Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

October 5, 2024

The light undercutting the cloud deck can make for some spectacular fall sunsets, like this one over Easton, N.Y. John Bulmer

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

The devastation caused by Hurricane Helene and its remnants may be quantifiable, but it is still no less hard to imagine.

Meteorologists estimate 40 trillion gallons of water fell — the equivalent of 619 days of constant water flow over Niagara Falls. Western North Carolina was particularly hard hit; in the words of Gov. Roy Cooper, “Communities were wiped off the map.” At least 202 people are confirmed dead.

As if things could be any worse, just before the storm, officials in Florida were warning residents who drive electric vehicles — the state is second in the nation with 280,000 registered EVs — to get them to higher ground because seawater can cause “thermal runaway” when it touches lithium batteries, causing the vehicles to ignite. Sure enough, a home video camera captured footage of a Tesla catching fire during the flooding and burning down a house in Sarasota.

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SUPPORTING BUSINESS: It’s a depressing fact of life that NIMBYs rule the world —fast to oppose new development, seemingly unable to see the irony that if everyone were like them, there would be no jobs and no places to live, and that slamming the door on development makes everything more expensive. Residents and businesses in the southern Adirondacks understand just how important good jobs are to their families and their region, which explains why the number of letters in support of the expansion of a garnet mine operated by Barton Mines outnumbered letters of opposition by a ratio of 9:1. “Dozens of current and former staff wrote passionate testimonials, many of them second- and third-generation Barton employees,” the Adirondack Explorer reported. “They wrote of how the mine gave them a chance to make a living and raise a family. Without the mine, many of them wrote, they would have had to seek work outside of the park and even outside of New York.”

HYPOCRITICAL OATH: We told you last week about the City of Albany’s dubious and inexplicable move to stick the Avila Retirement Community with a 3,700 percent property tax increase. Writing in the Albany Times Union, Avila’s CEO, Kathleen Richards, asks a very important question: What does this say about the city and its commitment to its older residents? “Is rhetoric about honoring and looking after our elders just a platitude? I worry, too, about the effect this issue is having on our residents. I hear it in their questions and sense it in their expressions. It’s heartbreaking, it’s unnecessary and it’s wrong.”

OLD BONES: The oldest building in a city founded 338 years ago is undergoing $3.6 million in renovations that, when finished, will become offices and event space for the Historic Albany Foundation. The structure, the Van Ostrande-Radliff House, was built in 1728 and stands in downtown Albany. “This has been a true labor of love for us,” Pam Howard, executive director of Historic Albany Foundation, told the Albany Times Union. “We can’t wait to make the oldest building in Albany our headquarters and share it with the community. We are honored to be its steward at this time in its history.”

SMALL-TOWN LIVING: The personal finance company WalletHub evaluated more than 1,300 U.S. cities and determined that Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is the 17^th-best small city in America. Last year, Saratoga Springs was rated the ninth-best small city. Carmel, Ind., near Indianapolis, again topped the list. WalletHub did note that Saratoga is on the pricey side; good living comes less expensively up the road in Glens Falls, which made Realtor.com’s list of top 10 affordable small towns “where you’d actually love to live.” Glens Falls’ safety, health care, cultural scene and proximity to higher education and the Adirondacks were cited. Meanwhile, as communities nationwide address law enforcement challenges posed by those who are living without housing, Saratoga Springs is pursuing a humane approach to connect people with services. Non-violent cases involving people without housing are being handled by a twice-monthly Community Outreach Court, the first outside New York City specifically to handle cases involving the unhoused. “We have a lot of success stories,” the executive director of a local housing and support services agency told the Albany Times Union. “Sometimes it takes a few times in court before it sticks. But we’ve gotten individuals connected to services.”

The tops of the towers at the Olympic Jumping Complex peek from a blanket of clouds in Lake Placid, N.Y. Nancie Battaglia

DNA DILEMMA: The genetic data of 23andMe’s 15 million customers could be up for grabs if the struggling company, which has been slashing costs and recently saw nearly every board member quit, is sold, a move co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki said she is considering. Medical privacy laws do not apply to customers of 23andMe, whose DNA database has helped families reunite (and revealed more than the occasional surprise) and helped police solve cold cases. “23andMe is floundering in part because it hasn’t managed to prove the value of collecting all that sensitive, personal information,” Kristen V. Brown writes in The Atlantic. “And potential buyers may have very different ideas about how to use the company’s DNA data to raise the company’s bottom line. This should concern anyone who has used the service.”

LA HONORABLE PRESIDENTA: Mexico this week swore-in Claudia Sheinbaum as its first female president and its first with Jewish heritage. A 62-year-old environmental scientist and former mayor of Mexico City, she was part of a U.N. team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. Her political coalition enjoys large majorities in the Mexican legislature. She replaces the popular Andrés Manuel López Obrador and pledged to carry out many of his policies.

INCOMPREHENSIBLE READING: We shared the news last week that middle and high school students are being assigned fewer books to read, and instead focusing on summaries and key passages. When those students get to college, they are overwhelmed by the expectations, a number of alarmed professors told The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch. “Anthony Grafton, a Princeton historian, said his students arrive on campus with a narrower vocabulary and less understanding of language than they used to have. There are always students who ‘read insightfully and easily and write beautifully,’ he said, ‘but they are now more exceptions.’ Jack Chen, a Chinese-literature professor at the University of Virginia, finds his students ‘shutting down’ when confronted with ideas they don’t understand; they’re less able to persist through a challenging text than they used to be. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet.”

