The Commonwealth February/March 2023

Discover Iceland’s spectacular scenery and rich cultural heritage. From Lake Mývatn to the incredible Vatnajökull National Park and Dettifoss – Iceland’s “Niagara,” witness numerous natural wonders.

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Learn about geothermal power at Hellisheidi Power Plant and experience Thingvellir National Park.

Explore sophisticated Reykjavik where you can enjoy an optional 3-day/2-night extension.

$6,892 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

CONTENTS

FEATURES

12 When ‘Sesame Street’ Set up Shop in Russia cover story: Nancy Lance Rogoff relates the wild tale of bringing a beloved educational program to post-Soviet Russia.

20 How Will Kevin McCarthy Handle George Santos?

Our 2023 kickoff meeting of the Week to Week political roundtable.

32 The Big Sleep

Dr. Aric Prather shares research on how to get the proper shuteye.

38 Misty Copeland on Her Ballet Mentor

The dancer talks about her mentor and her life in the ballet world.

46 The Webb Telescope—Our New Eye in the Sky

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi on what we’re learning from the latest space telescope.

DEPARTMENTS

4 Editor’s Desk by John Zipperer

5 The Commons

talk of the club: This year marks the Club’s 120th year as the nation’s leading public forum. also: When FDR spoke at the Club about his economic plans.

7 Program Info

8 Program Listings

Preview of Club events in February and March 2023.

“Sticking your head in a freezer as a cold exposure might be a novel thing to do to try to get through those midday doldrums. However, you can also go outside and exercise, get a brisk [walk], get your heart pumping. We’re trying to amp up that sympathetic nervous system.“

ON THE COVER: When Muppets took Moscow. (Main image by Victoria_Watercolor/Pixabay) ON THIS PAGE: Top: Sleep help. (Photo by CDD20/Pixabay.) Right: Misty Copeland. (Photo courtesy MasterClass.)

—ARIC PRATHER

“A very important person in the company [said] I should not be allowed to perform in the second act because I will ruin the aesthetic, I’ll ruin the line, this unison of white dancers dancing in white.“ —MISTY

JOHN ZIPPERER Vice President of Media & Editorial

The Next 120 Start Here

In this issue of The Commonwealth, you will find astronomer Andrew Fraknoi talking enthusiastically about the new James Webb Space Telescope. He reveals what is the object farthest away from Earth that humanity can now see—and because looking at great distances means looking back in time (speed of light and all that), we are able to see galaxies that were formed closer and closer to the very beginnning of our universe.

As The Commonwealth Club of California celebrates its 120th birthday, I find myself in an astronomical mindset. We measure our age by the number of times our planet has circled the sun. Put the Club on a different planet in our solar system with a longer or shorter year, and our birthday would be quite different from February 3. We also measure time by how many times our planet has turned on its axis. Sunrise, sunset. Over and over. That, too, would be different on any other planet.

We don’t even need to get into Einstein and other physicists’ theories about how time itself can be slowed or speeded up. Hours, days, years, centuries, millennia are all good enough for us to keep tabs on time in our little corner of the galaxy.

What matters is what you choose to do with your time on this planet as it careens around the sun. By suppporting the Club, you are part of more than a century of important—and sometimes just fun—events that have helped shine a light on common problems and possible solutions. And 120 years after we were founded, we are using technology, which is sometimes blamed for isolating people, as a way to bring people together. We have listeners and viewers across the Bay Area, throughout the nation, and around the globe experiencing our programs, sharing them, and asking quesitons.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, people are coming into the Club’s headquarters and meeting others, listening to and meeting speakers from a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints, and returning home better informed about politics, art, science, technology, business, education, and a whole lot more.

We’re grateful for everyone who has been with us as we circle the sun and try to make the most of our time on this planet.

Volume 117, Number 1

BUSINESS OFFICES

The Commonwealth

110 The Embarcadero

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feedback@commonwealthclub.org

VP, MEDIA & EDITORIAL

John Zipperer

PHOTOGRAPHERS: Ed Ritger, Sarah Gonzalez, James Meinerth.

ADVERTISING INFORMATION

John Zipperer, Vice President of Media & Editorial, (415) 597-6715, jzipperer@ commonwealthclub.org

The Commonwealth (ISSN 0010-3349) is published bimonthly (6 times a year) by The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. Periodicals postage paid at San Francisco, CA. Subscription rate $34 per year included in annual membership dues. Copyright © 2022 The Commonwealth Club of California.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Commonwealth, The Commonwealth Club of California, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105; (415) 597-6700; feedback@commonwealthclub.org

EDITORIAL TRANSCRIPT POLICY

The Commonwealth magazine covers a range of programs in each issue. Program transcripts and questionand-answer sessions are routinely condensed due to space limitations. Hear full-length recordings online at commonwealthclub .org/watch-listen, or via our free podcasts on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Audible or Spotify; watch videos at youtube.com/ commonwealthclub.

Published digitally via Issuu.com.

FOLLOW US ONLINE

What matters is what you choose to do with your time on this planet as it circles the sun.

PHOTO BY JAMES MEINERTH

TALK OF THE CLUB

ANNIVERSARY Club Celebrates Its 120th Birthday

On February 3, 1903, a small group of civic leaders met in San Francisco and agreed to create an organization that would work for the common good.

Describing his concept of the Club, co-founder and San Francisco Chronicle editorial writer Edward F. Adams would later write, “My conception of a public service club is a body whose members shall have entire confidence in each other’s regard for the public welfare, however diverse their views of obtaining it—their views, in fact, being as diverse as possible in order that no point of view may be missed.”

The new organization grew to become well known in the Bay Area, and then across California (launching its radio program in 1924), and eventually nationally. It is unlikely that the Club’s early leaders could have had any idea that it would become the country’s premier public forum—the largest and most active in the United States, reaching millions of listeners and viewers here and abroad. And did they imagine their organization would still be here 12 decades later?

Along the way, presidents, priests, poets and protesters have spoken from our stages, as have others from every walk of life. We have been the setting for many thousands of speeches and debates and conversations, some of them inspiring, some historic, some

controversial, and some that led to changes in public policy aimed at improving the common good—the source of the organization’s name, after all.

Now, in February 2023, The Commonwealth Club of California begins its 121st year. It will be a year of important topics, intriguing speakers, big changes and more events bringing together our community of interested and involved members and guests.

THE LATEST

Some Numbers to Know

Our online community of YouTube subscribers has grown to more than 166,000, continuing our rapid growth over the past few years. If you’re not already a subscriber, do so today—it’s free, and you’ll always have at your fingertips a huge archive of interesting videos: youtube.com/commonwealthclub . . .

The most popular Club video over the past month was a return engagement by author Mark Shaw, “Fighting for Justice for Marilyn Monroe, JFK and Dorothy Kilgallen.” The video received 202,840 views in January; the total number of views for the program is 847,000. In a little while, it might pass Shaw’s own previous Club program, “Collateral Damage,” which has 1.1 million views on YouTube . . . But will he be able to top the all-time most popular Club program? That would be “Andrea Bernstein: The Trumps, The Kushners and American Greed” with more than 1.2 million views . . . Altogether, Club videos have been viewed 33.1 million times on YouTube over the past 15 years . . . In non-video numbers, this is not only the Club’s 120th year, but on February 14, our Week to Week Political Roundtable celebrates its 11th birthday, Climate One is in its 17th year, and in 2024, the Club’s weekly radio program will celebrate its 100th year—the nation’s oldest continuing radio program, and still going strong.

THE COMMONS: NEWS OF THE CLUB, SPEAKERS, MEMBERS AND SUPPORTERS

Club co-founder Edward F. Adams, seen in an image from a 1928 film about the organization.

THE COMMONS

TIME TRAVELING

FDR Speaks

It’s one thing to know that Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his famous New Deal speech at The Commonwealth Club of California—that is an oft-told fact about the Club—but it is another to see contemporaneous reports of then-candidate FDR’s speech.

Leadership of The Commonwealth Club of California

CLUB OFFICERS

Board Chair

Martha C. Ryan

Vice Chair

John L. Boland Secretary

TBD

Robert E. Adams

Willie Adams

Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez

Scott Anderson

Dan Ashley

Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman

David Chun

Charles M. Collins

Mary B. Cranston

Susie Cranston

Treasurer

John R. Farmer

President & CEO

Dr. Gloria C. Duffy

BOARD OF GOVERNORS

Claudine Cheng

Dr. Kerry P. Curtis

Dorian Daley

Evelyn Dilsaver

Joseph I. Epstein

Jeffrey A. Farber

Dr. Carol A. Fleming

Leslie Saul Garvin

Gerald Harris

Peter Hill

Mary Huss

Michael Isip

Nora James

Alexis Krivkovich

David Leimsieder

Dr. Mary Marcy

Lenny Mendonca

Michelle Meow

Anna W.M. Mok

DJ Patil

Ken Petrilla

Skip Rhodes

Bill Ring

George M. Scalise

George D. Smith Jr.

David Spencer

James Strother

Hon. Tad Taube

Charles Travers

Don Wen

Dr. Colleen B. Wilcox

Brenda Wright

Mark Zitter

So we were pleased to see these images shared online of The New York Times front page story from September 24, 1932 about his speech the previous day in San Francisco.

You can read the text of his speech— which does not include the term “new deal”—at https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/ academics/research/faculty-research/new-deal/ roosevelt-speeches/fr092332.htm

PAST BOARD CHAIRS & PRESIDENTS

* Past Chair

** Past President

Dr. Mary G. F. Bitterman*

J. Dennis Bonney**

Maryles Casto*

Hon. Ming Chin**

Mary B. Cranston*

Evelyn Dilsaver*

Joseph I. Epstein**

John Farmer*

Rose Guilbault*

Claude B. Hutchison Jr.**

Anna W.M. Mok*

Richard Otter**

Joseph Perrelli**

Toni Rembe**

Victor J. Revenko**

Skip Rhodes**

Renée Rubin**

Richard Rubin*

Connie Shapiro**

Nelson Weller**

Judith Wilbur**

Dennis Wu**

ADVISORY BOARD

Karin Helene

Bauer

Hon. William

Bradley

Dennise M. Carter

Steven Falk

Amy Gershoni

Jacquelyn Hadley

Heather Kitchen

Amy McCombs

Don J. McGrath

Hon. William J. Perry

Hon. Barbara Pivnicka

Hon. Richard Pivnicka

Nancy Thompson

PROGRAMS INFORMATION

The Commonwealth Club organizes nearly 500 events every year on politics, the arts, media, literature, business and sports. Programs

are held online and throughout the Bay Area in San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Marin County, and the East Bay. Standard programs are

typically one hour long and frequently include interviews, panel discussions or speeches followed by a question and answer session.

PROGRAM DIVISIONS

In addition to its regular lineup of programming, the Club features a number of divisions that produce topic-focused programming.

CLIMATE ONE

Climate scientists, policymakers, activists and citizens discussing energy, the economy and the environment.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/CLIMATE-ONE

CREATING CITIZENS

The Club’s new education department.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/EDUCATION

INFORUM

Inspiring talks with leaders in tech, culture, food, design, business and social issues targeted towards young adults.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/INFORUM

MEMBER-LED FORUMS

Volunteer-driven programs that focus on particular fields.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MLF

MICHELLE MEOW SHOW

Talks with LGBTQ thought leaders from a wide range of fields of expertise.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/MMS

WEEK TO WEEK

Political roundtable paired with a preprogram social.

COMMONWEALTHCLUB.ORG/W2W

RADIO, VIDEO, & PODCASTS

Watch Club programs on KAXT, KTLN and KCAT TV every weekend, and monthly on KRCB TV 22 on Comcast. Select Commonwealth Club programs air on Marin TV’s Education Channel (Comcast Channel 30, U-Verse Channel 99), C-SPAN, and on CreaTV in San Jose (Channel 30). View hundreds of streaming videos of Club programs at youtube.com/commonwealthclub

CreaTV KAXT/KTLN TV

HARD OF HEARING?

To request an assistive listening device, please e-mail Mark Kirchner seven working days before the event at mkirchner@commonwealthclub.org.

PODCASTS

Subscribe to our free podcast service on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify to automatically receive new programs: commonwealthclub.org/podcast-subscribe

Hear Club programs on more than 230 public and commercial radio stations throughout the United States (commonwealthclub.org/watch-listen/radio). For the latest schedule, visit commonwealthclub.org/broadcast

In the San Francisco Bay Area, tune in to:

KQED (88.5 FM)

Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 2 a.m.

KRCB Radio (91.1 FM in Rohnert Park)

Thursdays at 7 p.m.

KSAN (107.7 FM)

Sundays at 5 a.m.

KALW (91.7 FM)

Inforum programs select Tuesdays at 7 p.m.

KNBR (680 and 1050 AM)

Sundays at 5 a.m.

KFOG (104.5 and 97.7 FM)

Sundays at 5 a.m.

TuneIn.com

Fridays at 4 p.m.

TICKETS

Prepayment is required. Unless otherwise indicated, all events—including “Members Free” events—require tickets. In-person programs often sell out, so we strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. Due to heavy call volume, we urge you to purchase tickets online at commonwealthclub.org; or call (415) 597-6705. Please note: All ticket sales are final. Please arrive at least 10 minutes prior to any program. Select events include premium seating, which refers to the first several rows of seating. Pricing is subject to change.

UPCOMING PROGRAMS

February & March 2023

On these pages is a preview of in-person and online programs scheduled for February and March 2023 at The Commonwealth Club of California. Most events take place at our headquarters at 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco.

To see more, including event details, new additions, and to buy tickets, visit commonwealthclub.org and/or subscribe to our weekly newsletter at commonwealthclub.org/mail

People are returning to downtown San Francisco and to our in-person programs at 110 The Embarcadero. Our building is easy to get to (by Muni, BART, bus, auto or foot) and there are many great restaurants nearby to make it a fun outing.

Safety Protocols for in-person attendance

• We follow best practices laid out by the CDC and state and local guidelines.

• We strongly recommend vaccination for guests, staff, and volunteers.

• Masks are strongly encouraged while indoors (if you do not have one and would like one, inquire at our front desk for a complimentary mask).

• We reserve the right to require different rules for specific events as necessary.

Our LEED Gold-certified building is designed to cool with outside air, using digitally controlled moveable windows and large ceiling fans. We are deploying additional HEPA filters inside to scrub the air. This is all in addition to increased cleaning of surfaces throughout the building.

DID

A

RUSSIAN

“SESAME STREET” CREATE A generation of more positive and peaceful youth? Hear the wild behind-the-scenes story of when the Muppets came to the former Soviet Union. Excerpted from the November 17, 2022, program “Muppets in Moscow”

NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF, Journalist; Television Producer; Filmmaker; Author, Muppets in Moscow

LESLIE DIXON, Screenwriter; Film Producer—Moderator

MUPPETS MOSCOW in

MUPPETS MOSCOW

LESLIE DIXON: I’m very humbled to welcome Natasha Lance Rogoff, whom I happen to know personally, to talk about her new book, Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia. It is entertaining, scary in places, very darkly funny, romantic and finally really uplifting when it demonstrates the artistry and the resilience of the Russian people.

It also gives you a peek behind the curtain, the Iron Curtain, maybe at a moment

in Russian history that is sadly gone and it’s replaced now by authoritarianism. So Natasha’s mission and that of her parent “Sesame Street” company, was really very altruistic. It was to educate millions of ex-USSR children —now Russian—encouraging honesty, humor, kindness and of course, racial tolerance.

What could go wrong?

Thank you, Natasha, for joining us today. You were a student and filmmaker in the ’80s in the pre-collapse USSR. Tell us how that came to be.

NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF: When “Sesame Street” tapped me to produce the original production of the iconic American

show in Russia, it was really an unprecedented time. The Soviet Union had just collapsed a few years earlier. This is one-seventh of the world surface, so a huge, massive territory. This included Central Asia, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia. It was really a period of incredible hope, excitement, but also pain and

humiliation, because they were a superpower.

DIXON: And confusion, I would imagine, about who they are now and what to hold onto and what to let go of.

ROGOFF: Nobody had any idea what the future would bring, and especially for their children.

ROGOFF: Talk about how you became fluent in Russian and how you studied there first, because it seems like that prepped you for being the kind of person they might have thought about to give this job to. You weren’t just some Hollywood TV producer that was dropped it cold into this environment. You

knew your way around, or so you thought.

ROGOFF: I thought I was the last person that should be doing this production.

DIXON: Why?

ROGOFF: Because I had no children’s television experience. So there’s that. I had spent 10 years in the Soviet Union previously. So I

PHOTO BY WIKIIMAGES/PIXABAY

spoke Russian, having worked for television news and making really serious documentaries.

DIXON: You were fluent, right?

ROGOFF: I was fluent in Russian, yeah.

And then these two “Sesame Street” executives showed up at a screening of a documentary, which was called Russia for Sale: The Rough Road to Capitalism. I had just come back after embedding myself with fascist communists who didn’t want to see the Soviet empire fail, and they wanted to retain power. And so these Muppet guys come up to me and they’re like, “Would you help us bring ‘Sesame Street’ to Russia?”

I said, “Did you guys just watch my film?” I just was completely confused.

This was a wonderful guy, Gary Knell, who said, “Come on down to the headquarters. Nobody says no to Elmo.”

