Chain-link Fence Research Articles

Physical Fitness Characteristics That Relate to Work Sample Test Battery Performance in Law Enforcement Recruits.

This study determined relationships between an agency-specific fitness test battery (PT500), and a work sample test battery (WSTB) in law enforcement recruits. Retrospective analysis on 219 males and 34 females from one agency was conducted. The PT500 comprised: push-ups, sit-ups, and mountain climbers in 120 s; pull-ups; and 201 m and 2.4 km runs. The WSTB comprised: 99 yard (90.53 m) obstacle course (99OC); body drag (BD) with a 165 pound (75 kg) dummy; 6 foot (1.83 m) chain link fence (CLF) and solid wall (SW) climb; and 500 yard (457.2 m) run (500R). Partial correlations, controlling for sex, calculated PT500 and WSTB relationships (p < 0.05). Stepwise regression determined whether fitness predicted WSTB performance. The 500R related to all PT500 assessments (r range = −0.127–0.574), 99OC related to all bar push-ups and mountain climbers, and BD related to none. The CLF related to sit-ups, pull-ups, and 2.4 km run; SW related to mountain climbers, pull-ups, and 2.4 km run (r range = −0.127–−0.315). Push-ups, pull-ups, and 2.4 km run were involved in predictive relationships for 99OC, CLF, SW, and 500R (r2 range = 0.217–0.500). To perform better in the WSTB and job-specific tasks, developing upper-body strength and aerobic fitness may be beneficial.

From Memory to Memorial: Shanksville, America, and Flight 93

From Memory to Memorial: Shanksville, America, and Flight 93

Blow

Blow Jen Soriano Behold the perfect white orb. Grasp it by its tender stem, hold it to your eye; see the world in the spaces between its stars. Now. Transform the orb—transform yourself—into a microcosm of power. Purse your sweet thick lips and do as you did with the flicker of fire that marked your second year. Blow. “Mano, mano” says my son, balancing on his tiptoes and reaching for my hand. He has just turned two and will not be carried. Together we stroll through the pre-school parking lot, past the playground’s chain link fence, up the narrow sidewalk toward our car. The journey is fraught with small dangers. Cement that lies uneasily on the ground, chunks of it rise, then fall, following the slope of soil. Cracks emerge where weeds have pushed through looking for light. My son breaks loose and runs. I yell his name, hold my breath as I watch his feet skim the uneven pavers, any one of which could rise to catch his toes and hurl his growing cranium toward cement; a potentially fatal blow. But he does not fall, not today. He stops at a tree and peers down. I catch up and see what he has bent over to examine: a small grove of wintered dandelions bobbing seductively in the breeze. Behold the tightly-wrapped brick. A perfect unit, near symmetrical on all sides, shiny like a child’s birthday gift. Slit taut plastic and slip white onto the corner of an impeccable blade. Bitter. Which you taste as sweet just before your tongue turns numb. Patch the slit with duct tape and the brick is back in play. Blow. “Your dog ate my fucking burrito!” David growled. He was always on edge, and it was always him against the world. But David wasn’t a bad guy, not really. Just shady. Slippery. Explosive. And a link in the California cocaine chain—though which was cause and which was effect was debatable. We stumbled upon his apartment one day, while walking around the Mission searching for a place to live. My boyfriend Josue and our friend Ruben saw an open door to an empty place and walked right in. The apartment smelled like fresh paint; there was fine wood dust on the kitchen floor and a caulking gun left on the counter. David, who lived upstairs, must have seen us from his window; he appeared in the doorway with a gruff “can I help you?” and I don’t know exactly what Josue and Ruben said to him, but soon they were all talking like old friends. In a matter of minutes Ruben and Josue had closed a deal with David on renting the apartment, [End Page 147] and we moved in two weeks later. Such a score, I thought. An affordable place, newly renovated, in the Mission. What a reward for our good Karma. This was long before I had a son, before I thought much about complicity. Behold the modern day bomb. Fat Man is a plump movie prop, Little Boy a poster-child missile. They are harmless shining steel with fine fins. But. Release Little Boy and watch Hiroshima melt to the ground; release Fat Man and see Nagasaki burn to the skies. Blow. “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was done with the atomic bomb.” At the apex of his career, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, reckoned with the blood he saw on his hands. During his three years of fervent experimentation with fission and implosion and controlled releases of nuclear energy, “Oppie” was largely untroubled by the ethical implications of his creation. The task at hand was to solve a “technically sweet” problem, and to beat the Nazis to the bomb. But his reckoning began when he saw the very first bomb explode. The Trinity Test: an earth-shattering success. And in its afterlife, just three weeks before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer famously uttered...

