This question often has been answered by referencing Mexico. Political scientists often link Mexico City’s devastating 8.0 magnitude earthquake on September 19, 1985, to the end of the PRI’s seven-decades-long rule of the country 15 years later. Their argument is not that the party was responsible for the loss of some 10,000 lives, but rather that the disaster exposed the incompetence and corruption of a regime that until then seemed to control everything. While the government of President Miguel de la Madrid looked hopeless, if not helpless, ordinary citizens took the lead in rescuing survivors and helping the injured. It was this unexpected bottom-up movement of people that presaged the eventual demise of the then-ruling PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional).

Today, the question of earthquakes and politics is again alive, with two new terremotos, including a 7.1-magnitude quake on the 32nd anniversary of the 1985 disaster, devastating Mexico as the PRI again clings to power. The response of ordinary citizens has been reminiscent of the 1985 quake: Tens of hundreds of young people in hard hats spontaneously joined the rescue operation, digging into rubble with bare hands and forming long lines to carry away pieces of concrete and mortar from collapsed buildings.

Despite the parallels, however, predictions of a political earthquake are overblown. Mexico’s quakes may shake the earth, but their political power has long been overestimated. The story of Mexico City quakes, past and present, reminds us that such events make slow impacts, and only damage political orders that were already weak and cracked. And for all the civic action that a tragedy may produce, the impact is temporary.

As a longtime resident and observer of Mexico, I have waited in vain for decades for an autonomous civil society to emerge there. The 1985 earthquake certainly didn’t produce it—nor was the quake the main catalyst for the end of the PRI’s rule.

The unraveling of Mexico’s one-party system really began with the economic crisis of 1982, which shook the country far more than any movement of the earth. The collapse of the peso was followed by high inflation, a deep recession, and a widespread sense of despair. There had been a lesser crisis and currency devaluation in 1976, but it was soon hidden by important off-shore oil discoveries and massive foreign borrowing. After 1982, there were no such band-aids. It was this moment that broke the unwritten contract between the PRI and Mexico’s middle classes.

This contract was simple. A broad political class, which controlled the peasantry, labor unions, and civil servants through the PRI, had brought the country three decades of steady economic growth nicknamed the Mexican “miracle.” In exchange, the growing urban middle classes spent more time vacationing in Acapulco than engaging in politics. Occasionally dissident groups appeared, even armed guerrillas in the mid-1970s, but they were either crushed or co-opted by the system.

The lack of economic growth was far more unsettling. Without it, the ruling political elite was unmasked as self-serving and corrupt and the middle classes began demanding a voice in the country’s affairs.

The demands grew in 1988 when the PRI resorted to fraud to insure the victory of its presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, over his left-leaning opponent, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Ignoring pressure for greater political freedom, Salinas instead chose economic reform, which included privatization of major state-owned companies and utilities and, later, negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.

Darker days followed. When an armed group known as the Zapatistas took up arms in the southern state of Chiapas on January 1, 1994, the rebellion won popular sympathy simply for daring to defy the regime. Three months later, Salinas’s hand-picked successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was murdered. Weeks after his PRI replacement, Ernesto Zedillo, took office, a new economic crisis erupted and, with it, fresh middle-class anger at the regime.

With his back to the wall, Zedillo sought to release political pressure by permitting genuinely free elections, with the result that in mid-term elections in 1997 the PRI for the first time ever lost control of the Chamber of Deputies. Then in 2000, to the fury of PRI party dinosaurs, Zedillo refused to step in to block the victory of the conservative National Action Party’s presidential candidate, Vicente Fox Quesada. The impossible had happened: the PRI had been ousted peacefully. The earthquake was merely one small part of a generation-long transformation.

Fox occupied the National Palace in Mexico City’s Zócalo, but he did not inherit the near-absolute power enjoyed by PRI presidents since the 1930s. His party did not control Congress and, as the traditional vertical structure of government fell apart, state governors exercised greater independence and labor unions slipped from central control. The coherence of PRI rule, however perverted it may have seemed to many Mexicans, vanished. As new centers of power emerged, powerful drug cartels which controlled the traffic of cocaine from Colombia to the United States posed a growing threat to the nation’s security.

In the 2006 presidential election, Fox’s party candidate, Felipe Calderón, was the narrow victor, but his leftist opponent, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed fraud and his supporters blocked Mexico City’s streets for months. To assert his power, Calderón declared war on the drug cartels, with disastrous consequences. The estimates of the number of people killed or disappeared during his six-year term range between 60,000 and 100,000, most of them as a result of territorial wars between rival cartels. These gangs also set out to terrorize the population, bombing nightclubs, hanging bodies from highway bridges, and even leaving the heads of victims outside some schools.

The perception of a breakdown in law and order was one explanation for the PRI’s return to power in 2012: The PRI may have been corrupt, the saying went, but it knew how to govern. It also benefitted from the undisguised support of Mexico’s dominant television group, Televisa. Even then, its presidential candidate, Enrique Peña Nieto, was hardly given a national mandate. Because Mexico has only one round of presidential elections (unlike, say, Brazil), Peña Nieto won with just 38.2 percent of the vote, with López Obrador again in second place and Calderón’s own party candidate trailing in third.

At first, Peña Nieto’s boast that he was leading a “new PRI” seemed to carry some weight, above all when he dared to break the exploration monopoly of the country’s oil giant, Pemex, and to challenge the near-monopoly of the telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim. But while a different approach to the drug war resulted in the capture of several leading capos, including the infamous Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the number of cartels has multiplied. Further, the old ogre of corruption returned: Peña Nieto’s wife bought a mansion with the help of a prominent businessman, and several PRI governors were caught enriching themselves. For many Mexicans, there was nothing new about this PRI.

Then Donald Trump appeared, with his insults toward Mexicans and his threat to build a wall along the common border. Peña Nieto tried appeasement, inviting Trump for hombre talks in Mexico City, only to find Trump resuming his flailing of Mexico immediately upon his return home. Given blossoming anti-American sentiments, Peña Nieto had no choice but to refuse to pay for any border wall, but he did persuade Trump to engage in talks to renew NAFTA rather than denounce the treaty.

On the eve of this September’s earthquakes, polls showed Peña Nieto’s approval rating at well below 20 percent, lower than any Mexican leader on record.

Will the seismic tremors push Mexico into another political earthquake? There’s reason for skepticism. This Mexico City earthquake, and the earlier major quake in southern Mexico, were less devastating than the 1985 quake, with the number of dead in the low hundreds, not the thousands. While some 40 buildings collapsed in the capital, including the wing of a packed primary school, the city as a whole remained intact, and Mexican authorities were better prepared than in 1985.

Once life returns to normal for all but the earthquakes’ victims, the issue consuming most Mexicans will be next July’s presidential elections. The political earth may again move because the current front-runner is the perennial leftist candidate López Obrador, known throughout Mexico by his initials of AMLO. Because his promises of sweeping economic and social reforms have alarmed the private sector and middle classes, the other three main parties are determined to stop him. But can parties of left, center and right agree on a “unity” candidate? If they fail, as seems likely, López Obrador could win with an even smaller percentage of votes than Peña Nieto won in 2012.

If the actual earthquakes and their aftermath reinforce public disenchantment with the political establishment, AMLO, with his cultivated image of the political outsider, could benefit. But even if by next July the disaster has been largely forgotten, and even if most Mexicans oppose him, enough voters may still opt for the unknown variable of a populist with a radical new message to elect him. And at that point, a new cycle of Mexican political instability will unavoidably begin.

The post Mexico’s ’85 Earthquake Didn’t Start a Revolution appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

One piece that is driving me absolutely nuts is the complete lack of any coherent White House staff structure. I spent nearly five years as a deputy communications director on the staff of California Governor Gray Davis. Despite turmoil, I happen to think we did pretty well in the middle of a political shooting gallery.

