Angela Davis - One of The New York Times Five Greats

Before the world knew what intersectionality was, the scholar, writer and activist was living it, arguing not just for Black liberation, but for the rights of women and queer and transgender people as well.

October 22, 2020

 Nelson George; Photographs by John Edmonds NEW YORK TIMES

Angela Davis, Photograph by John Edmonds // New York Times


THERE’S A WALL on Throop Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that is painted with a mural of Black icons. It begins with Bob Marley and Haile Selassie before going on to include Martin Luther King Jr., Betty Shabazz (Betty X) and Nelson Mandela. The last portrait is of Angela Yvonne Davis — scholar, activist and the only surviving hero of the global African diaspora. Davis’s image is painted from a photograph taken in the early ’70s, when she became a symbol of the struggle for Black liberation, anticapitalism and feminism. It’s a powerful portrait — she is wearing her hair in a round, black Afro, her hand curled as if she’s making a rhetorical point. Her expression is pensive, intelligent, challenging.

For the mural’s context, we have to return to the fall of 1969, when Davis, then an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Los Angeles, was fired at the beginning of the school year for her membership in the Communist Party, and then, after a court ruled the termination illegal, fired again nine months later for using “inflammatory rhetoric” in public speeches. She had recently become close to a trio of Black inmates nicknamed the Soledad Brothers (after the California prison in which they were held) who had been charged with the murder of a white prison guard in January 1970. One, George Jackson, was an activist and writer whom Davis befriended upon joining a committee challenging the charges. In August 1970 — after Jackson’s younger brother, Jonathan, used firearms registered to Davis in a takeover of a Marin County courthouse that left four people dead — Davis immediately came under suspicion. In the aftermath of that bloody event, she was charged with three capital offenses, including murder.
Angela Davis included in a mural in Brooklyn, N.Y., along with Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.
Nicholas Calcott // New York Times

Overnight, she became an outlaw. Within two weeks of the shootout, J. Edgar Hoover placed Davis on the F.B.I.’s Ten Most Wanted list, making her the third woman ever to be included. A national manhunt ensued before she was detained two months later in a New York motel. President Nixon congratulated the bureau on capturing “the dangerous terrorist Angela Davis.” After her arrest, the chant “Free Angela!” became a global battle cry as the academic — who had studied philosophy in East and West Germany in the late ’60s and had been a vocal supporter of the Black Panthers and the anti-Vietnam War movement — became widely viewed on the left as a political prisoner. She spent 18 months in jail before being found not guilty on all charges.

During the trial, Davis’s profile transformed. Before, she had been a noted scholar. After, she became an international symbol of resistance. In a period when images of Black women in major newspapers or on network television were scarce, Davis’s was both ubiquitous and unique. Whether in journalistic photos, respectful drawings or disrespectful caricatures, her gaze was uniformly stern — as if focused on her offscreen accusers — and unbowed. No matter the platform or the publication, she radiated rebellion and intelligence. When I search her name online today, there are countless images from this period to scroll through. There’s a drawing of a bespectacled Davis that reads, “You can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail a revolution.” There’s a photo of her holding a microphone at a rally, her own words written beneath: “The real criminals in this society are not all of the people who populate the prisons across the state, but those who have stolen the wealth of the world from the people.” There’s a painting of her washed with the red, black and green of the Pan-African flag. There’s a poster that makes her look like a sexy saint, with the words “Free Angela” hanging above and below her face; an Ecuadorean pennant depicting Davis in shackles alongside a sickle and hammer and the phrase “Libertad Para Angela Davis” — and hundreds and hundreds more.
Angela Davis on the FBI’s list of “Ten Most Wanted Fugitives,” August 1970.
Bettmann/Getty Images // New York Times
Davis gives the Black Power salute as she enters court in San Rafael, Calif., following her extradition from New York, Dec. 23, 1970. (John Abt, one of the early defense lawyers is seated on her left.)
Associated Press // New York Times

The consistent theme is a woman both radical and chic. Davis was more likely to be seen than read or heard at the time, but her very existence complicated the white and Black male gaze of what Black women could be. The impact of this representation has lingered in the culture. Consider this: For 50 years, Davis has existed as a pop-cultural reference point as well as a serious academic, one whose ideas were once thought of as extreme but are now part of the popular discourse. Both the Rolling Stones as well as John Lennon and Yoko Ono recorded songs about her in the early ’70s (“Sweet Black Angel” and “Angela,” respectively). In 1977, the great Vonetta McGee portrayed a watered-down version of Davis in the little-seen prison drama “Brothers,” based on her relationship with Jackson. Davis’s niece, Eisa, wrote and performed a critically acclaimed autobiographical play, “Angela’s Mixtape,” in 2009 about having a radical star as her aunt. A long-lost jailhouse interview with Davis was the highlight of the 2011 documentary “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” and a year later, the director Shola Lynch’s “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners,” which was executive produced by Jay-Z, Will Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith and James Lassiter, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. All of these projects have celebrated, even fetishized, that brief, electric period in Davis’s life.

In the ’70s, before the world fully understood who Davis was, they knew her face. She became, in a way very few public intellectuals ever do, an icon, a powerful image of Black femalehood in a culture that often reduced Black women to stereotypes. It’s in celebration of Davis’s ongoing visual impact and presence that T Magazine asked three young Black American artists to create portraits of Davis for this issue. “When I was in high school, I had an Afro,” says the Fresno, Calif.-based artist Kezia Harrell, 27, of the influence Davis — who has worn her own hair in an Afro since the late ’60s — has had on her life. “I had the world on top of my head.” Harrell painted Davis in an orange sweater she wore in 1972, and “imagined her gazing at freedom — a theme of such far distance.” 

Kezia Harrell’s “Angela As Black Divinity” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang // New York Times

BUT DAVIS, now 76, is not just an image on a wall or a talking head in a documentary. She remains a vital presence in the world, lecturing at major universities and advising young activists, like the Dream Defenders, a group founded in 2012 after the killing of Trayvon Martin. For most of the last 30 years, she has worked as a public intellectual, teaching at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and other universities, and embodying the kind of left-wing professor who drives conservatives crazy. She spoke out against the war on terror after 9/11, blamed the devastation in New Orleans caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 on structural racism and spoke at Occupy Wall Street rallies in Philadelphia and New York in 2011. In 2018, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Alabama invited her to receive an award, which was rescinded three months later after unnamed members of the community complained to the board about her support for Palestinian rights and a boycott of Israel. (The institute eventually reversed its decision and issued Davis a public apology.) Because of her personal history, ongoing engagement and career as a scholar, Davis is in a distinct position to connect the radical traditions of the ’60s to Trump-era activism.

Yet Davis is distinct in another way as well. Over the years, I’ve come in contact with a great many people who were activists during the Black Power era. Some are nested in academia. Quite a few have retired to the South. What unites them are the scars they carry: from being persecuted by the police and F.B.I., from being challenged on their more radical views by integrationist parents and friends, from the profound sadness they share over the fact that the revolution they fought for has yet to materialize. Davis is their peer, but she has shrugged off defeat — she still believes that America can be transformed into a more equitable society. She has kept her fire while relishing what she can learn from younger generations. Hers is a kind of openness and generosity that makes her not just an elder but a still-active participant in change.

