Scientists unveil universal aging mechanism in glassy materials

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

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"Glass" has a unique and distinct meaning in physics—one that refers not just to the transparent material we associate with window glass. Instead, it refers to any system that looks solid but is not in true equilibrium and continues to change extremely slowly over time. Examples include window glass, plastics, metallic glasses, spin glasses (i.e., magnetic systems), and even some biological and computational systems.

When a liquid is cooled very quickly—a process called quenching—it doesn't have time to organize into a crystal but becomes stuck in a disordered state far from equilibrium. Its properties—like stiffness and structure—slowly evolve through a process called "aging."

Now, a research team from the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a new theoretical framework for understanding the universal aging behavior of glassy materials.

The study reveals a fundamental mechanism that governs how glasses—from simple spin systems to complex network glasses such as amorphous silica—slowly evolve over time.

To understand the aging process, the researchers developed a generalized trap model (GTM) grounded in the material's energy landscape: a multidimensional map of all possible configurations and the energy barriers that separate them. According to the GTM, aging is driven by activated hopping across these energy barriers. A universal distribution of barrier heights, incorporating crucial finite-size corrections, governs the system's slow, nonequilibrium dynamics.

The theory predicts that during nonequilibrium aging, the system undergoes "weak ergodicity breaking" at a temperature higher than the conventional glass transition temperature. In statistical physics, "ergodic" refers to a system that explores all possible configurations consistent with its energy. In contrast, the term "ergodicity breaking" refers to an equilibrium system becoming trapped in a subset of possible states, unable to explore all configurations. Weak ergodicity breaking occurs in nonequilibrium systems and describes a system that continues to evolve but remains correlated with its initial configuration even after prolonged aging.

By applying the GTM to four distinct models, including the random energy model (a spin glass), the Weeks-Chandler-Andersen model (a simple atomic glass), and amorphous silica (a network glass), the researchers demonstrated that glass aging behavior follows universal mathematical laws. A key finding is that the logarithmic decay of the two-time correlation function, a hallmark of aging, is directly linked to the finite size of "activation clusters," or groups of particles that rearrange together during the aging process.

In the Weeks-Chandler-Andersen model, this insight allowed the researchers to extract a static length scale from the nonequilibrium dynamics, extending its observable growth range from a mere factor of two to three to a full order of magnitude. This provides strong supporting evidence for the random first-order transition (RFOT) theory, a leading theory of the glass transition.

This work provides a unified phase diagram that describes both ergodic and weakly non-ergodic phases in spin and structural glasses, offering a powerful tool for understanding these ubiquitous yet complex materials. These findings have implications not only for materials science but also for other complex systems, such as protein dynamics and even the training of deep learning algorithms, where similar slow relaxation processes are observed.

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Journal

Science Advances

DOI

10.1126/sciadv.aec4416 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Universal activated aging and weak ergodicity breaking in spin and structural glasses

Study reveals how Trump’s 2024 victory made prejudice cool again

 Supporters of Republican presidential nominee former U.S. President Donald Trump react as Trump speaks from the Palm Beach County Convention Center, as they attend an election watch party at Maricopa County Republican Committee during the 2024 U.S. presidential election in Chandler, Arizona, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Go Nakamura/File Photo

Adam Lynch

February 25, 2026

ALTERNET

A new study reveals that President Donald Trump’s derogatory rhetoric is making prejudice fashionable again.

“Individuals naturally want to fit in,” reports PsyPost. “They tend to hide their prejudices when society disapproves of them. However, when a prominent political figure openly uses derogatory language against specific groups, it sends a signal that these negative attitudes are now socially acceptable.”


Making people express their “previously hidden biases” was a talent Trump showed in his 2016 election, but his weird superpower expressed itself again in 2024, researchers noticed.

“After his initial campaign, voters across the political spectrum agreed that expressing prejudice against specifically targeted groups, such as immigrants and Muslims, had become much more acceptable,” PsyPost reports, so researchers needed to determine if Trump’s 2024 reelection triggered an identical reaction in a different political climate.

They recruited undergraduate students from a large midwestern state university and required them to evaluate a wide variety of social groups, including immigrants, Muslims, Asian Americans, disabled people, and many others, totaling 128 distinct groups. Sure enough, when Trump spoke harshly about marginalized communities during his campaign, such as immigrants, Haitians, and Asian Americans, participants became more likely to view prejudice against these same groups as socially acceptable after he won.

