Image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows a dead coral  off the coast of Florida on July 23, 2023. (Andrew Ibarra/NOAA via AP)

Dear Commons Community,

The water temperature on the tip of Florida hit hot tub levels, exceeding 100 degrees (37.8 degrees Celsius) two days in a row. And meteorologists say that could potentially be the hottest seawater ever measured..

Just 26 miles (40 kilometers) away, scientists saw devastating effects from prolonged hot water surrounding Florida — devastating coral bleaching and even some death in what had been one of the Florida Keys’ most resilient reefs.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Weather records for sea water temperature are unofficial, and there are certain conditions in this reading that could disqualify it for a top mark, meteorologists said. But the initial reading on a buoy at Manatee Bay hit 101.1 degrees (38.4 Celsius) Monday evening, according to National Weather Service meteorologist George Rizzuto. On Sunday night the same buoy showed an online reading of 100.2 (37.9 Celsius) degrees.

“It seems plausible,” Rizzuto said. “That is a potential record.”

While there aren’t official water temperature records, a 2020 study listed a 99.7 degree (37.6 Celsius) mark in Kuwait Bay in July 2020 as the world’s highest recorded sea surface temperature. Rizzuto said a new record from Florida is plausible because nearby buoys measured in the 98 and 99 (36.7 and 37.2 Celsius) degree range.

“This is a hot tub. I like my hot tub around 100, 101, (37.8, 38.3 Celsius). That’s what was recorded yesterday,” said Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters. Hot tub maker Jacuzzi recommends water between 100 and 102 degrees (7.8 and 38.9 Celsius).

“We’ve never seen a record-breaking event like this before,” Masters said.

But he and University of Miami tropical meteorologist Brian McNoldy said while the hot temperatures fit with what’s happening around Florida, it may not be accepted as a record because the area is shallow, has sea grasses in it and may be influenced by warm land in the nearby Everglades National Park.

Still, McNoldy said, “it’s amazing.”

The fact that two 100 degree measurements were taken in consecutive days gives credence to the readings, McNoldy said. Water temperatures have been in the upper 90s in the area for more than two weeks.

There aren’t many coral reefs in Manatee Bay, but elsewhere in the Florida Keys, scientists diving at Cheeca Rocks found bleaching and even death in some of the Keys most resilient corals, said Ian Enochs, lead of the coral program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory.

NOAA researcher Andrew Ibarra, who took his kayak to the area because of the hot water, said, “I found that the entire reef was bleached out. Every single coral colony was exhibiting some form of paling, partial bleaching or full out bleaching.”

Some coral even had died, he said. This is on top of bleaching seen last week by the University of Miami as NOAA increased the level of alert for coral problems earlier this month.

Until the 1980s coral bleaching was mostly unheard of around the globe yet “now we’ve reached the point where it’s become routine,” Enochs said. Bleaching, which doesn’t kill coral but weakens it and could lead to death, occurs when water temperatures pass the upper 80s (low 30s Celsius), Enochs said.

“This is more, earlier than we have ever seen,” Enochs said. “I’m nervous by how early this is occurring.”

All of this hot weather is getting scary!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

UPS and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have reached a deal on a new labor contract to avert a massive strike.

The two sides announced the tentative agreement for a new five-year contract Monday night, just a week before the union’s strike deadline.

The Teamsters union said the new contract deal comes with higher wages, more full-time jobs and workplace protections.  As reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“Rank-and-file UPS Teamsters sacrificed everything to get this country through a pandemic and enabled UPS to reap record-setting profits,” said Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien said in a written statement. “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”

UPS CEO Carol Tomé issued a statement saying “Together we reached a win-win-win agreement on the issues that are important to Teamsters leadership, our employees and to UPS and our customers.”

“This agreement continues to reward UPS’s full- and part-time employees with industry-leading pay and benefits while retaining the flexibility we need to stay competitive, serve our customers and keep our business strong,” Tomé said.

The Teamsters labor contract extends through July 31, and the union had threatened to strike Aug. 1 if it did not have a new contract agreement by that time.

Teamsters General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman said in a written statement that UPS “came dangerously close” to a strike, “but we kept firm on our demands.”

The Teamsters have more than 340,000 members at UPS, making it the largest private collective bargaining agreement in North America. A strike would have crippled shipping across the country, affect millions of deliveries a day and damage UPS’s reputation with customers.

