Cahokia, Illinois is a key example to how robust life was in the Americas long before Christopher Columbus

The Americas prior to Christopher Columbus were far from the untouched wilderness we have long been taught in school. They were instead a complex environment that worked because of the interplay between humans and natural forces, as I noted in my recent article about historian Charles C. Mann’s book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

I was particularly interested to get back to the section about Cahokia, which is now present day in Illinois just down the highway from where I grew up in Edwardsville and practically in the shadow of the St. Louis Arch (see these photos from my most recent visit to Cahokia).

I would have liked Mann to include more about Cahokia. But he colors in a bit of the amazing story of the Cahokia tribe of the Illiniwek people. Here are some of his highlights:

• Anyone traveling up the Mississippi River in 1180 would’ve seen the 120 "Cahokia mounds" looming in the distance. 
• Monks Mound was (and still is) the largest of the mounds and is the largest man-made mound ever built in the United States. Its base is larger than both the Pyramid of the Sun in Mexico and the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.
• With about 15,000 people, Cahokia was the largest concentration of people north of the Rio Grande. It was also really the only city - period - north of the Rio Grande. The population at the time was comparable in size to London, which, if you think about it, is kind of astounding.
• It had few specialized craft workers and no middle-class merchants. The inhabitants really knew nothing about how cities worked so they had to invent everything for themselves as they progressed.
• Much at the heart of Mann's thesis is that Cahokia's mounds weren’t always thought to be Native American. In the 19th century, various scholars believed them to be Chinese, Welsh, Phoenician, or others. In fact, there was very little serious study at all about Cahokia until the 1960s. 
• Since then, there has been a flood and we have learned a lot, including the 270 bodies that have been found, with all of the burials occurring between 1000 and 1200, including overwhelming evidence of sacrifical burials. Mann notes that about 50 women appear to have been buried alive.
• What eventually killed Cahokia's earliest society was the agricultural runoff created by their maize production, which got into Cahokia Creek and other waterways nearby. Cahokia's leaders were so focused on keeping a strong hold over their people that they didn’t pay enough attention to external environmental factors. 
• By 1350, there was almost no one left. Never again would be that large of a Native American community be established north of Mexico.

We are part of Sapiens, which is just one of the multiple human species that have existed

I've started reading Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari, and - if you're interested in people at all - it's a gripping read with each and every paragraph. It's broken into four parts, or revolutions: cognitive, agricultural, the unification of mankind, and scientific. My multi-part overview begins with Part 1 on the start of The Cognitive Revolution.

Harari's timeline at the beginning includes the most crucial of stats and puts everything nicely in context. That was what was missing in another history of humankind I recently read, A Little History of the World, by E.H. Gombrich. (Side conversation: If you’re looking for a chronological human history, Gombrich's book is a little all over the place and probably not for you. That said, his humor - and the narrator in the audiobook is very good too - is really well worth the read all by itself.) 

Back to Harari:

• Matter and energy appeared 13.5 billion years ago - the world of physics beginning about 300,000 years later with the Big Bang. The world of chemistry began with atoms and molecules interacting.
• Earth was formed 4.5 billion years ago. Then, about 3.8 billion years ago, the world of biology started when molecules formed organisms.
• Fast forward to 6 million years ago, when humans and chimpanzees shared the last of their immediate relatives.
• The genus Homo - species that evolve from a common ancestor and which are very closely related to modern humans (Homo Sapien self gratuitously means wise man) - evolved in Africa and invented the first stone tools 2.5 million years ago.
• Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia 2 million years ago.
• Neanderthals evolved in Europe and the Middle East 500,000 years ago.
• After an astoudingly long time continuing to exist and evolve in the cold, fire was invented and being used daily 200,000 years ago.

Harari's narrative begins 70,000 years ago with "The Cognitive Revolution," with this being essentially the start of our history, language emerging, and Sapiens finally spreading beyond Africa (long after other types of human species did). They settled in Australia 45,000 years ago, alongside the extinction of that continent's megafauna. Neanderthals became extinct 30,000 years ago. Sapiens setted America 16,000 years ago as American megafauna went extinct. 

From about 2 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, there were several different human species roaming the world. It wasn’t exactly like the posters we see of apes slowly progressing into modern humans. It was just like how today there are many species of dogs, foxes, bears, and pigs. Someday there very likely could be multiple human species on Earth as well.

If you traveled back 150,000 years ago, most scientists agree there were humans walking around East Africa that looked pretty much like us today. 70,000 years ago they started spreading through Eurasia. There are differing theories, but it seems most likely that Sapiens somehow killed off Neanderthals and everyone alive today harkens back to that original Sapien species from East Africa. This species made its way from Africa to Europe and Asia then to Australia and North America and finally to South America. There is some evidence and ongoing research to determine if Neanderthals weren’t completely killed off but actually merged with Sapiens and still exist in some small percentages to this day.

Homo Sapiens have long viewed ourselves "as set apart from animals. But that's just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother."

Humans have paid dearly for our many advantages. While being upright is nice because we can scan the landscape for threats and use our hands for things like throwing rocks at those threats, it is not easy to carry upright our heavy brains. These big-head-causing brains also have made it so we need to be born premature for mothers to survive childbirth, which is why it takes us a much longer time than animal babies, which typically start walking, eating on their own, and doing other mature things much faster than humans. 

The human place in the food chain, until recently, was right in the middle. We only jumped to the top about 100,000 years ago. While species like sharks and lions evolved over a much longer period of time to rule the food chain, humans ascended quickly, which made us “full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous.”

Fire was huge for us to because we could chew and digest our cooked food in an hour or so while chimps would take about five hours to do the same thing with raw foods. Cooking is believed to have “opened the way to the jumbo brains of Neanderthals and Sapiens.”

Joaquin Phoenix's depiction of Napoleon is one for the ages

While there is plenty of great stuff to see on Apple TV, there is also a lifetime’s worth elsewhere. So I cancelled my subscription upon completing 2023's Napoleon - a great way to go out with a bang.

Joaquin Phoenix has built a legend with some of the greatest performances in modern film, including The Joker, Her, Walk the Line, Quills, and The Master. He is the perfect Napoleon Bonaparte and this movie touches nicely on the French leader's major war battles and personal conflicts. It could have equally been a 10-episode TV series to fill in many more of the endlessly interesting details of his life.

Here are some of the things depicted in the movie that everyone high-school age and over should know about Napoeon Bonaparte:

• The film's story opens in 1789, with Marie Antoinette getting beheaded for her sympathies to the supposed enemies of France. This welcomed in the famed Reign of Terror. 
• Napoleon Bonaparte is in the crowd to witness the beheading. He is a young ambitious soldier from Corsica who is promoted after an impressive raid of the British at Toulon.
• He marries Joséphine de Beauharnais, who had been locked up as part of the Reign, and they have a robust sex life but can't conceive children. They also are not faithful to each other. (More than 41,000 prisoners were released at the end of The Reign of Terror.)
• As the tables turn and the French Royalists are rounded up, the former prisoners and people like Napoleon move into the mansions of Paris.
• The Battle of Austerlitz is a key exhibit of Napoleon's strategic genius, as he lures the Austrian emenies into a trap that backs them onto a frozen lake where Napoleon annihilates them.
• In 1812, Napoleon invaded Russia, only to find Moscow vacated in the dead of winter. Moscow burns, but France retreats, having lost an astouding amount of its military - estimated at more than half a million French dead.
• The failure in Russia causes the first of his exiles, with the powers that be shipping him off to the island of Elba. 
• After he sweet talks his way back into leadership, an epic Battle of Waterloo scene unfolds, which is actually the beginning of the end for Napoleon. After Joséphine has already succumbed to pneumonia (after their divorce), he also dies in another exile on the island of Saint Helena in 1821 - soon after witnessing an ominous fly in his drink.
• The movie notes that nearly 3 million people died in Napoleon's wars.

