Morning Lecture Recaps

In the 20th century, the average life expectancy increased by more than ever before; more than all life expectancy increases over the course of human evolution, combined. This gives Laura L. Carstensen good reason to assume that much of the current population, young and old alike, will live to see their 100s.

But an uncertainty still lingers: What’s the best use of all this time?

Carstensen, Stanford University professor and founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, discussed SCL’s new and improved map of life at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday, July 15 in the Amphitheater, opening Week Four, “The New Map of Life: How Longer Lives are Changing the World — In Collaboration with Stanford Center on Longevity.”

Life has been short throughout the course of human evolution. In the beginning of human existence, the average life expectancy was 18 years. By in the late 1800s, life expectancy had increased to 47. Throughout the 20th century, it made its most dramatic increase to 77. Now, it is 79.

“The speed with which these changes took place, my colleagues and I maintain, is the reason that aging feels so tense for many of us — that it feels different and awkward and frightening,” Carstensen said. “It’s brand new. In an evolutionary sense, this happened in the blink of an eye.”

As life expectancy increased over the last century, fertility rates dropped by half. The decreased fertility rates created aging societies — societies where there are more older people than younger people. In 1900, about 4% of the global population was over 65. By 2030, over 20% of the population is projected to be over 65.

“These are game changers,” Carstensen said. “These numbers will change every aspect of life as we know it.”

The story of longevity doesn’t start with the elderly; it actually begins with babies.

In 1900, 25% of children born in the United States died before they reached 5 years old. During that time period, population graphs were pyramid shaped because the age distribution got smaller at the top, which represented people who made it to old age. In the 20th century, those pyramids began to reshape into rectangles.

“What this means is we have created a world where the vast majority of little ones are going to have the opportunity to live their entire lives,” Carstensen said. “This is an extraordinary cultural achievement.”

Culture changed as the world was redesigned to support young life. Carstensen said past generations deemed the high infant death rates unacceptable, and in response, they invested in science and technology to understand ways to improve children’s chances of survival.

Those previous generations studied medical science to understand how diseases spread and  created vaccinations to prevent young people from ever having to experience certain diseases. In addition to medical science, culture changed — not in the sense of languages and food, but social norms and practices.

“There are some historians about this era who write that you have your garbage collectors to thank as much as your physicians for longer lives,” Carstensen said. “Improved sanitation greatly contributed.”

As sanitation improved, other aspects of life did too. Milk was pasteurized, water was disinfected. Electricity was distributed, and along came refrigeration.

“We came to understand nutritional needs and built nutrients into food fortification programs that virtually eradicated nutritional disorders like gout,” Carstensen said. “We didn’t ask every parent to change their practices. We made this an institutional practice; we built this into the food supply. The water became safer, and food was preserved as it should be.”

A society that recognized it had fewer children decided to invest in those children. Thus, public education became accessible in every state.

“Education is a better predictor of life expectancy than age,” she said. “It is an extraordinarily potent contributor to life expectancy.”

Longevity is also a story of cooperation, Carsetensen said.

“These changes, this effort to work together to improve the entire population, has resulted in a point in history where for the first time, five, and conceivably six generations, will be alive at the same time,” she said. “A 20-year-old male today has a better chance of having a living grandmother than a 20-year-old male in 1900 had of having a living mother. These are game changers.”

The prospect of more time doesn’t make humans as excited as Carstensen once thought. People are worried, but their worry is based on assumptions of very different times than their own. Aging used to be synonymous with deficits, but that downward trajectory is no longer apparent in current generations.

“There are many assumptions we have made about aging that are wrong,” she said. “There are some aspects of life that improve: emotional wellbeing gets better as people get older, our stores of knowledge go up and in the last 50 years, every birth cohort that has arrived at 65, has been healthier than the one before it.”

The number of diseases among older people are increasing; however, they’re mostly chronic diseases like arthritis because they take longer to develop.

Regardless of those diseases, older people are functioning better than ever before. Carstensen said people need to start thinking of aging as an increase in variability and heterogeneity.

Additionally, people are functioning better cognitively as they get older.

“People today in their 80s are testing like people in prior generations tested at 65,” Carstensen said. “People are doing better.”

Dementia rates have been falling since 1977. Between 2000 and 2012, incidents of dementia fell by 24% in the United States. Yet again, rates of dementia decreased among those with higher education, which is providing a buffer against brain disease.

Older people are also happier than younger people. They are slower to anger, they can regulate emotions better, they know how to solve emotionally charged conflict better, and are more grateful and likely to forgive.

“I want you to begin to imagine with me what a society might do with a growing number of people who are knowledgeable, functionally healthy and emotionally stable,” Carstensen said.

As people become healthier, fitter and more knowledgeable, they are also more likely to keep working. Carstensen said an aging workforce is not the biggest change in society. Instead, it’s age diversification in the workforce, as six birth cohorts are currently working at the same time.

“It looks like mixed-age workforces may be more productive than anything we’ve ever seen in the past,” she said.

Besides the advancements that have already been made, there is promise of further improvements in the 21st century.

Carstensen showed a cover photo of TIME magazine with the headline “Can Google solve death?” Some scientists have argued that immortality is possible, according to Carstensen, but for her, the goal is not to stop aging — the goal is to slow it down.

“We are beginning to understand what aging is in a biological level, and then we can affect it,” she said. “Techniques like parabiosis and senolytics are really encouraging.”

Senolytics focuses on the destruction of senescent, or aged, cells. As one ages, senescent cells stop dividing and secrete inflammatory proteins that destroy or impair the function of healthy cells around them. New research proposes the removal of some of those senescent cells to promote healthy longevity.

In terms of technology, Carstensen is excited about flexible polymer tattoos that may replace Fitbits and Apple watches. Connected by bluetooth, the tattoos can monitor respiration, glucose, heart rate and temperature, and warn the user of potential health problems.

An extraordinary amount of evidence shows that the best thing one can do for aging is to keep moving. Carstensen said if the effects of exercise could be bottled, it would be the most prescribed and expensive drug on the market.

“When you exercise, it improves mood, it improves bone strength, it improves your heart and lowers your risk of cardiovascular diseases,” she said. “Exercise. This is it. What we need to do in the meantime, while we wait for scientists to figure out what to do about some of this aging stuff, is keep moving.”

Carstensen doesn’t lose a minute of sleep over the prospect of living forever; what keeps her up at night is the potential cost of these medical and technological advancements and how broadly they will be distributed in society.

“I do think that, to an extent, if we find ways for the top 10% of people in the world — the most educated and affluent — if we find ways for us essentially to live better and we live better and we leave the rest of the population in the dust, we will have inequities and disadvantaged differences that would make today’s experience hell by comparison,” she said.

The SCL is working toward a “New Map of Life” to prevent those drastic inequities. Carstensen said the first step to their design was asking people to envision what a high quality, satisfying, century-long life could look like.

“You cannot achieve what you cannot envision,” she said. “Today, we are not doing a good job of envisioning century-long lives as lives that are flourishing.”

Carstensen hosted a meeting of 50 experts, including academics, architects, climate scientists, educators and pediatricians, who collaborated to envision the possibilities that might come with longer lives.

They started by mapping the basic stepping stones of life, such as school, marriage and retirement. The team noticed there was a huge blank spot for the 30 years after retirement. As Carstensen asked people what they would do with those 30 extra years, no one said they would want to use them at the end of their lives. Instead, people said they would add them to the years they raised kids or to time spent in high school. Some said the years belonged in early childhood, others said they would work multiple jobs or take multiple sabbaticals throughout their careers.

Castensen said there are no right answers to her question, but there is a clarification: Younger generations have just as much to do with longevity as older generations.

“Find ways to use this growing population of even-handed people who can address some of the greatest problems facing the world today,” she said. “We need to find ways that having more older people makes life better for the youngest among us.”

The next time someone sees kids playing outside at their local preschool, Carstensen hopes they will not only view them as kids, but as the first centenarians of the 22nd century. More importantly, she wants people to realize it is their job — now — to build a world that will support those kids “all the way through.”

“This is hard,” Carstensen said. “It is going to be hard. But I assure you, the greatest risk of failure is setting the bar too low.”

On Friday morning, Heather Koldewey shared with her audience a photo she described as fragile, extraordinary and strangely beautiful.

It was a seahorse clutching a cotton swab with its tail — an image that’s remarkable, but also “very, very wrong.”

@HeatherKoldewey begins by speaking on her work with seahorses. #CHQ2019 pic.twitter.com/1xZva6BepV

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 12, 2019

Koldewey, the Zoological Society of London’s senior technical adviser and National Geographic Fellow, and Lillygol Sedaghat, multimedia journalist and National Geographic Explorer, spoke at 10:45 a.m. Friday in the Amphitheater, closing Week Three, “A Planet in Balance: A Week in Partnership with National Geographic Society.”

Koldewey has studied seahorses for more than 20 years and said the species is “on the frontlines” of a planet in balance because millions of seahorses, like many other species, are captured for trade, aquariums and modern medicine every year.

“As fishing increases and the fish decrease, the amount of nets people are using to catch those fish also increases,” Koldewey said. “We are seeing a real spiral of declining fish for people to eat and increasing nets, which are essentially plastic.”

All over the world, 640,000 metric tons of fishing nets are discarded into the ocean annually. The nets are made of plastic and take at least 650 years to break down.

Koldewey has studied the impact of fishing nets in the Philippines, a center of biodiversity where the human population, living in extreme poverty, is entirely dependent on the ocean to survive.

But it’s not just nets that are a problem. The Philippine islands also lack a waste management system.

There is hope. There is a way to recycle those nets, and reuse them for nylon projects like carpets and clothes. pic.twitter.com/oE8zOOiWAJ

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 12, 2019

“There is no garbage truck that turns up to take the waste away,” she said. “So, what I have been seeing in my 20-plus years working there, are these becoming, slowly but surely, islands of waste.”

Seeing the accumulating waste in person gave life to a daunting statistic: By 2025, there is projected to be 1 ton of plastic for every 3 tons of fish.

However, because one person’s trash is another person’s treasure, Koldewey said there is hope on the horizon. Through her award-winning program, Net-Works, the plastic fish netting is being recycled into nylon yarn that can be used for carpet tiles and clothing.

“We see the visual change,” she said. “Because we are science-based, we’ve been monitoring the beaches, the environment and seeing a dramatic transition as the waste nets now have somewhere to go. They now no longer get left anywhere because there’s value in the system and a supply chain to ship them.”

Since starting the Net-Works project in 2016, more than 224 metric tons of netting have been recycled, enough to go around the world five times.

The interconnectedness of oceans makes it hard to consider the improvement in the Philippines a dent in the plastic epidemic. Koldewey visited British-Indian territory made up of 55 uninhabited islands. Even though no one lived there, she picked up 334 single-use plastic water bottles in 20 minutes.

“This really summarized, to me, the fact that there is no ‘away’ for our waste,” she said. “What we do, what we choose to buy and how we choose to dispose of it has a huge impact on our planet, and particularly, on our ocean.”

Koldewey looked to London, where on average, every adult uses 175 single-use plastic water bottles a year. To understand the system that makes that possible, she studied human behavior, business, infrastructure, design, policy framework and how to normalize “green” behavior.

As a result of her research, water bottle refill centers were placed around the city. She also worked with sports centers, schools and businesses to reduce plastic waste.

Her children’s school is now plastic free and a refillable water bottle is part of their school uniform.

“We are looking at change happening across our community,” Koldewey said. “The future can look different.”

Through all of Koldewey’s case studies, Sedaghat said she noticed one similarity: “Change starts with ourselves.”

“The most powerful way to change something, to believe in an idea that you, in your own life, are willing to make a difference that inspires others, comes from a place of love,” Sedaghat said.

Sedaghat’s journey with plastic started with her Taiwanese milk tea obsession. Growing up, she always went to the same California tea shop, ordering drinks in single-use plastic cups, until she realized the consequences of her decisions.

“I realized that every single time I drink the drink that I love, I’m harming the environment that I love,” she said.

To better understand the plastic supply chain, Sedaghat went on a National Geographic trip to Taiwan, one of the world’s “geniuses in waste disposal” due to 148 circular economy initiatives and a 55% recycling rate.

In Taiwan, people separate their waste into recyclables, compost and trash. To dispose of trash, citizens are required to buy government-mandated trash bags and pay by weight, whereas composting and recycling are free.

The entire system was created by a group of housewives in 1987, when Taiwan transitioned into a democracy. At the same time, Taiwan had created a strong petrochemical plastics industry, but the byproduct of their economic growth was waste.

“That love for their family, for their community, that created nature as an extension of their whole family model, moved on to creating and piloting the first composting program,” Sedaghat said. “They completely banned Styrofoam from the food and beverage industry in Taiwan, … and then they also banned single-use disposable plastics from public offices and from schools. This group of women. Mothers. Love.”

@LillygolS speaks on the Homemakers United Foundation started in Taiwan. #CHQ2019 pic.twitter.com/NGjUXoFHNj

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 12, 2019

In June 2018, National Geographic released an “iconic” issue: “Planet or Plastic?” Koldewey contributed to the magazine and the initiative with her study of plastic in rivers around the world.

“Rivers around the world are basically transporting waste through communities, through towns, through cities and ending up delivering plastic into the ocean,” Koldewey said.

Two months ago, Koldewey, along with an all-female team, went to the Ganges River in Bangladesh to design rapid assessment methodology to understand the source, flow and amount of plastic entering rivers. The team took samples from water and sediment; studied wildlife and how plastic affects the fish sold in markets; documented waste in communities; and hired a drone pilot to map the river bank and locate plastic entry points.

“But data is no good if you can’t use it, if you can’t take it and apply it to make change,” Koldewey said.

Sedaghat agreed, noting that impact only happens when data can be “humanized.”

Sedaghat went on an expedition to a basin located near the Ganges River and the Bay of Bengal, a region with the third-largest water disposal and the second-largest sediment load of all of the rivers in the world. She explored the region on a small wooden boat that gave her the proximity to understand the river’s role in the communities it flowed through.

“Being on a boat and understanding intimately, physically, what the river does to people — what it means to be entirely dependent and reliant on a source out of your control — helped us understand the plastics issue in the riverways with the communities and the livelihoods of the people there,” she said.

Along the river, Sedaghat met a community of people whose homes and land had washed away from river flooding in the monsoon season. Through that experience, she came to understand how the river is both loved and hated.

“It was appreciated and became an economic lifeline for thousands of people who relied on it for fishing, but it was also something that took — so intimately — directly from people’s lives,” she said. “At the same time, those people are just like us. They adapt to resources that are around them because what is most important is the love that they have for their children and for their families.”

It was during that trip that Sedaghat realized her choices and consumerist behavior in the United States affected millions of people, thousands of miles away. As she changed her habits, she came to understand the difference between having the capacity to change, and having the willpower to change.

@HeatherKoldewey shares ways in how London is improving the future. #CHQ2019 pic.twitter.com/2bPAlKmdVp

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 12, 2019

“People had reached a certain socioeconomic level, a certain threshold of living where they no longer had to think about reusing, remaking, repairing certain materials,” she said. “You could just buy something new. That was a luxury that had come with coming into this next socioeconomic status and level.”

To conclude the lecture, Sedaghat offered localized solutions for communities that want to reduce waste.

