There were 79 degree-granting programs in creative writing in 1975; today, there are 1,269! This explosion has created a huge source of financial support for working writers, not just in the form of lecture fees, adjunctships, and temporary appointments — though these abound — but honest-to-goodness jobs: decently paid, relatively secure compared with other industries, and often even tenured. It would be fascinating to know the numbers — what percentage of the total income of American fiction writers comes from the university, and what percentage from publishing contracts — but it’s safe to say that the university now rivals, if it hasn’t surpassed, New York as the economic center of the literary fiction world. This situation — of two complementary economic systems of roughly matched strength — is a new one for American fiction. As the mass readership of literary fiction has peaked and subsided, and the march of technology sends the New York publishing world into spasms of perpetual anxiety, if not its much-advertised death throes, the MFA program has picked up the financial slack and then some, offering steady payment to more fiction writers than, perhaps, have ever been paid before.
Everyone knows this. But what’s remarked rarely if at all is the way this balance has created, in effect, two literary cultures (or, more precisely, two literary fiction cultures) in the United States: one condensed in New York, the other spread across the diffuse network of provincial college towns that spans from Irvine, California, to Austin, Texas, to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to Tallahassee, Florida (with a kind of wormhole at the center, in Iowa City, into which one can step and reappear at The New Yorker offices on 42nd Street).
Mulholland began looking throughout Southern California for an alternative supply of freshwater, but it was Fred Eaton who came up with a solution. On a camping trip to the Sierra in the early 1890s, Eaton had gazed down upon Owens Lake and thought about all the freshwater flowing into it and going to waste. Yes, Los Angeles was some 200 miles away, but it was all downhill. All one would have to do to move it to the city was dig some canals, lay some pipe and let gravity do the rest. Furthermore, he realized, several streams flowing out of the Sierra could be used to generate hydroelectric power. Imagine, a 200-plus-mile aqueduct running downhill to L.A. and “free” power to boot! Over the next two decades, as his civic interest joined his personal financial interests, Eaton grew increasingly evangelical about Owens Valley water.
In September 1904, he took Mulholland to Owens Valley with only “a mule team, a buckboard, and a demijohn of whiskey,” Mulholland later recalled. Despite the hooch, it was the water and not the whiskey that made a believer out of Mulholland. He readily endorsed Eaton’s proposal to build an aqueduct. Eaton, meanwhile, was buying water options from Owens Valley ranchers and farmers whose pastures bordered the river, without disclosing the city’s plan. He also purchased a 23,000-acre cattle ranch in Long Valley, most of which he hoped to sell to the city, at a tidy profit, for use as an aqueduct reservoir.
For the past decade, I have sought out sea urchin like a zombified bipedal sea otter. I have eaten giant red urchins—uni, in sushi-speak—alive and wiggling in slow motion from the dock in Santa Barbara, California, and I’ve slurped from split shells in the street markets of Catania, Sicily. I’ve eaten it in $15 panini in Manhattan and off of a trompe l’oeil seashore of frozen rocks and ice in Copenhagen.
Many times I have heard the sotto voce benediction of “Hokkaido” delivered when the sushi chef hands over that trumping-everything-else piece of uni nigiri. Many times I have thought, Someday. Someday I will go there, to the northernmost island of Japan, and eat that most revered of urchins in full view of the waters from which it was plundered.
The following is an excerpt from Open Road Media’s Challenger: An American Tragedy, the new book by Hugh Harris, NASA’s “voice of launch control,” who recounts the shuttle tragedy that occurred nearly 30 years ago. Buy the book now.
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Chapter One: A Look Back Twenty-Eight Years
Challenger was a spacecraft designed to transport, protect, and nurture its seven-member crew as it transported them beyond the limits of our home planet’s life-support system. There, they would conduct experiments to improve lives on Earth. Among its passengers was the first civilian crewmember, the “Teacher in Space” Sharon Christa McAuliffe (known as Christa), who was already inspiring a generation of school children.
I had watched from the firing room as the twenty-four previous shuttles rocketed upward and successfully returned to Earth. But on January 28, 1986, Challenger was engulfed in a fiery inferno in full view of thousands of people at the center and millions of others viewing the launch on television.