DIXON: Well, you didn’t, did you? I’d like you to set the stage for us, because when you were there before, it was the USSR—like you say, fascist and humorless. And here you are about to bring this sparkling children’s program. What was different when you went back after you got the job? What did you walk into?

ROGOFF: Culturally, it was still very similar, because it really had only been two years since the Soviet Union collapsed. So it wasn’t that dissimilar from what it had been before.

DIXON: They hadn’t shaken off the hangover. [Laughter.]

ROGOFF: They hadn’t shaken off 70 years of communism overnight. Although you would think that if you looked at—this project in particular, funding for it was spearheaded by then-Senator Biden. The West was just evangelical about the collapse of communism.

DIXON: And they thought that was it. It was all good now?

ROGOFF: We were somewhat naive about how long it would take or at all [be] possible for Russia to change.

DIXON: Speaking of that naivete, that kind of leads into the next thing, the Henson Company, which also [is involved with] “Sesame Street,” and they are lovely people. Both my husband and I have worked for them and they’re known for their cultural nuances. They had previously done a number of foreign “Sesame Street”s, and they didn’t usually go in thinking they were just going to Xerox

what they’d been doing in America. In your book, it speaks about how they would really look at the history and culture and music and costumes and colors of these various places. They had a really good reputation for being sensitive to those things. And yet when you got there, it seemed like Russia was particularly insurmountable in this area. So was it Western arrogance that everybody just thought it would be a cakewalk, or was there more naivete involved that sets the stage for your unbelievable Herculean struggle to get this done?

ROGOFF: “Sesame Street” has international co-productions all over the world. And they did then, too. As you said, the Henson Company built the puppets for those international productions. And each of those productions ideally were supposed to reflect the values and culture of the different countries. So, for instance, every “Sesame Street” international co-production has a neighborhood and all the neighborhoods look different.

So in South Africa, it’s a marketplace. In

Norway, it’s a train station, their neighborhood. In the U.S., it’s an urban environment; the idea for that was basically Harlem. So when we went to create the Russian production, we used the same model that “Sesame Street” had used in all the different countries.

DIXON: Successfully, correct? They didn’t get the amount of pushback that you were about to walk into.

ROGOFF: This was probably the first one of the productions. I think that most of their productions were in Europe or in Mexico, where I had also worked and trained before I did the Russian production. But the challenges in this production were enormous. The cultural clashes—we faced tremendous violence, with our first sponsor of the show had his car blown up.

But in terms of the culture, there were many, many areas that came up during the curriculum seminar, which is a three day workshop where we bring together child educators from all over the former Soviet Union and the creative team. At this meeting, we are

PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/PEOPLETOGRAPHY

trying to decide what are we going to teach children of the post-communist era, what values, what scenarios are we going to write? How will these Muppets model new ideas?

So when we did that, for instance, I raised my hand and I said, “What about a scenario where children would have run a lemonade stand?” The reaction to that was just horror. They explained, “This would be shameful to have children selling things on the streets.” The only people that sold things under communism on the street were criminals, because independent commerce was illegal. Making a profit was illegal.

DIXON: Wow. You also got pushback about whether they even needed Muppets at all in Russia.

ROGOFF: Yeah, we nearly had, I think, an international crisis over the Muppets and the Russians. I say Russians, but we had Russians, Ukrainians, Armenians, everybody. But the creative team really didn’t like the Henson-style soft foam. When we first proposed the series, the head writer said, “We

want to use our own Muppets. We have a revered tradition dating back to the 16th century of puppetry—”

DIXON: Okay, I have to stop you there for a second. So their thinking was, if it was good enough for Catherine the Great, it’s good enough for my four year old. [Laughter.]

ROGOFF: But it’s true.

DIXON: Oh, God. And I think some of their actual nationally known puppets that had been on television were probably not something you wanted to pursue. Can you talk about that a little bit?

ROGOFF: Yeah, they were damn depressing. The first time, as they were arguing in favor of their own Muppets, they had me meet with their chief puppet designer. He walks in with two sacks and he pulls out these puppets and he starts holding them up, and one puppet says to the other puppet, “I’m going to kill you!” This is all in Russian. And I’m sitting here thinking, this puppet-on-puppet violence is not very “Sesame Street.” [Laughter.]

The characters were wooden, and they had really cruel expressions. So I thought we’re looking for something very different, something completely original.

DIXON: Well, there were a lot of centuries of things being a howling bummer. So I guess that just reflected that. Wasn’t one of them a cannibal?

ROGOFF: Oh, yeah. [Laughter.] I love what she remembers.

DIXON: Well, I read it over the last two days because I wanted to be fresh. This is not like I read it a month ago, so it’s burning in my brain right now.

Yeah. Cannibal Muppets. Henson’s gonna love that.

ROGOFF: This was at the end of one of these very, very long meetings where the whole table was covered with coffee cups and cookies and everything for hours [as we were] trying to figure out what to do. One of the people said they really wanted to have Baba Yaga as one of their Muppets, and that is a witch who eats children. So I was like, we have a long road to go here.

But it wasn’t only that. It was also like the music director—

DIXON: Oh, this is good.

ROGOFF: —who was an accomplished pianist and a composer. She insisted that the show only have classical music. “Sesame Street” is known for its music, its diversity, its inventiveness in terms of the music. And also, I had lived in the Soviet Union during this earlier period and had made another film about underground rock and roll. A lot of those musicians had been persecuted under communism. They weren’t allowed to record their music. They weren’t allowed to perform, and they couldn’t make any money [to] earn a living.

DIXON: And if this woman had had her way, they would have stayed that way. She was one of the more rigid and unflappable characters [in the book].

ROGOFF: Another colleague called her “the oldest 30-year-old I’d ever met in my life.”

DIXON: There is a lot of cultural pride, legitimate cultural pride, that these people had, and possibly mistrust of the West, because they’d been indoctrinated to think that for so many years. And now suddenly everything cracks open and they’ve got Pizza Hut and McDonald’s, which they might have mixed feelings about. And now there’s going to be adorable, clever little ditties like “Rubber Ducky” in Russian.

They admittedly did not do use any of the same songs that we knew in America. But there were arguably going to be new ones created that kids could actually sing. I don’t see kids on the playground singing Prokofiev.

“He pulls out these puppets, and one puppet says to the other puppet, ‘I’m going to kill you!’ I’m sitting here thinking, this puppet-on-puppet violence is not very ‘Sesame Street.’”

—NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF

Leslie Dixon (left) interviews Nancy Lance Rogoff at The Commonwealth Club.

But this is what she thought, right?

ROGOFF: Yeah. I understood where she was coming from. They had an incredibly long, rich tradition of music, and actually most of their animated series for children used classical music, and they’re beautiful. It’s all cel animation. We were lucky, because the talent base of these incredibly talented people was very high. So we pulled people— our team was about 400 puppeteers artists, set designer writers, producers and directors. So at this time, the studios in Russia were black. There was no money to make films, and they were unemployed. And when I went back to Russia in January of 2020 and I met with the chief director, who’s now in his eighties, and he told me something that he hadn’t told me for 30 years, and he had played hard to get when I was trying to hire him and telling me, “Oh, I’m doing another film right now and everything.”

He told me in January that he hadn’t worked in a year and a half, that he was incredibly worried about feeding his family. And when we offered him the job, it was like the greatest gift at that time. But it took him 30 years to tell me that.

DIXON: Would you say that economic sphere is one of the largest reasons why you were able to assemble this team? Why did they want you? What percentage of them do you think actually wanted to help you bring “Sesame Street” to Russia? And what percentage of them initially—because I know this changed over time—just wanted the paycheck, which also didn’t come right away.

ROGOFF: I would say that was not a depiction of the team at all. After living under communism for that many years, people felt this incredible release and hope and passion about trying to create a better Russia, a different Russia, as they often referred to it. “We want to create a normal country.”

At the same time, they did have enormous pride and rightfully so. I mean, Russia has made tremendous artistic contributions.

I had worked in different countries. The experience that I had creating the Muppets, for example, with the Russians was like nothing at all. I mean, the discussion of what the color was going to be of the Muppets involved a multi-dimensional conversation about Kandinsky. Vasily Kandinsky, the artist, had written a treatise on the theory of

“Soldiers came in and took over the entire floor, kicked everybody out of the offices, and then took locks and sealed the locks on the offices and put wax on it and said, ‘Everybody, that’s it, you’re done.’”

—NATASHA LANCE ROGOFF

PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/PEOPLETOGRAPHY

color. It related to the emotions that different colors carry. So this had to be part of the discussion.

DIXON: Because everybody was fluent in that.

ROGOFF: Yes, everybody. They looked at me when I said, “What are you guys talking about?” They said, “Oh, yellow, you can’t be yellow. That causes madness.” Then they got to the red one, and that makes children hyper. I thought, “Wait a second, Elmo’s red, you know? He’s like the most popular character.” But eventually they chose blue. And even that was a discussion, because the word for blue in Russian means gay. So some of the people thought people will think the puppet’s gay. And I was like, “Puppets don’t have a sexual identity.”

DIXON: When you’ve just arrived there, you are told by corporate headquarters that one of your first tasks in this kind of unstable environment is to find a broadcasting partner. This is the part of the book where I felt like Natasha was like Sisyphus pushing this boulder up the hill, only to have it roll down again and explode. So it’s worse than Sisyphus.

So if you could get into that a little bit; this was where I began to think I would not be woman enough to go through what you went through.

ROGOFF: The environment after communism had fallen apart was very violent. The center of the government was weak. At this point, you had western bankers [and] investors flooding into the country. There was enormous amounts of money flowing into Russia at this time, and the oligarchs were starting to take over.

“Sesame Street” is a nonprofit, and we are looking for a sponsor for our show. So we finally found one in one of the oligarchs, who decided that what we were doing was important and we negotiated a deal. He was all in. He was sort of upset that Big Bird wasn’t going to be in the show, but they were going to have their own original Muppets.

But anyway, his car was blown up in a car bombing and he had severe burns over most of his body. He had to leave the country immediately. That was one deal that exploded. And then not less than a few months later, we did another broadcast deal. So this was now the second time we had done this, and

that was with the head of Russia’s largest television broadcaster. There were only two channels in Russia at this time, so they didn’t have cable as we did in the U.S. There were a few tiny stations that were just starting, and that signal from the Russian station was sent across 11 time zones. So when we got the deal to do the broadcast, it was a big deal. This was a wonderful man who was trying to bring freedom of expression, a free press to the TV station and to battle corruption inside the television station related to advertising revenue.

And when he went home to his house after leaving the TV station, he was shot on the steps of his home.

DIXON: This is the moment where I want to ask you if at any point you were personally afraid for your own physical safety.

ROGOFF: It’s sort of like you’re younger; you sort of think you’re close to it. But these two circumstances were probably the scariest moments for me other than one other moment that happened later. It was just a little too close for comfort. Mostly I was just really sad, because these were people that I had become close to. They were my confidantes. I trusted them, and they were going to help us.

DIXON: And at no point was there ever an official explanation, right?

ROGOFF: To this day, that murder of Vlad Listyev has 120 judicial files in their police station, and it’s still unsolved.

DIXON: One of the things in Natasha’s book that I found, in retrospect, typically Russian is these unbelievably fraught things would happen, and there would never be any explanation. You would never really know who was behind it or why. I mean, it could have been the guy’s mistress or it could have been a complete political hit job. That’s always scary when you don’t know what you’re dealing with or who’s behind it. So this leads me to what I personally found, even though she was not physically present at the time, to be maybe the most scary incident. Those were awful; but this actually had to do with your offices.

ROGOFF: Yeah. Our office was inside the television station. This is the same station that I visited in January 2020, which was surreal to be walking around the same place 30 years later. But now it was completely different. And we had all of our scripts and

equipment, even a life-size Elmo that was our mascot in the office.

What happened is soldiers came in all of a sudden. They had AK-47s, and they took over the entire floor and kicked everybody out of the offices. [They] then took locks and sealed the lock on the offices and put wax on it and said, “Everybody, that’s it, you’re done.” And of course, everything was in this office. At this time there are no computers. Computers existed, of course, but we had very limited use of computers because most of the people, nearly 99.9 percent of the people we worked with, had never used a computer before. So we had all of our written scripts and everything in this office, and that was pretty terrifying.

DIXON: There are some slightly more lighthearted things I’m going to get to, but you had a glamorous female financial partner who professed great affection for you, but barely came through with offices or production money, and you never really knew what the deal was with her to this day, do you?

ROGOFF: Irina?

DIXON: Yes. She of the designer boots and fabulous hair. But somehow it seemed like the corporate headquarters had to bail you out a few times with cash infusions. She did finally come through with new offices.

ROGOFF: No, she was amazing. She was the kind of person that could get anybody to do anything.

DIXON: Including you.

ROGOFF: Including me. She was coquettish and incredibly powerful; at the same time, she made my life hell. But at the same time, I adored her. I mean, I know that her heart was in the right place, but it was very difficult to be a woman in the advertising and production business in Russia at that time. And for my team, we hired mostly women.

When I accepted the job with “Sesame Street,” I knew going in [that] Russia is a very patriarchal, sexist society. I had come from America as a film person, and it was also not easy. So I thought, okay, I can create the team that is more than 50 percent women. So having a female partner and females help facilitate the key roles made it a really unusual production.

DIXON: You fell in love, got married and got pregnant, all while trying to live like Atlas, the world on your shoulders. And after

corporate headquarters agreed to step in with a cash infusion because Irina wasn’t quite there yet, because your people weren’t getting paid, you became something that I have never before heard of, which is a lactating cash mule. Can you tell that story to these people? I was howling when I read it.

ROGOFF: There were no Western banks in Russia at this time. It was impossible, unless you establish yourself as an entity legally in the country. But also, if you sent money to Russia, your dollars were immediately converted to rubles, and the ruble was devaluing like 25 percent each month. You couldn’t run a production like that.

So we had to come up with other ways to do this; there were a lot of discussions around this. Everything we did was completely legal. At one point I had to carry less than the legal amount of $10,000—and of course, I had a double-D sized bra because I was pregnant and anyway, there’s ample room for the cash is all I can say. [Laughter.]

DIXON: It’s funny now, because she got through.

Okay, so we’ve talked a little bit about some of the creative pushback and difficulties, but can you talk about a couple of major creative turning points you had where these people start to come together, understand each other better, understand you better? There’s a point where it started to actually gel, and that was a long time coming, too. There was a lot of pushback. Some people quit because they didn’t get their miserable, sad Russian music or other reasons.

ROGOFF: If you take the music, for instance, the woman who was dead set against modern sounds, she met with one of my friends who had become a rock and roll star later. She was scared to meet this guy. He wore leather pants. He had an earring. This was terrifying for herm from where she was from, having been educated in the Moscow Conservatory. But she came back from this meeting like a changed woman. They found commonality. They had children the same age. He explained to her that he could also write music for children. And this guy ended up writing some of the best songs for the show. And the pianist, the music director, was able to change her attitudes and accept bringing in all kinds of young music artists. She didn’t have to quit.

Another example of this is when we were discussing inclusivity. This was at the three day curriculum seminar with all the education experts. We showed a clip from the “Sesame Street” American show to give them an idea of how tolerance can be addressed. In this clip, there’s a little boy in a wheelchair; he’s with a friend, and he’s flying a kite. In the background, there is this upbeat song, “Me and my chair, we go everywhere.”

I’m watching the clip and smiling. The video ends and I look at the group. They’re just looking at me and the TV, and they just say, “How can you do that? It’s so exploitative to show children in a wheelchair.” Another woman says, “Why would normal children ever want to watch a TV show with [not-normal children]?” She’s saying it just innocently. I’m sitting here listening to these enlightened educators and thinking to myself, “Maybe they’re not ready for ‘Sesame Street.’ Maybe this is just a really bad idea.”

This is kind of disheartening, because I’d already been through previous discussions about how they didn’t want our Muppets. There were all kinds of other challenges related to this besides the classical music. Then one woman says, “You Americans don’t understand that our children will never have wheelchairs, that our country is falling apart, that our health-care system has collapsed. So we have children who are trapped in their beds. If you have children who have wheelchairs in the TV show, how will these children trapped in their beds feel? They’ll just be sad.”

DIXON: Wow, that’s intense.

ROGOFF: It was intense. But then, it goes on from there, as the debate continues about how to handle this, because these educators feel a sense of responsibility; they’re making a show for millions of children. They want to change the country, but they’re not sure how.

One guy was a physicist and he said, “You’re tasking us with coming up with a TV show that can teach children and model for children values to help them thrive in a new open society. But we don’t know what a new open society looks like.”

ROGOFF: Could you speak to the racial inclusivity part? Because that was I think one of your triumphs.

ROGOFF: That’s a really good question. During this particular seminar it was very

difficult, because there was an attack in [Russia], Chechens were taking over a Russian town. It was one of the first attacks where you had post-Soviet brothers fighting against each other. So there was enormous feeling of hostility toward the Chechens and Central Asia.

Our goal was to create a TV show that would appeal to all children of the former Soviet Union. There were over 123 nationalities that were in the former Soviet Union.

This experience that went on over several days while we were having this discussion with the educators took enormous strength and I’d say tolerance on the part of the people in the workshop, because they had to overcome their feelings of incredible anger in order to think of the bigger issue of educating everybody.

