Culture

Many rural Coloradans, especially in agricultural communities, feel looked down on by their urban counterparts. One cattle rancher I spoke to put it plainly. “It’s an attitude … we are the idiots … we are the dumb farmers … we don’t really matter.”

Historian Nell Painter remarked in 2011, “Being white these days isn’t what it used to be.”

This coming school year, the Fairfield, Texas, school district, about halfway between Dallas and Houston, will roll out a new K-5 reading program that includes multiple biblical references.

But the staff, hoping to avoid debates over families’ religious beliefs, has chopped roughly 30 sections out of the curriculum, including a kindergarten lesson on the Golden Rule featuring Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and several excerpts about a Christian prayer the governor of Plymouth Colony said at the first Thanksgiving.

The district’s elementary teachers “went through the materials looking for things that may be controversial,” said Superintendent Joe Craig. They didn’t feel those parts of the curriculum “were in line with what we wanted the lesson to focus on.” A kindergarten discussion of the Golden Rule, which stems from the Bible and other religious texts, is among the lessons the Fairfield district in Texas removed from the state’s new K-5 reading program.

Fairfield’s process reflects the kind of selective approach that many districts have taken toward Bluebonnet Learning — the state-developed materials that prominently feature the Bible and Christianity. With feedback from 300 teachers, Fort Worth, the fifth largest district in the state, adopted the phonics portion of the curriculum, but turned down the units with religious material. Some districts ordered just a few books, likely for review purposes, while the Houston and Dallas districts opted to keep what they currently use.

Texas has spent roughly $100 million — and counting — to develop and promote its own reading curriculum. But some observers say they wouldn’t be surprised if districts aren’t rushing to pick it up, considering the State Board of Education approved it by a one-vote margin.

“They may be reluctant to bring that same controversy into their districts, especially in communities with families of diverse religious backgrounds,” said Eve Myers, a consultant with HillCo Partners, a political consulting and lobbying firm that is tracking adoption of the program. “It’s potentially a distraction from their focus on the budget, student achievement, school safety and all the other pressing issues they must address.”

Texas has over 1,200 districts and about 600 charter schools with elementary grades. Of the state’s 20 largest districts, only Conroe, north of Houston, intends to use the program this fall. A state purchasing system shows that between May and late July, 144 districts and charters, mostly mid-sized or small, ordered the materials.

State board members have asked for the total number of districts using Bluebonnet. “That’s the question we would all like to know,” said Pam Little, a board member who voted against the reading program last November.

Other districts could be using the online version of the materials, but whether students would have actual books, and spend less time on screens, was a major debate last year during the board’s consideration of the program.

State leaders and conservative advocates say the religious content reflects a classical and appropriate way to teach literacy skills along with history and culture. Others like the emphasis on cursive writing and challenging vocabulary. In an interview with The 74 last year, State Commissioner of Education Mike Morath said a phonics-based curriculum that also builds students’ background knowledge can help the state recover from declines in reading skills due to the pandemic.

But the program sparked a statewide debate over whether political leaders are forcing Christianity into public schools. Bluebonnet makes its debut in the classroom at the same time schools will be required, under a new state law, to display the 10 Commandments. Gov. Greg Abbott also signed legislation in June that allows districts to offer a daily, voluntary period of time to pray and read the Bible or other religious texts. Under a similar 2023 law, districts can hire chaplains to volunteer as counselors, but most districts aren’t participating.

“There is definitely a disconnect between the radical far right agenda … and what school boards who are accountable to local families and students are actually going to do,” said Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, senior director of policy and advocacy at the Interfaith Alliance, a national group that advocates for church-state separation. Texas, he said, is “taking away the rights of clergy and parents to lead religious instruction.”The Fort Worth Independent School District adopted just the phonics lessons from the state’s new Bluebonnet curriculum after consulting with 300 teachers. Those units don’t include biblical material.

‘Hard on the teacher’

In the 73,000-student Conroe school district, Dayren Carlisle, a curriculum director, said leaders picked Bluebonnet because teachers were previously working with a patchwork of materials. They often spent “arduous hours preparing for reading and writing instruction,” she told The 74 in an email. Bluebonnet provides a coherent set of lessons that meet state standards, she said.

But parent Christine Yates advocated against it.

“I don’t think religious-based instruction belongs in any type of public school setting,” said Yates, whose children will be in second and fourth grade this fall. Her family doesn’t attend church and she’s concerned that the lessons dealing with faith are just “borrowing trouble.”

Becky Sherrill, a former Conroe teacher, sympathizes with educators who will have to navigate parent’s requests to opt their children out of the lessons. It’s a right that many parents might be more likely to exercise this fall because of a June U.S. Supreme Court opinion in favor of religious families who want their children exempted from hearing stories with LGBTQ themes.

“It’s hard on the teacher. It’s already so hard at Christmas or even with birthdays,” Sherrill said, referring to Jehovah’s Witnesses she has had as students. “You can’t give some kids cupcakes because they don’t celebrate birthdays.”

She’s already homeschooling her middle school son and has pulled her daughter, a fifth grader, out of the district as well, largely because of Bluebonnet and the 10 Commandments law.

At a May board meeting, Carlisle explained to the board how teachers will field requests from parents who want to opt their children out of the lessons.

“If a parent were to complain about this… we would have to find a completely different text,” she said.

But that didn’t sit well with Tiffany Baumann Nelson, one of three conservative school board members, who call themselves Mama Bears, elected in 2022.

“There is no religion in this curriculum,” she argued. “They’re all historical references, and so in my opinion, there should be no alternative or modifications.”

Whether districts are removing biblical material or parents are opting their children out of the lessons, Little, the state board member, worries students could miss literacy skills they are supposed to learn.

