Success – KMZ Digest

The social benefits of psychological generosity

wordpress — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 19:43:36 +0000

Linda R. Tropp

May 21, 2025

How much do you engage with others when you’re out in public? Lots of people don’t actually engage with others much at all. Think of commuters on public transportation staring down at their phones with earbuds firmly in place.

As a professor of social psychology, I see similar trends on my university campus, where students often put on their headphones and start checking their phones before leaving the lecture hall on the way to their next class.

Curating daily experiences in these ways may appeal to your personal interests, but it also limits opportunities for social connection. Humans are social beings: We desire to feel connected to others, and even connecting with strangers can potentially boost our mood.

www.boundless.org

Though recent technological advances afford greater means for connection than at any other moment in human history, many people still feel isolated and disconnected. Indeed, loneliness in the American population has reached epidemic levels, and Americans’ trust in each other has reached a historic low.

At the same time, our attention is increasingly being pulled in varied directions within a highly saturated information environment, now commonly known as the “attention economy.”

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that so many Americans are experiencing a crisis of social connection. Research in social psychology helps to explain how the small behaviors and choices we make as individuals affect our experiences with others in public settings.

Where you focus your attention

One factor shaping people’s experiences in public settings concerns where they focus their attention. Since there is more information out in the world than anyone could ever realistically take in, people are driven to conserve their limited mental resources for those things that seem most crucial to navigating the world successfully. What this means is that every person’s attention is finite and selective: By attending to certain bits of information, you necessarily tune out others, whether you’re aware of doing so or not.

By Mariusz/peopleimages.com

More often than not, the information you deem worthy of attention also tends to be self-relevant. That is, people are more likely to engage with information that piques their interest or relates to them in some way, whereas they tend to ignore information that seems unrelated or irrelevant to their existence.

These ingrained tendencies might make logical sense from an evolutionary perspective, but when applied to everyday social interaction, they suggest that people will limit their attention to and regard for other people unless they see others as somehow connected to them or relevant to their lives.

One unfortunate consequence is that a person may end up treating interactions with other people as transactions, with a primary focus on getting one’s own needs met, or one’s own questions answered. A very different approach would involve seeing interactions with others as opportunities for social connection; being willing to expend some additional mental energy to listen to others’ experiences and exchange views on topics of shared interest can serve as a foundation for building social relationships.

How others interpret your actions

Also, by focusing so much attention on their own individual interests, people may inadvertently signal disinterest to others in their social environments.

As an example, imagine how it would feel to be on the receiving end of those daily commuting rituals. You find yourself surrounded by people whose ears are closed off, whose eyes are down and whose attention is elsewhere – and you might start to feel like no one really cares whether you exist or not.

As social creatures, it’s natural for human beings to want to be seen and acknowledged by other people. Small gestures such as eye contact or a smile, even from a stranger, can foster feelings of connection by signaling that our existence matters. Instead, when these signals are absent, a person may come to feel like they don’t matter, or that they’re not worthy of others’ attention.

How to foster connection in public spaces

_{Acknowledging another human with a smile, even when using an automated system, can help them feel seen and valued}. _{izusek/E+ via Getty Images}

For all these reasons, it may prove valuable to reflect on how you use your limited mental resources, as a way to be more mindful and purposeful about what and who garner your attention. As I encourage my Flickrstudents to do, people can choose to engage in what I refer to as psychological generosity: You can intentionally redirect some of your attention toward the other people around you and expend mental resources beyond what is absolutely necessary to navigate the social world.

Engaging in psychological generosity doesn’t need to be a heavy lift, nor does it call for any grand gestures. But it will probably take a little more effort beyond the bare minimum it typically takes to get by. In other words, it will likely involve moving from being merely transactional with other people to becoming more relational while navigating interactions with them.

A few simple examples of psychological generosity might include actions such as:

Tuning in by turning off devices. Rather than default to focusing attention on your phone, try turning off its volume or setting it to airplane mode. See if you notice any changes in how you engage with other people in your immediate environment.
Making eye contact and small talk. As historian Timothy Snyder writes, eye contact and small talk are “not just polite” but constitute “part of being a responsible member of society.”
Smiling and greeting someone you don’t know. Take the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” to the realm of social relations, by showing your willingness to welcome other people rather than displaying disinterest and avoidance. Such simple acts may help to foster feelings of belonging and build a sense of community with others.

https://www.wnyc.org/story/pleasant-commute-talk-stranger/

Among the most cynical, examples like these may initially be written off as reflecting pleas to practice the random acts of kindness often trumpeted on bumper stickers. Yet acts like these are far from random – they require intention and redirection of your attention toward action, like any new habit you may wish to cultivate.

Others might wonder whether potential benefits to society are worth the individual cost, given that attention and effort are limited resources. But, ultimately, our well-being as individuals and the health of our communities grow from social connection.

Practicing acts of psychological generosity, then, can provide you with opportunities to benefit from social connection, at the same time as these acts can pay dividends to other people and to the social fabric of your community.

theconversation.com/making-eye-contact-and-small-talk-with-strangers-is-more-than-just-being-polite-the-social-benefits-of-psychological-generosity-252477

Marion Joseph’s literacy crusade for teaching

itsme — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 20:24:44 +0000

phonics in California is paying off

Students at Stege Elementary School in Richmond on Feb. 6, 2023.
Photo by Shelby Knowles for CalMatters

Dan Walters

March 19, 2023

Sometimes – not often, but sometimes – one person can have a life-changing impact on the wellbeing of millions of people.

Marion Joseph, who died nearly a year ago at age 95, was one of those people. She impacted millions of California schoolchildren present and future who struggle with reading comprehension, the vital skill that underlies all of education.

Marion Joseph
https://www.corelearn.com/

The pandemic underscored that too many of California’s elementary school students lack effective reading ability. EdSource noted that, prior to the pandemic, fewer than 50% of the state’s third-graders were reading at the expected level for their age. Three years later, after students had suffered through school closures and haphazard Zoom school, that had dropped to 42%.

It’s evident that one factor in the state’s reading crisis was that too many students were being subjected to a trendy form of reading instruction called “whole language,” which largely left them struggling on their own to decipher the words in their books.

_Shutterstock

For decades, California educators and politicians had been waging what were dubbed “reading wars” over whether that approach or the rival phonics method was more effective. School districts were left to decide for themselves which to use.

Joseph was one of the fiercest reading warriors. She had retired in 1982 after a long career in the state Department of Education, but became a tireless advocate for phonics after discovering that her granddaughter was struggling in reading.

Appalled to learn that the majority of California’s elementary students could not read well enough to learn from textbooks, Joseph started pestering state officials to do something. In the 1990s, then-Gov. Pete Wilson appointed her to the state Board of Education, which gave her a platform for the phonics crusade.

Joseph had some success in advancing the phonics cause, which stresses fundamental instruction in the letters and letter combinations that make up sounds, thus allowing children to sound out words and eventually whole sentences and passages.

In 2005, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy research group, honored her, saying, “Her relentless, research-based advocacy – for which the retired grandma didn’t earn a dime – is still a sterling example of what a citizen-activist and lone individual can accomplish in reforming U.S. schools.”

https://firstbook.org/

Alas, after Joseph retired for a second time, the advocates of whole language, which assumes that reading is a naturally learned skill, much like speaking, recouped and reading scores once again stagnated. However it now appears that phonics, now dubbed the “science of reading,” will become the state’s preferred method.

Phonics have a new champion in Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has struggled with dyslexia and thus has a strong personal interest in improving reading skills.

Buried on Page 123 of a trailer bill attached to Newsom’s proposed 2023-24 state budget is a $1 million appropriation to the Department of Education for creation of a “Literacy Roadmap” aimed at improving reading and other language skills using “evidence-based literacy instruction in the classroom, including explicit instruction in phonics, phonemic awareness, and other decoding skills.”

_{Logo-The California Reading & Literature Project (CRLP) UC San Diego}

Newsom’s support isn’t the only indication that Joseph’s long struggle is paying off. Beginning next year, credentialing of teacher preparation programs will require reading standards aligned with phonics.

Perhaps most importantly, 14 leading figures in California education research and advocacy, including those who have fought in reading wars on both sides, have issued a joint paper that calls for more vigorous and targeted instruction in basic reading skills, including phonics.

It’s unfortunate Joseph is not alive to see what’s finally happening to address California’s literacy crisis.

calmatters.org/commentary/2023/03/reading-instruction-phonics-california

Can learning cursive help kids read better?

itsme — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 20:14:57 +0000

Pennsylvania is considering legislation that mandates cursive instruction in public schools.
Angela Guthrie/iStock via Getty Images

Some policymakers think it’s worth a try

Shawn Datchuk

May 6, 2025

Recently, my 8-year-old son received a birthday card from his grandmother. He opened the card, looked at it and said, “I can’t read cursive yet.”

Image: Cartoonstock

Then he handed it to me to read.

If you have a child in the Philadelphia School District, chances are they have not been taught how to read or write cursive either.

But cursive handwriting is making a comeback of sorts for K-8 students in the United States. Several states in recent years passed legislation mandating instruction in cursive handwriting, including California, Iowa and Oklahoma.

Pennsylvania and New Jersey are considering similar legislation, as are other states.

I’m an associate professor of special education and the director of the Iowa Reading Research Center. At the center, we’re conducting a systematic review of prior research to improve cursive handwriting instruction.

We also want to know how learning cursive affects the development of reading and writing skills.

Cursive instruction sidelined

In cursive handwriting, the individual letters of a word are joined with connecting strokes, such as in a person’s signature.