First, one needs to understand the waste management system in their community.

“In your neighborhood, your school, your place of work — where does your trash go?” she asked. “What can and can’t be recycled? Who operates that system? Most of us put blind faith into a recycling bin without realizing how to recycle properly.”

Second, one must understand that recycling is a market, and they need to wash materials before recycling.

“The products that we put into that recycling bin have to compete with virgin materials in the market,” she said. “If they are contaminated by food waste, their quality is lower.”

Third, changing day-to-day decisions gives one the capacity to make a difference.

“That means, perhaps, bringing your own water bottle, bringing your own bamboo utensils, bringing your own straw, or a towel or a little bowl to carry with you,” she said. “Similar to the way that you would leave your home with your keys and your ID, why not make this a part of your day-to-day habits as well? Little choices make a huge impact.”

Fourth, think differently.

“We live and operate in a linear, industrial model where we take things from the Earth, we make them into something, we use them for one thing and then we throw them away,” Sedaghat said. “But what we need to really have a planet in balance is a circular way of thinking. We need to ask ourselves, ‘Where do these materials come from? Where do they go? Can I reuse them in any sort of way?’ ”

Although change starts with one person, worldwide change will come from a collective effort, Sedaghat said.

“Realizing that we are connected in our decisions here in the United States, with children thousands of miles away in Bangladesh, makes us feel that we are a part of something and that we can do something — starting today,” she said.

@LillygolS closes with this speech. #CHQ2019 pic.twitter.com/lRDGvc9MBK

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) July 12, 2019

Kevin Hand zoomed out and put planet Earth in cosmic context to tackle one of the universe’s oldest and most profound questions: Is anybody out there?

Hand, astrobiologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer, addressed that question at 10:45 a.m. Thursday in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Three, “A Planet in Balance: A Week in Partnership with National Geographic Society.”

Hand found his place in the stars as a child. While growing up under the constellations in the Vermont sky, he realized the search for life beyond Earth is guided by the understanding of life on Earth.

“Planet Earth is teeming with life,” Hand said. “North, south, east, west, high, low, hot, cold — wherever you find liquid water on planet Earth, you generally find life.”

Various space missions have given scientists good reason to predict that vast, global liquid-water oceans exist beyond Earth. Those oceans are trapped beneath icy shells of moons orbiting planets like Jupiter, Venus and Saturn, and are changing the idea of what it takes for a world to be habitable.

In the early days of astronomy and planetary science, the idea was that in order for a planet to be habitable, it had to be at the right distance from its parent star for liquid water and oceans to exist on the surface.

“If you are too close, like Venus, you were too hot and you boiled off any water that you once had,” Hand said. “If you are too far away, like Mars, you were cold and you froze out or lost any water to space. There was this kind of Goldilocks scenario: You had to be just the right sun- and Earth-distance, so as to have a liquid ocean on the surface that could sustain life.”

Hand calls that scenario the “old Goldilocks.” The “new Goldilocks” describes habitability in terms of tidal energy, or the tug and pull that moons experience as they orbit planets.

The best example of the “tug and pull” can be seen on the moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. Liquid water is not a possibility on Callisto and Io, but Hand believes Europa has the perfect combination of tidal energy dissipation to sustain life and a surface-level ocean.

“Again, one of the key aspects of these oceans is that by merit of having liquid water, we think that they could harbor life,” Hand said. “If we have learned anything from life on Earth, it’s that where you find liquid water, you generally find life.”

However, the diversity of life on Earth depends on both liquid water and biochemistry.

“All life on Earth is connected by the same tree of life,” Hand said. “What I’m curious about is whether or not there are other trees of life, separate origins of life on worlds beyond Earth, worlds like Europa, worlds like these ocean worlds or possibly even on planets beyond our solar system. Is the origin of life easy or hard? Does life arise wherever the conditions are right? Do we live in a universe that is teeming with life?”

Hand said life itself has three components: liquid water; periodic elements; and energy, the most important of the three.

“Even though (some moons) have liquid water, they don’t necessarily have sunlight that can help power the food chain,” he said. “When we look around the surface of our planet, the energy from the sun not only contains liquid water, it also powers photosynthesis, helping to serve as the base of the food chain.”

To prove that oceans do exist on other planets, Hand referenced evidence from Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Using pictures from NASA’s Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, Hand discovered that the north side of the moon’s icy shell was covered with craters — a sign of impact and age on a moon’s surface.

Alternatively, there are cracks instead of craters on the south side of the shell. Scientists discovered that water was jetting out and fracturing the ice.

“The ice of Enceladus is maybe 10 or so miles in thickness, but the tidal tug and pull that Enceladus feels as it orbits Saturn causes that ocean to be contained,” he said. “But it also fractures the ice shell and those cracks allow water to seep on up and essentially boil off into space and jet into space.”

Europa has no signs of liquid water due to its average temperature of minus 280 degrees Fahrenheit, but there is evidence of salt and a fractured ice shell. Scientists believe Europa, similar to Earth, has an iron core and a rocky mantle, but the ocean underneath is estimated to be 60 miles deep.

“It’s a global ocean and if you do the math, it turns out that the volume of liquid water within Europa’s ocean is about two to three times the volume of all the liquid water found in Earth’s oceans,” he said. 

Since Hand is unable to explore extreme conditions on moons throughout the universe, he looks to Earth’s extreme conditions in northern Alaska. For more than a decade, Hand and a team of scientists have studied microbe survival and the methane gas that is seeping out of Alaska’s permafrost.

“In the summer, the lakes are open to the atmosphere and photosynthesis can occur, but during the winter, the lakes freeze over and the sun goes away because it’s too far north,” he said. “The microbial ecology takes over, and the microbes that are generating methane start to do their job.”

Hand only studies in Alaska for a few days each fall and spring, but he is working with a team of engineers to create a robot that can stay in the water all winter. Hand is working on a submersible rover that would roll upside down under the ice for increased mobility.

Exploring Alaska helped Hand imagine conditions on Europa, but the water was not deep or representative enough to make any direct comparisons. To experiment with another extreme environment, Hand explored hydrothermal vents, or hot springs, at the bottom of the ocean.

“What was astonishing was back in 1977, when these were first discovered, geologists were anticipating finding active regions that were perhaps chemically interesting, but they did not expect to find the biology that was there,” he said.

Around the vents, scientists found microbes that were feeding off the chemical energy and minerals from the hot water.

“It’s super heated, but the chemically rich composition of it allows microbes to eat it and then the crabs, the shrimp and the other creatures that we see are able to use those microbes as the base of the food chain,” Hand said.

To understand the pressure of Europa’s ocean, Hand attended a National Geographic trip to the Challenger Deep, the deepest known point in the Earth’s seabed hydrosphere. In addition to a human-occupied submersible, the team released robots that could remain underwater for long periods of time, meaning the team could attach bait to the robots and see what they attracted. 

“In the deepest, darkest, most extreme environment in our planet’s ocean, we see life not just seeking out a living, we see life thriving,” he said. “What you are seeing are hundreds to thousands of little shrimp-like creatures called arthropods that came out of the darkness to feed on a fish head in a trap that we set up.”

The exploration of Europa is Hand’s “dream of dreams” mission. Once a spacecraft enters the ice-ocean interface and makes contact with life, Hand said the understanding of life beyond Earth will “change forever.”

Hand closed his lecture by sharing a 400-year-old sketch by Galileo, what he calls his “favorite image of the universe.”

At the center of the sketch is Jupiter.

“Galileo turned his telescope to the night sky, pointed it at Jupiter and he saw not just Jupiter, but these four little points of light around Jupiter,” he said. “Those four little points of light, he initially thought were just stars.”

Galileo quickly realized the lights couldn’t be stars because their positions constantly changed. According to Hand, by discovering the moons of Jupiter, Galileo helped put the “final nail in the coffin of Aristotelian cosmology.” 

“With the idea that the Earth is at the center of the universe and everything revolves around the Earth, (Galileo) really opened the doorways for the Copernican Revolution, which set the stage for the Earth going around the sun, our sun being a star, the stars that we see being suns in their own right and potentially being host to planets of their own,” he said.

In the decades that followed Galileo’s lifetime, Hand said humans would come to appreciate that the laws of physics, geology and chemistry work beyond Earth. The role of the fourth major science on other planets — biology — is still unknown.

“We don’t yet know whether the science of us —  whether life — exists beyond Earth,” Hand said. “Does biology work beyond Earth, or is life on Earth the only singularity for biology in this universe?”

According to Hand, there is no better time than now to add biology to the list.

“We can send out the robotic spacecraft, do the experiments, search for signs of life and see whether or not we are alone,” he said. “In doing so, we can potentially bring the universe to life.”

Eric Klinenberg believes the key to a more equitable society lies in shared spaces — specifically, in libraries.

Klinenberg, professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University, and author of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life, spoke at 10:45 a.m. Friday, July 5 in the Amphitheater, closing Week Two’s theme, “Uncommon Ground:  Communities Working Toward Solutions.”

Klinenberg tried to impart the importance of libraries to his daughter through a social experiment. The plan was to take her to the new Amazon 4-Star store in SoHo, and refrain from buying anything. Next, he was going to take her to the Seward Park Library and let her check out anything she asked for.

However, his plan fell apart when the library was closed. Klinenberg forgot libraries closed on Sundays.

“Not long ago, Sundays were actually the busiest day in the New York Public Library system because on Sundays, what you want is to go be with your family in a place that’s generous, and to be with your neighbors, and just to have that time,” Klinenberg said.

According to Klinenberg, the experiment was a “powerful experience” that taught him the vital role of social infrastructures.

“When I say ‘social infrastructure,’ what I mean is that in the same way we have a lower-level infrastructure that supports things like water, power, transit —  things we take for granted — there is a set of physical places and organizations that shapes our capacity to participate in social life,” he said.

Klinenberg was first introduced to social infrastructure as a graduate student. The first project he completed for his program was about the 1995 Chicago heat wave.

In 1995, the temperature in Chicago hit 106 degrees, but “felt like 126 degrees.” Over the course of five days, thousands of residents were hospitalized and 739 died.

“I got really curious about what happened,” Klinenberg said. “I wanted to understand who died and why they died and where they died.”

The first thing Klinenberg did was draw maps of the mortality patterns. One thing jumped out right away: Chicago is a “famously segregated and unequal city.”

“The parts of Chicago that were most likely to suffer, that had the most deaths, were the neighborhoods on the South Side and the West Side where there is concentrated African American poverty,” he said.

Klinenberg said he doubts anyone would be surprised to learn that poor communities were hit the hardest.

“Is there a single person in this room who is surprised by the fact that when this heat wave came, this natural disaster came, that the poorest and most vulnerable areas were hit the hardest?” he said. “I don’t think so. That’s what we expect. That’s why that concept of ‘natural disaster’ is ridiculous. There is nothing ‘natural’ about that disaster.”

But when he looked closer, he saw something everyone else missed.

“The really amazing thing about what happened in Chicago, the real moment where social science helps us understand something we couldn’t otherwise see, is that there was also a set of neighborhoods in Chicago that looked, on paper, demographically like they should have fared catastrophically during this event,” he said. “But in fact, they proved to be some of the safest neighborhoods in Chicago, safer than the very affluent neighborhoods on the North Side.”

The neighborhoods of Englewood and Auburn Gresham border each other in Chicago’s South Side, but the impact the heat wave had on each of them could not have been more different.

According to Klinenberg, Englewood had suffered for decades before the heat wave hit. Factories had closed down, jobs disappeared and in response, thousands of people left.

“It feels bombed out,” he said. “It’s not just that there’s segregation and poverty over here, it’s that the social infrastructure is bombed out.”

In order to survive in Englewood, Klinenberg said people made their homes as nice as they could. They hunkered down and avoided socializing.

“What happens is if you live over here, you don’t ordinarily go out and talk to your neighbors and get to know people, like you do in Chautauqua, or even on the other side of the street,” he said. “That’s fine most of the time, but when a heat wave comes and your survival strategy is to stay indoors, you cook.”

Auburn Gresham looked the exact same on paper. The data on poverty levels and segregation was identical, except that the neighborhood didn’t experience the same cycle of depopulation.

“There are no abandoned lots or abandoned houses,” he said. “You still have retail infrastructure, you keep the sidewalks together, you’ve got local churches, you’ve got nonprofit community organizations. So what happens is you talk to each other.”

The socialization in Auburn Greshman made people more likely to check in on each other and help when needed.

“It’s not that in Englewood you don’t care, it’s just that you don’t know each other that well,” he said. “The death rate here in Auburn Gresham is 10 times lower than it is in Englewood. But here’s the really crazy thing: The life expectancy, no matter what the weather is, is five years longer. That’s social infrastructure.”

In September 2012, Klinenberg was teaching at NYU when he announced the university would begin working to rebuild New York City for “a new era.” That work was quickly brought to a halt a month later when Hurricane Sandy hit.

“Sandy was really hard,” he said. “I realized that in New York City even, there’s not really an institution that stands up and helps the city process what happens during a major event like this. I wanted the university to step up and play that role.”

In addition to planning city events focused on hurricane recovery, climate change and the future of New York City, Klinenberg started writing articles about social infrastructure. His work got the attention of the Obama administration.

“They saw this work; they were interested in social infrastructure and they said ‘Look, we are going to have this international design competition to try to generate innovative ideas for how to build infrastructure and structures to help the United States get into the 21st century,’ ” he said.

The competition was called “Rebuild by Design.” Klinenberg was recruited to be the research director and show design teams the “needs, vulnerabilities and possibilities” for the region, post-hurricane.

The teams didn’t come in with a proposal; they came in with a mission statement, and they would shape their proposal in the context of the competition. Klinenberg said bringing in outside perspectives was important, because a lot of leading engineers and policy officials suggested the city build a wall.

“This isn’t really a Republican thing, by the way,” Klinenberg said. “There is a long-standing American history of being confronted with a problem, like say, racial integration, and saying ‘Oh, the solution to this is to build a wall.’ They didn’t invent this, guys; we own it.”

But a wall wouldn’t work to protect Manhattan. The first reason is because the Hudson River’s ecosystem is too fragile to block the flow of water. The second reason is because New Jersey is on the other side.

“If you build a wall to protect Manhattan from a massive climate event, the water and the sediment that was surging in, it doesn’t just evaporate; it goes to New Jersey,” Klinenberg said.

The pattern continues from one state to the next; the question becomes: Where would the wall stop?

“Let’s be honest, we have to ask that question everywhere,” Klinenberg said. “Whether it’s inside the City of Cleveland or Pittsburgh or Chicago or Detroit or New York City, or whether it’s the southern border, where do we stop building the wall? The thing about a wall is, at best, it protects the people who are on the right side and says to everybody else ‘To hell with you, figure it out for yourself.’ And as it happens, a wall works just about as well for water as it does for people, which is not too well.”

Klinenberg was walking a design team around Brooklyn when they pitched him an idea called a “resilience center.” The building was supposed to act as a home away from home. There would be programs geared toward children and the elderly, with activities such as craft classes, book clubs and film screenings. There would also be free Wi-Fi, comfortable seating and coffee.

Klinenberg told the team they just described a library.

“It was weird because they basically just spent months reinventing the wheel,” he said. “I got frustrated about that because I love libraries, but the truth is that we live in a moment where a lot of people do take them for granted, and fail to recognize that we do have these things called libraries.”