“Say an East Asian religious parent has decided they don’t want their child to have [a Bible story]. Is that child going to miss skill development?” she asked. Accommodating parents’ requests will also be a burden on district staff. “What is the cost involved in the manpower time for these districts to go through and eliminate the religious content? There was no need for the controversy that the religious content is going to start.”

‘Reviewed it and loved it’

The state board narrowly approved the new program last fall after the Texas Education Agency spent roughly $84 million to adapt an existing reading curriculum, from the company Amplify. Renamed Bluebonnet, after the state flower, the Texas version includes highlights of Jesus’ ministry and offers an evangelical view of early American history. Lessons for example, include the parable of the Prodigal Son, an art history unit based on the creation story from Genesis and scriptural references to the motto on the Liberty Bell.

The agency, which would not provide a list of all districts that have ordered the program, paid multiple companies and content experts to craft and review the lessons, including the far-right Texas Public Policy Foundation. Hillsdale College, a Christian school in Michigan, volunteered to work on units related to America’s founding, and a Christian media company, co-founded by Mike Huckabee, U.S. ambassador to Israel, contributed illustrations. But Texas officials refused to identify who wrote the biblical passages.

In response to backlash, officials added more references to Islam and Hinduism and removed some texts that were offensive to Jews, but the final version still references Christianity more than other religions.

“We reviewed it and loved it,” said Cindi Castilla, president of the Texas Eagle Forum, a conservative organization. She pushed for state board approval of the curriculum last year, saying that there is “richness in biblical literature” and that Bible stories teach children character traits and the origins of the legal system.

Since then, she examined the final version with retired educators who have experience teaching a classical curriculum and thinks it will strengthen students’ cursive and phonics skills. That’s why Gina Eubank wishes her grandchildren’s school districts — Katy, near Houston, and Belton, near Waco — had adopted the materials.

“I watched … fourth- and sixth-grade honor students write a thank you note and was shocked by what I saw — the lack of legible handwriting and the horrific spelling,” she said.

Districts on the fence about Bluebonnet can reconsider their decision next year. To make it more enticing, lawmakers added financial incentives — up to $60 per student for districts that use state-approved materials. That was likely one reason why the 27,000-student Lubbock schools adopted it, said Clinton Gill, a former math and science teacher in the district who now works for the Texas State Teachers Association.

At the same time, he thinks district leaders assume students will stand a better chance of performing well on the state test if officials match it up to a curriculum the state developed. Adopting Bluebonnet “also helps the district not have to hire staff to write curriculum when they get it from the state for free.”

The per-student bonus isn’t the only way the state aims to ensure Bluebonnet becomes the preferred choice. In December, the month after the board approved it, the Texas Education Agency quickly made Bluebonnet available to order. Materials from other publishers weren’t available until May.

“It seems that Bluebonnet Learning had an advantage,” Little told Morath, the commissioner, during a June meeting. She said she heard complaints from publishers over the issue.

Morath called the delay a “one-time exacerbated problem” because the state had to add new language to contracts with publishers before making their materials available to districts. While the time lapse should be shorter next year, he said there would always be some gap.

In the current state budget, lawmakers authorized Morath to contract with businesses to “promote, market and advertise” Bluebonnet. A separate appropriations bill provides $243 million to districts to help with implementation costs, like coaching for teachers.

Last year’s budget included $10 million for regional education service centers to do similar work for districts adopting Bluebonnet. The centers are expected to meet targets for increasing the number of districts using the materials in their region to stay eligible for future funding.

Some leaders in the state say that top-down pressure could alter the relationship the centers have traditionally had with school systems in their regions. They help districts, especially smaller ones with fewer central office staff, stay in compliance with state regulations or work on school improvement.

The service centers have always been a “hub of knowledge,” said Martha Salazar-Zamora, superintendent of the Tomball Independent School District, north of Houston. Expecting districts to sell Bluebonnet, she said, “has been more of a strategic push.”

She doesn’t doubt that Bluebonnet will boost reading scores for some students, but Tomball is already rated a high-performing district in the state’s accountability system. Another reason why she didn’t consider the program is because a Spanish version is not yet available. Her district, where about 35% of students are English learners, has a Spanish-English dual language program.

“I love anything that helps kids,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the right tool for every district.”

As President Donald Trump ramps up immigration enforcement, targeting immigrants at workplaces and street corners across California, his administration is turning its attention to adult students.

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

In a memo earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education said adult students without legal status must be banned from federally funded career technical education classes, English-language programs and high school equivalency courses. Adult schools offer these courses to anyone over 18 years old, including immigrants, and many school leaders say the new policy could lead to enrollment declines. California’s K-12 districts may also need to adapt since they use federal funding to offer numerous career technical education classes that teach skills such as welding and farming.

The new policy poses administrative challenges for these schools, which don’t require students to prove their legal status. Many students, including U.S. citizens, lack the proper verification documents.

“It’s going to perpetuate this atmosphere of fear,” said Randy Tillery, the director of economic mobility for the nonprofit WestEd, which helps collect data on behalf of the state.

Last week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said the state is suing over the new policy.

The U.S. Education Department refused to comment on the new policy. In a press release, the department said it will enforce it starting Aug. 9.

Adult schools ask students to voluntarily share their Social Security numbers, which are only available for those with a legal right to work in the U.S. Of the more than 500,000 adult learners taking classes in California, about 10% voluntarily share their numbers with their schools, Tillery said.

Schools across the state say that they are waiting for more guidance from state and federal agencies before barring students from any classes.

‘What if you don’t return?’

V., a student at Huntington Beach Adult School, has been taking a beginner-level English-language class for the past two years, in-person, Monday through Thursday, for two and a half hours a day. V. agreed to be interviewed on the condition that CalMatters not identify her because she doesn't have legal status and fears deportation.