Whatever our administration’s faults, we had a well-ordered staff structure of the sort that a governor or a president needs. The required elements include a specific set of duties for everybody, an efficient process for analyzing and guiding legislation, smooth information dissemination, a polished rapid response system, and a smooth flow of staff internal communication.

Gray was accessible to all of us on staff. But you knew damn well you’d better not skip steps in moving a piece of the agenda. Any competent high-level elected official’s staff works the same way. I’ve experienced as much working for others.

Trump’s staff, by contrast, has no visible structure that I can discern. On Gray’s team we had a chief of staff, Lynn Schenk, who was tough, decisive, and stood just below the governor in the command structure. She was absolutely in charge as far as we were concerned.

If she issued a directive it was as if it came from Gov. Davis himself. We could discuss it, even offer suggestions. But when the decision was made, we carried it out to the letter. It was not just that people had job titles; Trump’s staff have titles. It was that each of us was an expert in her or his field, and the staff stayed within its assigned parameters. The communications department, where I worked, dealt with press relations, speechwriting, op-ed writing, and public relations—period. I was not assigned unexpectedly to vet potential judicial appointments, or construct an economic policy.

Nor did we get assignments because we were cronies of the governor. Yeah, we respected him; we worked there because we believed in Gray’s philosophy of governing. We were trusted because we did our jobs, not necessarily because we were friends.

Harry Truman supposedly said, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.” We weren’t the governor’s or the chief of staff’s friends. But we were collegial. So, despite the insanity of the energy crisis of 2000-2001, and the subsequent recall election, we accomplished a lot.

As to leaking—we didn’t. Why would we? Leaks were unauthorized information going out before it should be released. All that would do would be to sow seeds of disruption for our policies. My boss, the communications director, who had a long history as a news reporter, said that on his first day at the governor’s office he found himself with information on so many policies that he was in agony over not being able to write about them. He joked that he spent his whole first week just leaking stories to himself.

What did we do then in emergencies? For most, we had prep already in place. Part of my job was to run our rapid response system. That didn’t mean having a line of bull ready to release. It meant learning of dangers before the fact and preparing. I ran a call every morning with staff statewide to learn about potential issues. We then informed appropriate responders and prepared an action plan.

Sometimes we were slow off the mark, because complex issues, even when learned about early, take time to respond to. For this we got accused of being slow or too careful. But we were thorough, consulted subject experts, and looked for the best plan. The announcement of our actions always followed our consideration. We didn’t rant first and act later, if at all.

And we didn’t act in secret or hide the ball. We didn’t act vindictively. You can’t govern that way. At least not for long. Sadly, Gray got tagged with being reluctant to act and got thrown out for it in the recall. In truth, he and the rest of us were simply careful and deliberate.

Trump’s operation (I hesitate to call it a staff), appears to be a collection of yes men and women, who in his presence answer to him only, but who, away from Trump, conduct their business as if they were ministers without portfolio, doing and saying as they please until they get caught at it. You are Trump’s trusted dog’s body until he tires of you or needs a patsy, then off with your head.

One thing striking to people who work in an office environment is how various officials, including the short-lived Anthony Scaramucci, got a license for direct access to Trump. In any sane organization, there is a chief of staff who is the gatekeeper to all. Nobody (absolutely nobody) should have such special access. Such arrangements smack of mafia dons giving access to a secret consiglieri. Who else has secret access? Well, it’s a secret, so we don’t know.

I have long thought Trump to be mentally unstable. His paranoid twitter rants, his attraction to conspiracy theories, his attachment to unsavory characters with no business in politics, his love-hate affiliation with Vladimir Putin, his sudden shifts of temper against China and NATO and many other allies, his belief (real or purported) that all news and news sources are fake, all point to mental instability.

What to do in this case? There is, of course, the complicated process of impeachment. But if the president is incapacitated, the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a well-defined replacement structure, empowering the vice president and the majority of cabinet or congressional leaders to remove the president. No impeachment needed.

Angry tweets may be red meat to your base. But they mainly signal turmoil. A leader can only be as effective as the information he/she receives. And that comes from a trusted and well-ordered staff that works as a team, especially in troubled times. 

The post How Trump’s Staff Could Save Him from Himself appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The world was a very different place in the first decades of the 20th century. Notably, there was no real joined-up thinking when it came to healthcare. Throughout the industrialized world, most doctors either worked for themselves or were funded by charities or religious institutions, and many people had no access to them at all.

Public health policies—like immigration policies—were colored by eugenics. It was common for privileged elites to look down on workers and the poor as inferior categories of human being, whose natural degeneracy predisposed them to disease and deformity. It didn’t occur to those elites to look for the causes of illness in the often abject living conditions of the lower classes: crowded tenements, long working hours, poor diet. If they sickened and died from typhus, cholera, and other killer diseases, the eugenicists argued, then it was their own fault, because they lacked the drive to achieve a better quality of life. In the context of an epidemic, public health generally referred to a suite of measures designed to protect those elites from the contaminating influence of the disease-ridden rabble.

The first wave of the Spanish flu struck in the spring of 1918. There was nothing particularly Spanish about it. It attracted that name, unfairly, because the press in neutral Spain tracked its progress in that country, unlike newspapers in warring nations that were censored. But it was flu, and flu as we know is transmitted on the breath—by coughs and sneezes. It is highly contagious and spreads most easily when people are packed together at high densities—in favelas, for example, or trenches. Hence it is sometimes referred to as a “crowd disease.”

Policemen in Seattle wearing masks made by the Red Cross during the influenza epidemic, December 1918. Photo courtesy of the National Archives.

That first wave was relatively mild, not much worse than seasonal flu, but when the second and most deadly phase of the pandemic erupted in the autumn of 1918, people could hardly believe that it was the same disease. An alarmingly high proportion of patients died—25 times as many as in previous flu pandemics. Though initially they reported the classic symptoms of flu—fever, sore throat, headache—soon they were turning blue in the face, having difficulty breathing, even bleeding from their noses and mouths. If blue turned to black, they were unlikely to recover. Their congested lungs were simply too full of fluid to process air, and death usually followed within hours or days. The second wave receded towards the end of the year, but there was a third and final wave—intermediate in virulence between the other two—in early 1919.

Flu is caused by a virus, but virus was a novel concept in 1918, and most of the world’s doctors assumed they were dealing with a bacterial disease. This meant that they were almost completely helpless against the Spanish flu. They had no flu vaccine, no antiviral drugs, not even any antibiotics, which might have been effective against the secondary bacterial infections that killed most of its victims (in the form of pneumonia). Public health measures such as quarantine or the closing of public meeting places could be effective, but even when they were imposed this often happened too late, because influenza was not a reportable disease in 1918. This meant that doctors weren’t obliged to report cases to the authorities, which in turn meant that those authorities failed to see the pandemic coming.

The disease claimed between 50 and 100 million lives, according to current estimates, or between 2.5 and 5 percent of the global population. To put those numbers in perspective, World War I killed about 18 million people, World War II about 60 million. Rates of sickness and death varied dramatically across the globe, for a host of complex reasons that epidemiologists have been studying ever since. In general, the less well-off suffered worst—though not for the reasons eugenicists proposed—but the elites were by no means spared.

The lesson that health authorities took away from the catastrophe was that it was no longer reasonable to blame an individual for catching an infectious disease, nor to treat him or her in isolation. The 1920s saw many governments embracing the concept of socialized medicine—healthcare for all, delivered free at the point of delivery. Russia was the first country to put in place a centralized public healthcare system, which it funded via a state-run insurance scheme, and others in Western Europe followed suit. The United States took a different route, preferring employer-based insurance schemes, but it also took measures to consolidate healthcare in the post-flu years.

In 1924, the Soviet government laid out its vision of the physician of the future, who would have “the ability to study the occupational and social conditions which give rise to illness and not only to cure the illness but to suggest ways to prevent it.” This vision was gradually adopted across the world: The new medicine would be not only biological and experimental, but also sociological. Public health started to look more like it does today.