City Profile: Prince's Minneapolis

Notebook ON APRIL 21, 2016, a chain-link fence in a Minneapolis suburb became a monument. At Paisley Park in Chanhassen, purple flowers and balloons, stuffed animals, handwritten signs, and other tributes adorned the gate in a final salute to the great musician and singer, Prince. Minnesota’s love for Prince is boundless. Minnesota Public Radio’s KCMP named Purple Rain number four on its list of most essential albums, Prince number two among its most essential artists, and “Purple Rain” number one as its most essential song—but, if tuning into its broadcast isn’t a concrete enough experience of Prince’s imprint on the city, then you'll find it at the nightclub he brought to fame, First Avenue & 7th Street Entry. Also the filming location for the movie Purple Rain, First Avenue & 7th Street Entry encapsulates Minneapolis’s music scene, from local artist performances to headline tours to the yearly parties celebrating Prince, Bowie, and other classic ’80s rock. The massive stage and vast dance floor are never empty and always radiate the passionate energy of music lovers. Even from the outside, First Avenue stands out—530 silver stars are painted on the walls, each with the name of an artist who has played the club. The lone gold star holds the crown jewel: Prince. After snapping a picture with Prince’s star, head over to his favorite record store, Electric Fetus, a prominent location among indie record fans that turned fifty in June. Examine its collection of albums and artists , soaking up the various takes on rock, punk, pop, and R&B. While in Uptown, the eponymous neighborhood of the Prince song, swing by 26th Street and Hennepin Avenue to see the Prince Tribute Mural, a piece of public street art commemorating the musician’s life. To see Minneapolis’s final memorial to its beloved musician, you have to leave the city proper and go out to Chanhassen. Just beyond the Chanhassen Cinema—which, too, has a tributary mural painted on the outside—you’ll get to Paisley Park Studios, the former residence and recording studio of Prince and current museum of his musical legacy. A tour starts in the atrium with live doves and a Paisley Park–shaped urn of Prince’s ashes. It continues through rooms dedicated to his biggest albums and feature films, a hallway of his awards, and even the recording studio where you get to hear a brief segment of music never publicly released. Finally, you see the giant black-box auditorium, the private-party lounge, and—after eating a quick bite from Prince’s personal menu—a rotating piece of that chain-link fence. The museum cycles through displaying different segments, but each one shows the personal gifts from the countless individuals who gave back their love after decades of Prince giving their city his. Prince’s legacy continues to define the Minneapolis music scene in many forms: tourists traveling from across the country to see the Paisley Park museum, young artists such as Childish Gambino and Minnesota ’s own Janelle Monáe playing their Prince-inspired albums on the airwaves of KCMP (aka The Current), or First Avenue overflowing with music fans during the annual “Let’s Go Crazy” tribute. As long as music thrives, Minneapolis will never forget its Prince. James Farner is a WLT intern studying English writing and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. In his free time, he’s either listening to a podcast or working on The Aster Review, an OU student arts publication. He grew up in and around Minneapolis and is one of the frequenters of First Avenue who left flowers at Paisley Park after Prince died. Editorial note: For more, see Farner’s Minneapolis reading list in the takeaway insert at the end of this issue. city profile Prince’s Minneapolis by James Farner PRINCE MURAL: TMILLERPHOTO/FLICKR. MINNEAPOLIS PHOTO: TONY WEBSTER WORLDLIT.ORG 5 ...

Little Brown by Marla Frazee

Reviewed by: Little Brown by Marla Frazee Deborah Stevenson Frazee, Marla Little Brown. Beach Lane, 2018 [40p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-2522-3 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-2524-7 $10.99 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs The Little Brown of the title is a little dog with an attitude problem ("Probably because no one ever played with him. Or maybe no one ever played with him because he was cranky"). All the other dogs at the dog park are cavorting together, but "Little Brown did nothing and did it alone." In frustration, he starts capturing the other dogs' toys, and then there's a dog park standoff as the other dogs wonder what to do about Little Brown and their stuff and Little Brown wonders if the toys could bring him friends or leave everything the same. Frazee interestingly leaves the conclusion open-ended, with no dog managing to break the standoff; that lessens the drama of the ending slightly, but it also offers easy discussion prompts (the dogs' questions could be posed to the audience verbatim) for some empathy-building and social consideration, while the adults can consider larger political symbolism. Frazee's pencil and gouache illustrations draw on a somber earth-toned palette, and poor hunched-over Little Brown is the picture of unhappy distrust as he lurks against the chain-link fence. The absence of humans to bring higher authority emphasizes the playground aspects of the scene, and kids who've struggled to negotiate interpersonal dynamics there will find this a useful invitation to talk them through. DS Copyright © 2018 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner

Reviewed by: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner Savannah Shange Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 266 pp. In his first book, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, Damien Sojoyner delivers an extended critique of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline (STPP) model that has become hegemonic in both educational anthropology and carceral studies. Building on an intellectual genealogy of Black radicalism that begins with W.E.B. Du Bois and pours forth through St. Clair Drake, Clyde Woods, Beth Ritchie, and Ruthie Gilmore, Sojoyner disrupts the presumptive binary between schools and prisons by arguing that "counter to the pathway established by the School-to-Prison-Pipeline trajectory of schools funneling students into prisons, schools laid the foundation for the expansion of the prison regime in the United States" (35). First Strike establishes a framework for engaging what Erica Meiners (2007:32) calls the "nexus" between schools and prisons as a site of ongoing contestation and resistance, rather than a totalizing structure of neoliberal governance. In addition to his crucial theoretical intervention into scholarship on education and incarceration, Sojoyner also pushes on methodological conventions by privileging policy and history as sites of anthropological investigation, rather than elevating ethnographic narrative as the sole engine of analysis. In lieu of the STPP, Sojoyner offers the theoretical frame of enclosure as a lens through which to view the relationship between schools and prisons. Beginning with the ubiquitous chain-link fences topped with barbed wire that cordon off high schools serving Black and Latinx communities in Los Angeles, Sojoyner expands the notion of enclosure to include any structural limitation of Black mobility and livelihood. In this sense, [End Page 443] …enclosure is representative of social mechanisms that construct race, gender, class, and sexuality; and just as important as the imposition of the physical and unseen, enclosure embodies the removal/withdrawal/denial of services and programs that are key to the stability and long-term well-being of communities. (xiii) First Strike moves fluidly between these modes of captivity and rollback, focusing on one mode of enclosure in each chapter: cultural expression, ideology, penal discipline, gender, and academic education. County High School (CHS) is the central ethnographic site that grounds Sojoyner's analysis. A cramped, deteriorating music classroom serves as the backdrop for the first chapter, "The Problem of Black Genius: Black Cultural Enclosures." In it, Sojoyner establishes Black high schools as a center of the Black arts movement in Southern California that incubated poets, musicians, and visual artists in the 1960s and 1970s. He then uses the polymathic genius of one student as a lens into the systematic dismantling of Black cultural education in Los Angeles schools through budget cuts and the elevation of white artistic norms. Even CHS's jazz program—which had been founded a generation prior to combat Eurocentric arts education—only taught the music of white musicians. In an unexpected move, Sojoyner roots the evisceration of a culturally relevant music curriculum in the spread of Western Christianity in the 16th century. Early Black liberation movements drew on the text of Bible as a justification for resistance, and thus the liturgical interpretation of scripture became a site for contesting the social distribution of power. Sojoyner details the dissonance between Protestant and Catholic responses to Black cultural expression. He then uses this disparity to highlight resistance among Anglo Southern planters to baptizing slaves due to the revolutionary potential of the church. Christianity becomes a locus of cultural enclosure in the mid-1800s when planters began mandating church attendance on plantations, where services were infused with messages of obedience, work ethic, and the promise of deferred happiness in heaven. The result of these coordinated efforts of religious and economic institutions was "the formation of an enclosure model that sought to stop dissent through rearticulating Black culture as both dangerous and against the will of God" (31). Ideological enclosure is the focus of Chapter 2, "In the Belly of the Beast: Ideological Expansion." Sojoyner recounts the various ideological [End Page 444] positions occupied by CHS students vis-à-vis the state; while some of them bitterly complain...

Predicted long-term effects of group selection on species composition and stand structure in northern hardwood forests

The group selection method can potentially increase the proportion of shade-intolerant and midtolerant tree species in forests dominated by shade-tolerant species, but previous results have been variable, and concerns have been raised about possible effects on forest fragmentation and forest structure. Limited evidence is available on these issues for forests managed beyond the first cutting cycle. We used CANOPY, an individual-tree forest dynamics model, to assess long-term effects of group selection methods on tree species composition, fragmentation of the mature forest matrix, and sustainability of size distributions in northern hardwoods. Results were also compared to reference treatments that included a no-cut control, single-tree selection, and clearcutting. Model simulations predicted that group selection would increase midtolerant tree abundance compared to single-tree selection and controls, but magnitude of response was highly variable depending on habitat type and harvest design. All conventional single-tree and group selection designs greatly increased small-scale fragmentation of the mature forest matrix. Group or small patch cutting with area control (constant percent of stand area cut in openings in each cutting cycle with no cutting between groups) produced residual stands with ‘rings’ of mature and large tree crowns in a ‘chain-link fence’ pattern. All treatments, however, resulted in sustainable populations; size distributions did not deviate substantially from a descending monotonic distribution over the 300-yr period. Results suggest possible tradeoffs between maximizing midtolerant species composition and minimizing fragmentation of the mature forest matrix, and that the potential for increasing the abundance of midtolerant species can be strongly constrained by habitat type.