Davis speaking at a press conference in 1976 at the Communist Party U.S.A.’s National Party Headquarters, in New York City. She was the Party’s nomination for vice president in 1980 and 1984. (Seated is Henry Winston, then National Chairman of the CPUSA.)
Bettmann/Getty Images // New York Times

Icons of the nonviolent civil rights movement — people such as the late congressman John Lewis — are rightfully revered for their sacrifices in the face of violent white resistance to integration. But, as former President Bill Clinton’s dismissive reference to Kwame Ture (née Stokely Carmichael, who ousted Lewis as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1966 by advocating for Black political autonomy) at Lewis’s funeral earlier this year suggests, there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s. There are no monuments for the many who died in targeted police shootings or annual tributes to the people incarcerated because of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence program (Cointelpro), partly aimed at destroying more aggressive Black agitation. There are no statues or memorials in Oakland, Calif., honoring the Black Panthers (though there are quite a few murals). Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged. She may not be a very comfortable connection to America’s period of “We Shall Overcome,” but she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.” As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future. Her face may be on a mural, but it is also out in the world.

TODAY, DAVIS’S HAIR is gray, though it still circles her head like a crown. From the garden of her modest eucalyptus-tree-shaded second home in Mendocino, Calif., she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction. As befits a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades, her speech is peppered with references to scholars and activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Stuart Hall, historical figures such as Prudence Crandall (a white Quaker who opened a school for Black girls in Connecticut in 1833) and the white writer and civil rights activist Anne Braden, whom she considers a mentor. In on-camera interviews from the ’70s, Davis’s voice is melodic yet tart, with a clipped precision she used to scold naïve and hostile reporters. Decades later, the melody is still there, but it’s now manifested in a smooth, almost instructional flow, the result of years of delivering lectures.

“The orange in her hands is illumination,” says the New Haven, Conn.-based artist Tschabalala Self, 30, of her portrait. “It speaks to passing on a message that has something of value, an aura.” Self, who wanted Davis to look regal and powerful, imagined the activist orating to young Black people, referencing silhouettes from the time she came to prominence in the 1970s.
Tschabalala Self’s “Angela” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang // New York Times

Davis — who has written or edited nine books and retired from teaching at U.C. Santa Cruz in 2008 — is still very much defined by the iconography of her past. It hasn’t always been easy. “For a long time, I felt somewhat intimidated,” she acknowledges. “I felt that there was no way that I, as an individual, could actually live up to the expectations incorporated in that image. There came a point when I realized I didn’t have to. The image does not reflect who I am as an individual, it reflects the work of the movement.”

The turning point occurred a few years ago, when she met a young woman in a foster-care program who was visiting U.C. Santa Cruz. “She had on a T-shirt with my image on it,” Davis recalls. “My usual stance had been, whenever I would see people wearing T-shirts with my image, I didn’t really know how to act. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to respond. But this time, I asked her, ‘Why are you wearing that T-shirt? What does that image mean to you?’ She didn’t know a great deal about me at all, but she said, ‘Whenever I wear this, I feel like I can accomplish anything. It makes me feel empowered.’ From that moment, I realized it really was not about me as an individual. It was about the fact that my image was a stand-in for the work that masses are able to do in terms of changing the world.”

IN 1974, JOAN LITTLE, a 20-year-old Black inmate in a North Carolina jail, killed her rapist, the corrections officer Clarence Alligood, and pleaded self-defense after being indicted on a charge of murder. Davis wrote a piece on the case for Ms. magazine, which had been launched three years earlier, that focused on the underreported history of white male rape of Black women as a tool of social control. Later, she became an adviser to the defense. The underlying assumption of the prosecution (and of many white Southerners) was that a white man couldn’t rape a Black woman, that she had to have seduced her jailer, and that the case was open-and-shut. Little’s trial united the civil rights, the feminist and the jail-reform movements in what was then an unusual confluence of progressive forces. In a stunning victory, Little was found not guilty of murder — a ruling that, at the time, astonished both Black and white residents in the still de facto segregated South and sounds almost like science fiction to folks raised in the current era, when law enforcement misconduct is rarely punished and Black victims are rarely believed.

Davis published “Women, Race & Class” in 1981, inspired both by her time in jail and Little’s case, as well as by her work championing the cases of other unfairly incarcerated Black women and men. “That book represents a number of positions of people who had a broader, more — the term we use now is ‘intersectional’ — analysis of what it means to struggle for gender equality,” she says. “At the time that I wrote it, I was interested in pointing out that gender did not have to be seen in competition with race. That women’s issues did not belong to middle-class white women. In many ways, that research was about uncovering the contributions of women who were completely marginalized by histories of the women’s movement, especially Black women, but also Latino women and working-class women.”

For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large. The second-wave feminism of the ’70s was — much like its forerunner, the suffrage movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — driven by white women seeking equality with men in terms of opportunity, legal protections and control of their bodies. But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women — in addition to destroying the cartoonish sexualization of Black men as threats to white women — had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda. These are problems Davis identified when she was trying to grow support for Delbert Tibbs, a Black man falsely accused of rape and murder in Florida in the mid-70s. “He was facing the death penalty,” she recalls. “We were appealing to these white feminists to support him as well as Little, and there was reluctance. Some white feminists did, but by and large that appeal fell flat. So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?” Although she’s an essential figure in modern feminism, Davis remains a sympathetic skeptic of much feminist orthodoxy. She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.

Davis has kept her fire while relishing what she can learn from younger generations.

“Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A. and Columbia University. The concept invites us to see various forms of inequality as a prism. Its original organizing principle — that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them — has since been applied to other groups and animates much of today’s progressive political conversations and activity. Yet as Davis knows from her work in the ’70s, asking various advocacy groups to embrace this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration — this despite decades of glacial progress and the current White House occupant’s vision of America as white nirvana. In America’s deepening income inequality, Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed. Her optimism is particularly remarkable when you consider how long she’s believed that America could change. No, her generation did not get their revolution. And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.

Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system. While defunding the police has become a philosophical touchstone for Black Lives Matter and other activists, a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades. In 1997, she was one of the founders of Critical Resistance, an organization dedicated to abolishing the prison system. In “Are Prisons Obsolete?” (2003), she argued that “the most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring new terrains of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.” Today, Davis uses the phrase “the abolitionist imagination” to describe the mentality needed to see beyond how law enforcement works versus how it should. (She is currently collaborating with three other authors on a new book on the topic, tentatively titled “Abolition. Feminism. Now.”)

“The abolitionist imagination delinks us from that which is,” Davis tells me. “It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?”

Earlier this year, on March 23, Daniel Prude, a 41-year-old Black man with a history of mental-health issues, ran naked through the streets of Rochester, N.Y. He was subdued by several police officers, who placed a spit hood (a restraining mesh hood) over his head and held him down for two minutes until he stopped breathing. Prude was treated more like a criminal than a person in need of psychiatric care and would die a week after his encounter with police. Over these past months, I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally ill. “What if we ask ourselves, ‘Why is it that whenever an issue arises in the community that involves, say, a person who is intellectually disabled or mentally challenged, the first impulse is to call an officer with a gun?’” she asks. “Why do we assume that the police are the ones who will be able to recreate order and safety for us? In those instances, there have been so many cases of people being killed by the police simply because of their mental health. This is especially the case with Black people.”

