Oral history project example

President Joe Biden blamed climate change and Mother Nature’s “wrath” for wildfires in the past two years in an interview with The Daily Show Monday, failing to note that a historic blaze in New Mexico was started by his administration. “Mother Nature let her wrath be seen over the last two years,” said Biden, apparently referencing the above-average number of acres burnt in the 2022 wildfire season. “For example, I have travelled on helicopter over more forest area burned to the ground than the entire state of Maryland.” The president toured the Caldor wildfire in California by helicopter in 2021, but opted to fly by New Mexico’s Hermit’s Peak fire, the largest in the state’s history, in Air Force One, according to Reuters. The U.S. Forest Service (USFS) issued a report in June taking responsibility for the Hermit’s Peak fire, which grew out of control from a controlled burn initiated by the USFS, according to The Washington Post. The USFS report concluded that … [Read more...] about Biden Blames Climate Change For Burned Out Forests — But His Admin Caused One Of The Biggest Wildfires In History

Tech & Science Environmental Health Your skin is teeming with microbes. Millions of them. From the perspective of these tiny organisms, the surface of your body is their living, breathing habitat. This living layer is part of what's called the human microbiome—the collective genomes of all the "foreign" microorganisms that live in the human body—and research on it has exploded in recent years. But within microbiome research is a brand-new field that is just beginning to understand a stunning fact: Your microbiome extends beyond yourself, into the air around you. It hovers in a cloud around your body and leaves bits of itself on surfaces wherever you go. In short, you have an aura, except it isn't made of purplish light; it's your personal cloud of dead skin cells, fungus and many, many microbes. And researchers are learning to be able to identify you by it. "You know the dirty kid from Peanuts? Pig-Pen? It turns out we all look like that," says James Meadow, a data … [Read more...] about Auras Are Real, and Yours Looks Like Pig-Pen’s

RESTLESS GIANT The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore. By James T. Patterson. Illustrated. 448 pp. Oxford University Press. $35. THIS is first-rate history by a first-rate historian. Unlike many of his brethren, James T. Patterson can write, and he understands the value of vivid detail, using "Annie Hall," "Norma Rae" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" to help explain the women's movement. What's more, he can think, and he offers analysis and interpretation that is consistently sensible, if sometimes a trifle Panglossian. The events he describes make up the history -- social, economic and political -- of the United States during the final quarter of the 20th century, from Richard Nixon's departure from the White House and America's departure from Vietnam to the bitter partisanship of Bill Clinton's impeachment and Bush v. Gore. In between, he recalls the Ford and Carter administrations and the Iranian hostage crisis, the rise of Ronald Reagan and the resurgence of … [Read more...] about ‘Restless Giant’: The Rich and the Rest

The caliber of the decisions leaders make is often the result of the quality of the information they have available to consider at the time. The value of this information is nearly entirely driven by the power of the questions they ask. Yet all too often what leaders actually ask people for, and what leaders think they ask people for are two different things. It is easy for leaders to let the pressure of time, the power of their position, or perception of their expertise negatively impact the effectiveness of their questions without ever realizing it. Anytime leaders ask a question based on what they want to say, they increase the risk of embarrassing their counterparts, asking questions with implied expected answers, destroying their own credibility, and exposing the fact that they haven't been listening. Which in turn causes their counterparts to protect themselves, question their leaders' motives, and withhold information. Great questions are predicated on what their … [Read more...] about Five Questions Leaders Typically Ask Incorrectly and How To Improve Them

I. A Broken Economy As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working. The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems … [Read more...] about Obamanomics