Cursive fell out of favor in U.S. schools over a decade ago. In 2010, most states adopted Common Core academic standards which omitted cursive handwriting from expected academic skills to be learned by K-8 students. In fact, the standards only briefly mention print handwriting, a writing style in which the individual letters of a word are unconnected, as a skill to be taught in early elementary grades.

Educators often have trouble finding enough time in the school day to teach all the expected writing skills, let alone something that’s not mandated such as cursive handwriting.

In several national surveys, teachers have reported limited amounts of time for writing instruction and that they have found it difficult to address both the basic skills of writing, such as handwriting, and more advanced skills, such as essay composition.

Benefits of handwriting

The increased interest in cursive handwriting likely stems from effort by policymakers to improve the literacy performance of K-12 students across the country.

Ode to Cursive
Amy DiGi

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment, a measure of nationwide reading progress, only 31% of fourth grade students scored proficient or above. Philadelphia’s numbers were worse, with just 19% of fourth grade students scoring proficient or above.

Research suggests it may be possible to improve overall writing and reading through handwriting instruction.

The benefits have been more closely studied with print handwriting, but preliminary evidence suggests cursive handwriting instruction may also be beneficial. Some studies have found cursive handwriting instruction can improve handwriting legibility, writing length and select reading skills. In a 2020 study, researchers found cursive handwriting instruction can also improve spelling accuracy and storytelling ability.

Why might cursive make a difference? On the surface, it seems like a simple motor skill. But under the surface, cursive handwriting draws upon deep reading knowledge and requires the coordination of multiple cognitive and physical processes.

To handwrite letters or spell words in print or cursive, students need to commit multiple aspects of each letter to memory. For example, if students handwrite the word “cat,” they need to know the overall shape of each letter, as well as its name and sound.

After drawing upon this reading knowledge from memory, students use a combination of motor and vision systems to write each letter and the entire word. Gross motor movements are used to adjust the body and arm to the writing surface. Fine motor movements are used to manipulate the pencil with one’s fingers. And visual-motor coordination is used to write each letter and adjust movements as needed.

A skill with staying power?

Besides potential benefits to overall writing and reading development, cursive handwriting continues to have social importance.

It is often used to sign formal documents via a cursive signature, or to communicate with close friends or loved ones. Furthermore, understanding cursive is needed to read important historical documents, such as the Declaration of Independence.

Even in the digital age, touch-screen tablets and other devices often come with the ability to handwrite text with an electronic pencil. I teach courses at the University of Iowa, and many of my students handwrite their notes on electronic tablets.

For schools, low-tech options such as paper and pencils remain more cost-efficient than high-tech options. For example, it can be time-consuming and expensive to replace a broken laptop but relatively cheap to sharpen a broken pencil or get a new piece of paper.

Although it may be difficult for educators to find sufficient time for writing instruction, students will likely benefit from developing the capacity to express their ideas in a variety of ways, including cursive handwriting.

For anyone interested in learning about cursive handwriting and teaching it to their children or students, the Iowa Reading Research Center will release a free online course and curricula called CLIFTER on June 2, 2025.

theconversation.com/can-learning-cursive-help-kids-read-better-some-policymakers-think-its-worth-a-try-253610

How COVID-19 Changed College Athletic Recruiting

itsme — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 21:57:40 +0000

Hoboken High School in Hoboken, New Jersey (Photo/Luigi Novi -Wikimedia Commons)

By Nicole McNulty

April 19, 2021

ARCELIA MARTIN, HOST: On average only about 6% of high school athletes go on to play sports in college. In a normal year, graduating seniors would be signed to their college teams by now. But COVID has disrupted this cycle. Nicole McNulty explores what that means for kids hoping to play sports in college.

NICOLE MCNULTY, BYLINE: Tyler Sims has been playing basketball since he was 9 years old. And like a lot of kids.

TYLER SIMS: My dream school is definitely Duke University. You know, I’ve been watching them since I was little. That’s my favorite basketball team.

MCNULTY: That would be tough enough any year. But with the pandemic it’s even harder. Tyler is a 17-year-old senior guard on the Hoboken High School boys varsity basketball team. Normally, coaches would be in the stands watching him play. But this year, they can’t watch in person. So his only way to get in front of them is his highlight reel. He had to make it himself. His friend filmed it. Here’s a clip of him making a layup in his red Number 2 jersey.

TAPE: [Basketball game.]

MCNULTY: Highlight tapes were always a part of the process – videos players make and send to colleges. But this year, his video might be his only chance. And his season was shorter. He’s played half as many games.

SIMS: I’m nervous, but at the same time, I’m very confident that, um, I’ll be in the hands of the right school. I’m pretty sure that I’ll play college basketball.

MCNULTY: Still, Tyler, like many other kids in the U.S., is now behind the ball. The recruiting process usually looks like this:

TIM NEVIUS: It’s about getting the athlete recognized by a college coach.

MCNULTY: That’s Tim Nevius, a lawyer who works with college athletes on eligibility and other issues.

NEVIUS: And then that coach making contact with them via email, telephone and establishing a connection and then offering a scholarship or a roster spot or admission.

MCNULTY: Nevius says the COVID disruption has created two major problems. One of them is what kids like Tyler are dealing with.

NEVIUS: Because of canceled seasons or postponement or the inability of coaches to travel, the athletes aren’t actually being seen playing their sports as they normally would.

MCNULTY: And the second problem? Overloaded rosters. Because of the pandemic, the NCAA extended college players’ eligibility. Coaches can hold onto their seniors for another year. That means fewer spots for high school hopefuls.

NEVIUS: For the incoming freshmen, then, that means that they’re faced with even a larger roster of juniors and seniors than they otherwise would have been.

MCNULTY: Take Bloomfield College in New Jersey, a Division II school. Gerald Holmes is the basketball coach there. He’s bringing back three of his seniors this fall. That only leaves room for three incoming freshmen. He might be able to take one more, but there’s another problem. This year the rules are more flexible for transfer students. They’re bigger, faster, stronger.

GERALD HOLMES: A lot of coaches would prefer to have a transfer versus a freshman. So, high school kids are taking the brunt of that.

MCNULTY: This year there are many new rules: each sport and division has their own. And the pandemic has changed a lot of them. An already complicated situation is worse — everyone from coaches to parents and students are confused.

HOLMES: It’s almost like the wild, wild west out there.

MCNULTY: For high school athletes, it’s a struggle to stand out. Holmes says he gets at least 100 emails a day from recruiting services and high school players. He agrees, the ripples of COVID are going to be felt in the recruiting process for years.

HOLMES: In reality, this is going to be a full cycle of four years, is going to be because a kid who is a freshman for me this year is still a freshman next year.

MCNULTY: The rules say that if a college player’s season was disrupted by COVID, they can play an extra year. As for Tyler, the 17-year-old in Hoboken, he sent his tape to a few schools. But no one knows when he’ll find out for sure about making a team. If he doesn’t get in this year, he’ll wait, keep training and try again next year.

Nicole McNulty, Columbia Radio News.

columbianewsservice.com/2021/04/19/how-covid-19-changed-college-athletic-recruiting

This story first aired on Uptown Radio.

About the author(s)

Nicole McNulty

Nicole McNulty is an audio journalist based in New York. She was born in Texas and spent her adolescence in Germany and Colorado. After traveling in her van for two years she now calls the city home. Her freelance print work can be found in The Boulder Weekly, The City Weekly and The West Side Rag. Nicole is currently studying at Columbia Journalism School where she’s focusing on crafting audio stories for Uptown Radio. Connect with Nicole on Twitter @nicole_mcnulty and via email nicole.mcnulty@columbia.edu

Clubhouse Rules:

itsme — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 21:26:43 +0000

New York’s New Young Republican Leader Eyes the Future

Gavin Wax sits in the “Clubhouse” of the New York Young Republican Club. (Credit: Aidan Kahn)

November 8, 2022

By Asta Kongsted

Gavin Wax sat on one of the many brown leather couches lining the studio apartment that serves as the “Clubhouse” of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC) on a recent Thursday afternoon. It is thanks to Wax that this group has that Midtown apartment at all – a fact which the 28 year-old Queens native does nothing to hide and which no one does anything to dispute. When Wax took over the presidency of the Club in 2019, it had 50 members and nowhere to host them. These days, membership stands at 1,100, while more than 76,000 have subscribed to their newsletter. With the members came the donors, making it possible to rent the space. Among them are Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, whose sizable donation helped pay for the couches.

Across from Wax, a young and visibly awestruck man settled into a leather seat of his own. He looked around the room, admiring the heavy, crimson curtains, the elaborate hunting trophies and the prominent display of KellyAnne Conway’s book Here’s the Deal on the mantelpiece of a fake fireplace. Žiga Ciglaric, a member of Slovenia’s right wing populist party, Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS), had come to receive political advice from Wax, who took on the role of wartime consigliere with ease: “When did you lose the election?” he asked, brow furrowed. “How’s your relationship with the media?” he added and nodded with acknowledgment when Ciglaric complained of a “communist” media elite that is “brainwashing” the minds of the Slovenians, who turned their backs on SDS during a parliamentary election this April.

Under Wax’ leadership, meetings like these are common at the NYYRC clubhouse. Since 2019, the Club has created “coalitions,” as he likes to call them, with far-right youth movements from all over Europe. Meanwhile, Wax is gaining more attention in the United States. Media outlets like Newsweek reported on it when Wax enthusiastically endorsed Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán —whose government the European Parliament recently referred to as an electoral autocracy— in early 2022. When Wax later traveled to Hungary to speak at the first-ever Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in Europe, The New Yorker and Arkansas Online made note of his presence.