“If people have any attitudes at all about a group, they’re likely to be stable,” said Christian S. Crandall, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas. “But Trump can create strong new prejudices, especially if people don’t have much of an opinion about the group in the first place. Attitudes are fairly difficult to change, but they’re much easier to create.”

PsyPost reports the negative political language also predicted a direct rise in the participants’ own internal biases. Following the 2024 election, individuals admitted to holding stronger personal prejudices against the exact groups that the campaign had heavily criticized, which also included Muslims and transgender people.

Crandall said the resulting prejudice was “spread out across the whole nation and population.”

“I think that various kinds of prejudice have become much more overt. Antisemitism (which the administration says it’s fighting, but that seems to be a cover to attack universities, and I’m saying that as a personal opinion, not on the data), and elimination of all DEI-relevant policies and grants seem to be backing off concern for civil rights.”

The participants were predominantly white college students from the midwestern United States, reports PsyPost, which leaves into question how thoroughly Trump’s talent as a prejudice accelerant jumps across race. The study also evaluated changes over a span of just a few weeks, making the long-term stability of these shifts difficult to interpret.

 

How tech-dependency and pandemic isolation have created ‘anxious generation’

Taylor & Francis Group

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Unchecked use of technology and pandemic isolation have ‘reshaped’ how teenagers develop – but it’s not too late to intervene.

This is the stark warning of educator Amber Chandler, who suggests teens are struggling with unprecedented levels of anxiety in this ‘scared new world’, which presents a major challenge for parents and schools. However, the teacher says children can learn to flourish and thrive if given the right support.

No phones at bedtime, ‘no-tech’ public spaces and letting children handle their own problems are among scientific evidence-based solutions offered in her book Reclaiming Connection – How Schools and Families Can Nurture Belonging in a Scared New World.

Chandler also suggests parents become more ‘present’ by not scrolling on their smartphones when with their children. They can then take the lead in teaching their offspring how to be in the ‘here and now’.

Schools also have a vital role to play, she suggests, by helping students to navigate technology responsibly and safely.

Chandler’s position is not isolated, in fact concerns are growing worldwide among parents, schools and policymakers over the impact of smart phones and other devices on young people. Australia, for example, has recently banned social media for under 16s and other countries are considering similar policies.

Besides the unprecedented challenges teens face in the hyper-connected digital world, this generation of adolescents experienced an equally unprecedented global pandemic which isolated them from peers and shut off many developmental opportunities, while making many young people dependent on screens.

“The addictive nature of students’ online experiences began during the pandemic but has progressed now to a point where we must make some hard decisions, courageous decisions,” she explains. “These decisions require the ‘adults in the room’ to look at the evidence that screens, used indiscriminately, are toxic.

“The Scared New World that I fear we are inhabiting is the result of a reckless alchemy concocted from the isolation of the pandemic amalgamated with digital distractions far more powerful than we had suspected.”

Chandler hopes to counter the detrimental impact of the pandemic on young people’s social and emotional development by helping families, communities and schools come together to help them succeed.

She presents solutions based on her experiences spanning more than 20 years as a English Language Arts teacher, including seemingly simple suggestions such as teaching children about their data and digital footprint, and embracing opportunities for young people to get involved in clubs, groups and face-to-face activities.

An initial hurdle for many parents and teachers to overcome, she suggests, is pandemic fatigue – where many adults are simply ‘sick of’ talking about the pandemic, making addressing any issues doubly challenging.

“As I’m learning more, it is becoming clear that it isn’t something we can wish away. I’m saddened because the trauma inflicted on all of us has left its physical mark on us which then is playing out in the classroom and society,” she says.

The author also shares anecdotes about her own shortcomings as a parent to demonstrate the challenges that families face. She reveals she’s a ‘snowplough’ parent who clears obstacles from her children’s path, but who wasn’t alert to the dangers of smartphones. Now aware of the neurological changes in young people caused by screen use, Chandler advises parents to delay introducing phones and screens as long as possible.

“I’ll be honest, as an adult in this situation, I felt pretty guilty about my own children’s social media use when I realized that it was 100% designed to addict them and then mine their identity,” she explains.

But it’s not just parents – schools are increasingly reaching to screens to educate and test their students, something Chandler has deep concerns about.

“I am not anti-technology, but I am very much worried about the implications of our obsession with data collection that simply leads to remediation upon remediation. Instead, the younger years should be about discovery and innovation, problem solving and collaboration,” she explains.