Trains

Trains Rebecca Schamore (bio) Up the steep wooded hill behind my house in northeastern Tennessee lies an open field that has always reminded me of Bambi's meadow. I often wonder, as I watch them pass through, if the deer that traverse our woods stop at its edge and counsel their fawns on the danger lurking in that wide sunny spot. They forage here regularly on their way down from the mountain that is [End Page 22] the focal point of my Appalachian town. On the far side of the meadow behind a rusting chain link fence, railroad tracks wend westward through the neighborhood on their way to Kentucky coalfields. The tracks are generally quiet, but sometimes at dusk as the chickadees and titmice softly chatter in their hushed evening tones, and the last light dances through the summer leaves, I catch the rolling rumble through the trees, and I remember the trains of my childhood. I was still a child, five or six, when my grandmother first played her train records for me. I was mesmerized by the soulful complaint of the instrumental "Train Blues," but I was too young to manipulate her high fidelity phonograph by myself. I had to ask Grandma to set the needle on the records and turn them over to hear the other side. Because I loved to dance and pretend and because I was shy and self-conscious, I would only ask her to play the records when my sister and cousins were outside playing. All alone, I would spin around the room, a whirling dervish, as the train thundered down the track, then collapse in a heap at the sadness in the fiddle's lonesome song. The trains of my childhood were mythic trains, trains of story and trains of song. The 1954 edition of Watty Piper's The Little Engine That Could with its bright orange cover and its little blue engine spoke to me of kindness and optimism. I could not forgive the passenger and freight engines their haughty cruelty at leaving the toys and the broken-down train behind, nor could I understand the tired old engine's unwillingness to try. I adored the Little Blue Engine for pulling that broken train over the mountain and for helping deliver the toy animals and dolls, the picture puzzles, the big golden oranges, and the red-cheeked apples to the waiting boys and girls. That over the top moral lesson was not lost on five-year-old me. The Little Blue Engine was kind and helpful, she personified [End Page 23] my kindergartner's belief in who we should be. Best of all, she thought she could, and she did. If The Little Engine that Could was my song of innocence, my grandmother's records—those train ballads of Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, the Weavers, and so many others—were my songs of experience. I didn't need to understand the songs; it didn't matter. I knew enough, that there were trains, mines, and hardship. I knew that tarriers, whatever they were, had to "work all day for the sugar in [their] tay." And I knew, because Tennessee Ernie Ford told me, that you could "load sixteen tons" but all you'd get is "another day older and deeper in debt." The story that spoke most clearly to my younger self's sensitivity was "The Ballad of Casey Jones." All the other songs were simply a prelude. I acted out the story in my grandmother's living room. I wanted to warn Casey; I cried every time he said goodbye to his wife and climbed on that fateful train. I would stand in the great green chair by my grandmother's picture window and stare down imaginary tracks until I could see the train blocking Casey's path. I spent hours dancing and singing in that sunny room. If my grandmother or grandfather happened by and glanced my way, I would sit down so fast that sometimes I sent their oversized green footstool skidding across the floor. My play was private. I rode the Wabash Cannonball, took the night train to Memphis, and mourned the loss of that "brave engineer...

Cave of the Iron Door

Cave of the Iron Door Joan Frank (bio) What I wanted to say . . . was: I could not bear it, but out of my mouth came the words, “I cannot bear it.” —William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow The surface couldn’t have looked simpler. A brief getaway, some extra warmth at a chilly time of year. On the face of it, so natural. A visit to your old hometown—your first hometown, pays natale, place of birth, original setting for those big-bang memories. People smiled and nodded when you told them. Wholesome as a July 4th picnic. Yet I remember my heart squeezing as the plane touched asphalt, white sun deceptively mild through the air-conditioned cabin’s window. Out that window: purple-brown desert hills, landscape of childhood. Was it January? My husband sits beside me on the plane, happily crunching down my ignored mini-bag of mini-pretzels, tapping it to dislodge last bits, his mind dancing (as it does when he sets out anywhere) with images of turquoise swimming pools, tequila cocktails, gritty Mexican [End Page 77] food, eye-watering barbecue. He loves heat because he grew up with wrenching cold, so he becomes lavishly cheerful when we’re entering a guaranteed-to-bake kingdom. The plane’s windows are a pulse of light, like the blur filling Keir Dullea’s travel-pod in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Have I secretly assumed things will stay as I remember them? Maybe everyone who visits her childhood setting, after a lifetime away, has no choice. You’ve only your own lonely memory to go by. No one else is still alive—no one you know of—to second you, to say yes: it was that. What can anyone be sure of, after all? Less and less looks the way it once did. But tell me—what stays the same in the American West for fifty years? For five? Sky Harbor Airport: The words still send a shiver. Once the very sound of that name punched us little kids in the chest like the word Christmas. Now the image shrinks to that of an old hand-tinted postcard: its single control tower a lone lighthouse, scanning empty expanses of runway in clear, hot sun, its crown a big cut jewel, impenetrable dark glass facets flashing. What dwelt inside? Looming and silent—yes—as the omniscient monolith in 2001. Takeoffs and landings could in fact have been space launches, so much did their drama dazzle my family. You went to the airport for thrills: on ultra-special nights to dinner at Sky Harbor’s restaurant, watching planes come and go while you ate. We may as well have been driving our olive drab ’49 Ford straight into the future, those evenings: baby sister Andrea and I bouncing along in the back seat (beltless then), dreaming out the windows, singing made-up songs while dust billowed behind the car—so many roads still unpaved. Mesmerized, our family: pulled as if programmed toward a new modernity: fat propeller planes servicing ant-sized human masters, a shoal of shining silver airbuses trundling slowly in and out, plump with passengers. Tiny figurine-faces smiled through the capsule windows. Tiny figurine-hands waved. Everyone dressed for air travel as if for church, or a dinner party. Men wore fedoras, jackets, ties—sometimes bolo ties. Plenty of cowboy hats, often with business suits for a formal effect. Women wore crisp shirtwaist dresses, or what was heedlessly called a squaw dress: full-skirted, [End Page 78] rickrack-and-sequin-trimmed. Petticoats, hose, heels, girdles—gloves and chic hats. Air travel was still viewed as a privilege; Arizona air itself, ultra-clear and dry, prescribed for sufferers of tuberculosis and joint problems. In that clean light, colors shone true, deep and saturated as Christmas ornaments, and the clustered planes threw light back in blinding silver. From behind a simple chain-link fence, easily stepped around—the extent of security—we watched passengers descend like royals, stepping across the tarmac toward us with a kind of self-conscious self-possession: something surreal about this (though a child does not yet use that word), about seeing your uncle or...