Klinenberg recalled an article in Forbes magazine in which a columnist wrote: “A library as an institution is obsolete.” The columnist went on to propose that libraries across the country should get knocked down and replaced with Amazon stores.

Then, an “incredible” thing happened. Librarians united and posted testimonies about the power of libraries on social media.

“They said things about how libraries remain the place where more Americans get early literacy and exposed to books than any other institution,” he said. “The library does more English-as-a-second-language training than any institution. It does more citizenship courses, it provides companionship for older people, it has after-school programming for young people — the same young people we are always telling to get off the streets.”

Along with the resources libraries can provide, Klinenberg said a common theme on social media was how library cards serve as a right of passage.

“For many of us, it’s the first time in our lives that we get officially recognized by the government and by the community as a participant, as a member,” he said.

In response, Forbes took the article down. Klinenberg said he considers it “the only good thing that’s ever happened on Twitter.” However, it worries him that there are still people who think libraries are irrelevant.

“There are people who think if we are going to solve a big problem, we better get an app, we better have a market-based solution to make it sustainable,” he said.

Klinenberg asked the audience to forget that libraries exist, and to imagine pitching the idea of a library to Gov. Andrew Cuomo in Albany. Every aspect of the pitch would be appealing, until someone suggests that everything in the building should be free and operate on a system of trust.

“I am almost willing to guess that the idea that I just pitched to you, this idea of these public libraries, might be one of the most radical ideas ever to be pitched here on the stage of Chautauqua,” he said. “It’s a radical idea, but here’s the crazy thing: We have it. It’s real.”

The “radical” presence of libraries raises a question: “How did that happen?”

“What happened, that we have libraries in every town, in every neighborhood, that welcome us all in, that operate as the best social infrastructure you can get?” he said.

Klinenberg said libraries came to life because of the values of people who lived generations ago.

“People just like us, sat in a place just like this and said ‘I want to live in a society that’s a good society, where everyone has an opportunity, where people do well and live well, but not so outrageously well that it comes at the expense of the well-being of the people around me,’ ” he said.

Libraries were also the result of a government that invested in public good.

“They said ‘We are not just going to say this rhetorically, we are going to put our money there,’ ” he said. “ ‘We are going to invest our tax dollars, we will pay more money. I might have a little bit less, but in the big picture I am going to have a lot more.’ Generations before us said that. That’s why the (Smith Memorial Library) is right there.”

In order to progress as a society and create new, worthwhile social infrastructures, Klinenberg said the current generation needs to start prioritizing the “people coming next.”

“We have to rebuild,” Klinenberg said. “We have to build bridges. We need to reanimate our social life, our civic life and we need to do it now. If we try to do it by building a wall, we’re doomed. But you know how else we’re doomed? If we try to do it on our phones. No two people will argue faster in any form than Twitter if that’s where they meet. You know where we are going to do it? You know where we are going to rebuild? Smith Library over there, and in places like Chautauqua.”

Anna Clark believes Flint, Michigan, was harmed by the “danger of the single story.” As the chronicle of its water crisis was told again and again, she said the community was reduced being portrayed as “nothing but a basket case.”

To expand on the city beyond the crisis, Clark, journalist and author of The Poisoned City: Flint’s Water and the American Urban Tragedy, moderated the Week Two panel on “Uncommon Ground: Communities Working Toward Solutions” with journalist Jiquanda Johnson and entrepreneur Lev Hunter at the morning lecture Wednesday in the Amphitheater.

“It is not that this story is necessarily untrue, but it isn’t complete,” Clark said. “That causes actual harm to people. I think this is acutely relevant in Flint, Michigan, the City of Detroit, where I live, and in disinvested communities all over the country where there is the familiar story of what these places have lost over many, many years. In Flint’s case, I would venture that its single story actively contributed to the harm done of its extraordinary water crisis.”

Clark turned the conversation over to Johnson, founder and publisher of the hyper-local online newspaper, Flint Beat, and Hunter, creator of the shop and podcast “The Daily Brew,” asking how their Flint-centered careers originated.

Johnson started her journalism career at The Flint Journal. Born and raised in Flint, she knew there was more to the community than what the paper was reporting.

“At the time, we were saturated with crime, sports and the Flint water crisis,” she said.

Johnson took matters into her own hands and created Flint Beat to fill in the gaps of Flint’s untold stories.

“I really jumped out there on journalistic faith and I launched Flint Beat,” Johnson said. “I was thinking about it as a journalist and the impact I am going to make on my community, so I just stepped out there and started covering it in a way I felt it needed to be covered, and in a way that the community had asked me to cover it.”

Hunter is also a lifelong resident of Flint. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, he knew a business was the platform he wanted to use to make a difference. In 2018, Hunter launched The Daily Brew, an online coffee shop that “brews java and conversation.”

When Hunter was hesitant to take the first step, his pastor told him the best times to start a business are either when the community “is in a turnaround, or when there are issues or trouble.”

“During this time in Flint is probably the best time to start a business, because if you can be resilient in this, when the glory days come, this is going to be such a downhill, easy street to go,” Hunter said.

The Daily Brew’s business motto is “coffee brews conversation.” Hunter thinks conversation in Flint is critical to improve morale.

“So, when you have a water crisis, the only conversation people are having is ‘How bad is it?’ or ‘Woe is me,’ and I think sometimes if you can bring people together to have meaningful, intentional conversations, then you’ll start seeing a community change,” he said.

Clark asked Johnson and Hunter what they had to “keep and let go of” from the beginning of their careers in order to embark on their own journeys.

Coming from a traditional journalism background, Johnson felt she needed to get out of the “business of being in a hamster wheel.”

“I had to learn that’s not necessarily how I am going to make a real impact,” she said. “I need to start paying attention more to my sources, digging deeper for stories and not necessarily reaching for the low-hanging fruit.”

Johnson found that being her own boss has led to more success.

“Sometimes I sit on stories a little longer, sometimes I reach out to a few more people before we publish,” she said. “My one friend said ‘We got it first, but you got it right.’ ”

According to Hunter, the key is “using what you have.”

“It’s 2019, and business today is totally different than what it was for my father and my grandfather,” he said. “It’s this thing called the internet — I don’t know if you guys have heard of it. When you’re in a place like Flint, Michigan, you know, everybody is not well off, everybody’s not well-to-do, so you use what you have.”

With all Flint has lost in the water crisis, Clark asked why it was worth it to not only stay as residents, but to “grow new structures.”

Hunter said the people of Flint keep him inspired.

“I love Flint,” he said. “There is no other place in this world quite like Flint, and what makes that true is the people there. You have so many resilient people.”

In addition to his coffee business, Hunter also sees resilience through his job working with victims of violent crime.

“I am the ambulance at the bottom of a hill that someone has jumped off of,” Hunter said. “To be in that role with people, at their lowest moment, and they still have a will to want more or to want better, that’s remarkable. To have a water crisis, to have a job lost, to have violence, to have all of those things that have happened, you still have a core group of people that want to see (Flint) rise back to its glory days. I don’t know where you see an American story in our country like that.”

At one point, Johnson tried to leave Flint. After moving to Charlotte, North Carolina, she immediately wanted to go home.

“I just knew that I saw some wonderful things going on in Charlotte that could happen at home, so I was called back home,” she said. “I haven’t missed a beat. … It’s that love and that passion that keeps us where we are because I’ve had other opportunities. It’s also wanting to make a difference and being part of something that nobody knows what it’s going to bring, but we know it’s going to be great.”

Clark then directed the conversation to youth involvement, something Johnson has experience with in Flint.

Johnson said the kids in Flint were aware of the crisis, but didn’t know they could be a part of the reporting. In response, Johnson launched a youth journalism program in 2018 to implement new voices for Flint Beat.

“These young people, they are the today,” Johnson said. “But they also, in Flint in particular, need people who are going to invest in them, people who are going to listen to them and position them in places they need to be in order for them to also have an impact and make change. In Flint, doors are closed on these young people so often. I’m 43, doors are closed on me all the time in Flint. I am just one of those people who wants to be a vehicle for them so they can make change.”

Clark asked Johnson and Hunter why they focus on generating “alternative sources of power” in their community.

Hunter said the question reminded him of one of the “greatest presidents,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his efforts in the New Deal.

“He talked about the New Deal and getting people back to work and really getting this country together to bring prosperity, and that’s what we are doing in Flint,” Hunter said. “We are looking for those opportunities — that are unconventional — to bring jobs or sometimes just a smile. We use what I call the ‘New Deal 2.0,’ and it’s really going to come from people investing back into places like Flint.”

When it comes to investing, Clark asked if there were any public policies that could help Hunter and Johnson do their jobs and make the necessary changes for Flint’s longevity.

As a journalist, Johnson tries to separate herself from policy. However, she thinks it’s important for people to understand that Flint is serving as a “sustainability model.”

“(Flint Beat) is being now looked at nationally (for how we can) sustain journalism in underserved communities,” she said. “When we speak to the underserved, it’s not just predominantly black communities, we are talking about poor communities or rural communities. What do we need to be able to support this kind of news? Because it’s needed.”

Hunter believes there is a lot of “distrust” in the government in Flint, so he’s putting his trust in the hands of the people.

“At the end of the day, I would probably like to bet more on people helping better than government helping people,” he said. “It’s people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, but learning how to craft the bootstrap, how to sell the bootstrap. I don’t know if policy is the key, it’s people. People help people.”

Clark recognized that Hunter and Johnson can’t do their jobs alone, and asked what help they have accepted along the way.

Hunter recalled an opportunity in Flint to receive a Per Capita loan. From what he had been told, Hunter did not meet the necessary criteria to apply. When he met one of the lenders, he was told the information he had wasn’t true. He wasn’t alone; it was why no one in Flint had applied for the loan in the past year.

“It is so disheartening when you go to the places in your town that are supposed to help you and they put barriers in front of you,” Hunter said. “It seems as if there is a checkbox that they check to say ‘Hey, we did all of these things, now give us more money,’ to continue to be gatekeepers to money.”

Johnson said she agreed with Hunter “150%” and has her own set of issues with philanthropic foundations acting as gatekeepers.

“What I’m suggesting to them is let’s take that (barrier) down,” she said. “Let’s go directly to me. Give me the money so I can put it where I need it to be, instead of giving these foundations money where they’re building capacity to tell me where they think I need it.”

Outside of funding, Clark asked what the two have learned from other organizations that have aided them in their work.

Johnson said she learned that she couldn’t be successful by herself.

“If you do this by yourself, if you try, you’ll probably fail,” she said. “You need a team, you need a partner, you need some support. It’s not always about funding; it’s us being resourceful.”

For Hunter, it’s all about building the right relationships. Hunter said he has gained a lot of opportunities through other entrepreneurs.

“Like (Johnson) said, it’s not all about funding,” he said. “Sometimes that’s just the engine in the car. It’s all about if you don’t have the engine running, can you ask two or three people to help you push?”

To conclude the conversation, Clark asked what Flint can teach communities beyond its city limits.

For both Hunter and Johnson, it all goes back to resilience.

“You find out you’re resilient when you are forced into a situation,” Johnson said. “The water crisis was not a happy thing, and through it some people found out they could endure a lot more than they thought they could. It is because of that Flint will survive. It’s because of resilience that we will rebuild, we will move forward and there will be a better day.”

Hailed as a hero in the “Boston Miracle,” the Rev. Jeffrey Brown helped launch a movement that decreased youth crime rates in Boston by 79%. The way he did it was radical at the time — he went straight to the source.

To share his experiences, Brown, pastor and co-founder of Boston TenPoint Coalition, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, July 2 in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Two’s theme, “Uncommon Ground: Communities Working Toward Solutions.”

When Brown first became a pastor, he wanted to serve in a megachurch.

“I wanted a 15 to 20,000-member church,” Brown said. “I wanted my own television ministry. I wanted my own clothing line. I wanted to be a long-distance carrier. You know, the whole nine yards.”

After a year, his church only grew by 20 members, and he realized his dream was farther away than he anticipated. In the meantime, Brown simply wanted to be a “good pastor.”

“I wanted to be with people through all of the passages of life,” he said. “The birth of children, who grow, go to school. To be with families through all of the crises of life; when someone gets sick, to go to a hospital and to visit them and to be there for the final transitions when the matriarchs and the patriarchs pass on, and you gather a family together to remember a life well lived.”

As Brown was embarking on the path “God called him to,” the homicide rates in his Boston community increased dramatically.

“There were young people who were shooting and killing each other for reasons I thought were very trivial,” he said. “Someone stepping on someone’s sneaker in a high school hallway and after school, instead of fisticuffs, someone would get shot.”

It occurred to Brown that he had a congregation at his disposal. He started to preach against the violence and began developing programs in the church he hoped would bring in at-risk youth. At the same time, he was encouraging other pastors to do the same.

“I thought, ‘this is our contribution to the problem, and if we have enough people to do it for long enough, then perhaps we will stem the tide of violence,’ ” Brown said.

But Brown’s efforts fell short, and the violence started to “spiral out of control.”

“The city of Boston experienced, out of 700,000, 152 homicides and 1,100 gun shootings that year,” he said. “Which means the violence was not just focused on those who were out on the streets, but also on folks who had absolutely nothing to do with the violence.”

The violence was so bad that it started to change the character of the city. Gunfire rang like fireworks every night and consequently, hospitals filled with victims of the crimes. Brown realized he was aiding families in the passages of life like he had always dreamed, but not for the matriarchs and patriarchs he had envisioned.

“I was also doing funerals of 18-year olds, 17-year olds and 16-year olds,” he said. “I was standing at the pulpit of a church or a funeral home, struggling to say something that would make a difference.”

Then came the moment Brown said he “will never forget.” At a community meeting about the violence, a woman stood up and said it was caused by a “lost generation.”

“Her solution was this: We need to take the time, talent and resources and plow them into the generation coming up, because this generation that is experiencing this violence is a lost generation,” Brown said.

When Brown left the meeting, two problems occurred to him: First, how can a community survive without an entire generation? Second, even if the community decides to take its time, talent and resources and concentrate them on youth, a generation was still being lost.

“I realized that (her solution) wasn’t the answer,” he said. “So the question was, ‘what is the answer?’ ”

Brown recalled a story of a boy named Jessie. Jessie had bought a brand new leather jacket and when two boys tried to take it, Jessie resisted. They killed him. As Jessie was running away, an eyewitness said he was running toward Brown’s church and died 150 yards in front of the building.

“Not to say he was trying to get to the church, but if he would have gotten to the church, it wouldn’t have made any difference because the lights were out and nobody was home,” Brown said. “When I got there later on and they told me the circumstances of what happened, it was an image that I could not get out of mind. The young man in desperate need of help, but the church would not have been there to help him because there was nobody there.”

A few days later, police caught some of the people involved in the murder, and Brown was shocked to find out they were only a few years younger than him.

“These young men who had done this deed were part of my own generation, but I knew nothing of the world they lived in,” he said.

As Brown contemplated what had happened in his city, a “funny kind of paradox” started to emerge. The paradox was that Brown’s definition of community was excluding the people committing the crimes.

“If I really wanted the community that I was seeking and praying for, I needed to redefine my sense of community and reach out and embrace those I had cut out of that definition,” Brown said.