The New Haven-based artist Tajh Rust, 31, wanted his painting of Davis to be a “tribute to her decades of work.” Rust remembers seeing her in person for the first time as an undergraduate at Cooper Union in 2008 but being “too shy to thank her personally. I stood a few feet away from her while other students thanked her and posed for pictures with her.”
Tajh Rust’s “Angela Davis” (2020).
Photograph by Weichia Huang // New York Times

AS THE WORLD has caught up to her, Davis has found herself impressed with not just the fact of today’s current progressive organizations but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader. Whether it was Huey P. Newton with the Black Panthers in Oakland or Mark Rudd with the Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized. (I recently came across a vintage broadcast from 1973 of a 90-minute panel organized by PBS’s “Black Journal,” of which only two of the 12 panelists were women — Davis and the civil rights firebrand Fannie Lou Hamer — a composition inconceivable on any panel today.) “[Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted. One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.” She points to Black Lives Matter, the most influential U.S.-based protest movement in generations, which was founded by three Black women — Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi — all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves. “Inevitably,” says Davis, “when one asks who is the leader of this movement, one imagines a charismatic male figure: the Martin Luther Kings, the Malcolm Xs, the Marcus Garveys. All of these men have made absolutely important contributions, but we can also work with other models of leadership that are rooted in our struggles of the past.”

As she reminds us, women have always been central to the history of American protest. She cites the 1955 to ’56 Montgomery bus boycott, which ignited the civil rights movement. Aside from Rosa Parks, whose arrest for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., was the inciting action, the activist E.D. Nixon, former president of the local branch of the N.A.A.C.P., and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. are most often named as the boycott’s leaders. Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,” Davis says. “The collective leadership we see today dates back to the unacknowledged work of Rosa Parks and Ella Baker and many others, who did so much to create the basis for radical movements against racism.”
An Angela Davis-inspired poster is displayed above the entrance to the Seattle Police Department’s East Precinct, vacated June 8, 2020.
Jason Redmond/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images // New York Times

But the Montgomery bus boycott is not simply a historical reference for Davis. She grew up in Alabama, in nearby Birmingham, in a neighborhood called Dynamite Hill because of the racist bomb attacks on the homes of middle-class Black residents there. Two of the four young girls who were murdered in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing by members of the Ku Klux Klan lived near the Davis family home.

But the Davises were not intimidated. Her parents — Sallye, a schoolteacher, and Frank, a former teacher who owned a service station — made sure Angela, the eldest, her sister, Fania, and her brothers, Ben and Reggie, had a well-rounded childhood that included spending time on their uncle’s farm outside Birmingham and taking vacations up north in New York. Davis was a stellar student, regularly attended Sunday school and was active in the Girl Scouts. Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress; several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party. Formed in 1937 and highly active until 1949, the S.N.Y.C. boycotted businesses, registered Black voters and educated rural African-Americans about their legal rights long before the more celebrated work of the 1950s and ’60s civil rights movement. Though sanitized from many histories of the civil rights movement, the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)

Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools. Upon graduating, she won a scholarship to Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., where she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, whose career as an intellectual and activist became a model for Davis. Marcuse belonged to the Frankfurt School, an ideology whose articulation of philosophy and critical theory would greatly influence much of Davis’s work. From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union. It was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue. She began to see herself not just as an academic but a participant in political change.

After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism, a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers. Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world. Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, as the Communist Party U.S.A.’s presence dwindled, and Communist regimes worldwide became increasingly totalitarian, Davis remained a staunch supporter of the party’s ideas, twice running as its candidate for vice president in the ’80s. In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. Today, she describes herself as a “small c” communist, remaining enthusiastic about the ideology but not beholden to any single organization.

NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights, both forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics. It’s a shift that dovetails with Davis’s own biography. Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent. Her public announcement represented both a personal declaration and made more urgent her belief that racial and gender issues are deeply interconnected. “We didn’t include gender issues in [earlier] struggles,” she says. “There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.” She smiles. “A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”

Davis at a Juneteenth rally and dockworker shutdown at the Port of Oakland, in Oakland, Calif., June 19, 2020.
Yalonda M. James/San Francisco Chronicle/Associated Press // New York Times

There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services. Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion. “The elephant in the room is always capitalism,” she says. “Even when we fail to have an explicit conversation about capitalism, it is the driving force of so much when we talk about racism. Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.” Davis cites the Covid-19 pandemic as “a crisis of global capitalism,” adding that “we do need free health care. We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.” She believes we need to imagine a “future that will allow us to begin to move beyond capitalism” but refuses to endorse any existing government as a model for the kind of America she envisions. It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.

Because of this, many people were surprised by Davis’s support of Joe Biden’s campaign, but her reasoning is quite pragmatic: “We cannot allow Donald Trump to remain in power. The damage he’s done to the federal court system with his appointments will take several generations to correct.” Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.

Here again, Davis is ultimately optimistic: this time about the future of progressive activism, viewing the current agitation in America as a continuation of the work that occurred during the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and has grown over the last decade with the prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement. From her perspective, this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media. It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly. “When we do this work of organizing against racism, hetero-patriarchy, capitalism — organizing to change the world — there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”

Angela Davis, photographed outside her home in Oakland, Calif., on July 25, 2020.
Photograph by John Edmonds // New York Times

She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy. “‘Structural racism,’ ‘white supremacy,’ all of these terms that have been used for decades in the ranks of our movements have now become a part of popular discourse,” she observes. “As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism. Then there was the fact that we were all sheltered in place; in a sense, we were compelled to be the witnesses of police lynching. That allowed people to make connections with the whole history of policing and the history of lynching and the extent to which slavery is still very much a part of the influences in our society today.”

AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history. We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it. Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity.

These days, Davis uses social media to curate her own image. The photo at the top of her Facebook page is a favorite of mine. It was taken in Oakland on Juneteenth, June 19 of this year, as longshoremen along the West Coast shut down ports in support of Black Lives Matter. Davis, right fist held high, salutes (and is saluted by) a sea of young people. It is an image of defiance that connects labor organizing, activist politics and Black history. That Davis and the people around her are all wearing masks indelibly dates it to our present moment.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that our work as activists is always to prepare the next generation,” she says. “To create new terrains so that those who come after us will have a better opportunity to get up and engage in even more radical struggles. And I think we’re seeing this now.” She plans to be around to see it through.


[Nelson George is an American author, columnist, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award.]

FILM

Why the Alt-right’s Real Power Is In the Narrative It Sells

“They’re hucksters,” says the director of White Noise, a new doc that focuses on three prominent right-wing figures: Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Lauren Southern.

November 3, 2020 Alissa Wilkinson VOX

Richard Spencer in White Noise., The Atlantic

One among a sea of unfortunate consequences of the last four years is that ordinary people have heard of many political figures who once would have been relegated to the fringe. There’s Mike Cernovich, a self-styled provocateur and meme creator who is an InfoWars regular. There’s Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who became especially notorious during the violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017. And there’s Lauren Southern, a YouTube personality and anti-immigrant activist who famously supported the “Defend Europe” group, which opposes search-and-rescue operations for refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.