Whether he was a great man or something else, it seems difficult to tell - certainly from this movie. But it is great cinema. I loved it, and if you want some historical fiction with love, war, and more, you should watch it. Napoleon left me wanting to know lots more than I currently do about this wildly fascinating time in human history.

4.5 out of 5 stars

AI will inevitably help us become more human than we used to be

Writer Kevin Kelly concludes that “the computer age didn’t really start until computers merged with the telephone” in the early 1980s. The Internet has of course grown since then to be central to the way our society operates and it will continue to grow. That is the baseline that begins his 2016 book The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. A pretty intriguing title, and I wanted in on the secrets.

Things we can’t stop include massive copying, massive tracking and total surveillance, decentralized ownership, virtual reality that is actually real, and improved artificial intelligence and robots that will both take our jobs and create new businesses. Kelly writes that we need to embrace these changes. We don’t want to fight any one invention because the scientific process has made it so that we’ll take “solid things - an automobile, a shoe - and turn them into intangible verbs. Products will become services and processes. Embedded with high doses of technology, an automobile becomes a transportation service … rapidly adapting to customer usage, feedback, competition, innovation, and wear.”

Kelly has organized his book into 12 categories that are verbs like "accessing, tracking, and sharing" and posits that we look at technology this way instead of "iPhone, Uber, or shoe." Which products or companies will succeed or fail is unpredictable because those are determined by fads, fashion, and commerce. 

“Becoming” is the first area of focus. In the 1980s and 90s, young boys in chatrooms and Wall Street traders used the internet but leaders at ABC TV, WIRED, and many others scoffed at the thought of the internet going big. Many thought there would be 500 or so channels on TV that would be where the content would be created. “Instead, billions of users created the content for all the other users. There were 500 million channels.” The internet stuff the execs couldn’t imagine was that passive consumers would become active creators. We still fail to truly grasp how awesome the web has become, with its 60 trillion web pages (about 10,000 for every person alive). 

The corporations eventually realized the online world could be their distribution network, but they did not foresee that they wouldn’t be the ones making the content. YouTube, blogs, and social media were not created by big-media’s staff but by their users. We no longer even typically get customer service anymore from corporations because we can ask the global community congregating at places like Reddit subgroups. 

By now, the internet feels completely bloated, with “more than enough content to demand our attention for the next million years.” But Kelly claims, in reality, “nothing has happened yet! The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.” For instance, by 2050, just about everything with have a little AI added to it. “The last 30 years has created a marvelous starting point, a solid platform to build truly great things.” We are just now “becoming” and the coolest inventions are yet to happen. 

“Cognifying” is the second inevitable and it’s all about AI. Granted, this book was released seven years ago so quite a bit has already happened, but perhaps not as much has happened as one would think. “At the rate AI is improving, a kid born today will rarely need to see a doctor to get a diagnosis by the time they are an adult.” AI will not look like HAL 9000 - “a discreet machine animated by a humanlike consciousness” - but rather like Amazon Web Services, “a cheap, reliable industrial-grade digital smartness running behind everything and almost invisible except when it blinks off.” 

One example of being cognitive is photography. Years ago, it would have taken $100,000 and hefty bags of equipment to do everything cameras and iPhones do today to make photos treated, modified, and beautiful. Other examples could include music created in real-time as needed for soundtracks or video games, smart clothes that tell laundry machines how to wash them, advertising optimized for how many people follow and watch and what their level of influence is, matching buyers and sellers of real estate, real-time adjustments of medical care and treatments, dolls that will probably be the first really popular robots, and stats on every breath and movement of athletes to create highly advanced fantasy sports.

Google has been working on AI for decades and has always seen its search engine as a way to refine its AI rather than AI as a way to improve its search engine. Google has indeed been buying up lots of AI companies and, by its own predictions, AI should be its main product by 2026. This would be pure hyperbole, except three recent breakthroughs have made the ancient promise of AI possible: “parallel computation” has become so cheap that companies are able to use it in ways that Facebook can identify friends easily in photos and Netflix can make reliable recommendations, it’s taken a long time to get enough big data fed into the system for computers to get this smart, and the growing amount of users is helping to make it all even smarter. 

By 2100, Kelly predicts that 70 percent of the jobs people do will be replaced by automation. Assembly-line and factory workers will be the first to go. Pharmacists will be replaced by pill-dispensing machines. Office and school cleaners, truckers, and information-intensive white-collar jobs are in the AI path. But these aren’t things to worry about. No Victorian boy ever dreamed of one day becoming a professional video-game developer. Those who once farmed began working in factories and then later moved to other jobs. 

“Today, the vast majority of us are doing jobs that no farmer from the 1800s could have imagined.” AI’s greatest benefit is that it “will help us define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.” It’s not a race against the machines. It’s a race with the machines. “Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us dream up new work that matters” and helps us become “more human than we were.”

European colonization of the Americas greatly set back human progress

I’m often not great at staying focused while listening to audiobooks and was bored silly with the first hour of 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. But I really wanted to know more about his challenge to the long-held notion that the Americas were a sparsely populated wilderness before Christopher Columbus landed ashore. 

Luckily the Hoopla library app has a 20-page Cliff notes-type summary. Here are my Cliff notes to the Cliff notes. Caution: it's interesting stuff:

• As the last Ice Age receded, the New England region turned into an ecologically diverse landscape. Many people were hunter-nomads, but there were also settled villages with established agricultural practices.
• As early as 1616, hepatitis began attacking the indigenous population in the region. It had been brought by European settlers and killed off most of the region’s native Americans. The same thing was happening in Peru. The sophisticated engineering and military capabilities of the Inca society were no match for the smallpox brought by Europeans. Hernando de Soto’s exploration left almost no population in its wake in the Mississippi Valley, thanks mainly to the diseases his pigs carried.
• Europeans understood how diseases operated and spread, but there were not any attempts to halt or slow colonization. Transmission was often viewed simply as God’s will. Scholars have put the death totals in the millions, suggesting there had been a significant population in the Americas. 
• The human die off truly set humanity back, as there was a ton of knowledge and advancement lost in the entire colonization process.
• Peru’s mountainous landscape was shaped by continental drift that became an attractive locale for diverse groups of Indians around 10,000 B.C., with complex societies, governments, and urban centers common by 3200 B.C.
• The cultivation of maze throughout Mesoamerica was truly one of humanity's greatest feats of genetic engineering. Native American ecological influence could have helped greatly advance society's progress, but Europeans wiped out the native people and, with them, almost all their knowledge of landscape architecture and the urban settlement of places like Cahokia, Illinois, near modern-day St. Louis. 
• I grew up very close to Cahokia, where several mounds/hills still exist. It’s amazing to think back to how advanced this society was in 1250 B.C. before it collapsed around 1350 due to environmental mismanagement, social unrest, and a devastating earthquake. Likewise, the Mayan population collapsed between 800 and 830 B.C. because of overpopulation, resource overuse, and severe drought. 