DIXON: And they did.

ROGOFF: And they did.

DIXON: But I guess the Chechen Muppet was out. You weren’t going to make one of them.

ROGOFF: [Laughter.] No Chechen puppet.

DIXON: Can you just come up with one example of a moment you really felt you turned the corner? Was that maybe what we were just discussing?

ROGOFF: Just continuing on this theme of inclusivity; I didn’t really finish that story. What ended up happening is that there was a woman in the back of the room who suddenly spoke up and she said, “My name is Ludmila and I’m from Chuvashia”—which is a small region in western Russia, which extends from the Volga to Siberia—“and our town was used as a dumping ground for hazardous chemicals during the communist era. So we had the highest rate of deformities of children.” As she’s talking to the group and they’re still trying to debate this issue of inclusivity, she says, “I work with these children every day. I play with them, I laugh with them, and they yearn to play with normal children.”

DIXON: And she was heard by the others. They heard her?

ROGOFF: I watched her speaking and then she pleaded with them. “Why can’t you write scenarios for these children that show them as human and valuable to the society?” And the guy who had spoken earlier who said “Oh, you can’t show children in wheelchairs”

and they’re all sitting there, you know, shifting in their seats uncomfortably.

Then I look around the room, and I see that a couple of people are crying. This is humiliating for them. And you have Americans that are sitting in that meeting with them as well.

DIXON: Were you crying, too?

ROGOFF: I was crying, too. And I was trying to hide it, because I’m the one who’s supposed to be in charge. It was really an incredible moment, because I didn’t need to say anything. The Americans just sat there and [the Russians] said it to each other. [Ludmila] was like an angel descending into the room, and then everybody just came to this conclusion that together they had to do this, they had a sense of their responsibility.

DIXON: I want to know something that doesn’t have to do with an angel coming down, although it does sound like that’s what it was. Why were you able in the end to succeed? The more you read this book—and it’s got lots of freakish humor in it and it’s very engaging, but I would have packed up and gone home in week two. Why were you able to succeed? I think that they could have sent 90 other people and they would have washed out. Was it your love of the culture? Was it your respect for the creative process? Tell me why you think in the end you were able to succeed.

Because she did succeed. The show did get made. It did become a huge hit from the day it first aired, and it was on the air for years

even after she left. We all know the end of the story, but I’m very interested in what you think you were able to pull out of yourself that made you—with the assassinations and the AK 47s in the office and these tremendous clashes of all of these creative egos— why do you think you succeeded?

ROGOFF: I think it was very much about the people that I was working with and seeing the sacrifices that they were willing to make and the incredible hope after living under communism for so many years—the idea that it was possible that this country, this vast country, could change was incredibly seductive. And the ambition that “Sesame Street,” as a nonprofit, the risks that the company was willing to take, it was phenomenal. I mean, most companies would have walked out at that point.

DIXON: And these people knew that you cared about and respected them.

ROGOFF: I did love them.

Also, people were dying. There are people that you work with every day and suddenly they’re just murdered. I didn’t even talk about the third person who was also murdered. That was the third broadcaster. Two weeks before, I had given him a Tickle Me Elmo doll, and he had a picture of his eight-year-old daughter on his table. We talked about that. He was this kind of buff, attractive guy who hugged me when he first met me, which is kind of unusual, usually [there’s]a little more distance [with] Russians. And this guy was also murdered. No explanation to this day.

But when you’re in that environment and then you go home—I go back home to my fiancé who then became my husband—and you’re in America, it’s peaceful by comparison and stable and has had 200 years of democracy. So you go back and you go out to dinner with friends and they’re talking about pasta and real estate. [Laughter.] And then you go back to Moscow, and you’re in this intense environment where there’s the possibility of creating a totally different future, and to give children something that can help them move into a more open society.

Being part of that for me was a gift. It was nothing like making documentaries.

DIXON: The Russian relationship with misery is really [tight], and that must have been very hard for you to pry that apart a little bit and let some sun in.

ROGOFF: It was, but it was often such an organic process. You ask what kept me there? It was not only the discussions about Kandinsky, but it was also these moments where you have this discussion [about appropriate music], and then several months later, after we had we tested some of these serious songs that we had created; the director was open to changing his mind, because in some of these videotaped research studies where we tape the kids watching the show, the reaction to those songs was not as good as when we had the upbeat music. And in one of them, a little boy picked up a fake pistol as he was watching the lyrical, poetic song, and he shot the little girl with the braids next to him. So the director was like, “Oh, okay . . .”

But I will say one of the things I think about now that just gives me such solace. I thought about this at about 4:00 in the morning one night. I had been watching all these young men and women marching out of Russia. They’re in their late twenties and early thirties. And they don’t want to fight. They don’t support the war. It occurred to me that’s the age cohort that watched “Ulitsa Sezam.” That’s the “Ulitsa Sezam” generation. Then as I was lying in bed, not able to sleep—it’s been hard with this horrific war and having seen where we were 30 years ago and where we are today—I realized in Ukraine as well, that the young people fighting for their independence now, who are the same age cohort, they are also the “Ulitsa Sezam” generation. So we did make an impact.

PHOTO BY SARAH GONZALEZ/PEOPLETOGRAPHY

Nancy Lance Rogoff (left) and Leslie Dixon in the Club’s Green Room

POLITICS IN THE AGE OF GEORGE SANTOS

JOHN ZIPPERER: Welcome to Week to Week. This, by the way, completes our 11th year as The Commonwealth Club’s political roundtable.

I’m your host for Week to Week. I’m also a former Goldman Sachs and Citigroup employee, a graduate of Baruch College and the former head of Friends of Pets United. [Laughter.]

So our first topic: There’s been a lot of power changing hands in Washington, D.C., over the past couple of months. Let’s focus on the U.S. House of Representatives, which was won by the Republicans in the fall election. The GOP holds the chamber with a slim margin of four votes, and that narrow majority came into play in glorious Technicolor during the recent selection of the speaker of the House, which, of course was finally won by California Representative Kevin McCarthy.

Melissa, I want to start with you. Much was made about the Wagnerian opera of the selection process that we all witnessed. But what about the substance? What was happening?

Excerpted from the January 19, 2023, program “Week to Week Political Roundtable: 2023 Kickoff.”

TIM ANAYA , Communications Director, Pacific Research Institute; Former Assembly GOP and California Legislature Staffer

BOB BUTLER , Reporter, KCBS Radio; Broadcast Vice

President, SAGAFTRA; Mentor, SPJNews 2022

MELISSA CAEN, Host, “Get Out the Bet” Podcast; Political Analyst and Journalist; Attorney

JOHN ZIPPERER , Producer and Host, Week to Week Political Roundtable; Vice President of Media & Editorial, The Commonwealth Club of California—Host

As we begin a new year, big questions abound for our leaders in Washington.

FULL PAGE PHOTO: George Santos. BOTTOM, LEFT TO RIGHT: attendees at social hour; panelists Bob Butler, Tim Anaya, Melissa Caen, host John Zipperer; Anaya and Caen.

FULL PAGE PHOTO: Kevin McCarthy. BOTTOM: Scenes from the political roundtable.

What was the meaning of these very tense battles we were seeing within the Republican Party?

MELISSA CAEN: Oh, boy. [As Elmer Fudd]“Kill da wabbit.” [Laughter.]

So here’s the thing. The things that the holdout Republicans were fighting about are actually, if you look at the list of things that they wanted, some of them folks on the left would object to; some of them you can debate; but there were certain things that they were trying to do to kind of unclench the party fist in the House.

You have even people like AOC coming out saying, “You know what, these aren’t all terrible. Like, this is actually a good thing that we’re going to be able to vote on more things, we’re going to be able to debate more things,” because the way it kind of works now is whoever’s in power goes into a room and comes up with a bill and it’s like 75,000 pages long and it’s got everything in the world in it. And then they just immediately bring it out to the floor, vote on it, and that’s it. So there are a couple of the things that they were trying to do that I think we can all hold hands and agree are probably okay. It would probably be okay to vote on things more and to debate more and to have bills that aren’t huge books that only get put on the floor and you vote right away. There’s a 72-hour rule as part of the thing. So that’s part of it.

There’s also, you know, they want to go after Hunter Biden. And there are the other kind of more partisan things in there. But there are certain parts of this that it’s hard to make the case against, really. If you are, like me, not a fan of political parties, I was like, “Okay, great.”

[We might] not like the drama of it. But I wasn’t mad at some of the things that they were asking for, even though I’m not a Republican.

TIM ANAYA: I think one of the interesting things is we’re used to the speaker being this kind of all-powerful person in Washington, and historically, the speaker was very powerful. They controlled all the money that was doled out to candidates, and they certainly controlled all the committee assignments and perks and what kind of office you got and what kind of congressional delegation trips that you got to go on.

I think this whole debate shows us that that’s really a relic of the past. Now that internet grassroots fundraising is such a big thing right now, someone like a Matt Gaetz or an AOC [is] not dependent on the party leadership anymore. So when they come to them and say “You better vote for this or else,” or “You better vote for me or else,” they can tell them to pound sand, because they’ve got their own $20 million in the bank and they have a whole network of people across the country who are following what they’re doing and are sending in their $5 and $10.

I think that kind of drama was on full display for us to see really for the first time of how different things are in Washington today.

CAEN: Literally, [in one confrontation, we could see] the congressmen get [in another congressman’s] face. The security guy came and kind of grabbed him by the face. That was an amazing C-SPAN [moment]. I remember watching it and being like, “What is happening right now?” People are walking up the aisle and yelling at each other. My British friends were like, “Thanks, America. We were a little sheepish after our whole prime minister thing there for a minute. But you have successfully taken the attention away from us and put it on your system.” [Laughter.]

BOB BUTLER: Yeah. C-SPAN. That may

be one of the next bills—to ban C-SPAN from being in the House.

ZIPPERER: They really showed their value. What were your thoughts when you were watching this unfold?

BUTLER: I was sitting here thinking the country is in a position where you want legislators who are going to legislate for the people. And I just don’t feel comfortable that the Republican Party really cares about legislating for the people. Who in their right mind would propose getting rid of Social Security or changing it to the point where anybody who’s getting it would lose out? That, to me, is a loser for their constituents. I can’t wait for the debate on getting rid of the IRS in favor of a 30 percent sales tax.

CAEN: Well, here’s the thing, though. When you’ve got a split between the House and the Senate like we do now, where you have the House controlled by one party, and the Senate controlled by the other, you get a lot of signaling legislation. The Democrats do this, too; when Republicans are in charge of the Senate, you constantly will get emails [from House Democrats] saying, “We passed our bill giving a free puppy to every American and it died in the Senate.” You never thought that was going to actually take place.

BUTLER: With voting rights—

CAEN: [The whole point of passing signaling legislation is] to be able to send that email asking me for money, telling me you did the thing. So now that it’s flipped and now that the Democrats are in charge in the Senate and Republicans in the House, there’s going to be a lot of that. There’s going to be a lot of bills that are passed in the House that you might think are totally bananas, but it’s just so they can go back and tell their constituents, “I voted for that bill” even though they know it would nev-

er actually happen.

We’ll probably see a lot of that. There’s a lot of people making representations, but it’s really a lot of just fundraising and no one really thinks necessarily they’re going to be signed into law.

ANAYA: I can speak to that, having worked in the California legislature for nearly 20 years. There are bills that you have in your package every year that are district bills to solve problems that your constituents have come forward with. And then there are bills—we would call them “messaging bills”—where there’s an issue like tax reform or Social Security reform, where you’re not going to pass it. You may not even bring it up for a vote in some cases, but you want to start a conversation sometimes. A lot of legislation doesn’t pass in the first year or even in the first session. Sometimes it takes five or ten years to get the ball moving and build a coalition around that issue. So some of these ideas—there’s no way any of those bills are ever going to be passed by both houses, but those people pushing them want to start a conversation on those issues.

BUTLER: And they want to play the blame game. “We have this great idea. And the Democrats killed it. The Democrats hate America. They killed this.” They killed the bill to abolish the IRS and get rid of your Social Security, and raise your sales tax 30 percent. It’s bonkers. But that’s the performative performances we’re going to see in the next couple of years.

ZIPPERER: There’s been a lot of talk and kind of bewilderment about [how] McCarthy had to make a lot of concessions—and everyone has to make these concessions when they’re doing that negotiation to be speaker, moreso when you have a really narrow majority. Pelosi did it, Boehner did

it. Tim, you worked with McCarthy when you were at the state legislature. Can you tell us what you think of him, how does he operate, and how can we expect him to operate in what’s probably going to be a very contentious year on many fronts?

ANAYA: On that issue of the trade-offs and how to do it, we certainly all saw, thanks to C-SPAN, some of the wild things that people were talking about during that week. Well, if you think that’s wild, go behind closed doors when they’re off the record and hear the things that they’re talking about and asking for.

Nancy Pelosi had to do this; any party leader [does]. You have to, with a straight face, take these things seriously and cut a deal and get enough people and move forward. It’s been said that if you’re a party leader—moreso if you’re minority leader, but I think it applies if you’re the speaker— it’s like trying to herd feral cats.

We saw that all on display here. Now, Kevin, [here] is what he’ll be like. I worked for him for three years when he was Republican leader in Sacramento. I think we could expect two things.

One, he’s a very political person, and by that, I don’t mean he’s going to be this, that or the other in his press conferences, lobbing charges. Yes, there’ll be those times. But in terms of he’s a political animal, he knows every district, who the congressman is, who are the key players in their district, who are the up-and-coming people to recruit. Last year, he raised over $500 million to elect Republican candidates to the House. So this is someone who literally—even though we have this kind of new era of grassroots fundraising, a lot of people up there owe Kevin their jobs. That will help him. He’ll be attuned to how do we keep the seats we have and how do we

move forward.

Now, the knock you’ll get on Kevin is, well, he’s not a policy guy. He’s not really interested in policy. And that might have been true earlier in his career. The times I have seen him lately, he is really deep on policy, and certainly if you see him in an interview now, all he’s talking about are policy issues. But I think that’s the thing of leadership. When you look at issues in Washington, the president’s agenda is always the Biden agenda. But the congressional agenda, well, it’s really not the McCarthy agenda or the Hakeem Jeffries agenda. It’s really the party’s agenda. And if you’re a good leader, yes, you’re out in front. But you empower your membership to be the ones who are carrying those bills and being the front people for their top priorities. So though Kevin may not be the one saying, “This is my plan and here are all the things I want to do,” it’s actually smart on his part to be saying, “Yes, I’m there and yes, I’m supporting my team.” But you’re really putting the key members up front, having that front and center moment in the spotlight.

So I think you’ll see a lot of that. Member management, as we would call it, is really the key function of a speaker aside from their policy duties, and I think he’ll do quite well at that despite this kind of wild environment he finds himself in.

ZIPPERER: One of the things that Nancy Pelosi was very good at was giving cover for her members, protecting moderate members who might have the more progressive members mad at them on abortion or gun control or something like that, because they’re from more purple districts. How do you think McCarthy will do on that?

ANAYA: He will get that. Yeah, that will be

his inclination. But that’s one of the consequences of the rules changes that the rebels wanted to see, because when you have more votes on amendments on the floor and more debate, one of the consequences of that, if you’re a party leader, is members in tough races are going to have to take votes they don’t want to take.

So you’re going to see that those in competitive districts are who could be at risk of losing their seats in the next election. They’re going to have to take those votes.

ZIPPERER: Melissa, you interviewed John Boehner for the Club. He was a speaker who famously got frustrated dealing with his hard right, I guess the Tea Party.

BUTLER: Or the mainstream right.

ZIPPERER: Just like [some] Democrats thought Reaganites were extremists, and then Reaganites were the ones who were driven out of the party by the Trumpists.

CAEN: Revolutions always eat their own.

I can tell you, no one’s happier right now than John Boehner. He’s on the golf course laughing. He wrote this book called On the House—it’s a great book. He was such a great interview, because he was no longer speaker. You could talk about it. And he called them the “hell no caucus.”

He said the problem with them is that they know the crazier they are, the more it’s sort of like in sports, how everyone wants the “SportsCenter clip,” [showing] the big hits. They’re not doing the fundamentals. They just want that highlight clip, so they care more about that than they do the mundanity of performing government work.

When he grew up, his dad owned a bar. He basically said, “Look, I grew up in a bar. I’m used to dealing with crazy people. Deal with it.” And he literally said crazy. He’s like, “Crazy people come in, it’s fun. You do

your best.” I asked him, “You raised money for them, and then they show up and they’d say all these things about you.” And he’s like, “Yeah.”

So it doesn’t mean necessarily that they’re going to dance with the one that brought them. If you’re angling for something else, a very tough reelection isn’t your goal; if being a pundit is your goal or some other kind of thing is your goal, that’s not necessarily going to be sort of a tie that’s going to hold you to [loyalty to the speaker].

But he said that it was very difficult and that you really couldn’t compete with these other pressures or other polls that were pulling your party members into a different place. You just kind of do your best and find that sort of Venn diagram. I think McCarthy might do something like let his caucus do whatever crazy stuff they want to do so they can go back and say they did it. But then “In exchange, when it comes to the important stuff, we expect you to line up.” I don’t know how that’s going to go, but that might be the plan. Might be right. The plan might be let them do their thing and then in exchange, they will raise the debt ceiling or whatever it is that we need them to do when we need them to do it.