The tragedy produced a myriad of human emotions. For Todd Halvorson of Florida Today, it was an unforgettable introduction to space reporting. Hired the day before, but not yet on the job, he stepped out of the Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn to watch. Burned into his psyche are the pitchfork contrails and the memory of a weeping young girl, pointing upward and crying over and over, “The teacher is up there! The teacher is up there!”
For some young astronauts, it was a “loss of innocence” that took some time to accept. Franklin Chang-Díaz flew on STS-61C, the shuttle mission just a few weeks before Challenger. He and his crew experienced the tragedy from a viewing room at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
“I think we were all unprepared to deal with this kind of event,” he says. “From my first flight before the Challenger disaster, to my second flight, after, it felt as if we had lost our innocence. When I went into my second flight—well, it was probably the same way a soldier goes into battle with a few scars. You don’t look at that battlefield the same way you did on the first day. I mean, it was still exciting, it was still wonderful, but we realized it was not child’s play anymore.”
Lisa Malone, then a young public information specialist who would become director of public affairs for the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) twenty years later, recalled, “At the time, I was angry. I was angry at the engineers. I didn’t yet realize how hard space flight was. Later, as I started to go to more technical meetings, I learned the difficulty of managing risk posed by a highly complex vehicle.”
The accident triggered in-depth investigations and denied the nation of human access to space for almost three years. Unmanned launches continued, but our astronauts stayed on the ground.
It brought into question the way management and technical experts worked together. It highlighted the role played by political decisions and uncertain year-to-year funding. It exposed the roadblocks to communication imposed by managers and organizational culture.
It was a chilling reminder that it is safer to sit on the ground than fly into space. But that’s not an option for the human race.
Ultimately, it helped enable 110 more space-shuttle flights and the construction of the International Space Station, which ranks near the top of human achievement.
Dozens of people gave the “go” to launch on that morning twenty-eight years ago, and tens of thousands more had worked on the hardware. Yet, despite all of the investigative probing and some rancorous finger-pointing in the months to follow, no one ever alleged less than a strong desire to do his or her job to the best of his or her ability.
It demonstrated, once again, how much there is to learn as humankind continues to advance the boundaries of science, technology, and human interaction.
On that day, I was the chief of public information for NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the launch commentator. This piece will take you on the same journey I experienced in the hours before launch and then along the bumpy road to find the cause of the accident and heal the system.
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Chapter Two: A Cold, Cold Night
The night of January 28, 1986, was the coldest I can remember in Florida. But when I left my house in Cocoa Beach at two a.m., I wasn’t thinking of the cold. I was worrying about getting to the Kennedy Space Center on time.
Every time I served as “the voice of launch control” for a space shuttle launch—a responsibility I had held beginning with STS-1 in 1981—I worried that my car would be delayed by the hundreds of thousands of people who came to watch. If I didn’t get to the firing room on time, the launch would have happened anyway, but I would have felt like I’d let down the team.
But this morning, as I drove toward KSC, I did not find the usual congregation of cars. Very few were parked along the causeway over the Banana River. Normally, even at that early hour in the morning, and eight or more hours before a launch, the causeways were crowded. Families would leave their cars to make new friends or gather around radios to keep track of the progress of launch preparations. Cars would sport license plates from dozens of states—California, Washington, even Alaska. The space program was a source of national pride, and we who were privileged to work in it could not help but be inspired.
But this night was different. The few who had come were huddled inside their vehicles.
In the distance, Pad 39 B and Challenger were sparkling in the pure white light of the xenon searchlights. The thick shafts of light illuminated the rocket vehicle and slanted skyward for many miles.
As I drove toward the center along State Route 3 on Merritt Island, some of the orange groves huddled under blankets of smoke from large bonfires created to help protect the fruit from freezing. Most of the large groves had been flooded or sprayed with water. The temperature of fruit encased with ice does not drop below freezing. Smudge pots were no longer used due to pollution.
