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As I mentioned in Dying to Vote  after watching Selma  last year, fear of black voters was the main motivator of those who violently opposed the civil-rights movement. Overcoming obstacles to the vote likewise became the chief concern of the movement. A half-century after the shameful events in Alabama, we all celebrate a narrow victory over bigotry in Alabama that would have been won by a wider margin, had the spirit of Bull Conner not continued to guide the state's political leadership. The current " Weekend Read " article by the Southern Poverty Law Center is essential reading for anybody who is interested in the foundational concept of one person, one vote. That is, it should be essential reading for everybody. It details the many ways in which political elites in Alabama continue to work against the voting rights of African Americans. It is a very well-researched article, full of links to careful documentation of its alarming claims. The 2013 reversal of key provisio

As reported by CNBC , recent fires in California have been quite startling when viewed in satellite images, most dramatically in the December 5 image above, captured by the European Space Agency Sentinel-2. The report includes the long-archaic superlative "visible from space," which is also true of objects as small as my garage on publicly-available imagery and as small as my dog's eyelashes with spy satellites. (Well, maybe I exaggerate; I have no way of knowing.) Back to the original story -- the reporting provides several examples of the use of geotechnologies on the part of NASA and other agencies both for monitoring climate change and other changes in earth systems, and to guiding responses to disasters. It may be in part because the monitoring verifies uncomfortable truths about human interactions with the environment, that NASA is being directed to return its focus to lunar exploration . Using clear-sky imagery -- from NASA by way of Google -- the same area of Vent

I write this post from our family's "Whaling House" near the historic whaling port of New Bedford, where we are members of the Whaling Museum . I am also an active member Whaling City Rowing and the Azorean Maritime Heritage Society , where I have learned how to row whaleboats. We even have a harpoon leaning in the corner.  Like many others in the area, I enjoy the stories of Moby-Dick and the Essex , and learning about the lives of those who worked in this most gruesome of trades for more than a century. I have learned that I need to be careful, as my enthusiasm has occasionally given students the impression that I actually hunt whales myself. That became clear when I showed a class this image of spermaceti oil that was recovered from a beached sperm whale on Nantucket.   Pure spermaceti oil at the Whaling Museum of Nantucket; for a brief time,  this snapshot I took was the official WikiMedia image of the historic material.  I had to assure the class that I had not hun

SPOILER ALERT:  I take it for granted that everyone has seen  It's A Wonderful Life , but of course each person has to have a first time. If you have not yet seen this, please go find it and come back to this commentary. I think it is especially important to watch it if English is not your first language -- as with the film  Wizard of Oz , this is full of expressions that have become common in American English. My  favorite librarian  and I have watched  It's a Wonderful Life  together just about every year we have been together, and I know I had watched it quite a few times before that; so I have seen it at least three dozen times. We know every line, and find ourselves speaking lines from the film to each other throughout the year. Among the most common: "I've been nominated for membership in the National Geographic Society." and "She's ... she's just about to close up the library!" Last week, we had a special treat, seeing it on the big screen

Photo: Boston Discovery Guide Today is the 100th anniversary of a terrible tragedy in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- a maritime accident leading to an explosion whose destructive power would not be exceeded until the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. It is also the beginning of a century-long (so far) story of redemption and gratitude. I learned the general outline of this story shortly after moving to the Boston area in 1997, but I learned a lot more from a brief conversation on NPR's Morning Edition  today. Journalist Steve Inskeep discusses the accident in the context of U.S.-Canadian relations with John U. Bacon, author of The Great Halifax Explosion . Spoiler alert: I knew that the people of Halifax continue to send the best Christmas tree they can find to Boston in gratitude for the help that came from our city to theirs. From this conversation, however, I learned just how significant the gesture was in the context of strained relations between the two countries at the time. In our dang

Photo: Tim Peterson, Grand Canyon Trust A week after insulting Navajo veterans of World War II -- the code talkers who helped to win the war in the Pacific -- under a portrait of the odious Andrew Jackson, the president of the United States announced the unprecedented removal of National Monument status from over 1,000,000 acres of land in Utah whose protection had been sought by Navajo and other tribes. Fortunately, the United States does still have three branches of government, and it is possible that a Federal court will agree that that the Antiquities Act does not give a president this authority. Still, as widely reported yesterday, the president is asserting just such authority in Utah, and if successful he may try to do the same in many other states, though not in Montana . In the NPR report above, Matt Anderson argues that President Obama's naming of the Bears Ears National Monument had itself been overreach, and that reverting to BLM status would keep "the areas open