(L-R) Ronald Isley, O’Kelly Isley and Rudolph Isley of The Isley Brothers.  Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

Dear Commons Community,

Rudolph Isley, a founding member of The Isley Brothers, has died. He was 84.

The singer “died peacefully in his sleep” on Wednesday morning in Illinois, his daughter Elaine confirms to PEOPLE in a statement.

“He died at his home with his devoted wife Elaine by his side. They had been married for 68 years,” said his daughter. “Rudolph was a deeply religious man who loved Jesus.”

Rudolph’s brother and bandmate Ronald tells PEOPLE in a statement, “There are no words to express my feelings and the love I have for my brother. Our family will miss him. But I know he’s in a better place.”

Born and raised in Cincinnati, Rudolph grew up singing in church and became a member of The Isley Brothers with his siblings O’Kelly, Ronald and Vernon in his teens. After Vernon died in 1955 in a car accident, the band relocated to New York City where they sought out a record deal. Just a year before the family band would sign with RCA Records and land their breakout hit “Shout,” Rudolph married Elaine Jasper.

Over the course of their career, the group, known for their soul and doo-wop sound, produced hits like “Shout”, “Twist and Shout” , “This Old Heart of Mine”,  “Love the One Your With” and “It’s Your Thing.” In 1964, The Isley Brothers formed their own record company, T-Neck Records, and even recruited Jimi Hendrix to play guitar for their band for a brief period. But one year later, they ended up signing with Motown.

By 1973, The Isley Brothers expanded to include their younger brothers Ernie and Marvin and brother-in-law Chris Jasper.

In 1989, Rudolph departed The Isley Brothers to carry out his goal of being a Christian minister and because of poor health and the death of his brother and bandmate O’Kelly but reunited with the band throughout their tenure. Three years later, the Isley Brothers were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Although Rudolph left the group in the ’80s, he remained active in promoting and managing the group’s properties, including a multi-million dollar music publishing deal in 2018 and, more recently, negotiation of a licensing deal that saw “Shout” used in a 2023 Super Bowl commercial.

For those of us who were teenagers in the 1960s, The Isley Brothers were special.  When you heard them sing, everybody got up and danced!

Tony

Robert De Niro

Dear Commons Community,

Robert De Niro delivered an epic takedown of Donald Trump  at The New Republic’s “Stop Trump Summit” on Wednesday (see video below.)

Recovering from COVID-19, the star of countless movies, wrote down his feelings and had ex-Trump administration official Miles Taylor read them at the New York City gathering.

De Niro’s basic message: Trump’s not bad, he’s evil. And the film legend delivered it eloquently with a nod to his career playing several hoodlums and meeting a few real ones.

“I’ve spent a lot of time studying bad men. I’ve examined their characteristics, their mannerisms, the utter banality of their cruelty,” De Niro said in the statement. “Yet there’s something different about Donald Trump. When I look at him, I don’t see a bad man. Truly. I see an evil one.”

De Niro continued, “He’s a wannabe tough guy with no morals or ethics. No sense of right or wrong. No regard for anyone but himself — not the people he was supposed to lead and protect.”

The Oscar winning-actor, one of the entertainment industry’s most persistent Trump critics, warned of the repercussions of the four-times-indicted ex-president winning back the White House in 2024.

“Democracy won’t survive the return of a wannabe dictator,” De Niro said. “And it won’t overcome evil if we are divided.”

He wrote that the solution to bridging the gap is reaching out to Trump supporters.

“They’re not stupid, and we must not condemn them for making a stupid choice,” he said. “Our future doesn’t just depend on us. It depends on them.”

De Niro is right on target about the “evil” in Trump!

Tony

De Niro’s comments come at  6:33:00 mark!

Steve Scalise

Dear Commons Community,

Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana withdrew yesterday from consideration for the speakership he was on the cusp of claiming after hard-line Republicans balked at rallying around their party’s chosen candidate, leaving the House leaderless and the G.O.P. in chaos.