The cornerstone of public health is epidemiology—the study of patterns, causes, and effects in disease—and this now received full recognition as a science. Epidemiology requires data, and the gathering of health data became more systematic. By 1925, for example, all U.S. states were participating in a national disease reporting system, and the early warning apparatus that had been so lamentably lacking in 1918 began to take shape. Ten years later, reflecting the authorities’ new interest in the population’s “baseline” health, U.S. citizens were subjected to the first national health survey.

Many countries created or revamped health ministries in the 1920s. This was a direct result of the pandemic, during which public health leaders had been either left out of cabinet meetings entirely, or reduced to pleading for funds and powers from other departments. But there was also recognition of the need to coordinate public health at the international level, since clearly, contagious diseases didn’t respect borders. The year 1919 saw the opening, in Vienna, Austria, of an international bureau for fighting epidemics—a forerunner of today’s World Health Organization.

By the time the WHO came into existence, in 1946, eugenics had been disgraced and the new organization’s constitution enshrined a thoroughly egalitarian approach to health. It stated that, “The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition.” That philosophy wouldn’t eliminate the threat of flu pandemics—the WHO has known three in its lifetime, and will surely know more—but it would transform the way human beings confronted them. And it was born of an understanding that pandemics are a social, not an individual problem.

The post The 1918 Flu Pandemic That Revolutionized Public Health appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I have annual passes to both the U.S. and the California Parks and Recreational Areas. So when someone asks what we need in terms of parks, my visceral answer is always: More! But others view the National Monument and National Park systems differently. Right now, the Trump administration is re-evaluating them with an eye towards shrinking some and opening up others to mining and development.

The economist in me wants to ask: What are the trade-offs of making such changes in our parks? And how are such changes valued?

Let’s start by acknowledging there is always a trade-off between economic activity and the environment. Everything we do—from sheltering and feeding ourselves, to going to movies and ballgames—changes the natural environment around us. And this is not new. Pre-Columbian hunter-gatherers altered the environment as they burned Great Plains grasses in their quest for buffalo burgers.

What are the costs of such alteration? For a long time, planners have sought to ascertain the value of urban open space. A recent study by Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes and Colorado State University professor John Loomis tried to estimate the value of the National Park Service system. It is a big number, $92 billion. But even then, they admit that many aspects of the park system are undervalued because putting any price on them would be speculative at best.

Among these difficult-to-price aspects are the health and psychological benefits to those who use the parks—and to those who don’t use the parks, but who benefit from changed behavior by those who do. Their analysis also does not consider the opportunity cost of the parks—in other words the money that might be made were they not parks, but privatized for housing, mining, logging, or commercialized recreation.

The Trump administration’s current evaluation is focused on those parks that are designated as National Monuments under the Antiquities Act of 1906. While there are huge challenges in conducting a cost-benefit analysis of the National Monuments, it is still a worthwhile exercise to think about the values that can be pinned down.

Let’s begin with an easy example. The Statue of Liberty is a National Monument. It sits in New York Harbor on Liberty Island, prime real estate. In 2016 there were over 4.5 million visitors. They paid about $27 each to visit, which includes the boat ride to and from, and admission tickets to all or part of the monument. If we compare this to Manhattan skyscrapers that have an average age of over 60 years, then over the same amount of time visitors will have spent more than $7 billion at the monument.

Again, we don’t count those who benefit because others have been inspired by their visit to the Statue of Liberty, nor the value of connecting us to our heritage. It is undeniable that these are significant.

On the road to Bears Ears. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An alternative to the statue would be a skyscraper. The island would be prime real estate for building exclusive condos with views of the city and the harbor. The value would be diminished by the fact that domestic and maintenance workers would have to be paid more to get over to the island, and that access to the city would require a boat ride. So perhaps the comparable development is the Kushner family’s 666 Fifth Avenue office tower, another prime property.

The Kushners paid $1.8 billion for it, and The New York Times reports that they expect to spend $3.3 billion to renovate it. When you add this up—$5.1 billion—it is clear that the Statue of Liberty Monument (with a value of $7 billion-plus) is worth more than the alternative condo skyscraper occupying the same land.

And this is just the pure economic cost-benefit analysis. It leaves out the non-pecuniary value of being inspired by Lady Liberty, of connecting us to our heritage, and of reminding Americans that we were all once immigrants yearning to breathe free.

So it’s clear why no one, as far as I know, is contemplating selling or leasing parts or all of Liberty Island. But what about Bears Ears National Monument, the first target of Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s effort to shrink national monuments and open them up for development?

I’m betting that, at least until recently, you never had heard of it. Bears Ears is in a remote part of southern Utah.

But as an example, Bears Ears is instructive—and the economics are a bit more complicated. First of all, Bears Ears, like many monuments, is free to visit. So we don’t have admissions revenue to look at. Plus, the remoteness of the park means it will not have the same level of visitor traffic as the Statue of Liberty National Monument. Of course, luxury condos are not an alternative in such a remote place. But you can make the case that mining is an alternative use.

Now let’s consider the full value of Bears Ears. It spans an area with a fossil record from the age of the dinosaurs, one of the most complete records we have. The value in studying this record is that we may obtain a better understanding of the fossils from this time spanning the Triassic and Jurassic periods. Also, Bears Ears is home to more than 1,000 archeological sites dating from when early Native Americans lived in the area. This civilization vanished and new knowledge on how climactic changes seemed to have decimated their civilization is going to be useful for our grandchildren (or maybe even ourselves). The monument also has other values—to the visitors who make the trek there, and to Native Americans who still live in the area and have a spiritual and heritage connection to many parts of it.

What are we giving up by protecting this potentially useful historical, cultural, and scientific research site? Uranium. The Daneros Mine in Red Canyon is an existing uranium mining operation in the Bears Ears area that was purposely left out of the monument. But the monument effectively prevents further exploration and mining inside its boundary.

Here is the context. Uranium prices have been falling since they peaked in 2007, and economics teaches us that this happens when demand falls or supply increases. So if other parts of Bears Ears were not great places to mine before the monument was declared, they certainly are not now.

The counter to that point is: Uranium prices may change someday. How and when is hard to predict. But uranium ore is important, and could be critically important to our national security. Still, this is unlikely. The U.S. demand for uranium is not likely to increase anytime soon, as reactors like San Onofre in California close and other reactors—such as two to be built in Jenkinsville, South Carolina—are abandoned in mid-construction. Indeed, there is so little demand that most of the uranium now mined from southwest Utah is exported.

In such a case, where we are dealing with “might-be’s” instead of quantifiable benefits, we can turn to optimal decision theory to help us make wiser choices.

The optimal decision is the one that provides at least as good an outcome as all other available decision options. So if the costs of the “might-be’s” are not immediate, they receive little weight. In the case of Bears Ears, the optimal decision now is to leave well enough alone and to keep an eye on the “might-be’s” just in case.

In other words, if we don’t need to make a decision, the optimal action is to make contingency plans for the time when a decision must be made.

A secondary argument for opening Bears Ears to mining is that it takes time to open a mine and begin ore production. So if we need uranium for national security, we could be behind the production power curve. The answer to this is quite easy. If quick access to uranium is valuable, then instead of exporting it from the Daneros Mine to South Korea, the federal government should purchase and stockpile it. The reason why this is superior is that uranium seams play out, and if they are opened today they still might not be available when a national crisis requires them. Thus the uncertainty of the need for the strategic ore drives the decision to preserve Bears Ears.

There is also the issue of jobs. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this amounts to less than 40 jobs. In an economy of 147 million jobs in the United States and 1.5 million in Utah, this is no more than spit in the ocean. So the strategic metal arguments are the ones to consider seriously, and they point to no economic alternatives superior to doing nothing with Bears Ears at the moment.

My guess is that other National Monuments would end up with a similar cost/benefit calculus. There may be legitimate arguments about future needs, either by those who will benefit from maintaining the park in perpetuity, or by those who see a national interest in exploiting resources from the park at some point in time. But the absolute wrong economic decision would be to change a “might-be” to a “must,” thereby creating a cost in the loss of the park.