Mann’s conclusion is that the Americas were not an untouched wilderness but rather a complex environment that worked because of the interplay between humans and natural forces. This suggests that people now and in the future should focus on building sustainable habitats rather than trying to simply reproduce what has been done in the past in terms of restoring ecosystems. 

It's no wonder "white trash" is so prominent in America. That's who founded it

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election because, like so many politicians before him, such as Bill Clinton, he refused to be the usual scripted politician and embraced “the common man, the working stiff, the forgotten rural American,” according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.

Turns out, sound deliberation and calm problem solving have never been the reality of the U.S. political landscape, which jibes with my master’s thesis, which concluded that personal foibles tend to help presidential candidates win office. 

The scumbag family that accuses a Black man of rape in To Kill a Mockingbird, disgraced chef Paula Deen, and the Duke boys of Dukes of Hazzard are all popular examples of white trash - “marginalized Americans stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children.” These examples of “human waste” were known as “waste people” as early as colonial times in the 1500s.

British colonizers saw the New World as the perfect place to ship its most unproductive and idle people. One reason we don’t see it this way any long, Isenberg writes, is that our elementary-school history lessons tend to become pretty much the extent of what we still know years later as adults, which, essentially equates to a series of vague myths about American exceptionalism, our uniqueness, and that there is an absence of class in our country. “Americans do not like to talk about class. It is not supposed to be important in our history. It is not who we are.”

We celebrate the Pilgrims only because Thanksgiving was invented to boost the struggling poultry (turkey) industry during the Civil War. And earlier, just because the country had won its independence from England, it doesn’t mean the British class system suddenly went away. “Long-entrenched beliefs about poverty and the willful exploitation of human labor … [meant that some humans have] remained disposable well into modern times.” 

In the time of Shakespeare, French and English intellectuals became fascinated with the idea of sending Sir Walter Raleigh and other like-minded “men of action endowed with larger-than-life egos, heroism, and ill-tempered public behavior” overseas to the “almost inconceivable” wilderness of America, which they imagined to be filled with cannibals that could be tamed and subordinated and helpful in gathering natural resources for "the greater good."

But it wasn’t just the wealthy and educated who thought the artisans, the poor, and the homeless should be the ones put to better use in America. "This view of poverty was widely shared." Most of the settlers of the early 1600s to Jamestown died off quickly and a good portion of the rest “dreamt of finding gold, which did little to inspire hard work.” Gold didn’t pan out but some success started to happen with the “filthy weed” tobacco. The land was still barren by the late 1600s but the process for distributing land ownership and the creation of a white slave class ensured an already deeply entrenched division of classes. 

The 700 or so who landed on the Mayflower and other ships in Massachusetts were considered slightly less scum-of-the-Earth. They were, like the Jamestown arrivals, big on land ownership, but unlike those in Jamestown they were religion crazy. When two Quaker women tried to escape the church community, they were charged with contempt and hung. Pretty standard stuff. Class rank was becoming even more embedded in Puritan America, with “age, reputation, marriage, estate, number of sons all properly calculated before a church seat was assigned.”

Bacon’s Rebellion is an example of a defining event of the era. Sir Francis Bacon originated from wealth but decided to fight for the lower class. Part of what he was rebelling against was the “the most promising land was never equally available for all.” The game was rigged against many people, something that should sound similar to all of us today - no matter whether we’re on the rich or poor side of the divide.

Yeah, Salt Lake City has lots of Mormons, but there are lots of other fun things to do there

I’m headed to Salt Lake City, Utah, so I wanted a good book to get me in the mood. Luckily, professor of American history Benjamin E. Park has just released American Zion: A New History of Zion.

Park is a life-long Mormon who says the stories he was raised on are quite different from what he’s discovered in the historical record, even that of the Mormon library at Brigham Young University. “At the founding meeting for what was then the Church of Christ on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith, the faith’s ‘first elder,’ dictated the revelation that commanded the faith to keep ‘a record.’ [However,] the new faith’s historical record was primarily envisioned to reaffirm Smith’s role as a prophetic leader and encourage followers to obey his dictates.”

Smith’s first church was actually started way back near Fayette, New York. Even before that, when he was 15, he claimed God descended upon him in a pillar of light and assured him that even though the world was sinful, his own sins would be forgiven.

The controversies started from the beginning. Brigham Young claimed to be Smith’s successor and burned all the existing history at the time so nobody would question his authority. By now, some 400 sects have sprouted that verge from Smith’s original visions for what this American-grown religion would be about. The thesis of the book is to narrate “the long history of cultural wars waged over Mormonism’s purpose and mission.”

Park continues on with the religious or spiritual or whatever visions young Smith encountered along his way. At that point I lost interest in the fairly academically-written tome and decided to instead look at what things I might like to do in Salt Lake City, although with two days at the Kilby Block Party planned, there won’t be time for much else. 

According to “36 Hours in Salt Lake City” in The New York Times, some possible interests include:

• “Celebrate the repeal of liquor laws that required bars to operate as private clubs and collect membership fees. The Red Door has dim lighting, a great martini list and kitschy revolution décor — yes, that’s a Che Guevara mural on the wall. Squatters Pub Brewery serves high-gravity beers from the award-winning brewmaster Jenny Talley.”
• If we need to walk off the rock’n’roll, there’s The Red Butte Garden, “nestled in the foothills above the University of Utah campus. The Living Room is a lookout point named for the flat orange rocks that resemble couches. Sit back and absorb the expansive views of the valley, mountains and the Great Salt Lake.”
• “Chart your own architecture tour. The city’s Main Library, a curving glass structure built in 2003 by the architect Moshe Safdie, has fireplaces on every floor and a rooftop garden with views of the city and the Wasatch Mountains. For older buildings, wander the Marmalade Historic District, home to many original pioneer homes from the 19th century.”
• A growing non-white share of the population means there are great restaurants to be found, including Tibet, Bosnia, and Somalia ones. This includes Himalayan Kitchen, “a down-home dining room with turmeric-yellow walls and red tablecloth tables, where dishes include Nepali goat curry, Himalayan momos, and steamed chicken dumplings served with sesame seed sauce.”
• “As the only sizable city between Denver and Northern California, Salt Lake City gets many touring bands passing through. Hear established and up-and-coming acts at places like the Urban Lounge and Kilby Court.” Ok, I will.
• I kind of can’t believe, with the area STILL getting snow, that I’m not skiing “28 miles east at Park City’s Utah Olympic Park,” but alas it seems my ski season is over.

Misinformation is a running theme when some non-Jews attempt to tell the Jewish story

While Austria and Serbia began fighting in World War I, and while many other countries began to join into the fighting, a series of frenzied negotiations and conflicting agreements took place. One was the Balfour Declaration in 1917 that “promised to reestablish an independent national home for the Jewish people in the backwater former Ottoman province of Palestine.” 

