Orange Wednesday yielded to White Thursday, as smoky air filled the region. If anything, visibility was somewhat worse, though it was much lighter and felt less like the end of time.
Journalism during this pandemic is more important than ever, yet very difficult to do well. That's because journalists, like the rest of us, are stuck at home and cannot interview people in person, attend meetings or go to the scene of the crime.
When they are able to go out on a story, they are taught to use all of their senses to describe to us what they encounter. They are often called our "eyes and ears" but they also bring back the smells, tastes and touch sensations relevant to each story.
During this wildfire outbreak, unprecedented in recorded history, it is especially critical that we understand just how hot it feels to be affected by one of these blazes, how they smell and what the roar of burning vegetation sounds like. The photos are critical components of coverage, but sometimes it is the ability to summon an emotional moment that really brings the piece home.
This struck me earlier in the week when I was listening to NPR's Steve Inskeep interview a volunteer fire marshall in a small town in California, where many structures were destroyed, including a vacation cabin that had been in an elderly woman's family for generations.
The fire official had to inform her that her homes lost. She cried and spoke of gathering pine combs in the surrounding woods when she was a little girl.
When we are young we are too busy making memories to know we are doing that.
When we are old, we treasure those moments when we were far more care-free. Then, time seemed long, stretching into an unknowable future.
Now, time feels short but memory seems long.
I don't know Steven Inskeep, though we overlapped in our public media careers. But he (and his producer) did more to help me understand the tragedy of wildfire by including that one elderly woman's story than all of the statistics, photographs, and official statements combined.
It's the stories from the heart that touch us as long as ours' keep beating.
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* Benjamin Ginsburg, a veteran election law attorney and longtime fixture of the GOP’s legal team, has written a searing op-ed blasting Trump for his harmful rhetoric about electoral fraud. Jones Day, the firm where Ginsburg was employed until he retired last month, works for Trump’s 2020 campaign. That makes the attorney’s Washington Post op-edall the more striking, since it tore into the president and Republicans for baselessly sowing doubt about the integrity of the U.S. election system. [HuffPost]
* You can get a robot to keep your lonely grandparents company. Should you? (Vox)
* Experts say that climate change is driving the severity of the fires — how big they get, how quickly they spread, and how difficult it is to fight them as they bear down on communities. (NYT)
* The orange skies around San Francisco and in much of Oregon and Washington are the result of ash and smoke from fires, rising high and spread widely by strong winds. The smoke particles tend to scatter blue light from the sun, while allowing yellow-orange-red light to reach the surface, causing skies to look orange. (NYT)
* Despite cries for athletes to “stick to sports,” particularly from conservative pundits and politicians, a 62 percent majority of Americans say that professional athletes should use their platforms to express their views on national issues. (WashPo)
* Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain announced new coronavirus restrictions, banning gatherings larger than six people, referring to it as the “Rule of Six.” (NYT)
* The U.S. Treasury Department announced Thursday that it is sanctioning a Ukrainian lawmaker with ties to President Donald Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, accusing him of being a Russian spy involved in Moscow's interference efforts in the 2020 election. to weaken Democratic nominee, former Vice President Joe Biden. (CNN)
* Trump heads to Michigan; Biden seizes on virus revelations -- President Trump planned to hold a rally in a key battleground state in the Rust Belt, a day after Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, delivered a scathing rebuke of his economic stewardship from a union hall there. (WashPo)
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“People are hungry for stories. It's part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another." - - Studs Terkel
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