Her three children, who are U.S. citizens, couldn’t stand the idea of their mom going to school this summer as the threat of immigration raids loomed. “When I grabbed my backpack to go to school, my kids said, ‘Don’t go, mom. What if you don’t return?’” she told CalMatters in Spanish, her voice shaky, on the verge of tears.

Last month, she sent a note to her teacher, saying that, because of “uncontrollable anxiety” she needed to take the class online. “I was, I am and I continue to be terrified to leave (my house),” she said later.

Normally her class has about 40 students, but this summer, it’s down to 24, according to her teacher. The class is livestreamed, and an increasing number of students are opting to take the course online, the teacher said. CalMatters is withholding the teacher’s name to ensure V.’s anonymity.

It was harder to focus while taking online classes, V. said — her kids often interrupted the livestream or something on the computer distracted her. After about two weeks of online school, V. returned to class in person, despite her kids’ fears.

Steve Curiel, the principal, said the school is allowing students without legal status to attend, at least for now, until the education department provides more guidance about its new policy.

For a month now, adult schools have been managing uncertainty over federal policy and funding. Federal funding for adult schools typically comes through on a yearly basis, with the fiscal year beginning July 1, and it provides as much as 30% of a school’s budget. The education department withheld the money for a month, leading California Attorney General Rob Bonta to sue Education Secretary Linda McMahon. On Friday, the department said it would begin releasing the money this week, but the lawsuit is still ongoing, according to Elissa Perez, a spokesperson for Bonta's office.

“We’re feeling optimistic but we’re still holding our breath a little bit because we want to see the actual release of the funds,” said Curiel. He was about to begin making cuts on Friday to contracts at Huntington Adult School but said he will now hold off.

“It’s going to perpetuate this atmosphere of fear.”
Randy Tillery, director of economic development at WestEd

Many states rely entirely on the federal government to fund English-language learning and high school equivalency programs for adults, whereas California has a financial cushion: The state provides over $650 million each year specifically for adult education, representing the bulk of funding for California’s adult schools.

Turning teens away from classes

The education department’s new policy on adults without legal status could also affect high school students. Although much of the federal funding in question supports adults taking English classes and high school equivalency courses, career technical education is part of a separate pot of money, known as Perkins funds, and includes hundreds of high schools across the state. The education department memo says that funding for those programs should be restricted to students who are legal residents or citizens.

An estimated 150,000 children between the ages of 3 and 17 live in California but lack legal status, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The vast majority are enrolled in school.

The U.S. Supreme Court case Plyer v. Doe requires K-12 school districts to provide all students, regardless of their legal status, with “a basic public education,” but in the memo, the U.S. education department said that career technical classes are no longer considered part of a “basic” education. The memo also says that children without legal status are now prohibited from taking college-level courses in high school.

To implement the education department's new policy, public K-12 schools would need to tell certain students that they can’t take specific classes because of their legal status. It would create “an enormous problem for schools,” said Tillery, since schools don’t ask students about their legal status. Public schools would need to gather data about who is a legal resident and who isn’t, he said, which could deter some students from attending school at all.

The U.S. Education Department did not respond to CalMatters’ questions asking how schools should respond or what enforcement might look like. The Los Angeles Unified School District said it was “awaiting further guidance” from the state’s education department, which also declined to comment.

For V., the English classes are about her family more than anything, she said repeatedly. Her daughter is about to be 11 years old and prefers to speak English over Spanish, though she has a speech impediment and struggles to communicate in either language. V. said she wants to be able to speak more English with her daughter, hoping it might help, despite the risks of going to class.

“We’re not living our own lives,” said V. “We’re living for our children.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Several years ago, an employee at Universal Music came across a cassette tape in a Tokyo warehouse while sorting through archival materials. On it was a recording by the late Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng that had never been released; the pop ballad, likely recorded in the mid-1980s while Teng was living and performing in Japan, was a collaboration between composer Takashi Miki and lyricist Toyohisa Araki.

Now, to the delight of her millions of fans, the track titled “Love Songs Are Best in the Foggy Night” will appear on an album set to be released on June 25, 2025.

Teng died 30 years ago. Most Americans know little about her life and her body of work. Yet the ballads of Teng, who could sing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Indonesian, continue to echo through karaoke rooms, on Spotify playlists, at tribute concerts and at family gatherings across Asia and beyond.

I study how pop music has served as a tool of soft power, and I’ve spent the past several years researching Teng’s music and its legacy. I’ve found that Teng’s influence endures not just because of her voice, but also because her music transcends Asia’s political fault lines.

From local star to Asian icon

Born in 1953 in Yunlin, Taiwan, Teresa Teng grew up in one of the many villages that were built to house soldiers and their families who had fled mainland China in 1949 after the communists claimed victory in the Chinese civil war. Her early exposure to traditional Chinese music and opera laid the foundation for her singing career. By age 6, she was taking voice lessons. She soon began winning local singing competitions.

“It wasn’t adults who wanted me to sing,” Teng wrote in her memoir. “I wanted to sing. As long as I could sing, I was happy.”

At 14, Teng dropped out of high school to focus entirely on music, signing with the local label Yeu Jow Records. Soon thereafter, she released her first album, “Fengyang Flower Drum.” In the 1970s, she toured and recorded across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and Southeast Asia, becoming one of Asia’s first truly transnational pop stars.

Teng’s career flourished in the late 1970s and 1980s. She released some of her most iconic tracks, such as her covers of Chinese singer Zhou Xuan’s 1937 hit “When Will You Return?” and Taiwanese singer Chen Fen-lan’s “The Moon Represents My Heart,” and toured widely across Asia, sparking what came to be known as “Teresa Teng Fever.”

In the early 1990s, Teng was forced to stop performing for health reasons. She died suddenly of an asthma attack on May 8, 1995, while on vacation in Chiang Mai, Thailand, at the age of 42.