Fingers crossed.

ZIPPERER: There’s a quote that’s attributed to [former Speaker of the House] Sam Rayburn, “Son, if you can’t take their money, drink their whiskey, . . . and then vote against them, you don’t deserve to be here.” That’s actually the PG version.

But there was some talk, as the country was watching this happen, as to whether [McCarthy] should make these concessions, get elected speaker, and then basically ignore the crazier claims or demands from some of the folks in his caucus.

BUTLER: I think that’s what’s going to

happen. He’s made a lot of concessions. Allowing one member to get up and call for his head—that’s fine. But you have to have people vote for it. So I don’t know that that’s actually going to happen. But I think he wanted to be speaker. He said, “I’ll do anything to be speaker. And then once I get there, all bets are off. I’ll do what I want to do.”

And I think that’s what’s going to happen.

ANAYA: I would say on the one-member issue, we don’t know how things are going to take us, but if we get to that point, you still need 218 votes on the floor to do it. So if you’re Hakeem Jeffries, it’s in your interest to have kind of disarray, but is it in your interest to topple him as speaker and have someone else you can work with? Can you work with person X, Y or Z?

ZIPPERER: Do I have this right, only Republican members could move to vacate?

BUTLER: No, no.

ZIPPERER: Anyone? Democrats?

BUTLER: Anybody can.

I’m actually surprised during this whole thing that Jeffries didn’t go to [McCarthy] and say, “Look, let’s reach a power sharing agreement. You’re the speaker, but I’ve got six people that will vote for you to get this taken care of.” I’m surprised that didn’t happen.

ZIPPERER: At least what they were saying through the news was that the Democrats had all agreed not to do that.

BUTLER: Well, but then there’s always [deals] in the back room.

ZIPPERER: Speaking of [great] minds in Congress, let’s dive into the saga of George Santos, if that’s his real name. [Laughter.]

We’ll stick with you, Bob. The MSNBC talking heads and the political tweeters are, of course, very engaged in the Santos story.

Is this likely to be anything that gets down beyond the entertainment level of the political world or does it become one of those millstones around the neck of the Republicans nationally, always hanging over their heads as well?

BUTLER: I don’t think the Republican Party cares if you lie, because I think that’s the kind of disregard for the party nowadays. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you win. So I don’t think George Santos has anything to worry about until reelection. Come reelection, I think even a lot of the people who voted for him now are saying, “If I [had known] all this, I never would have voted for the guy.” So I think he may have a problem then. But the party itself, I don’t think the party really cares because, you know, he’s another vote.

But I’m wondering—we’ve got all these people that ask for pardons and stuff. You just wonder if the DOJ [Department of Justice] is going to one day come up and issue some indictments of these people that basically tried to help Trump overturn the election. I don’t know. But if that happens and if they’re from Democratic states, that could very quickly flip the House.

CAEN: Every day is just like, you pick up the phone, you look at the news and you’re like, “Oh, he killed a dog. Well, of course.” One of these days it’s going to be like [Santos pulls off a mask and reveals he’s] Vladimir Putin. [Laughter.]

I want to know where was his opponent? Because, look, there’s a lot of reasons why I don’t run for office, but one of them is I’m just convinced that my opponent would be out there talking to my first grade teacher about how I used to eat paste, and I don’t need the world to know that.

But you know what? A lot of us believe that there is usually the opponent, somebody, doing some vetting out there. And

so that’s part of why this is so baffling. It’s just like that’s who I want to talk to.

ZIPPERER: Well, apparently a lot of criticism has been aimed at the head of the Democratic Party in New York state, because they had this information, it was out, or they had some of the information. And frankly, if you can’t take a small kernel of information of bad news for your opponent and make it into a big thing, you don’t deserve to be in politics, not in the big leagues.

CAEN: But there’s a few ways to kind of deal with this. I know people are mad that he got seated, but the truth is—there’s two things [regarding excluding a House member]. One is exclusion from the House, and the other is expulsion. So to exclude someone [means] that you can’t even take your seat. You have to have failed the three tests—citizen for seven years and a resident of your state and be a certain age. So if you were those things, they kind of have to seat you. There’s really no other way to prevent someone [from taking their seat once they win their election].

But once you’re in, to kick you out, then that’s a two-thirds vote and that’s something that they can do. I think [members of the House Ethics] Committee are investigating now. People think that the cops should come. But the truth is there’s very little that you can do once somebody is already in. If they’ve met those requirements and they’ve been elected, the place to look is if when you go to sign your candidate statement, whether or not he attested to certain things under penalty of perjury that weren’t true. If that’s the case, then the D.A. or secretary of state of New York—I know in California that would be, I think, the secretary of state—but the attorney general could come after you.

So those are the only real avenues that

you have, aside from, as you point out, reelection, which can seem like a long time. But it’s not that long when it comes to being in Washington. And as soon as the dust settles, you’re already running for reelection. So hopefully this short national nightmare will be over soon.

BUTLER: You mentioned the investigation; [it] didn’t go to the Ethics Committee, the one that Kevin’s going to disband.

CAEN: Oh, is he disbanding the Ethics [Committee]? I think he’s putting together something to—

BUTLER: It’s not going to be very ethically sound.

ZIPPERER: Maybe Matt Gaetz will chair it. [Laughter.]

Democrats probably don’t want [George Santos] out of office for the next year.

ANAYA: That’s right. You want him front and center every day; you want the albatross for the next election. You know, everybody who took money from him or gave him money or sat next to him on the floor or voted with him or [was] seen anywhere with him—that’s gold, really. But I think you’re right. This is a question that is going to be solved.

Obviously, he has no shame, so he’s not going to step down. Congress doesn’t exactly have a great track record over the years, including recent times, of investigating their own. So I wouldn’t put much faith in that. It’s going to be whether on his campaign reports that he said something fraudulent or [there are] questions about what his spending was. That’s the way to go.

I don’t know about you all, but last year one of the shows I’d binged on Netflix was [the drama series] Inventing Anna. And Inventing Anna has a whole story like this. But in the [real] world, we may have found the second season of Inventing Anna

George Santos’ opponents “want him front and center every day; you want the albatross for the next election. Everybody who took money from him or gave him money or sat next to him on the floor or voted with him or [was] seen anywhere with him—that’s gold.”

—TIM ANAYA

On the Road to Freedom Understanding the Civil Rights Movement

October 8-15, 2023

Discussion Leader

Robert Greene

Robert Greene is the CEO/ Principal of Cedar & Burwell Strategic Consulting, specializing in the application of DEIBA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity, Belonging, and Accessibility) technologies in broad-scale organizational development consulting. Prior to Cedar & Burwell, Robert served as a teacher and administrator in educational organizations, department leader in for-profit organizations, and trustee and director for non- profit and social entrepreneurship agencies. He brings insightful thinking, writing, and consulting to issues ranging from organizational development and leadership design; diversity and inclusion leadership and management strategies; wealth and social class disparities; the impact of identity differences in employee culture; and bias awareness and bias resistance training.

He’s partnered with an extensive and varied list of leaders and organizations including Berkeley Law School; BlackRock; Capital Group; The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; Harvard-Westlake School; Marin Country Day School (CA); Media Rights Capital Studios; Occidental College; Phillips Academy Andover; St. Mary’s College; SFFilm; and YPO among many others.

Robert earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Brown (econ/political science) and Harvard (administration, planning, and social policy) respectively.

JACKSON

Sunday, October 8 R,D

Independent arrivals in Jackson. Transfer to the Westin Jackson. Afternoon visit to the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. This museum provides an honest and painful account of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, beginning with the back story to the civil rights period – the European slave trade. Evening welcome reception and dinner at the hotel.

JACKSON

Monday, October 9 B,L,D

O ur morning begins at the Medgar Evers Home Museum, where Evers lived and was later assassinated in 1963. Walk past the home, which has been restored to the way it looked in 1963. Continue to Malaco Records, an American independent record label based in Jackson, that has been the home of various major blues and gospel acts. Continue to COFO’s Civil Rights Education Center and meet with Dr. Robert Luckett, Director of the Margaret Walker Center. We also meet with Hezekiah Watkins, a civil rights activist from who became the youngest Freedom Rider nearly 60 years ago.

After lunch drive to the former Greyhound bus station, a prominent site from the 1961 Freedom Rides. Continue to Farish Street, a thriving center of African-American life in the Jim Crow era and pass by the Collins Funeral Home, where 4,000 mourners marched after the death of Medgar Evers.

Stop by the Big Apple Inn, where we will meet with the owner, Geno Lee, whose unique delicacy, Pig’s Ear Sandwich, has attracted the likes of BB King and even President Obama.

Dinner tonight at Johnny T’s and after enjoy a private performance by a local Blues musician.

LITTLE ROCK

Tuesday, October 10 B,L,D Depart Jackson today for Little Rock, stopping by the BB King Museum

Drive to Greenwood and the Museum of the Mississippi Delta where we have an authentic delicious barbeque lunch prepared by Mary Hoover, who catered for the movie “The Help.”

Continue to Baptist Town with Sylvester Hoover who shows you their store and the Back in the Day Museum Tour the community museum which explores the history of African-American culture in the Delta. Continue on to the nearby town of Money to see the remains of the Bryant’s Grocery, the site associated with the murder of black teenager Emmett Till.

End the day in Sumner at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center and meet with Benjamin Saulsberry where we will learn of the apology resolution written by the community. Enjoy dinner at Sumner’s Grille before continuing on to Little Rock and the Burgundy Hotel

MEMPHIS

Wednesday, October 11 B,L,D

Today begins with a visit to Little Rock High School, a national emblem of the often violent struggle over school desegregation. The crisis here forced the nation to enforce African-American civil rights in the face of massive southern defiance during the years following the Brown decision, a major triumph of the movement. Here we will have the opportunity to meet with Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine.

Continue on to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center housed in a gleaming modern space overlooking the Arkansas River.

Continue on to Memphis and check-in to the hotel. Dinner at a local restaurant.

MEMPHIS

Thursday, October 12 B,L

Begin the morning at the Lorraine Motel, now the home of the National Civil Rights Museum. Martin Luther King, Jr. stayed at the motel on April 4, 1968, the day of his assassination. Enjoy lunch at The Four Way, one of

For additional information or to make a reservation, contact Commonwealth Club Travel

(415) 597-6720

the oldest soul food restaurants in Memphis whose regulars included Martin Luther King Jr, Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin. This afternoon, we will focus on Memphis’ music history with a visit to the Stax Museum of American Soul, located in Soulsville. End the day with a visit the Slave Haven Underground Railroad Museum, where dark cellars, hidden passageways and trap doors were used by runaway slaves attempting to flee north to freedom. Dinner is at your leisure this evening.

MONTGOMERY

Friday, October 13 B,L This morning, drive to Birmingham and meet with Carolyn McKinstry at the 16th Street Baptist Church where a bomb killed four young girls as they prepared to sing in their choir on September 15, 1963. Rev. Carolyn McKinstry, was 14 and inside the church when the bomb exploded, Across the street is the historic Kelly Ingram Park, site of civil rights rallies, demonstrations and confrontations in the 1960s and now sculptures provide visual reminders of the past.

Continue by road to Selma and stop at the Brown Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the site of Malcolm X’s address in support of voting rights. Three marches from Selma to Montgomery began here and it served as the temporary headquarters for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

At the Selma Interpretive Center enjoy a conversation with Foot Soldier, Annie Pearl Avery whose civil rights

work spans decades. Walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge where we will walk in memory of those who were beaten while seeking the right to vote.

Continue on to Montgomery via the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail and check into the Renaissance Montgomery Hotel. Dinner this evening is at your leisure.

MONTGOMERY

Saturday, October 14 B,L,D Morning drive to the home of Richard and Vera Harris with their daughter, Dr. Valda Harris Montgomery. Located four doors down from MLK’s parsonage, the house was a haven for freedom riders. Enjoy a short walking tour and a chance to hear of the extraordinary meetings that took place in this home.

End the morning at the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration. Focusing on the history of racial injustice, the museum is situated on the site where enslaved people were once warehoused.

Enjoy lunch at local restaurant before visiting the deeply powerful National Memorial for Peace and Justice, created by the Equal Justice Initiative.

End the day with a debrief led by Robert Greene. This will allow an opportunity to discuss our experiences of the week.

Enjoy a farewell dinner at Central Restaurant.

What to Expect

Please note that our itinerary involves some time driving from city to city, as well as a fair amount of walking around the sites including climbing up and down stairs. Most days have an earlymorning start and include a full day’s schedule of activities, lectures and special events. Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group. The temperatures in the region average in the 60s - 70s (°F) and can be slightly humid. This program will be covering topics that include violence, and that may be difficult for children. Lectures and discussions are geared to an adult audience. Therefore, we do not recommend this program for people under 16.

DEPART

Sunday, October 15 B Independent transfers to the airport for return flights home.

Itinerary is subject to change.

On the Road to Freedom: Understanding the Civil Rights Movement

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Mail completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105. For questions or to reserve by phone call (415) 597-6720.

_____ I / We have read the Terms and Conditions for this program and agree to them.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS

The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted with Distant Horizons (DH) to organize this tour.

Reservations and Payments: A $1,000 per person deposit, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 60 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.

Tour Price Includes: Accommodations in hotels as outlined in the itinerary based on double occupancy, prices listed are based on two persons sharing a twin room. Distant Horizons reserves the right to substitute hotels for those named in the brochure when necessary. Distant Horizons will do all possible for single participants to satisfy requests to share rooms. On occasions when it is not possible, the single room supplement will apply. If Distant Horizons assigns you a roommate and your roommate cancels or changes their mind about sharing a room, you will be liable for the single room supplement. American breakfast (B), lunches (L) and dinners (D) are included as specified in the itinerary. Iced tea or lemonade are included with lunch and dinner; welcome and farewell receptions include beer and wine; educational program of discussions; entrance fees to monuments; bottled water kept on the tour vehicle; the services of a Distant Horizons tour manager; special activities as quoted in the itinerary; and gratuities to the local guides; tour manager, driver, and waitstaff for included meals.

Tour Price Does Not Include: Air service to Jackson and from Montgomery; meals not specified in the itinerary; transfers to and from airports; chambermaid gratuities; alcoholic drinks at included meals except for welcome and farewell receptions; drinks other than soft drinks at meals; porterage; personal items such as laundry; telephone calls; liquor; room service; independent and private transfers; luggage charges and private trip insurance.

Cancellation and Refund Policy: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply:

• Up until 120 days before departure: $250 of the $1,000 deposit

• 119 -90 days before departure: $500 of the $1,000 deposit

• 89-61 days before departure: $1000 deposit

• 60 days before departure: No refund

The tour can also be cancelled due to low enrollment. The minimum group size of this departure is 15 paying participants. Neither CWC nor DH accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased in conjunction with the tour.

Trip Cancellation and Interruption

Insurance: We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.

Medical Information: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health (should we say the trip requires travelers to be able to walk a total of a mile per day and be on their feet for about an hour at a time). It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Dietary restrictions must be known well in advance as we may not be able to accommodate all requests and restrictions.

COVID-19: Guests will be required to show proof of vaccination. During the trip, we will follow the recommended precautions from the Centers of Disease Control (CDC), state and local agencies at the time of travel. Our aim is to protect our travelers, guest speakers, local staff, and communities we visit.

Itinerary Changes & Trip Delay: This itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing (January 2023) and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or DH or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes are not included. The minimum group size of this departure is 15 paying participants. Should the number of guests drop below 15 a small-group surcharge will be proposed.

Limitations of Liability: CWC and DH its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation

carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective services. CWC and DH shall not be held liable for

(A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, terrorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, pandemics, epidemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The participant waives any claim against CWC/DH for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/DH shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers.

Registration: The Commonwealth Club (CST# 209688940). Distant Horizons, (CST #2046776-40)

Tour Price Per Person: $4,995

• Single Occupancy Room: $6,205

Based on a minimum of 15 travelers

Tour Price includes:

• Accommodations and meals as per itinerary

• All sightseeing in an air-conditioned coach

• Bottled water on the bus

• All entrances and events as listed

• Discussion Leader to accompany the group

• Pre-departure materials and reading list

• The services of a professional tour manager to accompany the group

• Gratuities

Does not include:

• Airfare to Jackson and back from Montgomery

• Alcoholic beverages except for wine and beer at welcome and farewell events

• Excess luggage charges

• Trip Insurance

• Items of a purely personal nature

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma

THE BIG SLEEP

The secrets to a restful, restorative nightime slumber

MARK ZITTER: Tonight we’re going to talk about sleep, which is something we all know a lot about. Dr. Aric Prather is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at UCSF here in San Francisco. He runs the sleep lab there, which has both clinical work—seeing patients—and research work. So we’ll benefit from both of those streams of your expertise.

So let’s get started. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that everyone listening right now has had experience with sleep in the last 24 hours and probably just about every night of their lives as well. So we all think we know a lot about sleep, and I think we all know that we feel better if we get a good night’s sleep.

Feeling better is a great reason to get a good night’s sleep. But what are other benefits of getting enough sleep? Why should we care?