Women Who Cry

Women Who Cry Amy Peterson (bio) Lament is risky speech. It is risky because it calls into question structures of power, it calls for justice, it pushes the boundaries of our relationships with one another and with God beyond the limits of acceptability. It is a refusal to settle for the way things are. - Denise Ackermann By the waters of Babylon we sat down and wept. - Psalm 137:1 At the Clifton Heritage National Park on Nassau, we are standing on a cliff. Just yards away from us, stone steps built into the land lead down to the coast. Some call them the slave steps, our tour guide tells us, and others call them the pirates’ steps. Recent hurricane damage has made them inaccessible, but our guide waves in their direction. We stand on dusty ground covered more by pebbles than by grass or sand. Off the cliffs, the water glints sapphire, and oil tankers anchored not [End Page 49] far from shore bob like rusty tin cans cut in half. In a little while we’ll go snorkeling a half mile from here. We’ll see a dozen kinds of fish, rays, a coral reef, and we’ll come out spotted with crude oil, wondering how much of it we may have ingested, and if the stains will come out of our swimsuits, horrified by what is happening to the natural beauty. At the Clifton Heritage National Park on Nassau, we are standing on a cliff. It’s January, but hot. We are sturdy American tourists in baseball caps and backpacks, shading our eyes and gazing off in a dozen different directions. I watch the undergraduate students I’m chaperoning. They gaze at the screens of their iPhones, snapping photos. The cliff is edged with wispy Australian pines, non-native invasive plants that cause soil erosion, and a green chain-link fence, no longer upright. We are not the only ones standing on this cliff, looking out to sea. There are women here who have been watching the coast for decades. Carved from the trunks of cedar trees planted by Ponce de León, they lean toward the water. Their faces are black, and their bodies dry gray wood. Faded blue scarves wrap their heads. One’s hip juts to the south. One’s shoulders hunch with grief. One wraps her arms around her chest, as if to hold her heart in place. Each is scarred with rough parallel lines sawn slanting down her sides, marks of the slave captain’s whip. “They are looking toward Africa,” our tour guide tells us, “their homeland.” Our tour guide is a stocky black Bahamian grandmother in a beret and khaki pants. “But they are not sure which direction Africa is in, so you see they are all looking different ways. Or maybe they are looking for their children. Families of slaves were often separated, taken to different islands.” The cedar woman closest to me seems, more than anything else, to be looking toward the sky, as if she knows that both her homeland and her children are gone and will not return, and she will not stop asking God why. Women have a lot of painful questions for God, perhaps more than men have. At least that’s what I see in the art. These cedar trees remind me of a sculpture I saw outside the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall two years ago. When the Japanese occupied Nanjing in 1937, they [End Page 50] slaughtered more than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians, raping twenty thousand women. They raped children, the elderly, and nuns. Often, soldiers would go door to door, searching for a girl to gang rape. When they were finished, they would pierce her through the vagina with a bayonet or a stick of bamboo. Outside the memorial hall, a giant bronze woman holds her dead child loosely, her hands falling to the ground. Her legs are heavy, weighted, her back beginning to arch, her eyes blank toward the sky, her mouth a silent o. Or what I saw in Italy, Mary after Mary after Mary cradling the baby who would die. A voice is heard in Rahah, mourning and...