By the end of the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the Allies had divided the former Ottoman Empire, a broad, wide-open, and not divided landscape, “into new and invented states based on colonial interests rather than natural borders, tribal affiliation, family connections, or a desire for self-determination” and “to secure the establishment of the national Jewish home.”

A few years' later, in 1924, Noa Tishby’s grandmother was living in Russia and realized - or thought she realized - she was part of and in a good free society. But while seemingly good, a dark underbelly of that society was simultaneously “trying to break down the Jews. It occured to her grandmother that she wanted “a new movement to rebuild the old homeland based on communal ideas, shared living, shared ownership of all personal possessions, and self-sufficiency.” Luckily she escaped before being sent to Siberian work camps, but unluckily her family “left Russia penniless and embarked on a boat, infested with rodents and thieves, from Odessa to the promised land” - also known as the harsh and barren landscape of Jaffa (what is now part of Tel Aviv). Tishby’s grandmother was living at the very tipping point of “Zionism.”

As Tishby continues with fascinating story after fascinating story in 2021's Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth (and she has a new one as well called Uncomfortable Conversations with a Jew, which she wrote with ex-NFL player Emmanuel Acho and discussed with him recently on the CBS Morning Show - pictured), she notes, “After thousands of conversations with highly educated people, I have come to realize that most don’t know” what Zionism means.

Jews, a minuscule portion (less than 1 percent) of the global population, have long been discriminated against, with the Russian tsars being particularly heinous and continuous offenders. In 1903, the tsar’s secret police force created “one of the first pieces of viral fake news” called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which “claimed Jews were part of a global conspiracy to take over the world.” Henry Ford went on and on about it in his babblings for the paper he owned called the Dearborn Independent. Partly because of that, the book was a huge bestseller, contributing to the slaughter and banishment of millions of Jews the world over. “Cue the Zionist movement,” which was basically all about finding a safe harbor and being able to practice self determination like everyone else.

Theodore Herzl really coined the term Zionism in the 1890s when he realized Jews could never really “shake off the Jewishness” around other people and that a homeland to return to as needed was a pretty good idea. Jewish people were spread out all over the world, mostly persecuted in ghetto-ish areas, and the idea of going off to this far-off place was foreign and not seriously considered by the vast majority, but Herzl’s rallying began to slowly take affect. His writing, beginning with The Jewish State, was laughed at, not covered by the media, and called silly and desperate. The Russian Jewry were the ones who accepted it the most and that’s how it got to Tishby’a grandmother and her family. 

Herzl got Jews to meet in 1897 in Switzerland for the First Zionist Congress, and while the attendees had trouble agreeing on much of anything, they did end up agreeing that Israel should be the home base, "aliyah" or migration to Israel could connect the diaspora, the Hebrew language would be restored, and all Jews should join in solidarity against antisemitism. It would take about 50 years, and a little after Herzl’s death, but the newly formed United Nations established a Jewish state in Israel.

Herzl's subsequent writings about the topic as the 1900s began sounded like John Lennon and ahead of his time, with a slogan of “man, you are my brother!” Right on, Theo! He tried to get the support of leaders from around the world but it would take the Holocaust for there to be enough support for the Jews to finally have a little home, to have Israel. Those who stayed behind in Europe perished in World War II, but those who had made it to Israel survived. 

Tishby, the author, grew up in Israel and, well into her teens, didn’t realize there was such a thing as anti-Zionism until she was having a romantic moment with a hot guy from Germany who told her there possibly wasn’t really such a thing as the Holocaust. For someone whose grandmother had written so much of the her history down, it was clear that not only would this boy get no more of her time that night, but Tishby’s goal in life would be to start to undue the misinformation that dangerously exists around the Jewish story.

I'm really enjoying this book and it's as important as ever, as antisemitism puzzlingly marches on and seemingly progressive students at colleges all over the U.S. appear to be propagating the misinformation of those long-ago terror-mongering and evil Russian tsars.

Earth's hot spots can blow just about anytime and anyplace

Nebraska used to be like the Serengeti plains in Africa, which is now where much of the world goes when they want to have the very best safaris. Starting in 1971, animal bones such as those found in Africa were discovered there buried under volcanic ash, which was odd, since volcanoes have never been in Nebraska. Through more scientific discovery, the source of the ash that killed all the animals in the state was present-day Yellowstone National Park, about 1,600 miles away. 

The park is the source of such a cataclysmic hot spot on earth that the ash in Nebraska was about 10 feet deep. And those massive volcanoes at Yellowstone happen every six hundred thousand years. Oh, and by the way, it’s been six hundred thousand years since Yellowstone blew hard.

If that’s not bleak enough for you, then consider that we know lots more about the sun’s core than we do the middle of the Earth. “If the planet were an apple, we wouldn’t yet have broken through the skin,” via our various mining operations, writes Bill Bryson in his classic A Short History of Nearly Everything. (I also wrote about the geology section of the book back in 2022.)

We hear a lot about the Richter scale, which is less an actual scale and more an idea about the power of individual earthquakes. It’s named after Charles Richter who was at Caltech the 1930s. Since that time, the two largest quakes measured were both in the low 9s, centered in Alaska in 1964 and in the ocean near Chile in 1960. Just a little less powerful was the one in 1755 that destroyed Lisbon, Portugal. Sixty-thousand people died and virtually all the buildings there crumbled.

Tokyo could consider a new marketing slogan as “the city waiting to die” because it sits on three tectonic plates. It suffered a big quake in 1923 that killed 200,000 people. If that happened today, the economic cost would exceed $7 trillion, which, give or take, is about one-tenth of all the money that exists in the world.

Less understood are earthquakes called intraplate quakes, which aren’t close to plate boundaries, come from much deeper underground, and are completely unpredictable. The three worst of this kind all happened in the winter of 1811-1812 in New Madrid, Missouri (yes, the place Uncle Tupelo sang about). These quakes caused chimneys to fall in Cincinnati, wrecked boats docked on the East Coast, and toppled scaffolding on the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C. Such quakes “are as random as lightning” and “have never been known to happen in the same place twice.”

Moving deeper down to the Earth’s core, scientists - basically - don’t know much:

• They know that there is liquid that causes magnetism (unlike the Moon and Mars, which don’t have magnetic fields). 
• They know that the magnetic field changes and was three times more powerful during the time of the dinosaurs than it is now. 
• They know the field reverses itself about every 500,000 years. We don’t really want to be around during one of these reversals because cosmic rays from space will do a serious number on us at that point. For now, the field protects us. I guess you could say we are one with the Force. 

In 1980, the world was captivated for two months while it appeared Mount St. Helens in Washington state was going to erupt. Finally it did and “it was the biggest landslide in human history and carried enough material to bury the whole of Manhattan” in about 400 feet of ash. Fifty-seven people died, which was lucky because it was a Sunday and many timber workers were not in the death zone. About 80 miles away, in the town of Yakima, Washington, ash turned the streets to dark in a place that had no emergency plan or emergency broadcast system because the Sunday-morning staff didn’t know how to work the equipment. Yakima was completely shut down for three days, and it had received less than an inch of ash. 