These three individuals are the focus of White Noise, an excellent new documentary from Daniel Lombroso, a journalist at the Atlantic. The film paints a portrait of the past few years of their lives, but more than that, it subtly exposes how much of the internet-fueled alt-right is driven by a desire to get rich, become well-known, and draw acolytes. Lombroso spent several years tagging along with Cernovich, Spencer, and Southern, attending their events, letting them talk, and quietly allowing them to do the work of unraveling their own arguments.

I recently spoke with Lombroso about how he secured this access, what he learned, and how it’s changed him. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.



Students For Western Civilisation President George Hutcheson with Lauren Southern in White Noise.

The Atlantic
Alissa Wilkinson

How did you get connected with these subjects?
Daniel Lombroso

I started covering the alt-right as a reporter at the Atlantic way back in 2016, before the figures in the film were especially well known. It started with a series of short documentaries. I was actually the guy who caught a roomful of people breaking out into Nazi salutes [in 2016], which was a pivotal journalistic moment that solidified the alt-right as fundamentally a white nationalist — and potentially a neo-Nazi — movement.

So, I was covering the alt-right in short documentary form. I did a profile on Richard Spencer back before he was, you know, essentially synonymous with David Duke the way he is now.

Then I returned to my day job as a video producer at the Atlantic, covering all sorts of issues, but really carving out a niche around fundamentalism. I did a piece on far-right Christian media called Church Militant. I did a piece on Israeli settlers in the West Bank and spent two weeks there.

Then Charlottesville happened. It was eight months after the Nazi salute excerpt that went viral, and it was a pivotal moment for a million reasons. In the newsroom, we knew we had to do something deeper. So, I immediately circled up with Jeff Goldberg, the editor-in-chief [at the Atlantic], and Kasia [Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg], who ran Atlantic Studios. All of us had always wanted to do a feature. I think we didn’t know when it would happen or what it would be about, but right away when Charlottesville happened, and when Trump failed to disavow white nationalists, we knew that this had to be the story.
Alissa Wilkinson

So that was three years ago, and it’s evident in the film that several years elapse from the beginning to the end. What was it like to stick with them for so long?
Daniel Lombroso

I spent three years reporting out the film, beginning with Richard, then meeting [Mike] Cernovich, and then eventually getting access to Lauren [Southern]. She was the hardest and actually took eight months to negotiate access to. And for me, she’s the most pivotal to the film. She is a female face of racism, and she embodies such blatant contradictions.

The Atlantic was really great about giving me space. I basically work alone as a reporter and a filmmaker, so I’m a one-man band. I shot the film and directed it and co-produced it.

I started by reporting and filming with maybe 20 or 30 subjects on the right. It became clear to me pretty quickly that I didn’t want to just amplify a fringe voice, someone who wasn’t relevant, and make them relevant by giving them the credibility of the Atlantic. I quickly decided, along with Jeff and Kasia, that it had to be these three figures, because they have followings in the millions and a tremendous amount of influence. Cernovich can start a meme from his laptop in Orange County, and a few days later, it’s coming out of [Sean] Hannity’s mouth on Fox News and then eventually the president’s mouth.

It was a slow burn. After Charlottesville, I spent two or three months all over the country. By October or November of [2017], we were planning on those three [subjects]. And it took until May of the following year, eight months later, for Lauren to sign on.

From there, I just tracked their stories very closely. For Richard, it’s a little more than three years; with Mike and Lauren it’s more than two. At its core, White Noise is a “follow film.” To do that right, you need time. And thankfully the Atlantic gave me the space to do that.


Mike Cernovich in White Noise.

The Atlantic
Alissa Wilkinson

This film struck me as a portrait of what it takes to be a grifter today, or at least it explains the social and financial rewards inherent in taking extreme positions on the internet.

Daniel Lombroso

They’re opportunists, they’re hucksters, and I would say it’s fair to say they’re grifters, too. It’s tricky, because they do believe what they say — Cernovich a little bit less than the other two, but they definitely believe it enough to say it.

But, they’re also in it for the fame and for the money. I think Cernovich is the most extreme example of this. He starts the film very comfortable using the term “alt-right.” When that term becomes a little bit more toxic after Charlottesville, he says, “Fuck the Nazis,” and gets away from them and re-brands. And then at the end of the film, you see he’s selling supplements and lifestyle regimens.

Lauren is really interesting. She knows what her package is. She is very articulate, and she can use her looks, and she’s very convincing — and on YouTube, that’s the sort of thing that works. It almost feels Stalin-esque, like old Russian propaganda stuff; if you look down the barrel of the lens and say something that’s convincing, it feels true. And she’s able to back it up with pseudo-science that’s usually not accurate.

Their motivations are so mixed, and at its core, that’s what the film seeks to expose. The real power of the alt-right is that they’re selling a narrative, that they understand life, and that if you feel lost or depressed but follow them, you’ll be connected to the great history of white civilization.

By allowing you to sit with the subjects for so long, the film lets you see how mixed their motivations really are. They have a vested interest. They want to be famous. They want to get rich. And they are constantly contradicting the things that they believe.
Alissa Wilkinson

A challenge in this era seems to be figuring out how to write about these folks without aestheticizing them, without talking wonderingly about the “clean-cut” neo-Nazi. The film shows that a lot of what they’re doing is essentially leaning on an appealing aesthetic. They’re presenting a picture to people of who they could be. Are there special challenges in presenting that in film, which is a visual medium?
Daniel Lombroso

We didn’t want the film to glorify them in any way. That influenced everything from the scene selection to the shot selection. We had very spirited conversations about everything from the way we cover the subjects down to shot-level decisions. We screened for diverse audiences and built a really diverse team around the film.

What they’re doing is fundamentally aesthetic. They’re so obsessed with their appearance that it is obviously part of the story. I think it’s our responsibility as journalists to cover that ethically and responsibly, and to be highly critical. I think the film does that.

And you are missing the mark if you ignore it, because the appeal of the alt-right is to upper-middle-class, highly educated white kids in New York and LA. It’s hardly about the white nationalism. It’s about the community. It’s about a clique. It’s about the way you look and dress, and the way you say, “Hello” — all of their interesting codes of communication, different kinds of ways they communicate online but also in the physical sphere. That’s pretty fundamental to understanding the movement.


Lauren Southern with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes in White Noise.

The Atlantic

In the film, you see that in various ways. In the conference at the beginning, when Richard says, “Hail Trump!” — we really dwell on the fact that they’re young. He says, “Stand up if you’re under the age of 30,” and the whole room stands. Most of those kids went to college — I interviewed a lot of them — and they are educated. They have a very clear aesthetic. You might call it Hitlerjugend, 20th-century fascism, but it’s like suit and tie, and they all have a haircut that they call “the fashy.”

Lauren’s package is all about her image. I have a story on this; she’s very conscious of her image and she uses it. She very consciously uses it. She’s an intelligent person and knows how to be convincing, but she knows the package she’s selling and uses it to maximize her effect and her influence.