China catches Teng Fever

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Teng’s story is that Teng Fever peaked in China.

Teng was ethnically Chinese, with ancestral roots in China’s Shandong province. But the political divide between China and Taiwan following the Chinese civil war had led to decades of hostility, with each side refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the other.

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Teng speaks at a press conference in Hong Kong in 1980. P.Y. Tang/South China Morning Post via Getty Images

During the late 1970s and 1980s, however, China began to relax its political control under Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up policy. This sweeping initiative shifted China toward a market-oriented economy, encouraged foreign trade and investment, and cautiously reintroduced global cultural influences after decades of isolation.

Pop music from other parts of the world began trickling in, including Teng’s tender ballads. Her songs could be heard in coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Shanghai, inland cities such as Beijing and Tianjin, and even remote regions such as Tibet. Shanghai’s propaganda department wrote an internal memo in 1980 noting that her music had spread to the city’s public parks, restaurants, nursing homes and wedding halls.

Teng’s immense popularity in China was no accident; it reflected a time in the country’s history when its people were particularly eager for emotionally resonant art after decades of cultural propaganda and censorship.

For a society that had been awash in rote, revolutionary songs like “The East is Red” and “Union is Strength,” Teng’s music offered something entirely different. It was personal, tender and deeply human. Her gentle, approachable style – often described as “angelic” or like that of “a girl next door” – provided solace and a sense of intimacy that had long been absent from public life.

Teng performs ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ in Taipei in 1984.

Teng’s music was also admired for her ability to bridge eras. Her 1983 album “Light Exquisite Feeling” fused classical Chinese poetry with contemporary Western pop melodies, showcasing her gift for blending the traditional and the modern. It cemented her reputation not just as a pop star but as a cultural innovator.

It’s no secret why audiences across China and Asia were so deeply drawn to her and her music. She was fluent in multiple languages; she was elegant but humble, polite and relatable; she was involved in various charities; and she spoke out in support of democratic values.

A sound of home in distant lands

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Chinese immigrant population in the United States grew to over 1.1 million. Teng’s music has also deeply embedded itself within Chinese diasporic communities across the country. In cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, Chinese immigrants played her music at family gatherings, during holidays and at community events. Walk through any Chinatown during Lunar New Year and you’re bound to hear her voice wafting through the streets.

“Da, duh.”

Two simple notes – E and F – have become synonymous with tension, fear and sharks, representing the primal dread of being stalked by a predator.

And they largely have “Jaws” to thank.

Fifty years ago, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film – along with its spooky score composed by John Williams – convinced generations of swimmers to think twice before going in the water.

As a scholar of media history and popular culture, I decided to take a deeper dive into the staying power of these two notes and learned about how they’re influenced by 19th-century classical music, Mickey Mouse and Alfred Hitchcock.

When John Williams proposed the two-note theme for ‘Jaws,’ Steven Spielberg initially thought it was a joke.

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The first summer blockbuster

In 1964, fisherman Frank Mundus killed a 4,500-pound great white shark off Long Island.

After hearing the story, freelance journalist Peter Benchley began pitching a novel based on three men’s attempt to capture a man-eating shark, basing the character of Quint off of Mundus. Doubleday commissioned Benchley to write the novel, and in 1973, Universal Studios producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown purchased the film rights to the novel before it was published. The 26-year-old Spielberg was signed on to be the director.

Tapping into both mythical and real fears regarding great white sharks – including an infamous set of shark attacks along the Jersey Shore in 1916 – Benchley’s 1974 novel became a bestseller. The book was a key part of Universal’s marketing campaign, which began several months before the film’s release.

Starting in the fall of 1974, Zanuck, Brown and Benchley appeared on a number of radio and television programs to simultaneously promote the release of the paperback edition of the novel and the upcoming film. The marketing also included a national television advertising campaign that featured emerging composer Williams’ two-note theme. The plan was for a summer release, which, at the time, was reserved for films with less than stellar reviews.

TV ads promoting the film featured John Williams’ two-note theme.

Films at the time typically were released market by market, preceded by local reviews. However, Universal’s decision to release the film in hundreds of theaters across the country on June 20, 1975, led to huge up-front profits, sparking a 14-week run as the No. 1 film in the U.S.

Many consider “Jaws” the first true summer blockbuster. It catapulted Spielberg to fame and kicked off the director’s long collaboration with Williams, who would go on to earn the second-highest number of Academy Award nominations in history – 54 – behind only Walt Disney’s 59.

The film’s beating heart

Though it’s now considered one of the greatest scores in film history, when Williams proposed the two-note theme, Spielberg initially thought it was a joke.

But Williams had been inspired by 19th and 20th century composers, including Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky and especially Antonin Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” In the “Jaws” theme, you can hear echoes of the end of Dvorak’s symphony, as well as the sounds of another character-driven musical piece, Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

“Peter and the Wolf” and the score from “Jaws” are both prime examples of leitmotifs, or a musical piece that represents a place or character.

The varying pace of the ostinato – a musical motif that repeats itself – elicits intensifying degrees of emotion and fear. This became more integral as Spielberg and the technical team struggled with the malfunctioning pneumatic sharks that they’d nicknamed “Bruce,” after Spielberg’s lawyer.

As a result, the shark does not appear until the 81-minute mark of the 124-minute film. But its presence is felt through Williams’ theme, which some music scholars have theorized evoke the shark’s heartbeat.

During filming, issues with ‘Bruce’ the mechanical shark forced Steven Spielberg to rely more on mood and atmosphere. Screen Archives/Moviepix via Getty Images

Sounds to manipulate emotions

Williams also has Disney to thank for revolutionizing character-driven music in film.

The two don’t just share a brimming trophy case. They also understood how music can heighten emotion and magnify action for audiences.