On the morning of Oct. 5, President Bush and his education secretary, Margaret Spellings, paid a visit, along with camera crews from CNN and Fox News, to Friendship-Woodridge Elementary and Middle Campus, a charter public school in Washington. The president dropped in on two classrooms, where he asked the students, almost all of whom were African-American and poor, if they were planning to go to college. Every hand went up. “See, that’s a good sign,” the president told the students when they assembled later in the gym. “Going to college is an important goal for the future of the United States of America.” He singled out one student, a black eighth grader named Asia Goode, who came to Woodridge four years earlier reading “well below grade level.” But things had changed for Asia, according to the president. “Her teachers stayed after school to tutor her, and she caught up,” he said. “Asia is now an honors student. She loves reading, and she sings in the school choir.” Bush’s Woodridge … [Read more...] about What It Takes to Make a Student

Following is the transcript of Barack Obama's economic speech at Cooper Union in New York, as provided by CQ Transcriptions Inc. Thank you so much for being here. Let me begin by thanking Dr. Drucker and Cooper Union for hosting us here today. I have to say that the last time an Illinois politician made a speech here it was pretty good. So... (LAUGHTER) ... the bar is high. And I -- I want everybody to know right at the outset here that this may not be living for generations to come, the way Lincoln's speech did. I want to thank all our elected supporters who are here. I want to -- there are a couple of special guests that I'm very appreciative for being in attendance: Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board... (APPLAUSE) We appreciate his presence. William Donaldson, the former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. We thank you. And finally I want to thank the mayor of this great city, mayor Bloomberg, for his extraordinary … [Read more...] about Obama on ‘Renewing the American Economy’

The roads surrounding the Jerusalén-San Luis Alto Picudito Indigenous reservation in Putumayo, Colombia, are treacherous on a good day. Made mostly of gravel and mud, they narrow to barely the width of a small truck in some places, and in others, especially after a storm, they yield almost completely to the many rivers with which they intersect. They also twist and turn and bump without stop. So, in the most difficult months of her pregnancy, when everything tasted like cardboard and it hurt even to sit or stand, Marleny Mesa avoided traveling altogether. This meant skipping checkups at the clinic in Villagarzón, which could take two hours or more to get to. But Marleny wasn’t overly worried. A nurse had assured her early in her pregnancy that her blood work was good and that everything looked fine. As a midwife herself, Marleny knew that making the trip would be riskier than missing a few doctor’s visits. But now, in the final days of her pregnancy, she could not shake the feeling … [Read more...] about The Incredible Challenge of Counting Every Global Birth and Death

Since the pandemic began to wane, New York-watchers have stoked fears about an urban doom loop : Millennials like me — liberated from the chains of our desks — would abandon Midtown Manhattan and perhaps the city or state altogether in search of lower costs of living. The commercial tax base would be obliterated, leaving no funds to support essential services like the subway. To prevent this dystopian future, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams convened an expert panel that I served on, and they released the “ Making New York Work for Everyone ” plan (also known as the “‘New’ New York” plan) in December, a sweeping set of 40 proposals to keep the economy humming. The goals of the plan, broadly, are to reimagine the city’s business districts, to make it easier for New Yorkers to get to work, and to generate inclusive growth that positions the city to “lead the emerging industries of the 21st century.” But now, it is budget season in Albany. The proverbial “three men in a … [Read more...] about Will Ambitious Plans for a ‘New’ New York Get Crushed in Albany?

ARLINGTON, Va. — When Douglas Holtz-Eakin took over in 2003 as the director of the Congressional Budget Office — the nation’s bean counter in chief — he walked right into a firestorm. For years, Republicans had been pushing the budget office to change the way it estimated the cost of a tax cut. Rather than looking only at the revenue lost, they argued, the office should also consider how tax cuts would change behavior. With lower tax rates, businesses would invest more, workers would work more — and the government would thus get a tax windfall. This, in a nutshell, is supply-side economics. A bearded academic, Mr. Holtz-Eakin had just finished a stint in the Bush administration and had spoken favorably about dynamic analysis. So his appointment excited Republicans almost as much as it scared Democrats. Senator Kent Conrad went so far as to call it “a mistake.” But it turns out that both parties underestimated Mr. Holtz-Eakin. He did indeed begin using dynamic analysis, which … [Read more...] about Weighing a McCain Economist