The air temperature was in the low thirties and dropping rapidly into the twenties. The smaller grove owners could not afford to protect their groves, and a week later their oranges would be thudding to the ground at the rate of a dozen per minute.
The officers at the first guard gate wore heavy jackets. “Do you think it will go, Mr. Harris?” one asked.
I told them the launch had already been postponed an hour and might be delayed further because of concern due to the cold. I said, “They’re supposed to start tanking around three a.m. If they tank, they’ll try to launch. They have about a two-hour window.”
In capitulation to the freezing cold, the press site looked pretty deserted when I arrived. Normally, the photographers and reporters would be walking between buildings or gathered in little groups for a smoke. This morning they were all indoors.
There were fewer press representatives than normal, as well. The shuttle launches had become routine through the years. About five hundred media had been accredited for Challenger—as opposed to five times that number for STS-1. As I recall, only one of the major networks was covering the launch live.
The science writers typically on hand for launch had a conflict this time. Press briefings were taking place at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where many of the most knowledgeable space reporters were learning what scientists were discovering as Voyager flew past Uranus. Laurie Garrett of National Public Radio described the experience by saying, “Every single minute Uranus was blowing our minds more than the minute before. The moons of Uranus were absolutely the most stupendously puzzling things any of us had ever covered.”
The twelve-acre press site is located at the Banana River Turn Basin, slightly more than three miles from the launch pads. During the Apollo program, barges bringing the rocket stages from Michoud Assembly Facility, just outside of New Orleans, unloaded at the turn basin; now it was the shuttles’ external tanks that were unloaded there. It is just across the road from the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB), where the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRB), external tanks, and orbiters were bolted together on a mobile launch platform before being taken to one of the two launch pads, designated Pads 39 A and 39 B. The Challenger launch was taking place from 39 B.
A three- to four-acre, six-foot-high mound had been built along the back of the press site with material dredged up to deepen the turn basin. On top was a 350-seat grandstand fitted with long counters, telephone hookups, and folding chairs, as well as several permanent structures put up by NASA, the major television networks, and the wire services. Another half-dozen office trailers had been brought in by Florida Today, the Orlando Sentinel, the Nikon camera company, and others were split between the mound and the lower level.
The public information office, my home away from home, was located at the press site in a geodesic dome originally bought for the United States Bicentennial Exposition. It also provided working space for media who didn’t have their own facilities. KSC office spaces lined one inner wall of the dome; along the other were several rows of long, counter-like desks for the press with assigned spaces where they could order temporary phone hookups. There were bins for fact sheets and news releases and a bank of pay phones.
A waist-high counter separated the press from the information people and provided space for the press to ask questions. Members of the press were not allowed behind the counter unless they were invited in for an interview or other business.
The flags of the sixteen countries that were partners with the United States for the Spacelab missions and for the future International Space Station flew over the press area.
Down below the mound were several acres of grass and the large, iconic countdown clock at the water’s edge. Many news photographers had used the countdown clock in the foreground of pictures of previous launches. Thousands more posed with it as proof that they had covered history.
For each launch, temporary grandstands were trucked in to accommodate about a thousand VIP visitors. These included the extended families of the astronauts who were flying and guests invited by NASA headquarters or other centers. The immediate families of the astronauts and special guests, such as members of Congress, would watch from the roof of the Launch Control Center.
Approximately twenty thousand other invited guests would be taken by bus or given car passes to park on the causeway across the Banana River connecting KSC and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station about seven miles from the pads. Loudspeakers set up in each location allowed my commentary to keep them informed about what was happening. Public affairs representatives and car parkers at each location helped direct them and answer questions.
I reached the press site about eight hours before the then-scheduled launch time of 10:38 a.m. and went into my office after checking with the staff and saying hello to the press who had come in early. Almost everyone commented on the cold and speculated that we would postpone the launch for a third time.
The launch scheduled for two days earlier had been canceled because of the weather forecast. It turned out to be a perfect day. The attempt of the previous day, January 27, had been scrubbed because sensors showed that the crew ingress door on the Challenger was not securely closed. Once that was corrected, the handle used to latch the door could not be removed without drilling out the bolts. Time ran out, and crosswinds at the shuttle landing facility became unacceptable.