That brings me back to my personal interests in parks and monuments. Of course, I don’t want to see even one-tenth of one acre given over to mining or development. But the point that should drive decision-making is not personal preference, but analysis of costs and benefits to society as a whole. And it’s clear that careful study and a willingness to admit what we don’t know can lead to a better solution for such places than short-term changes in policy to satisfy exploitation interests.

And if we don’t take care to respect the analysis, you might find yourself booking a tour of the unique architecture of Liberty Island Condos in the middle of Upper New York Bay some day.

The post The Trump Administration Wants Uranium Mining in Utah—but What About the Dinosaur Fossils? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’m not the only one benefiting from this lesson. When my mother, Alicia Mayer, flies in from India and stays with us at our home in West L.A., my friends invite themselves over for lunch, dinner, and even breakfast, because she is incapable of cooking small servings and hates to see leftovers. My kitchen is then filled with simmering pots, intoxicating smells, and hungry people.

Her desire to feed and nourish stems from her life’s calling as a teacher. The school she runs in Dehra Dun—a small town in the foothills on the Indian side of the Himalayas—caters to children with learning disabilities, and those who have fallen between the cracks in a sprawling mass education system that misses children with alternative learning styles. On a recent visit to Los Angeles, she was eyeing my sons’ old laptops, and when I offered to buy her new ones for her school, she said that her students would feel intimidated by shiny new computers.

It’s this ability to see true value in the slightly tarnished that also makes her such an ace in the kitchen.

Her town in northern India is known for producing the highest quality basmati rice, unmistakable in its fragrance and long-grained fluffiness. Rice is the canvas on which the intricate flavors of Indian food are painted. However, even the most complex curry has a humble beginning in chopped onions and tomatoes.

Make that a very humble beginning. When I took her to Gelson’s, as part of a daughter’s attempt to impress her with L.A.’s high-quality grocery produce, she looked at the beautifully ripe and polished tomatoes and said that she would feel bad cutting them up for a curry. The neat, well-lit aisles felt more like museum installations than a grocery store to her. So I took her to Whole Foods instead—after all, their produce is laid out in a more rustic décor. But there she complained that they didn’t even have “basic” ingredients like curry leaves and bitter gourds. (Sorry Amazon/Whole Foods, you’re going to have to ramp up your world food offerings to impress my mother!)

Enter Leticia Lara, our energetic home cook, who specializes in Mexican food. She took my mother to the mercados of East L.A., which turn out to be a paradise for Indian cooks. My mother joyfully picked out fruits and vegetables from the rejected produce areas, because those make the best ingredients for curry. Unripe mangoes can be turned into a savory-tangy chutney. Slightly moldy eggplants are smoked and tossed with fried onions into a bharta. And discarded flour tortillas are transformed into casings for spicy samosas.

Indian and Mexican food share several basic ingredients. Rice is a standard side dish for a curry or mole; tortillas or roti can be rolled up or broken off and used in place of silverware; boiled or refried beans and lentils cut the spiciness of a kabab or fajita. Cumin adds earthy goodness to protein, turmeric gives rice a golden glow, and cilantro is liberally used as garnishing in both cuisines. And what’s a good tortilla chip or poppadum without a dash of red chilies sprinkled on top?

Leticia and my mother have ventured into homespun Indian-Mexican fusion dishes, much to the delight of my children. We eagerly dine on sopes topped with shredded Tandoori chicken, burritos filled with flavorful vegetable pulao, and black beans seasoned with dried red chilies and mustard seeds.

Their collaborative efforts in the kitchen spring out of each woman’s need to, quite literally, bring something to the table. When Alicia drizzled her mint-cilantro chutney atop Leticia’s Mexican street tacos, we reeled with the burst of unexpected flavor and spice.

That got them started on their wonderful collaboration. They soon realized their mutual preference for starting every recipe from scratch without the shortcuts of the average home cook, like using frozen chopped vegetables or a pre-mixed marinade. And most specially, they both share the hallmark of a great cook, whose aromas draw people into the kitchen like a magnet.

There were some hurdles to overcome, like incredibly different accents and the difficulty of translating names of vegetables from Hindi into Spanish. Papita is potato in Spanish, but it means papaya in Hindi. Trust me, you don’t want to eat a samosa stuffed with papaya!

Now that they are several years into their collaboration, they have worked out most of the kinks. Though it’s still hilarious to hear my mother giving Leticia directions to the Indian store. Their friendship runs so deep that I’m often put on hold when I call my mother in India, because she is face-timing with Leticia about a new dish they want to try out.

My feelings of India-Mexico connection go beyond my taste buds. As I make my way around Southern California, I am often mistaken for being Mexican—so often that I decided to delve deeper into the historic yet underreported relationship these two countries share.

Mexico, it turns out, was the first Latin American country to recognize India’s independence in August 1947. And, according to to Deborah Oropeza Keresey’s history The Asian Slavery in the Viceroyalty Of the New Spain, 1565-1673, the earliest person known have to traveled from India to Mexico was a slave girl from Calicut, in southern India, who arrived with Juan de Umbrage, the Franciscan Bishop of Mexico, in the mid-16th century.

And guess what? She was a cook!

South Indian cuisine is rich in pepper, coconut, and ginger. Its recipes entail marinades and slow-cooking in earthen pots to draw out the complex spices. Preparing a mole sauce is very similar to preparing a rich curry. It is likely that hundreds of years ago, Spanish colonial trade ships carried not just slaves from India but also its flavors, seasonings, and cooking styles, and eventually brought them to the New World.

The present-day culinary collaborations of my mother and Leticia convince me that these two countries, separated by two oceans, are home to the same people—just different shades of brown.

The post How Mexico and India Fused in My L.A. Kitchen appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These institutions range from families to religious tithing to formal insurance contracts and diversification strategies for market investing. But, whether formal or informal, social or financial, all serve to ensure that those of us who are unfortunate enough to face adversity at any one time are taken care of by those who are not.

The very ability to share risks allows us to be bolder, more adventurous and frankly, take more risks. Why not? After all, taking more risks and exploring uncharted territories brings rewards. But this also means that when risk-sharing systems fail— as all systems are bound to fail sometimes—the consequences are direr, failures more glaring, and disasters unprecedented. In some senses, the safer we feel, the more at risk of big disaster we may be.

If this makes you think of the financial crisis of the last decade, you’re right—this is a perfect example of the phenomenon. Before the crisis, the financial markets appeared to work well: Mortgages were easy to find, and it was convenient for lenders to transfer some of the risks they faced to other financial institutions with fancy financial instruments such as the credit default swaps. Individuals as well as institutions loaded themselves up with excessive debt. But when the housing crisis hit, these interlinked systems came crashing down leading to a recession, unemployment, and bankruptcies.

The financial crisis was treated as a fluke, a product of specific bad regulations and bad actors. I disagree: This pattern of crisis in risk and resource-sharing systems is common. It is a feature, not a bug.

How? First, better risk-sharing encourages more risk-taking—for good reasons. Secondly, as we search for better and better risk-sharing mechanisms, complexity increases—as we witnessed with innovation of complex financial hedging instruments before the financial crisis. In time, the combination of complexity and risk-taking becomes increasingly difficult to monitor and police. It was only in the aftermath of the financial crisis that we began to decipher the complex web of interdependencies that were built in among the various financial institutions, including banks, large insurance companies, and the government.

In fact, this relationship between risk-sharing and increased risk of systemic collapse is not limited only to financial systems—it is a property of many domains, and its mixture of safety and unseen risk is woven through many aspects of modern life.

Take transportation, for example. Societies first built small roads that could carry horse carriages for transporting goods and people. The roads were not heavily traveled and accidents occurred but were often not severe or life-threatening. As societies progressed, the costs of building big, smooth roads fell, and governments began building highways and freeways that could accommodate many vehicles simultaneously traveling at ever increasing speeds. This is an example of sharing a resource that made traveling large distances at fast speeds easy and convenient. That is the good news. But every now and then, there will be an accident on the freeway or closure due to inclement weather that could cause a multi-vehicle collision often leading to congestion, injuries, and deaths.