Brown said that meant not only creating programming for at-risk youth, but engaging those who were committing the acts of violence. However, as soon as he came to that conclusion, another question occurred: “Why me?”

“As soon as that question came up, the answer came back just as quickly,” he said. “Why me? Because I’m the one who can’t sleep at night. Because I’m the one looking around saying, ‘Somebody needs to do something about this,’ and I’m starting to realize that someone is me.”

Just as Brown was finding his individual purpose, an incident occurred that brought the entire community together. Brown called this moment “the morning star.”

During a funeral at the Morning Star Baptist Church in Boston, a young man entered the room. A gang across the street from the church knew him as a member of a rival gang and they ran in after him. The gang started shooting and stabbing the boy in front of the altar.

The pastor at the funeral went on the radio that night and said a line had been crossed, and that the community of faith in Boston needed to come together.

More than 350 clergy members came from around Boston to meet with the pastor. They gave “eloquent speeches” and decided to meet the next Tuesday to talk about what actions could be taken. They did that again and again until nine Tuesdays had passed; only seven clergy members were showing up and zero action had been taken.

At the last meeting, it was recommended that the clergy members break off into committees. Realizing the answers did not lie within the four walls of his sanctuary, Brown made the decision to “meet the youth where they were at,” on the streets. Thus, a street committee formed.

The street committee met in Four Corners, the most violent neighborhood in Boston. Every night from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m., the committee would walk the streets, observing the activity around them. At first, Brown said people just stared at them, but eventually, they started to approach the group.

“Then we did an amazing thing as preachers,” he said. “We decided to listen and not preach.”

As Brown listened, he realized he had many misconceptions about the youth in his community.

“What we discovered was our perception was being colored by the 11 o’clock news or by the popular culture of the day, the music, the movies,” he said. “The reality was very, very different.”

The first misconception was that the youth were materialistic.

“We thought these kids were completely materialistic and that all they wanted was clothing and jewelry, ‘the bling,’ as they would call it,” he said. “But we found out that these kids were no more, no less bitten by the consumer bug than we are.”

The second misconception was that the kids would never want to talk about faith. 

“I have had some of my most profound theological discussions, not in the hallowed halls of a seminary, but on a street corner at 1 a.m.,” he said.

Brown recalled a story in Four Corners when the committee tried to get people to stop selling drugs in a local park. There was a fence that separated the park from the street and there was always a boy at the door of the fence to let the pastors in and out. He never spoke, until one day he asked to speak to Brown’s friend, Bob.

At the end of the night, everyone asked Bob what the boy said.

The boy told Bob that out of all the things he had done in his life, he seemed to have lost his conscience and needed help getting it back.

“Imagine walking out with your friend, late at night, shots ringing out, a boy gets hit, you watch the life drain out of his body and you’ve got questions,” Brown said. “Where is he going? What are we doing in all of this? Can we ever get out?”

According to Brown, that is where the movement began — when he saw that people could find common ground through dialogue. Realizing he needed more than the help of other clergy members, Brown created a partnership with the Boston Police Department.

“If you know anything about the City of Boston and its history of race relations, you should know it is no small thing that you have black and Latino pastors coming together with white, Irish, Catholic police officers.”

Brown said the partnership started with the gang unit officers patrolling the streets. The officers started reaching out to clergy members to hear their perspective on the community.

“We started to talk to them about the work that we were doing with these gang members, and they realized that they had community leaders who understood what they had to deal with on a nightly basis,” he said.

The youth in the community agreed to let the clergy be a liaison between them and the police.

“We had this role between the police and the youth as these honest brokers, trying to find a way to make this whole thing work and make the community safer,” Brown said.

Soon enough, probation officers and city officials got involved, and Brown saw a transformation in his city.

“In the beginning, most of the homicides were juvenile related; either a juvenile was being killed or involved in a shooting,” he said. “We went from 152 (homicides) to a 29-month period in which we had zero juvenile homicide.”

“It’s not so much that the youth decided not to shoot, but it was the adults being able to come together and check their egos at the door,” he said.

Although the journey had its ups and downs, Brown has seen stability in his work. To him, the future is not only about making sure the rates of violence stay down, it’s about ending the “dominance and era of violence.”

“You might say ‘Well that’s a tall order,’ ” he said. “Well, I believe in a God that relishes tall orders, who takes the impossible and brings it into the realm of possibility. Even in the midst of our struggle and all the things we are dealing with today, I still believe we are at a moment in which we can come together, even in the midst of our divisiveness, to actually be the community that God means for us to be. I may  just be a believer, but I know I’m not the only one.”

As a first-semester freshman at Ohio State University, John Kasich talked his way into the Oval Office. Coming up short in two presidential elections since then, Kasich would say he peaked at 18.

Kasich, former Ohio governor and current CNN political commentator, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday in the Amphitheater, opening Week Two, “Uncommon Ground: Communities Working Toward Solutions.”

Kasich grew up in Mckees Rocks, Pennsylvania, a town he called “rough and blue collar.” His father was a mailman, and his grandfather was a coal miner. His mother was a smart, but “undereducated woman” and his grandmother could barely speak English.

“It was the kind of  place, for those of you who know Mckees Rocks and blue collar towns, if the wind blew the wrong way, people found themselves out of work,” Kasich said.

To break the cycle he watched growing up, Kasich made the decision to move away for college and ventured to Ohio State University in Columbus.

Right off the bat, Kasich said there were a number of things he did not approve of in his dorm building. Taking his uncle’s advice, “If you want to get somewhere, start at the top,” he called the president of the university and asked for a meeting.

After a lot of back-and-forth with the woman at the front desk, he eventually got in.

Kasich was impressed with the OSU president and his office. After expressing his concerns about campus residence halls, Kasich continued talking with the president to learn more about his job. The OSU president explained his day-to-day responsibilities, and mentioned an upcoming trip to see President Richard Nixon in Washington D.C.

“I said, ‘Sir, there are a number of things I’d like to talk to (Nixon) about also, could I come with you?’ ” he said.

OSU’s president said no, but agreed to let Kasich write a letter to pass along to Nixon. A couple weeks later, Kasich received a letter inviting him to the Oval Office. After convincing his parents the letter was legitimate, he flew to D.C.

Upon arriving at the White House, a man told Kasich he would have five minutes with Nixon.

“Let me tell you what I’m thinking: new jacket, new shirt, new tie, new pants — I didn’t come here for five lousy minutes,” Kasich said.

And he didn’t. Kasich spent 20 minutes with Nixon in the Oval Office.

“If you add up all of the time I’ve spent in the Oval Office as a nine-term congressman, I peaked out at the age of 18,” he said.

Despite this achievement early in his college career, Kasich ended up graduating without any connections for a job. Out of desperation, he inquired at the Ohio Statehouse and was offered an internship.

His boss was close with Ronald Reagan, who was just starting his campaign for president. During a convention in Kansas City, Kasich’s boss called and asked him to fly down and help. When he showed up, he was informed that the person who was supposed to run five states for Reagan didn’t show up and Kasich needed to take the position.

“I had no idea what that meant, and I said ‘No doubt about it, I can do it,’ ” he said.

Kasich went on to become the youngest state senator in Ohio’s history, served in Congress for 18 years and served two terms as Ohio’s governor.

Throughout his career, Kasich said he saw a shift in the way people express their political beliefs.   

“We were in a place in this country where we were just fighting with one another about politics,” he said. “Now we are at the point where we just don’t want to bring it up; we’re walking on eggshells.”

When Kasich looks at the way people have been divided over political ideologies, he said he finds it “crazy,” because power comes from the people.

“It’s kind of crazy to me because frankly, power doesn’t flow from the top, down,” Kasich said. “Power in America flows from the bottom, up.”

Kasich often hears people refer to each congressional and presidential election as “the most important election we’ve ever had in our history.” Although he recognizes that the stakes are higher in presidential elections, he doesn’t agree with that mentality in either case.

“I maintain that on a day-to-day basis, I’m not affected much by that,” he said. “I’m not. I would make an argument that most of you are the same way.”

Instead of Washington politics, Kasich said what affects the lives of everyday Americans is what happens in their towns, with their neighbors, their families and schools.

“Those are things that affect us so much more than (national) politicians,” he said.

To emphasize the importance of individual efforts, Kasich called on an audience member in the front row and told her “there has never been anyone like you.”

“I want you to internalize that because you were made for a purpose,” Kasich said. “You were made for a legacy. Understand that we are all part of a mosaic.”

Comparing the concept to a puzzle with a missing piece, Kasich said people neglecting their purpose and special gifts leads to the mosaic being incomplete.

The broader topic encompassed in the mosaic is “figuring out the meaning of life.”

While people explore the art, music, culture and conversations Chautauqua has to offer, Kasich believes their time on the grounds is about something more.

“You know what it’s really about?” he said. “ ‘Who am I? What am I? What am I supposed to do?’ This isn’t some canned speech or canned lecture, this is why the Lord lets me do this, I believe.”

While exploring the meaning of life, Kasich said he is frustrated by people resisting getting older.

“This whole business about getting old? Get over it,” he said. “God doesn’t have a retirement plan for us. It’s not like we get to a certain point and we are supposed to stop. Are you kidding me? People, when they get older, have greater wisdom, can give better direction to people and we have to use it.”

Whether people derive life’s meaning from the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas or John Locke, Kasich said they all agreed on one thing: “None of us are getting out of this place alive.”

“We are not here forever, so realizing that we have a gift, realizing that we have a responsibility to find those gifts and to use them in whatever way we can, means that we have a purpose and that we have to establish a legacy and we should not wait until the end,” he said.

Comparing the course of life to a touchdown in the last minute of a football game, Kasich said people often wonder what the players are waiting for the whole game.

“Let me ask you a question: Do you want to live a life where you are waiting for the last three minutes?” he said. “Why not get started today? Why not get rolling today? To lead an impactful life, to score some touchdowns and move the ball up and down the field?”

Meeting thousands of people in his political career, Kasich had numerous examples of ordinary citizens who didn’t wait.

He started with a story of a shoe shiner named Albert. One day, Albert heard an opportunity on the radio to help at a local children’s hospital. He took his life savings of $800 and donated it. Along with taking his donation, the hospital offered him a job shining shoes a couple days a week. Albert would put his shoe shining money in one pocket and his tip money in the other pocket to donate.

“Over the course of his service at the children’s hospital, he donated over $200,000 for a fund to help mothers and fathers pay the bills of their kids,” Kasich said. “Did Albert change the world? Yes, he did. Wouldn’t we all like to be Albert today?”

When Kasich was governor, he would give out courage awards to honor someone “who did something special.” His youngest honoree was a 9-year-old boy. The boy had grown up in homeless shelters until he moved in with his grandmother. She knew he wanted an Xbox and decided to tell him he would be getting one for Christmas. Instead of agreeing to accept it, he asked that she use the money to buy blankets for people living in homeless shelters.

“They bought the blankets, and people from all over were sending blankets to the homeless shelter,” he said. “What a kid, huh?”

Kasich said everyone he used as an example shared the knowledge that there was more to the world than just them.

“None of them were victims, none of them were ever bitter, and they knew they could overcome the obstacles in their way to achieve something,” he said. “Well, what they were really doing, is they were living a life a little bigger than ourselves.”

To broaden their perspectives on the world they are trying to change, Kasich said people need to make the effort.

“I have people say to me ‘I don’t even know what to believe,’ ” he said. “It’s not that hard. Research, do a little work. When you go to buy a car, you don’t look in the parking lot and say ‘OK, what do you have here?’ and the guy says ‘This is the greatest car ever’ and so you go and buy it?”

Kasich said rather than buying a car on the spot, one shops around first.

“So why don’t we shop around for what we believe?” Kasich asked.

People also need to stop refusing to consider other points of view, according to Kasich.

“You don’t have to agree with it, but stop walking away from it,” he said.

Attempting to make change, Kasich said, is often “walking a lonely road.”

“Martin Luther King — how do you think it went for him?” he said. “We all know Martin Luther King, but at that time, no one knew him, he was just some preacher down south. It killed him. They assassinated him for what he thought.”

Additional examples ranging from Rosa Parks, to Fannie Hamer, to the Parkland students and Greta Thunberg, Kasich proved his point that being disparaged can come with the territory of standing up for what one believes. Although it makes him angry, he believes it is important to consider the “misguided nature of the people who are doing the attacking.”

“One of the things I have found in my lifetime is if I can put myself in other people’s shoes, there are times when I can soften my opinion or soften my judgment,” he said. “But there are times when I’m just flat-out angry.”

Knowing polarization will rise again with the 2020 election, Kasich encouraged the audience to focus on what they can do in their communities to make a difference.

“I am going to wring my hands a little bit, but then I am going to try to figure out what I can do to be as impactful as I can be in my day-to-day life,” he said. “You see, in the great effort to repel the negativity and the division, power comes from the bottom, up. I mean think about it: the Civil Rights Movement didn’t come from the top, down. John Kennedy wanted nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement.”

To conclude his lecture, Kasich said if only a few people heard his message and chose to make a difference in their minds, hearts or communities, it would have been worth it.

“We are so good as a people,” he said, “if we just open our hearts and touch one another and remember in this country, the people rule. Bottom, up. It takes time, it takes patience, but at the end, that is how we will renew America. Let’s try it together. God bless you.”

When our lives are shaken, “we have a physical and spiritual shortness of breath,” Rabbi Sharon Brous told the congregation at the 9:15 a.m. Ecumenical Worship service Friday in the Amphiteather. “The question at the heart of our spiritual and political lives is: How do we get our breath back?”

Her sermon title was “I Need You to Breathe,” and the scripture text was Exodus 6:1-9. Brous said that when Moses told the people of Israel that God was ready to free them from bondage, they were too breathless from hard work to hear him. After 400 years of slavery, they could not fathom release.

Religion suffers in the modern world. First it suffers from religious terrorism, from those who wave the banner of religion in an obscene way that makes a mockery of what religion stands for. Second, it suffers from empty religiosity that is barren of life. Both of these sufferings, Brous said, are alienating a generation that defines itself as spiritual but not religious. The third way religion suffers is through religious escapism — religion as a pacifier.

“This is ‘our thoughts and prayers are with you’ religion,” she said. “We send thoughts and prayers to victims of hurricanes but will not deal with the climate change that is causing them. We send thoughts and prayers to the victims of shootings, but let’s not talk about gun control because that will politicize the tragedy.”

Religion is our oxygen, Brous said, “it is our fuel to breathe in a breathless time.” Brous asked why God had chosen Abraham to be the father of the faiths — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

“What was so special about him?” she asked. “Well, every superhero has an origin story.”

To illustrate her answer, she told the story of a traveler who saw a palace consumed by flames. The traveler asked “Who is the caretaker?” The owner poked his head through a window and said, “I am the owner.” Abraham, Brous said, saw the world on fire and asked who the caretaker was, and God said, “I am the owner.”

Brous said she loved everything about this story. The traveler was a person on the go who looked up from his cell phone and saw the palace on fire. As a person just passing through, he would have plausible deniability to say it was not his problem and keep going.

But the traveler stopped “and demanded to know who the caretaker was, who was responsible,” she said. “The man in the palace said ‘I am the owner. You, who noticed the fire, are the caretaker. Now it is your problem.’ ”

The descendents of Abraham must be awake in the world. There have always been palaces on fire, but we have to see, to notice, to be wakeful and respond with willful opposition, Brous said.