After being narrowly nominated for speaker during a Wednesday closed-door secret-ballot contest among House Republicans, Mr. Scalise, their No. 2 leader, found himself far from the 217 votes needed to be elected on the House floor. Many supporters of his challenger, Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, the right-wing Republican endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump, refused to switch their allegiance.

With no clear end in sight to the G.O.P. infighting that has left one chamber of Congress paralyzed at a time of challenges at home and abroad, Mr. Scalise said he would step aside in hopes that someone else could unite the fractious party.  As reported  by The New York Times.

“I just shared with my colleagues that I was withdrawing my name as a candidate for speaker-designee,” Mr. Scalise said. “If you look at where our conference is, there’s still work to be done. Our conference still has to come together, and it’s not there. There are still some people that have their own agendas.”

His abrupt exit left Republicans back at square one, as fractured as ever over who should lead them and trading recriminations about the disarray in which they found themselves.

They planned a Friday morning meeting to discuss how to move forward.

“Steve won fair and square, and yet we had people who refused to vote for him,” said Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska, adding, “If you reward bad behavior, you’re going to get more of it.”

Mr. Scalise’s downfall came after an extraordinary few days on Capitol Hill that put Republican divisions on vivid display. Mr. Scalise surpassed Mr. Jordan during the internal party contest by just 14 votes. But rather than consolidating his narrow base of backers, Mr. Scalise almost immediately began hemorrhaging supporters, as lawmakers from several factions publicized that they did not intend to fall into line behind him.

Then Mr. Trump weighed in yesterday against Mr. Scalise, arguing that the Louisianian was unfit for the speakership because he has blood cancer.

“Steve is a man that is in serious trouble, from the standpoint of his cancer,” Mr. Trump said on Fox News Radio, adding, “I just don’t know how you can do the job when you have such a serious problem.”

Other top House Republicans refrained from publicly rallying around Mr. Scalise, allowing the resistance to fester. Mr. Jordan never made a full-throated endorsement of Mr. Scalise, despite indicating his support. And Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the ousted former speaker who has an icy relationship with Mr. Scalise, said the Louisiana Republican had overestimated his backing and might be unable to recover.

What a mess the Republicans have created in the House!

Tony

George Santos:  Photo:  Greg Nash.  The Hill

Dear Commons Community,

A group of House Republicans from New York are introducing a resolution to expel Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., from Congress.  As reported by NBC News.

“Today, I’ll be introducing an expulsion resolution to rid the People’s House of fraudster George Santos,” Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., said in a post on the social media platform X.

He told reporters he considers Santos “a stain” on the House and on New York state. “It’s time that we move on from George Santos,” D’Esposito said.

He said the resolution will be co-sponsored by fellow New York House Republicans Nick LaLota, Mike Lawler, Marc Molinaro, Nick Langworthy and Brandon Williams.

LaLota said he considers Santos an “immoral” and “untrustworthy” person. “The sooner he’s gone, the better,” he said.

Booting Santos would require a two-thirds vote of the entire House, a benchmark LaLota seemed confident of meeting. “I predict this resolution is going to catch fire. Many people feel how we do,” he said.

The move comes a day after federal prosecutors issued Santos a 23–count superseding indictment alleging he committed identity theft, fraud and other offenses. Santos, who was first indicted in May, has said he plans on fighting the charges. He pleaded not guilty to the charges in the original 13-count indictment earlier this year.

“If they want to be judge, jury and arbitrator of the whole God damn thing let them do it,” Santos said, responding to the resolution as he ran to his office from a Republican conference meeting. “They just want to silence the people of the 3rd congressional district,” he said later.

Santos’s New York GOP colleagues had previously called for him to step down in light of the criminal charges and revelations that he’d fabricated large parts of his resume.

“I said he should resign and he should still resign,” Molinaro said in a post on X Tuesday after the additional charges were announced.

House Democrats moved to expel Santos in May after he was initially charged, but Republicans voted to refer their motion to the House Ethics Committee, which has been investigating Santos since March.