Although his career started in the silent film era, Disney became a titan of film, and later media, by leveraging sound to establish one of the greatest stars in media history, Mickey Mouse.

When Disney saw “The Jazz Singer” in 1927, he knew that sound would be the future of film.

On Nov. 18, 1928, “Steamboat Willie” premiered at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City as Disney’s first animated film to incorporate synchronized sound.

Unlike previous attempts to bring sound to film by having record players concurrently play or deploying live musicians to perform in the theater, Disney used technology that recorded sound directly on the film reel.

It wasn’t the first animated film with synchronized sound, but it was a technical improvement to previous attempts at it, and “Steamboat Willie” became an international hit, launching Mickey’s – and Disney’s – career.

The use of music or sound to match the rhythm of the characters on screen became known as “Mickey Mousing.”

“King Kong” in 1933 would deftly deploy Mickey Mousing in a live action film, with music mimicking the giant gorilla’s movements. For example, in one scene, Kong carries away Ann Darrow, who’s played by actress Fay Wray. Composer Max Steiner uses lighter tones to convey Kong’s curiosity as he holds Ann, followed by ominous, faster, tones as Ann escapes and Kong chases after her. In doing so, Steiner encourages viewers to both fear and connect with the beast throughout the film, helping them suspend disbelief and enter a world of fantasy.

Mickey Mousing declined in popularity after World War II. Many filmmakers saw it as juvenile and too simplistic for the evolving and advancing film industry.

When less is more

In spite of this criticism, the technique was still used to score some iconic scenes, like the playing of violins in the shower as Marion Crane is stabbed in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”

Spielberg idolized Hitchcock. A young Spielberg was even kicked off the Universal lot after sneaking on to watch the production of Hitchcock’s 1966 film “Torn Curtain.”

Although Hitchcock and Spielberg never met, “Jaws” clearly exhibits the influence of Hitchcock, the “Master of Suspense.” And maybe that’s why Spielberg initially overcame his doubts about using something so simple to represent tension in the thriller.

In the fall of 1971, Sly and the Family Stone’s “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” landed like a quiet revolution. After two years of silence following the band’s mainstream success, fans expected more feel-good funk from the ensemble.

What they got instead was something murkier and more fractured, yet deeply intimate and experimental. This was not just an album; it was the sound of a restless mind rebuilding music from the inside out.

At the center of it all was front man Sly Stone.

Long before the home studio became an industry norm, Stone, who died on June 9, 2025, turned the studio into both a sanctuary and an instrument. And long before sampling defined the sound of hip-hop, he was using tape and machine rhythms to deconstruct existing songs to cobble together new ones.

As someone who spends much of their time working on remote recording and audio production – from building full arrangements solo to collaborating digitally across continents – I’m deeply indebted to Sly Stone’s approach to making music.

He was among the first major artists to fully embrace the recording environment as a space to compose rather than perform. Every reverb bounce, every drum machine tick, every overdubbed breath became part of the writing process.

From studio rat to bedroom producer

Sly and the Family Stone’s early albums – including “Dance to the Music” and “Stand!” – were recorded at top-tier facilities like CBS Studios in Los Angeles under the technical guidance of engineers such as Don Puluse and with oversight from producer David Rubinson.

These sessions yielded bright, radio-friendly tracks that emphasized tight horn sections, group vocals and a polished sound. Producers also prized the energy of live performance, so the full band would record together in real time.

But by the early 1970s, Stone was burnt out. The dual pressures of fame and industry demands were becoming too much. Struggling with cocaine and PCP addiction, he’d grown increasingly distrustful of bandmates, label executives and even his friends.

So he decided to retreat to his hillside mansion in Bel Air, California, transforming his home into a musical bunker. Inside, he could work on his own terms: isolated and erratic, but free.

Stone relied heavily on overdubbing when recording music from his home. Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images

Without a full band present, Stone became a one-man ensemble. He leaned heavily into overdubbing – recording one instrument at a time and building his songs from fragments. Using multiple tape machines, he’d layer each part onto previous takes.

The resulting album, “There’s a Riot Goin’ On,” was like nothing he’d previously recorded. It sounds murky, jagged and disjointed. But it’s also deeply intentional, as if every imperfection was part of the design.

In “The Poetics of Rock,” musicologist Albin Zak describes this “composerly” approach to production, where recording itself becomes a form of writing, not just documentation. Stone’s process for “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” reflects this mindset: Each overdub, rhythm loop and sonic imperfection functions more like a brushstroke than a performance.

Automating the groove

A key part of Stone’s tool kit was the Maestro Rhythm King, a preset drum machine he used extensively.

It wasn’t the first rhythm box on the market. But Stone’s use of it was arguably the first time such a machine shaped the entire aesthetic of a mainstream album. The drum parts on his track “Family Affair,” for example, don’t swing – they tick. What might have been viewed as soulless became its own kind of soul.

This early embrace of mechanical rhythm prefigured what would later become a foundation of hip-hop and electronic music. In his book “Dawn of the DAW,” music technology scholar Adam Patrick Bell calls this shift “a redefinition of groove,” noting how drum machines like the Rhythm King encouraged musicians to rethink their songwriting process, building tracks in shorter, repeatable sections while emphasizing steady, looped rhythms rather than free-flowing performances.

Though samplers wouldn’t emerge until years later, Stone’s work already contained that repetition, layering and loop-based construction that would become characteristic of the practice.

He recorded his own parts the way future DJs would splice records – isolated, reshuffled, rhythmically obsessed. His overdubbed bass lines, keyboard vamps and vocal murmurs often sounded like puzzle pieces from other songs.