“We have to show up as pursuers of righteousness and justice in defiance of unjust power structures, to challenge God and man,” she said.

There is an ambiguity in this story, she said. Was the palace burning down, or was it radiant with light? The traveler might have stopped and asked “Who is responsible for this beauty?” The owner might say, “Thank you. Let’s work together.”

Abraham might have seen a world radiant with light and stopped in wonder. The Irish poet John O’Donohue said that we have a “huge interiority within us,” she told the congregation.

“What is going on in this sacred place, where people eat on their porches, invite neighbors in for a drink, go to the ballet and symphony, helps us remember our huge interiority,” she said. “It is impossible not to be swept up in what is breath-giving.”

When the heart is constricted, “awe” stretches the heart back out. There is a sense of wonder in the presence of altruism and compassion, and when we suffer from shortness of breath and spirit, we can’t hold onto beauty and ecstasy, she told the congregation.

“Is the palace burning down, or is it radiant with light? It is clearly both,” Brous said. “If all we see are the fires, we need to rediscover the beauty. If we only see the beauty, we need to be reminded of the brokenness that needs fixing.”

In our hour, she told the congregation, we need prophetic resistance to hold together the wonder and heartache, grief and grandeur.

“This is not an escape,” she said. “It is to be awake to the brokenness, and breathe life back into the world to usher in the world that could be.”

The work of Chautauqua begins when people leave “to bring ‘awe’ back into the world,” she said. “I beg you to remember there is beauty everywhere and you cannot forget to see it. Our culture trains us to see what went wrong, but we also have to train ourselves to see what is beautiful.”

Brous said she re-reads Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning every year. A survivor of Auschwitz, Frankl wrote that to live is to suffer but that “in some ways, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.” Frankl told a story that one night he was already in his hut with other prisoners, and a fellow prisoner came in and told them to run to the assembly ground to see the sunset. When they got there the sky was full of clouds that kept changing colors from steely blue to brilliant red. Those colors were reflected in the puddles on the ground with the gray huts as a backdrop.

One by one the prisoners said, “How beautiful this world could be.” Brous said, “And this, from Auschwitz.”

Brous then asked, what is the good news?  It is knowing where to find a patch of blue in the sky when there are clouds.

“Faith is not about being content, it is rebelling against the world as it is to help it become the world it can be, the world we want our children to inherit.”

“We need to find our breath,” she said, and then read a poem by the Rev. Lynn Ungar, “I Need You To Breathe.”

Breathe, said the wind./ How can I breathe at a time like this,/ when the air is full of the smoke/ of burning tires, burning lives?/ Just breathe, the wind insisted./ Easy for you to say, if the weight of/ injustice is not wrapped around your throat,/ cutting off all air./ I need you to breathe./ I need you to breathe./ Don’t tell me to be calm/ when there are so many reasons/ to be angry, so much cause for despair!/ I didn’t say to be calm, said the wind,/ I said to breathe./ We’re going to need a lot of air/ to make this hurricane together.

“We don’t need to escape,” Brous said. “We need to remember how to breathe. We are created to love and be loved. That is the good news.” The congregation, once again, gave her a standing ovation.

Inthe seemingly clear waters of the five Great Lakes, Dan Egan proved that looks can be deceiving.

Utilizing a combination of journalism, history and science, Egan painted a portrait of one of America’s most pressing ecological catastrophes, while outlining the ways to preserve the lakes for generations to come.

Two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Death and Life of The Great Lakes, Egan discussed the past and future of the lakes in a conversation with Emily Morris, Chautauqua’s vice president of marketing and communications and chief brand officer, Wednesday in the Amphitheater, continuing Week One’s theme “Moments That Changed the World.” This lecture also served as the first Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle Author Presentation of the summer.

In 1991, Egan started his newspaper reporting career in Idaho. Without any formal training in journalism, he said he felt “thrown” into the profession.

“As it happened, I was thrown into it in a place that had a lot of ecological issues that were really national issues at the time,” Egan said.

Reporting in central Idaho, the ecological issues he wrote about included topics such as salmon restoration and grizzly bear recovery.

“These were things that I wasn’t trained to do but I was immediately drawn to,” he said. “Not just the biology, but the tension between human wants and needs and these critters —humans and nature.”

Egan spent the next 10 years in Idaho and Utah covering various natural resource issues. In 2002, he moved to Wisconsin and started reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. He was hired as a “super-general-assignment feature writer,” meaning he could write long-form pieces on any subject. Egan found he was immediately drawn to the Great Lakes.

“I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I had been out west for a decade, literally in the desert, and then you come back and you see a body of water the size of what you see with the Chautauqua Lake out there, let alone Lake Michigan,” he said. “So, I was just sucked in to do stories, whether it was about ecological history of the waves, or the economy, or features about people who live on the lakes and have lived on the lakes for generations.”

About a year later, his managing editor suggested he turn the Great Lakes into a beat. Egan agreed.

“What followed was another 10 years of Great Lakes reporting,” Egan said. “That is where I got most of the material for this book. A lot of people say, ‘How long did it take you to write the book?’ The honest answer is more than 10 years because I got a running start with the newspaper.”

The idea to write a book originated in 2011 when he started a master’s and fellowship program at Columbia University in New York City.

“My goal, at the time, was just to take a break from the daily newspaper grind and to show my kids a little bit more of the world than suburban Milwaukee,” he said. “I thought it would be a time to recharge, and it was a time to be drained. It was a very intense program.”

Part of the program included a book-writing seminar where students had to put a book proposal together. Egan felt his reports over the years “stacked up like chapters,” making him more than prepared for the assignment.

“At this point, I wasn’t excited about the idea that I had a book-writing seminar and writing a book proposal, and that maybe someday this would become a book,” he said. “I was just trying to pass the class.”

Even if granted the time to complete such a large project, Egan said he felt too detached from the information to believe it would make any impact. 

“I got numb to all of this material that I had been reporting because I got so close to it, and I was writing for Milwaukeeans and Wisconsinites,” he said. “I had an assumption that a lot of people understood some of the basic history of the Great Lakes.”

Egan found that assumption to be untrue when his peers at Columbia were shocked by the stories he told of the lakes’ decline. While that response was encouraging, he still took a regional approach to the book in his proposal, an approach agents told him wouldn’t be enough. 

“It was really pressed upon me that I was writing too regional and that this is a national story,” Egan said. “I didn’t really believe them, but I do now because here I am.”

The story in his book starts by explaining why the five Great Lakes were originally isolated from the rest of the aquatic world.

“That’s because nothing could swim up from the Atlantic,” he said. “First of all, you have the St. Lawrence River, which in its natural state was a heck of a torrent. There was no way stuff was going to migrate up from Montreal. Even if something could make it across Lake Ontario, you’re going to hit a wall, and that wall is Niagara Falls. That’s how these lakes and their fish were isolated on the East Coast.”

In The Death and Life, Egan refers to the East Coast as the “front door.” The “back door” is the subcontinental divide, a ridge that separates the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes.

The “death” of the lakes started with the “front door.” Canals were built to link the eastern seaboard to the lakes for “obvious economic reasons,” Egan said.

“But we didn’t just get the cargo coming in that they were expecting, we got species that we weren’t ready for and never even pondered,” he said.

The same thing happened on the western side of the lakes with the construction of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal in 1900, a canal designed to reroute Chicago’s sewage away from Lake Michigan because it was infiltrating drinking water supplies.

“It made sense to flush it away from their drinking water intakes in Lake Michigan and put it into the Mississippi River basin, but that created a corridor, too, for all manner of species to come into the lakes,” he said. “So, we had this pristine, well-functioning, exquisitely balanced system, that got shredded in a matter of decades.”

The first thing Egan said “did a number on the lakes” was sea lamprey, a parasitic lamprey native to the Eastern Hemisphere. Egan believes the lamprey entered the lakes through the Erie or Welland Canal.

“The lamprey, they’re fish, but they look like a snake or an eel, and they’re hundreds of millions of years old,” he said. “They are good at what they do, and what they do is they suck the life out of big fish, and so when these canals opened, the lampreys slithered in and they just did a number on the lake trout.”

At the time, lake trout were the “wolves” of the lakes. 

“They controlled the flow of energy in the system,” he said. “In a matter of decades, they knocked it out and with no wolf in control, everything underneath it exploded.”

Behind the lamprey came an invasion of alewives and ocean herrings. Egan said at one point, the alewives made up 90% of the fish in Lake Michigan. However, they began dying at an alarming rate.

“They were dying because they weren’t natural born, freshwater species,” he said. “They spent some of their life in freshwater, but most of it was out in the ocean. So, their kidneys were constantly in distress, which made them vulnerable to all manners of die-offs and they were dying by the billions.”

To start fixing the disrupted balance, Egan said scientists developed “lampricide,” a poison that killed only lamprey.

“We started dosing the streams with lampricide and we knocked out the lamprey,” he said. “It’s a program that’s still going on today and it costs about $25 million a year, and it’s been going on since the 1950s, so you’re looking at something up into the billions of dollars that this has cost. Not to eradicate it, but to control it.”

Once the lampreys were taken care of, scientists needed to find something to eat the alewives because the lake trout were almost gone. Though the alewife population in the Great Lakes experienced die-offs, those die-off events happened seasonally; thus alewives were still an ongoing issue for lake trout.

“We could have brought back lake trout exclusively to the Great Lakes, but there was this idea that we could bring in something sexier, something more fun,” he said.

Pacific coho, a type of salmon, was brought in to try to restore the balance, but scientists were skeptical that the new fish would survive. Although they did, Egan calls this victory an “artificial balance” because canals were still allowing invasions.

However, the second round of invasions was not caused by fish swimming in, but rather by organisms that stuck to boats sailing up the Welland Canal.

Egan said this type of invasion was prevalent in the St. Lawrence Seaway, a series of canals in Canada and the United States, that connected the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes.

“On a map, it made a lot of sense, but nobody was pondering what this could mean to open it to, not just barges coming in, but big ocean freighters,” Egan said. “These freighters need balance water, which helps them sail safely, but that water isn’t dead weight, it’s anything but.”

Since the seaway opened in 1959, that “dead weight” has added more than 60 non-native species. According to Egan, quagga mussels did the most damage out of all of them.

“They are remarkable,” he said. “They are only the size of a fingernail, but you can’t think of them as one organism, you have to think of them as cancer cells in a bloodstream, it’s part of a larger, little organism. By large, I mean the bottom of Lake Michigan is almost 100% covered with these mussels, clustering in densities of 100,000 per square meter. Each one of them can filter a liter of water a day, so they are literally sucking the life out of the lakes.”

Because the quagga mussels filter-feed so much plankton, which exist near the bottom of the food chain, the food web of the lakes was changed.

Even with restoration efforts, Egan said the opening of the “front and back doors” permanently altered the lakes.

“The doors that we opened with the best of intentions — they were good ideas at the time, but a good idea for this time is to close them,” he said. “And they can be closed. We have technologies that we didn’t have in 1959 that we are not fully using.”

According to Egan, the suffering these issues cause reaches far beyond the U.S. and Canadian residents inside the basin.

“It is because these doors, particularly the East Coast, the front door, is really a door to the continent,” he said. “You would not have zebra mussels here if you did not have boats sailing on the St. Lawrence Seaway from the other side of the ocean. They can’t swim, they needed a ride, and so we open these doors and we don’t just suffer on the shores of the Great Lakes, we suffer across the country.”

Egan recognizes that although the lakes will never be what they were, the future isn’t “all doom and gloom.” It’s fragile, but a new balance is returning to the lakes. To continue fostering the new order among species, Egan said people have to find a way to limit entry points into the lakes.

No legislative action has been taken to work toward limiting access into the waters, but according to Egan, that wouldn’t make the necessary difference. Instead, the future of the lakes depends on individual action.

“This isn’t going to happen with one magic signature,” he said. “The water isn’t going to take care of itself, and it’s easy to say that you value freshwater, but you have to get educated about it and then you have to be committed to doing something to protect it. The business interests are interested in their business, as they should be, but the public should be interested in the public’s resource. These lakes don’t belong to the farms, or to the shippers. They belong to everybody.”

Hutzpah, said Rabbi Sharon Brous, means embarrassingly nervy behavior, unencumbered audacity, overentitledness and shamelessness “as in ‘there are not enough lox at a free lunch.’ ”

“I first heard the phrase ‘Holy Hutzpah,’ said Batman-style, from Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein,” Brous said. “It is the kind of clear-headed, deep insistence that things are not what they should be and we should fight for our core values.”

Brous was preaching at the 9:15 a.m. Wednesday Ecumencial Worship in the Amphitheater. The title of the sermon was “Holy Hutzpah: Our Inheritance of Willful Opposition,” and her scripture text was Genesis 18:17-33.

This kind of hutzpah started in the Bible and through the generations has become “our standard bearer for a life of faith,” she said.

In the Genesis text, the Lord was contemplating destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, and wondered if he should tell Abraham what he was about to do.

“The Lord cannot do what he is about to do without informing Abraham or asking permission,” Brous said. “The Lord needs human permission.”

Brous then asked: How could Abraham be a moral leader if God did not give him the opportunity to lead when it mattered most? The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were well known to God and they caused God great pain.

“In Jewish tradition, the sins of the cities were cruel inhospitality,” Brous said. “They had a stingy spirit and would not share the abundance they had been given.”

Abraham accompanied the men he had entertained at Mamre as they moved toward Sodom and this encounter with God. When the men heard what the Lord intended to do, they went on to Sodom and left Abraham alone with God.

“How often are we more like those men?” Brous asked. “Fear led them away; not everyone is up to the task of Holy Hutzpah.”

Abraham asked God if he would sweep away the innocent with the guilty, an act which is fundamentally unjust. “Have we not asked why bad things happen to good people?” she said.

What if there are 50 innocent people; would God overrule the punishment? Abraham said to God, “Far be it from you to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

“How many of us would speak like that to our boss, much less to the boss of all bosses?” Brous asked. “Abraham is telling God ‘you are better than this; the judge is behaving unjustly.’ There is a justice beyond even divine law and that is moral law by which even God must abide.” 

God ceded to Abraham’s moral intuition, and so Abraham spoke again and again, bargaining down to 45, then 40, then 30 then 20. How far would Abraham go? He got God to agree that if there were 10 innocent people, God would save the city.

“It was a successful negotiation, but why did Abraham stop there?” Brous asked. “The number 10 is the origin of the prayer minyan, the number needed to let holy power flow, but it might reflect Abraham’s lack of imagination. Or perhaps there is still work we need to do, to exercise our own moral intuition.”

God departed and Abraham “returned to his place.” But maybe Abraham was out of place, Brous said.

“We need to step out of place for what is right,” she said. “This was a classic act of hutzpah, the ultimate spiritual audacity, and the Holy One was charmed.”

This “successful negotiation” came because God and Abraham were in a relationship, his requests were made with humility and love.

Brous cited Moses as another practitioner of Holy Hutzpah who would not let go of God’s cloak until God changed his mind about destroying Israel after the Israelites built the golden calf.

Hannah, in the Book of Judges, is accused by the priest Eli of being drunk in a holy place. Hannah told him that if a holy place could not hold her brokenness because she could not bear a child, it was not holy.