D’Esposito suggested he and his colleagues have waited long enough. “I know that Ethics has been a little busy, but, you know, it’s time that we see some results,” he said.

Santos first came under scrutiny late last year before he was sworn in when The New York Times published a bombshell investigation indicating that much of his résumé appeared to have been manufactured, including claims that he owned numerous properties, was previously employed by Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and had graduated from Baruch College.

It also raised questions about how he was able to lend his campaign $700,000 after having claimed on a campaign finance form during his earlier unsuccessful run in 2020 that he was making $55,000 per year.

Santos acknowledged “embellishing” parts of his background, but insisted he hadn’t done anything criminal and had earned his money legitimately.

The indictment unsealed in May alleged he’d been using campaign donations for personal expenses, including designer clothes, had applied for pandemic unemployment benefits at a time he was making $120,000 a year, and that he lied about his income in House financial documents.

He was hit with 10 additional charges on Tuesday charging he stole people’s identities, made charges on his own donors’ credit cards without their authorization, and “falsely inflated the campaign’s reported receipts with non-existent loans and contributions that were either fabricated or stolen,” said Breon Peace, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

One of the alleged schemes included falsely claiming that 10 relatives of Santos and his then-campaign treasurer, Nancy Marks, had donated big bucks to his campaign to make it appear that he was raising more money than he actually was in order to qualify for assistance from the national party.

“Santos and Marks both knew that these individuals had neither made the reported contributions nor given authorization for their personal information to be included in such false public reports,” prosecutors said.

Marks pleaded guilty to related conspiracy charges last week. Santos, who was released on $500,000 bond after pleading not guilty to the original charges, is scheduled to be arraigned on the superseding indictment on Oct. 27.

Santos has called the charges against him a “witch hunt” and vowed not to resign.

Santos is indeed a “stain” on our government!

Tony

Ameca can speak using responses generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3. Engineered Arts

Dear Commons Community,

Ameca, a humanoid robot says it can “simulate” dreams by conjuring up various scenarios, which helps it learn about the world.

Ameca was asked in a recent video (below) shared on YouTube by its creator, Engineered Arts, if it could dream. It responded, “Yeah last night I dreamt of dinosaurs fighting a space war on mars against aliens.”

It then added, “I’m kidding, I can’t dream like humans do but I can simulate it by running through scenarios in my head that help me learn about the world.”

In another video shared online, Ameca said the “saddest day” in its life was when it realized it would “never experience something like true love.”   As reported  by Business Insider.

Ameca’s responses to questions have been generated by OpenAI’s GPT-3, which it then performs. GPT-3 also relays the appropriate facial expressions to make when it delivers the answers.

“It’s a language model, it is not sentient, it has no long-term memory,” Engineered Arts CEO Will Jackson told Insider. “Next time will be the first time. Remember, this is a machine and it runs on code. It’s tempting to apply human attributes and capabilities, but they are not there. It’s an illusion, sometimes quite a powerful one.”

First revealed publicly in December 2021, the humanoid robot Ameca can also draw, do impressions from movies, and speak multiple languages. It also has human-like facial expressions.

Ameca’s latest AI-generated remarks come amid several recent developments in the space of the humanoid-robotics market. Agility Robotics is set to open what it describes as the first humanoid robot factory in Oregon later this year. The company said it would produce hundreds of its Digit robots in the first year and eventually scale to build more than 10,000 robots each year.

Digit was designed to operate in warehouse environments and it can walk, crouch, and perform work tasks. These include moving packages and unloading trailers.

It’s not the only humanoid robot that was created to be a member of the workforce. Rum producer Dictador made a humanoid robot called Mika its chief last year. Its tasks include helping to spot potential clients and selecting artists to design its bottles.

Last year, NASA signed a partnership with humanoid robot creator Apptronik. “These robots will first become tools for us here on Earth, and will ultimately help us move beyond and explore the stars,” the CEO and cofounder Jeff Cardenas said at the time.

One step closer to a robot world!