ARIC PRATHER: First I want to say thank you for having me. I’m a proud listener of The Commonwealth Club.

Sleep is such a critical part of our humanness, it’s a biological imperative. It’s as necessary as food and water and oxygen.

In fact, we can live longer without food and water than we can without sleep, in part because it provides so many critical benefits to our cognition, to our cardiovascular system, to our immune system. It makes us better people when we get sleep; we’re better partners, we’re better parents, we’re more empathetic, and we’re kind of a better version of ourselves. We’ve learned a lot in the sleep science over the last several decades, but we’re still kind of chipping away at what it is that makes sleep so special, like why we sleep. But it’s clear that if we don’t, we just can’t survive.

ZITTER: We know that from research. So what about the flip side? What are some of the downsides, besides not feeling so good, if we don’t get enough sleep?

PRATHER: If we don’t get enough sleep, we don’t feel as good. We’re more sensitive to stressors when they happen in the world. I always tell my patients that when we don’t get sleep, little things feel like big

SLEEP IS ESSENTIAL TO

our physical and mental wellbeing and just as important as food, water and oxygen. So why do so many of us struggle to get a good night’s rest? Dr. Aric Prather shares effective techniques that he uses to help his own patients achieve healing and restorative sleep. From the November 7, 2022, program “Aric Prather: How to Get a Good Night’s Sleep.”

ARIC A. PRATHER, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco; Author, The Sleep

Prescription: Seven Days to Unlocking Your Best Rest

MARK ZITTER, Founder, Zetema Project; Member, Commonwealth Club of California Board of Governors—Moderator

things to us. But also biologically, sleep is so critical. If we don’t get sufficient amounts of sleep—and this is something that’s just evolving in the science, sleep seems to be critical for helping to clear our brain of metabolites that build up throughout the day. So we’ve begun to recognize the lymphatic system is such a key piece of “clearance” within the brain. And when we don’t get sufficient amounts of sleep, that doesn’t happen as well.

I do a lot of work on the immune system, and we know that when people don’t get sufficient amounts of sleep, our immune system doesn’t seem to do as well. We’re perhaps more susceptible to infectious illnesses. We don’t respond as well to vaccines, which obviously became much more timely over the last couple of years. So sleep just plays a strong role in making our systems work better.

ZITTER: I’m assuming everyone listening to this is interested in sleep and sleeping better. Some people have big problems with sleep. But how big a problem is it? How many Americans have substantial sleep problems?

PRATHER: It’s shockingly high. The data suggest that 30 percent of Americans report insomnia symptoms regularly. If you scale that up, that’s almost 100 million Americans. So that’s a really big problem beyond just sleep disturbances. A large proportion of the population also gets what’s called insufficient amounts of sleep, getting short sleep duration.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends for adults to get at least 7 hours of sleep per night. And a lot of people aren’t getting that. What we know from the epidemiologic data, the population-level viewpoint, is that when people are in that short-sleep duration group, they’re more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, more likely to develop type 2 diabetes.

As I mentioned, we’re learning more about risk toward neurodegenerative diseases—and not to be outdone, short sleep duration is also a predictor of premature mortality.

ZITTER: Wow. So there’s a lot of Americans who aren’t getting enough sleep or are having sleep problems of some sort. Does that vary by gender, by race, by age?

PRATHER: Yeah. There are growing understandings about differences in populations. We certainly know that if we look at men and women, women tend to report worse sleep quality. Some of this might be linked to changes across the

life course and perimenopause and menopause. But men tend to get less sleep in general.

And then there is something that I’m really passionate about. There’s a growing appreciation for sleep inequities within populations. So Black Americans routinely are shown to get less quality sleep compared to white counterparts, individuals that are on the lowest rung when it comes to socioeconomic status tend to get less sleep and less quality sleep.

ZITTER: Do we know why?

PRATHER: We’re learning more about it. We think there are certainly environmental factors that drive differences in sleep. So if we take racial differences, sleep is socially patterned. Where you live, work and play matters for how you sleep. So if you live in an area that has light pollution or noise pollution or more crime or less sanitation, or you to live in a more crowded area like more people per room, all of those things contribute to our ability to sleep well, our opportunity to sleep well. I’ve really approached this like a social justice issue, that everyone deserves the right to have adequate rest. Currently, it’s just not distributed evenly.

ZITTER: I think most of us have assumptions about sleep issues. I will admit that when I read your book, I thought I knew a lot about sleep, and some of the things that I believed turned out to be true, according to your book, some partially true, and some were dead wrong. So I’d like to try something. I’m going to make a couple of statements about sleep and . . . then we’ll get your expert opinion.

The first one: It’s easier to fall asleep if the room is dark than when it’s light. Is that true?

PRATHER: True, true. That is one of the key pieces of sleep hygiene. Darkness makes it easier to sleep.

ZITTER: All right, so I knew that. I knew that I got that one right.

The best temperature for sleeping is room temperature. I hope that’s true, because I don’t want to adjust my thermostat every night when I go to bed. Is it true? Is the best temperature for sleeping room temperature?

PRATHER: That’s a tricky one, because it depends on what temperature the room is. It turns out that our core body temperature has to drop as part of sleeping. And it turns out that we sleep better as a species if we’re in this range of between 60 to 68, 67 degrees Fahrenheit.

We don’t want it too hot, and for some people, that’s a little cool. So that’s where it’s important to have layers, make sure that you’re able to get within that range. The data suggests that that’s the best. So if you think room temperature is 68 degrees, maybe a little bit less than that.

ZITTER: Okay. You’re more likely to fall asleep if your room is free of clutter and distractions. Does that matter?

PRATHER: Yes. A cluttered room can be challenging, in part because you want your bed to be like a shrine to sleep. You want to set it up so that when your body gets into it, it knows what it’s supposed to do. But a lot of people—and this is certainly true of the pandemic, when, before remote working was figured out, people were using their bed as their workstation, as their TV watching place, as where they throw things. And it just makes it less special for sleep. So the more that it just serves a function of facilitating sleep, the better off people are.

ZITTER: So it’s not really a physical thing, because why should my body care if my computer is four feet away from me or not with my eyes closed, if I’m in bed? But psychologically, I may think it’s not quite a sleep environment.

PRATHER: That’s a great point. It turns

“The data suggest that 30 percent of Americans report insomnia symptoms regularly. If you scale that up, that’s almost 100 million Americans.”

—ARIC PRATHER

out that there are a lot of environmental things that are triggers to tell us what our body is supposed to do. I always use the example of when I used to come home from the clinic, I would touch the doorknob of my apartment and I would immediately get hungry. That was because I would eat something every time I would get home. So then my body knew what was supposed to happen, even if I had just eaten it. It would be like, “I need to start making insulin.” The same is true for the bedroom and the bed. The bed is this environmental trigger that tells your body what to do.

If you’re using the bed for other things, it gets confused. It becomes less of a powerful thing that allows us to let go. Sleep is about letting go, and we need things in our environment to help us know when to do that.

ZITTER: Interesting. Here’s another one. Some people are night owls and simply need to go to sleep and get up later than others. True or not true?

PRATHER: There is circadian variation, meaning that our biological rhythms are often genetically driven, and some people are night owls, meaning that their body prefers to go to bed later and sleep in later. There are also morning larks, where people want to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. Most of us are kind of in the middle. We have a preference. But on the extreme end it can be really challenging, as you might imagine, because the world isn’t set up that way.

ZITTER: Yeah. So if you’re a night owl married to a morning lark, you really have some challenges. You have some of those, right?

PRATHER: I was just talking to someone today about their sleep problems. They were remarking [about how] there’s often the case that someone that has really severe insomnia is married to someone who sleeps like a rock. So they are constantly seeing that in their face.

I always say that, luckily, we typically choose a mate based on other characteristics than just their sleep preference. And it changes over time. So that’s just something [that is] part of the aging process.

ZITTER: Here’s one I think we’ll all find interesting. You can’t skimp on sleep all week and then catch up over the weekend. A lot of people do that. Does that work?

PRATHER: It’s definitely something that people do a lot of. I think subjectively it can often feel like people can make up some of that sleep. The tendency for someone

to have this sleep and then try to shift it and make it up is often called social jetlag. We often change our rhythms, and we try to make up this time. We’re learning more about the cost of those things; that tendency to do that seems to actually put people at risk for a lot of these age-related conditions that I mentioned around short sleep duration.

Some of it’s about short sleep duration, right? You go most of the week getting less than you need and your body can’t make up all that. We deprive someone of sleep in the laboratory, say, for 24 hours, they lose 8 hours of sleep when we let them sleep. It’s not like they sleep 16 hours.

Your body can compensate, which is really important. We’re built for this as humans. Ask any parent. You can do this thing if you have little kids, but it’s not a 1-to-1 thing. I mean, there are things in place within our body to help compensate for that lost sleep.

But the data is supporting this idea that it seems to wear away at some of the biology. ZITTER: So you can partially compensate, but not not that much.

PRATHER: At least not chronically.

ZITTER: Okay. Here’s one about you and your practice. People come to your clinic because they’re having trouble sleeping. So the most frequent recommendation you make to people who come to your sleep clinic is to go to bed at the same time each night. Is it [true or] false?

PRATHER: That is not my most common recommendation. The most common thing if anybody needs to work on their sleep— again, people come to me because they’re having sleep problems—is to actually maintain a stable wake time every day. This has a lot to do with insomnia and how insomnia lives within the brain. We don’t get to choose when we fall asleep. But we do have control over what time we wake up. I always try to make the case that sleep isn’t something that we make happen. Sleep is something that comes to us, like washes over us.

We use the same amount of energy throughout the day, typically. So then you’ll tend to get sleepy around the same time each night. But if we set a known time that you need to be asleep, that actually can be distressing, right? Like you’re on the clock. Tick, tick, tick. “Oh, my gosh, why am I not asleep? I need to be asleep in 5 minutes. The doctor told me that I need to be asleep at this time.” That actually just feeds that anxiety, and that anxiety is what

gets in the way of restful restorative sleep, that letting go that I mentioned before.

ZITTER: I was surprised to read in your book [where] you mentioned that probably the most common thing you see with people who have trouble sleeping is anxiety about sleeping, which is sort of a vicious cycle.

PRATHER: Yeah. Everybody has bad nights of sleep, but when you start to doubt whether you’re able to sleep—think of it as people with insomnia, they’re all often on defense. It’s like always trying to figure out what to do because sleep has become so unpredictable. So you’re really trying to put yourself in the right place at the right time just because maybe sleep will happen. I don’t want to miss it. That shift in thinking around “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight, and if I don’t sleep, X, Y and Z is going to happen” really drives their daytime experience.

They spend a lot of effort thinking about that next night and what they should do. I have met lots of people that will cancel social engagements, because they don’t want to be away from their bedroom just in case they feel that sleepiness cue and they want to be in bed. That’s no way to live. That’s really hard.

In our treatment in our clinic, we really try to give people more confidence in their sleep by these behavioral things, as a way of really shifting their cognitions around sleep so that it’s something they don’t think about anymore, that it’s something that just happens; for people who don’t have sleep problems, they often aren’t thinking about sleep. It’s just happens.

ZITTER: Okay, next statement: If you feel drowsy in the afternoon, you should stick your head in the freezer.

PRATHER: Well, this one takes a little bit explaining. In the book I use it as an example of an exposure that we know from the science can perk people up. There’s a term called hermetic stress, which is kind of like a good stress that builds resilience within the body. Think about a polar plunge. People do that all the time and it invigorates them. Kind of something as an alternative to another cup of coffee. We’ll probably talk about caffeine a little bit.

But sticking your head in a freezer as a cold exposure might be a novel thing to do to try to get through those midday doldrums. However, you can also go outside and exercise, get a brisk [walk], get your heart pumping. What we’re really trying to do is amp up that sympathetic nervous

system so that we have the alerting signals on board to get through the remainder of the day until it’s time to wind down at night.

ZITTER: Let’s talk about caffeine. Having caffeine after lunchtime can affect our sleep. What do we think?

PRATHER: I would say maybe it depends on what time we’re talking about. It turns out that caffeine has a half life—meaning how long it takes for half of it to be gone from your system—of about 6 hours. That means that if you have a double espresso at 4 p.m., at 10 p.m., you still have a single espresso in your system.

So no surprise, for many people that can be disruptive to their sleep. It’s really about ensuring that you’re not adding too many things to your system that will be alerting to impact your sleep. Caffeine is probably the biggest culprit, though. There are, of course, other substances that can muck around with our sleep. So we say not after lunch in general, just to keep people safe from doing that. But of course, if you don’t go to bed til three in the morning, maybe a little bit after lunch is fine.

ZITTER: Speaking of substances, let’s talk about alcohol. Regardless of its other health impacts, drinking alcohol can help us sleep better. What about alcohol and sleep?

PRATHER: Alcohol is a tried and true soporific. You know, people have a nightcap, and it absolutely helps people fall asleep.

ZITTER: So it is good to sleep well.

PRATHER: Well, it’s complicated, because it actually really affects the brain. It can change your sleep architecture. It suppresses what’s called rapid eye movement sleep. As a consequence, you get a big dose of deep sleep. And then a couple of hours later, you have this rapid eye movement rebound and that leads to more fragmented sleep across the night.

So it changes the quality of our sleep. In addition to that, alcohol hits on our GABA [neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutyric acid] receptors in our brain, which help facilitate relaxation. That helps give us the effect of alcohol. But alcohol doesn’t stay in your system forever. As you go throughout the night, it wanes. Your brain notices it doesn’t have this chemical creating this relaxation anymore. As a consequence, you have more fragmented sleep, less restoration.

ZITTER: So—easier to get to sleep, but harder to stay asleep.

PRATHER: Absolutely. Yeah.

ZITTER: By the way, I found that more as I age.

PRATHER: Yeah. We definitely hear that more as people age. It turns out, as we age, a lot of things get more challenging. We can’t do all the things that we used to, and we become more sensitive to certain things. I think alcohol turns out to be one of those.

ZITTER: You mentioned earlier that you’re supposed to get at least 7 hours sleep a night. We have a question from the

audience that is the reverse: Is it bad to get more than 8 or 9 hours of sleep a night?

PRATHER: That’s a great question. It’s a little bit complicated. We don’t have a great understanding of sleep need at this point. We have population-level information, usually based on one question that was asked to thousands and thousands of people. Then we weighed it to make it representative of the population.

But as this viewer asks, it turns out that long sleep duration is also associated with increased risk for a lot of these negative health outcomes that I mentioned with respect to short sleep duration. Usually it’s around 10 or more hours of sleep. It depends on the study. The question is why would long sleep duration be associated with all these bad things?

There’s a couple different potential explanations which are still being figured out. One could be that what long sleep duration is really an indicator for is some early sign of disease. So if you ever get a cold or an infection, oftentimes people sleep a lot more, right? Their sleep doesn’t feel great, oftentimes, but they sleep more than they usually do. So maybe what we’re really seeing is the long sleep duration is just a proxy for something that’s going on in the body.

The other one that [scientists] have been interested in is that hypersomnia is also seen in a subtype of depression. Depression is associated with a whole bunch of negative health outcomes. So maybe what is going on is that some of these individuals are experiencing this depression. It’s really just on the pathway for the link between depression and illness.

ZITTER: Drinking warm milk before bedtime can help us fall asleep. Maybe with some cookies, too. What about more milk or some other food just before bedtime?

PRATHER: This is one that I hear a lot. We don’t have great data on this topic, but lots of people swear by it. I hear warm milk, I hear cheese, I hear bread. There may be some data to support that link. I also think that oftentimes sleep is really governed by a lot of rituals, and those rituals themselves actually cue the body to be able to sleep. I wish we had the randomized controlled trials to know about warm milk versus some warm water, perhaps. But certainly for many people, it seemed bundled in with their experience of sleep and thus somehow facilitates that

“My most common recommendation . . . if anybody needs to work on their sleep is to maintain a stable wake time every day. This has a lot to do with insomnia and how insomnia lives within the brain.”

—ARIC PRATHER

experience.

ZITTER: Whatever ritual you have that makes you think sleep. That’s good. And it sounds like a lot of people’s sleep problems [are because they] don’t have rituals that perhaps [prepare them for] sleeping.

PRATHER: That’s absolutely right. Oftentimes when people have insomnia, it’s due to changes in their behavior that in the moment seem like they make a lot of sense, and they do. But they actually, in the long term, undermine how sleep works. So a good example would be when people have a bad night of sleep, they’ll try to sleep in and make up all that time.

But that can really throw in motion challenges for the following night. So if someone already has insomnia, they sleep in extra long or maybe they nap later because they don’t feel good, and then they find that they can’t fall asleep. They start worrying about the fact that they’ve lost control of their sleep and it just can feed forward. Those routines can really throw sleep off track.

ZITTER: One more more statement for us to think about: Having even a moderately stressful day can cause sleep problems. The stress leads to sleep problems.

PRATHER: That’s another great question. I will say that stress plays a critical role in most individual’s insomnia, like something happens in their life. But then it’s these changes in behavior that often perpetuate the insomnia. We do a lot of this work in our laboratory, because we’re really interested in the links between stress and sleep. They’re bi-directionally linked. We have this opportunity for interventions on both sides of the equation, right?