Her advice to families, schools and mentors is to be compassionate about the decisions made until now, but to insist on change for the future: “We have to recognize that we were duped. Most people simply did not know that cellphones were addictive.”

The author doesn’t shy away from holding herself accountable, and encourages others to too. Chandler says: “Unpopular opinion: Families need to hold themselves accountable. Small children cannot drive to the store, buy an expensive device,  and regulate screen time when they can’t even tie their shoes.  We bought the phones, iPads, and gaming consoles.”

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DOI

10.4324/9781003659969 

 

New research shows God-believing ‘nones’ align more closely with religious Americans

Religious nones who believe in God are far more likely than other nones to hold conservative views

University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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image: 

Philip Schwadel is a leading researcher on the growing population of religious "nones."

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Credit: Craig Chandler, University Communication and Marketing

Nearly one in three Americans now identify as religious “nones,” and new research from University of Nebraska–Lincoln sociologist Philip Schwadel suggests that this fast‑growing group is far more ideologically diverse than commonly assumed.

In a new study, published in Sociology of Religion, Schwadel found that religious nones who believe in God are far more likely than other nones to have similar policy preferences to their religiously affiliated counterparts. Nones — or those who identify as atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular — have grown from approximately 16% of the population in 2007 to 28% according to the most recent data from the Pew Research Center.

Using data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative survey of adults in the United States, Schwadel examined 16 measures ranging from attitudes on capital punishment to government spending and political intolerance. God-believing nones are more likely to support school prayer, the death penalty and making pornography illegal, while opposing abortion. They are less likely than other nones to support increased spending on welfare, scientific research, education or to protect the environment.

These findings build on Schwadel’s previous work documenting the growing diversity among the religiously unaffiliated. While Americans increasingly disaffiliate from religion, many still assume the nones represent a single ideological bloc. Schwadel’s new research points out that isn’t true.

“We tend to think of these people as all atheists,” Schwadel, Happold Professor of Sociology, said. “I see in popular discourse, people often conflate the non-religious with atheists, but very few of them are atheists. The biggest takeaway is that we treat these people as one group, but as 28% or so of Americans, they have tremendous diversity.”

Schwadel said the conservatism he found among God-believing religious nones compared to other nones was somewhat surprising.

“I did expect God-believing nones to be different from the other nones, the atheists and agnostics,” he said. “I did not expect it to be this different. I did not expect that in many cases, they are just as conservative on a lot of these issues as religious affiliates who believe in God. Nones who believe in God look more like religious Americans than they do other nones. Many of these people, as this article shows, support the death penalty, oppose abortion, support school prayer.”

And God-believing religious nones are a large subsection. Schwadel noted that among the religiously unaffiliated, 35% believe in God, 28% believe in a higher power, 21% are agnostic and 16% are atheists.

That God-believing nones are growing could have political implications, Schwadel said, and he is exploring the religious language politicians use in future research.

“I think there's a clear implication for Republican politicians,” he said. “I do think that they can appeal to some of these nones who believe in God or even believe in a higher power, whose policy perspectives align with the Republican Party, if they tone down a little bit of the Christian-specific language.”

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Journal

Sociology of Religion

DOI

10.1093/socrel/sraf037 

Method of Research

Survey

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

The Social and Political Perspectives of Believing and Non-Believing Religious Nones

An Epic About Capitalism and Detroit

Ron Jacobs

 February 13, 2026

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Detail from Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industrial Murals, Detroit Institute of Art. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

John Sayles is a fantastic storyteller. Most people who share this viewpoint probably know Sayles from his films, which include Eight Men Out, Matewan and Return of the Secaucus 7. While those films certainly are among some of the best films in the last fifty years, it’s through his writing that I know Sayles best. I first read his story “At the Anarchists Convention” in the February 1979 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It was one of those afternoons when I was hanging out at the public library in downtown San Diego, California. Perusing the magazine shelves, I picked up that issue and glanced at the table of contents. Two things captured my interest: an article by Stephen Kinzer about the revolutionary forces in Nicaragua and a short story with the seeming contradiction of an anarchists’ convention. After finding a seat, I read the two submissions. Kinzer’s article didn’t exactly jibe with my understanding of the revolutionaries in Nicaragua, but it was decent stuff for a mainstream liberal magazine. John Sayles’ short story made me laugh, while his ability with words was a lesson in composition. I looked up his name in the card catalog and found that he had published two books—Pride of the Bimbos and Union Dues and in the weeks that followed read both.