When Wax finished counseling Ciglaric on this particular October afternoon, he was headed straight to the Taiwanese Embassy.

Wax’ idea is to nurture a global network of young, far-right politicians with a shared ideological framework, which he describes as populist and centered around “opposing free trade, opposing free immigration” and “economic pragmatism.” Ideally, the New York City-based Club will be the movement’s center of gravity.

At the same time, there’s work to be done on a national level, Wax said. Were it up to Wax, the Republican establishment would be on its way out and the remaining party members would adopt what he describes as the populist agenda that former President Donald Trump might have instigated, but of which he is only the beginning.

“The end goal for us is to take over the governing infrastructure that runs the Party. We need to put people that ideologically agree with us in positions of power so they can influence and shift things overnight,” said Wax.

In the future, it may very well be up to him. He’s president of the largest and oldest Young Republican Club in the country, he’s added appearances on alt-right podcasts and Fox News, he has ties to the likes of Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz, so Wax’ words hold sway. And he intends to put action behind them. Eyeing the midterm election, he’s focused on a bright red future that few others see for true blue New York.

The “Emperor”

By mistake or design, and probably as a result of both, Wax’ origin story somewhat resembles Trump’s. As a former Bayside, Queens-resident with a college degree from Nassau Community College, Wax doesn’t possess the political pedigree of a traditional Republican leader.

Wax was raised by a single mother working shifting office jobs and the two of them moved around New York a lot. He frequently changed schools and found it difficult to fit in among his peers who wore clothes that his mom couldn’t afford. In high school, Wax said that he started selling “weed and mushrooms” to students and parents. He never touched the stuff himself, he said. He was in it to afford the same clothing as his customers.

“I didn’t like the clothes I had, I didn’t like that I was poor. You know, stupid petty shit,” Wax said. It took him a few years – and the political emergence of Trump – to realize that “fitting in” was not going to be the most politically salient strategy in the future.

These days, he’s selling political ideas. And like any good salesman, he easily attunes to the audience he’s trying to reach, weaving himself in and out of different discourses: at times speaking softly on the leather couch, while at others, screaming 140 characters onto Twitter, where he, until recently, called himself “The Emperor.”

At the Club, his leadership seems to agree he’s earned that title.

“Gavin’s problem is that there’s just not enough time in the day,“ said Nathan Berger, vice president of the Club. A sentiment that is echoed nearly word for word by the leaders of the club’s Black and Catholic caucuses, Jude Somefun and Michael Bartels. Perhaps once an outsider, he’s now the center of the world in the Midtown apartment promoting a Trumpian agenda, which may once have seemed fringe but is quickly becoming mainstream within the GOP.

The club’s former leadership is less likely to praise Wax’ talents. Some have claimed that he took over the once liberally Conservative club by way of a coup in 2019, when alumni of the NYYRC enticed Wax and then-associate Vish Burra to replace the presidency.

“We won an election without opposition and it was unanimous,“ said Wax, calling it a coup only “in the metaphorical sense. The club rapidly changed direction, ideologically and otherwise,“ embracing a more divisive profile: Disputing the 2020 election results while embracing a far-right political agenda. The former leadership have since left the club and the five members that were contacted for this story declined to comment on the specific circumstances of their departure.

When confronted with the fact that some are unwilling to go on the record about him, Wax seemed pleased: “If I’m going to be hated, I’d rather also be feared.“

Meanwhile, a collective amnesia seems to hover over the current members, who all have a hard time remembering the details of the change in leadership, Wax included.

As he walked around the Clubhouse, tidying the already immaculate space, he pointed to pictures of notable alumni, recounting their names and dates of membership. At the same time, he found it hard to remember the name of the former president from whom he took over the Club. It’s Melissa Marovich, a young woman who presided over the Club from 2016-2019 and has since left politics altogether. She, too, declined to comment about her exit.

Wax simply refers to his predecessor and the rest of her former presidency as a group of “no-names,” unable to fulfill the potential of the Club.

Winning on the Margins

Why anyone would want to ascend the throne of a tiny Club of 50 members ruled by a bunch of “no-names” only makes sense if you can spot the political potential that Wax is committed to realizing. Many think of New York as a decidedly Democratic state, but in Wax’ mind nothing is set in stone.

“There is a very fertile ground in New York based on a very populist agenda: crime is up, the economy is a mess, people are fleeing the state in droves, taxes are too high, the services are too bad. The situation is abysmal and I think it’s shifting the political dynamics in favor of the Republicans. That doesn’t have to do with the brilliance of the party. That just has to do with the fact that the average Joe-Schmo, the average Sally-Jane, realizes they’re spending more money and they’re getting less in return,” he said. Wax argues enthusiastically that the key to flipping the state red is getting a third of New York City to vote for a Republican.

Calling the ground “fertile” is an overstatement, at least for now. No polls indicate that the road toward a new golden era for Republicans has been paved.

“Suppose that you were able to convince a third of New York City voters to vote Republican,” said associate professor of Data Journalism and former database journalist at FiveThirtyEight, Dhrumil Mehta. “It still doesn’t make much of a difference to the overall New York State result.”

Wax is, however, convinced that with the right candidate – and the right Democrat to run against – it can be done. Wax gave the example of Democratic Mayor Eric Adams.

“Eric Adams was a former Republican who ran as a cop on an anti-crime agenda. He did not run like a left-winger. Eric Adams kept the margins where they were, but if you get rid of Eric Adams and swap him with a Far-Leftie, you’re talking about 30-40 points for Republicans in the city. So it can happen,” Wax said.

Besides, “politics is about winning on the margins,” and so Wax is committed to keep chipping away at the Democratic majority while they’re looking the other way.

The rivals at the Manhattan Young Democrats (MYD) are indeed looking the other way. But perhaps not for the reasons Wax would like to think.

“I don’t think about Gavin Wax,” was the succinct answer from the president of MYD, Jeremy Berman, when asked about Wax’ political efforts. Berman paused briefly after learning about the recent growth of the Republican Club, but then added:

“They can have as many members as they want, but we are the ones who are electing the elected officials. I’m less concerned with how fancy the venue my banquet is in, and how many Congress members I can meet from outside the state of New York, and I’m more concerned with making people’s lives better.”

Berman said the focus of the MYD is on local politics rather than international relations. He is running for the Democratic State Committee this year.

Meanwhile, Wax is aware that little will come of his aspirations without political power. So he’s got a plan targeting his own party.

“We can take over the local party. We did a test run this year, and we got a few dozen people elected to the county committee,“ he said, referring to a contested Manhattan county committee election, in which the NYYRC was accused of committing ballot fraud – an allegation Wax refuses. “If we committed ballot fraud, we would have been prosecuted.”

So he’ll apply the same strategy going forward, starting with intentional moves to lift up local leaders.

“And slowly but surely, we’ll put our people into positions of power within the party, and have direct political influence and control of the levers of power,” Wax said.

Pace is a recurring theme for Wax. “Slowly,” Wax’ political faction will carve out the GOP establishment through the county committee. “Slowly,”that faction will start to seriously challenge the city Democrats. And slowly, no rush indeed, Wax himself may consider running for office.

With Tweets disputing the recent Brazilian election results and an endorsement of the now-defeated former president Jair Bolsonaro, Wax’ Twitter-presence would surely scare off New York City liberals. His real life persona is less extreme. Compared to characters like former Republican mayoral candidate and Guardian Angels-founder Curtis Sliwa or the underwhelming gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, Wax has a few extra strings to play. He’s traded Queens for the Upper East Side and secured a job as Global Digital Marketing Director of the alt-right tech startup GETTR, a social media platform not unlike Trump’s TRUTH Social. Dressing the part might have been an issue in high school, but these days, the cufflinks on his suit are Gucci.

Wax may be busy, but he’s not in a rush. He recently flew down to Florida to attend the wedding of the Congressman Matt Gaetz to Ginger Luckey; Gaetz has continually made headlines recently for his alleged involvement in a sex trafficking probe. It was an intimate event, Wax said, visibly proud to belong to Gaetz’ inner circle, who celebrated next to punny signs announcing that “Gaetz got Luckey.”

The following Monday, Wax was back at the Club, keeping the leather couches occupied and the NYYRC’s membership growing. He may also be calling his real estate agent soon. The Club is starting to outgrow their current clubhouse. Lucky for him, more private donors – whose identities Wax will not disclose – are lining up to show their support. He’s convinced that, eventually, the voters will too.

Correction: A previous version of this story misspelled Dhrumil Mehta’s surname.

About the author(s)

Asta Kongsted

Asta Kongsted is an M.S. student at Columbia Journalism School. She is the former editor of the Danish media Føljeton.

columbianewsservice.com/2022/11/08/clubhouse-rules-new-yorks-new-young-republican-leader-eyes-the-future

Battling the Loneliness Ogre:

itsme — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:20 +0000

One Man’s Journey in the Remote Work Era

By Ragnhildur Thrastardottir

May 18, 2023

When Benjamin Schwartz, 25, moved from New Jersey to New York City in 2021, he felt lonely. He was working from home as an advisor for Deloitte, and his days would often start with him crawling out of bed to get his computer and then returning to do the work from his bed. Schwartz didn’t meet many people or take regular lunch breaks, and this lifestyle started to take a toll on him. “This sucks,” he thought. “Maybe this isn’t the way life is supposed to work.”

He tried going to coffee shops and libraries and renting a desk at a coworking space. But even though he was surrounded by people, he still felt alone.