There are really dangerous ways to cover that. I mean, there was a botched profile early on — I don’t want to call out who wrote it — that really dwelled on Richard being a dapper white nationalist. We’ve seen all sorts of iterations of that. I think it just comes down to being very, very careful, from the shot selection to the way you talk about the subjects. But their aesthetic is really fundamental to the whole project, in the way it always has been for fascist movements.
Alissa Wilkinson

So much about fascism is about the myths and legends that the look of it calls to mind.
Daniel Lombroso

Exactly.
Alissa Wilkinson

Sometimes when I’m watching a documentary, I feel like I’m just reading a magazine article. So one thing I appreciate about White Noise is how skillfully you use the visual medium to reinforce and undercut what people are saying out loud, or to get at elements that you couldn’t easily capture in a piece of writing. I’ll never get over the look on Cernovich’s face when he is hawking skin care products.
Daniel Lombroso

Or in the car wash. He’s sitting, depressed, going through a car wash.
Alissa Wilkinson

Are you looking for those images as you shoot?
Daniel Lombroso

When people watch a movie, they want to see a movie. What I’m really looking for are quiet, telling moments that don’t require dialogue. What destroys most Hollywood films is exposition, or saying something in dialogue that you would never say in real life, just to set up the audience. That’s the bane of everything I wanted to do. In the edit, I was trying to find ways to set up and say things that are very subtle.

I’m always looking for ways to let the subjects hang themselves. For instance, in one scene, Richard says very proudly, “I’m bigger than the movement” — which is insane for a million reasons. And then five minutes later in the film, which was the following day in real life, he gives a speech in a school of agriculture, and six people are there, maybe 10.

This is my first feature, but I’m always looking for visual ways to tell the story and to stay subtle. I think that’s ultimately a lot more powerful than a talking head or someone telling you, “This is a racist movement. Cernovich is a grifter.” I think it’s much more revealing when you just see him putting on facial serum and talking about how that’s his latest pivot.
Alissa Wilkinson

There’s a bit where Lauren is watching a video of herself talking, and she’s sitting with another woman who is side-eyeing her the whole time. It felt like that scene encapsulates something else the film shows: the kind of bubble that your subjects built around themselves to elevate their importance. Richard’s statement is a good example of that. They know they’re influential, but they also have surrounded themselves with people who keep saying “You’re influential” to them.

Did you get a sense of that while following them around? Were there times where you were, like, “Wow, your sense of reality is so far from reality”?
Daniel Lombroso

Absolutely. There’s so much disinformation on the far right. People just casually joke about things like Pizzagate, which is just false. There’s not even a basement at Comet Pizza, where [according to the disproven Pizzagate conspiracy theory] there was allegedly a pedophilia ring in the basement.

But all of them have a sense of inflated importance. I think that’s because they very intentionally surround themselves with yes men, or with people who play to their ego.

Richard is the most obvious example. He’s constantly followed by mostly younger kids in their 20s, college kids or kids right out of college, who have this dated but modernized fascist aesthetic. On a typical day, especially when I’m not filming and just sitting with them, they’re pouring him whiskey and buying him dinner and they’re fulfilling his every command. He has the air of a cult leader.


Lauren Southern livestreaming a rally in Berkeley, California in April 2017.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

With Lauren and Mike, it’s to a lesser extent. This might be surprising to people, but Mike is sort of a father figure to people in his sphere. In that alpha-male section of the alt-right, called “the manosphere” or whatever, people really trust Mike and turn to him for advice. So, when Lucian Wintrich — who we ultimately played down a little bit, he’s a far-right provocateur who started the “Twinks4Trump” meme — went through a breakup, Mike was one of his first calls. He wanted Mike’s advice. I think that’s what sets apart Mike from the other two characters: In his world, people really trust him, and that might be surprising.

Lauren is going through a transformation in the film, and ultimately, it’s an incomplete one. She’s always doubting herself. She gets her validation online, and I think the moment you mentioned is a really good example. Everything’s mediated through screens. She’s in Moscow, watching herself speaking in London through a screen, and then Brittany, who’s jealous of her, is side-eyeing her watching herself.

Lauren derives a lot of her confidence from comments, and she obsesses over negative comments and things that don’t go her way. That’s been hard for her, and continues to be hard for her. I think part of it is just that she was so young when she got into this, and this is all she knows. It’s all she’s ever known.
Alissa Wilkinson

That attention bubble seems so warping. I had the feeling watching White Noise that I had watching the two documentaries about Steve Bannon that’ve come out in the last few years, or that I have every time I read one of those explosive interviews that Isaac Chotiner does at the New Yorker. I wonder, why on earth would these people talk to a journalist or filmmaker, or let cameras follow them around? What do you think is the character trait or quality that makes a person willing to have a filmmaker follow them around for a few years when they know that person is is not sympathetic to their views?
Daniel Lombroso

Part of it is narcissism, and that comes across pretty clearly in the film. The other is that I work really small. I shoot alone, I’m a one-man band, and that helps neutralize them. They’re all willing to sit and give a quote here and there. But it’s sort of a misconception that the alt-right wants attention — they’re happy to give you a quote here and there, or sit for an interview, as long as they’re in control. This sort of unvarnished, all-access thing was incredibly difficult to achieve. And I think part of the reason they did it was that I was genuinely curious, and I kept coming back.

But part of it was their narcissism. I think they thought that they could outsmart me, that if they only depict a positive part of their life — for instance, Cernovich’s sunny, southern California life — that could help redeem him or rewrite his public image.

Part of it, too, especially with Lauren — I’m a little bit older than her, but I’m around her age, and we grew up experiencing a lot of the same things. So there are enough reference points in common that, when you’re spending hundreds of hours off-camera just killing time in an airport or getting lunch, there’s enough to talk about to kind of get them to that place where they’re willing to open up.

In the film, you see many of the juiciest moments. But all documentary filmmakers know that you spend hours and hours to get people to that point. The three minutes of Russia in the film was a 10-day trip. It was that way across the board.
Alissa Wilkinson

You said you covered fundamentalism in the past. Is there an overlap between fundamentalism and this topic?

Daniel Lombroso

There’s absolutely overlap. Extremism allows you to feel like you’re part of a historical narrative. You feel like you’re living for the past and for the future, that you’re part of something larger than your mundane, day-to-day, even boring experience.

I don’t mean to conflate these things because they are different, but you see that with far-right evangelicals. In the Church Militant piece, I interviewed a bunch of interns who were working at this far-right media company, and it was the same narrative. One of them said, “I was lost for years and years and years, wandering in the darkness, until I met Michael Voris,” the person who started Church Militant. It’s the same narrative.


Richard Spencer at CPAC in February 2017.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With Israeli settlers — again, I don’t mean to conflate the situation there with white supremacy! — but there’s this feeling that in settling the West Bank they’re writing the next chapter of Jewish history. That’s a lot more fun, in a way, than just being a person who will die and everyone will forget you.

So, there is this gravitas to it. At its core, it’s the same appeal — a profoundly emotional or even metaphysical appeal.

Alissa Wilkinson

So you spent three years in the alt-right’s world. How did the experience change the way you think about American politics?