Sayles made many more films in the next decade. His next novel Los Gusanos was published in 1991. Since then, he has published five more novels, all of them being what I would call epics, as in a long poem or narrative describing heroic deeds. To clarify, it’s not like Sayles novels are on par with ancient tales like Odysseus or even the Old Testament. However, the deeds of his protagonists inside these fictions of modern life can certainly be considered heroic within the context of the story being told. The most recent is titled Crucible and tells a story centered around the motorcar mogul and megalomaniac Henry Ford. The time period the tale takes place runs from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. The characters portrayed include workers, company thugs, union organizers, their families and their women. The profit-driven fantasy of Ford’s that resulted in the construction of a village in the rubber-producing jungles of Brazil is but one location in the webs of power, corruption and capital woven by Henry Ford. So too, are his antisemitism, white supremacism, interest in Nazism and the paranoia and ego that informs it all.

In the Amazonian village constructed to produce rubber, there’s a young girl named Kerry whose father is assigned to manage the whole show. The girl’s natural curiosity and heightened intellect influence her interactions with the locals, even creating a teen romance for the times between her and an indigenous lad who is equally curious and smart. The experiment in rubber cultivation ultimately fails, the economic crash being only one of the reasons. Meanwhile, back in Detroit union organizers are making headway amongst the workers. Unlike the failed jungle town, the economic crisis is the primary reason for this unforeseen (in the minds of management) transfer of loyalties among Ford company workers. Interwoven and splashed across the growing struggle between Ford’s capital and the United Autoworkers (UAW) organizing are the omnipresent curses of US history; curses manipulated by CEOs and anti-union forces even today—racism, sexism and anti-immigrant hatred. These phenomena appear discreetly in the conversations the author creates for his characters and violently in the actions of police, scabs and their protectors. They are not only present in the boardrooms and banquet halls of the owners; they are understood in their conversations and in the orders they send to the cops and private police fighting workers in the streets.

Certain protagonists imprint themselves in the reader’s mind, in part due to their relatability and in part because of Sayle’s mastery of the art of fiction. I found the communist labor organizer Rosa to be as genuine as the foreman in Brazil Jim Rogan’s daughter; the African-American autoworker Zeke as rounded a human being as the Polish worker called Kaz. The scenes inside the factories smell of steel, ring with industrial noise and rival the fear, anger and attitude of the men and women standing opposite well-armed cops of all kinds in the struggle for a union. Merriam-Webster suggests that the word crucible came from the “medieval Latin crucibulum, a noun for an earthen pot used to melt metals”. Over time, it has also acquired the definition which one undergoes a severe trial; a “place or situation in which concentrated forces interact to cause or influence change or development.” Considering all of these definitions in regards to this novel titled Crucible, it becomes clear that each description fits in its own way. The aforementioned Zeke works in a furnace room with most of the other African-American workers melting ore into steel. The international economic crisis and the onset of fascism and war provide a severe test at a time which results in changes unforeseen, as in the crucible of war and depression, death and repression. As the title of the novel, the word Crucible describes the work wholly and completely.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com

Nobody Starts With a Blank Slate: an Interview with John Sayles

Richard Klin

February 13, 2026

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John Sayles at the Miami International Book Fair. Photo: Rodrigo Fernández. CC BY-SA 3.0

The novels of John Sayles encompass a wide swath of American history. Since the wide swath of American history is replete with one injustice after another, those are front and center in Sayles’s fiction.

Crucible, his latest novel, is set in the tumultuous, violent Detroit of the 1920s to World War II. It is a mix of real figures—including Henry Ford, Diego Rivera, Joe Louis, and Ford’s ruthless majordomo/enforcer Harry Bennett—and a multi-ethnic array of fictional characters, drawn from the city’s struggling working class. To describe a book as a sprawling canvas is a cliché, but Crucible is just that—a sprawling canvas that, among other loci, looks at Henry Ford’s grandiose, ill-fated scheme to launch his own rubber-producing empire in the Brazilian Amazon. This new novel, like Sayles’s other work, manages to artfully weave together a host of themes and characters. His writing is a vital piece of the literary landscape.

RK: You’ve said: “History is great because someone has already worked out a plot and a timeline for you.” Is that your main impetus for writing historical fiction?

John Sayles: I got to go to college and I never took a history course. It was something I discovered later. The official story was usually pretty one-note: good guys and bad guys, depending on who wrote it. I realized that there was a better story–a more complex and interesting human story–if you dug a little bit.