As Schwartz, a soft-spoken young man who takes a pause before he answers every question about his business, found out, he wasn’t the only remote worker experiencing loneliness. Remote work became increasingly necessary when the Covid-19 pandemic started, and many who continue to work remotely feel pangs of isolation.

Earlier this year, Schwartz quit his advisor job and started a one-person events company that aims to solve the isolation problem, albeit on a small scale. It’s called The Tavern, with the name meant to evoke the idea of a central place where digital nomads can convene.

Since starting the company, Schwartz has hosted a few events for specific communities of remote workers. They meet in a restaurant, work in the same space, have lunch together and discuss challenges they face professionally, with the hope of finding a group solution. They then finish the day with a happy hour.

When the social isolation started to get to him during the pandemic, Schwartz thought: “What could I do for my community to fix this?”

With his friends Daniel Maron and Anna Kaplan, he started a pilot program at the Jewish Center synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last December. They brought together a group of a dozen people from different professions, and they worked together for a few afternoons. It was successful, and Schwartz decided to take the idea further.

He wasn’t interested in opening a regular coworking space where people rent out desks. He wanted to build a community, and that’s what Schwartz is now selling to his customers. He kicked off the first event, geared toward young professional women, in a Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood. Eight women showed up the first time and fewer the next. But Schwartz didn’t give up. He decided to step back, gather some data and reach out to others for advice. When he hosted the next event in early May at the coincidentally named restaurant Hudson Yards Tavern, the 25 slots he had available filled up.

“We had some learning moments, but now we’re ready,” Schwartz said, referring to shifts in his marketing strategy. He focuses more on reaching out to people through Instagram and TikTok than before, and that seems to be successful.

The event at Hudson Yards was open to people in their 20s. They filled the back of the restaurant, worked on their laptops and occasionally chatted.

Amrit Subramanian, an independent software engineer, was one of them. He’s been working remotely for two and a half years. He sometimes feels trapped in his apartment and finds it hard to disconnect from work.

“I think people have gotten too used to feeling isolated, and they are craving real-life experiences,” said Subramanian, who is working on an app to connect people with similar interests. “That’s why I decided to come out today.”

Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, declared in May that loneliness and isolation are part of a new health epidemic in the United States.

Many of the attendees at the Tavern’s May event have felt that epidemic. Janna Safran, who works in international public health, is one of them. She works in a hybrid model and had been to the office that morning. But she found it almost empty.

“There’s not a lot of overlap, and most of my colleagues are international, so I really appreciate coming into a space where I can see people,” Safran said. “It’s been very hard to connect with other people, so I was very grateful for this.”

Even though the attendees had tried coworking spaces and attended multiple networking events, mixers at bars often had loud music, so they found the Tavern’s event unique.

“It’s cool to be networking while still getting work done,” said Richard Damas, a hybrid worker who works in professional development for financial advisors at CitiBank.

Schwartz is starting small, with monthly events, but he hopes to expand to multiple times a week, with different communities of people each time. One of the groups he wants to reach out to is recent college graduates, and the reason for that is personal.

“I had a very hard transition when I moved to New York City, even though I’m from half an hour away,” Schwartz said. “I was right out of college, I came from a very close network of people, and I was just alone in this huge city.”

Each guest pays $10 to attend an event and is expected to purchase a meal and a drink at the restaurant. Because the Tavern brings customers to Manhattan restaurants during slow hours, more common after the pandemic, Schwartz gets the space for free in return.

People who work from home tend to have this disposable income, too. With fewer days at the office, people are spending much less money on restaurants and other services near their work, data from The Working From Home Research Project shows. Last year, annual spending per person surveyed decreased by $4,661 from the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

Babu Chow, one of the owners of the Hudson Yards Tavern, has felt this loss and was happy when Schwartz reached out to him with the idea of bringing in a group of coworking people.

“In this area, we need these kinds of things,” Chow said.

Schwartz is tapping into a big market, which grew tremendously during the pandemic. Even though many people have returned to the office, a significant portion of the American workforce remains at home, hybrid, or flexible on the terms, and many only come into the office a few times a week.

Research from the Partnership of New York City, a nonprofit group of CEOs from corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms, shows that as of late January, only 9% of the borough’s office employees came into the office five days a week. Further, Manhattan employees who the organization talked to predict that the new normal average of daily occupancy of the borough’s offices will be 56%.

Schwartz isn’t the only one targeting this remote market. Other businesses targeting the remote and hybrid worker have launched, including The Wing, a women’s coworking club that shut down last fall. But Schwartz doesn’t worry about the competition.

“Coworking is thought of as real estate, but I see it as event planning and marketing, which is just totally different,” he said.

Schwartz is self-funding the company so far and has spent around $10,000, mostly on marketing and consulting. He’s hoping to make money through ticket sales, taking some percentage of the food and drink sold, and selling advertisements distributed during the events. He compares the advertising model to social media, where ads are directed at specific communities of people. By advertising with the Tavern, Schwartz said, companies can do precisely that, reach the targeted community that attends each event.

Schwartz sees a future for this business, especially when he mentions the Tavern ten years from now and speculates about the company’s growth. Still, he feels lonely sometimes.

“I think I’ve tapped into something in myself that’s very mission-driven,” Schwartz said.

About the author(s):

Ragnhildur Thrastardottir

Ragnhildur Thrastardottir is a journalist currently pursuing an M.S. degree in journalism at Columbia University.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes2

kim zolotar — Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:16:50 +0000

These innovators, scientists, creative thinkers and just regular people all played a pivotal role in helping me live my best life.

Ralph Braun

Wheelchair van pioneer

Ralph Braun

Ralph William Braun (December 18, 1940 – February 8, 2013) was the founder and CEO of the Braun Corporation. He is also known as the “Father of the Mobility Movement” at BraunAbility.

Braun was born and raised in Winamac, Indiana. When he was six years old, doctors diagnosed him with muscular dystrophy. He started using a wheelchair at the age of 14. At the age of 15, he created a motorized wagon with his father to help him get around. Five years later, Braun created a motorized scooter, which he called the Tri-Wheeler, using various parts from his cousin’s farm. Ralph rode the Tri-Wheeler to and from his day job as a Quality Control Manager for a nearby manufacturer. When the facility moved several miles away, he equipped an old mail carrier Jeep with hand controls and a hydraulic tailgate lift, enabling him to drive his Tri-Wheeler in and out of the vehicle unassisted.

In 1970, Dodge introduced the first full-sized, front engine van. Braun retrofitted a Dodge van with a lift and called this new invention the “Lift-A-Way” wheelchair lift. When word spread about this new invention, Braun assembled a team to help fill orders across the nation, all from his parents’ garage. As demand increased, Braun decided to quit his full-time job to focus on his part-time business.

Braun started “Save-A-Step” manufacturing in 1963 to build the first motorized scooter, made from “a lawnmower differential, four big wheelbarrow tires, two 6-volt automotive batteries, makeshift wiring and switches I got from the hardware store, a kitchen chair, and a motor from a 1957 Pontiac kid’s car that I rescued from a mortician’s trash bin”.[6] In 1966 Braun created the first wheelchair accessible vehicle, by creating a wheelchair platform lift and hand controls that were added to an old Post Office Jeep.[6] In 1970, Ralph added wheelchair platform lifts to full-sized vans. “Save-A-Step” was incorporated under a new name, The Braun Corporation, in 1972.

In 1991, Braun introduced its first wheelchair accessible minivan, based on the Dodge Caravan and called the Entervan.[7] In 1999, Braun acquired Crow River Industries, a specialized manufacturer of wheelchair platform lifts. In 2005, Braun acquired IMS of Farmington, NM, a specialized manufacturer of Toyota Sienna wheelchair accessible minivans. In 2006, the Braun Corporation adopted the brand name, BraunAbility, for its personal-use products. In 2011, the Braun Corporation acquired partial ownership in AutoAdapt, a European mobility company. In 2011, the Braun Corporation also acquired Viewpoint Mobility, a small Michigan-based company that specializes in the wheelchair accessible minivans with rear entry.

In May 2012, Braun was named a “champion of change” by U.S. President Barack Obama.

In 1991, the the Braun Entervan was introduced. It was equipped with a ramp and kneel system and removable front seats which allowed the chair user to enter the vehicle independently and drive from their wheelchair.

My disabled sports mom ride

BraunAbility makes vans that have side entry ramps, as well as models with rear entry ramps. Vans are available with powered ramps, or with manual ramps for people on a smaller budget.

Driving from my wheelchair for the past 11 years has been a godsend!

Edwin Binney & C. Harold Smith

wp:image {“id”:6477,”align”:”center”,”className”:”wp-block-image aligncenter size-full is-resized”} –>

Founders of Crayola Crayons

The company was founded as Binney & Smith Company by cousins Edwin Binney and Charles Harold Smith^[6] in New York City in 1885. Initial products were colorants for industrial use, including red iron oxide pigments used in barn paint and carbon black chemicals used for making tires black and extending their useful lifespan.^[7] Binney & Smith’s new process of creating inexpensive black colorants was entered into the chemistry industries competition at the 1900 Paris Exposition under the title “carbon gas blacks, lamp or oil blacks, ‘Peerless’ black” and earned the company a gold medal award in chemical and pharmaceutical arts.^[8][9] Also in 1900, the company added production of slate school pencils. Binney’s experimentation with industrial materials, including slate waste, cement, and talc, led to the invention of the first dustless white chalk, for which the company won a gold medal at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair.^[9]

^{Staonal marking crayon 1902}

Initially formed as a partnership, Binney & Smith incorporated in 1902, and in that year Binney & Smith developed and introduced the Staonal marking crayon. Then Edwin Binney, working with his wife, Alice Stead Binney, developed his own famous product line of wax crayons beginning on June 10, 1903,^[10] which it sold under the brand name Crayola. The Crayola name was coined by Alice Binney who was a former schoolteacher. It comes from craie (French for “chalk”) and ola for “oleaginous” or “oily.”^[9][11]

Tom Ross: Remember when Crayola 64 was a status symbol?