“Now bear that in mind, please," Bryson writes, "as we consider what a Yellowstone blast would do.”

Road ecology is a relatively new science, but it could shape wildlife and highways

Cliff swallows are a bird species that live all over the United States, but nearly all of them live on bridges. Scientists have found that, over recent years, their wings have grown smaller to adapt to being able to fly in tighter spaces and to be able to maneuver quickly in spaces where human vehicles are speeding along. “They have been shaped, subtlety, by the road,” writes Ben Goldfarb in Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet.

His thesis is that about "40 million miles of road encircle the Earth" and that "when alien archaeologists exhume the rubble of human civilization, they may conclude that our raison d’être was building roads." Said another way by writer E.B. White: "Everything in life is somewhere else ... and you get there in a car."

Surprisingly, the study of "road ecology" was not even considered until a Harvard ecology professor wondered, in 1993, why researchers knew so much about Amazon rainforest ecology but nobody had ever thought to study the ecology of the roads running through the Amazon. The professor was initially laughed at but then the study of how roads were affecting plants and wildlife quickly took off and became a popular subject of study. 

Goldfarb notes:

"Constructed bridges for bears, tunnels for turtles, rope webs that allow howler monkeys to swing over highways without descending to the forest floor. On Christmas Island, red crabs clamber over a steel span during their beachward migrations; in Kenya, elephants lumber beneath highways and railroads via passages as tall as two-story houses. And road ecology has yielded more than crossings: we’ve also learned to map and protect the migrations of cryptic animals, to design roadsides that nourish bees and butterflies, and to deconstruct the derelict logging tracks that lace our forests."

One could actually claim that road ecology began back in 1924 when a young married couple of Iowa scientists started a game of counting roadkill as they travelled along the roads in what was likely a Model T. (That still sounds like a fun game with little kids, assuming they can stomach it.) One of their research papers noted: "America’s burgeoning need for speed had become one of the important checks upon the natural increase of many forms of life."

Ironically, many of our first roads were carved by wildlife who had used the pathways for many years. Native American footpaths and later Europeans with their "Good Roads" (for bikes!) activism cntinued the job of preparing for the as-yet-not-envisioned cars. By the 1920s, road building, with the likes of concretes and sealants and asphalt, was becoming serious business. Before then, roads were perceived as part of the natural environment, but now they were shaping the environment and conquering nature.

Daisy Buchanan ran over Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby and that was about par for the course, as there were 23,600 car-related deaths in 1924 - a form of checking out that has always remained more prevalent than we seem to like to know about. But while road deaths for humans have nominally improved with better roads, deaths for animals have become worse with better roads. 

Speed was a major factor in the danger of roads to animals. As early as the 1930s, research pointed out that "below 35 miles per hour, cars seldom struck animals. Accelerate to 45, though, and they kill rapidly. Exceed 60 miles per hour, and you can figure on scoring a kill every 10 miles or less on most of the improved roads."

That early knowledge - almost prehistoric, at least in the sense of road ecology - fell away as those scientists died off, but the topic popped up again in the 1960s when deer populations began to explode in the nation’s suburbs. Now everyone knows how prominent the deer-vehicle collision problem is. We’ve all seen Tommy Boy, Get Out, and the episode of the Simpsons when the family hits a statue of a deer. There are nearly 60,000 people injured and more than 400 killed each year from collisions with deer. But deer were oddly never among the roadkill in those long-ago studies. That’s because suburbs created the perfect "edge" habitats that grew their numbers. The problem was that the suburbs had a very dangerous predator - speeding vehicles. Car interiors were especially dangerous places back then for coming into contact with deer, and after Ralph Nader wrote his book Unsafe at Any Speed, Congress made seat belts mandatory in 1966.

Long before suburbs, deer had formed a mental map and learned exactly which patterns to follow in their migration. That was never considered by engineers who blazed paths right across their territory, creating a situation that will likely never go away. The practice of using GPS collars to better understand the movements of migrating species didn’t begin until after the explosion of suburbia. As deer and other migrating animals began to be tracked better by scientists, it was discovered that only a small portion were becoming roadkill. Most starved because they couldn't get past interstates and barriers alongside them. They couldn’t get to their food sources and they starved en masse. 

Species don’t just rush from point A to point B when they migrate, they "surf the green wave," meaning they seek to find spots along the way where the snow has recently melted and plentiful fresh and colorful salads have sprouted. They will go from one of these zones to the next, often spending weeks in a single location along the way and attempting to migrate to spots where it is eternally early spring-like. 

In 2016, a biology study split animals into four groups: nonresponders like leopard frogs ignore roads and hop across no matter what’s happening on them, pausers like skunks get out onto roads and then hunker down on them, intelligent avoiders like grizzly bears stay away from any roads as much as possible, and speeders like deer evolved to outrun predators and that’s essential what they are doing trying to zip through cars on a roadway. When cars get going into the 70 and 80 mph range, deer finally give up and realize they don’t want to try to run through that, so rural country roads will usually have easily as much death for deer as interstates do. 

Another famous example of habitat destruction by road is Ventura Highway’s dissection of the Santa Monica Mountains - which are essentially the country’s largest urban park. Mountain lions need huge territories to survive and they are trapped there by the freeways. If they don’t get killed trying to cross, they tend to die at the hands of their parents. Young mountain lions leave their parents but the roads often keep them bouncing back in the their journey for independence, often leading to them to unnaturally return home and get killed by their parents. The area’s most famous lion, P-22, was recently hit by a car and succumbed to his injuries, but his celebrity is helping raise private (much of it celebrity) funding for an animal crossing above Ventura Highway. 

We always hear that 40,000 vehicle fatalities happen each year in the U.S., but that fatality number is even more stunningly around 3,600 around the world each day! The interstates, under the guise of helping spur "urban renewal," especially wiped out minority communities: Rondo in St. Paul, Overtown in Miami, Treme in New Orleans, and countless others. But now, cities like Syracuse, Oakland, Milwaukee, and Seattle are tearing down the viaducts that soar over cities and directing some traffic down to ground level or redirected away from cutting through the heart of places filled with people. "Creating a world that’s amenable to feet" is the dual goal of urban advocates and road ecologists. 

When COVID-19 hit, road-ecology scientists captured some startling data. California, Idaho, and Maine are states that have strong roadkill data, and the numbers dropped precipitously, with the researchers estimating a year of reduced travel "would save 27,000 large animals in those states alone." With traffic noise down, sparrows were found to sing more and actually sing better! 

Goldfarb concludes that we need to remake our roads as a massive public-works project. Some good news came along with the November 2021 infrastructure bill that included $350 million for wildlife crossings - the largest such investment of its kind in U.S. history. As the story progresses, this book will remain a valuable and surprisingly entertaining resource.

RIP (sorta) O.J. Simpson

I was just a little too young to watch O.J. Simpson during his prime Buffalo Bills era, although I still have some cards from when he was on that team. But from a very early age - while I might not have seen him running wild in his white, blue, and red uniform - I distinctly recall Simpson in his fancy suits flying through the airport walkways in his Hertz rental-car ads.

I did eventually see plenty of football highlights of "The Juice" and, wow, was he great. He also had an infectious personality later on as an NBC Sports game-time announcer and the detective who flies out of his wheelchair from the upper deck of a stadium in the first of three Naked Gun films in which he appeared.