One of the things that I read in college on my own was [Dee Brown’s] Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Every chapter is a different confrontation between an Indian nation and the white people who are moving west. And I realized: Wait a minute. I’ve seen this movie! I’ve seen this movie—Charles Bronson or Jeff Chandler played the Indian! Not only had I seen the movie, but I realized that Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was a better story. Why didn’t they tell this story in the movies? It’s much more two-sided–it’s at least two sides, maybe more than that and with more complexity in it. It’s a much more interesting story than the one that they told. That’s pretty much been my experience with historical stuff.

With Crucible, I knew some headline things about Detroit and about Henry Ford in this period, but then when I started looking into what happened in that world between 1927 and 1942, there were all these incidents that I had no idea about. I figured, Join the club! There are a lot of people who don’t know about this. And this is a really interesting, complex thing on all sides.

RK: The list of things I didn’t know goes on and on, including Ford’s Brazil project and the fact that there was the Klan in Detroit.

JS: And the [white supremacist] Black Legion. There’s a movie with Humphrey Bogart about a guy who gets sucked into this outfit. [Black Legion, 1937]

RK: Besides being a fount of anti-Semitism, Henry Ford comes across as really bizarre. He doesn’t fit the criteria of a straight-out robber baron; he’s a paternalistic crackpot.

JS: It’s an interesting thing to write about. Ford was iconic in his day. At one point he was known as “America’s favorite tycoon.” He was kind of a holdover in that by 1927 there weren’t that many guys who owned the company lock, stock, and barrel. There were no stockholders in the Ford Motor Company. He owned about 52 percent of the stock and his son Edsel was given 48 percent. And it was going to be handed over to Edsel. So he had that kind of power. If he said that he would close his factories if the workers unionized, he would and he could do it.

On the other hand, he didn’t care about money that much. He had this feeling that he had been touched by a higher power and he was a vessel to improve peoples’ lives. There was a lot of frustration: Why aren’t people following what I’m telling them? This is how they should live and everything would be fine. He rented an ocean liner during World War I, sailing to Europe with a bunch of peaceniks and antiwar people and said, “Here I am, Germany, France, Great Britain—come and talk to me and I’ll solve all your problems. You don’t have to be killing each other.” Nobody wanted to talk to him. He was startled and came back on the ocean liner with his tail between his legs.

There were some very good things about him. He decided he was going to pay his workers twice as much as everybody else so they could afford to buy a Model T. He said that if Black workers were doing the same work, he was going to pay them the same as white workers. Nobody else was doing that in Detroit or anywhere else. On the other hand, he was ignorant. He was a guy who grew up on a farm and he’d never met anyone Jewish in his life—and it’s not like he was alone, especially in Detroit, with Father Coughlin on the radio. Or in the United States as a whole, where Catholics were still considered suspicious. Ford had a lot of the prejudices of the day. He had never met any of these people and had all these crazy ideas about them. He’s a very complex character. And then the thing I really didn’t know about, which I got interested in, is this terrible, tragic relationship between him and his son. Everything you read said that people really liked Edsel. He was a good guy; he was actually pretty artistic. He was a good designer and was behind the designs of some of the nicer looking Ford cars. I’m sure he was rolling in his grave when they put out the Edsel car! The ugliest thing ever and they put his name on it! Henry Ford thought, My son is weak. He grew up as a rich kid. I’ve gotta toughen him up and treat him like hell.

RK: There’s a lot of humor in the book, which is a difficult perch and very effective. Harry Bennett, for example, is funny. Bennett is a complete monster—but he’s funny. And I felt sort of guilty for thinking that. You’re obviously dealing with some very heavy topics, but there’s humor throughout.

JS: Bennett was a pretty good painter and he played several musical instruments. He was very charismatic in his way. He could sit down with labor union guys and mobsters and sports people. That’s part of why Ford hired him: This guy’s such a great storyteller and such a tough little guy—he’s exactly what I need at my factory to keep people in line. He doesn’t take a step backward. Ford met him while Harry Bennett was having a fistfight on the street with a couple sailors and he kind of held his own. Henry Ford took him for a drink and they got talking and he gave him a job and he was good at it. Ford kept moving him up and up and up and Harry Bennett just kept taking more and more and more. He was entertaining.

Humor is part of how Americans deal with a bad situation. Some of the funnier thirties movies were made in the depths of the Depression. There were some very funny movies made at that time. One thing to consider when you’re writing a character is: Does this character have a sense of humor? [The fictional character] Rosa Schimmel, who’s the young radical, really doesn’t—she’s a very serious Communist at first. But some of the scenes that’s she’s in are funny because of the situation.