Or consider grocery and household stores. Mom-and-pop shops were friendly, convenient, and just around the corner, but they could not carry a large or varied inventory because that was expensive. The supermarkets could handle the expense of endless variety, more competitive prices, and more well-stocked inventories. They were not as close, but faster cars and access to freeways made it easier to travel to these stores and buy large quantities at one time instead of visiting the local store more often.

But what happens when there is a big disruption in supply to one of these stores because of a labor strike, a trade dispute, or an international conflict? The arrival of big box stores has accelerated a wave of consolidation in agribusiness, so that food comes from fewer and fewer large suppliers making us more dependent on larger and more complex supply-chain systems. We haven’t experienced a collapse of this system so we do not yet know how deep or destructive it might be.

Last but not the least, we have become so accustomed to using the internet to obtain knowledge, manage our financial affairs, and make our travel plans, among other things, that the very thought of life without Google, Wikipedia, Expedia, or Paypal is inconceivable. These gains raise the damage that an internet shutdown, or of a web-attack paralyzing our systems, could cause.

Are we better off in this complex and risk-filled world? To answer that, we must take into account the benefits of resource and risk-sharing, and the costs of large crises that enables. And it would appear that the benefits outweigh the costs, right? Or why else did we as a society allow ourselves to become reliant on global financial markets, networks freeways and air travel, giant super-stores such as Amazon, big machines and industrial complexes, and other large systems? Food is cheaper than ever before and is available year-round in most places. Communications even across long distances have become instant and inexpensive. Ever-increasing amounts of knowledge are available online, and you can receive high-quality teaching at very low cost through the Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity (and even, through online platforms, top universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Princeton).

But maybe the answer isn’t so easy. The benefits of large and complicated systems accrue to individuals but some of the risks they generate are systemic. Economists call these risks negative externalities. Consider again faster automobiles and freeways that allow us to travel at high speeds. We all understand that driving at 80 miles per hour on a freeway has benefits of faster travel but also carries an increasing risk of a serious accident. Balancing these individual trade-offs, we may still decide to drive 80. What we do not consider is the costs we impose on others who might be affected by our decision—those who lose a family member or friend or co-worker, or who even lose time and productivity because of traffic accidents.

Getting a better balance between individual benefit and systemic risk—whether the matter involves traffic safety, financial regulation, or other complex systems—requires collective action, political will, persistent persuasion, and efficient design of incentives and intervention. It is easy to get mired in systems that are inefficient, corrupt, and exclusive to only some powerful sections of the society. Moreover, collective action increasingly requires cooperation across borders and across societies that have different priorities and norms. Navigating and negotiating international agreements is complicated, time-consuming, and complex.

But the stakes for getting this right have never been higher. How can I assert this with such confidence? It is precisely because life has never been more pleasant and satisfying than it is right now. I feel comfortable, but I am also worried.

The post Risk-Taking Is Profitable—but Perilous in Our Interdependent World appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

What’s more, whether through this medium or another, and whether you’ve realized it, you’ve been enjoying fanfiction for a long time. From John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost (published in 1667) to Game of Thrones (and many more examples) in the present, fanfiction has formed a fundamental part of our creative experience, and will only do more so in the future.

In its simplest definition, contemporary fanfiction is the act of creating stories using the settings, plot elements, subtexts, and characters of a previously established fictional universe—from television, video games, movies, musicals, books, comics, or other sources. It can take the form of anything from brief imaginative snippets, to missing scenes of a TV episode, to standalone book-length works that are written as well as, or better than, many published novels—and all available for free.

It is posted and circulated on dedicated fanfiction sites such as Fanfiction.net, Archive of our Own (AO3), or blogging platforms like Tumblr. These places boast millions of users and entries in tens of thousands of categories—if you can think of it, fanfiction does it. I’ve been writing fanfiction since 2003 (and original fiction for longer), and it has been integral to my enjoyment of popular media, development as a writer, formation of a circle of friends, and imaginative engagement with the world.

Critics of fanfiction dismiss it as a niche subset of badly written porn (think 50 Shades of Grey) bordering on plagiarism—in short, a bunch of weirdoes on the internet who rip off other people’s stories because they lack the talent to create their own. Several noteworthy authors, Martin among them, believe that fanfiction is essentially derivative copycatting that doesn’t fill any need or perform any important work, and are uncomfortable with the idea of their characters being used outside the plots and situations they originally imagined. I understand this mindset, to an extent. But I strongly feel that those who ignore or deride fanfiction are missing something vitally important about the way in which we interact with our favorite media these days, and the power and creativity that these stories inspire.

A reader’s lineup of fanfiction. Photo courtesy of Merlin Alexander Cheng/Flickr.

While fanfiction in its current form is a recent invention—it’s generally accepted to have been started by Star Trek fans in the 1970s—it has a much longer history. Adaptations, illustrations, and reinterpretations of stories have existed as long as stories themselves. Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is “Bible fanart,” and Milton’s Paradise Lost is “Bible fanfiction.” Shakespeare borrowed from countless other authors. J.R.R. Tolkien reworked old myths and legends (and a legion of imitators reworked Tolkien). Then movies, television, tentpole franchises, and the internet came along, and everything was up for grabs.

Nearly everything in popular media right now is somehow based on pre-existing work (how many reboots is Hollywood making?). ABC’s Once Upon a Time uses Disney/classic fairytale and literary characters, FOX’s Lucifer spins on Paradise Lost and the Bible, and Starz’s Black Sails is a prequel to Treasure Island—and this is to name only three shows that I have watched and written fanfiction about. Then there’s Still Star-Crossed, which had a brief run on ABC this summer. It’s a TV adaptation of a novel set after the end of Romeo and Juliet and, yes, it already has fanfiction. These young fan authors are re-writing Shakespeare’s characters (which he himself adapted) almost half a millennium later, reinventing and retelling them. I don’t know about you, but I find that absolutely delightful.

Indeed, the human appetite for stories is one of the most universal things about us. Fanfiction fills our insatiable need to know “what happened next,” and empowers us to take part in finding out. Every fanfiction author I know has a treasured review (or several) from readers explaining how they were engrossed by a story, how it helped them through a difficult place in life, or how much they enjoyed this new take on things. When we love characters and worlds, we want more, and since there is an obvious limit on how much can be produced from the source, we have to take it upon ourselves. Fanfiction lets readers move from passive reception to active creation.

Most importantly, it creates community. It is often given as a present between online friends, or used as a collaborative endeavor. After all, reading has only recently in human history become a private, silent act done by one person. Books were once rare and valuable, so stories belonged to an oral tradition, designed to be shared and passed down. We’re merely doing it in a modern context, in our own free time and for no money or fame, because we love the story and want more of it. Fanfiction is artistic democracy with a side of anarchy, turning traditional hierarchies of supply and demand on their heads. There is no one central or official authority, and no divide between author and audience. Everyone can be both creator and consumer of fanfiction, offer their own take and theories on the material, and all contributions have the chance to be considered equally. It is the ultimate in crowdsourced creativity.

So why is it so reviled?

In my experience, fanfiction is put down, stereotyped, and dismissed largely because it is such a female-dominated space. An overwhelming majority of fan authors are women, and you only need to be a conscious person in the world to know how it goes when we try to play with the boys’ toys, or have any assertive online presence at all. A mob of white men with Twitter accounts are ready to magically disprove the existence of sexism at the drop of a hat, and when you add racism, religion, queerness, and other factors, it becomes even more fraught. Consider the uproar over the all-female Ghostbusters, or the recent recasting of Doctor Who as a woman; the amount of reactionary male gatekeeping in many intellectual properties is both absurd and absurdly predictable. Women are often challenged on whether they’re “real fans,” despite being some of the most active and engaged members of fandom communities.