But those were just the bright-side warmup to O.J.'s approaching dark-side pop-culture legacy. I can still remember being on vacation near the beach in Alabama when my eyes were glued to the TV on June 17, 1994 as that white Ford Bronco led the police on a chase across Los Angeles. It would be the beginning of the entire nation getting more O.J. than they had ever wanted. It took me a long time to finally see him as the cold-blooded murderer of his wife rather than the friendly-eyed TV personality I had grown to love.The drama took us all the way to the innocent verdict date of October 3, 1995 and way beyond. In fact, I can't believe the car chase and the trial took less than a year-and-a-half. It seemed like forever. Of course, Simpson was found liable in civil court in 1997 for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. 

O.J. Simpson has died of prostate cancer at the age of 76.

Some other interesting Simpson nuggets of note:

• He was born in a housing project in San Francisco.
• He blamed a lot of his later troubles on having an absent father after his parents separated when he was 5.
• When he was little, he had rickets and bowed legs that caused other kids to make fun of him.
• He won the Heisman trophy as college football's top player while at USC.
• Simpson was the first NFL player to surpass 2,000 yards rushing, which he did in 1973.
• He met Nicole Brown way back in 1977 at a Beverly Hills nightclub.
• He spent nine years in prison for trying in 2007 to steal O.J. Simpson memorabilia.
• He had clearly started to lose his mind in his last years with his rambling video posts on X but to his credit at least he mostly stuck to football commentary.

What a run he had!

Dinosaur tracks and Corona Arch make for a rocking vacation

After a hike in Arches National Park two days before that was four times as long, it was nice to give our feet a rest on Sunday with a short, three-mile roundtrip hike at Corona Arch outside of Moab, Utah. 

That was after we stopped to climb Potash Road Dinosaur Rocks and Petroglyphs to view dinosaur tracks from the Early Jurassic Period - about 190 million years ago. The tracks we saw were on a rock slab that had fallen from higher up. The part where the dinosaurs left tracks - about 10 animals in total - had been preserved by other rock covering it until it fell and split open. The larger tracks on the slab were from a dinosaur that was about twice as big as a human, while the smaller tracks were from ones about the size of a turkey. The dinosaurs were moving about 3 mph when they left the markings. 

Also along this stretch on Utah Highway 279, we stopped to view rock art right alongside the road, where many people also just park their vehicles to get out and climb (although not on the preserved rock art). The art was created by Native Americans between 6000 B.C. and 1300 A.D.

I really loved and recommend the hike to Corona Arch on Bureau of Land Management land. Formerly known as Little Rainbow Bridge, the Arch got a reputation on YouTube as a place where people would swing from a rope they would attach to the massive arch. That seems terrifying to me because where I took that photo above from, it was very windy and there was a straight, very long drop down to the Colorado River and train tracks below. In 2013, a man miscalculated his rope swing and smashed to his death. Now, rope swinging from the arch is prohibited, at least for now.

We finished our vacation with a night in Grand Junction, Colorado, which has a lovely downtown with lots of shops, restaurants, and funky statues. It's the home of Colorado Mesa University. Then we flew back home out of tiny Montrose/Telluride airport.

Mountain biking in Moab, Utah is a dream come true

I've always loved mountain biking. I don't do it anymore as much as other activities like tennis and road biking, but when I do, I always have a blast (even when tumbling bike over heels down cliffs, which seems to happen way too often to me).

So knowing that about me, you can guess that Moab, Utah has been a place I've wanted to visit for a long time. It's known as the mecca of mountain biking in the U.S. I took about a three-hour ride on Saturday with my family and didn't do anything too daring, but it was an exciting taste of what the area known for Arches and Canyonlands national parks has to offer. 

We rode in Dead Horse Point State Park, which is located on a mesa (a flat-top mountain) high above many breath-taking views of the Grand Canyon-like sandstone cliffs of Canyonlands National Park and the Colorado River.

It seemed like we barely explored the 17-mile mountain-bike trail system located in the park. It takes a long time to go a little way over such rocky trails, especially with our 10-year-old in the mix. That said, she was able to conquer the many obstacles along the way and this is a really good option for other families with young kids (and bike rentals, although pricey, are available right there in the park at the trailhead alongside a handful of camping yurts).

Other points to note:

• Dead Horse Point allegedly got its name from many horses dying there from exposure to the elements high on the mesa (it was a very windy ride, at least on this day).
• It has provided a set for many movies and TV shows, including Con Air (1997), Joe Dirt (2001), MacGyver (1985), Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), Westworld (2016), and, most famously, the ending scene in Thelma & Louise (1991).

 

Arches is a national park from another time and place

That long-ago image of Delicate Arch from Life Magazine in Arches National Park must have been imprinted on my mind because this jaw dropping-at-every-turn place has been on my bucket list my whole life. A lot of the park - a few miles north of Moab, Utah - reminds me of scenes from Planet of the Apes (“the Forbidden Zone”) and other Hollywood sci-fi and Western classics. 

We took an 8-mile hike around the Primitive Loop on Friday - our first of three full days based in Moab - and it was epic the whole way. Even the last two miles, when we were all getting pretty exhausted, was spectacular, as we had to cross and climb massive, sky-high rock formations. The start and end of the trail were fairly busy with voyagers, but the entire middle of the loop, the furthest parts away from the parking, were nearly all our own.

With 2,000 or so natural sandstone arches, the park has the highest density of arches anywhere on Earth. The salt beds under the ground are what have created the arches. 

It became a national monument in 1929 (after resistance from Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover made it happen) and a protected national park in 1971. The fact that nearly 2 million people visit Arches each year is very tough on the fragile ecosystem, as compression from footsteps makes it very difficult for the soil to recover from human contact.

Other interesting tidbits:

• Humans have occupied the area since the last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. Spanish missionaries saw American-Indian tribes there 700 years ago but Europeans didn’t settle there until Mormons did so in 1855. They didn’t last long before moving down to Moab. 
• FDR and LBJ significantly enlarged the size of the park over the years, Dwight Eisenhauer allowed for a portion of road to go through it, and Richard Nixon designated it a national park but shrunk the size of it considerably in the process.
• Writer Edward Abbey was a park ranger there from 1956 to 1957 and turned his journals during that time into his classic Desert Solitaire. 
• In terms of wildlife, we didn’t see much besides kangaroo rats and prickly pear cacti, but there are actually a lot of foxes, cougars, rattlesnakes, and other plants and animals.

Hot springs offer a refreshing and unique experience in Glenwood Springs, Colorado

I belong to a pool in the summertime, but I wouldn’t say that lounging in a man-made body of water with a raft of other humans is exactly my idea of a thing to do all day. That said, the Spa of the Rockies at the Glenwood Springs Lodge in western Colorado is a pretty great experience to include at least once in your life.

Fresh off of five days skiing, the best features of the hot-springs park are the massage showers and chairs in the hottest end of the two-football-field-long pool, which rests alongside Interstate 70 (with the semis rumbling past not far away), a gondola taking people up to explore the area’s caves and amusement park, and a walkway over to the cute town of Glenwood Springs, where we ate a delicious Nepalese meal. 