We know how to help with people who are stressed [with] stress management skills and meditation. We do a lot of mindfulness trials at UCSF, and so we might get an improvement in sleep as a a spillover.

But in the same way, we also know how to treat sleep, and we might give people the resources to better deal with their stress. In doing this work, we’ve been interested in the push and pull of these things. We know that stress contributes to insomnia, but does it really impact sleep in people that don’t have insomnia? What we found is that when people have bad nights of sleep, they are more sensitive to stressors during the day. So, as I mentioned earlier, little things feel like big things to them. That certainly is a true statement that we’ve seen in multiple data sets and different research groups have found.

What we’ve also found is that when people have stress, it often doesn’t really affect their sleep so much unless it’s really close to bedtime. I think part of that has to do with the fact that sleep is regulated by lots of things, like our environment, our sleep drive that builds up across the day, our circadian rhythm. So maybe these little stressors, these daily hassles that we have don’t play as big a role. Now, if you have a really big thing happen to you, then you’ll probably be thinking about it in overdrive. Difficulties with sleep. Or say you get into an argument right before bedtime, that’ll probably impact your sleep.

But I think of it as good news, because we can’t get rid of all the stress in our day and the data suggests from our group and others around the country that the relationship is

much stronger from the sleep distress side than it is from the stress—the sleep side in general—in regular day-to-day people.

ZITTER: Interesting. Poor sleep causes more stress for us to be more responsive to stress.

PRATHER: Yes, yes, yes. We’re absolutely more sensitive to it.

ZITTER: So forgetting about the milk and cookies, how does diet affect sleep, or does sleep affect diet, or both?

PRATHER: We have less of an understanding about how diet affects sleep. We’re starting to learn more about whether it’s complex carbs or simple carbs that seem to improve sleep, and those trials are being done. We certainly have a really good understanding about what sleep loss does to our choicees around nutrition. All of us have probably been in a situation where we had a bad night of sleep and we had to choose between the salad and the pizza. We almost always choose the pizza. Part of it has to do with the impact of sleep loss, what it has on our reward system in our brain.

When we experience sleep loss, our reward system—our drive toward some of these things—increases and our ability to regulate decreases. So we’re like the gas is on and the break isn’t working. That ultimately leads to challenges and food preferences and actual behavior, too.

It’s certainly a really interesting area of neuroscience to think about how sleep really helps govern some of these things that are so critical to health and well-being. As the sleep field has progressed over time, it’s clear that sleep is now being considered as a pillar alongside exercise and nutrition. And that wasn’t the case even a decade ago.

ZITTER: But seeing the links is interesting. I recal something in your book about a study with supermarkets where people who had less sleep often bought food that wasn’t as good for them.

PRATHER: Yeah. Oh, man. It’s definitely one of my favorite studies ever. It was a study where they deprived people of sleep or they didn’t. Then the research group had built a grocery store and given them like X-amount of money and they could walk around. The caloric density of the food that was bought by the people that were sleep deprived was so much higher. We had seen these data around preferences and “I would do this or that.” But to actually see the behavior was really interesting and really compelling.

Mark Zitter (left) interviews Aric Prather on The Commonwealth Club stage.

MISTY COPELAND’S BALLET MENTOR

MINA KIM: Misty, congratulations on the book. It was such a lovely tribute to Raven Wilkinson, and also to intertwine her story with your incredible story. Let me start by asking you: Who was Raven Wilkinson?

MISTY COPELAND: Thank you so much for having me. It is such an honor.

I think I say this with every book that I write, but this one is my most proud accomplishment of all the books that I’ve written. And that’s because of what Raven means to me.

Excerpted from the November 16, 2022, program

“Misty Copeland: What I’ve Learned from My Mentor Raven Wilkinson.” This program was generously supported by the Applied Materials Foundation; it is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation.

MISTY COPELAND, Principal Dancer, American Ballet Theatre; Author, The Wind at My Back: Resilience, Grace, and Other Gifts from My Mentor, Raven Wilkinson

In conversation with MINA KIM, Host, “Forum” on KQED

Raven Wilkinson was the first Black ballerina to join a mainstream, major, elite touring classical company, one of the first ballet companies that came to America, I believe in the ’30s, the ballet Russes de Monte-Carlo. She joined the company in 1955, and she was the first Black woman to dance there. She became a soloist very shortly after joining, which was unheard of for a Black woman in the ballet fields. She endured so much adversity and hardship throughout her career, having her life threatened whenever the company would tour through the South, experiencing the KKK. Incredible stories. Them coming onto the stage in the theater, stopping the tour bus, look-

ing for the Black dancer and really threatening her life.

It derails her career for a little while, and eventually she ended up moving to Amsterdam and dancing with the Dutch National Ballet for about 10 years before returning to New York City. But she never did dance again in America in a classical ballet company, because no white company would take her. She went into performing with the New York State Opera, where she sang and acted and danced a little bit. But she is a pioneer in the classical ballet world and became a close mentor and friend of mine over the last about 10 years or so.

KIM: And a close mentor and friend of yours. But you happened to learn about her by watching a documentary. Can you tell us how you found out about her?

COPELAND: Yeah, it was really unbelievable. I’ve spent the majority of my career, at least the first 10 years or so, not really knowing my history as a Black person, as a Black woman in classical ballet. I was searching for this sense of belonging and acceptance. Where is my history within this world?

There’s just not a lot of documentation of Black women’s con-

Misty Copeland

PHOTO BY MASTERCLASS

tributions to this art form. So I was always looking for a way to learn more. I happened to be watching a documentary on the ballet Russes de Monte-Carlo, wanting to learn more about the history of this art form. And, I don’t know, an hour and a half or so into this documentary, this elegant Black woman appeared on the screen, and it was the first time that I even became aware that there was a Black woman in that company. I was stunned. I was angry that I didn’t know her, her story. But I also felt like she gave me the second wind in a time when I felt like I was at a standstill in my career, and knowing that there had been someone who had walked the same path as me gave me a different sense of purpose and made me feel as though it was my responsibility to do everything that she didn’t have the opportunity to do.

It’s really incredible that after learning of her and feeling that I needed to share her story and every platform that I had, then eventually finding out that she was still alive and she actually lived a block away from me in New York City.

KIM: I think that’s incredible. And that she knew about you. She had actually been watching you well before you found out about her.

COPELAND: That was one of the more remarkable things. I mean, of course, the fact that we probably had passed each other on the street a number of times and never knew it, but meeting her and I’m expecting for her to just be learning about me and to be meeting me for the first time. And the first thing she says to me is, “I’ve followed your career since you were 15 years old, and I’ve come to most of your performances throughout your professional career”—that was just mindblowing to me.

KIM: I remember you talking about that moment of seeing her in that company and feeling a certain sense of recognition, which I think can mean so many things. But you also say that it was at a certain time in your life where you really needed to discover someone like Raven. What were you going through at that time?

COPELAND: You know, I spent the first decade of my career the only Black woman at American Ballet Theater in a company of between 80 and 90 dancers within that time. It was a sense of just feeling isolated and feeling like maybe this is not the place for me, the place where I can truly thrive.

I had been a soloist, I think, for three years when I learned of Raven. And though I had made it to soloist and I was only the second Black woman to ever reach that position in

the company’s 70-year history or something like that—I just felt like maybe that was as far as I could go.

There had never been a Black woman to reach the rank of principal dancer. And I wasn’t being challenged. I wasn’t being given opportunity, and I was often overlooked. There were so many instances where I would ask about certain roles and why I wasn’t cast in them when my other soloists in the company were, and it was literally, “Oh, sorry we overlooked you.” I feel like that’s the story for a lot of minorities, where you feel that even though you stand out, you’re not seen or heard. I felt that I needed someone who understood my journey and my path to help guide me, in a way.

A lot of the mentors I had at that point were incredible Black women who had done so much for me and inspired me and nurtured me, but were not a part of the ballet world. They were successful in their own right and in different fields. But Raven was literally the perfect person that I needed to show me how to look at my career in a different way. She was so hopeful and so present and so balanced and had incredible empathy after all that she has endured throughout her career.

KIM: She passed in 2018. For all the incredible things you learned from her throughout your relationship with her, I was also struck by how it also made you realize how little had changed for Black ballerinas, even from the time that she was dancing to the time that you were dancing.

So let’s go back a little bit to talk about your arc as well and how it reflected to you that there was still a long way to go. When were you first introduced to ballet?

COPELAND: I had, I guess, an unusual path into the veins of the ballet world. I was 13 years old when I really kind of stumbled upon it—I mean, I really stumbled upon dance in general. I was never a part of any structured classes. I never took a dance class in my life. But I loved movement. It was something that I was doing in the privacy of my home, because I was so shy and so introverted.

Music and dance became this escape for me. I had a very chaotic childhood. I was one of six children in a single-parent home. A lot of moving around and changing schools and sometimes not even having a roof over our heads. We were living in a motel actually at

the time when I discovered ballet, but the first form of dance that I did was joining the drill team at my middle school in Southern California.

For some reason I had no confidence when it came to anything in my life. And for some reason I felt that I should audition for the position of captain of this drill team when I had no experience. I did [audition],

and they made me captain. It was from there that the coach said, “You know, you have a lot of potential, and I think you should take these three ballet classes that are being offered in the Boys and Girls Club in San Pedro, California.” I was already a member. My mom had me and my siblings there to have a safe place for us to go after school. That’s when I was introduced to my first ballet teacher, who was teaching this ballet class on a basketball court in the gym at the Boys and Girls Club, looking for more diverse students to give scholarships to [and] bring [them] into her school.

She said from the first class that she taught me that she knew that I was a prodigy. Eventually, she invited me to live with her and her family so that I could really focus and catch up since I started so late—because most professionals would go off to join companies between the ages of 16 to 19, and I was already 13. So I had a lot of catching up to do. I ended up training for four years before I moved to New York City and joined American Ballet Theater.

KIM: You talked about how music just made sense in your body, that doing ballet just felt so natural and organic. I’m curious what you feel like ballet gave you, especially as you describe the backdrop of your life at that time.

COPELAND: Ballet gave me everything I think I was searching for as a child; it gave me stability and consistency. It made me feel safe, just the environment of being in a stu-

“A lot of the mentors I had were incredible Black

me, but were not a part of the ballet world.”

women who had done so much for me and inspired me and nurtured

dio where you’re literally like naked, you’re vulnerable, you’re literally just wearing tights and a leotard. But you’re in this environment where I just felt so at ease.

I felt like my body could relax, like all of the tension that I always had, from just the environment that I grew up in, I could let go. And I felt beautiful for the first time in my life. I felt like I was good at something. I was being told I was good at something. There was something that was just mine. I didn’t have to share it with my five siblings. It was really difficult for my mother to put in the time and give attention to each one of us when there were six of us and she was working many jobs. It gave me confidence, and it showed me what perseverance and strength and grace [could do]—all of these things. I understand the power of dance and the power of art, which is why I started my own foundation with a similar program to the one I came up in.

KIM: The description of it giving you this sense of power was a very powerful thing to read, because the irony is, once you really committed yourself to it, the gatekeepers of the ballet world kept trying to chip away at something that gave you power. So it had this dual effect.

I remember even when you were describing being the Swan Queen in Swan Lake and just the way that they asked you to dust yourself with white powder and things like that, to be able to sort of blend in and follow the idea that this is really an art form for white dancers, those kinds of things are just the tip of the iceberg of all the kinds of messaging that the ballet world would give you.

Do you want to talk a little bit about getting the role of the Swan Queen in Swan Lake, what that means? I think it really does in so many ways encapsulate all of the pressures, expectations that you were experiencing while also trying to be and own that space of power that ballet gives you.

COPELAND: Swan Lake is really the most iconic ballet in the repertoire, and for a principal ballerina, that’s the top; that’s what most dancers aim for. Even if you are principal dancer, it doesn’t guarantee that you will ever perform that role. I know principal dancers that have danced at ABT that never even had the opportunity to do that role.

It’s also one of a category of classical works that is called the ballet blanc, which translates into “white ballets.” It’s probably one of the most recognizable from that genre. It’s when the second act of the ballet is typically characters that are spirits or otherworldly,

not alive or not human. So they will powder their skin to take away the shine so they don’t look human.

But for generations and generations, Black women have not been cast in the second act of these ballet blanc ballets, period, let alone even be considered to do the lead. The White Swan, the Swan Queen, the dual role of Odette Odile, which is the white and the black swan. There is this long kind of generational trauma that is connected—this Black ballerina, generational trauma—that I think is so connected to Swan Lake in particular.

So that’s not even a role I allowed myself to dream of doing. Joining the company, Swan Lake was the first ballet that I performed as a ballet member with ABT when I was 19 years old. I remember a colleague in the company overhearing a very important person in the company who was a part of the artistic staff saying that I should not be allowed to perform in the second act because I will ruin the aesthetic, I’ll ruin the line, this unison of white dancers dancing in white.

When the company filmed the ballet—it’s actually a video you can purchase today—I was not a part of the second act of any of those parts of the ballet, because of the color of my skin. So there’s a long history connected to that. It must have been 14 or 15 years after I joined the company, which is a very late age to be given some of your first principal roles. If you’re not a principal dancer by that point, it most likely is not going to happen. So when I was told that I would be learning the role of Odette Odile at 32 years old, my mind was blown and I literally had to kind of reassess, change the way I thought about this ballet.

I should have gone to therapy. I shouldn’t go to therapy strictly for Swan Lake. I did it, because there was so much change in my mindset that needed to happen to allow me to really feel confident and that I should be performing that role. So there was a lot of baggage that came with it.

KIM: You write about how you kept questioning whether you were worthy of it, and then at the same time putting the pressure on yourself that if you didn’t do it well, that you would make it harder for other Black ballerinas to be given that role. That is just an incredible amount of pressure to carry.

But I was struck by something that you said in the introduction, which is that what you learned from Raven was that when “I enter the hall, when I enter, the whole race enters with me, that it’s not just a burden or

pressure, but it offers the promise of possibility.” I just was wondering, how did Raven teach you that? And how did you come to internalize that so you could see it as an opportunity as opposed to just something tremendous to carry?

COPELAND: It took me having a lot of—I guess you could say Raven was my therapist, especially having a lot of conversations with her. Raven was such an incredible, I guess you can call her teacher, but not your typical teacher, where she’d sit down and have these life lessons that were so clearly being told. But it was through these stories or just the way that she treated people that allowed me to see that even with everything she experienced throughout her career, she still had such a love and respect for the art form and for the people in it as well. That she was a part of something that was so much bigger than her and that she had a responsibility every time she went on stage—and that it wasn’t just a responsibility, but a privilege to be able to do what we do, to be able to do something that you’re passionate about and that there could be one person in the audience that you’re affecting and you’re changing their lives.

It really allowed me to kind of step back and think about these opportunities in different ways. How many people can say that they had the opportunity to perform the Swan Queen? This was my shot to go out there and enjoy myself. That was one of the big things that she would always say, that you’re doing this because you love it. You want the audience to feel that it’s coming from a true and natural and genuine place. But she just changed the way that I looked at things. It’s a serious thing when you’re on stage and you work your whole life to do these roles, but at the same time, it’s just ballet.

KIM: I was struck by how she would talk about how ballet itself, the core of ballet, is not racist, that it’s not designed to be exclusive. It’s the gatekeepers who make it that [way]. Did you question that, too, as you got into it and saw the lack of representation? And initially you were like, that’s okay. Like, [your] love of this is so powerful that it overcame whatever concerns you had about the lack of representation of Black dancers in it.

But the way that she talks about how it’s not racist, the core of it is not racist. What did she mean by that?

COPELAND: If you think back to the fact that this art form was created hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and the technique has

Raven Wilkinson

PHOTO BY PAMELA V. WHITE

not changed, we’re literally still doing the exact same technique that our ancestors were doing. It’s such a pure technique and art at its core that it’s not had to change in that way. Of course, the stories that we’re telling and the body types that have evolved because of cross-training and the physicality of things and the way that we’re eating and taking care of our body has changed and shifted. But the technique does not discriminate against different body types. All body types can do this art form, and it creates the most

Black, being African-American, to be told that you should be doing African dance when that’s not at all something that [the dancer] was trained in. But a lot of Black dancers are steered toward more modern dance, because the stereotype is that Black people have flat feet, and it’s more suitable when you’re not in a pointe shoe you don’t have to articulate your feet. [To be told] that ballet is something that takes more skill than a Black person has, intelligence that a Black person doesn’t have. And so we’re often told that we will find more success if we try jazz, hip hop or African dance, modern dance. Not classical.

KIM: We have questions coming in from the audience. One of them: Is there a role or performance that is still on your bucket list?

COPELAND: It’s a subjective art form, but it’s the artistic director’s preference, and there’s so much of it that you can’t control. I feel like a lot of times, they don’t want to ever make clear promises, because you never know how a dancer might change, or [suffer an] injury, and the expectations that are set, so there’s just so much fuzziness when it comes to that aspect of the ballet world now.

KIM: This audience member wants to know what is the best piece of advice either professional or personal that you’ve received and who has it from?

incredible outcome.

It’s even more beautiful what it’s done on different body types and people from different backgrounds. But it’s so clearly the structure, the institutions that have kept people of color out of it. It’s not the technique that’s saying these certain body types can’t do it. It’s the people involved, and it’s these institutions that have been built with a certain aesthetic in mind. It’s really convinced people that ballet dancers look a certain way, which just perpetuates the same discrimination and exclusion and racism.