The next step is for the union’s 176 local leaders to meet July 31 to review the tentative agreement. If the recommend it for a ratification vote, UPS rank-and-file members will vote on the deal Aug. 3-22.

O’Brien has worked to maintain unity among members on the UPS negotiations, after years past in which the the Teamsters had divided into factions.

The Teamsters union had previously announced tentative agreements on a number of terms during negotiations that started in April, including equipping new trucks with air conditioning, ending a two-tier pay system, stopping required overtime on a day they aren’t scheduled to work and establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a full holiday.

Last month, the union’s members voted to authorize a strike in the event that negotiations fail to reach an agreement. Union leaders then ratcheted up pressure in the negotiations, pushing for faster progress in the talks.

UPS has been losing some business to competitors, including FedEx, as customers worried about how they would move their goods if there is a strike.

Tomé also said in April that the company had a pipeline of potential business worth more than $6 billion, but that it was “hard to sell into… because of that Teamsters negotiation.”

“But we are going to go hard at it once we have that handshake deal,” Tomé said. “We’ve got to win faster, and we will win faster when the uncertainty is behind us” of the Teamsters negotiations.

Congratulations to both sides for reaching an agreement and averting disruption to services in the country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Monday suggested how Republican megadonors can thwart Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.

In a column for The Wall Street Journal, Romney encouraged GOP donors to pull funding to their preferred candidates as soon as their campaigns sag, forcing them to drop out of the race.

Why? Because Trump can still be beaten “if the field narrows to a two-person race” before he “has the nomination sewn up,” argued Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee.

Romney even said when that should happen: “No later than, say, Feb. 26, the Monday following the contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.”

Otherwise, the crowded field of warring GOP candidates “will split the non-Trump vote, giving him the prize,” said Romney.

Romney, a longtime critic of Trump, acknowledged the financial and other incentives for candidates to stay in the race, even when their chances are all but busted. But he concluded:

“Our party and our country need a nominee with character, driven by something greater than revenge and ego, preferably from the next generation. Family, friends and campaign donors are the only people who can get a lost-cause candidate to exit the race. After Feb. 26, they should start doing just that.”

Romney has it right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Chris Christie gave it to  his 2024 GOP presidential rival Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Sunday after the Floridian attempted to distance himself from a controversial decision by the state’s board of education.

Last week, Florida’s Board of Education released a set of educational standards that directs teachers to instruct students about the skills enslaved people developed and how they could have been applied for their “personal benefit,” as well as the “violence perpetrated against and by African Americans,” HuffPost previously reported.

But in a CNN interview on Friday, DeSantis, who has approved several pieces of legislation limiting the teaching of Black history, denied playing any role in the board’s controversial decision.

Christie called DeSantis out on Sunday, telling CBS’s Margaret Brennan on “Face the Nation” that DeSantis’ denials were “not the words of leadership.”

“DeSantis started this fire with the bill that he signed and now he doesn’t want to take responsibility for whatever is done in the aftermath of it. And from listening and watching his comments, he’s obviously uncomfortable,” Christie said.

Christie also said the Florida governor has been “micromanaging curriculum in schools” rather than focusing on bigger national issues, such as inflation.

“I think people see this as politically manipulative,” Christie said. “We’re dividing our country into smaller and smaller and smaller pieces. And politicians are pitting them against each other to create conflict. And that’s not going to make the country bigger, better, stronger, or freer,” he added.

DeSantis is currently polling in second place in the 2024 Republican field at about 20%, behind front-runner former President Donald Trump, who has about 50% support, according to Real Clear Politics. Christie, a committed Trump critic, is trailing behind in seventh place with backing in the low single digits.

Christie has taken jabs at DeSantis before, saying he doesn’t consider DeSantis a conservative.

Just last month, Christie called out DeSantis when the Florida governor refused to denounce Trump’s involvement in the 2021 Capitol insurrection. DeSantis also said he was nowhere near Washington when it happened.

“He ‘wasn’t anywhere near Washington,’” Christie said. “Did he have a TV? Was he alive that day? Did he see what was going on? I mean, that’s one of the most ridiculous answers I’ve heard in this race so far.”

Christie is one of the few GOP candidates with the guts to call out others in the Republican Party.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Elon Musk has unveiled a new black and white “X” logo to replace Twitter’s famous blue bird as he follows through with a major rebranding of the social media platform he bought for $44 billion last year.