Music scholar Will Fulton, in his study of Black studio innovation, notes how producers like Stone helped pioneer a fragment-based approach to music-making that would become central to hip-hop’s DNA. Stone’s process anticipated the mentality that a song isn’t necessarily something written top to bottom, but something assembled, brick by brick, from what’s available.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stone’s tracks have been sampled relentlessly. In “Bring That Beat Back,” music critic Nate Patrin identifies Stone as one of the most sample-friendly artists of the 1970s – not because of his commercial hits, but because of how much sonic space he left in his tracks: the open-ended grooves, unusual textures and slippery emotional tone.

You can hear his sounds in famous tracks such as 2Pac’s “If My Homie Calls,” which samples “Sing a Simple Song”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Jam,” which draws from “Family Affair”; and De La Soul’s “Plug Tunin’,” which flips “You Can Make It If You Try.”

The studio as instrument

While Sly’s approach was groundbreaking, he wasn’t entirely alone. Around the same time, artists such as Brian Wilson and The Rolling Stones were experimenting with home and nontraditional recording environments – Wilson famously retreating to his home studio during “Pet Sounds,” and the Stones tracking “Exile on Main St.” in a French villa.

Yet in the world of Black music, production remained largely centralized in institutionally controlled studio systems such as Motown in Detroit and Stax in Memphis, where sound was tightly managed by in-house producers and engineers. In that context, Stone’s decision to isolate, self-produce and dismantle the standard workflow was more than a technical choice: It was a radical act of autonomy.

The rise of home recording didn’t just change who could make music. It changed what music felt like. It made music more internal, iterative and intimate.

Sly Stone helped invent that feeling.

It’s easy to hear “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” as murky or uneven. The mix is dense with tape hiss, drum machines drift in and out of sync, and vocals often feel buried or half-whispered.

But it’s also, in a way, prophetic.

It anticipated the aesthetics of bedroom pop, the cut-and-paste style of modern music software, the shuffle of playlists and the recycling of sounds that defines sample culture. It showed that a groove didn’t need to be spontaneous to be soulful, and that solitude could be a powerful creative tool, not a limitation.

In my own practice, I often record alone, passing files back and forth, building from templates and mapping rhythm to grid – as do millions of musical artists who compose tracks from their bedrooms, closets and garages.

Half a century ago, a funk pioneer led the way. I think it’s safe to say that Sly Stone quietly changed the process of making music forever – and in the funkiest way possible.

Jose Valentino Ruiz, Associate Professsor of Music Business and Entrepreneurship, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

When Ted Bundy was a child in the 1950s, he hunted for frogs in the nearby swamps in Tacoma, Washington. The young Gary Ridgway, the future Green River Killer, grew up just a short drive north. Both men went on to become prolific serial killers, raping and mutilating dozens of women, starting in the 1970s and ’80s. These types of sociopaths are exceedingly rare, representing less than a tenth of 1 percent of all murderers by some accounts. Yet in Tacoma, they were surprisingly common — and there were more than just Bundy and Ridgway.

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In her new book Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Caroline Fraser maps the rise of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest to the proliferation of pollution. In this case, the lead- and arsenic-poisoned plume that flowed from Asarco’s metal smelter northwest of Tacoma, which operated for almost a century and polluted more than 1,000 square miles of the Puget Sound area, the source of the famous “aroma of Tacoma.”

Fraser grew up in the 1970s on Mercer Island, connected to Seattle by a floating bridge with a deadly design, not far from a terrifying lineup of serial killers. George Waterfield Russell Jr., who went on to murder three women, lived just down the street, a few years ahead of Fraser at Mercer Island High School. (No surprise, his family once lived in Tacoma.) She had always thought the idea that the Pacific Northwest was a breeding ground for serial killers was “some kind of urban legend,” she told Grist.

But after much time spent staring at pollution maps, and looking up the former addresses of serial killers, she came up with an irresistible hypothesis: What if lead exposure was warping the minds of the country’s most harrowing murderers? In Murderland, Fraser makes a convincing case that these killers were exposed to heavy metal pollution in their youth, often from nearby smelters and the leaded gasoline that was once burned on every road in the country.

Studies have shown that childhood lead exposure is connected to rising crime rates, aggression, and psychopathy. In children, it can lead to behavior that’s been described as cruel, impulsive, and “crazy-like”; by adulthood, it’s been linked to a loss of brain volume, particularly for men. Fraser doesn’t pin sociopathy solely on exposure to lead, though she suggests that it’s a key ingredient.

“Recipes for making a serial killer may vary, including such ingredients as poverty, crude forceps deliveries, poor diet, physical and sexual abuse, brain damage, and neglect,” Fraser writes. “Many horrors play a role in warping these tortured souls, but what happens if we add a light dusting from the periodic table on top of all that trauma?”

Fraser is a fan of true crime, but when writing the book, she tried to correct for what she sees as the genre’s problems, she said. Biographers often zoom in on a killer in isolation, like Ted Bundy or the Zodiac killer, and he comes off as some kind of mastermind. In Fraser’s telling, with all their deprived murders placed side-by-side, these killers seem patterned, almost predictable. “It was also revealing to see that they’re not only not as smart as we may have thought they were after Hollywood got through with them, but that their behavior is so similar,” she said. “Like, they’re almost kind of automatons, where their behavior’s very robotlike.”

Fraser draws a parallel between murderers as we normally understand them and more indirect killers, the book’s true arch-villain: smelting companies and the people profiting off them, like the famous Guggenheim family that acquired Asarco. In 1974, officials at Asarco’s Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg, Idaho, did a back-of-the-napkin estimate and found that poisoning 500 children with lead had a legal liability of merely $6-7 million, compared to the $10-11 million they’d make by increasing lead production. So the choice was easy.