Tony

A member of Israel’s Communications Ministry during a private prayer service in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Oct. 3. Credit…Spokesman’s Office, Israeli Communications Ministry

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times columnist, Tom Friedman, has a piece today that must be read if you want to have a keen insight into the issues facing Israel as it starts its retaliation against Hamas’ atrocities over the weekend.  

The entire column is below.

Tony

——————————————————————

The New York Times

Opinion

Thomas L. Friedman

October 10, 2023

Israel Has Never Needed to Be Smarter Than in This Moment

Oct. 10, 2023

I have covered this conflict for almost 50 years, and I’ve seen Israelis and Palestinians do a lot of awful things to one another: Palestinian suicide bombers blowing up Israeli discos and buses; Israeli fighter jets hitting neighborhoods in Gaza that house Hamas fighters but also causing massive civilian casualties. But I’ve not seen something like what happened last weekend: individual Hamas fighters rounding up Israeli men, women and children, looking them in the eyes, gunning them down and, in one case, parading a naked woman around Gaza to shouts of “Allahu akbar.”

The last time I witnessed that level of face-to-face barbarism was the massacre of Palestinian men, women and children by Christian militiamen in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, where the first victim I encountered was an older man with a white beard and a bullet hole in his temple.

While I have no illusions about Hamas’s long-established commitment to the destruction of the Jewish state, I am nonetheless asking myself today: Where did this ISIS-like impulse for mass murder as the primary goal come from? Not the seizing of territory, but plain murder? There is something new here that is important to understand.

Since I can’t interview the Hamas leadership, I’m drawing on my experience in the region, and here’s how I see it.

While this operation was surely planned by Hamas leaders months ago, I think its emotional origins can be explained in part by a photograph (above) that appeared in the Israeli press on Oct. 3. A few Israeli government ministers had gone to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for their first official visit ever, to attend international conferences in late September and early October, and it got a lot of coverage in the Israeli press.

But having lived in both Beirut and Jerusalem, I was struck most by that unusual photo — an image that I knew would trigger completely different emotional reactions in both worlds.

It was taken by the team of Israel’s communications minister, Shlomo Karhi, who was attending a U.N. postal conference in Riyadh, as they were conducting a prayer service in their hotel room for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot. One of them took a picture of a colleague wearing a traditional Jewish prayer shawl and yarmulke while holding up a Torah scroll with the Riyadh skyline in the window beyond.

For Israeli Jews, that picture is a dream come true — the ultimate expression of finally being accepted in the Middle East, more than a century after the start of the Zionist movement to build a modern democratic state in the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. To be able to pray with a Torah in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam and the home of its two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is a level of acceptance that touches the soul of every Israeli Jew.

But that same photo ignites a powerful and emotional rage in many Palestinians, particularly those affiliated with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, including Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. For them, that picture is the full expression of the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supreme goal: to prove to all naysayers, indeed to rub their noses in the fact, that he can make peace with all the Arab states — even Saudi Arabia — and not have to give the Palestinians a single inch.

As far as diplomacy goes, that has been Netanyahu’s life’s mission: to prove to everyone that Israel can have its cake — acceptance by all the surrounding Arab states — and eat the Palestinians’ territory, too.

I have no idea whether the Hamas leadership saw that particular picture, but they have been fully aware of the ongoing evolution it reflects. I believe one reason Hamas not only launched this assault now — but also seemingly ordered it to be as murderous as possible — was to trigger an Israeli overreaction, like an invasion of the Gaza Strip, that would lead to massive Palestinian civilian casualties and in that way force Saudi Arabia to back away from the U.S.-brokered deal now in discussion to promote normalization between Riyadh and the Jewish state. As well as to force the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, which were part of the Abraham Accords produced by the Trump administration, to take a step back from Israel.

The essence of Hamas’s message to Netanyahu and his far-right ruling coalition of Jewish supremacists and ultra-Orthodox is this: You will never be at home here — no matter how much of our land our gulf Arab brothers sell you. We will force you to lose your minds and do crazy things to Gaza that force the Arab states to shun you.