Musk replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture yesterday of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.

The X started appearing on the top of the desktop version of Twitter yesterday, but the bird was still dominant across the phone app.  As reported by the Associated Press.

Musk had asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco, saying it “certainly will be refined.”

“And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted Sunday.

The billionaire is CEO of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.

The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said.

In response to questions about what tweets would be called when the rebranding is done, Musk said they would be called Xs.

Musk, CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated with the letter. The billionaire is also CEO of rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., commonly known as SpaceX. And in 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal,

He calls his son with the singer Grimes, whose actual name is a collection of letters and symbols, “X.”

Musk’s Twitter purchase and rebranding are part of his strategy to create what he’s dubbed an “ everything app ” similar to China’s WeChat, which combines video chats, messaging, streaming and payments.

Linda Yaccarino, the longtime NBC Universal executive Musk tapped to be Twitter CEO in May, posted the new logo and weighed in on the change, writing on Twitter that X would be “the future state of unlimited interactivity — centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”

Experts, however, predicted the new name will confuse much of Twitter’s audience, which has already been souring on the social media platform following a raft of Musk’s other changes. The site also faces new competition from Threads, the new app by Facebook and Instagram parent Meta that directly targets Twitter users.

X marks the spot!

Tony

Generated by DALL-E

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times columnist, had a piece yesterday entitled. “In the U.K., a Disaster No One Wants to Talk About”.  She reviews the disastrous consequences leaving the European Union has meant for the British.  Here is an excerpt.

“There’s a growing understanding in Britain that the country’s vote to quit the European Union, a decisive moment in the international rise of reactionary populism, was a grave error.

Just as critics predicted, Brexit has led to inflation, labor shortages, business closures and travel snafus. It has created supply chain problems that put the future of British car manufacturing in danger. Brexit has, in many cases, turned travel between Europe and the U.K. into a punishing ordeal, as I learned recently, spending hours in a chaotic passport control line when taking the train from Paris to London. British musicians are finding it hard to tour in Europe because of the costs and red tape associated with moving both people and equipment across borders, which Elton John called “crucifying.”

According to the U.K.’s Office for Budget and Responsibility, leaving the E.U. has shaved 4 percent off Britain’s gross domestic product. The damage to Britain’s economy, the O.B.R.’s chairman has said, is of the same “magnitude” as that from the Covid pandemic.

All this pain and hassle has created an anti-Brexit majority in Britain. According to a YouGov poll released this week, 57 percent of Britons say the country was wrong to vote to leave the E.U., and a slight majority wants to rejoin it. Even Nigel Farage, the former leader of the far-right U.K. Independence Party sometimes known as “Mr. Brexit,” told the BBC in May, “Brexit has failed.”

This mess was, of course, both predictable and predicted. That’s why I’ve been struck, visiting the U.K. this summer, by the curious political taboo against discussing how badly Brexit has gone, even among many who voted against it. Seven years ago, Brexit was an early augur of the revolt against cosmopolitanism that swept Donald Trump into power. (Trump even borrowed the “Mr. Brexit” moniker for himself.) Both enterprises — Britain’s divorce from the E.U. and Trump’s reign in the U.S. — turned out catastrophically. Both left their countries fatigued and depleted. But while America can’t stop talking about Trump, many in the U.K. can scarcely stand to think about Brexit.

“It’s so toxic,” Tobias Ellwood, a Tory lawmaker who has called on his colleagues to admit that Brexit was a mistake, told me. “People have invested so much time and pain and agony on this.” It’s like a “wound,” he said, that people want to avoid picking at. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, one of the few Labour Party leaders eager to discuss the consequences of leaving the E.U., described an “omertà,” or vow of silence, around it. “It’s the elephant in the room,” he told me. “I’m frustrated that no one’s talking about it.

What a shame.  This could have been avoided!

Tony

Henri Campeã

Dear Commons Community,

The novelist, Emily St. James, had a guest essay yesterday in The New York Times, lamenting what has happened to our public libraries especially those that have become political battlegrounds where books are targeted for censorship.   She recalls her youth and the importance of her small town library that for her growing up was a haven to learn about the world and its people regardless of their differences. Here is an excerpt.

“As far as my childhood self was concerned, the Carnegie Library in my tiny South Dakota hometown was the best place on earth. Once every week, I climbed its stairs and entered a space that smelled of mildew and oak.

