towns and cities are growing.  Thubron consistently reminds the reader of the tensions between the two sides throughout his journey.

I found The Amur River a fascinating read about a part of Siberia and its people that I knew nothing about.  If you decide to take the plunge, make sure to follow the map at the front of the book that traces Thubron’s journey and keep your iPhone close by to view images of the places visited. There are no photographs in this book.

Below is a review that appeared in The New York Times.

Tony

—————————————————————————————-

The New York Times Review of Books

A Journey Along the River That Separates Russia From China

By Ben Ehrenreich

Sept. 24, 2021

THE AMUR RIVER
Between Russia and China
By Colin Thubron

Travel writing is a complicated pleasure. Titillating stories of faraway lands date to at least as far back as the fifth century B.C., when Herodotus wrote of a goat-footed people far to the north, and of the cannibals beyond them. Ibn Battuta’s and Marco Polo’s accounts of their adventures in the 13th and 14th centuries are still widely read, but as a modern genre, travel writing would not take off for another few centuries, until European colonialism had opened Africa and Asia to assorted gentlemen — and occasional gentlewomen — travelers. Think of Sir Richard Francis Burton, who searched out the source of the Nile and visited Mecca disguised as a Muslim pilgrim, or T. E. Lawrence, he of “of-Arabia” fame.

Burton and Lawrence were military men, but civilian contributors to the genre also did their part, intentionally and not, to further the cause of European dominance. The scholar Edward Said would famously argue that travel writers’ creation of a backward “Oriental” other was crucial not only to the inflated self-image of the West, but also to the actual maintenance of empire. “From travelers’ tales, and not only from great institutions,” Said wrote, “colonies were created and ethnocentric perspectives secured.” This was not limited to the Levant. Mark Twain’s “Roughing It,” for instance, made it easier for white readers to feel just fine about the extermination of American Indians he described as “the wretchedest type of mankind I have ever seen.”

If the weight of this legacy has spurred critical self-awareness among some more recent practitioners in the genre, Colin Thubron does not seem to be among them. He is an Englishman of a decidedly old-school sort — Eton-educated, the son of a military diplomat — and his first forays into travel writing fit neatly into the Orientalist mode. In “Mirror to Damascus,” published in 1967, he wandered that city’s alleys and souks, dwelling on its ancient past, uninterested in the contemporary realities of an independent Syria. His was the familiar invented “Orient of memories” discussed by Said: all “suggestive ruins,” and “forgotten secrets,” the present inhabitants having little to offer. In his 1969 “Jerusalem,” Thubron repeated tropes that appear to us today as racist: “The old Arab qualities remain. The people are ever quixotically proud, yet yielding, secretive, mercurial. Facts and logic grow dim under the surge of their dreams and senses.”

But the frontiers of empire had by then already shifted. In 1983, Thubron published “Among the Russians,” his account of a 10,000-mile solo journey by car behind the Iron Curtain. It can be a fun read, keenly and affectionately observed, but Thubron is upfront about his Cold War loyalties, which means there is a hard limit to the sort of exploration he is capable of undertaking. The moral superiority of the narrator’s civilization goes unquestioned. However fondly he may feel about the people he meets, he remains an observer behind enemy lines. Soon Thubron would learn enough Mandarin to travel alone through China too. In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s embrace of capitalism, he has remained focused on East and Central Asia with one book on Siberia, two on the Silk Road, another on Tibet.

Thubron’s latest, “The Amur River: Between Russia and China,” is hence not entirely new territory for him. Though the Amur, called the Heilongjiang in Chinese, is longer than the Indus and as politically consequential as the Rio Grande, it remains largely unknown in the West. Beginning about 500 miles east of Russia’s Lake Baikal and almost that far from any significant human settlement, it spills into the Pacific just past the grim, Russian harbor town of Nikolaevsk, Thubron’s final stop. Because it forms the border between Russia and China for more than 1,000 miles, much of its length is off limits even to travelers as determined as Thubron. Perhaps to make up for it, he begins his journey at the source of the source: the marshlands of northern Mongolia where another river, the Onon, is born in a trickle that, when it crosses into Russia, becomes the Shilka and eventually the Amur.

Even where it is not a highly militarized border zone, this is forbidding country. In Mongolia, Thubron passes through the Khenti Strictly Protected Area, a vast reserve of mountain, swamp and steppe that includes the birthplace and legendary burial site of Genghis Khan. There are no roads, so he travels on horseback with local guides, and breaks an ankle and two ribs for his effort. In Russia, the climate is bleak, the isolation profound. Already sparse populations are dwindling fast. Only on the Chinese side, where Thubron spends relatively little time, is there much infrastructure or social vitality. There, cities are sprouting almost overnight, forests giving way to factories and farms.

Thubron hires guides, hitches rides, hops a train when he has to, and chats up whomever he can. The Russians, it turns out, fear and resent the Chinese. The Chinese feel much the same about the Russians, though with perhaps less fear than contempt. Their shared history is not a pretty one. In 1689, after Manchu armies uprooted Cossacks from forts they had established throughout the region, the czar ceded the Amur basin and much of Siberia to Beijing. By the mid-19th century, China had been hobbled by rapacious European powers, including and particularly by Britain. In 1858, Russia took back all lands north of the Amur. It was hardly worth it. The Amur, difficult to navigate even when it wasn’t frozen, formed a poor highway to the Pacific. The towns that Thubron visits on the Russian side are dour, alcoholic, near-abandoned. On the Chinese side, new cities “gleam with the future.” There, the pace of change is so furious, the past is all but lost.