Fanfiction authors have dreamed up countless sequels, prequels, and re-imaginations, riffing on a previously established universe (such as that of Star Trek, shown here), often sharing in online forums. Image courtesy of Deviant Art.

Because fanfiction takes an interest in sex, gender, and politics—and because it critiques or reworks the source text, transforming characters and settings into different or minority iterations of themselves—it is by its very nature provocative, transgressive, and challenging. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that one of the first famous authors to openly talk about and accept it—Harry Potter’s J.K. Rowling—is a woman. Both Rowling and Twilight’s Stephenie Meyer have broken ground in encouraging their readers to write and share stories set in their worlds, and both franchises rank near the top of the list when it comes to the most fanfiction. For example, an increasingly popular fan re-interpretation visualizes Harry Potter himself, the Boy Who Lived, as a Desi/Indian man and Hermione Granger as a black woman (indeed as she was cast, with actor Noma Dumezweni, in the Harry Potter and the Cursed Child play in London’s West End). The act of allowing some of this generation’s most popular and ubiquitous fictional heroes to represent their fans of color is emblematic of the power that fanfiction and fanart can have for its creators.

I don’t want to paint the world of fandom as a postmodern utopia. The increasing recognition of fanworks, and the availability of social media, has led to toxic bullying campaigns and other backlash against authors, actors, and screenwriters for not conforming to popular fan interpretations. As well, white feminism and internalized misogyny are often present—in other words, while women are mostly doing the writing, women of color or characters of color, or female characters at all, can still suffer. But no one should reduce or dismiss the entire enterprise just because, like any collective cultural production, it has problems. I’m always wary of anyone who wants to stop a conversation or creation cold.

Perhaps the real issue isn’t with fan artists and authors, hungry to engage with stories they love, but with a mainstream media that gives an increasingly diverse, interested, creative, and thoughtful subculture of all ages and backgrounds so little opportunity to see itself well-represented, and that scoffs at our efforts to fill the space. Fanfiction offers both an escape from our often alarming current reality, and a critical reflection of it. It’s not at all shocking that we want to explore our new takes on old stories, and have them taken seriously. Until the zeitgeist finally catches up, we’ll have to tell them ourselves—and even when it does, we’ll still write fanfiction.

Have a favorite story, and want more of it?

How about you come on down.

The post From <I>Paradise Lost</I> to <I>Harry Potter</I>, Fanfiction Writers Reimagine the Classics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Now, both my daughter and I understand that genetics determined her sex months earlier, but it’s fun for us to have a story that imagines the universe magically speaking to me. When I found out that she was a girl during an ultrasound, and an amniocentesis confirmed the result, the confirmation wasn’t exciting. And that’s a story she never asks me to repeat.

So I am not surprised at the appeal of gender reveal parties, at which expectant parents deliver the doctor’s pronouncement—no peeking—to a bakery, with instructions to make a pink or blue cake or cupcakes. During the party, they cut the cake or give out the cupcakes, and the color hidden under the frosting reveals to everyone whether the couple is expecting a boy or a girl. The party is suspenseful (revealing a secret), egalitarian (everyone finds out at once), and delicious (cake!)—a perfect afternoon. Unheard of a decade or two ago, gender reveal parties are the latest manifestation of the conflict between modern technological pregnancy and its ancient legacy of mystery. That this all plays out through pink and blue cake speaks to the peculiar anxieties and ironies of our time.

Now that almost every detail about pregnancy can be known, it’s hard to imagine a time when carrying a child was a hidden, and private, affair. Prior to the 19th century, the only way to be sure a woman was pregnant was at the quickening, when she could feel movement in her belly. This moment was the woman’s alone to experience, and she had the power to share her news or not. Women could withhold this information or adjust its timing in order to protect information about who the father was.

Gender reveal parties rely on a confusion over sex and gender. Photo courtesy of Kristin Ausk/Flickr.

In the Middle Ages, piss prophets used a combination of appeals to the divine and examination of a woman’s urine to create a precursor to the pregnancy test. But before there were ultrasounds and genetic testing, the sex of the baby was revealed only at birth. Of course, once people knew they were pregnant, they attempted to predict sex. Even today old wives’ tales endure, focusing on the position of the belly bump (low: boy) or the cravings a woman has (sweet things: girl) or how much morning sickness a woman experiences (more sick: girl).

Mystery accompanied fault-finding. Until recently women had limited legal power or autonomy over their bodies and shouldered blame for their child not meeting social expectations. During the Renaissance, the theory of maternal impressions warned that every thought a woman had affected an unborn baby. If a child was born with abnormalities, those were thought to have been caused by the mother’s thoughts. Some cultures believed that women were able to control the baby’s sex. Even today, women are still blamed for birthing the wrong gender, though we now understand that the baby’s sex is determined by the sperm.

The moment of birth for women often was—and still might be—a frightening reckoning with others’ expectations as well as a moment in which mysteries were solved. Would she produce the required heir? Would she produce the required sex? Would she even survive childbirth?

With scientific advances of the 20th century, the puzzling, worrisome, and solitary experience of pregnancy gave way to a glut of information, advice, images, and a new set of expectations. Some developments gave women control. The history of the pregnancy test shows how this technology allowed women to confirm pregnancy earlier than ever before and privately make decisions about it.

Scientific advances also meant more opportunities to connect with an unborn child. Fetal ultrasounds, originally used only to diagnose problem pregnancies, have become emotional occasions during which parents bond with their fetus and even discover its sex. Some parents pay for private 3D-ultrasound viewings solely so that they can look at their baby.

But the medicalization of pregnancy, which Robbie Davis-Floyd refers to as the technocratic model of birth, led to power shifts. Women actually lost control over their bodies as the people around them became fixated on the growth of their fetus. Machines and tests used by doctors replaced instinct and feedback from mothers to assess the progress of pregnancy.

Furthermore, expectant parents are expected to share ultrasound pictures with the rest of the world, even to upload them to social media sites like Facebook or to post online videos. Television programs use ultrasounds as a form of entertainment. Social pressures on women ask them to examine the air they breathe, monitor what they eat, and measure their levels of stress, all in the name of having a healthier fetus. While some of this research may lead to healthier babies, it also brings increased judgment of, and restrictions on, pregnant women.

The medicalized pregnancy has also become a commoditized one. Outside experts have come to dominate pregnancy advice. Hotels sell baby-making packages, gyms offer pregnancy yoga and massages, and an entire market is devoted to products supposedly educating the fetus in the womb.

Amidst all these pressures there has arisen a greater desire for rituals, like belly-bump photo sessions, belly tattoos, and elaborate baby showers. The months of pregnancy are now divided into smaller and smaller segments, each filled with invented customs.

The gender reveal party has become yet another ritual, and a way to retrieve the mysteries of pregnancy. If, during the age of the mysterious pregnancy, a pregnant woman had little power but much knowledge about her body—knowledge that others depended on her to reveal—gender reveal parties reclaim the privilege of revelation, along with some control. Parents can orchestrate these parties, choose their rituals, and plan for the future with the knowledge that they are likely to survive childbirth. The ritual includes birth partners, allowing them to share in this womb time, just as they expect to be involved in egalitarian parenting after the birth.

But the logic behind gender reveal parties contradicts many of our current sensibilities about gender. First, there’s the name: It should really be called a sex reveal party, since sex is a function of one’s DNA. These parties conflate sex and gender. As the French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir said, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” A person’s gender identity may not match the sex they were assigned at birth, and gender roles are culturally constructed notions.

Gender reveal parties thus contrast with recent progress in the United States, including more rights for transgender people and those who are gender-nonconforming. Many families today wish for unlimited possibilities for their children, regardless of sex or gender. Some parents intentionally choose names that do not signal male or female. They cheered when McDonald’s announced that it would stop asking children if they wanted a boy or girl toy with their Happy Meal. Some parents buy from fashion lines that market gender-neutral clothing for infants. A ritual that emphasizes the importance of sex or gender seems to go against such progress, especially with oddly anachronistic themes like “Little Man or Little Miss” and “Bows or Bowties.”