“The behavior of the people who built these smelters, invested in them, ran them, continued to emit tons of lead and arsenic into the air in populated cities — I mean, it’s beyond astonishing, what they did,” she said. Take Dr. Sherman Pinto, the medical director at the Tacoma smelter, who claimed that the lung cancer deaths among workers were simply because of pneumonia. “It just struck me how much their behavior is comparable to that of serial killers, because they’re constantly lying,” Fraser said.

Beyond the Pacific Northwest, the book follows the depraved behavior of Dennis Rader in Kansas in the 1970s and 1980s, and Richard Ramirez in California in the 1980s — both of whom also grew up near smelting. Even London’s famous Jack the Ripper was probably poisoned by the lead smelting boom in the 19th century, driven by demand for paint. Yet Murderland focuses on Washington state for a reason. When Fraser looked at the Washington Department of Ecology’s map of lead and arsenic contamination, she saw four plumes: The fallout from Asarco’s Tacoma smelter, another smelter plume in Everett, former orchard lands in central Washington that were sprayed with lead arsenate as a pesticide, and a cleanup site on the upper Columbia River.

“Every one of those plumes, including the most remote and least populated site on the Columbia, has hosted the activities of one or more serial rapists or murderers,” Fraser notes. (Israel Keyes, the serial killer and necrophiliac, grew up downriver from the Trail smelter in British Columbia.)

Leaded gas was fully phased out in the United States by 1996, and metal smelters have largely been decommissioned for financial reasons. But the legacy of lead remains with us. A recent experiment found that about 90 percent of toothpastes tested contained lead; a few weeks ago, the supermarket chain Publix recalled baby food pouches after product testing detected lead contamination. Last year, the Biden administration issued a regulation requiring drinking water systems across the country to replace lead pipes within 10 years, but the Trump administration and some Republicans in Congress are trying to roll back these protections.

“Regardless of whether you agree with my connection between lead exposure and serial killers, I do think people really need to be aware that that was a huge part of our history, and it’s still out there,” Fraser said. “I hope that this book does something to help people make connections between where they live, and what they might be exposed to, and what that might mean.”

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/culture/murderland-caroline-fraser-serial-killers-pacific-northwest-lead-pollution/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org

During the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong pushed for the closure of Chinese universities, seeing higher education as little more than a breeding ground for counterrevolutionary bourgeois intellectuals. After closing for a period, China’s universities reopened on a limited basis from 1970, with selection criteria based on class background, revolutionary devotion and connections to the communist party.

In the past, Daniel Lisi — now a director at Foundation Publishing Group — interacted with a lot of liberals and progressives thanks to his involvement in Los Angeles' literary scene. But according to The Guardian's Jason Wilson, Foundation's new publishing deal with Passage Press gives Lisi a connection to the far right.

In an article published by The Guardian on June 3, Lisi explains, "The far-right U.S. publisher Passage Press is now part of Foundation Publishing Group and it is connected via a Foundation director, Daniel Lisi, to Network Press, whose only title to date is an 'effective accelerationist' manifesto by tech-right venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Another right-wing publisher, science fiction publisher Ark Press, appears connected to Chapter House, which Lisi, a literary scenester in Los Angeles, originally co-founded as an independent publisher of poetry, sci-fi and esoterica, but which now presents itself as a homeschooling resource."

Wilson adds, "The developments illuminate the far right's efforts to disseminate ideologically charged material as art in the U.S., and raise questions about its place in the broader culture wars waged by the Trump Administration, which is carrying out a broad attack on what it sees as liberal culture…. Lisi, the publisher and director, spent years as a face in Los Angeles' diverse and left-leaning literary scene. He has now emerged as a player in a sprawling far-right cultural push, with his role in Foundation, Network, Passage and Ark revealed in company filings, trademarks, open-source materials and public records."

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Lisi, according to Wilson, didn't respond to interview requests from The Guardian.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, finds the Passage/Foundation deal troubling and described it as "another example of the far right moving to directly impact culture, and especially young people, with extremist and anti-democratic beliefs."

Beirich told The Guardian, "These efforts represent another front in the culture wars, one that is pushing America further from democracy and equality and closer to autocratic rule.”

Passage, Wilson notes, was founded in 2021 by Jonathan Keeperman, who "long operated in far-right circles online under the online pseudonym 'L0m3z.'"

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Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

NPR sued U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday over his recent executive order aiming to end federal funding for the outlet, a move that the lawsuit calls an illegal attack that "threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information."

Colorado Public Radio, KSUT Public Radio, and Roaring Fork Public Radio joined NPR in filing the legal challenge, which also names White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

"The order is unlawful in multiple ways," the lawsuit states. "It flatly contravenes statutes duly enacted by Congress and violates the Separation of Powers and the Spending Clause by disregarding Congress' express commands. It also violates the First Amendment's guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press."

"The order aims to punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the president dislikes and chill the exercise of First Amendment rights by NPR and individual public radio stations across the country," the suit continues. "The order is textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment."

"NPR will never agree to this infringement of our constitutional rights, or the constitutional rights of our member stations."

Trump's May 1 executive order instructed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which is funded by Congress, to end both direct and indirect funding to NPR and PBS, accusing the outlets of "biased and partisan news coverage."

The lawsuit demands court action barring the Trump administration from implementing the president's order.

Roughly 1% of NPR's funding comes directly from the federal government, and its member stations across the U.S. receive around 10% of their funds from the CPB. NPR says more than 43 million Americans consume its articles, podcasts, and other content on a weekly basis.

Katherine Maher, NPR's president and CEO, said in a statement Tuesday that Trump's order "is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment's protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press."

"The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times over the past 80 years that the government does not have the right to determine what counts as 'biased,'" said Maher. "NPR will never agree to this infringement of our constitutional rights, or the constitutional rights of our member stations, and NPR will not compromise our commitment to an independent free press and journalistic integrity."