KIM: To the point that there were times when people suggested that you dance in a different type of dance.

COPELAND: Yeah, it happened for both Raven and I. It’s pretty awful just being

COPELAND: Oh, my goodness. I’ve done so much in my 20-plus year career at ABT. I think that there’re certain roles that I haven’t done enough that I want more time, more of an opportunity to do. You know, these more really powerful story ballets, where it’s just a lot of meaty acting and it’s so difficult. It’s like this in life; you have a young body and you physically can do so much, but you don’t have the life experiences, you don’t have those reps. So doing something and feeling comfortable in it, it’s like a double-edged sword. I feel that tackling these meaty acting roles, like I’m ready and I have all the life experience, but my body is not what it used to be.

KIM: I think you talked about how determining who gets a solo in a performance is a secretive [process] that’s really opaque.

COPELAND: I received so much incredible advice. It’s hard to say just one person. Susan Jaffe, who was a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater and is taking over as artistic director next year, which is so exciting; but she was someone that was always saying, whenever I’d be distracted by the reviews or critics or blogs or whatever it is, people writing about me on the Internet, to not let other people’s words define you and that you really have the power to take what you want from people.

Prince was another one—the musician. I worked with him for some time. He definitely changed the way that I looked at myself as being “the only” and feeling isolated in a company and having this negative outlook on that. He was like, “You know how incredible it is to be different and to be unique and to be the only? There’s so much power in that. People are looking at you. You know how many people want that focus?” And I was like, huh? I never looked at it in that way. That definitely helps me to understand and change my perception of myself and the power I did hold by being the only and being the first.

“We’re often told that we will find more success if we try jazz, hip hop or African dance, modern dance. Not classical.

SCOTLAND

JUNE 3-14, 2023

Discover Scotland’s enduring appeal, traveling from city to country and loch to glen with our expert guide, all while encountering stunning natural beauty and historic treasures.

• Enjoy an architectural tour of Glasgow’s unique architecture and enjoy a private tour of Pollok House, the ancestral home of the Maxwell clan.

• Experience the Scottish Highlands, stopping by the banks of Loch Lomond, Great Britain’s largest lake.

• Visit beautiful Glencoe and take a full-day excursion to the Isle of Skye, known for its strong Gaelic influence.

• At Loch Ness, take a boat ride, then explore Urquhart Castle’s evocative ruins.

• Discover Edinburgh’s 18th-century Georgian “New Town,” the medieval “Old Town” and the Royal Mile. Tour Holyrood and enjoy ample free time for exploring independently.

$6,496 per person, double occupancy, including air from SFO

Andrew Fraknoi: THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE

WHAT MAKES THE

Webb a pioneering instrument, what the first images actually show, and what scientists expect it to accomplish in the years to come. Excerpted from the November 30, 2022, Technology & Society and Humanities Member-led Forums program “The James Webb Space Telescope: Andrew Fraknoi Explores Our Giant Eye on the Invisible Sky.”

ANDREW FRAKNOI, Chair Emeritus, Astronomy Department, Foothill College; Former Executive Director, Astronomical Society of the Pacific; Lead Author, Astronomy

GERALD HARRIS, President, Quantum Planning Group; Chair, Technology & Society Memberled Forum, The Commonwealth Club of California—Moderator.

ANDREW FRAKNOI: It’s my pleasure tonight to talk to you about one of the most exciting things going on above our heads, which is the James

Webb Space Telescope, which really is a giant eye on the invisible sky. I want to show you some of the work it’s already done.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched on December 25th of last year after years of delay and problems. The most complex telescope we’ve ever launched into space, and it’s operating, I’m happy to say, flawlessly, a million miles from Earth [operated via] remote control across all that distance.

But the story of the telescope really begins in the year 1800, when an amateur astronomer and musician by the name of William Herschel discovers that there are invisible rays coming from the sun. Herschel was a great experimenter, and he was playing around with a prism. You’ve played with a prism, where light goes through the prism, it goes out in all the colors of the rainbow. He wanted to measure the temperature of each color of the rainbow; so he took a thermometer and carefully measured, and then he got to the red color and he went beyond the red color and the thermometer still kept going up in temperature. He said, “Whoa.” He started again, and he went beyond the red color, and the thermometer

PHOTO BY NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI; IMAGE PROCESSING: JOSEPH DEPASQUALE (STSCI), ALYSSA PAGAN (STSCI), ANTON M. KOEKEMOER (STSCI)

The “Pillars of Creation” as seen by the JWST.

kept going up.

Something invisible was heating up the thermometer beyond the red, below the red. So this eventually got known as infrared, just like infrastructure is stuffed below the street. Infrared is a color below the red, and he discovered the first invisible rays coming from the sun of the infrared world.

The infrared universe turns out to be quite different from the universe you know with your eyes. And that’s what I’m here to talk about tonight. Now, in fact, his discovery was only the beginning. It turns out that the universe shines with a great array of different invisible rays, and the light we see with our eyes is an incredibly small minority of the ways that the universe can shine. So we’ve had to develop telescopes and instruments for each of these other kinds of waves.

Gamma rays, x rays—which you know from your dentist—ultraviolet, infrared, microwave, radio, television, the cell phone frequencies that you use, wireless— all of these are invisible rays that inform us about what’s going on in the universe. And because many of these rays are actually absorbed in the atmosphere, we put telescopes above the atmosphere to tell us what’s going on. The infrared is certainly one of those where we need to go into space to get a good view.

Now, we already had a good telescope in space, the Hubble, but it’s now more than 30 years old and its mirror size was limited by the size of the payload bay in the space shuttle, which launched it.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched folded, and it had to unfold like petals. Once it got to its destination, that was our biggest scare: What if it didn’t unfold? But it did. It unfolded beautifully.

The bigger the mirror, the more energy, the more kind of light or infrared you can collect. The primary mirror consists of 18 hexagonal segments made of beryllium coated with gold. Now, they’re not just coated with gold, because it was a government project. Gold is actually a very good reflector of infrared, and so we use gold in a very tiny layer to reflect the kind of light we want to see.

The 18 segments have to be aligned perfectly to within 1,000th the width of a human hair. We know how to do this for mirrors we’ve already played with on Earth.

The Webb telescope is four times further from the Earth than the moon is, so it’s roughly a million miles away from Earth. It’s at a stable point where the pulls

of the Earth, the moon and the sun are balanced in the right kind of way so that we can orbit the sun and keep the Webb in our view. When it all unfolded and got organized, it’s the height of a three-storey building. Just the heat shield below the mirrors is the size of a tennis court. The whole thing weighs seven tons. The sun shield keeps the sun’s energy away from the heat-seeking telescope so well that it can stay at an operating temperature of -370 degrees Fahrenheit. Don’t try to do that in your own refrigerator.

In fact, the whole setup with the cooling and everything that had to happen, NASA reported that [there were] 344 single points of [potential] failure in the process of setting it up, and every one of those worked. So let’s hear it for NASA; they don’t always do things well, but this they did great.

So the setup [of the telescope]: Basically, infrared energy comes in, hits [a] gold mirror, bounces to the secondary mirror.

You [can] see through the hole in the middle of the gold mirror to the scientific instruments which are behind it. It’s those scientific instruments that then analyze the light, make pictures for our eyes to see, and tell us what’s going on in the infrared universe. The sunshade is always pointed at the sun and keeps the sun’s heat from interfering with the delicate measurements we want to make.

Light Show

Infrared can show us things that we don’t even suspect are there.

Firefighters use infrared scopes so they can peer through the smoke and see what’s going on. In the same way, we peer through the smoke of the universe, through the dust of the universe, to see what’s going on in ways that visible light can’t show us.

. . . We get waves of energy coming from the universe to tell us what’s going on. And those waves travel at the speed of light. Infrared is also something that travels at the speed of light. That speed is 186,000 miles per second, which in your more familiar units is 670 million miles per hour. Everything we know about the universe tells us that that’s the upper speed limit of how fast things can go. And although it’s extremely fast, we live in a big universe, and therefore it takes a while for information to get

here. That delay is a lot of what I want to talk about tonight. We use a measure of distance called the light year, which is the distance that light travels in the course of a year. So we can all do the math together: 186,000 miles every second times 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in every hour, 24 hours in a day, 365 and a quarter days per year—you’ve all done this in your head—and the answer is 6 trillion miles. The distance that light travels in one year is 6 trillion or 6,000 billion miles.

Now, you might say that’s a lot, but the nearest star, which we call Alpha Centauri, is four light years away. So 25,000 billion miles. Okay. So four light years away from the nearest star; all the other stars are even further away. So it’s going to be some delay before the information gets here. Betelgeuse C is part of the constellation of Orion the Hunter. Betelgeuse is one of the brightest and easiest-to-see stars in the sky, but it’s about 600 light years away, which means the light we see tonight left Betelgeuse 600 years ago and the news we get is 600 years old.

All right. That’s the star picture. It gets even worse with the galaxies. If you now look at how the stars are organized into these giant galaxies and you look for a major galaxy, a galaxy you can bring home to mom with pride, our closest major galaxy neighbor is two and a half million light years away. So that means the light we see tonight from that galaxy left there two and a half million years ago. And it’s two-and-ahalf-million-year-old news now. CNN fans say “This is unacceptable; I want to know what’s happening right now.” But you can’t see what’s happening right now. There’s a delay built into the universe because of the speed of light. And for astronomers, this is wonderful, because what do you guys expect us astronomers to be able to do? You expect us to tell you the story of the development of the universe over billions of years? How could we possibly do that? The only way we can do it is by looking at things really far away, where the light has been on its way to us from billions of years ago, and can therefore tell us what was happening billions of years ago.

The further away from us we look, the longer the light took to get here and the further into the past we’re able to look. And

Jupiter dominates the black background of space in this image from JWST. The image is a composite, and shows Jupiter in enhanced color, featuring the planet’s turbulent Great Red Spot, which appears white here.

Tim Miller interviews Maggie Haberman from The Commonwealth Club’s main

we built the James Webb Space Telescope to look really, really, really far into the past.

Seeing the Universe

The first Webb telescope image was released at the White House. It was a really awkward ceremony where no one quite knew what to say. [See photo on page 31.] You’re looking at really distant galaxies, tiny little dots, each of them consisting of billions of stars, but so far away they look like little dots. But that’s the game here with the James Webb telescope. We can see really far back into the past. There are, we think, objects on this picture looking almost back to the beginning.

Stars, like people, have lives with stages. I divide the stages of a star’s life into these categories because they parallel what people do. There’s the prenatal stage; the birth of a star; adulthood, which lasts a long time; then a mid-life crisis for every star; old age, where the star kind of falls apart; and then death. Eventually you put the star in the stellar graveyard. Each of these stages has been understood, not for the sun, which is doing everything very slowly, but by looking at stars in different stages of their lives.

What the James Webb telescope is especially good at is the first two stages: prenatal star formation and then the birth of stars. We have great hopes for really learning a lot about how a star is born. That’s great, because adult stars we see quite well with the Hubble. It is stars that are so faint and so shrouded with their birth material that we can’t see them with the Hubble—and that’s where the Webb specializes.

Star birth is often hidden. The constellation of Orion [can be] seen with our eyes and a good telescope. Lots of stars, bright stars, make up the constellation figure. But you see mostly stars in visible light. [In] the same scene in infrared, what you see is the hidden raw material of stars, the stuff from which stars and planets and maybe even future Commonwealth Club members are formed. You see literally the dust, the dirt and lots and lots of gas, which transforms itself through gravity into stars and planets. The infrared shows you; the visible light does not.

So let’s take a look at one such region of star birth called the Carina Nebula. Stars that were born inside this cloud of raw material began to shine, and that light illuminates the raw material. You can see glowing clouds, because stars have been born inside those clouds and their shine makes the cloud shine.

But I want to show you a specific region a little distance away from the main nebula. [It is] a young cluster of stars that formed relatively recently; they’re only about 12 million years old, which for astronomers is really young.

There’s a kind of cavity that you see here. . . . At the bottom left, you can see winds from the star are pushing at that cavity. [Even with] a Hubble picture with some exaggerated color of this little piece of this starburst region . . . we see some beautiful things. We kind of see a wall of dust from the bottom and then some gas glowing in blue at the top. With the James Webb Space Telescope, you can see that what looked like a region mostly of dust has actually got a lot of holes in it and many more stars.

These stars shine more with infrared and not so much with light. So we’re looking into the cloud, seeing baby stars in the process of being born and seeing a lot more detail in the clouds of raw material. Pictures like this are going to give us a much better understanding of the first stages in the life of a star.

So here is another nebula called the Tarantula Nebula. What [you can see] is a huge region, 340 light years across, and you can see that there’s all this dust, which is gaseous material. In the middle [is] a cluster of stars. That cluster was born very recently. It’s energy is pushing out the center of the cloud, excavating, if you will, a cavity in the middle. And those cavities tell

us that some pretty energetic adolescent stars are in the middle. Just like teenagers have way too much energy, these young stars have way too much energy and push out the material from which they formed. As they do that, they compress the material, they push it out and compress it. And from compression comes more gravity, comes more stars being born. So we’re seeing some beautiful images of star birth. They nicknamed it the Pillars of Creation. And it looked pretty good with the Hubble. But the Webb . . . just makes the Hubble pictures look pathetic in comparison. [See Pillars of Creation image on the opening spread of this article.]

Those young stars are not yet hot enough to give off light, many of them, but they glow distinctly in the infrared colors that the Webb is sensitive to. Then they took another picture at a particular color and wavelength range where those stars are not visible and the dust glows. You can see that those same pillars are thick with dust full of raw material, even though they look a little bit transparent [when viewed in different wavelengths].

So depending on which kind of wave you’re looking at with the Webb, you get information about different parts of the picture, young stars [in one], raw material and particularly dust [in another wavelength]. These pillars, by the way, are 4 to 5 light years tall. So you’re looking at vast amounts of raw material and lots of star formation going on.

Planetary Discovery

Next I want to focus on what is perhaps the most exciting discovery in astronomy in my lifetime, which is that in the last 30 years or so, we’ve discovered that there are planets orbiting other stars.

We always hoped that there would be planets orbiting other stars—Star Trek was built on the idea that the Enterprise would visit a different planet every week—but we’ve never been able to prove it until recently. Now our observations just in the last couple of decades have shown us that there are exo-planets—exo meaning outside our solar system—everywhere we look. The universe is crowded with planets. It’s almost hard to find a star that doesn’t have one. Suddenly exoplanets are the rage in astronomy, and many of these exoplanets are in what we call the habitable zone, where water can be liquid, where temperatures are right, where perhaps life might be able to form. So the study of exoplanets is

Astronomer Andrew Fraknoi

another area where we have great hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope today.

We already know 5,000 established planets, and more are known all the time. I want to focus in on one particular planet, which is given the terrible name of WASP-39 b. WASP stands for Wide Angle Search for Planets. This is “Target 39” and the planet is called “B.” It’s 750 light years away, and it’s an interest thing.

It’s a planet bigger than Jupiter, but weighs only one quarter as much. So in order to be bigger in size than Jupiter, it must be heated, bloated, kind of all distended. And we now understand why that is, because it takes only four days to orbit its star. What? The closest planet in our own solar system is Mercury. It takes 88 days to orbit our star. The Earth takes 365 days to orbit our star. So four days to orbit is crazy, is disgusting, is impossible. But it is. We’ve now found

this with many planets, that there are planets much closer to their star. And WASP-39 b is heated by being so close to its star [and] takes only four days to go around. But because of that, there’s a lot of energy coming from it and we can begin to do studies of it

Just like in the supermarket, a unique barcode identifies each item so they know what to overcharge you for that container of mac and cheese. In the same way, lines and colors in the spectrum of light uniquely identify elements. For us, this is a science called spectroscopy. Every astronomy student spends many years learning about how to spread out the light or infrared of a star, and to understand what the different lines are telling us, just like the different lines in the barcode are telling you different things.

From that we can actually identify what elements, what compounds, what materi-

als are in the star or in the atmosphere of a planet. So the James Webb telescope is able to look at the light emitted by the star. Then it can tell that if the light goes through the atmosphere of the planet, as it is in this picture. [Refers to an image on the screen.] The planet is in front of the star. It has a thick atmosphere around it. The light of the star goes through the atmosphere of the planet. The atmosphere absorbs some colors, take some colors out, and that can tell us what substances are in the atmosphere of the planet. By comparing the light of the star without the planet to the light of the star with the planet, we can tell something about what the planet’s atmosphere is made of.

That’s really hard to do when planets are hundreds of light years away. But with the James Webb telescope being so large and precise and out in space, we can do this. I’m

IMAGE: NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI

In the first JWST image to be released, thousands of galaxies flood this near-infrared image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723.

“The study of exoplanets is another area where we have great hopes for the James Webb Space Telescope today.”

happy to report that just this past week, a detailed report was published of the atmosphere of WASP-39 b, and you can see the different substances they have discovered; some of [substances there they discovered] for the first time in the atmosphere of an alien planet.

First of all, there’s water— that’s not new. There’s carbon dioxide. That’s the first unique identification. There’s sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide. We’re talking about substances that we identify with organic chemistry here on Earth. Knowing what the atmospheres of alien planets are made of can tell us a lot about conditions on the surface and whether or not life might be possible there.