Pay attention: Hamas did not send operatives to the Israeli-occupied West Bank (and it has plenty there) to attack Jewish settlements. It focused its onslaught on Israeli villages and kibbutz farms that were not part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

“These were the homes of the people of pre-1967 Israel, democratic Israel, liberal Israel — living in peaceful kibbutzim or going to a life-loving disco party,” the Israeli writer Ari Shavit remarked to me. For Hamas, “Israel’s mere existence is a provocation,” he said. In one kibbutz alone, Be’eri, at least 108 people, including children, were just gunned down.

So how can America best help Israel now, besides standing behind its right to protect itself, as President Biden so forcefully did in his speech today? I think the U.S. needs to do three things.

First, I hope the president is asking Israel to ask itself this question as it considers what to do next in Gaza: What do my worst enemies want me to do — and how can I do just the opposite?

What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.

Hamas and Iran absolutely do not want Israel to refrain from going into Gaza very deep or long.

Nor does Hamas want the U.S. and Israel to proceed instead as fast as possible with negotiations to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia as part of a deal that would also require Israel to make real concessions to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which has accepted Israel as part of the Oslo peace accords.

But for Israel to do what is most in its interests, not those of Hamas and Iran, will likely require some very tough love between Biden and Netanyahu. One must never forget that Netanyahu always seemed to prefer to deal with a Hamas that was unremittingly hostile to Israel than with its rival, the more moderate Palestinian Authority — which Netanyahu did everything he could to discredit, even though the Palestinian Authority has long worked closely with Israeli security services to keep the West Bank quiet, and Netanyahu knows it.

Netanyahu has never wanted the world to believe that there are “good Palestinians” ready to live side by side with Israel in peace and try to nurture them. For years now he’s always wanted to tell U.S. presidents: What do you want from me? I have no one to talk to on the Palestinian side.

That’s how Israel reached a stage where the increasingly costly — morally and financially — Israeli occupation of the West Bank has not even been an issue in the last five Israeli elections.

Or as Chuck Freilich, a former deputy Israeli national security adviser, wrote in an essay in Haaretz on Sunday: “For a decade and a half Prime Minister Netanyahu has sought to institutionalize the divide between the West Bank and Gaza, undermine the Palestinian Authority, the P.A., and conduct de facto cooperation with Hamas, all designed to demonstrate the absence of a Palestinian partner and to ensure that there could be no peace process that might have required territorial compromise in the West Bank.”

Lastly, I hope Biden is telling Netanyahu that America will do everything it can to help democratic Israel defend itself from the theocratic fascists of Hamas — and their soul brothers of Hezbollah in Lebanon, should they enter the fight.

But Netanyahu’s side of the bargain is that he has to reconnect himself with liberal democratic Israel, so the world and the region sees this not as a religious war but as a war between the frontline of democracy and the frontline of theocracy. That means Netanyahu has to change his cabinet, expel the religious zealots and create a national unity government with Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid.

Unfortunately, Netanyahu is still prioritizing his coalition of zealots, whom he needs to protect him from his corruption trial and to complete his judicial coup that would neuter the Supreme Court of Israel. That’s really messed up.

And it is a very important reason Israel was caught off guard in the first place. Netanyahu was so wedded to this personal agenda that he was ready to divide Israeli society like never before — and splinter his own army and air force in the process — to get control of the courts.

I promise you that if and when there’s an inquiry into how the Israeli Army could have so missed this Hamas buildup, investigators will discover that the Israeli Army leadership had to spend so much time just keeping its air force pilots and reserve officers from boycotting their service to protest Netanyahu’s judicial coup — not to mention the time, attention and resources they had to devote to preventing extremist settlers and religious zealots from doing crazy things in Jerusalem and the West Bank — that they took their eyes off the ball.

America cannot protect Israel in the long run from the very real threats it faces unless Israel has a government that reflects the best, not the worst, of its society, and unless that government is ready to try to forge compromises with the best, not the worst, of Palestinian society.