Two large rooms stretched off to either side of the librarian’s desk, each subdivided into smaller spaces by old, wooden shelves. A small table bore videotapes and books from the state library in Pierre, titles that our perpetually underfunded library could not afford to add to its collection but wanted to make available anyway.

I grew up in a very white, very rural world, and the library let me know other lives were possible. There, I encountered books by authors like Ralph Ellison and Maya Angelou, which spoke of a world I had yet to encounter. Just reading the back cover of something like Oscar Hijuelos’s “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love” served as a reminder that there were other ways to live than my own.

I was also a queer girl who lacked the language to explain the feelings I had deep inside of me. Yet at the library, I encountered some of the first people who seemed at all like me, people written about as political activists in magazines like Time and Newsweek, as supporting characters in the occasional sci-fi novel the friendly librarian pressed on me, as curiosities in certain books containing anecdotes about, say, Christine Jorgensen, a World War II veteran and trans woman whose transition in the early 1950s caused a media sensation.

Maybe you had a similar space in your own youth, one that still looms large in the memory. Increasingly, however, libraries, mostly in exurban and rural communities like the one where I grew up, are encountering some of the harshest resistance they’ve ever faced, usually centered on books about queer identities or America’s long history of racism. Books targeted for censorship in America’s libraries in 2022 were up nearly 40 percent over 2021, with 41 percent of challenged books involving L.G.B.T.Q. identities, according to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.”

For me growing up in the South Bronx, the Melrose Library was where I would go as a youngster.  I can still remember one of the first books I borrowed, a biography of Sun Yat-sen.  Why I chose this book I cannot remember but it introduced me to China and its remarkable history. As an undergraduate I took a number of courses on China and Asia and would always recall this book.

Tony

Jack Schlossberg and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dear Commons Community,

The grandson of President John F. Kennedy, Jack Schlossberg, ridiculed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., on Friday for not endorsing Joe Biden’s re-election bid and running for president himself as he continues to spread conspiracy theories.  As reported by NBC News.

In a video posted to his Instagram, Schlossberg, Caroline Kennedy’s son, said his grandfather’s legacy is important and that Biden is becoming “the greatest progressive president we’ve ever had.”

“Under Biden, we’ve added 13 million jobs, unemployment is at its lowest in 60 years. Biden passed the largest investment in infrastructure since the New Deal and the largest investment in green energy ever. He’s appointed more federal judges than any president since my grandfather. He ended our longest war. He ended the Covid pandemic, and he ended Donald Trump. These are the issues that matter. And if my cousin, Bobby Kennedy Jr., cared about any of them, he would support Joe Biden too,” Schlossberg said.

“Instead, he’s trading in on Camelot, celebrity conspiracy theories and conflict for personal gain and fame,” he said about his second cousin. “I’ve listened to him. I know him. I have no idea why anyone thinks he should be president. What I do know is his candidacy is an embarrassment. Let’s not be distracted again by somebody’s vanity project. I’m excited to vote for Joe Biden in my state’s primary, and again in the general election. And I hope you will too.”

Schlossberg’s comments come a day after RFK Jr. testified before the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. During the hearing, Kennedy tried to defend himself from wide condemnation over comments he recently made suggesting Covid may be an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon possibly designed to spare “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

Kennedy set aside his prepared opening remarks saying, “I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic.”

Other members of the Kennedy family have also lashed out against RFK Jr. for his remarks and behavior.

Earlier this week, Kerry Kennedy, one of his sisters, lambasted her brother in a brief statement Monday after a report that quoted him as saying that Covid-19 was “targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”

An overwhelming proportion of American Jews are Ashkenazi Jews, who are descended from Jews who lived in Central and Eastern Europe.

NBC News has not verified the video. In a statement on Twitter later in the day, Kennedy defended his remarks, saying they were not antisemitic.

Former Rep. Joe Kennedy III, D-Mass., also weighed in Monday, tweeting that he condemns his uncle’s remarks.