“Imagine Hannah in a synagogue or church today,” Brous said. “She would not sit or stand when told. She would scream and protest and shatter the gates of heaven. We cannot allow our sacred ritual to become passive and devoid of heart.”

Holy Hutzpah, the refusal to accede to social norms, is ubiquitous in sacred literature.

“A life of faith, lived in obedience to God, will claim its inheritance against unjust systems and even God,” she said. “We have to find our Holy Hutzpah, our moral courage. The shape of tomorrow depends on exercising moral courage today.”

Brous talked about her trip to Liberia and meeting Leymah Gbowee, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to end the Second Liberian Civil War. She gathered women in prayer to end the war, and they kept praying until they won peace.

“God stands with the righteous,” Brous said. “Every social movement has one person who takes one crazy step forward. The time is coming that we will not be able to stomach cruel and heartless policies that harm families yearning for something better.”

She told the story of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his family trying to cross the Rio Grande River. From El Salvador, they had tried to migrate to the United States and were stopped in Mexico. Tired of waiting to present their case for asylum, he swam his daughter, Valeria, across the river and left her safely. As he swam away to bring his wife across, Valeria jumped into the water trying to follow him. He saved her by putting her inside his shirt, but they were both swept away by the current as his wife Tania watched. The photo of their bodies, seen around the world, shows Valeria with her arm around her father’s neck, out of love.

When we see the picture of Oscar and Valeria, “what will we do?” Brous asked. “Turn away, wish that we could do something more? Holy Hutzpah will make us rise up until our policies actually reflect our values.”

“This is not an action plan,” she said. “If we used just one-tenth of our spiritual and material resources we would find a solution.” Abraham stood up to God; all we need to do is stand up to elected officials, she continued.

We, she told the congregation, are called to lead by moral intuition, to live with hutzpah that will fuel social movements to make change and peace possible, to claim the audacity that is the birthright of the descendants of Abraham.

“That might be what we were placed here for, to use our Holy Hutzpah to fight for the change that the world so desperately needs,” Brous said.

The Rev. George Wirth presided. Lynn Stahl, who co-leads the Chautauqua Dialogues program, read the scriptures. Jared Jacobsen, organist and coordinator of worship and sacred music, led the Motet Choir in “The Lord Is My Shepherd” by Will Todd. The Edmund E. Robb – Walter C. Shaw Fund supports this week’s services.

With centuries of history on her side, Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that America was founded on a lie, and has spent 250 years trying its best to cover that up.

That lie originated with the slave trade of 1619, a year she said rivals in importance with 1776.

“It was the year 1619 that our decision to become a ‘slaveocracy,’ which is what we decided, is as important as our decision in 1776 to become a democracy,” Hannah-Jones said. “You can’t disentangle those two from the identity of our country, who we would ultimately come to be and who we are as a nation right now.”

Hannah-Jones, MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow and reporter for The New York Times Magazine, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, June 25 in the Amphitheater, continuing Week One’s theme, “Moments That Changed the World.”

In 1619, a ship brought 20 African slaves ashore in the British colony of Jamestown, Virginia; this summer marks the 400th anniversary of forced migration to North America.

“It’s an amazing story of intrigue that lands this ship here,” Hannah-Jones said. “The slave trade of taking Africans of European powers, of taking Africans across the Middle Passage into the colonies of the Caribbean and South America, had already been going on since the late 1500s by the time this ship lands on the shores of North America.”

The slaves on the ship were from Angola, which, despite the popular narrative,  was a “highly advanced” society.

The Africans were stolen by the Portuguese and as they sailed to Virginia, the ship was robbed, overtaken and other colonial powers took the slaves on board. The slaves were traded for supplies.

“So, they traded these 20 human beings who managed to make it across the Middle Passage and into the Virginia colony in order to get supplies, and then they sailed down south to drop off the rest of those enslaved people, who they treated as cargo, into the Caribbean,” Hannah-Jones said.

The decision of those original settlers to purchase human beings and force them across the ocean has left “nothing in America untouched,” according to Hannah-Jones.

“You can look across the spectrum of American life and see that that very early decision that we were going to join the African slave trade has had ramifications across every aspect of our society,” she said.

Hannah-Jones said most people are unaware of the extensive history of slavery because the majority of American textbooks only devote a few pages on the issue.

“That’s intentional,” she said. “W. E. B. Du Bois called this ‘the propaganda of history,’ that in trying to make the mythology of America, we had to downplay the role of slavery because slavery is incompatible with democracy.”

Because of that “propaganda of history,” Hannah-Jones said she still hears people make the argument that since many countries practiced slavery, the United States was not unique in its wrongdoing.

“There was no system of slavery that the world had ever known like the trans-Atlantic slave trade,” she said. “The trade went from Europe to Africa, where Africans were either stolen, kidnapped or sold into slavery, and then they were traded into the new colonies that European countries had settled in both the Caribbean, South America and the United States.”

Over the course of the slave trade, there were more than 36,000 slave voyages.

“Think about that sheer number of ships going to Africa and robbing Africa of its youngest people — 36,000,” she said. “The best number that we have is that 13 million Africans were brought across that Middle Passage. Some go as high as 20 million.”

The magnitude of slaves transported resulted in the reformation of the entire Western Hemisphere, Hannah-Jones said.

“Those countries that you are vacationing on are all black because of the slave trade,” she said. “We completely remade new countries, new black countries because we transported so many millions of Africans across the ocean to build these lands.”

Hannah-Jones told the story of Olaudah Equiano, a slave who, once free, wrote a book about his experiences being transported on the Middle Passage.

“He talked about the shrieks of the women and the groans of the dying and wishing, wishing that he would die too,” she said. “(He was) actually feeling that he wanted to join them, that he would rather die than have to endure this passage to a place that they did not know. They could only imagine how terrible the place would be where they were going if this was the way that they were getting there.”

The ironic connection to 1776 begins with Thomas Jefferson’s famous line in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

“We believe this to our core,” Hannah-Jones said. “This is what makes America an exceptional country, except what we also know is even as Thomas Jefferson was using his quill pen to draft those words on parchment, he was holding more than 200 human beings in bondage himself, including his own children.”

Hannah-Jones said people try to excuse the behavior of Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, stating they were simply men of their time who didn’t know any better.

“They know that it is wrong and they know that it is hypocritical to say that you are going to start a nation based on the individual rights of men, a nation that would be the freest and most libertarian country the world has ever seen, while holding a fifth of your population in bondage,” she said.

To deal with the conflicting nature of the issue, Jefferson wrote about slavery in the original Declaration of Independence, blaming it on the king of Britain for bringing slavery into the Colonies in the first place.

“He is attempting to have clean hands, he is attempting to say that the Colonies did not want slavery, it was forced upon them,” Hannah-Jones said. “That passage is not in the Declaration of Independence that you can go see in Philadelphia and that is because, already by this time, the economy of the United States is intrinsically connected to slavery.”

In addition to the idea that the Founding Fathers didn’t know any better, Hannah-Jones has also been told these men were unaware that “black people are human beings,” another misconception she found easy to discredit.

“Twelve of our first presidents engaged in human trafficking… that’s 1/4 of every man that has ever served in the office of presidency” @nhannahjones

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 25, 2019

“One does not believe that Africans are not human beings, but make it illegal for them to read,” she said. “You don’t have to make it illegal for animals to read. You don’t have to spend so much time trying to legislate against people who are running away and rebelling and resisting if they’re not actually human beings.”

To further understand American slavery, Hannah-Jones said one has to understand how it differed from slavery that functioned in other parts of the world. Unlike slavery outside of the country, slavery in the United States fell under five different categories: It was racial, it was heritable, slaves were treated as property, they operated under social deaths and, lastly, slavery was permanent.

“We are an exceptional country in that we invented an exceptional institution of slavery,” she said.

But the discrimination of Africans did not end with slavery itself. Even people opposed to slavery were opposed to black equality.

“Most abolitionists wanted to end slavery and then they wanted to get rid of the black people who were here,” she said. “We actually believed as a nation that black people were incompatible with democracy. Once black people could no longer be used as free labor, black people should cease to exist in the United States.” 

The racism that developed to justify the trafficking of human beings became an irreversible part of America, according to Hannah-Jones.

“The institution of slavery can end, but it can’t end this belief about the inherent inferiority of black people or the problem of people who are forced to live under that system,” she said.

Hannah-Jones said the most ironic thing about the history of slavery is that black people were actually the “most American of all Americans.”

“Africans were made black,” she said. “They were shorn of any of those connections, they were forced to create a country anew here in this country. There are no countries to go back to. The names of black people are the names of people who enslaved them. There is no tongue that you could learn, there is no connection you can make. Those who were considered the least, actually ended up being the most.”

That irony echoes that of the lie Hannah-Jones said America was founded on: America was founded on the inalienable rights of men, rights that 20% of the population could not and would never possess.

“I always say that black people are the most inconvenient people in America because we are the constant reminder of that lie,” Hannah-Jones said. “We only exist because of that lie.”

Even today, it is on the backs of black people that “we get as much democracy as we have,” Hannah-Jones said. For example, black people are involved in the armed services at the highest rates of any other group in America.

“Imagine such a belief in the ideals of a country that didn’t even include you, that you would die for a country and for beliefs that you hoped would one day include your own people,” she said.

“Those who were considered the least… actually ended up being the most” @nhannahjones pic.twitter.com/psk8xBgWln

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 25, 2019

Because of the suffering black people have endured, Hannah-Jones said they often play the role of trying to assure rights for everyone, a role she saw play out in the 2016 election.

“The black vote was not split on Donald Trump,” she said. “More than 90% of black people voted against Donald Trump, more than any other group. They did not get caught up in the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment. They didn’t buy into any of that rhetoric because who knows better the cost of xenophobia than black Americans.”

According to Hannah-Jones, data shows that black people are the most progressive of all Americans, consistently voting for issues that push America toward the common good more than any other group. However, she said that this is not to say black people are more progressive because there is something “magically great” about them, but that because of their particular experience in American history, black people are “extremely empathetic to the suffering of others.”

“If we really want to be a democracy, if we really want to be a country who cares about all of our citizens, not just ourselves, if we want to live up to those founding ideals, follow the lead of your most American of Americans,” Hannah-Jones said. “Trust black women, starting with this one.”

Annie Griffiths likes to refer to herself as an “accidental photographer.”

The plan was always to be a writer, but two years into college, she realized it wasn’t the medium she wanted to use to tell her stories. That’s when she found photography. And if it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, she now has more in her collection than authors whose ranks she once aspired to join.

Griffiths, one of the first female photographers at National Geographic, spoke at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Monday, June 24 in the Amphitheater, opening Week One’s theme, “Moments That Changed the World.”

“What I did was: I tripped over a camera and fell completely in love with it and then threw my entire heart and soul into trying to catch up and become a strong enough photographer to be published,” Griffiths said.

“I needed to show to the women that follow me, and the men, that you can do this job without abandoning your family.” – @AnnieG_Photo

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

Griffiths would spend her days lying behind her parents’ couch, a place she chose to read and learn, uninterrupted.

“I was laying on my belly with National Geographic and Life magazine and Look magazine and there were these indelible images that reflected moments in time,” she said. “I remember the exact images, I remember the feel of the paper and I remember being brought into worlds I really didn’t understand or know existed.”

Among the historical moments in the photos she continues to gather inspiration from, there was one she also experienced firsthand: 9/11. Griffiths lost three friends that day.

“So it was, for me, very personal and very tragic,” she said. “What I didn’t understand at that time is the ripple effect of these horrific things, the unintended ripple that then flows through the rest of the world and has powerful, sometimes disastrous and sometimes fabulous impact on the world.”

On the impact of 9/11- “the biggest byproduct is global fear… if you break hate down, you’ll find fear every time” –@AnnieG_Photo pic.twitter.com/aVfM7A7Z11

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

But before Griffiths felt she could tell the audience that story, she needed to go back to the beginning of her own.

Her story begins with that of her mother, a midwestern, “good Catholic” girl whose life was shaped by the day she was born: May 20, 1927, the same day Charles Lindbergh, American aviator, began the first-ever solo flight across the Atlantic. Her mom was told that story her entire life and eventually, she too wanted a career in aviation.

“When she finished high school she went to the Pan Am office,” Griffiths said. “She went to see if she could get a flight attendant job and they wouldn’t even interview her. So, my mom, being the woman she was, said ‘Thank you very much’ and she packed her disappointment, left and became a pilot. This is what we can all do. We can be bitter or we can be determined.”

Griffiths took that message of perseverance with her throughout her own career, which started in her home state of Minnesota.

“Fortunately, my first stories were kind of in my own backyard,” she said. “So, I didn’t have to worry as much about language and disease and passports and visas and all of that stuff.”

Shortly enough, Griffiths fell in love with exploring her own country and culture. As much as she enjoyed working with wildlife and wide open spaces, it was always the people she met who made the greatest impact.

“The people are hardworking and solid and not the people who usually make the news, and that is important to me,” she said, “not just in our country, but everywhere I go. I don’t feel like I have been to a place unless I can get the heck out of the city and into the countryside to really experience the culture.”

When her career at National Geographic began, Griffiths started traveling internationally, something she never had the opportunity to do growing up. In that, she discovered what her purpose as a photographer was.

“I started traveling, and the job at Geographic really was to take you to all of the places that maybe you had never been, or take you to places you’ve been and show them in a new light,” Griffiths said.

Along the way, Griffiths had two kids: Lily and Charlie. Because her assignments lasted around three months a year, she decided she couldn’t leave them behind.

“So, I packed them up and I took them on my assignments,” she said. “I didn’t mention it at the office, but I figured they weren’t asking the guys about their day care situations. I recognized that I needed to show, for the women that might follow me, and the men, that you can do this job without abandoning your family.”

Griffiths made sure to only travel with her kids to locations that were guaranteed to be safe. These locations included Europe, New Zealand and to much of the audience’s surprise, the Middle East.

“(The Middle East) was so safe,” she said. “I mean that from my heart. Because it was so safe, I could take my kids there and they would be safe. We lived in Aqaba, Galilee, we traveled up to Syria. These were beautiful, beautiful places that were safer than any American city.”

While in the Middle East, she was drawn to Arab women, specifically Bedouin women. The more she photographed them, the more she realized the similarities they shared could benefit them both.

“I recognized that because I was a woman, there were all of these underreported stories that I could have access to,” Griffiths said. “It was the most wonderful thing for me to realize, that so many people are underrepresented in the media or misrepresented, and the biggest misrepresentation is usually of women in the developing world.”

Then Griffiths had an epiphany: She wanted her stories and her photos to be more than beautiful. She wanted them to make a difference.

In order to work toward that goal, she started making herself available to aid organizations. She focused mostly on environmental work, capturing issues such as deforestation, the destruction of salt marshes and the melting ice in Antarctica.

“This conservation work helped me feel like I was at least part of moving issues forward,” she said.

The exposure to world issues she gained from traveling brought her back to the concept of unintended consequences she experienced with 9/11.

One day, Griffiths was photographing a mother and daughter in a refugee camp of 70,000 people. The head of the camp told her hardly any of them would ever make it out because of 9/11.