An Unpublished Interview with Arthur Miller

[Editor's Note: Arthur Miller has the distinction of being one of the most interviewed literary figures of his time. During his long career, he was open to sitting down with print and broadcast journalists, theater critics, and scholars to discuss his views on his own work, the state of the theater, American and international politics, and social issues. The inaugural issue of The Arthur Miller Journal (Spring 2006) included one of Millers final interviews before his death, a conversation with his biographer Christopher Bigsby. I am pleased that this issue contains a previously unpublished interview with Miller by Rupendra Guha Majumdar of the University of Delhi. Conducted in Millers New York apartment on 27 April 1993, the interview is a lively exchange with Majumdar who was a Fulbright Fellow at Yale at the time. The edited conversation includes Millers views on his famous plays, nineteenth-century American writers, Eugene O'Neill, theatrical realism, and his plays of the 1990s. I have included Majumdars introduction that details the unique circumstances that led to the interview. The photos that Majumdar has provided include what may be the only Miller "selfie" on record!Stephen Marino]IntroductionWhen Arthur Miller graduated from Brooklyn's Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, his most satisfying accomplishment came as a football player on the second squad of the school's team. He certainly was exposed to the football "heroes" on the "A" squad whose personalities he would use in fashioning Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Miller's youthful athletic shape was recognizable in his robust appearance at seventy-seven. In fact, if it had not been for his white hair, he could have passed for a man in his early sixties, Willy Loman's age in the selfsame play. Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, walking briskly, his speech equally focused, though with contemplative pauses, the hint of a smile on his face-Miller presented the picture of a man on his intellectual toes, leading a very active social and professional life; a man respected by serious theatergoers the world over for many decades. This was what I saw when I met him in New York in 1993.Miller's international image is rooted in his alignment with an American tradition further complicated by his being Jewish. This is similar to Eugene O'Neill and his Irish background. From the beginning of Miller's career in the forties to the start of the twenty-first century, he acknowledged the vital presence of his (fellow-Connecticut) precursor, O'Neill, without having been, in any sense, under the latter's artistic shadow. It is quite an amazing coincidence, therefore, that a character in O'Neill's lone comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, set in 1906, and published and produced in 1933, not only should be called "Arthur Miller," but also turns out to be a football champion and university student.1I forgot to ask Miller about this piquant connection between his name and that of his precursor's protagonist when I met him in Manhattan. I presume he must have been aware of it, because I later came across his own reference to the O'Neill play in his discussion of the Great Depression in the introduction to The American Clock (1980), set in 1930s America. Miller is likely to have had his share of surprise in meeting a stage doppelganger of sorts: yet the nostalgia for a lost frontier-suggested in a title like Ah, Wilderness!-and the sense of alienation and transcendence that defines the problematic angst of many of O'Neill's protagonists can also be seen in Miller's heroes. Indeed, Miller himself upholds the "noble quest" and the "fabulous appetite for greatness" that he attributes so magnanimously to his pathbreaking precursor, in his New York Times review (6 November 1988) of Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill.2On 15 February 1993, I wrote Arthur Miller a letter from Yale University, where I was spending an academic year in the English Department as a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow from Delhi University, India. …

Cost and Benefit Evaluation of Graffiti Countermeasures on the Nevada Highways

Nevada is one of the major states that are currently suffering from graffiti problem. It was estimated that graffiti costs Southern Nevada around $30 million per year. The major highway structures that were suffering from graffiti were bridges, sound walls, retaining walls and traffic signs. Removing graffiti from these infrastructures was a big challenge to the maintenance division of Nevada Department of Transportation (NDOT). Thus, the department was looking for cost effective proactive countermeasures to prevent graffiti on highway infrastructure. This study first identified a spectrum of proactive countermeasures, and then evaluated them by conducting a cost-benefit analysis. Pedestrian fencing and chain link fence were found to be cost effective countermeasures for preventing graffiti on bridges and sound walls. However, for relative long sound walls, the chain link becomes less cost effective. Rat guard was found to be cost effective for road signs; however, it was more useful for traffic signs that are located in the area where the taggers cannot find the way to bypass the rat guard. Coating and landscaping were found to be cost effective for small structures. The security camera countermeasure was not cost effective at the locations where the reduction in graffiti was small. The software for spectrometers was relatively high cost and might hinder the cost effectiveness of this countermeasure. To reduce the cost of the software, developing the software internally could be adopted. And finally, the electronic database was recommended since it was not difficult to develop and maintain.

Living with the fence: militarization and military spaces on Guahan/Guam

The landscape of Guahan/Guam, an organized unincorporated territory of the USA and the largest and southernmost island of the Mariana Islands archipelago, is visibly marked by chain link fences that enclose land taken for use by the US military. This US military presence on Guam is evidence of a long military colonial history that has stressed, particularly under US rule, the importance of the island's strategic location. The ‘fence,’ a frequently used but rarely defined expression, refers to a multiplicity of lines, most of which recreate a dichotomous view of military/local relations, and help to make invisible the complex web of identities that go through, over, and beyond its real and imagined spaces. Working from an understanding that theory must be grounded in experience, this article draws on interviews to explore the multiple meanings of the fence. It focuses on the ways the colonized, militarized, and gendered spaces of the fence promote US values, interests, and security concerns but also mark points of resistance to militarization and colonization. Exploring the ways colonization and militarization are played out on the bodies of those who live and work on the island, the article concludes that tearing down the ‘fence’ must include both demilitarization and decolonization, but in ways that transcend, rather than reproduce its present gendered and dichotomous spaces.

Chains, necklaces and weaving chain-link grids from self-assembly reactions.