The coolest

Of course, the most sought-after status symbol at Charles R. Van Hise Elementary School was a big box of Crayola 64 crayons. I endured a couple of years with boxes of 16 colors and nervously peeled the paper off my purple crayon as other kids leered at me. They were using the in-box sharpener to ready themselves for the day’s map-coloring exercise – “Let me see now, what color should I make Bolivia?

Willis Carrier

Developed the first air conditioning

Engineer Willis Carrier took a job that would result in the invention of the first modern electrical air conditioning unit. While working for the Buffalo Forge Company in 1902, Carrier was tasked with solving a humidity problem that was causing magazine pages to wrinkle at Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn.

Through a series of experiments, Carrier designed a system that controlled humidity using cooling coils and secured a patent for his “Apparatus for Treating Air,” which could either humidify (by heating water) or dehumidify (by cooling water) air. As he continued testing and refining his technology, he also devised and patented an automatic control system for regulating the humidity and temperature of air in textile mills.

It wasn’t long before Carrier realized that humidity control and air conditioning could benefit many other industries, and he eventually broke off from Buffalo Forge, forming Carrier Engineering Corporation with six other engineers.

Without his invention, my life in the Inland Empire would be a lot tougher, especially in the summer.

https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-air-conditioning

Justin Dart, George H.W. Bush & Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)

_{^{President George H.W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, surrounded by Evan Kemp, Chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; Justin Dart, Chair of the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities; Sandra Swift Parrino, Chair of the National Council on Disability; and Rev. Harold Wilke, an ordained minister and disability advocate.}}

Americans with Disabilities Act

July 26, 1990

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 or ADA (42 U.S.C. § 12101) is a civil rights law that prohibits discrimination based on disability. President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act into law. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) authored what became the final bill and was its chief sponsor in the Senate. Harkin delivered part of his introduction speech in sign language, saying it was so his deaf brother could understand.

As DREDF attorney and prominent ADA activist and scholar Arlene Mayerson has aptly and eloquently written in her publication:

The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act-A Movement Perspective

“For the first time in the history of our country, or the history of the world, businesses must stop and think about access to people with disabilities. If the ADA means anything, it means that people with disabilities will no longer be out of sight and out of mind. The ADA is based on a basic presumption that people with disabilities want to work and are capable of working, want to be members of their communities and are capable of being members of their communities and that exclusion and segregation cannot be tolerated. Accommodating a person with a disability is no longer a matter of charity but instead a basic issue of civil rights.

While some in the media portray this new era as falling from the sky unannounced, the thousands of men and women in the disability rights movement know that these rights were hard fought for and are long overdue. The ADA is radical only in comparison to a shameful history of outright exclusion and segregation of people with disabilities. From a civil rights perspective the Americans with Disabilities Act is a codification of simple justice.”

Mayerson, Arlene. “The History of the Americans with Disabilities Act. A Movement Perspective.” Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, 1992.

https://dredf.org/about-us/publications/the-history-of-the-ada/

The ADA led to significant improvements in terms of access to public services, accessibility in the built environment, and societal understanding of disability.^[53]

On signing the measure, George H. W. Bush said:

“I know there may have been concerns that the ADA may be too vague or too costly, or may lead endlessly to litigation. But I want to reassure you right now that my administration and the United States Congress have carefully crafted this Act. We’ve all been determined to ensure that it gives flexibility, particularly in terms of the timetable of implementation; and we’ve been committed to containing the costs that may be incurred…. Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

Hair straightening visionaries

Straightening irons, straighteners, or flat irons work by breaking down the positive hydrogen bonds found in the hair’s cortex, which cause hair to open, bend and become curly. Once the bonds are broken, hair is prevented from holding its original, natural form, though the hydrogen bonds can re-form if exposed to moisture.

Marcel Grateau

Early hair straightening systems relied on harsh chemicals that tended to damage the hair. In the 1870s, the French hairdresser Marcel Grateau introduced heated metal hair care implements such as hot combs to straighten hair. Madame C.J. Walker used combs with wider teeth and popularized their use together with her system of chemical scalp preparation and straightening lotions.^[3] Her mentor Annie Malone is sometimes said to have patented the hot comb.^[4] Heated metal implements slide more easily through the hair, reducing damage and dryness. Women in the 1960s sometimes used clothing irons to straighten their hair.

Ada Harris

The woman who invented the straight iron was a school teacher from Indianapolis, a woman forgotten by history. A woman named Ada Harris, looking to lose her curls. The first patent for a hair straightening iron was filed on November 3rd, 1893.

In her patent, she wrote, “My invention relates to a hair straightener whose purpose is to straighten curly hair, and is especially of service to; colored people in straightening their hair.”

Unfortunately, Harris never built an empire with her invention attempting to find investors or a company to purchase her patent. She never did anything with her patent for the hair straightener, perhaps because she didn’t have the finances to help develop her invention. But she should be recognized for the effort made to create this tool.

https://www.racked.com/2017/1/4/14014216/hair-straightener-flat-iron-inventor-ada-harris

Isaac K. Shero

In 1809 Isaac K. Shero patented the first hair straightener composed of two flat irons that are heated and pressed together.

Ceramic and electrical straighteners were introduced later, allowing adjustment of heat settings and straightener settings.

Ms. Lady Jennifer Bell Schofield was that person in1912. Big hair was big fashion with big curls in the early 1900s but Lady Schofield was obsessed with straight hair, and when she did not find the appliance she wanted to straighten her hair. She improved on the ideas of Marcel Grateau and Isaac Shero in the early 1900s to make a better straightening iron.

My defiant bangs rely on this the hair straightener almost daily.

Percy Spencer

Microwave Oven

The microwave oven was invented as an accidental by-product of war-time (World War 2) radar research using magnetrons (vacuum tubes that produce microwave radiation, a type of electromagnetic radiation that has a wavelength between 1 mm and 30 cm).

_{The Raytheon Radarange being demonstrated in 1946.
Image originally appeared on page 15 of the October 14, 1946 publication of the Press and Sun-Bulletin.}

In 1946, the engineer Dr. Percy LeBaron Spencer, who worked for the Raytheon Corporation, was working on magnetrons. One day at work, he had a candy bar in his pocket, and found that it had melted. He realized that the microwaves he was working with had caused it to melt. After experimenting, he realized that microwaves would cook foods quickly – even faster than conventional ovens that cook with heat.

Raytheon, then filed a patent on October 8, 1945 for a microwave cooking oven, eventually named the Radarange. The Raytheon Corporation produced the first commercial microwave oven in 1954; it was called the 1161 Radarange. It was large, expensive, and had a power of 1600 watts.

It wasn’t until 1967 that the first microwave oven that was both relatively affordable ($495) and reasonably sized (counter-top model) became available.

Lean Cuisine microwave entries helped me lose about thirty pounds in high school, so I am a loyal microwave user.

Helene Winterstein-Kambersky

Waterproof mascara

Austrian singer and performer Helene Winterstein Kabersky invented waterproof mascara in the 1930’s, after many attempts at developing mascara and other cosmetics that would not smear or run under hot stage lights.

Helene Winterstein-Kambersky, née Vierthaler (13 March 1900 in Vienna – 12 June 1966 in the Hinterbrühl) was a singer and inventor of the world’s first waterproof mascara.

During her numerous stage performances the stage lights repeatedly made her make-up run an left back black marks under her eyes.

This worrying situation caused her to begin work on the perfect mascara in her own kitchen.

After 2000 failed attempts the first patented waterproof mascara in the world was invented and began a new era of cosmetics designed for eyes.

After about two thousand attempts, she made the patented recipe known far beyond the borders of Austria under the name of La Bella Nussy. Winterstein-Kambersky founded a cosmetics company in 1936, which is still family-owned and produces the recipe almost unchanged.

Justus von Liebig

Powdered baby formula

In an attempt to improve the quality of manufactured baby foods, in 1867, Justus von Liebig developed the world’s first commercial infant formula, Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies.^[120] The success of this product quickly gave rise to competitors such as Mellin’s Food, Ridge’s Food for Infants and Nestlé‘s Milk.^[121]

Gloria (Campano) Cooper & Charles Cooper

Bradley Cooper Family

Actor Bradley Cooper addresses the crew of the USS Ronald Reagan underway in the Gulf of Oman, July 13, 2009. _{^{U.S. Department of Defense Photo:VIRIN: 158823-L-FDH84-178.jpg}}

Their union produced him.

Advocates for the left-handed population

Dr. Bryng Bryngelson

Dr. Bryng Bryngelson, a University of Minnesota speech pathologist and a pioneer in the study of left-handedness, flatly stated that left-handers tend to be more creative and imaginative. But others credit any creativity and imagination shown by left-handers to their efforts to survive in a right-handed world.

Seattle public schools

Countless left-handers tell of developing neck and shoulder pains from from writing at one-armed right-handed desks in school.

13 years ago, a left-handed student filed a formal complaint with the administration at Bellingham’s Western Washington University saying he had been denied an equal educational opportunity because there were no left-handed desks.

It’s hard to write on these tables.
Go to memesr/memes
nightshade_1612

Seattle schools and local colleges do their best these days to rectify old wrongs.

