Ice, fire, and Feiffer
Hello friends,
It’s been a weird and scary few days here in DC. It feels dangerous to leave the house. An Arctic blast rolled in yesterday like a freight train and knocked the temps into the low teens. Taking the dogs around the block means suiting up like a polar explorer.
The weather’s far from the scariest thing to hit town this week. Apologies to my high school English teachers for indulging in pathetic fallacy, but the cold feels like retribution for what’s been unfolding in DC. I could go on, but I doubt you need me to catch you up on the news.
To distract myself from one disaster by keeping tabs on another, I’ve been using the Watch Duty app to see if my oldest kid, who relocated to the LA area in September, is still safely out of the fire zone. (So far she is.) It’s an impressive app, and doing real public service. Since the fires broke out, Watch Duty’s become a critical resource for a lot of people. Many media outlets have written it up now, including the Verge:
If you live in Los Angeles, you are probably already intimately familiar with Watch Duty, the free app that shows active fires, mandatory evacuation zones, air quality indexes, wind direction, and a wealth of other information that everyone, from firefighters to regular people, have come to rely on during [these] historic and devastating wildfires.
Watch Duty is unique in the tech world in that it doesn’t care about user engagement, time spent, or ad sales. The 501(c)(3) nonprofit behind it only cares about the accuracy of the information it provides and the speed with which the service can deliver that information. The app itself has taken off, rocketing to the top of Apple’s and Google’s app stores. Over 1 million people have downloaded it over the last few days alone.
Tech isn’t going to save us, but applied like this, it helps.
[A good read related to the LA fires: Carolyn Kellogg on the seven books she saved when it came time to evacuate.]
New writing from me: Don’t forget about the humanities, either. We still need those, so it made me happy to write this piece for EdSurge: “As Humanities Fight for Support, New Journal Aims to Celebrate Their Role in Public Life”
A new peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Public Humanities, aims to strengthen the connections between university-based humanities work and the wider world, creating a space for academics and practitioners to share what they do and how they do it. And its creation is a sign of how professors and others in higher education want to make the case that, in spite of perennial laments about the crisis in the humanities, they’re very much alive, especially if you look beyond dismal stats about funding cuts, threatened departments and declining majors.
RIP Jules Feiffer, whose illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth were a source of enormous joy for me as a kid. (They still are.)
From the WaPo obit for him:
“Discharged in 1953, Mr. Feiffer was unable to get his comic work published. He worked at various jobs, getting himself fired every six months so he could collect unemployment. He called it ‘my own personal National Endowment for the Arts subsidy, awarded by myself at six-month intervals for a period of three years.’”
Be like Jules Feiffer and find your own way.
Stay warm, stay safe, keep clear of frost and fire and insurrectionists.
Thanks for reading,
Jen
“My own NEA subsidy” wow!!! What a quote. Thanks for sharing and hope your kid stays safe.