Moreover, the new ritual of the gender reveal party might offer women only pseudo-power. When others are brought into pregnancy—not only doctors and friends and relatives but also cake decorators and party planners—women cede control over what’s happening in their bodies. Projecting human attributes onto the fetus makes it easier to imagine that it is a baby at an earlier stage, which also shifts power away from a woman’s control of her own body.

Still, the desire to create new rituals surrounding birth makes sense to me. When we have constant information at our fingertips and share our innermost thoughts with others, the idea of having one aspect of life where we control the mystery and create suspense for others is seductive. The birth story I share with my daughter is special in part because it provides us with an origin story of our own. Humans need stories, myths, and rituals along with our neonatal vitamins and ultrasounds.

Once we’ve cut the cut the cake and publicly declared “It’s a girl” or “It’s a boy”—what do we want that to mean? What’s troubling about the gender reveal party is that it’s a new ritual that doesn’t take us forward. Rituals that recreate the mysteries of the past must remember the history of struggles for the hard-won freedoms and empowerment that came with them. A ritual that sexes and genders a person before they are born places limits rather than offers possibilities on who they may become.

The post What the Gender Reveal Fad Says About Modern Pregnancy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It could have said something like, “AJ has given up his studies,” because the French wording is similar for all scenarios. That particular formulation is most often used in reference to death, true. But on this quiet Sunday morning, when I was about to go grocery shopping, I found the concept outrageous: AJ was simply too real to me to turn up dead online.

AJ loved the L.A. Zoo, Donald Duck orange juice, and cats. He often held his arms close to his chest, like a T-Rex. He was sarcastic. He could play the guitar, and would sometimes play mine, but he didn’t sing. He was very much alive in my mind.

I texted Fergus, a mutual friend from high school: “AJ is fine, right? He didn’t kill himself or anything.” Fergus texted back: “I don’t think he killed himself. Nico got a Snapchat from him the other day.” The text tone was mocking. I didn’t text AJ for this very reason; I was so sure that he was alive that I thought he, like Fergus, would make fun of me for being worried that he was dead.

So now all was presumably well. We had Facebook, we had Snapchat, we knew what was going on! I responded with “Ok yay, glad AJ is still alive!” and Fergus and I continued to debate whether pancakes or waffles were tastier. Something significant and heart-wrenching had happened, but it quickly disappeared, lost in the way social media collapses all distinction between the trivial and the profound.

The author (left) and AJ. Photo courtesy of Emma Electra Jones.

I met AJ sometime in the fifth grade. At first we weren’t friends. In fact, I hated him for a good portion of the sixth and seventh grades in that irrational way that children sometimes hate one another. Eventually I no longer found him an awful person to be around, and we were good friends throughout high school. When we went off to college we carried on our friendship online—the way my friends and I do almost everything. But an unforeseen hazard of living life online is that it confers a kind of immortality that doesn’t square with real life—and certainly not real death.

Around 11 p.m. that same Sunday, I was cooking chicken-less chicken nuggets for a group of friends in my New York apartment when I went to my bedroom to grab my phone. There was a text: “Emma, AJ did kill himself. I’m sorry if you wake up to this.” Fergus had just gotten off the phone with AJ’s mother. Later, I would find out that he had died two days earlier after overdosing on heroin. I would learn that he was an addict and had overdosed once before. I would remember that he’d dabbled with drugs while we were in high school. But the moment that I read those words, the only thought that came to mind was being 16, out past curfew, parked somewhere in the Hollywood Hills, and as I collapsed in the hallway of my apartment, weeping, I kept repeating: “Oh my god, I kissed him in the back of a truck and now he’s dead.”

I had some previous experience with death: the passing of a great uncle. The sensations that I was having now, though, were new and horrible. This death made me frantic. Finding out that a close friend has died without any human contact, not even the sound of another person’s voice, is disorienting. For me there was no ritual to delineate when he had died and when he had lived—no sheet pulled over the face, no pennies on the eyelids, no pronouncement and silence.

That night everyone who knew him was bewildered. We exchanged shocked online messages. Was this real? Could these texts be trusted? Because that’s all anyone was getting: texts. The mother of a friend of mine was waiting to tell her children until she had “more evidence.”

But in the end, it didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any. There were only those same words sent over and over again from person to person: “AJ is dead.”

My relationship with AJ was always somewhere between friendly and flirtatious, and it reached an apex the summer before we became seniors in high school when we watched a lot of movies, kissed in a truck; I even had dinner with his parents. Maybe for a second we almost were, and then we weren’t. But that was okay; our relationship had always been fluid and easy. I trusted AJ. Even though I knew he liked drugs, and would often do them at parties, I never worried that he’d take things too far. He once told me that he would never do heroin “because I know I’d like it too much.”

But of course that wasn’t what happened. Fifty thousand Americans died from drug overdoses in 2016, and AJ was one of them. As soon as Fergus texted me the news I wanted to call him to find out how AJ had gotten involved with opioids. I wanted to know whether everybody else was aware of his drug problem and I was just in the dark. I wanted to understand how in the world this could have happened.

But Fergus lived in Canada and didn’t have a phone plan. It would cost him a fortune to talk on the telephone. I realize how irrational that sounds—Your friend died and you were concerned with phone plans? Or: What about Skype? Maybe it was also easier not to call. Maybe I appreciated the distance that technology gave us. I knew that a call would reflect my own shock and sadness back at me, and I didn’t want to stare at someone through a screen who I knew felt as hollow as I did.

And calling would also have made it real, as though I’d killed him. He wasn’t really dead yet. Not if I let the internet stand between me and his death.

After he died, I was alone in Manhattan, texting people and reading Facebook messages filled with condolences. I found out about the date of his funeral in a Facebook post from his mom. So while all of this public grief was unfolding online, each of us was experiencing it alone, tucked away in our separate corners of the world.

Later I got a message that AJ had “liked” one of my photos, but in fact his mother had taken over his Facebook page and it was no longer him, though it seemed to be. I still get the occasional notification that AJ has posted something on his wall or that he is online. This always feels existentially wrong, a dead person spending time making Facebook posts.

The first time I felt genuinely better after his death was when I flew home to L.A. for the funeral. I spent the whole weekend in a cluster of friends, and was alone for no more than two hours the entire time. We really “shared” memories and stories. We held one another. We cried. We also went go-cart racing and ate garlic fries. We existed together in a way that was impossible over social media. We couldn’t plan what to say or how to express ourselves, as you can in online forums, and I think we suffered less because of it. We got to experience the honesty and relief of laying our grief bare to one another.

And, perhaps most importantly, we could all see, plainly, that AJ was not there.

The post When You Live Online, Will Anyone Know When You Die? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Clark had it all wrong: This was exactly the kind of music people played in Minneapolis. The Minneapolis Sound, which influenced musicians from Janet Jackson to Sheila E., has come to be practically synonymous with Prince, thanks to his classic songs such as “Little Red Corvette,” “Erotic City,” and “Kiss.” But although Prince was its high priest, he was not its author. The Minneapolis Sound was bigger than one diminutive, enigmatic, driven-genius kid from the city’s north side. It was the offspring of ambitious school-based music training put in place by polka-loving European settlers, and the prodigious talents of a small group of black musicians who migrated to the area during the first half of the 20th century. It had been brewing in the small, easily-forgotten black section of a vanilla city for decades. It was the result of a cultural accommodation that was characteristic of the Twin Cities’ unusual ethno-musical heritage, a mix of styles that its vastly outnumbered black musicians—Prince and others—turned to spectacular advantage.

The story began with the region’s first outsiders: Europeans from Norway, Sweden, and Germany, and whites from northeastern U.S. states who poured into St. Paul and Minneapolis in the middle of the 19th century. They were pulled by cheap land and milling jobs on the banks of the Mississippi River, and they displaced the native peoples in the area. By the close of the 19th century, Minneapolis had grown into a sizable city of more than 200,000, one New Deal-era study of the region estimated.