Daniel Lombroso

I don’t know that I was ever naïve enough to think that we lived in a post-racial America, but I was probably a little bit more hopeful going into the project, and now I’m a lot more cynical about the whole thing. The film is an unsympathetic eulogy to the alt-right. You see the figures fall off at the end, but their ideas are now so clearly part of our discourse. They’re on Fox News every night. There are newer influencers coming up who are saying things a whole lot worse. Tucker Carlson is now the highest-rated person on broadcast TV and he’s saying things that I heard Richard say three or four years ago.

It’s been very depressing to see the scale of white nationalism and conspiracy in both American and especially European politics, and I just don’t see it going away. I think it’s wrong to think that if Trump loses the election, it’s done and it’s over, because even if a section of his base lost, they’re still there. There are still kids who are finding these videos on YouTube and being radicalized by them.

In the way we talked about radical Islam, for better or for worse, as being a defining issue of the late ’90s and early ’00s, I think white domestic terrorism and white nationalism are issues we’re going to be dealing with for a long time.

White Noise is available to digitally rent on platforms including Apple TV and Google Play; see the website for details.

NYPD ends policy requiring hijab removal for mug shots

THE HIJAB IS A BABUSHKA


Volunteer Asma Kayal (C) demonstrates how a Hijab is worn during 'Meet-a-Muslim' day at the Worcester Islamic Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. 

File Photo by Matthew Healey/UPI | License Photo


Nov. 10 (UPI) -- The New York Police Department has agreed to no longer force women to remove hijabs for mug shots as part of a settlement of a federal lawsuit.

At issue, was a lawsuit filed two years ago by two Muslim women, Jamilla Clark and Arwa Aziz, who claimed they were embarrassingly forced to remove their hijab headscarves for mug shots after being arrested on low-level charges for violating orders of protection that were later dismissed.

"No one should be forced to undress just to be fed into a facial recognition database," the women's lawyer and founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Albert Cahn said in a statement. "New Yorkers are able to get a drivers' license or passport while wearing the hijab, and there's absolutely no reason for it to be removed by police."

The New York Police Department agreed in a settlement filed last week to change its policy to allow Muslim women who wear the headscarves to conform to Islamic standards of modesty to keep the hijab on during police photographs as along as their faces are unobstructed. The agreement applies to not only hijabs, but also other religious head coverings, such as burqa, turban, or wigs worn by Orthodox Jews.

"It was appalling that this was happening for many years in New York and that our city was betraying the values of religious inclusion," said the women's lawyer Albert Fox Cahn. "But now we won't see any more New Yorkers subjected to this discriminatory policy."The NYPD also agreed to train officers to "take all possible steps, when consistent with personal safety," to allow prisoners to keep their religious headwear on to protect "privacy, rights and religious beliefs."

According to the settlement, there is an exception for searches for weapons or contraband.

The police department also agreed to keep track of any incidents when prisoners were forced to remove religious headwear over the next three years.

The two women who filed the lawsuit alleged that the NYPD violated their constitutional rights, including the First Amendment, Fourth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment, and the rights of other people in their same situation. The settlement left outstanding monetary claims for damages.

"Now that the NYPD has agreed to end the policy, they still need to go a step further," Cahn added in his statement. "That's because this settlement doesn't address the thousands of New Yorkers who were subjected to this unlawful policy. That's why we're still fighting in court to make sure the NYPD pays for the harm its already inflicted."

Patricia Miller, chief of the Special Federal Litigation Division of the New York City Law Department, said in a statement Monday that the settlement was "a good reform" for the NYPD.

"It carefully balanced the department's respect for firmly held religious beliefs with the legitimate law enforcement need to take arrest photos, and should set an example for other police departments around the country," Miller said.

Diet affects skin gene expression in both healthy and atopic dogs

by University of Helsinki

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain

Researchers from the University of Helsinki, Finland examined 48 Staffordshire Bull Terriers, of which eight dogs—four healthy and four atopic—were selected for RNA sequencing where their skin gene expression was compared between both atopic and healthy dogs as well as between dogs that ate dry food or raw food. The diet appears to make a great difference in skin gene expression.

"Before the dietary intervention comparing atopic and healthy dogs, only a total of eight genes functioning in a range of ways in the skin were found, but the intervention increased this figure manifold. In other words, dietary intervention is extremely important for actual differences in gene expression to emerge," says researcher Johanna Anturaniemi from the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Helsinki.

The effect of the diet on skin gene expression was mostly associated with the immune system, antioxidants and inflammatory processes. Raw food appeared to activate the skin's immune defense system as well as the expression of genes that increase antioxidant production or that have anti-inflammatory effects.

"A previously conducted study also demonstrated that diets based on raw meat engender an anti-inflammatory effect on blood gene expression," Anturaniemi says.

In terms of puppyhood, the researchers consider a particularly important finding the fact that the immune defense of dogs whose diet is based on raw food is activated. What is known is that in people suffering from atopic dermatitis, the development of immunity has been disturbed and that diverse exposure to microbes in childhood reduces the risk of becoming atopic.

The differences in skin gene expression between atopic and healthy dogs highlighted the possibility of deficiencies in the lipid metabolism and keratinocyte proliferation of atopic individuals. Both hold a key role in the normal functioning of the skin barrier. Additionally, the expression of genes that boost the formation of new blood vessels, a phenomenon known to be associated with the inflammatory response of the skin, was seen to have increased in atopic dogs. The findings support those made in prior studies.

"We identified several genes whose link with canine atopic dermatitis had not been reported earlier. Some of them are associated with previously known disturbed metabolic pathways, while the role of others in atopic dermatitis requires further investigation. Since the number of dogs involved in the study was small, the results can be considered preliminary. Indeed, the aim is to confirm them at a later date by utilizing the rest of the skin samples collected," Anturaniemi says.


Explore further Scientists identify unique subtype of eczema linked to food allergy
More information: Johanna Anturaniemi et al. The Effect of Atopic Dermatitis and Diet on the Skin Transcriptome in Staffordshire Bull Terriers, Frontiers in Veterinary Science (2020).

DOI: 10.3389/fvets.2020.552251
Provided by University of Helsinki

Cable failures endanger renowned Puerto Rico radio telescope

by Dánica Coto

In this Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020 file photo, provided by the Arecibo Observatory, shows the damage done by a broken cable that supported a metal platform, creating a 100-foot (30-meter) gash to the radio telescope's reflector dish in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Giant, aging cables that support the radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, threatening scientific projects that researchers say can't be done elsewhere on the planet. (Arecibo Observatory via AP)

The giant, aging cables that support one of the world's largest single-dish radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, pushing an observatory renowned for its key role in astronomical discoveries to the brink of collapse.

The Arecibo Observatory, which is tethered above a sinkhole in Puerto Rico's lush mountain region, boasts a 1,000-foot-wide (305-meter-wide) dish featured in the Jodie Foster film "Contact" and the James Bond movie "GoldenEye." The dish and a dome suspended above it have been used to track asteroids headed toward Earth, conduct research that led to a Nobel Prize and helped scientists trying to determine if a planet is habitable.