“It just broke my heart and I thought ‘Well, what am I doing?’ ” she said. “ ‘I should just give up, I should walk away. I can’t make a dent in this, this is just too hard, too awful.’ ”

Two years later she was in a refugee coordinator’s office when she saw her photo of the mother and daughter on the wall. The man she was meeting told her they were doing great, and that the woman and her husband now both had jobs.

“I thought, ‘We can’t ever give up,’ and I didn’t get her out of that refugee camp,” she said. “I take pictures. But, if my pictures can help people who can get her out of a refugee camp, then that’s what I want to spend the rest of my life doing.”

That moment is where her nonprofit, Ripple Effects Images, was born.

The seven areas Griffiths and her team try to tackle in their coverage are health, food, water, education, economic empowerment, energy and climate change. She has captured content of positive impact in all of those areas, but the examples she shared started with health.

“Women are also really smart, and if you teach them how to keep their kids healthy, they’ll do it,” she said.

Griffiths once traveled to an indigenous community in Vietnam where she said the women had little to no access to health information.

“They didn’t know about washing to keep their kids healthy, and once they learned, the incidents of infection dropped dramatically,” she said. “It’s not rocket science, it’s information.”

In terms of education, Griffiths said she’s never talked to a poor mother who didn’t want her kids to be educated more than anything else of monetary value.

“Mandatory education for all children is imperative for any country to lift itself out of poverty,” she said.

Griffiths showed a photo of the poorest woman she had ever met. It was a woman in Kolkata, India, who had lost seven children to malnutrition. When she got a $25 micro-loan, she started a food business on the side of the road. One day, an orphan walked up to her stand. The woman took her in.

According to Griffiths, the first thing the woman did when she saved enough money was buy her daughter a school uniform so she could attend classes. After Griffiths took her photo and listened to the woman’s story, the daughter asked for her pen and notebook and brought it over to her mother. To Griffiths’ delight, the woman’s daughter had taught her how to read and write.

“That’s the ripple effect,” Griffiths said. “That’s it. And women who haven’t had the luxury of going to school are smart as can be, and they can be taught.”

Griffiths said agriculture is one of the most important things for women to be knowledgeable about.

However, this field in particular is not something she sees women entering on their own.

“They are gathering together in co-ops,” Griffiths said. “The solution for women globally is groups, a safe place to gather and learn from each other.”

On an assignment, Griffiths met a group of women in an agriculture co-op. In this co-op, the farmer brings her crops in instead of taking them to a middle man, and the other women weigh, sort and test the product for quality. Then there is a “commodities broker,” who asks the market what the going rate is for specific items and lists hers for less.

“These women will never, ever go back to the middle man,” she said. “They just won’t.”

Griffiths closed her lecture with a story from a trip to Pakistan, one she said “brings me to my knees.”

Griffiths was in a small village in the desert, and the hosts brought out their best cots and blankets for the guests to sleep on. The women made them soup, and as it was getting dark, one of the women asked Griffiths if she would like music. Griffiths said yes, and out came a group of elderly men with homemade instruments who would play for them until they fell asleep.

“I promise you, they had never heard of National Geographic,” she said. “They didn’t know who the heck this crazy white lady was who landed in their village, but they did what my mother always taught me people do. She said, ‘People with the least, give the most.’ So how could I not spend the rest of my life giving back?”

She concludes with a quote her mother always told her, “The people with the least give the most” –@AnnieG_Photo

— The Chautauquan Daily (@chqdaily) June 24, 2019

When Ann Hornaday moved to New York City in the 1980s to pursue writing — against the grain of her political science and government college education — movie media coverage was coming to the fore.

Breakout documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line,” a true-crime tale with revolutionary reenactments and stylized visuals, and “Roger & Me,” a personal, provocative piece about Flint, Michigan’s relationship to General Motors, rocked “canonizers” and tastemakers.

“These all came out within a few years of each other,” Hornaday said. “In a way, each of them distills traditions in documentary filmmaking that reach back to the beginnings of the form, but they also point a way forward. And they very much ushered in — what I still consider — a golden age of documentaries.”

The work of late 20th-century documentaries boosted the current “golden age of documentaries” while galvanizing Hornaday’s career as a film critic — a career spanning four decades and 1,500 movies.

Prior to her tenure as a film critic at The Washington Post, Hornaday began as a researcher and editorial assistant at Ms. magazine, quickly transitioning to a freelance writer. She eventually went on to write for The New York Times Arts & Leisure section, later writing for the Austin American-Statesman in Austin, Texas, and then The Baltimore Sun; she was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

Hornaday is also the author of Talking Pictures: How to Watch Movies. She spoke to the history of documentaries and the role of the audience in critically evaluating their messages at Wednesday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture in the Amphitheater. Her lecture continued Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Documentaries were the genesis of film, she said; motion captured with the early versions of the camera featured everyday activities, like people chatting in yards and trains departing from stations, in short, sparse videos. More advanced 20th-century documentaries went down like “spinach,” Hornaday said, for the children who grew up watching them.

“It was usually some sort of stock footage, usually narrated by a guy — a white guy — very authoritative, a little bit droning,” she said. “It was boring; it was bland. … It was good for you, but you’re not going to like it very much.”

But that changed with Ken Burns’ “The Civil War.” It was still a hodgepodge of archival footage, authoritative narration, unexciting and static visuals, Hornaday said; but the combination of editing, writing and music elevated the traditional, educational, historical documentary to a must-see spectacle — “they’re not spinach anymore; they probably never were,” she said.

With the increasing allure of film festivals and the onset of streaming services, documentaries are trending, according to Hornaday. HBO pioneered widely accessible documentaries, followed by Netflix, Amazon and cable networks that have recently dedicated airtime to network-produced documentary programs. In the mainstream, “RGB” and “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” are taking box offices by storm, she said while taking a “ceremonial sip” of water for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Also in high demand is another facet of documentary work: reality television. Through one lens, Hornaday said, reality TV is voyeurism, a human zoo.

“To put another lens on it, it’s this interest we have in each other’s lives and in each other’s behavior,” Hornaday said. “It’s a form of moral reasoning, if you will. It’s a way for us to grapple with our own values, our own judgement. It might be invidious, it might be critical, it might be negative, but it’s all a way of situating ourselves in terms of what we believe, of what we think is right and wrong. So even the most silly and stagy and tacky reality programming, I do think — I would like to think — fulfills a deeper moral purpose.”

While “The Bachelor,” “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and “Big Brother” are notorious for being scripted-ly unscripted, Hornaday stressed the importance of not taking presented truths at face value, referencing Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” as the “first cautionary tale.”

“Nanook of the North” is an early 20th-century docudrama about Nanook, an Inuk man, and his family in the Canadian Arctic. Though it was widely revered as the first feature-length documentary, it was later revealed that Flaherty staged scenes to depict stereotypical, obsolete practices of the Inuk people.

“Because documentaries have become so much more visually sophisticated,” Hornaday said, “and because those reality show producers are evermore shrewd about blurring the lines between fact and fiction, it’s more crucial than ever for viewers to be as critically discerning as they can be about what they are watching.”

If its characters are compelling, the story is riveting, the information imparts alarming or astounding or inspiring material — let that immersion happen. But when the spell is lifted, remember: you might have gotten the facts, but you were looking at art.”

Hornaday pulled three evaluative questions from her book, Talking Pictures, for movie audiences to contemplate: what was the filmmaker trying to achieve, did they achieve it and was it worth making?

“Formal questions of what to put in and what to leave out in editing immediately lead to ethical ones when it comes to issues such as access, agendas and transparency,” she read from her book. “Did the filmmakers use reenactments along with historical footage to make their film more seamless and compelling? Did they use images from another time and place because they fit their uses better? Did they compensate their subjects, or were they compensated by their subjects while making the film?”

Despite the similarities and the parallels drawn between the two mediums, Hornaday does not see the documentary as the “new journalism.” To her, equating documentaries with journalism is alarming; she seeks to preserve documentaries as an art form — as a form of storytelling.

“They are a form of conveying a narrative and of making meaning that are deeply dependent on anecdotes. They are dependent on and expressions of one artist’s point of view,” Hornaday said. “There is a level of craft and shaping of the narrative that, in my mind, exceeds the boundaries of what we think of when we think of journalism.”

However, similar to journalism, she sees the next frontier for documentaries as “transparency” — directors letting viewers in on their processes, noting staged scenes, forged photographs or fudged footage. Such transparency, she said, would strengthen the bond between viewer and videographer.

Hornaday closed with a “how to” on watching documentaries:

“Succumb, to let it wash over you. If its characters are compelling, the story is riveting, the information imparts alarming or astounding or inspiring material — let that immersion happen. But when the spell is lifted, remember: you might have gotten the facts, but you were looking at art.”

After the conclusion of Hornaday’s lecture, Geof Follansbee, vice president of development and chief executive officer of the Chautauqua Foundation, opened the Q-and-A by asking what the line is between documentaries and fact-based fiction.

“As these filmmakers are getting more bold about mixing it up, that line is going to be blurry,” Hornaday said. “Again, I think it’s up to the filmmaker to be transparent about that.”

Follansbee then turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked Hornaday to comment on the inherent bias of documentaries.

“To the degree that they have a point of view, yes,” Hornaday said. “That’s my point about art — they are the work of artists, and artists have a point of view. They will reflect that personal point of view of whoever is making it. Then the question is … ‘How does the filmmaker use that power and how are they then transparent about that bias?’ ”

To close, Follansbee read a question from Twitter: How does one stay true to themselves and find commercial success?

“I don’t think you can manufacture that,” Hornaday said “ … I think ‘stay true to yourself’ is the best thing because if you’re going to be living with this subject matter for goodness knows how many years, you’d better love it and believe in it and then really hope it connects with an audience.”

Behind the scenes, Geoffrey C. Ward and Dayton Duncan work to bring the written word to life — with the occasional on-screen, or onstage, appearance.

The two filmmakers, scriptwriters and authors discussed processes and their bodies of work at Tuesday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture on Aug. 20 in the Amphitheater, a continuation of Monday’s “The Filmmaker as Collaborator” conversation with director and filmmaker Ken Burns.

Burns was not able to participate in the morning’s conversation, but he prepared a video message with opening remarks, in which he assured the Amp audience they were in good hands. If they enjoyed Burns’ films, he said, it was thanks to Duncan and Ward’s writing — if the audience did not, it was all Burns’ fault.

Duncan and Ward have worked extensively with Burns; Ward has collaborated with him since 1984. He was the sole or principal writer for “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “Jazz,” “Mark Twain,” “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History” and “The Vietnam War.” An award-winning author, Ward has written various companion volumes for Burns’ series. His book A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

He won two Writers’ Guild Awards, seven Christopher Awards and five Emmy Awards. In 2018, Ward was awarded the Writers Guild’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for Career Achievement.

Duncan has worked alongside Ward on films including “The Civil War” and “Mark Twain”; he worked with Burns on films like “Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery” and “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” which won him two Emmy Awards. “The Dust Bowl,” which he wrote, won a Spur Award and was nominated for two Emmys.

Prior to his work in documentary films, Duncan served as chief of staff to former New Hampshire Gov. Hugh Gallen; Walter Mondale’s deputy press secretary during his 1984 presidential campaign; national press secretary for Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential campaign; and as chair of the American Heritage Rivers Advisory Committee.

The men were joined on stage by Chautauqua Institution President Michael E. Hill, who moderated the conversation as part of Week Nine’s theme, “Documentary Film as Facilitator: Storytelling, Influence and Civil Discourse.”

Hill opened the conversation by asking the writers to describe their writing processes.

“I don’t quite think of it as a process,” Ward said. “What we do is we get interested in a subject. There is no subject that isn’t interesting, it seems to me. I wrote the history of baseball, to which I could care less. And during the year and half it took to write it, I was fascinated by it. I lost interest right after that.”

Ward said much of his process is dedicated to reading; he reads dozens of books on a topic, carefully dissecting each word. Eventually, it’s guilt — and the deadline — that forces him into writing.

“There’s a point in which you just say to yourself, ‘They’re not paying me to read; I really, really have to get started,’ ” he said. “I start with the prologue; I’m sort of simple-minded that way. I want to get the first scene set, and then everything else trails from that. I guess if there are any rules for me, (it’s) chronology is God.”

While Ward is copiously reading and scarcely writing, Burns and producers, like Duncan, are conducting interviews, which are then sliced and diced and pieced together into the script.

“The story is what we do,” Duncan said. “We tell stories that happen to have a place. We tell stories that try to put you as much as we can into that moment of history, of the contingency of history.”

Duncan, who oscillates between producer and writer, also immerses himself joyfully into literature when working on a film — something the former reporter loves doing, he said. His timeline for writing is deadline-driven, often looking over his own shoulder as a producer to nudge his writer-self along. Unlike Ward, Duncan starts writing at the first narrated scene; the prologue comes later in the process.

Eventually, the men collaborate in the editing stages, which Hill asked about next: Does collaborating on texts change their  processes?

The two writers initially collaborated by accident, when Ward fell gravely behind schedule on “The West” and Duncan swooped in to help. Since then, the men have co-written and worked on several films seamlessly. Duncan attributes this to having similar narrative voices that mesh their writing styles.

Aside from being nose-deep in a book or hunched over a keyboard, Duncan and Ward have both managed to be featured on screen — outside of the credits — in Burns’ films. Duncan made his debut in a film on what he called a captivating subject: “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.”

“This was something very much a part of something that I felt was an important topic to do, and I wanted for us to approach it as not just a travel log or a nature film — which it has a little bit of — but (as) a story of an idea,” he said. “It is the Declaration of Independence applied to a landscape, saying that the most majestic places and sacred places in our land are available to everyone — everyone.”

They played a clip from the six-episode series featuring the story of John Muir, whose activism helped preserve what is now Yosemite National Park. In it, Duncan spoke to Muir’s quirky nature.

Ward appeared in the 2014 documentary film “The Roosevelts: An Intimate History,” which he also wrote. He has written extensively about the Roosevelts in his aforementioned book A First-Class Temperament, as well as in Closest Companion: The Unknown Story of the Intimate Friendship Between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Margaret Suckley and Before the Trumpet: Young Franklin Roosevelt.

A scene played from “The Roosevelts” centered around President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s battle with polio. Ward was featured discussing Roosevelt’s prognosis, while dismantling the belief that “polio didn’t bother him.” After the clip, Ward commented on this history’s modern-day relevance:

“Sadly, though we a have far more civilized and intelligent view of people who are disabled, I think in this era no one as badly handicapped as Franklin Roosevelt could ever be elected president of the United States. … I think that’s a tragedy, but I think that is true.”

To close the morning, Hill asked the screenwriters and authors how writing for film differs from writing a book.

“I like them both,” Ward said. “I like the collaborative process of making films. The plus of writing a book is, it is all your own book, and hell to anybody else.”

A book cannot capture the emotion of hearing a story told through thrilling narration, Duncan said.

“When it works, it is magic,” he said.

After the conclusion of their conversation, Hill switched from the chair to the podium for the Q-and-A portion of the morning. Piggybacking off of Monday’s lecture, Hill asked: “What’s next?”

Duncan is amid production of “Country Music” — which the Amp audience previewed Monday — a documentary chronicling the history of the “uniquely American art form.” Duncan said “Country Music” will be the last documentary he will produce. He has also been commissioned to write the script for Burns’ film about Benjamin Franklin and American buffalo.