RK: Reading Crucible, you can’t help notice the parallels between now and then. I’m wondering how conscious you were of that or how much you crafted the book to reflect that.

JS: I was aware generally. I wrote this about two years ago. Elon Musk was just making automobiles. He was just some guy people didn’t know much about and he was sort of a wonder boy who was making a new kind of car that sounded like, “Oh, that would be good for the environment. It won’t be burning gasoline.” He caught up to the book in a way.

Our history doesn’t start with a blank slate. Nobody starts with a blank slate. You’re born into the world, you’re a certain class, you’re a certain color, you’re a certain sex—that may change during your life! You’ve got a lot of history that you’re hauling and you’re not even conscious yet.

The Civil War’s not over. We thought, Finally they’re not flying the Stars and Bars anymore and we’ve taken those statues down and we’re starting to tell the real story. And then Trump gets in and says, Oh, hold it. We’re erasing what you just did. We’re putting it back to what it was around 1920. That’s the history that they want Americans to learn and to believe about themselves.

RK: Who have been some of your literary inspirations?

JS: I was reading kids’ books at the same times that I would pick up a paperback that my parents might have around. And I tried to figure out what was going on. Sometimes I would really like the story, especially if it had been made into a movie, because I could imagine the people in the movie in it.

I remember—really early on—reading [Herman Wouk’s] The Caine Mutiny. Nelson Algren was a guy that I discovered fairly early. I read Elmore Leonard before he got well-known. I read all his westerns—they were westerns and they were a little more interesting and had a little more going on with them. Chester Himes—I just picked up If He Hollers Let Him Go and it was—wow! Los Angeles during World War II! And I searched out his other books. A lot of Eudora Welty’s short stories. I eventually read a lot of Faulkner.

What I did instead of taking history courses or even going to classes when I was in high school, I would read three or four novels a week. I would go to the library and I started in the A’s. There had been all these American authors that I’d heard of, but these books had not been available to me. So luckily Mark Twain was under Clemens. And I think I got up to about M or N by the time I graduated. I did read some Philip Roth because he was very hot at the time. Kurt Vonnegut was very hot at that time. But really, it was catch-as-catch-can. In college, I took one English course, a freshman English course and I really didn’t like the way it was being taught. I wasn’t a literature or an English major; I was a psych major.

It’s only been in the last couple years that I’ve started to read classic French, Russian, and British literature; Dickens and people like that. Certainly for [his novel] Jamie MacGillivray I read some Dickens and Smollett and Fielding. I’m still catching up in a lot of ways.

RK: What’s next for you?

JS: I’ve written a novel called Gods of Gotham. It’s already done. It’s set in New York City between 1949 and 1951—a much shorter time period—and it’s a little bit of On the Waterfront and a little bit of West Side Story; the Puerto Ricans are starting to show up. It’s got a lot about corruption; the CCNY point-shaving scandal is one of the centerpieces of it. It’s also about the beginning of television becoming a factor in American life. Because at first not that many people had TV sets and there were four networks. And one of them—the DuMont network–their studio was a showroom at Wanamaker’s department store in New York.

And then the Kefauver Committee happened and everybody wanted to see mobsters on TV. We’d been hearing about these people and they’re bringing them in! And they’re bringing in big-city mayors and senators and stuff like that to ask them point-blank about corruption. In New York City, theaters closed; bars were full and it wasn’t the Friday night fights. All of a sudden, TV became not just an entertainment factor, but also a political factor. That’s woven into the book. Not quite as many characters as Crucible!

RK: How do you write socially conscious fiction in a really horrible time? I assume this implies there’s an element of hope.

JS: Nothing surprises me anymore. My poor father went through World War II and went Trump first got elected, he said, “I thought we were making progress.” And he was really depressed until Trump was out. He was very glad to see him defeated the second time, but then there was that attack on the Capitol. He was 96 by that point and he said, “I think I’m done. I’m disappointed in the American people.” And that was my feeling with the second election.
I think an important thing is the cultural conversation. Most of my friends don’t even read fiction, so it’s not like I think there’s a huge audience for what I’m doing, but it is a part of the conversation. And unless you keep that conversation going, it’s like democracy dies in darkness. The Washington Post is still putting that on their masthead, but they’re part of the problem now.

It’s almost a responsibility, in my way—while I can still do this and get something published—putting something into the world that makes people think about what’s going on around them.