They buy about 10 percent left-handed desks when they place new orders.

In Seattle Public Schools, they also buy left-handed scissors and left-handed pouring ladles for home-economics classes.

Bud Turner, district physical education coordinator, orders two or three left-handed softball mitts for every 15 purchased, “and the same with golf clubs.”

David Hall, an overseer of space needs for the University of Washington’s capital budget office, says that left-handed desks traditionally have been “segregated” – in the front row, back row or at the ends of rows. No longer. When new classroom seating is designed, left-handed desks are scattered randomly throughout the class.

Back in 1979, when Seattle University undertook the remodeling of its nursing building, a committee sat down to discuss the needs of the handicapped. After the usual provisions for ramps, wide doors and special lavatory equipment, someone asked, “But what about left-handers?”

Result: Seattle U bought 15 left-handed desks and 135 right-handed ones. The school’s public-information director later said it was the first time in his memory that left-handedness had been recognized as a handicap.

Dec 20, 1990

Don “Lefty” Duncan, Don Duncan

Duncan, Don https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19901220&slug=1110557

Left Out — Left-Handers Are Handicapped In This Right-Handed World, But Why? Arm Yourself With These Facts

It’s nothing big. Some of you may not even notice it. But it is SO nice to have a left-handed chair.

Inventor of soft contact lenses

Otto Wichterle

Otto Wichterle (27 October 1913 Prostějov now in the Czech Republic – 18 August 1998) was a Czech chemist known for his invention of modern soft contact lenses in the 1960s.

Czech chemist Otto Wichterle made a huge breakthrough in making the first hydrogel lenses. Together with his colleague Drahoslav Lim, they created a material that absorbed up to 40% water, which was also transparent and could be moulded into a comfortable lens shape. Fun fact: using his son’s toy construction kit, Wichterle produced the first four hydrogel lenses.

Several models of contact lenses (including sketches of the concept by Leonardo da Vinci) preceded Wicherle’s invention. I got contacts when I was 16, over thirty years ago, and they have improved my “vision” of the world immensely!

Drahoslav Lím

Drahoslav Lím (September 30, 1925, in Czechoslovakia – August 22, 2003, in San Diego, California)^[1] was a Czech chemist. He invented polyhydroxyethylmethacrylate, the synthetic material used for soft contact lenses (hydrogel).

Lím worked^[2]^[3]^[4]^[5] as a member of the team of Otto Wichterle (the inventor of soft contact lenses) and in 1955, he came up with poly(hydroethyl-acrylate), the material later used for the lenses. This work was later published in Nature^[6] and was the subject of US patents.^[7]^[8] During 1970 to 1974 he worked in Palo Alto, California, improving contact lenses materials and technology.

I’ve worn contacts since high school, so this invention has improved my vision of the world immensely!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_lens

Why it matters that Americans are comparatively bad at math

itsme — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 20:55:56 +0000

by JON MARCUS

September 26, 2023

Desola Lanre-Ologundisruptxn

Employers, experts raise new alarms about competitiveness and national security

Like a lot of high school students, Kevin Tran loves superheroes, though perhaps for different reasons than his classmates.

“They’re all insanely smart. In their regular jobs they’re engineers, they’re scientists,” said Tran, who is 17. “And you can’t do any of those things without math.”

Tran also loves math. He was speaking during a break in a Boston city program for promising local high school students to study calculus for five hours a day throughout the summer at Northeastern University. And his observation was surprisingly apt.

At a time when Americans joke about how bad they are at math, and already abysmal scores on standardized math tests are falling even further, employers and others say the nation needs people who are good at math in the same way motion picture mortals need superheroes.

They say America’s poor math performance isn’t funny anymore. It’s a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“The advances in technology that are going to drive where the world goes in the next 50 years are going to come from other countries, because they have the intellectual capital and we don’t,” said Jim Stigler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who studies the process of teaching and learning subjects including math.

There’s already ample and dramatic evidence of this.

Several largely overlooked reports, including from the Department of Defense, raise alarms about how Americans’ disdain for math is a threat to national security.

One, issued in July by the think tank The Aspen Institute, warns that international adversaries are challenging America’s longtime technological dominance. “We are no longer keeping pace with other countries, particularly China,” it says, calling this a “dangerous” failure and urging decisionmakers to make education a national security priority.

“There are major national and international challenges that will require better math skills,” said Josh Wyner, vice president of The Aspen Institute and founder and executive director of its College Excellence Program.

“This is not an educational question alone,” said Wyner. “It’s about knowledge development, environmental protection, better cures for diseases. Resolving the fundamental challenges facing our time require math.”

The Defense Department, in a separate study, calls for an initiative akin to the 1958 Eisenhower National Defense Act to support education in science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM. It reports that there are now eight times as many college graduates in these disciplines in China and four times as many engineers in Russia than in the United States. China has also surpassed the United States in the number of doctoral degrees in engineering, according to the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, the number of jobs in math occupations — which “use arithmetic and apply advanced techniques to make calculations, analyze data, and solve problems” — will have increased by 29 percent in the 10 years ending in 2031, or by more than 30,000 per year, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show. That’s much faster than most other kinds of jobs.

America’s poor math performance is a threat to the nation’s global economic competitiveness and national security.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

Tennessee Tech runs a summer camp teaching cybersecurity, which requires math, to high school students. “That lightbulb goes off and they say, ‘That’s why I need to know that,’” Allen said.

There are deep shortages of workers in information technology fields, according to the labor market analytics firm Lightcast, which says that there were more than 4 million job postings over the last year in the United States for software developers, database administrators and computer user support specialists.

With billions being spent to beef up U.S. production of semiconductors, Deloitte reports a projected shortage in that industry, too, of from 70,000 to 90,000 workers over the next few years.

All of these careers require math. Yet math scores among American students — which had been stagnant for more than a decade, according to the National Science Foundation — are now getting worse.

Math performance among elementary and middle-school students has fallen by 6 to 15 percent below pre-pandemic growth rates, depending on the students’ age, since before the pandemic, according to the Northwest Evaluation Association, which administers standardized tests nationwide. Math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress fell by 9 points last year, the largest drop ever recorded, to their lowest levels in more than three decades.

In the most recent Program for International Student Assessment tests in math, or PISA, U.S. students scored lower than their counterparts in 36 other education systems worldwide. Students in China scored the highest.

Even before the pandemic, only one in five college-bound American high school students were prepared for college-level courses in STEM, according to the National Science and Technology Council. Among the students who decide to study STEM in college, more than a third end up changing their majors, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

“Mathematics is becoming more and more a part of almost every career,” said Michael Allen, who chairs the math department at Tennessee Technological University.

“And these are the students who have done well in maths,” said Jo Boaler, who studies the teaching of math as a professor at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education. “That’s a huge loss for the U.S.”

One result of this exodus is that, in the fast-growing field of artificial intelligence, two-thirds of U.S. university graduate students and more than half the U.S. workforce in AI and AI-related fields are foreign born, according to the Georgetown University Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Only around one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American, the National Foundation for American Policy reports, and the rest come from abroad. Most will leave when they finish their programs; many are being aggressively recruited by other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom.

The economic ramifications of this in the United States are twofold: first, on individuals’ job prospects and earnings potential; and second, on the country’s productivity and competitiveness.

Every one of the 25 highest-paying college majors are in STEM fields, the financial advising website Bankrate found.

Ten years after graduating, math majors out-earn graduates in other fields by about 17 percent, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute using the education and job histories of more than 50 million workers. That premium would be even higher if it wasn’t for the fact that 16 percent of math majors become teachers.

Knowing math “is a huge part of how successful people are in their lives and what jobs are open to them, what promotions they can get,” Boaler said.

Only around one in five graduate students in math-intensive subjects including computer science and electrical engineering at U.S. universities are American.

A Stanford economist has estimated that, if U.S. pandemic math declines are not reversed, students now in kindergarten through grade 12 will earn from 2 to 9 percent less over their careers, depending on what state they live in, than their predecessors educated just before the start of the pandemic. The states themselves will suffer a decline in gross domestic product of from 0.6 to 2.9 percent per year, or a collective $28 trillion over the remainder of this century.

Countries whose students scored higher on math tests have experienced greater economic growth than countries whose students tested lower, one study found. It calculated that had the U.S. improved its math scores on the PISA test as promised by President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors in 1989, it would have resulted in a 4.5 percent bump in the U.S. gross domestic product by 2015. That increase did not occur.

“Math matters to economic growth for our country,” Wyner said.

This is among the reasons that it isn’t only schools that have been pushing for more students to learn math. It’s economic development agencies such as the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, which is trying to get more students into STEM so they can fill jobs in fields such as semiconductor production and electric vehicle design, in which the state projects a need for up to 300,000 workers by 2030.

“Math just underpins everything,” said Megan Schrauben, executive director of the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity’s MiSTEM initiative to improve STEM education. “It’s extremely important for the future prosperity of our students and communities, but also our entire state.”

The top reason young people ages 13 to 18 say they wouldn’t consider a career in technology is that it requires math and science skills, a survey by the information technology industry association and certification provider CompTIA finds. Forty-six percent fear they aren’t good enough in math and science to work in tech, a higher proportion than their counterparts in Australia, Belgium, India, the Middle East, and the U.K.

In Massachusetts, which is particularly dependent on technology industries, employers are anticipating a shortage over the next five years of 11,000 workers in the life sciences alone.

“It’s not a small problem,” said Edward Lambert Jr., executive director of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. “We’re just not starting students, particularly students of color and from lower-resourced families, on career paths related to math and computer science and those things in which we need to stay competitive, or starting them early enough.”