"As someone who depends on Arecibo for my science, I'm frightened. It's a very worrisome situation right now. There's a possibility of cascading, catastrophic failure," said astronomer Scott Ransom with the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, a collaboration of scientists in the U.S. and Canada.

Last week, one of the telescope's main steel cables that was capable of sustaining 1.2 million pounds (544,000 kilograms) snapped under only 624,000 pounds (283,000 kilograms). That failure further mangled the reflector dish after an auxiliary cable broke in August, tearing a 100-foot hole and damaging the dome above it.

Officials said they were surprised because they had evaluated the structure in August and believed it could handle the shift in weight based on previous inspections.

It's a blow for the telescope that more than 250 scientists around the world were using. The facility is also one of Puerto Rico's main tourist attractions, drawing some 90,000 visitors a year. Research has been suspended since August, including a project aiding scientists in their search for nearby galaxies.

The telescope was built in the 1960s and financed by the Defense Department amid a push to develop anti-ballistic missile defenses. It's endured over a half-century of disasters, including hurricanes and earthquakes. Repairs from Hurricane Maria, which devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, were still underway when the first cable snapped.

Some new cables are scheduled to arrive next month, but officials said funding for repairs has not been worked out with federal agencies. Scientists warn that time is running out. Only a handful of cables now support the 900-ton platform.

"Each of the structure's remaining cables is now supporting more weight than before, increasing the likelihood of another cable failure, which would likely result in the collapse of the entire structure," the University of Central Florida, which manages the facility, said in a statement Friday.


University officials say crews have already noticed wire breaks on two of the remaining main cables. They warn that employees and contractors are at risk despite relying heavily on drones and remote cameras to assess the damage.

The observatory estimates the damage at more than $12 million and is seeking money from the National Science Foundation, an independent federal agency that owns the observatory.

Foundation spokesman Rob Margetta said engineering and cost estimates have not been completed and that funding the repairs would likely involve Congress and discussions with stakeholders. He said the agency is reviewing "all recommendations for action at Arecibo."

This July 13, 2016 file photo shows one of the largest single-dish radio telescopes at the Arecibo Observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Giant, aging cables that support the radio telescopes are slowly unraveling in this U.S. territory, threatening scientific projects that researchers say can't be done elsewhere on the planet. (AP Photo/Danica Coto, File)

"NSF is ultimately responsible for decisions regarding the structure's safety," he said in an email. "Our top priority is the safety of anyone at the site."

Representatives of the university and the observatory said the telescope's director, Francisco Córdova, was not available for comment. In a Facebook post, the observatory said maintenance was up to date and the most recent external structural evaluation occurred after Hurricane Maria.

The most recent damage was likely the result of the cable degrading over time and carrying extra weight after the auxiliary cable snapped, the university said. In August, the socket holding that cable failed, possibly the result of manufacturing error, the observatory said.

The problems have interrupted the work of researchers like Edgard Rivera-Valentín, a Universities Space Research Association scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas. He had planned to study Mars in September during its close approach to Earth.

"This is the closest Mars was going to be while also being observable from Arecibo until 2067," he said. "I won't be around the next time we can get this level of radar data."

The observatory in Puerto Rico is considered crucial for the study of pulsars, which are the remains of stars that can be used to detect gravitational waves, a phenomenon Albert Einstein predicted in his theory of general relativity. The telescope also is used to search for neutral hydrogen, which can reveal how certain cosmic structures are formed.

"It's more than 50 years old, but it remains a very important instrument," said Alex Wolszczan, a Polish-born astronomer and professor at Pennsylvania State University.

He helped discover the first extrasolar and pulsar planets and credited the observatory for having a culture that allowed him to test what he described as wild ideas that sometimes worked.

"Losing it would be a really huge blow to what I think is a very important science," Wolszczan said.

An astronomer at the observatory in the 1980s and early 1990s, Wolszczan still uses the telescope for certain work because it offers an unmatched combination of high frequency range and sensitivity that he said allows for a "huge array" of science projects. Among them: observing molecules of life, detecting radio emission of stars and conducting pulsar work.

The telescope also was a training ground for graduate students and widely loved for its educational opportunities, said Carmen Pantoja, an astronomer and professor at the University of Puerto Rico, the island's largest public university.

She relied on it for her doctoral thesis and recalled staring at it in wonder when she was a young girl.

"I was struck by how big and mysterious it was," she said. "The future of the telescope depends greatly on what position the National Science Foundation takes ... I hope they can find a way and that there's goodwill to save it."


Explore further  Broken cable damages giant radio telescope in Puerto Rico

© 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

Reviewing past neuroscience research that explores the neural mechanisms of aggression

by Ingrid Fadelli , Medical Xpress
Credit: David Clode, Unsplash

Aggression is a common behavior both among humans and other animals, which is known to be particularly important for defense, protection and survival. While psychologists and neuroscientists have been investigating aggression for several decades, recent technological advances have enabled the collection of increasingly precise and insightful data that has helped to identify many of the neural mechanisms associated with aggressive behaviors in different species.

Researchers at New York University School of Medicine recently reviewed some of the most recent findings of studies investigating the neural underpinnings of aggression in order to delineate what the neuroscience research community has so far discovered about this crucial behavior. In their paper, published in Nature Neuroscience, they delineate a 'core aggression circuit' composed of four subcortical brain regions that have been found to be linked to the manifestation of aggressive behaviors in multiple animal species.

"There have been significant advances in technology in the past 10 years, for instance, enabling the precise recording and manipulation of specific sets of cells in brain regions of interest," Julieta E. Lischinsky and Dayu Lin, the two authors of the review paper, told Medical Xpress. "These advances allowed neuroscientists to address a number of fundamental questions related to the study of aggression. In our article, we provide an overview of these advances and how they are paving the way towards a better understanding of the brain regions, cells and circuits responsible for aggression, as well as how it can be altered by the internal state of the animal."

In their review paper, Lischinsky and Lin tried to identify the fundamental principles and neural mechanisms underlying aggressive behaviors across a wide range of animal species. To do this, they analyzed past study findings and looked at the similarities and differences between how aggression manifests in three main types of animals, namely rodents, songbirds and primates.

Based on past observations, the researchers delineated what they refer to as a core aggression circuit (CAC); a set of four subcortical brain regions that are particularly active while animals are exhibiting aggressive behaviors. Lischinsky and Lin also highlight the existence of two parallel circuits that appear to drive motor actions of aggression. These include a circuit that involves the medial hypothalamus and the midbrain, which has been linked with innate aggressive actions (e.g., biting in mice) and a circuit that contains the hypothalamus, dopamine cells in the ventral tegmental area and ventral striatum, which appears to drive aggressive behaviors that are acquired over time (e.g., specific types of singing in songbirds).

"The relative importance of these aggression-driving circuits varies across species," Lischinsky and Lin explained. "In our paper, we also use past findings to describe the key circuits for controlling aggression. The hippocampus-lateral septum circuit is considered the major top-down control for rodents and birds, while the prefrontal cortex plays a more important role in modulating aggression in primates potentially through its primate-specific direct projection to the medial hypothalamus and its dense connection to the midbrain."