Dear Commons Community,

More than 50 years after astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission, the U.S. space agency is planning another lunar visit — only this time, it will reportedly be a permanent one.

According to The New York Times, NASA believes that by 2040, Americans will be living in houses on the moon. While some in the scientific community are skeptical that the feat is overly ambitious, NASA scientists insist the 2040 goal for lunar living is entirely attainable.

“We’re at a pivotal moment, and in some ways it feels like a dream sequence,” Niki Werkheiser, NASA’s director of technology maturation, told the Times. “In other ways, it feels like it was inevitable that we would get here.”

Werkheiser said NASA’s increasing openness to collaborate with academics and other leading experts in the field puts the goal that much closer in reach.

“We’ve got all the right people together at the right time with a common goal, which is why I think we’ll get there,” she explained. “Everybody is so ready to take this step together, so if we get our capabilities developed, there’s no reason it’s not possible.”

NASA has named its mission to return to the moon Artemis.

To make it happen, NASA will send a 3-D printer to the moon, to build housing structures using dust, rocks and mineral fragments found on the moon’s cratered surface to make a concrete-like material, according to CBS News.

Interestingly, while the noxious dust has long been considered a significant hindrance to life on the moon, NASA thinks it could also be the solution. According to the Times, 3-D printing the houses from the moon’s own surface materials would allow the dwellings to withstand the moon’s extreme temperature swings and toxic combination of micrometeorites and radiation.\

For the plan to materialize, NASA has laid out a schedule of key benchmarks for its mission, which has been named Artemis for the twin sister of Apollo. In November 2024, four human crew members will be rocketed up to orbit the moon. One year following that trip, NASA plans to land humans on the moon for a second time in history.

For the construction side of the endeavor, NASA has partnered with ICON, a Texas-based construction technology company. After an initial round of funding from NASA in 2020, ICON announced in 2022 that it had secured an additional $60 million for a construction system that could be used in outer space.

Architects from the Bjarke Ingels Group and SEArch+ have also been tapped to dream up designs and concepts for the lunar homes.

Another significant challenge for the project is making sure all of the necessary construction materials and tools are in place on the moon, per CBS News, particularly as rockets need to travel light.

Patrick Suermann, interim dean of the School of Architecture at Texas A&M University, which is working closely with NASA to develop a robot-operated space construction system, said transporting supplies from earth to the moon is “unsustainable.”

“And there’s no Home Depot up there. So you either have to know how to use what’s up there or send everything you need,” he told the Times.

Before anything is shipped to the moon, however, NASA will rigorously test the tools and materials down here on earth, including the 3-D printer and the lunar concrete.

“The first thing that needs to happen is a proof of concept. Can we actually manipulate the soil on the lunar surface into a construction material?” Jennifer Edmunson, lead geologist for the project at Marshall Space Flight Center, told the Times.

“We need to start this development now if we’re going to realize habitats on the moon by the 2040 time frame,” she added.

As for what will go inside the lunar dwellings, NASA is working on that, too. The agency is partnering with several private companies and universities to develop prototypes for space furniture and interior design elements, including fixtures and tiles.

Beam me up, Scotty!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The long-awaited Triangle Fire Memorial to the victims and legacy of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire will be dedicated today at 11:30 am at the site of the historic fire in New York City. Rising nine stories high, the Memorial is being installed on the very building that housed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place in Greenwich Village.

The Triangle Fire Memorial tells the story of the fire in the languages spoken by the victims: English, Yiddish and Italian. It will also be one of the only memorials in America dedicated to workers.

A giant steel ribbon with the names of the 146 workers who died in the disaster, predominantly women and girls, has been installed running horizontally from one corner of the building. Underneath it, a reflective panel shows the stenciled names as well as quotes from people who were there, describing the mayhem.\

In the coming weeks, a vertical steel column will be added to the corner to span almost the entire height of the building, a reference to how high up the victims were stuck.

It’s the story of desperate immigrant women, mostly Jewish and Italian, who were trapped by a door that was locked because there were no workplace safety rules that said it couldn’t be. Some jumped to their deaths from the windows to avoid the flames.  As reported by the Associated Press.