The Bridge to Calculus program at Northeastern where Kevin Tran spent his summer is a response to that. The 113 participating students were paid $15 an hour, most of it from the city and its public schools, the program’s coordinator, Bindu Veetel, said; the university provided the classroom space and some of the teachers.

The students’ days began at 7:30 a.m., when teacher Jeremy Howland roused his sleepy-looking charges by having them run exercises in their heads, such as calculating 20 percent of various figures he’d written on the whiteboard.

_{Bridge to Calculus was founded by Northeastern professor Dr. Robert Case to empower children from Boston’s underserved communities to succeed in advanced math classes.}

He wasn’t doing it to show them how to leave a tip. He wanted them to explain their thought processes.

“I can see the wheels turning in your head,” Howland told the sea of faces in front of him one early morning as knees bobbed and pens drummed on pages of paper notebooks crowded with equations.

The students’ daily two-hour daily calculus class got only tougher after that. Slowly the numbers yielded their secrets, like a mystery being solved. One of the students even corrected the teacher.

“Bada-bing,” Howland said whenever they were right. “Okay, now you’re talking math.”

Students used some of the rest of their time learning how to apply that knowledge, trying their hands at coding, data analysis, robotics, and elementary electrical engineering under the watchful supervision of mentors including previous graduates of the program.

“We show them how this leads to a career,” said Veetel, who said the program’s alumni have gone on to software, electrical and civil engineering, math research, teaching, medical, and other careers.

“They have so many options with math. Slowly that spark comes on, that this is something they can do.”

It’s not just a good deed that Northeastern is doing. Some of the graduates of Bridge to Calculus end up enrolling there and proceeding to its highly ranked computer science and engineering programs, which — like those at other U.S. universities — struggle to attract homegrown talent.

More than half of the graduate students in all disciplines at Northeastern, including those that require math, are foreign born, university statistics show. In his field of engineering management, “80 percent of us are Indian,” Suuraj Narayanan Raghunathan, a graduate student serving as a Bridge to Calculus mentor, said with a laugh.

The American high school students said they get why their classmates don’t like math.

“It’s a struggle. It’s constant thinking,” said one, Steven Ramos, 16, who said he plans to become a computer or electrical engineer instead of following his brother and other relatives into construction work.

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

But with time, the answers come into focus, said Wintana Tewolde, also 16, who wants to be a doctor. “It’s not easy to understand, but once you do, you see it.”

Peter St. Louis-Severe, 17, said math, to him, is fun. “It’s the only subject I can truly understand, because most of the time it has only one answer,” said St. Louis-Severe, who hopes to be a mechanical or chemical engineer and whose gamer name is Mathematics Boss. “Who wouldn’t like math?”

Not everyone is convinced that a lack of math skills is holding America back.

_{https://www.freepik.com/}

“We push so many kids away from computer science when we tell them you have to be good at math to do computer science, which isn’t true at all,” said Todd Thibodeaux, president and CEO of CompTIA.

What employers really want, Thibodeaux said, “is trainability, the aptitude of people being able to learn the systems and solve problems.” Other countries, he said, “are dying for the way our kids learn creativity.”

Back in their classroom at Northeastern, students spent a brief break exchanging math jokes, then returned to class, where even Howland’s hardest questions generally failed to stump them.

They confidently answered as he grilled them on polynomial functions. And after an occasional stumble, they got all the exercises right.

“Bada-bing,” their teacher happily responded.

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.

Jon Marcus

Jon Marcus writes and edits stories about, and helps plan coverage of, higher education. A former magazine editor, he has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Wired, Medium.com and the Times (U.K.) Higher Education magazine, among others. His work has been honored by the National Headliner Awards, Mirror Awards, National Awards for Education Reporting, City and Regional Magazine Association, Deadline Club of New York City and others. Marcus holds a bachelor’s degree from Bates College and a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, attended Oxford University, and teaches journalism at Boston College and Northeastern University.

Jon Marcus is the higher education editor at The Hechinger Report.

Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you

itsme — Tue, 05 Sep 2023 20:32:48 +0000

Julie Boland, Robin Queen

I’m a cognitive psychologist who studies language comprehension. If I see an ad for a vacation rental that says “Your going to Hollywood!” it really bugs me. But my collaborator, Robin Queen, a sociolinguist, who studies how language use varies across social groups, is not annoyed by those errors at all.

We were curious: what makes our reactions so different?

We didn’t think the difference was due to our professional specialties. So we did some research to find out what makes some people more sensitive to writing mistakes than others.

What prior research tells us

Writing errors often appear in text messages, emails, web posts and other types of informal electronic communication. In fact, these errors have interested other scholars as well.

Analysis of the world, from experts

Several years before our study, Jane Vignovic and Lori Foster Thompson, who are psychologists at North Carolina State University, conducted an experiment about vetting a potential new colleague, based only on an email message.

College students who read the email messages perceived the writer to be less conscientious, intelligent and trustworthy when the message contained many grammatical errors, compared to the same message without any errors.

And at our own University of Michigan, Randall J. Hucks, a doctoral student in business administration, was studying how spelling errors in online peer-to-peer loan requests at LendingTree.com affected the likelihood of funding. He found that spelling errors led to worse outcomes on multiple dimensions.

In both of these studies, readers judged strangers harshly simply because of writing errors.

Typos vs. grammos

Over the last several years, we conducted a series of experiments to investigate how written errors change a reader’s interpretation of the message, including the inferences that the reader makes about the writer.

For our original experiments, we recruited college students to be our readers, and for our most recent experiment, we recruited people from across the country who differed widely in terms of age and level of education.

In all of our experiments, we asked our participants for information about themselves (e.g., age, gender), literacy behaviors (e.g., time spent pleasure reading, texts per day), and attitudes (e.g., How important is good grammar?). In the most recent experiment, we also gave participants a personality test.

In each experiment, we told our participants to pretend that they had posted an ad for a housemate and gotten 12 email responses. After reading each email, the participants rated the writer as a potential housemate, and on other factors like intelligence, friendliness, laziness, etc.

In fact, we had created three versions of each email. One version had no mistakes. One version included a few typos, e.g. abuot for about. Another version had errors involving words that people often mix up, such as there for their (we called these grammos).

Everyone read four normal messages, four with “typos,” and four with “grammos.” Different people read the other versions of each message, so that we could separate responses to the errors from responses to the message content.

Errors matter – but to whom?

In all of our experiments, readers rated the writers as less desirable if the emails included either typos or grammos. We expected this based on the earlier research, described above. In addition, people differed in their sensitivity to the two types of errors.

For example, college students who reported higher use of electronic media were less sensitive to the errors, though time spent pleasure reading had no effect. Prior research on writing errors had not compared types of errors, nor collected information about the readers, in order to see which reader characteristics influenced interpretation.

Both of these strategies for understanding how errors impact interpretation are unique to our research.

Perhaps the most interesting finding is from the experiment in which we gave participants the personality test. It measured the five traits considered to be important in personality research: extraversion (i.e. how outgoing or social a person is), agreeableness, openness to experience, conscientiousness and neuroticism (prone to anxiety, fear, moodiness).

This experiment involved adults who varied a lot in age and education, but those differences didn’t affect their interpretation of the writing errors.

Unlike the initial study with college students, use of electronic media had no effect. What mattered were the personality traits: people responded to the writing errors based on their personality type.

Responses to errors in emails depend on personality types.
Pesky Librarians, CC BY-NC-ND

People who scored high in conscientiousness or low on the “open-to-experience” trait were more bothered by the typos. People who scored low on agreeability were more bothered by the grammos. And people who scored low on “extraversion” were more bothered by both types of errors. In contrast, how people scored on neuroticism did not alter the impact of either type of error.

Remember, by being bothered we mean that the reader gave lower ratings on the housemate questionnaire to writers who made that type of error.

Why a short email could matter

Our findings – that our personality influences our interpretation of a message – complement other research that has found that our personality influences what we say and how we say it.

In 2015, Gregory Park and other researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge analyzed Facebook posts from more than 66,000 users who had also completed a personality test based on the same five personality traits that we measured in our study. They found the use of words like love, party and amazing are correlated with extraversion, while the words sick, hate and anymore are correlated with neuroticism.

This research built upon earlier work by researchers Tal Yarkoni and James W. Pennebaker.

Personality traits that influence reactions to writing errors.
Julie Boland, CC BY

While reading our research, two key points need to be kept in mind. First, we think that errors influenced readers’ perception of the writer mainly because the writer was otherwise unknown – the short email was the only basis for judgment. Second, we didn’t ask the readers how likely they were to point out errors to the people who make them.

So, it doesn’t necessarily follow from our study that your friends will view you more negatively if you don’t proofread your email messages, or that you can predict which people will call you on it based on their personality.

But, you might want to keep these findings in mind when you write for an unknown audience or when you read something from someone you don’t know.

theconversation.com/why-grammar-mistakes-in-a-short-email-could-make-some-people-judge-you-57168

The Power of the Chorale: How One Choir’s Love of Music Keeps Them Going During the Pandemic

itsme — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 19:23:46 +0000

By Vanessa Blankenship

January 27, 2022

Wearing special singing masks, members of the Stonewall Chorale rehearse at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea. (Credit: Vanessa Blankenship)

Inside St. Luke in the Fields, a whimsical church in the West Village, a choir group gathered for weekly rehearsal in November. On that Tuesday evening, a crisp late fall breeze blew through the open stained-glass windows. Of the 36 members in attendance, more than half were bundled in their overcoats, and some passed out hand warmer packets to help soothe their shivers. In the rows of pews, everyone practiced social distancing, and everyone was wearing a mask.