Finally we were at January 28. The day had everything going for it in terms of weather, except the bitter cold.
The first person I called was information specialist Andrea Shea King, who was in the firing room, keeping the press informed on the progress of loading liquid hydrogen and oxygen. “What are you hearing on the OIS?” I asked, referring to the Operational Intercom System, which tied all elements of the launch team together on more than thirty voice circuits.
“It’s been pretty smooth, except for concern about ice on the pad,” she reported. “The temperature is below thirty-two degrees. All the valves on the water lines on the pad have been open slightly all night so that they don’t freeze. Can you see the icicles?”
Bill Green | Washington Post Ombudsman | April 19, 1981
In 1980, Janet Cooke made up a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict, won the Pulitzer Prize for it, then, two days later, gave it back. Here’s the internal investigation of how the Post leaned on her to get her to admit she faked it.
[Cooke’s] new resume claimed that she spoke or read French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Her original resume claimed only French and Spanish. The new form claimed she had won six awards from the Ohio Newspaper Women’s Association and another from the Ohio AP. […]
Janet was crying harder, and Bradlee began to check off her language proficiency. “Say two words to me in Portuguese,” he said. She said she couldn’t.
“Do you have any Italian?” Bradlee asked.
Cooke said no.
Bradlee, fluent in French, asked her questions in the language. Her answers were stumbling.
(The formatting is not that great, but if you save it in Instapaper and read it there, it’s easier to follow. Here’s a non-single-page link).
Revisiting the Northridge earthquake two decades later. Before Hurricane Katrina, it was considered “costliest natural disaster in U.S. history”. As recalled by Richard Andrews, director of California’s Office of Emergency Services at the time:
I took a turboprop plane with Wilson and the head of the California Highway Patrol from Sacramento to Los Angeles. We knew there had been damage to the freeway system, so on the flight down we were poring over maps of Southern California and trying to locate the places where we knew there would be freeway interruptions. We began talking about the strategy that we would eventually employ later that day of fast-tracking contracts to get the debris cleared and the repair work under way on the freeways. That proved to be one of the smartest things we did, because not only did it shorten dramatically the time to get the freeways back up and running, it also sent the public a signal that somebody was in charge and taking action quickly to address some of the major problems.
After we landed in L.A., we boarded an LAPD helicopter and took an aerial tour. We saw the damage to the Nordstrom out in Canoga Park, the freeway collapse at the 14/I-5 interchange and along the I-10 toward Santa Monica.
This year we featured not only the best stories from the web, but also great chapters from new and classic books. Here’s a complete guide to every book chapter we featured this year, both for free and for Longreads Members: Read more…
My story, The Match Maker, was online at ESPN.com only a few hours on Aug. 25 when I heard from a California man who shrugged at the possibility that tennis champ and American hustler Bobby Riggs had thrown the famous September 1973 Battle of the Sexes match. The man’s name is Russell Boyd, and he claimed Bobby Riggs had talked openly and repeatedly with him, back in June 1973, about his intention to lose his upcoming match against Billie Jean King at the Houston Astrodome. “I didn’t realize at the time that it was such a serious matter of him playing Billie Jean King,” Boyd, 56, told me, “and that he was actually expected to make an effort to win.” Read more…
“Google is visually impressive, but this frenzy of energy and hipness hasn’t generated large numbers of jobs, much less what we think of as middle-class jobs, the kinds of unglamorous but solid employment that generates annual household incomes between $44,000 and $155,000. The state of California (according to a 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California) could boast in 1980 that some 60 percent of its families were middle-income as measured in today’s dollars, but by 2010 only 48 percent of California families fell into that category, and the income gap between the state’s highest and lowest earners had doubled. In Silicon Valley there has actually been a net job loss in tech-related industries over the past decade. According to figures collected by Joel Kotkin, the dotcom crash wiped out 70,000 jobs in the valley in a little over a single year, and since then the tech industry has added only 30,000 new ones, leaving the bay region with a net 40,000 fewer jobs than existed in 2001.”
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