TRAIN PAINS: Get ready for great train debate. It happens every time someone broaches the topic of expanding New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, the nation’s busiest transit hub, as happened this week when officials with Amtrak, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, New Jersey Transit and other railroads said with one voice that the footprint of the station must grow to accommodate more trains and travelers, The New York Times reports. Opponents of expansion, which would require demolition in a fully developed area, argue that there are alternatives, including efficiency improvements, that should be tried first.

FAMILY MAN: A candidate in a tightly contested congressional race in Virginia doesn’t have a wife and kids of his own to soften his image, so he borrowed a friend’s.

A SINKING SHIP: A Florida company has a tentative deal to buy the historic SS United States, the largest passenger ship ever built in the U.S., and sink it in the Gulf of Mexico, to become an artificial reef that could generate millions in annual tourism spending. 

SAVING MORE THAN PAR: A business owner from central Ohio swam the frigid waters of the North Sea to rescue a man who had been caught by the rising tide and in danger of drowning 200 yards off shore, then returned to finish his golf round at the famed St. Andrews, which thanked him and his friends by offering an open invitation to play and tickets to the 2027 British Open.

A CLUB OF ONE: Happy 100^th birthday to former President Jimmy Carter, the only president ever to reach that mark and who, in the estimation of Margaret Renkl of The New York Times, “remains a shining monument to what it means to be a good American and a good citizen of the earth.”

DELAYED REACTION: A bomb at a Japanese airport detonated nearly 80 years after it was dropped by a U.S. warplane, causing a large crater in the runway and the cancellation of multiple flights but no injuries. The damage was fixed by the next day.

PETE ROSE was, for a very long time, a baseball superstar with broad, popular appeal, a hustling, hard-charging competitor on the field and successful pitchman off it, with a string of national brands lining up his endorsements. No one played in more games or produced more hits, but he was banished from the game he loved — and barred from induction in the Baseball Hall of Fame, a divisive topic among fans of the sport — when he was found to have bet on baseball while managing the Cincinnati Reds, his hometown team and the club for which he played most of his career. He denied the allegations for years before finally confessing. “Pete Rose died Monday, which surprised me,” the incomparable Rick Reilly wrote in The Washington Post. “I never thought he’d slow down long enough to do it.” Rose died at 83 of hypertension and heart disease.

JOHN AMOS considered a career in professional football before a coach who’s now in the Hall of Fame suggested he pursue his interest in writing instead. He did that for a couple years before shifting to acting, landing his first big TV role as weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In 1974, he was cast as James Evans Sr. on Good Times, perhaps his most famous role, though one that ended after three years because he felt the storylines, featuring Jimmie Walker in a breakout role, had grown inauthentic to the Black experience that Amos sought to portray. He later earned an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of an adult Kunta Kinte in Roots, made frequent appearances on The West Wing and had roles in several films, including Coming to America and its 2021 sequel. He died August 21 at 84 of natural causes.

DIKEMBE MUTOMBO was a giant on and off the basketball court, a 7-foot-2 center who was a dominant defender and shot blocker throughout his playing career and transitioned to a role as the NBA’s first Global Ambassador, working to spread the game’s impact throughout the world, especially across Africa. Known for a playful wag of his finger after many of his 3,289 blocked shots, Mutombo played 18 NBA seasons, was a four-time defensive player of the year, played in eight All-Star Games and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2015. “He was a humanitarian at his core,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. “I had the privilege of traveling the world with Dikembe and seeing first-hand how his generosity and compassion uplifted people.” He died at 58 of brain cancer. 

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON, it seemed, could do it all, and do it better than just about anyone else. A Rhodes scholar, he became a music legend, with many of his enduring songs — Me and Bobby McGee; For the Good Times; Help Me Make It Through the Night — performed by others. He also was an acclaimed actor, with leading roles in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and alongside Barbra Streisand in A Star is Born, for which he won a Golden Globe. He won three Grammy awards, and before all that had been a college football player, a boxer, a soldier and a pilot. “I imagined myself into a pretty full life,” Kristofferson told NPR's Fresh Air in 1999. “I was certainly not equipped, by God, to be a football player, but I got to be one. And I got to be a Ranger, and a paratrooper, and a helicopter pilot, you know, and a boxer, and a lot of things that I don't think I was built to do. I just imagined ’em.” He was 88.

JOHN SAWCHUK was an assistant principal at a high school east of Albany, N.Y., in 2004 when he tackled a student who fired a shotgun in a school hallway, wounding a teacher. The student would later credit Sawchuk for saving his life. He took over as principal of the same school two years later and, as the Albany Times Union reported, developed a reputation as an innovator who required student representation on committees and advisory boards and ate lunch every day in the school cafeteria, engaging with the students. “John’s work at Columbia High School and the East Greenbush (school district) was exemplary,” former Superintendent Terrance Brewer in a statement included in the district's announcement of Sawchuk's death. “His educational focus was always on kids.” He retired to North Carolina in 2018, where he died unexpectedly at 61.

“I thought stressful was not having Super Bowl rings so there was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t daycare. If I wanted to have fun, I would’ve went to Disneyland with my kids.”
— Tom Brady, responding to comments by Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Baker Mayfield, who said Brady’s intensity created a stress-filled environment in the locker room. (Harvard Business Review evidently was impressed enough with Brady’s results that it asked him to talk about the art of leading and motivating teammates)

SILLY SEASON: Taylor Swift is scheduled to perform in Indianapolis for three nights beginning November 1. The Indianapolis Star published a weather forecast.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen.

Contributors: Mark Behan, Ryan Moore, Kristy Miller, John Brodt, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia and John Bulmer.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com