Assembly of two ditopic units, a phenanthroline substituted by 4-ethynyl pyridines at the 2-and 9-positions and a dimetallic paddlewheel, gives a linear chain polymer rather than a closed cyclic species, which would appear equally possible. The chain may be decorated by binding a copper-containing macrocycle around the phenanthroline units to form a polypseudorotaxane. When two phenanthroline ligands are assembled in a first step around copper(I), the paddlewheel acceptor can link them in a second step to form a two-dimensional interwoven grid that resembles the form of a chain-link fence. Each copper(I) centre in this structure is chiral, and the crystal shows complete homochirality, implying selection during the assembly process.

From The House in Scarsdale

From The House in Scarsdale Dan O’Brien (bio) Two actors play all the roles here—ideally one actor in his 30s, who plays Dan most of the time, and an actor in his 50s to play the “other” Dan and most every other character. The younger of these two actors has the first line of the play, and with each new character-heading the actors alternate. In the margin of the script are suggestions for lighting, sound, a few stage directions, as well as photographs, moving images, etc., to be displayed as video and/or projections. Place & Time: Various, the present. Scene 8: Dead Ends Animation: DAN: Did you go, Dan? line drawing DAN: You went with me, Dan. of a seed. DAN: What happened there? DAN: I walked down the dead-end street looking— DAN: For what? DAN: Like a schizophrenic skulking in the cul-de-sac, skunk cabbage The seed growing and wild grape vines, like a thread DAN: scrub oak and mud-soft of water. weeds we used to call The Swamp. DAN: That brook seething with broken bottle glass and rotting leaves, a rusted car battery. DAN: What did we find there? DAN: A haunted house. Smaller. The grass is Becoming grass. greener than it once was. The dogwood’s pink and maybe taller. A tree. DAN: This is not the house, this has never been the right house. DAN: Then where did we go? DAN: To Auldridge. The corner of Weaver and Griffin. Above the thrumming parkway. Highest hill in the county with The tree a view of the Sound beyond. DAN: Mexican drops its leaves. gardeners with their leaf blowers tumbling waves of plumb and gold down to curb. DAN: Chain-link fences gird the acreage now. This gate is all that’s left. Oxidized pikes are rising up with words wrought in iron reading like the entranceway to Dachau or Hades, DAN: “Auldridge.” Leaves become a DAN: Stooping to peer through the shifting labyrinth. barrow of branches, DAN: I’m straining to see the house through these trees planted long before she was just a girl of twelve DAN: —and you feel The labyrinth you were right. You know you’ve always been becomes a house right of leaves. about her. DAN: The brick house sprawls. Twin lions poised in granite. Sandstone steps. Antique cars line the driveway. DAN: The glass of the green house smearing the fire of a November sun artfully. DAN: Somebody else lives here now. DAN: Who could possibly live here now? DAN: Should I ring the bell? Could I walk inside and see her standing like a ghost in a blue dress at the bottom of the stairs to the rooms no one’s allowed into? KATHLEEN: You’ll never know how bad it was for me. DAN: I know I’m right, I’ve always known the truth. DAN: A Dalmatian swivels its ears and starts racing across the undulating lawn barking. DAN: I turn tail and run for my train laughing. The house of leaves DAN: So tell me is blown apart. what’s wrong. DAN: I don’t know who to reach out to next. DAN: You’ll always have me. DAN: But nobody else wants to talk to me. DAN: Why do you want to talk to them then? DAN: I’ve hit a dead end, and I’ve got to find the truth. DAN: And to find the truth you’ve got to ask people questions, DAN: and then people have to answer them. DAN: Who do you want to talk to still? Who is it that could answer all this for you? —Let’s do this thing! DAN: I call a guy on Cahuenga Boulevard: ADAM: If you want to go off the grid you can. But it’s never easy. E.g., no credit cards, no cell phones. No address or medical records. Cash is king. Wives call me up all the time saying, Adam, my husband’s cheating! Can you surveil him for me please? And I’m like, Ma’am, surveillance costs like two hundred an hour. I tell them, Go online and look at his statements cause...

Forensic Engineering Analysis of Vehicle-Pedestrian Impact Using EDR Data and Reconstruction Software

This paper will analyze a pedestrian impact with a 2012 vehicle in a criminal matter. The driver of the vehicle struck the pedestrian before crashing into a chain-link fence and tree. The driver was arrested and charged with vehicular homicide and driving while intoxicated (DWI). The question was: Where was the pedestrian standing when she was struck? The airbag control module was downloaded by the prosecution expert. The speed, steering angle, and longitudinal/ lateral accelerations were recorded for a period of 5 seconds prior to algorithm wake-up as a result of a fence side-swipe and then algorithm enable (AE) for the deployment of the vehicle-side airbags after impacting a tree. The recorded data was input into Virtual Crash and PC-Crash (accident reconstruction software that uses Newton’s laws of motions in analysis). The software allowed the time-distance-speed path of the vehicle to be visualized. The prosecution expert opined that the pedestrian was struck on the sidewalk a short distance from where she came to rest. This author was retained by the defense to determine the pedestrian’s posi-tion — either in the roadway or on the sidewalk.

