‘Tornado Pioneer’

Tim Samaras wasn’t just a storm chaser, he was also a legendary researcher. After news surfaced of his death, The Weather Channel eulogized Samaras by re-airing an April 2012 profile of him. “We still don’t have a clear understanding why some thunderstorms create tornadoes and others don’t,” said Samaras, detailing the goals of his research.

Injured in the Line of Duty

The last thing the world needs is a new outbreak of fear of flying. But that is the unhappy consequence of a spat between James Fallows of The Atlantic and Hugo Lindgren, editor of The New York Times magazine.

Fallows and others pounced on an essay in the magazine by Noah Gallagher Shannon with the attention-getting headline “The Plane Was About to Crash. Now What?”

Days before my graduation some 25 years ago, I asked my Indian-American parents when they planned to arrive for the big event. To my great shock, my father said he and my mother weren’t going to attend. “When you get your Ph.D., I will come,” he said.

At the time, I was crushed. All of my friends’ parents would be there and, at 22, graduating from the University of Pennsylvania was my single biggest accomplishment. What I didn’t realize is that for my father, like many Indian-Americans of his generation, the bar was very high, and for their children it was just as high. Graduating from college was like getting to base camp in the Mount Everest–like climb in life.

Well ain’t that America? We make a competition out of spelling, televised and hyped by ESPN. And it’s won by an Indian-American kid from Queens who accurately spelled a Yiddish word for dumpling: knaidel.

Mazal tov! Or is it mazel tov? On the other hand, oy vey! The idea of a competition in which exactitude and standards are paramount being decided by a Yiddish word is a little ferkakte.

Chicago seemed the capital of gun violence when 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was killed by a stray round there just days after performing at President Obama’s second inauguration. 

But even then, Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy was reorganizing the department and implementing new strategies that would lead to a dramatic reduction in the violence.

The university president is standing by her. The governor has declined to meddle. Could embattled Rutgers athletic director Julie Hermann actually hang on to her job?

If students had their way, probably not—and based on a tour of campus and the school’s Facebook pages, a lot of them would like to see the president himself get the boot, too.

The Nantucket emergency preparedness council is meeting after hours. People from Miami to New York are ordering custom-made hurricane-proof windows. And volunteers are working around the clock at Fort Tilden beach in the Rockaways to fortify sand dunes.

That’s what Memorial Day weekend looked like seven months after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on much of the East Coast and just a few days ahead of the official start of the 2013 hurricane season, which is expected to be particularly intense and potentially dangerous.

IN THE darkest days of the Great Recession, Joel Kotkin wrote that “America is a country founded on and sustained by optimism.” And when his book The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050 came out in 2010, many readers found its upbeat predictions implausible. But as economic numbers in the United States continue slowly, steadily to improve while the European Union’s continue their shaky decline, Europeans are looking to Kotkin for ideas. The key, in his view, is demography. “In stark contrast to its more rapidly aging rivals,” he writes, “America’s population is expected to expand dramatically in coming decades.” By 2050 there will be at least 400 million people. Yes, they will make the country “a complex, crowded, and competitive place,” blending, often uneasily, into what Walt Whitman called “the race of races.” But the American mix has always advanced through the power of innovation. The Old World has never come to terms with its need for immigrants; never really shared with them a sense of optimism. So the French journal Futuribles writes somewhat ruefully that by 2050 the United States “very likely will remain the only real superpower in terms of society, technology and culture.”