Gravity

Let’s move now to a much bigger realm. I want to take you to the realm of the galaxies, where each object is not a star, but a huge collection of billions of stars, and show you again what the Webb can do.

One of the things that we learned recently about galaxies is that they, too, are social animals. Just like stars gather into galaxies, galaxies gather into groups. This is a small group of five galaxies called Stephan’s Quintet after the discoverer [Édouard Stephan]. You see it here with the Hubble. Actually only four of the galaxies are connected— the four that are yellow; the blue one is an interloper and at a different distance. But this is what we see with our eyes.

Now, [with] the James Webb Space Telescope, you see much more connection between the galaxies, material stretching much further out, material which is actually being exchanged between the galaxies. You see again the raw material, but you see far more interaction and connectivity between and among these galaxies than we could see with visible light. These are the kind of images we’re going to rely on to understand the social interaction of galaxies, the way galaxies not only interact with each other, but ultimately collide—which happens to a lot of galaxies—and merge together into bigger galaxies. We think the galaxies we have today were built up from the collisions [and] mergers of smaller galaxies.

Had [Albert] Einstein been at the White

House [when] the first James Webb image [was] released, he would have been smiling. Why? Because in 1916, ’17 and from then on, Einstein proposed a new theory of gravity—a theory of time, space and gravity which we call the general theory of relativity, a complicated theory which has taken many years for us to fully understand and to prove correct, but which has now been validated in many different ways. One of the things his theory said is if gravity is really strong, it can warp the fabric of space itself. Strong gravity can twist, bend, warp space itself so it no longer behaves the way it normally does in the absence of gravity, but has kind of a bend or warp to it.

If that’s so, then if you have a galaxy with a lot of gravity and light comes through that galaxy from further away to us, the gravity of that galaxy Einstein said might warp, might twist, might bend the light from behind it in weird ways—he proposed that it would be something like a funhouse mirror or lens. Have you been to a funhouse, where you see a reflection of yourself but you don’t look like you? You look like some twisted, horrible-looking thing, because the mirror has warped your your image. That’s what we’re seeing here. We’re seeing things that look like little arcs. These arcs are warped light produced by the strong gravity in this cluster of stars. [Refers to an image showing the arcs in a field of galaxies.] These arcs are the same galaxy from 9 billion years ago, 9 billion light years away, whose light is coming from behind. This strong cluster of galaxies and the gravity of the cluster in the foreground is taking the light from further away and warping it and bending it into these round arcs. Kind of surrounding the middle of the picture in the center is where the actual galaxy from behind is, but the light has been twisted by gravity into these arcs. This is called gravitational lensing. When Einstein proposed that, it was one of the hardest things for people to accept in terms of his theory. And now here you see direct proof that light is warped by the strong [gravity] of this cluster of galaxies. Not only that, but you can see different little dots which are even further away. For

example, . . . you see light from a galaxy which we see as it was 13 billion years ago. Now we think the Big Bang happened 13.8 billion years ago. So 13 billion years ago is pretty good, but it’s not a record holder.

[Even with Hubble we could see light from] a galaxy which is 11.3 billion light years away. Is that a record holder? No, not yet. But they were very excited to get these even in the first picture. Of course, they made this the first picture because they got it and examined it and made some measurements. They knew what they wanted to release. But this gave us hope that we will be able to see things that send us light from really, really long ago.

And now just last week, we got the record. [A] cluster of galaxies called Pandora’s Cluster [is] the result of the collision of four smaller clusters of galaxies. It’s about 4 billion light years away. . . . Shining faintly through that cluster, astronomers have found two even more distant galaxies. One is seen as it was only 450 million years after the Big Bang. Is that the record? Nope. But below it is a little red dot, which is a forming galaxy, a galaxy in the process of forming, seen as it was only 350 million years after the Big Bang.

And that’s the record. That’s the most distant object we have so far identified. It is 350 million years after the Big Bang. Now the Big Bang was 13.8 billion years ago. This is still a baby galaxy, probably just forming, but already shining with the heat that we call infrared radiation.

It is only 350 million years after the creation event, and already it has a unique, separate shape from [everything else]. It’s isolated into a blob, which is the scientific term for some unit. And that little blob is already, we think, disk shaped. So it’s flattened because it’s rotating and it’s going to turn into probably something like our Milky Way galaxy, which is also flattened and rotating in the shape of a disk or a Frisbee. The fact that something could form this early in the history of the universe is remarkable. The fact that we can look back to this early in the universe is mind boggling.

But that’s what we’ve been able to do. Even in this very first set of pictures from the James Webb Space Telescope. Ladies and gentlemen, I can only put it this way. We are now looking back to the dawn of time, to the first organization of matter in the universe. And the amazing thing is that this instrument that we humans built and put a million miles from Earth has the power to take us there.

“The fact that something could form this early in the history of the universe is remarkable. The fact that we can look back to this early in the universe is mind boggling.”

Walking in Germany & France

ITINERARY

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26

Depart the U.S. on independent flights to Zurich.

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27

ARRIVE ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

Arrive in Zurich, Switzerland, and transfer to our hotel. This evening gather for a tour orientation and welcome dinner at a local restaurant.

Hotel Europe Zurich (D)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 28

TITISEE-NEUSTADT, GERMANY

After breakfast depart for Titisee-Neustadt (New City) in the Black Forest. En route we visit the breathtaking Rhine Falls and have lunch on our own. We arrive in the late afternoon for check-in, followed by dinner at the hotel.

Walking: ~ 1.5 miles / ~2 hours, paved paths and city streets

Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,D)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 29

FREIBURG / TITISEE-NEUSTADT

Take a train to Freiburg, the capital city of the Black Forest and the most southern city in Germany. It is frequently called Germany’s ‘sustainable city’ and, taking advantage of the sunny location near the Rhine River in Baden-Württemberg, it is renowned for its ecological initiatives, vineyards, and university life. Enjoy a walking tour of the old town with a local guide followed by free time to explore on your own. Visit one of Freiburg’s numerous cafes and pastry shops and try Black Forest Cake or Freiburg Bobbele (chocolate). Return by train to Titisee-Neustadt.

Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, city streets

Maritim Titisee Hotel (B)

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30

BLACK FOREST HIGHLANDS

Today we hike the Heritage Trail of the Black

Forest Highlands, which also functions as an open-air museum. We begin by walking through the Löffeltal and the beautiful forest, along Rotbach Stream to the Hell Valley. Enjoy a short visit to St. Oswald Chapel which dates back to 1148. See Hofgut Sternen, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once stayed, and attend a demonstration of the local glass blowing. After lunch, continue hiking and pass through the Ravenna Viaduct with its impressive stone arches, and take in the romantic Ravenna Valley. We follow the trail until it takes us back to the hotel.

Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, trail walking Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,L)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 1

FELDBERG / TITISEE-NEUSTADT

We drive to Feldberg (4’711 ft), the highest summit of the Black Forest. Walk to Feldsee, a cirque lake, created by the glaciers of the last Ice Age. It is over 100 feet deep and is the largest cirque lake in the Black Forest. Steep walls surround the lake on three sides, and rare protected alpine plants can be found on the sunny rocks. After lunch at a farmhouse, we hike to Feldberg Valley Station. Weather permitting, we enjoy a boat ride on this magical lake.

Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, mountain trails Maritim Titisee Hotel (B,L)

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2

ALSACE / COLMAR, FRANCE

This morning we head to Colmar, France. We travel via Kaiserstuhl, a geologically volcanic region, and Germany’s sunniest area, with a mountain range, grapevines, and a uniquely diverse flora. Enjoy a walk in the Rhine River Valley area with a local expert. Discover colorful meadows, almond trees, wild orchids, cacti, and an abundance of vineyard herbs. We then continue to Neuf-Brisach for lunch at a local restaurant. See the Neuf-Breisach Fortress, one of the last fortresses built by the brilliant engineer Sébastien Le Prestre, Lord of Vauban. At the service of Louis XIV, he created the “iron belt”, a series of fortifications capable of resisting any siege and protecting the borders

of France. After our visit, we continue to our hotel in Colmar for dinner.

Walking: ~ 3 miles / ~2.5, cobblestone streets

Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L,D)

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3

VALLÉE DE MUNSTER, LES VOSGES / COLMAR

We set off this morning for Petit Ballon (4’173 ft), a flat summit situated in the Vosges Mountains, a small mountain range separating the Munster Valley and the Lauch Valley. This is an area of woodland, pasture, wetland, farmland, and historical sites. We hike through forests and over colorful meadows, and we see the political border between Germany and France. On the top of the summit, an amazing panorama surrounds us. We enjoy lunch at a local inn, before returning to our hotel.

Walking: ~ 4-5 miles / ~3 hours, easy trails

Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L,D)

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 4

COLMAR / ALSACE WINE REGION

Discover the town of Colmar during a guided tour walking down the flower-bedecked alleys, and past traditional buildings and canals. Colmar’s thousand-year-old history is visible at every corner. After the tour, enjoy some time exploring this city on your own. In the afternoon we walk through the vineyards and learn about the capital of the Alsace wine region. Enjoy a stop for a wine tasting before returning to our hotel. Dinner on your own.

Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, paved roads

Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L)

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5

ALSACE / WWI & WWII HISTORY

Visit the Linge Memorial Museum and the site of a battlefield in WWI. As the only mountain battlefield on the western front, it holds a special significance and is a powerful place of remembrance. We then start a hike, one that takes us through history as we see war trenches and the forests of former battlefields. We make stops at local inns (ferme auberge) and enjoy lunch. This afternoon we visit the American 21st Corps Monument in Sigolsheim. This

monument honors American soldiers who sacrificed themselves during World War II helping liberate the Alsace. Return to the hotel for dinner on your own.

Walking: ~ 5 miles / ~3 hours, natural and gravel paths

Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,L)

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6

STRASBOURG

Today we explore Strasbourg, the capital of the Alsace and an international hub. Enjoy a narrated boat ride on the river, and then take a guided walking tour through the vibrant streets. Learn about the European Parliament in Strasbourg and how it made Strasbourg a proud symbol of democratic values, peace, and reconciliation. Learn how modern architects connected their art to the old structures. Then enjoy free time in the city strolling the shopping mile, visiting one of the city’s excellent museums, or relaxing in a café at the river. In the late afternoon, return to Colmar for our farewell dinner at a local restaurant.

Walking: ~ 2 miles / ~2 hours, city streets

Le Grand Hôtel Bristol Colmar (B,D)

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 7

ALSACE / ZURICH

On our last day, we start with a small hike through the Alsace Plain, which encompasses an extensive number and variety of castles. Arrive to Eguisheim for lunch on your own and time to explore this town which was officially named “one of the most beautiful villages in France”. Settled in the Roman Age, it is also the hometown of Pope Leo XI (10021054). Today, its long history is also visible in the town’s onion-shaped appearance, with houses circularly surrounding the town center. We then transfer to Zurich for a free evening in this vibrant Swiss city. Dinner is on your own.

Walking: ~ 3 miles / ~2 hours, natural and gravel paths

Dorint Airport Hotel Zurich (B)

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8

ZURICH / U.S.

Depart via the hotel shuttle for independent flights home. (B)

Trip Details

COST

$6,595 per person, double occupancy

Single Supplement: $1,050

GROUP SIZE

Minimum 8, Maximum 16

INCLUDED:

Tour leader, local guides, and speakers; activities as specified in the itinerary; transportation throughout; airport transfers on designated group dates and times; 11 nights accommodations as specified (or similar); 11 breakfasts, 5 lunches (including some picnic lunches), 5 dinners; wine and beer with welcome and farewell events; Commonwealth Club representative with 10 or more participants; gratuities to local guides, drivers, and for all included group activities; pre-departure materials.

NOT INCLUDED:

International airfare; gratuity to tour leader; visa and passport fees; meals not specified as included; optional outings and gratuities for those outings; alcoholic beverages beyond welcome and farewell events; travel insurance (recommended, information will be sent upon registration); items of a purely personal nature.

WHAT TO EXPECT

Participants must be in good health and able to keep up with an active group of walkers. Walks are moderate with some more strenuous segments. On average we walk 2-5 miles each day over 2-4 hours, broken up throughout the day. Travelers should be able to walk on gravel and dirt hiking trails, over uneven terrain, and use stairs without handrails. Sturdy walking/ hiking shoes are required; ankle-high shoes are recommended. One does not have to participate in every activity, but we want you to be aware of the pace.

Walking in Germany & France Featuring the Black Forest, Colmar & Strasbourg

SEPTEMBER 26 – OCTOBER 8, 2023

Phone: (415) 597-6720

Fax: (415) 597-6729

SINGLE TRAVELERS ONLY: If this is a reservation for one person, please indicate:

I plan to share accomodations with I wish to have single accomodations.

I’d like to know about possible roommates.

I am a smoker nonsmoker.

PAYMENT:

Here is my deposit of $__________ ($1,000 per person) for ____ place(s).

We require membership in the Commonwealth Club to travel with us. Please check one of the following options:

I am a current member of the Commonwealth Club.

Please use the credit card information below to sign me up or renew my membership.

I will visit commonwealthclub.org/membership to sign up for a membership.

____ Enclosed is my check (make payable to Commonwealth Club). OR ___ Charge my deposit to my ___ Visa ___ MasterCard ___ American Express

The balance is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.

CARD NUMBER

AUTHORIZED CARDHOLDER SIGNATURE

Mail completed form to: Commonwealth Club Travel, 110 The Embarcadero, San Francisco, CA 94105, or fax to (415) 597-6729. For questions or to reserve by phone call (415) 597-6720

____ I / We have read the Terms and Conditions for this program and agree to them.

TERMS & CONDITIONS

The Commonwealth Club (CWC) has contracted European Walking Tours to organize this tour.

RESERVATIONS: A $1,000 per person deposit, along with a completed and signed Reservation Form, will reserve a place for participants on this program. The balance of the trip is due 90 days prior to departure and must be paid by check.

ELIGIBILITY: We require membership to the Commonwealth Club to travel with us. People who live outside of the Bay Area may purchase a Worldwide membership. To learn about membership types and to purchase a membership, visit commonwealthclub.org/membership or call (415) 597-6720.

CANCELLATION AND REFUND POLICY: Notification of cancellation must be received in writing. At the time we receive your written cancellation, the following penalties will apply:

• 120 or more days to departure: Full refund of deposit

• 119-91 days to departure: $350 per person

• 90-60 days prior to departure: 50% fare

• 59-1 days to departure: 100% fare

Tour pricing is based on the minimum number of participants and can be cancelled due to low enrollment. Neither CWC nor European Walking Tours accepts liability for cancellation penalties related to domestic or international airline tickets purchased inconjunction with the tour

TRIP CANCELLATION AND INTERRUPTION INSURANCE:

We strongly advise that all travelers purchase trip cancellation and interruption insurance as coverage against a covered unforeseen emergency that may force you to cancel or leave trip while it is in progress. A brochure describing coverage will be sent to you upon receipt of your reservation.

MEDICAL INFORMATION: Participation in this program requires that you be in good health and able to walk several miles each day. The “What to Expect” outlines what is required. If you have any concerns see your doctor on the advisability of you joining this program. It is essential that persons with any medical problems and related dietary restrictions make them known to us well before departure. Proof of vaccination against COVID-19 is required of all particpants.

ITINERARY CHANGES & TRIP DELAY: Itinerary is based on information available at the time of printing and is subject to change. We reserve the right to change a program’s dates, staff, itineraries, or accommodations as conditions warrant. If a trip must be delayed, or the itinerary changed, due to bad weather, road conditions, transportation delays, airline schedules, government intervention, sickness or other contingency for which CWC or European Walking Tours or its agents cannot make provision, the cost of delays or changes is not included.

LIMITATIONS OF LIABILITY: In order to join the program, participants must complete a Participant Waiver provided by the CWC and agree to these terms: CWC and European Walking Tours its Owners, Agents, and Employees act only as the agent for any transportation carrier, hotel, ground operator, or other suppliers of services connected with this program (“other providers”), and the other providers are solely responsible and liable for providing their respective services. CWC and European Walking Tours shall not be held liable for (A) any damage to, or loss of, property or injury to, or death of, persons occasioned directly or indirectly by an act or omission of any other provider, including but not limited to any defect in any aircraft, or vehicle operated or provided by such other provider, and (B) any loss or damage due to delay, cancellation, or disruption in any manner caused by the laws, regulations, acts or failures to act, demands, orders, or interpositions of any government or any subdivision or agent thereof, or by acts of God, strikes, fire, flood, war, rebellion, terrorism, insurrection, sickness, quarantine, epidemics, pandemics, theft, or any other cause(s) beyond their control. The participant waives any claim against CWC/ European Walking Tours for any such loss, damage, injury, or death. By registering for the trip, the participant certifies that he/she does not have any mental, physical, or other condition or disability that would create a hazard for him/herself or other participants. CWC/ European Walking Tours shall not be liable for any air carrier’s cancellation penalty incurred by the purchase of a nonrefundable ticket to or from the departure city. Baggage and personal effects are at all times the sole responsibility of the traveler. Reasonable changes in the itinerary may be made where deemed advisable for the comfort and well-being of the passengers.