We experienced some of the reasons that Glenwood Springs is considered one of the country’s most walkable cities, strolling across that pedestrian bridge above the waterway and interstate and witnessing the many roundabouts and innovative parking infrastructure that originated in the 1980s as the city decided to battle traffic congestion. 

What makes the town feel so nestled into the landscape is that it’s where the Roaring Fork and Colorado Rivers meet down below the spa. Indigenous people have lived in the area for thousands of years and Glenwood Springs is a home-rule city of about 10,000 residents. It was established in 1883 with the name of Defiance and was made up almost entirely of gunslingers, gamblers, and prostitutes. Isaac Cooper is considered the founder of the town but his wife didn’t like its vibe, so she encouraged a name change. They built the main part of the spa’s building (seen above in the photo) in 1888. 

It’s always been a popular and convenient place for visitors passing through near the Colorado-Utah border. President Teddy Roosevelt spent one summer on vacation at the nearby Hotel Colorado (pictured), gunslinger Doc Holliday of O.K. Coral fame is buried in the cemetary, and serial-killer Ted Bundy escaped the county jail for 17 hours at the end of 1977.

RIP Joe Lieberman

Back at the dawn of the modern election-conspiracy era, Al Gore and his running mate Joe Lieberman, despite winning a half-million more votes than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, suffered defeat at the hands of a clearly biased Supreme Court.

He told The New York Times in 2023, “It was a miscarriage of justice on two levels. One was that the Florida Supreme Court had already ruled in our favor to continue the recounts, and the other was that it was an extrajudicial political decision made in the crisis of a transition of power, and out of line with precedents of the Supreme Court.”

Lieberman passed away this week at age 82 after injuries from a fall at his Bronx home.

Instead of becoming vice president, Lieberman began a retreat from a long and impressive career of public service. He was about as centrist as a politician got and his style has not exactly translated to our era of maximum fringe and infighting. 

But Lieberman had a truly impressive record of work on social causes to better the world, starting with his earliest efforts in civil rights. He went on to be a major player in the introduction of the Department of Homeland Security after the September 11 terrorist attacks, led the fight against "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and provided the tie-breaking vote to pass Obama’s Affordable Care Act. 

His descent was spurred by losing in the Democratic primaries for president in 2004 and losing his Senate seat for Connecticut in 2006. Even since leaving politics - when I hadn’t really thought about him for years beca,use I assumed he had retired from public life - Lieberman worked at a lawyer, as chair of No Labels and was even surprisingly considered for a short time by Trump to lead the F.B.I. 

The Times added:

At his political peak, on the threshold of the vice presidency, Mr. Lieberman — a national voice of morality as the first major Democrat to rebuke President Bill Clinton for his sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky — was named Mr. Gore’s running mate at the Democratic National Convention that August in Los Angeles. He became the nation’s first Jewish candidate on a major-party presidential ticket.

“It was a very hard thing for me to do because I liked him,” he told Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator. “But I really felt what he did was awful.”

Becoming a cult leader led to Shoko Asahara's attack on the Tokyo subway 29 years ago today

I just finished Netflix's six-part series How to Become a Cult Leader fittingly today on the 29th anniversary of the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult led by Shoko Asahara, the subject of part 5 of the fairly well-done series (I'll give it 3.5 out of 5 stars).

The series, narrated by Peter Dinklage, takes "at best a questionable approach to the material," noted the Chicago Sun-Times. Providing a "playbook" for how to start a cult, each episode focuses on one leader and the tools they used for success. 

• Charles Manson has always been the Mt. Everest of cult leaders for me, and while I didn't learn anything from the episode about him, there is excellent footage from his story and each of the other ones highlighted. 
• I've always been fascinated by crazy-eyed Marshall Applewhite of the Nike-shoes-wearing Heaven's Gate.
• I learned a lot about the Jim Jones cult.
• I didn't previously know anything about the failed-actor Jaimie Gomez's "army of servants."
• I learned more about Sun Myung Moon and his sushi-pushing, Washington Times-owning, mass-wedding Unification Church.

On March 20, 1995, there were coordinated releases of sarin gas on five Tokyo subway trains near the Japanese parliament headquarters, which killed 13 people, severely injured about 50 more, and resulted in temporary vision problems for almost 1,000 others. 

The tragedy was found to be the work of Asahara, who was sent away as a child to a boarding school and felt he had been abandoned by his family. According to the TV series, this was the source of his pain and his desire to create a major PR plan around his life and image. That plan was to form Aum Shinrikyo in 1984 as a yoga and meditation group, all the way through its transformation into a killer cult that wanted to purify the world. His believers thought he was god and that he could levitate and read people’s minds. 

Aum gained 10,000 members in Japan and about 40,000 worldwide. Japan had become very materialistic in the 1980s and people there were vulnerable to questioning this consumerism. Asahara gave speeches at top universities about spiritual awakening, and he gained prominent professors into the cult. 

He began killing cult members if they somehow acquired bad karma. For his other followers, that was fine. He also ran for office to gain more attention and to spread his message. The mass media ended up making fun of him and his group and from then on, Asahara decided the world was corrupt and it would need to be punished. On a busy Monday morning, his canisters caused thousands of people to go into convulsions and have trouble breathing from the nerve gas. 

The subway attack was not the end of the cult's murderous rampage, as they tried to assassinate judges and government officials who opposed them, succeeded in murdering a lawyer investigating them as well as Asahara's own son, and developed bombs and biological weapons like anthrax. Asahara and other top members of the cult were eventually found guilty in what the Japanese press dubbed "the trial of the century" and he and others were executed by hanging in 2018. His ashes were given to one of his daughters in 2021.

I was still curious as to why Asahara became so murderous. The show didn't quite tackle that well enough, but it seems the combination of his obsession with Biblical prophecies of apocalypse, his immense control over his followers, and the possibility that he wanted to overthrow the Japanese government during a vulnerable time of economic turmoil may have been the perfect storm for Aum Shinrikyo.

Were the 1980s truly the death of the rock star?

In the 1980s, rock stars were no longer coming from the world of music, according to Joe S. Harrington in his excellent 2002 musical and cultural history Sonic Cool: The Life and Death of Rock n’ Roll.

He argues that heroes like Mick Jagger were being replaced by the computer and tech creators like Bill Gates and that the regime change from Democrats to Republicans helped speed along the corporate takeover. Ronald Reagan had been working for years leading up to this environment, fighting in the 1960s to outlaw LSD and push along the Vietnam War and crying for family values in the 1970s to replace the morally decrepit hippy takeover. He finally took over the whole she-bang at age 69 - the second-oldest president elect ever behind Joe Biden - which actually helped him in the eyes of many who had begun to distrust the youth culture that had supposedly ruined the country over the past decade-plus. Religion came back strong in the 80s as well, partly branded as a way to restore moral fiber, which could obviously be seen hanging by a thread in the parking lot of any high school in the U.S., with dope and acid and other poisonous gases porously escaping into the atmosphere. 