The recent paper authored by Lischinsky and Lin provides an overview of the main biological features of aggression across species and the neural substrates that are now known to play a key role in aggressive behaviors. While it does not present any new evidence, it could prove to be highly valuable for neuroscientists who are conducting research related to aggression, as it offers a clear summary and representation of the neural circuits associated with this particular behavior based on what neuroscientists have discovered about it so far.

"Our paper summarizes past findings that show how the same subcortical regions in the core aggression circuit are implicated in aggressive behaviors across species, despite the differences in aggression observed in these species," Lischinsky and Lin said. "This highlights how understanding the circuitry in other species such as rodents and songbirds can be very informative for uncovering the complexity of human aggression."

Although the majority of past studies investigating the neural underpinnings of aggression were carried out on animals, some of the findings could also apply to humans. As aggressive outbursts are associated with numerous psychiatric conditions, including conduct disorder and schizophrenia, the evidence that Lischinsky and Lin review in their paper could ultimately contribute to the development of more effective pharmacological or psychological treatments for these conditions, which are specifically designed to reduce aggressive behavior.

"Our plans for future investigation are to better understand more precisely the connectivity among CAC regions and their top-down control at the neuronal population level that results in aggressive actions," Lischinsky and Lin said. "We are also interested in how the circuit we delineate in our paper is modified in the short- and long-term by the internal state of the animals such as by energy level, reproductive state and experience, among others."


Explore further Researchers probe how aggression leads to more aggression

More information: Neural mechanisms of aggression across species. Nature Neuroscience(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41593-020-00715-2.
Journal information: Nature Neuroscience

Former piece of Pacific Ocean floor imaged deep beneath China

by Rice University

Seismic imaging in northeastern China revealed both the top (X1) and bottom (X2) boundaries of a tectonic plate (blue) that formerly sat at bottom of the Pacific Ocean and is being pulled into Earth's mantle transition zone, which lies about 254-410 miles (410-660 kilometers) beneath Earth's surface. Credit: F. Niu/Rice University

In a study that gives new meaning to the term "rock bottom," seismic researchers have discovered the underside of a rocky slab of Earth's surface layer, or lithosphere, that has been pulled more than 400 miles beneath northeastern China by the process of tectonic subduction.

The study, published by a team of Chinese and U.S. researchers in Nature Geoscience, offers news evidence about what happens to water-rich oceanic tectonic plates as they are drawn through Earth's mantle beneath continents.

Rice University seismologist Fenglin Niu, a co-corresponding author, said the study provides the first high-resolution seismic images of the top and bottom boundaries of a rocky, or lithospheric, tectonic plate within a key region known as the mantle transition zone, which starts about 254 miles (410 kilometers) below Earth's surface and extends to about 410 miles (660 kilometers).

"A lot of studies suggest that the slab actually deforms a lot in the mantle transition zone, that it becomes soft, so it's easily deformed," Niu said. How much the slab deforms or retains its shape is important for explaining whether and how it mixes with the mantle and what kind of cooling effect it has.

Earth's mantle convects like heat in an oven. Heat from Earth's core rises through the mantle at the center of oceans, where tectonic plates form. From there, heat flows through the mantle, cooling as it moves toward continents, where it drops back toward the core to collect more heat, rise and complete the convective circle.

Fenglin Niu is a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice University. Credit: Rice University

Previous studies have probed the boundaries of subducting slabs in the mantle, but few have looked deeper than 125 miles (200 kilometers) and none with the resolution of the current study, which used more than 67,000 measurements collected from 313 regional seismic stations in northeastern China. That work, which was done in collaboration with the China Earthquake Administration, was led by co-corresponding author Qi-Fu Chen from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The research probes fundamental questions about the processes that shaped Earth's surface over billions of years. Mantle convection drives the movements of Earth's tectonic plates, rigid interlocked pieces of Earth's surface that are in constant motion as they float atop the asthenosphere, the topmost mantle layer and the most fluid part of the inner planet.


Where tectonic plates meet, they jostle and grind together, releasing seismic energy. In extreme cases, this can cause destructive earthquakes and tsunamis, but most seismic motion is too faint for humans to feel without instruments. Using seismometers, scientists can measure the magnitude and location of seismic disturbances. And because seismic waves speed up in some kinds of rock and slow in others, scientists can use them to create images of Earth's interior, in much the same way a doctor might use ultrasound to image what's inside a patient.

Niu, a professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences at Rice, has been at the forefront of seismic imaging for more than two decades. When he did his Ph.D. training in Japan more than 20 years ago, researchers were using dense networks of seismic stations to gather some of the first detailed images of the submerged slab boundaries of the Pacific plate, the same plate that was imaged in study published this week.

"Japan is located about where the Pacific plate reaches around 100-kilometer depths," Niu said. "There is a lot of water in this slab, and it produces a lot of partial melt. That produces arc volcanoes that helped create Japan. But, we are still debating whether this water is totally released in that depth. There is increasing evidence that a portion of the water stays inside the plate to go much, much deeper."

Northeastern China offers one of the best vantage points to investigate whether this is true. The region is about 1,000 kilometers from the Japan trench where the Pacific plate begins its plunge back into the planet's interior. In 2009, with funding from the National Science Foundation and others, Niu and scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, the China Earthquake Administration, the Earthquake Research Institute of Tokyo University and the Research Center for Prediction of Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions at Japan's Tohoku University began installing broadband seismometers in the region.

"We put 140 stations there, and of course the more stations the better for resolution," Niu said. "The Chinese Academy of Sciences put additional stations so they can get a finer, more detailed image."

In the new study, data from the stations revealed both the upper and lower boundaries of the Pacific plate, dipping down at a 25-degree angle within the mantle transition zone. The placement within this zone is important for the study of mantle convection because the transition zone lies below the asthenosphere, at depths where increased pressure causes specific mantle minerals to undergo dramatic phase changes. These phases of the minerals behave very differently in seismic profiles, just as liquid water and solid ice behave very different even though they are made of identical molecules. Because phase changes in the mantle transition zone happen at specific pressures and temperatures, geoscientists can use them like a thermometer to measure the temperature in the mantle.

Niu said the fact that both the top and bottom of the slab are visible is evidence that the slab hasn't completely mixed with the surrounding mantle. He said heat signatures of partially melted portions of the mantle beneath the slab also provide indirect evidence that the slab transported some of its water into the transition zone.

"The problem is explaining how these hot materials can be dropped into the deeper part of the mantle," Niu said. "It's still a question. Because they are hot, they are buoyant."

That buoyancy should act like a life preserver, pushing upward on the underside of the sinking slab. Niu said the answer to this question could be that holes have appeared in the deforming slab, allowing the hot melt to rise while the slab sinks.

"If you have a hole, the melt will come out," he said. "That's why we think the slab can go deeper."

Holes could also explain the appearance of volcanos like the Changbaishan on the border between China and North Korea.

"It's 1,000 kilometers away from the plate boundary," Niu said. "We don't really understand the mechanism of this kind of volcano. But melt rising from holes in the slab could be a possible explanation."

Explore further Distinct slab interfaces found within mantle transition zone
More information: Xin Wang et al, Distinct slab interfaces imaged within the mantle transition zone, Nature Geoscience (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-00653-5
Journal information: Nature Geoscience