White Minnesotans loved polka music, which borrowed from European folk traditions. Pennsylvania governor and 1964 presidential hopeful William Scranton and his wife courted Republican delegates from the state by dancing the polka. Photo by Paul Vathis/Associated Press.

These Europeans who settled in Minneapolis brought their folk music traditions with them. The musical migration could not have happened at a better time, or in a better place. Early Minnesotans had always placed a high value on music. Ethnic folk music, orchestras, early ragtime, minstrels, brass bands, and vaudeville all were part of Minneapolis’s early music tradition. By the turn of the 20th century, the city had the state’s first symphony orchestra, and boasted numerous music venues that attracted performances by the country’s best musicians.

Polka made its appearance during this time. A combination of different European folk musical traditions, polka or “pulka,” which is Czech for “half-step,” originated in eastern and central Europe in the 1820s, spreading throughout the continent by the 1830s and then, with migration, into the United States. It took hold in northeastern cities and in the upper midwest, as European migrants moved west (the “Polka Belt”), taking up regional variations along the way. Americans loved polka’s energy and vitality, and the ways it connected them to the Old World they missed.

The music thrived in Minneapolis—and inspired a strong commitment to musical education. Around the turn of the 20th century, city leaders institutionalized the town’s love of music through its schools. All public school students in Minneapolis were trained in voice, instrumentation, and music reading. The Minneapolis board of education said the intent was to increase “participation and appreciation of music,” and to provide poor and working class immigrants and their children with the tools to play, read, and write music. This had the effect of keeping alive the folk music traditions that Europeans had brought with them to the state, and would breathe life into the growing polka scene.

The Minneapolis Sound, which Prince and his band The Revolution popularized in the 1980s, was a blend of white and black musical styles. Here, in 1985, the musicians accepted the American Music Award for best single for “When Doves Cry,” in Los Angeles. Photo by Doug Pizac/Associated Press.

But it wasn’t just polka that benefited: Free music education also helped young Prince to lay the groundwork for the Minneapolis Sound. His family, like the European immigrants who invented polka, didn’t have the money to pay for musical instruments or lessons. But with the public schools providing these resources, Prince spent every second he could in his high school’s music room, practicing multiple instruments, honing his sound, and making demos.

Minneapolis’s polka love provided a perfect entry point for wildly creative black musicians like Prince in another way, too: by forcing them to mix with white culture in ways their brethren in other cities never had to. Black people have lived in Minnesota since before the state was founded. Blacks from Canada traded with Native Americans in the 19th century, and slaves (both slaves and escaped former slaves) also were a presence in the state. The first free black settlement in Minnesota was founded along the banks of the Mississippi in 1857, and in the years after abolition, migration increased. Minnesota’s growing liberalism and the state’s willingness to enfranchise black men sent a signal to many that they would be treated fairly in the northern metropolis.

Still, there were never very many black people in the area. Between 1880 and 1930, the black population in Minnesota grew from a negligible 362 to a still tiny 4,276. African Americans made up just 1 percent of the population in 1930; even when Prince was born, in 1958, the percentage of the state’s black population remained in the single digits. (It’s no wonder that the comedian Chris Rock joked in the 1990s that only two black people lived in Minnesota: Prince and Hall of Fame baseball player Kirby Puckett.)

But their small numbers didn’t diminish the impact that blacks had on the music scene—rather, it may have amplified it. While white Minnesotans played their polkas, black music migrated up the Mississippi, with minstrel shows, ragtime, jazz, and the blues all gaining enthusiastic, if small, followings in Minneapolis. Black musicians started thinking of the city as a place where they could live and thrive. Early black musical migrants included Lester “Pres” Young, the talented tenor saxophonist, and the jazz pianist James Samuel “Cornbread” Harris, II (whose son, Jimmy “Jam” Harris, became a well-known R&B songwriter and producer and an important figure in the popularization of the Minneapolis Sound).

Prince’s Yellow Cloud Electric Guitar, 1989. Image courtesy of the Division of Culture and the Arts, National Museum of American History.

Others followed. The parents of producer Terry Lewis (Jimmy “Jam”s’ musical partner), and those of guitarist Dez Dickerson (who played with Prince’s band, the Revolution), migrated to the Twin Cities during this same period. Prince’s parents made the journey too: Mattie Shaw, a singer, and John R. Nelson, a composer and pianist, both moved up from Louisiana in the 1940s. They met through Minneapolis’s small but vibrant black music scene, also known as the “chitterling circuit,” in the 1950s. Like many black migrants, they landed in North Minneapolis, a formerly Jewish area, where Prince was born and raised.

Because the black music scene in Minneapolis was so tiny, black musicians who hoped to make a living by performing played for white audiences whenever possible. Segregation reinforced the musical color line, with most white audiences wanting to hear classical music, jazz standards, polka, or pop music. Black musicians learned to accommodate them, and developed a vast musical range. Cornbread Harris, for example, learned to play “polkas, mambas, salsas, and calypsos,” says Prince biographer Dave Hill. Black musicians’ virtuosity expanded their own community’s musical vocabulary, melding a new family of sounds into the jazz, blues, and R&B they played for black listeners.

Prince’s generation followed the pattern. In the early 1970s, when Prince was a teenager, the numbers of black people in Minneapolis were still “small enough to be ignored,” according to Hill, and white pop music continued to dominate. Prince was schooled in black musical forms like R&B, funk, and soul, but there was still only one small, low-frequency black radio station, so he and his contemporaries also listened to rock and folk artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

Lester Young, 1958. Photo by Herman Leonard. Courtesy of Herman Leonard Photographs, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

Prince’s unique virtuosity made it possible for him to forge a new style from the wide variety of white and black genres that he and his city loved. Even as a high school student, he could hear a song in his head and translate it to sound. He played several instruments by ear, including guitar, piano, drums, and bass guitar. He coolly mimicked masters like Carlos Santana note for note. Folk influences like Dylan and Mitchell course through Prince’s work with his first band, Grand Central, which played rock-tinged funk and soul. By the mid-’70s, punk, indie rock, and New Wave—the music that floated around the “vanilla market” in the city at the time—had filtered into his recordings, too. This musical collage is apparent on Prince’s first album, For You, which was less a commercial release and more a statement of what the young musician could do: Minneapolis Sound lite, with flares of the sexually provocative lyrics for which he would become famous.

By the time Prince recorded his third album, 1980’s Dirty Mind, he had refined the sound. Instead of showcasing his ability to play multiple instruments and diverse musical tastes, as his first release had, Dirty Mind showed Prince’s ability to blend his influences to create an entirely new sound. It was a giant leap creatively. Hailed by critics as a landmark, Dirty Mind put Prince and the Minneapolis Sound on the map. Songs like “when you were mine,” “Partyup,” and “Uptown” (an ode to the bohemian Minneapolis neighborhood that Prince identified with), were punk-funk music, incorporating heavy New Wave and rock overtures smoothed out with R&B. Erotically-charged songs like “Head,” “Dirty Mind,” and “Sister” shocked—and delighted—listeners and critics alike. Rolling Stone said the album was “a pop record of Rabelaisian achievement,” and music critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine called it a “stunning, audacious amalgam of funk, new wave, R&B, and pop, fueled by grinningly salacious sex and the desire to shock” that “set the style for much of the urban soul and funk of the early ’80s.”

The press anointed Prince the next Jimi Hendrix—the new black rock royalty for the ’80s. In fact, he was more than that. Mining the sounds that reverberated in his unique corner of America, from polka to punk, Prince forged a style that was just right—in spite of, or perhaps because of, its oddball roots in black and white culture. Over the next three decades, Prince released dozens of albums and stored away enough recordings to release two or more albums a year for a century. His was a singular talent, of a sort we’re unlikely to see again. But without Minneapolis’s crazy musical mixture in his past, he might have remained only a prince, instead of becoming an emperor.

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