Ward is writing Burns’ upcoming documentaries on the American Revolution and President  Lyndon Johnson.

Hill then turned to the audience for questions. One attendee asked how the filmmakers, as white men, give a voice to minorities in their films.

“I am not responsible for my gender or my race,” Duncan said. “I am responsible for how I can or how I tell what I think are important stories of America in this experiment of democracy on this continent — and it still is an experiment. … (In) my storytelling, I try as hard as I can — within the limits of (being a) white kid from a small town in Iowa — to try to embrace that tapestry and the rich stories that are there and the importance of that. It’s unfinished business, and all I can be responsible for is doing my damnedest to tell that right.” 

Common ground is not racially bound, the Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a discussion of his life, legacy and the work of his friend and fellow civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. at Friday’s 10:45 a.m. morning lecture in the Amphitheater on Aug. 17.

He was joined in conversation by the Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, in a crossover of Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century,” and the week’s interfaith theme, “Not to Be Forgotten: A Remembrance on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“We move along in just trying to remember — I think, which is a very important thing — the role that King played in the life of all of us, of all of the things that Jesse and I and others have gone through,” Campbell said. “We take a look now at what’s before us today and what we learned from yesterday and how we will behave in a country much in need of what it is that these people of the past have given to us.”

Campbell is an ordained Christian Church and American Baptist Church minister. She presided as the first female associate executive director of the Greater Cleveland Council of Churches; the first female executive director of the U.S. office of the World Council of Churches; the first ordained female general secretary of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA; and the first female director of religion at Chautauqua Institution from 2000 to 2013.

The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, vice president of religion and Chautauqua’s senior pastor, moderated the conversation. He opened by offering condolences to Jackson for the death of soulful, musical icon Aretha Franklin, who passed Thursday. Jackson and Franklin were longtime friends.

Franklin, the daughter of Baptist minister and civil rights activist C. L. Franklin, was around Jackson and the civil rights movement often, campaigning and fundraising for Jackson and his cause. Jackson visited her on her deathbed, to which he said: “I had the chance to feel the warmth of her hand one more time and to kiss her forehead. It was hard to let go.”

Robinson asked, in a week honoring civil rights activists, specifically King, is his work ever romanticized? He turned to Jackson, who worked closely with King directing Operation Breadbasket.

“Sometimes we become sentimental, and we over-conceptualized him,” Jackson said. “Next year will be the 400th year since African-Americans came here enslaved. We didn’t come as immigrants looking for a better life; we did not come as refugees in desperation. … Segregation was more violent than slavery. … Dr. King emerges out of that context.”

Campbell recalled King’s time in Cleveland, where he met with various congregations across the city campaigning against poverty and discrimination, while fighting to elect the first African-American mayor. At a meeting, King said he visited every black congregation in the area, but had yet to visit a white congregation. Campbell, being “young and naive,” invited King to her church.

Her decision was met with passive resistance; members went as far as to propose renovating the chapel during King’s scheduled visit.

“But the church had in it many more people who wanted him there than people who were fearful to have him there,” Campbell said. “They were the courageous ones. … The troublemakers became more so — more noise — but the people determined to have him also increased.”

By the time of King’s sermon, thousands of people surrounded the church — that church was never the same again, she said.

“One of the concerns Dr. King had was that we have been taught to learn the lesson well of how to survive apart — never been taught how to live together, which is our challenge,” Jackson added. “Racism, after all, is unscientific. It is well-taught. It’s a social order. Someone has to unteach a lesson learned well. The question is, will the church be a teacher or an extension of the bad lesson?”

Robinson went on to ask how King and Jackson always found the strength to preach hope, despite the seemingly hopeless circumstances.

Jackson described a wall; on one side, ignorance, fear, hatred and violence. On the other side, the people. It is not those who are evil who control the people, he said, but rather those in power over the wall. King’s philosophy: to pull the wall down takes strength, Jackson said.

He marked the immense growth in dismantling the wall, from African-American chief executive officers to redefined football rivalries, while also acknowledging politicians’ efforts to reverse this growth.

“There is a trend now to turn that back,” Jackson said. “Trump can turn the clock back, but he cannot turn time back. We ain’t going back.”

Robinson looked to current movements, like Black Lives Matter, asking how they relate to previous movements.

“Black Lives Matter is a hashtag of the old movements that matter,” Jackson said. “The abolitionists were saying ‘black lives matter’ and the anti-segregationist was saying ‘black lives matter.’ Those who were saying ‘make lynching a federal crime — by the way, lynching is not yet a federal crime, lynching is not yet a federal crime, lynching is not yet a federal crime’ — said ‘black lives matter.’ … Black Lives Matter is a hashtag; it’s the same matter of equal protection under the law.”

Robinson interjected; why is “all lives matter” a bad response, he asked.

“It’s insufficient,” Campbell said.

For Jackson, it’s agreed that “all lives matter,” but the reality is that discrimination against people of color is real and institutionalized — that “blacks were being killed without consequences.”

He related this to football; “Whenever the playing in field is even … and the rules are public and the goals are clear, the referees are fair and the score is transparent, we can accept the outcome.” But in reality, one team — white people — has the upper hand, running half as much for the same first down as a systematically disadvantaged team.

“Something about true and transparency has power, … fairness matters” Jackson said. “Hillary beat Trump by 3 million (votes), and she’s not the winner? It ain’t transparent. It ain’t fair. A ‘one person, one vote’ democracy and you win by 3 million and lose?”

Relating to institutionalized racism, Robinson gestured to the mostly-white audience and asked how people can be “white allies.”

Jackson said to “move from racial battleground to common ground” on affordable, universal health care and to equalize public education because “schools cost less than jails.”

“If the ballplayers can figure it out, surely we can figure it out,” he said. “When the young African-American male put children in the classroom, the president puts them in cages, and those in the church are silent where the cages are — that breaks the rhythm of transparency and fairness. Lebron (James) put children in classrooms, Trump put them in cages and the silence of the church is betrayal.”

Campbell looked out to the audience.

“My friends, we have power,” she told them. “We can make a difference. It is not just a matter of what could be done, what should be done, who else can do it — the fact of the matter is, I look out across all of this space, I know within these rooms and within the people sitting here, there is the possibility, maybe even the probability … that perhaps today we can take one another’s hands and say, ‘Our best selves call us today to something that will guide us into a nation that is more fair, that is more clear about who we are and where we want to be.’ ”

Jackson interjected by reiterating the Golden Rule: “Treat others the way you want to be treated.”

“The difference between us is not scientific, it is social,” he said.

Robinson closed the lecture by asking if Jackson were to write a letter to the clergy, similar to King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” what would it say?

Jackson said King’s 1963 letter denouncing the church’s intolerance toward injustice planted a seed, which culminated in Alabama’s 2017 special election, where white and black people alike voted a Democrat into office.

“You can’t plant the seed today and say ‘grow,’ ” Jackson said. “Seeds have to germinate, so the people of Alabama are learning to live together.”

Robinson turned to the audience for questions; one attendee asked what King would have thought of Barack Obama’s presidency. From the Affordable Care Act, the Paris climate agreement and bringing the country out of the recession, Jackson said King would have been impressed.

To close, an audience member asked if multiculturalism prevents a common familial culture.

Before answering, Jackson listed off the handles, numbers and contact information for himself and his organization Rainbow PUSH Coalition, a multiracial, multi-issue, progress organization fighting for social change.

“We need not be of one color to have common values,” he said. “I would argue (that) we must move from racial battlegrounds to economic common ground to moral higher ground. If we make that transition, then we’ll make transitions based not upon race, (but) based upon reason. Do we want children in cages or not? Do we want to feed the hungry or not? Do you want to educate children or not? Affordable health care or not? … We must be bond by common values.”

After a standing ovation and roaring applause, Amp attendees rushed to the floor in front of the stage as Jackson shook hands and led attendees, Campbell and Robinson in prayer:

“Let us bow our heads in prayer and join hands. Join our hands and bow our heads in prayer. We pray especially today for the sick; if Aretha had had no insurance, she would have been dead 10 years ago. We pray to God for the health care of all of his children. We pray to learn to live together as brothers and sisters and not die apart as fools. For grieving families everywhere, we pray. For those who died in our cities, we pray for them. Those in the coal mines of Appalachia, we pray for them. We pray for each one of us to have a more perfect union, a better nation and a more fit nation. So touch our hearts. We fall down sometimes. We make mistakes. We get up again, same as the sinners get back up again. We fall down and get back up again because the ground is no place for a champion, and nothing is too hard for you, and so see us through. In late years I’ve been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and yet I thank God for saving my life and for sustaining my will to work. One thing I’m sure about is once I was young, but now I’m old. I have never seen you foresake the righteous. Bless us, bless Chautauqua — let this little place be the center of the universe. Let the joy from this place flow to the streets of our nation. Amen.”

A panoramic photo, a missing panel and a plot against a Native American tribe — the elements of a forgotten, rather removed, piece of American history.

In 2012, The New Yorker staffer David Grann’s interest piqued after visiting the Osage Nation Museum, when he first saw a seemingly innocent, 1920s image of Osage and white settlers gathered together; a panel was discretely removed. When asked why it was removed, the director shuddered. It was the “devil,” she said.

Her terror sparked Grann’s most recent book, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, an account of sinister injustice in early 20th-century America. His first book, The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, was a 2010 Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection.

Grann summarized Killers of the Flower Moon at the 10:45 a.m. morning lecture Tuesday, Aug. 14, in the Amphitheater, continuing Week Eight’s theme, “The Forgotten: History and Memory in the 21st Century.”

The Osage’s history is “tangled,” he said; they owned territory stretching from Missouri to the edge of the Rocky Mountains until the early 19th century when, within a few decades, the United States government forced the secession of over 100 million acres of land from the people.

Confined to a reservation in Kansas, the Osage people fell under siege by white settlers looking to claim land during westward expansion in the 1860s; one of those settlers was Laura Ingalls Wilder, Grann said; Wilder’s father said in Little House on the Prairie: “white people are going to settle all this country, and we get the best land because we get there first and take our pick.”

The “squatters” became more aggressive, Grann said, massacring Osage people. By the 1870s, the Osage, in the most dire of straits, sold their land to the government and relocated to rocky, infertile land in Oklahoma. In 1906, the United States government forced “allotment” — distribution of land parcels to Native Americans — onto the Osage. When negotiating with the government, the Osage added a clause to their contract: “We shall maintain all the subsurface rights, mineral rights to our land.”

“Nobody thought the Osage were sitting upon a fortune,” Grann said. “ … And the Osage very shrewdly managed to hold on to this last bit of their territory — a realm that they could not even see. … They had become the world’s first underground reservation.”

They were indeed sitting on a fortune, he said. The Osage settled on oil-rich land, striking metaphorical gold with every tap. In 1923 alone, Grann said, they grossed $400 million, making them the wealthiest people per capita in the world.

“As the Osage’s wealth increased, it provoked increasing alarm across the country from whites,” he said. “The U.S. Congress went so far as to pass legislation requiring many Osage to have white guardians to manage their fortunes. … This system of passing legislation requiring guardians, it was not abstractly racist — it was literally racist.”

After the introduction of such systems, the Osage suspiciously began to succumb to mysterious circumstances, specifically the family of Mollie Burkhart, who were well-endowed from “headrights” — oil production royalties allocated during allotment.

“One night in 1925, (Mollie) had a party at her house, and her older sister Anna attended,” Grann said. “Anna left the party that evening, and she disappeared. … About a week later, Anna was found in a ravine with a bullet in the back of the head. It was the first sign that her family had become a prime target of this conspiracy.”

Within days, Burkhart’s mother grew ill; within two months she stopped breathing, he said. Evidence indicated poisoning.

“Within the span of two months, Mollie had lost her older sister … and her mother,” Grann said. “ … One night, at 3 a.m., Mollie heard a loud explosion. She got up, and went to the window and looked out. And there in the distance, she could see an orange fireball rising into the sky. It looked as if the sun had burst violently into the night.”

It was the house of Burkhart’s younger sister, who moved closer to town in fear of the killings. She, her husband and their live-in housekeeper were killed.

Burkhart turned to cattle baron, reported “king of Osage Hills” and deputy-sheriff William Hale — the uncle of her husband, Ernest Burkhart, Mollie Burkhart’s ex-chauffeur and her legal financial guardian — for help. Law enforcement at the time, Grann said, was extremely corrupt; local authorities did not pursue investigations into the systemic, targeted murders. Hale issued rewards for information, going as far as to hire private detectives.

With no leads and no results, the Osage Tribal Council pleaded for federal authorities to step in. The case was taken up by an “obscure” branch: The Bureau of Investigation, modernly known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau, under the director of J. Edgar Hoover, enlisted field agent Tom White for the Osage murder investigation.

White put together a ragtag team of undercover agents who were deployed in Osage County. They posed as cattlemen and insurance salesmen — who sold actual insurance policies, Grann said.

“The investigations had many twists and turns,” he said. “It was less like a criminal investigation and more an espionage case. The agents’ reports were being leaked out to the bad guys. They were being followed. … Ultimately, what you need to know is they followed the money.”

The agents traced Burkhart’s headrights, linking it back those who profited from the murders.

“Now, headrights cannot be bought and sold. They can only be inherited,” Grann said. “ … Ultimately, it led them to a man who Mollie not only knew, but who she knew intimately. It led them to her husband, Ernest. The money had been funneled from each of these killings in the family to Mollie’s accounts, which where managed and controlled by Ernest, who was her guardian. Once more, these crimes and this scheme had been hatched by none other than William Hale, the king of the Osage Hills, the reported man of law and order.”

Grann quoted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to summarize this tale of most intimate betrayal: “Where wilt thou find a cavern dark enough to mask thy monstrous visage? Seek none, conspiracy. Hide it in smiles and affability.”

To close, Grann revealed the missing panel from the photo — the genesis of his book. The “devil” the museum director quivered at the thought of was Hale, standing amid Osage people, an innocent smirk swiped across his face with chapeau and glasses in tow.

“The Osage have removed that photograph, not to forget what had happened, but because they can’t forget,” he said.  “And so many Americans — I include myself among them — have never learned about this history or had forgotten it.

“We have excised it from our conscience.”

After the conclusion of Grann’s lecture, Institution Chief of Staff Matt Ewalt opened the Q-and-A by asking how the Osage Nation has responded to the publication of Killers of the Flower Moon.

Grann said sharing this history and making it part of common consciousness is important to the Osage. Unfortunately, many of the cases remain unsolved due to corruption in local law enforcement and conspiracies. What Grann realized through writing Killers of the Flower Moon is that documenting injustices cannot bring justice, but it can bring accountability.

Ewalt then turned to the audience for questions; “what are the complications of (Grann) as a white man telling this story,” one attendee asked.

“All reporting is difficult,” Grann said. “The most important thing is your sense that you’re judicious, you’re fair and you are, as best as possible, truthful.”

To close the lecture, Ewalt asked how Grann’s work with the Osage will stay with him.

“When I began this story … photographs became integral to the project in a way that I had never really used before because I saw this as a working documentation, a work of chasing ghosts, a work of documenting every little bit I could,” Grann said. “ … I kept those photographs on a wall in my office, and for me that was always what the project was about, a reminder of what it was about, and that will always stay with me.”