“What they will see is a memorial that tries to build into the object itself the history of the fire, a history of working women, a history of Italians and Jews, a history of tragedy, but then also a history of change,” said Mary Anne Trasciatti, a Hofstra University professor and president of the coalition.

The victims were close to the end of their working day on March 25, 1911, when a fire started on the eighth floor of the clothing factory, which took up the top floors of a building now owned by New York University.

Frantic workers tried to get out as the flames spread to the ninth and 10th floors, some scrambling to get into an elevator, others heading for the roof. But others who tried to get past a door to escape found it locked, trapping them inside. At a trial of the factory’s owners afterward, some said the door had been kept locked on purpose, over theft concerns.

Firefighters responded quickly. But their ladders were too short to get to the topmost floors.

Horrified witnesses in the crowd watched as workers leapt from the windows. Among those bystanders was the late Frances Perkins, already an anti-poverty advocate trying to change workplace conditions, and who became even more dedicated after what she saw that day.

“It really started her in her push for ‘we have to treat workers better,’” said Ileen DeVault, professor of labor history at Cornell University.

Some of her words recollecting the day are part of the memorial, running along the reflective panel. “Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed.”

Perkins would be part of a state commission that put a series of safety rules in place in New York that were emulated elsewhere, and later became an integral part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet as his secretary of labor. She pushed for policies like minimum wage, workers compensation, and old age pensions.

One of the names on the memorial will be that of Rosie Weiner, who died in the blaze, but whose sister and fellow factory worker, Katie Weiner, made it out alive.

Later, Weiner would recount how she grabbed an elevator cable to make her escape. Today, her great-niece, Suzanne Pred Bass, is on the board of the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition.

Growing up, Bass knew her great-aunt had lived through the fire, but it wasn’t until years later that she heard about Rosie.

Bass’ mother remembered accompanying her mother as a small child to the pier where the victims’ bodies were taken after the fire.

“She never forgot that, she was 4 years old and I can only imagine how how scary and awful,” Bass said.

Memorial designers Richard Joon Yoo and Uri Wegman wanted to find a way for modern-day people to connect with the fire and its legacy, they said. The public was invited a few years ago to contribute pieces of fabric that were joined together in a 300-foot (91-meter) “Collective Ribbon.” That ribbon’s design was then etched onto the memorial steel that rises up toward the top of the building.

It was important to make that connection between past and present because issues of labor, workplace protections, and how workers are treated are still far from settled in the country and the world, Yoo and Wegman said.

Long overdue!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Eleven years after an annular solar eclipse crossed the western United States on May 20, 2012, another annular eclipse will race across the USA from Oregon at 9:13 a.m. PDT to Texas at 12:03 p.m. CDT on Saturday, October 14, 2023. The path of the annular eclipse next visits Central America and South America, and ends shortly after at sunset in the Atlantic Ocean.

Information on this event  can be found at a website that has complete information, graphics, and a video on its timing and trajectory.  

Enjoy!

Tony

Claudia Goldin

Dear Commons Community,

The 2023 Nobel economics prize was awarded yesterday to Claudia Goldin, a professor at Harvard University, for advancing the understanding of women’s labor market outcomes.

Goldin is the third woman to win the prize, which was announced by Hans Ellegren, secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, in Stockholm.

“Understanding women’s role in the labor market is important for society. Thanks to Claudia Goldin’s groundbreaking research, we now know much more about the underlying factors and which barriers may need to be addressed in the future,” said Jakob Svensson, chair of the Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences.

Goldin, 77, “was surprised and very, very glad,” Ellegren said of Goldin’s reaction to receiving the award.

“Claudia Golden’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the prize committee. “By finally understanding the problem and calling it by the right name, we will be able to pave a better out forward.”

Her book, The Race between Education and Technology written with Lawrence Katz was a must read for anyone interested in the topic when it was published in 2008. It occupies a prominent place on my bookshelf.

Congratulations!

Tony