Like with punk before it, certain segments of music started to happen completely outside of the mainstream. In the Bronx, DJs started talking over extended funk and disco jams, which was morphing into a new art form called rap. While it was Sugarhill Records that got the hip hop and rap balls rolling, it was Russell Simmons and Rick Rubin with Def Jam Records who “revolutionized the realm of recorded sound,” with the likes of the Beastie Boys, Run-DMC, and Public Enemy, bands that all brought in dirty words to the genre as well. While criticized by Blacks and whites, the Beasties’ debut License to Ill was a major departure from their previous hardcore sound and turned rap into a money-making proposition for the first time. 

Rock music, and music in general, was becoming less of a focus for consumers because video games and VCRs were now entering the picture and taking up people’s time. In fact, it was inevitable that TV and music would merge. USA Today’s Night Flight and HBO’s Video Jukebox preceded MTV. It may have been the blandness of FM radio at this time that also helped MTV succeed.

Rock criticism was changing too. Whereas before, a good or bad album review in Rolling Stone could make a real difference, now people were seeing the music they wanted to listen to and could make choices based on that. Dave Marsh had helped break bands like the Who and Bruce Springsteen, but his decrees that MTV was killing rock got him fired from Rolling Stone by Jann Wenner, who appreciated anything that made money. Kurt Loder was an example of someone who could swallow his pride and his tastes to become a regular MTV presence. 

The consumerist mindset of the country took deeper root with the help of the first generation of MTV stars like Michael Jackson, Madonna, and Prince, and the record companies loved that they could replace albums with CDs, were much cheaper to produce and distribute. While the Beatles, Stones, and Bob Dylan pumped out an album a year in the 1960s, by the 1980s, top artists were lucky to release one every four years, partly because they were all acting, doing TV shows, and making videos for optimal mass marketing. 

The only guitar-based music still having major mainstream success began to be “poodle-haired bands like Bon Jovi, Poison, and Def Leppard.” Female empowerment grew by leaps and bounds in the decade, with Madonna leading the charge of women emasculating men in her music videos. Exercise also became big as the yuppies needed to alter their decadent behavior of the past two decades and find a way to clean up their acts and their minds and bodies. Many men were baffled by the newfound control that women were using and retreated into the world of porn, which would explode with the later introduction of the Internet. All this set up the right climate for Tina Turner to finally write her autobiography and hang her wife-beating former husband Ike out to dry. 

Sonic Cool is a really fun book to read. In a way that's surprising because it's a fairly academic perspective on rock music's place in society, but nearly every paragraph offers a display of Harrington's cutting wit and discerning eye. He's strongly opinionated and I don't always agree with him. For instance, I still think rock is alive, but he has a point that it now occupies a far smaller percentage of the public's imagination than it did during its heyday of the 1960s through the 1980s.

What America looked like as a very uncivil Civil War wound down

As the Civil War wound down in the spring of 1865, it had mostly closed the book on what is still to this day the deadliest war in terms of U.S. casualties. More than 600,000 died, which was more than the total of U.S. soldiers who died in World War I and World War II combined. The introduction of rapid-fire guns, lots of booby traps, and outdated strategies such as frontal assaults were the main reasons for such horrific and frankly unnecessary death counts.

While the North settled into a law-making and forward-facing geography, the South remained for many years as a total wasteland, with rotting and vacant houses and widows in Charleston and ruined factories in Tennessee and the lawlessness in Missouri that helped people like Frank and Jesse James go on a warpath of bank robberies. The cotton and tobacco crops would not recover for well over a decade. The sugar crop in Louisiana would take three decades to recover and many other crops like rice and hemp basically never did. 

Slavery ended, but Black people were still slaves to society. They had no money or property and had to work hard to find friends and even family. Congress established a “Freedmen’s Bureau” to offer land - “40 acres and a mule” - to former slaves, but this was a difficult process to administer. While new constitutional and legal rights had importantly been granted to former slaves, these were really only temporary relief, with all kinds of problems still existing regarding land use, such as how medical care and schools would work and also how the limited amount of land would truly be divided up. 

As noted in the excellent history textbook called America: A Narrative History, by former University of North Carolina history professor George Brown Tindall abd David E. Ski, President Abraham Lincoln was soon, “in the hour of victory,” shot by “a crazed actor who thought he was doing something for the South.” In a quirk, Lincolns’s murder catapulted Andrew Johnson, an unaffiliated politician from Tennessee, into the presidency. He declared reconstruction unnecessary because he claimed basically that the North and South were still one and that the South hadn’t seceded in any way. 

Despite the blatant racism of many in Congress representing the Southern states, Blacks were now at least holding property and could sue and be sued in the court system. But major hurdles remained, such as in Mississippi, where the penal code leaned heavily towards tough punishment for ex-slaves who got in the way of the law there. Johnson did the cause of freedom for former slaves no favors by becoming a bit of a drunk (although the degrees to which that’s true are still debatable). He took to touring the country to get people onboard with reconstruction, which proved harder than he had imagined. He was fairly renowned as an interesting speaker on the stump, but he was also quite a bit like later president Donald Trump in that most of the things he said were completely idiotic and he was ridiculed and labeled as a “drunken imbecile.” 

As Johnson became more and more ineffective through 1867, Congress began a campaign to impeach him for, in their eyes, not working well with Congress. It was close, but the impeachment effort failed and it contributed to making impeachment a very difficult thing to accomplish going forward. It did however make Johnson even less effective throughout the rest of his term which, in turn, helped reconstruction move forward again in a productive direction. This included the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, which gave former slaves the right to vote. For Black children, the opportunity to go to school under the new state school systems led to more than 600,000 attending schools in the South by 1877.

The Ku Klux Klan was established in 1866 in Pulaski, Tennessee by a group of men who started out pranking Blacks and Republicans who had invited Blacks into their political folds. But the group quickly became violent and other chapters rapidly sprung up throughout the South. When President Ulysses S. Grant was able to mass prosecute KKK members in nine counties throughout South Carolina, in 1871, it significantly halted the terrorist group’s more outrageous acts, although more subtle acts of racist terrorism obviously persisted.

Ulysses S. Grant

Grant was elected in 1868 and was wildly popular for his military record. He could have also run for any party since he had almost no political background but became a Republican mainly because he no longer liked President Johnson. The Radicals pushing to end slavery also admired him. While Grant dominated the electoral college vote, it was still surprisingly close in the popular vote, really taking the 500,000 newly ex-slave voters to push him to victory. A major reason his political record would never match his war one is because he made a series of bad cabinet appointments at the start of his run, failing to consult experts and picking wealthy men that he seemed to be in awe of and who happened to lack talent and integrity. 

Grant won a second term but it didn’t go well. Although he didn’t appear to be involved, his brother-in-law was part of a plan to falsely inflate the value of gold, which caused the market to burst and set back the economy. There were many other financial scandals happening, including one that took railroad funds away from shareholders to line the pockets of politicians, including future president James Garfield. Grant was not implicated in any of them, but his time in office was an exceptionally corrupt time for the country.

Thanks to the two-term limit being in place, Grant would not run for a third term. He probably could have won 10 terms based on his long-ago performance at Appomattox alone. But after a series of more scandals from potentially stronger candidates, Rutherford B. Hayes made it out as the next president. He was a three-time Ohio governor and strong on fiscal matters, despite being “a third-rate nonentity … obnoxious to no one.” Fittingly, he took the office by a measly one vote in the electoral college.