The Kennedy name was political magic.  Not with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Friday, my wife Elaine and I saw Oppenheimer, the biographical movie about “the father of the atomic bomb” directed by Christopher Nolan.  Based on the book, American Prometheus (2005) by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time.  The plots and subplots are riveting and keep one’s attention.  The acting by Cillian Murphy (J. Robert Oppenheimer); Emily Blunt (Kitty Oppenheimer); Matt Damon (Leslie Groves)  and Robert Downey Jr. (Lewis Strauss)  among others, is superb.  Even the brief character scenes of a pantheon of theoretical physicists depicting Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Isidore Rabi, Enrico Fermi, and Richard Feynman are  for the most part historically correct allowing the viewer “to experience by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.”  Culminating scenes of the first atom bomb test, Oppenheimer’s meeting with President Harry Truman, and the hearing into Oppenheimer’s connection to the Communist Party jump out at the audience.  The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not shown.  The film concludes with Oppenheimer having his security clearance revoked. A great injustice as ever on the part of the conspiracy zealots in the U.S. government. 

In sum, I concur with the New York Times review (below) that Oppenheimer is “a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.”

See it!

Tony

———————————————————————————–

The New York Times

‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

In Christopher Nolan’s new film, “Oppenheimer,” Cillian Murphy stars as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American physicist who oversaw the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, N.M.Credit…Universal Pictures

By Manohla Dargis

Published July 19, 2023

Updated July 21, 2023

Oppenheimer https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/movies/oppenheimer-review-christopher-nolan.html

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

The movie is based on “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time.

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “Dunkirk” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Dear Commons Community,

President Joe Biden has chosen Admiral Lisa Franchetti to lead the Navy, an unprecedented choice that, if she is confirmed, will make her the first woman to be  the first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Biden’s decision goes against the recommendation of his Pentagon chief. But Franchetti, the current vice chief of operations for the Navy, has broad command and executive experience and was considered by insiders to be the top choice for the job. As reported by the Associated Press.

In a statement yesterday, Biden noted the historical significance of her selection and said “throughout her career, Admiral Franchetti has demonstrated extensive expertise in both the operational and policy arenas.”

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recommended that Biden select Adm. Samuel Paparo, the current commander of the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, several U.S. officials said last month. But instead, Biden is nominating Paparo to lead U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

A senior administration official said Biden chose Franchetti based on the broad scope of her experience at sea and ashore, including a number of high-level policy and administrative jobs that give her deep knowledge in budgeting and running the department.

At the same time, the official acknowledged that Biden understands the historical nature of the nomination and believes that Franchetti will be an inspiration to sailors, both men and women. The official spoke earlier on condition of anonymity because the nomination had not been made public.

Franchetti’s nomination will join the list of hundreds of military moves that are being held up by Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. He is blocking confirmation of military officers in protest of a Defense Department policy that pays for travel when a service member has to go out of state to get an abortion or other reproductive care.

Biden, in his statement, blasted Tuberville for prioritizing his domestic political agenda over military readiness.

“What Senator Tuberville is doing is not only wrong — it is dangerous,” Biden said. “He is risking our ability to ensure that the United States Armed Forces remain the greatest fighting force in the history of the world. And his Republican colleagues in the Senate know it.”

Franchetti is slated to serve as the acting Navy chief beginning next month when Adm. Michael Gilday, the current top naval officer, retires as planned.

Several women have served as military service secretaries as political appointees, but never as their top uniformed officer. A woman, Adm. Linda L. Fagan, is currently the commandant of the Coast Guard. She, however, is not a member of the Joint Staff. The Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security, not the Pentagon.

The news last month that the defense chief had recommended Papara stunned many in the Pentagon because it was long believed that Franchetti was in line for the top Navy job.

In a statement yesterday, Austin praised the nomination, saying, “I’m very proud that Admiral Franchetti has been nominated to be the first woman Chief of Naval Operations and member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where she will continue to inspire all of us.”

A surface warfare officer, she has commanded at all levels, heading U.S. 6th Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Korea. She was the second woman ever to be promoted to four-star admiral, and she did multiple deployments, including as commander of a naval destroyer and two stints as aircraft carrier strike group commander.

Paparo, who if confirmed will replace Adm. John Aquilino, is a naval aviator and a TOPGUN graduate with more than 6,000 flight hours in Navy fighter jets and 1,100 landings on aircraft carriers. A Pennsylvania native, he graduated from Villanova University and was commissioned into the Navy in 1987.

Prior to his Pacific tour, he was commander of naval forces in the Middle East, based in Bahrain, and also previously served as director of operations at U.S. Central Command in Florida.

Biden also said he will nominate Vice Adm. James Kilby to be the vice chief of the Navy and tap Vice Adm. Stephen Koehler to head the Pacific Fleet.

Congratulations Admiral Franchetti!

Tony