Despite the discomfort, they relished being there together – no small feat after more than a year of singing while being apart. The Stonewall Chorale, one of the first LGBTQ-friendly chorus groups in the country, continues to adjust to new normals. But as the pandemic drags on, so does the uncertainty.

Founded in 1977, the Stonewall Chorale puts on a concert series every year. Along with the rest of the world, it came to an almost complete halt when the coronavirus spread in March 2020. That spring, the choir was busy preparing for the second concert of their 43rd season, “Here Comes the Sun.” A week and a half before the show, the rest of the season was canceled.

Once a group of up to 70 singers, membership quickly shrunk to between 40 to 50 amid the pandemic. A canceled concert season resulted in choristers requesting a leave of absence. Membership dues were officially suspended. Some tested positive for Covid-19. A few got really sick. In-person rehearsals were out of the question. Like so much of the rest of the country, the Stonewall Chorale went online, performing and practicing over Zoom.

The “December Sunrise” program kicked off their 45th season. Weeks ahead of the concert, artistic director Cynthia Powell stood before the church’s altar like a priest addressing the congregation and led the opening vocal warm-ups:

Ma-Me-Mi-Mo-Mu.

“Are our Zoomers on?” Powell asked as she directed her attention to the chorale’s membership chair Larissa McDowell, who set up her smartphone on a tripod to include those who felt ill or couldn’t make it in person.

After roughly ten minutes of vocal exercises and stretches, it was time for “Wild Forces,” the second movement of award-winning composer Jake Runestad’s “The Hope of Loving.”

Sitting upright, chests up, the choir harmoniously chanted over and over:

There are beautiful, wild forces within us.

Let them turn millstones inside, filling bushels that reach to the sky.

“It needs to be louder,” said Powell. “Let’s try again and see if we can express emotions with our eyes. We want to give the audience something.”

This time, Powell, a conductor who has served as the chorale’s artistic director since 2002, had them all stand up and simultaneously sway side to side. The melody’s warm vibrations filled the freezing church. “Excellent, that was really something,” she exclaimed. “We’re starting to get somewhere.”

In mid-November, Stephanie Heintzeler, one of the altos, sat toward the back in the 12th row or so. Heintzeler was raised in Germany and is a certified birth and postpartum doula and the founder of The New York Baby, a doula services agency. She’s been a pivotal member of the Stonewall Chorale for almost a decade and never once thought of leaving the group, even after the pandemic created chaos for the group. For her, it’s more than just a choir. Without it, she never would have met her wife, Janet Thompson.

“We have a very strong bond with the chorale and always felt that we are not only a member, but we are the chorale,” Heintzeler said. “It exists because of us.”

If Heintzeler’s life were a rom-com, the moment she first saw Thompson would be a classic meet-cute scene. It was January 2013, and Heintzeler had just spent the past several months looking for a chorus group. She wasn’t sure what kind of music she wanted to sing. She just knew she loved classical music and liked the idea of joining an LGBTQ choir to better connect with the city’s community. She joined the Stonewall Chorale, and at her first rehearsal, Thompson sat next to her. The group rehearsed Mozart’s Requiem, and Heintzeler left practice knowing Thompson would one day be her person. The feeling was mutual.

Thompson proposed to Heintzeler in August 2020. Weeks later, they pledged their unconditional love before 20 of their closest friends at a small ceremony by the Belvedere Castle in Central Park. Powell was the wedding officiant.

A year later, Heintzeler celebrated another monumental moment in her life: the end of the Stonewall Chorale’s hiatus.

“I just know I’ll feel five times better when I’m there,” Heintzeler said. “And that’s new. I always felt better after rehearsal before, but now, somehow, the benefit is larger. I feel it physically and mentally; I feel it more than I used to.”

***

Michael Conwill usually sits near the front of the church with the other basses. As president of the board of directors and member of the Stonewall Chorale, he’s spent nearly two years safeguarding the group’s physical and mental well-being by enforcing COVID-19 safety measures. His goal is to avoid the unthinkable – starting a superspreader event, like when the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal made headlines in early 2020. Out of the 61 members who attended, 53 singers contracted COVID-19 symptoms and two died.

To salvage what was left of the Stonewall Chorale’s membership and come back together in the safest way possible, Conwill and other board members appointed a COVID-19 task force made up of chorus members with medical backgrounds. The team spent weeks researching and analyzing what choirs around the country were doing and incorporated protocols recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New York State Department of Health. They decided they needed a bigger rehearsal venue, mask requirements, social distancing, temperature checks, proof of vaccination, sanitizing, and increased air circulation with open windows and portable filtration units.

“It’s been quite a journey to get here,” Conwill said.

Over the months, the weekly rehearsals began to serve purposes beyond singing. Some weeks Powell taught new vocal techniques or had guest performers join in. Others, members logged on for online check-ins just to connect with friends who, too, were feeling isolated. Many rehearsals were even designated as game nights, and once a month, the choristers participated in diversity, equity and inclusion workshops.

The chorus also managed to organize their entire 44th season virtually with a compilation of pre-recorded videos and announced several online concerts, like their holiday performance, “Home for the Holidays,” on the chorale’s YouTube channel.

“We all are happy that we hopefully will never have to do that again,” Conwill said. “The point of being in a choir is singing with other people. Sitting at home and singing into a camera and a microphone is not choral singing in any way, shape or form.”

***

Gwendolyn Stegall, an alto who has been singing with the choir since 2016, first fell in love with the chorale as a devoted fan in the audience. Stegall’s mother started taking her to the concerts when she was 10 years-old to watch their friend David Fanger, a tenor who still sings with the chorale. She recalled attending one show around the holidays when the chorale performed “A Musicological Journey Through the Twelve Days of Christmas.”

By July 2020, Stegall joined the board of directors as the new vice president and was driven by the call for social change after the murder of George Floyd unleashed a national reckoning. With in-person rehearsals on pause that summer, Stegall took the moment as an opportunity to encourage the chorale, a predominantly white group, to participate in open conversations about the movement.

“I think a lot of organizations, especially ones that are mission-driven like ours in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, wanted to rethink the way they operated,” Stegall said. “The pandemic also gave us an opportunity to reflect and have some time to think about things that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to address in a normal concert period.”

One Tuesday per month, Stegall helped organize workshops to explore mission-based initiatives that were covered in The Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA) workbook, “A New Harmony.” The conversations ranged from race and ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, ageism to socio-economic status.

“It reinforced my love for this community,” Stegall said. “The fact that people were willing to show up and have these conversations and then make the connection between the sort of broad, abstract concept and the specifics of how the Stonewall Chorale operates and how we could change the way we do certain things, I think was really helpful and eye-opening.”

***

On December 7, the Stonewall Chorale gathered for dress rehearsals at the concert venue in Chelsea, Church of the Holy Apostles. It was the last time the singers would practice before performing “December Sunrise,” the debut of their 45th concert season, in front of a masked crowd of around 200 people.

The singers were accompanied by Powell, the conductor, pianist Eric Sedgwick and a symphony orchestra. In many ways, the concert would answer a central question: Can the Stonewall Chorale safely pull off a pandemic-era concert season? If all went well, the chorale’s March concert, “Music for the Soul,” and June concert, “Curtain Up!” could go on as planned.

“Things seem to miraculously come together,” Powell said that night. “When you get to the actual concert, and little things tend to work themselves out, little fairy dust happens.”

There was a slight pause during dress rehearsals, and the voices that once bounced off the church’s walls transitioned into whispers. Then, the vocalists focused on the movements from Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” meaning eternal light. The group dedicated this work to the memory of Richard Froehlich, a Stonewall Chorale tenor who passed away at the age of 58 from a heart attack in late September, just when the choir finally returned to in-person rehearsals.

“It was a shock to all of us because he had just been at rehearsal the week before,” Powell said. “He had just come back after almost two years.”

After three hours, dress rehearsals wrapped up. The Stonewall Chorale roared in applause, and several members exchanged high-fives and bear hugs.

The evening of the concert, the Stonewall Chorale posted on Facebook a message thanking everyone who came to support the choir, along with a few lyrics from “Alway Something Sings,” a song they rehearsed often during the peak of the pandemic.

But in the darkest, meanest things

There alway, alway something sings.

***

Before the Omicron strain of COVID-19 struck New York City, the Stonewall Chorale rode on a high.

“We were very happy with the concert,” Conwill said in early January. “It was the first time we’ve sung in public and masked, and our audience told us that it didn’t make a difference in our sound. It didn’t seem to muffle us in any way. The singing masks must work.”

Many of the singers in the chorale started utilizing the Singer’s Mask, designed by Broadway Relief Project. These masks are specially designed to contain the user’s droplets and fit closely on the face while giving just enough room around the mouth to sing without distorting the sound.

Record-breaking Omicron cases in New York City, though, brought what Conwill called another “gut punch.”

Days after performing “December Sunrise,” two altos in the chorale tested positive, along with one orchestra member. Everyone who was at the concert was notified. One audience member also tested positive.

Because Omicron is extremely transmissible, the choir decided to conduct weekly rehearsals for their next concert, “Music for the Soul,” remotely through the month of January. If Omicron cases continue to rise, the March concert will most likely be postponed until a later date.

“We hope this strain will burn out in cold weather and that things will be a little better when we get into warmer weather,” Conwill said. “But it’s conjecture at this point.”

About the author(s)

Vanessa Blankenship

Vanessa Blankenship is a grad student at the Columbia Journalism School covering arts and culture.