Press freedom organizations have issued dire warnings about the consequences of federal funding cuts for NPR and PBS, arguing they could result in the closure of hundreds of local radio and television stations nationwide.

"The harm of these cuts will disproportionately befall rural American communities," a coalition of advocacy groups wrote in a letter to congressional leaders last month. "Less densely populated parts of the country tend to have fewer options for reliable news sources. These markets are often less viable for commercial media, making it unlikely that the gap left by shuttered public media stations will be adequately filled."

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Donald Trump’s ratings continue to slide on most issues. Recent Economist/YouGov polling across the US, completed on May 9-12, shows 51% think the country is on the wrong track, while only 45% have a favourable impression of his job as president. On inflation and prices in the shops, only 35% approve of his handling of this policy.

Trump seems to be scoring particularly badly with young voters. Around 62% of young people (18 to 29s) have an unfavourable opinion of the president, compared with 53% of the over-65s.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to pursue an agenda to close down, or shackle, much of the media it considers not on his side.

Funding for national public service radio NPR and television PBS, as well as the global news service Voice of America, is under threat. Some national news outlets are under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) for their coverage.

In a speech in March, Trump said broadcasters CNN and MSNBC, and some newspapers he didn’t name “literally write 97.6% bad about me”. He added: “It has to stop. It has to be illegal.”

The Trump team clearly see the role of the media as important to establishing and retaining support, and have taken steps to shake up White House coverage – including by changing who can attend the White House press pool.

About seven in ten members of the American public say they are following the news for updates on the Trump administration. It is interesting, therefore, to consider the role of the media in influencing Trump’s popularity, and insights can be found in the massive US Cooperative Election Study, conducted during the presidential contest last year.

That survey showed 57% of Americans had watched TV news in the previous 24 hours. Around 81% had used social media during the same period, but only 20% had used it to comment on politics.

There is a lot of attention being paid to fake news on the internet, which is helping to cause polarisation in the US. But when it comes to news about politics, TV coverage is still very important for most Americans.

The survey asked respondents about the TV news channels they watched, and Fox News came out on top with 47% of the viewers. ABC came second with 37%, and CBS and CNN tied on 35%. Fox News is Trump’s favorite TV station, with its rightwing populist agenda and regular output of Trump-friendly news.

Relationship between Trump voters and Fox News’s audience in 2024 US presidential election:

Source: Author graph based on Cooperative Election Study 2024, CC BY

The Cooperative Election Study had 60,000 respondents, which provides reasonably sized samples in each of the 50 states. The Trump vote varied quite a lot across states, with only 34% of voters in Maryland supporting him, compared with 72% in Wyoming. The electoral college formally decides the results of presidential elections, and this is based on states – so, looking at voting in this way can be quite revealing.

The connection between watching Fox News and Trump’s vote share can be seen in the chart above. It varies from 21% who watched the channel in Vermont to 60% in West Virginia.

Vermont is represented in Congress by Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist from a radical political tradition, and only 32% voted for Trump there. In contrast, West Virginia is part of the rust belt of impoverished states hit by deindustrialisation and the decline of the coal mining industry, and 71% voted for Trump there.

We can use a regression model (which looks at the relationship between variables) to predict support for Trump using key measures that drive the vote share for Trump in each state. The model uses three variables to predict the results with 95% accuracy, which means while not perfect, it gives a very accurate prediction of Trump’s vote.

Not surprisingly, partisanship – that is, the percentage of registered Republicans in each state – is one of the key metrics. In addition, ideology – the percentage of respondents who say they are conservatives – is another.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the third important predictor is viewership of Fox News. The relationship between watching the channel and voting for Trump is very strong at the state level. Also, the more time people spend watching the channel, the more likely they are to have voted for Trump.

Impact of key factors on Trump voting in 2024 US election:

During the United States' 2016 presidential election, then-Fox News host Megyn Kelly bitterly clashed with Donald Trump and his supporters. Kelly was inundated with death threats from Trump devotees, and she even needed an armed bodyguard for protection.

But like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Vice President JD Vance, Kelly flip flopped and went from being a Trump critic to being a loyal supporter.

In an article published on May 19, The Guardian's David Smith describes Kelly's transition from Trump critic to Trump cheerleader.

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"Kelly, 54, has become one of the most influential figures in right-wing media," Smith explains. "Her eponymous podcast moves with rare dexterity from heavyweight political interviews — such as the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard — to topics such as Joe Biden’s cognitive decline to celebrity gossip about the likes of Halle Berry, Sean 'Diddy' Combs, Meghan Markle and the Kardashians.… This makes her one of the most prominent cheerleaders for Trump and shapers of his MAGA (Make America great again) agenda, most especially its hostility to immigrants and transgender rights."

Smith adds, "Kelly is even emerging as a rival to her former employer Fox News, which dominated the narratives of Trump’s first term in office."

Larry Jacobs, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, notes that Kelly has done a great deal of flip-flopping along the way.

Jacobs told The Guardian, "Megyn Kelly's various transformations can make you dizzy if you follow them. The days when she had credibility as a truth-seeker are over, and now, she's strictly in the business of following clicks. Her campaigning with Trump, including on the last night, confirms what the business model is. She is trying to establish herself as the preferred media outlet for the MAGA movement. She is demonstrating that even Fox is now vulnerable and is being picked apart by the podcasters who become the viewer choice."

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Author David Litt, an ex-speechwriter for former President Barack Obama, told The Guardian, "The crux of Trump's argument was: I'm a bad guy, but you need me in the White House anyway. Nobody could speak to that argument — both Trump’s personal lack of character and, by endorsing him, say we need him anyway — better than Megyn Kelly. He knew that, and she knew that. They saw a moment of symbiosis."

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Read David Smith's full article for The Guardian at this link.