It is in the past, though, that Thubron seems most comfortable. Everywhere he can, he visits museums, cemeteries, sites of half-forgotten massacres. In the Mongolian steppe, he peers through the window of a ruined monastery alleged to be haunted by butchered monks. “I glimpse only a disintegrating prayer-hall,” Thubron writes, “and the advance of swarming fungus.” At its best, “The Amur River” evokes a sense of history advancing as just such a swarm, erecting and toppling empires, goading hopes and trampling dreams.

But this vision rarely comes into focus. Mainly, it hovers over the text as an ambient sense of loss. Meanwhile, Thubron’s interest in contemporary political dynamics remains hazy. He acknowledges the ecological carnage wreaked by illegal logging and poaching — one of his guides is a poacher — but he presents these phenomena as local dilemmas, turning a blind eye to the global circuits of capital that make them profitable. He shies from making connections of any sort between the world through which he travels and the one in which we live, as if the places he explores exist on some other planet.

More inexplicably, Thubron ignores the one factor that is altering the landscapes through which he travels more than any other. He explicitly mentions climate change just once, when a woman he meets alludes to the catastrophic floods that hit the Amur in 2013. Such deluges, he notes, “are the bane and terror of the river. Climate change has not abated them.” But there is nothing timeless about the Amur’s flooding. The river rose higher in 2013 than it had in any year since record-keeping began. Rising temperatures and shifts in rainfall make floods more common and extreme, just as they have caused devastating drought, uprooting hundreds of thousands of people in the parts of Mongolia through which Thubron traveled. He did not notice them, choosing instead to write about Genghis Khan and the cruelties endured under communism.

Thubron never says why he wanted to follow the Amur, nor what, if anything, he hoped to learn. It must have seemed important — Thubron was nearly 80 when he set out — but one begins to suspect it was just pride that motivated him, or force of habit. This silence robs his account of urgency. His wanderings feel aimless: another rotting Russian town, another sad museum, another undulating vista. It doesn’t help that the Cold War mind-set Thubron brings with him excludes far more than it is capable of holding. The role he was able to comfortably play for so many years, the confident scout of a society certain of its power, is no longer viable. You can feel the loss in the sag of his narrative.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of “Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time.”

Dear Commons Community,

Former CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was terminated yesterday, less than a week after documents showed just how deep the journalist was involved in helping his brother, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), respond to allegations of sexual harassment.

“Chris Cuomo was suspended earlier this week pending further evaluation of new information that came to light about his involvement with his brother’s defense,” CNN Communications said in a statement. “We retained a respected law firm to conduct the review, and have terminated him, effective immediately. While in the process of that review, additional information has come to light. Despite the termination, we will investigate as appropriate.”

Cuomo was suspended on Tuesday following the release of documents as part of Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation into Andrew Cuomo’s behavior while governor. Andrew Cuomo resigned in August after James released a damning report detailing claims by 11 women who said he acted inappropriately while in office.

Documents showed texts between Chris Cuomo and his brother’s top aide, Melissa DeRosa, in early March of this year.

“Please help me with prep,” the CNN anchor texted.

In another message, Chris Cuomo said he had “a lead on the wedding girl,” one of the governor’s accusers.

The CNN anchor previously admitted his involvement in helping his brother back in March, but the newly released texts show just how deeply involved he was in the scandal.

“This is not how I want my time at CNN to end but I have already told you why and how I helped my brother,” Cuomo said in a statement Saturday. “So let me now say as disappointing as this is, I could not be more proud of the team at Cuomo Prime Time and the work we did as CNN’s #1 show in the most competitive time slot. I owe them all and will miss that group of special people who did really important work.”

Cuomo previously addressed the controversy after he was suspended from CNN.

“It hurts to even say it. It’s embarrassing. But I understand it,” Cuomo said on “Let’s Get After It” following his suspension earlier this week from CNN.

“And I understand why some people feel the way they do about what I did. I’ve apologized in the past, and I mean it,” Cuomo continued. “It’s the last thing I ever wanted to do, is compromise any of my colleagues.”

It will be difficult for him to resurrect his career!

Tony

Dear Community,

The National Weather Service has issued a blizzard warning for Hawaii saying wind gusts of above 100 mph (160 kph) and 12 inches (30.4 centimeters) or more of snow were possible.

The warning in effect through Sunday morning for the Big Island said “travel should be restricted to emergencies only” and those who must travel especially in the mountain areas should have a winter survival kit.

Blizzard warnings for Hawaii are rare, but not unheard of. The Big Island has mountain peaks that reach nearly 14,000 feet (more than 4,200 meters). CNN reported that the last blizzard warning issued by the National Weather Service in Hawaii was more than three and half years ago.

The threat of snow in Hawaii comes as places in the Rocky Mountains more used to white wintery weather are close to breaking records for days without snow. Denver’s high temperature Wednesday hit 73 degrees Fahrenheit (23 degrees Celsius), tying the record set in 1973.

Tony