The Detention-Industrial Complex in Australia

> It doesn’t matter whether you’re a child, it doesn’t matter whether you’re pregnant, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a woman, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an unaccompanied minor, it doesn’t matter if you have a health condition, if you’re fit enough to get on a boat then you can expect you’re fit enough to end up in offshore processing.1 > > —Scott Morrison, Australian minister of immigration Situated 800 kilometers from the capital of Papua New Guinea, the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre is a remote outpost far from the political dispatches of the Australian government in Canberra. Manus Island became an active base for US soldiers during World War II. Littered throughout the area are dilapidated Quonset huts first erected on the site by the Americans; some of these structures are still being salvaged to house new detainees and offices. Along the island’s first paved road connecting the airport to the detention center, building contractors ensured that the footprint of the former military base was reused. Located on state land, the current detention facility on Manus is a collection of enclosed compounds in which canvas tents, shipping containers, and other prefabricated units have been erected on flood-prone terrain (Figure 1). Two prominent entry points guarded by men with machine guns are located behind at least three additional layers of chain-link fencing. Between each of the compounds is a narrow corridor that reduces interactions among detainees. At the heart of the center stand two long elevated prefabricated buildings whose windows have been obscured by plastic tarpaulin; a small sign indicates that the shower, toilet, and entertainment area are nearby. Figure 1 Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, October 2013. After taking this photograph, both authors were interrogated by the detention center director and local armed guards (authors’ photo). More striking, however, is the initial sitework …

The art and science of forensic meteorology

When weather factors into a legal dispute, meteorologists use eyewitness accounts, troves of atmospheric data, and simulated reenactments to figure out what went awry.

Pediatricians Can Learn to Play Well With Others

Pediatricians Can Learn to Play Well With Others

Stealing Pears

Stealing Pears Cynthia Miller Coffel (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Nick Saltmarsh [End Page 82] When I was thirteen, in 1968, I found a paperback called Campus Traders, waterlogged, wrinkled, splayed open and facedown in the vines near Mill River in East Rock Park in New Haven, Connecticut. I’d wandered past my neighborhood of steady Victorian houses and hundred-year-old elms, by the bright blue mailbox on the corner of Cold Spring Street and the spot where you could see Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument, up the Giant Steps at the top of East Rock. I’d walked through a sloping section of chestnut trees and silver maples, beyond the abandoned jungle gym with its carousel horsehead swing, past a chain-link fence and around tar-covered tennis courts. Then I entered a part of the city park I’d promised my mother I would never go into—over to the old iron footbridge, [End Page 83] behind a cliff and down a path and onto the banks of the murky Mill River. Hollyhocks and morning glory looped around willows and hemlock down there, and the stump on the side of the path by the river, where I sat to read the book I’d found, was a little bit muddy. I knew there had been attacks here sometimes, men exposing themselves or robbing people who strayed here. I associated this area and the tramps who I, wrongly, thought lived here with the regicide judges, Goffe and Whalley, who, my mother told me, had hidden from King Charles I in Judges’ Cave, up beyond Whitney Avenue in West Rock Park. Campus Traders seemed to be about two couples, one of the men a full professor, the other a younger assistant professor. The older professor had a wife whose body he thought of as freakish because, though she was old—thirty or so—she kept it in unrealistically good shape with exercise and training. She wore a lot of see-through yellow things when she walked through the kitchen; they showed off her buttocks, and that had started to bother him. He wanted someone young, with a real, unexercised body, and so, with some trepidation, he had a talk with the assistant professor, who had a lovely young wife. “Enjoying the book?” A stranger stood on the path in front of me, hands in his pockets, smiling. I wondered if maybe the book was his, because he seemed to have a sense of what was in it. “Oh, yes!” I said, without thinking what my answer might say about me. “I like it a lot!” Then I remembered that I was in a dangerous part of the park, which suddenly seemed a bit chilly. I pulled my sweater close around my shoulders. There were dirty pieces of paper and bottle caps in the river, I saw now. As soon as the man had left, I got up, dusted myself off and hurried home. I brought the book with me. Because by thirteen I had already been a character in a book myself— captured, on page 131 of my father’s book The Fifteenth Ward and the Great Society, as an example of a white girl adjusting to the black students being bused to her school—I felt a special kinship with the characters in books I read. Because I had been a character and could reasonably expect to become one again, I empathized with the characters I met in books, sorry for the poverty of their authors’ representations. At the same time, I felt proud that I had been placed between my father’s pages. I had seen my father’s book on my science teacher’s shelf when she invited our eighth grade class to her house; I felt specially known because she’d read [End Page 84] his thoughts about the impact of the Great Society programs—urban renewal, scattered housing, school desegregation—on our city and because she’d read that section in which my father’s “daughter Cynthia” sat on the edge of her bed thinking about the black kids who were coming to her school. I’d seen notes written...