Joe Palca’s cubicle in NPR’s Washington, D.C., headquarters is strewn with bicycle gear from his daily commute, assorted piles of books about science, and random objects: a can of mackerel, a leaf-shaped bottle of maple syrup. From this cluttered perch, the longtime science correspondent has the power to shape what becomes news. If Joe Palca ’74 decides a story is worth putting on the air, roughly a million listeners hear it. And if he misses a story, well, some of those listeners may never hear about it.

In 1996, Science magazine published a study on a novel approach to treating cancer. Immunologist James Allison and his co-authors reported that they had successfully treated malignant tumors in mice by blocking molecules on immune system cells that act as a brake on immune response. Palca didn’t cover the study. “Nobody covered that paper,” he shrugs. “Everybody has cured cancer in mice.”

Two decades later, Allison’s immunotherapy methods have led to the first effective treatment for advanced melanoma. Patients used to die in less than a year; with treatment based on Allison’s research, some now live more than a decade. Allison has won dozens of prestigious awards for this work in recent years, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, often a precursor to the Nobel.

Someone, it seems, ought to have reported on that initial study. “If news is to tell you about the things that are important,” Palca says, “that’s the paper I should have been telling you about.” But out of all the promising studies published that week, Palca could not have known which one would make history. Reporters rarely do. “None of us in science journalism is smart enough to know which are the really important papers,” he says. “No one is.”

Nevertheless, the media generally presents scientific findings as if they were breaking news. As a result, Palca says, studies that will later prove inconsequential get the limelight, sometimes simply because they lend themselves to sexy headlines. Meanwhile, reporters inadvertently ignore research that, in hindsight, they ought to have covered (like that 1996 immunotherapy study). So a few years ago, after two decades as an NPR science correspondent, Palca had an idea. A big idea. What if he stopped trying to identify the important science stories and focused exclusively on the interesting ones?

Three years later, Joe’s Big Idea is going strong. The series tells the stories behind innovations: what drives scientists and inventors, how they come up with their ideas, and how they implement them (or try to). Palca has produced pieces on soccer-playing robots, ant traffic patterns, and a phone app that checks photos for eye disease. He’s followed efforts to end dengue fever, the search for life on Mars and the passionate quest for the perfect toothbrush. He hopes that by focusing on what’s intriguing about the scientific process, listeners will come to share his fascination. As he recently told an audience, “I want people to know there’s a joy and a delight and a beauty in science.”

The key to conveying that beauty is often the researcher. “You can’t tell a really moving story about a nanoparticle,” Palca says. “But the person studying the nanoparticle can be pretty interesting.”

Pediatric oncologist James Olson is a case in point. Olson developed a paint that makes brain tumors glow, helping surgeons to locate and remove them. While the story of the paint itself is fascinating—it’s derived from scorpion venom—the profile of the man behind it got the most emotional response of Palca’s career. It turns out Olson is a practicing physician. This is what drives his tumor research: He’s tired of telling parents their children are going to die. He’s “sick of seeing the devastation on people’s faces,” Palca says in the piece, “sick of feeling helpless.” Yet Olson has the rare ability to cast a child’s cancer prognosis in a bearable light. One parent tells him her 7-year-old’s death to cancer “was as beautiful as her birth” because he helped the family see it that way. Here’s a man who is not only trying to cure pediatric brain cancer; he’s helping parents part with children who’ve succumbed to it. A hundred listeners left grateful comments about the story online. “I had colleagues coming up and hugging me, telling me they were sitting there sobbing,” Palca says. ”And I understand it because it still makes me tear up.”

Of course, not all subjects have such inherent drama. Still, Palca says, scientists are not the cold-blooded, calculating creatures they are often presumed to be. “I’m sick of the caricature, of the white lab coat. The lab coat says ‘I’m an expert, not a person.’”

Palca’s irritation on this subject is personal. An animated guy with a mischievous streak and a penchant for tangents, he is himself a trained scientist. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he studied human sleep physiology. Remember Jim Allison, the immunologist? Palca worked for him as a lab technician, his first full-time job out of Pomona College. (He also happens to be married to a molecular biologist, a deputy director at the National Institutes of Health.) Palca decamped for journalism immediately after earning his degree. Research was tedious to him. “You have to have a long attention span to be a scientist,” he says.

Palca’s attention span may not have served for years of lab work, but he has covered some impressively arcane research as a reporter. A giant hand-painted bowl in his office is proof. He received the bowl for delivering the 24th annual Ullyot Public Affairs Lecture to the Chemical Heritage Foundation. It was titled “Covering Complex Science, or How I Explained a Frank-Kasper Phase in Sphere-Forming Block Copolymer Melts to a Radio Audience.” Palca really did produce a story on a study by that name. In fact, he chose it precisely because it was so daunting. “I said I’m going to pick the most obscure thing I can find and do a thoughtful, serious story about it just to prove I can,” Palca says. (One charming detail from the piece: the researchers used marshmallows and coffee stirrers to model the molecules they studied.)

Palca claims no research is too obscure to make for an engaging story. He travels around the country giving lectures to scientists about how to couch their research in compelling terms. The trick, he says, is knowing what to leave out. Sometimes it’s the very detail the researcher is most fixated upon. Scientists tend to focus on what is new in their fields, he says, a habit that only perpetuates the media’s tendency to do the same. “A lot of the time scientists think that the ‘news’ is the new thing, which of course it is,” Palca says. “But in fact, the new thing may be pretty tedious.”

Take adaptive optics. This technology has been used in astronomical telescopes for several decades. It unblurs the blurring caused by the atmosphere. “So if you say you want to do a story about adaptive optics, well, the scientist will tell you about how they’ve tuned the laser and how the signal’s getting better and the interferometry,” Palca says. “And you say, ‘Wait a minute! You can do that? You can unblur the atmosphere?’ That’s where scientists get lost. They know about adaptive optics. It doesn’t occur to them that nobody else does.”

That’s because it’s easy to get lost in the details as a researcher, Palca says. The work can be monotonous. Palca recalls reporting on the successful cloning of Dolly the sheep in the mid-1990s, an event that spawned headlines the world over. Scientific findings too often overshadow the work it took to get to them, Palca says. So his reporting focused on the tremendous effort it took to clone just one sheep. Palca did. “It took months of failure, months and months and months of boring, tedious, awful, discouraging failure to get one successful birth,” he says.

By interesting the public in the fits and starts that characterize scientific research and the personal drive that keeps researchers forging ahead, Palca hopes to convey a truer picture of how science really works. He says that the alternative, focusing on dazzling findings and reporting them as breaking news, gives the public the wrong idea. “I think it contributes to a sense of science lurching from breakthrough to breakthrough,” rather than as a continuum with incremental steps along the way, he says. It may also engender mistrust. “I wonder if the need to do more and more and more big science stories, the really exciting stories, has set science up for a fall,” Palca says. “Water on Mars? Wait a minute, I thought you figured that out already. Why are we still hearing about it?”

In the end, Palca hopes his own enthusiasm for science, and that of the people he talks to, is contagious. “The passion that people have and the desire to make a difference, it’s fun to listen to that,” he says. As he told an audience recently: “Not every study is going to lead to Teflon or Tang, but we’re going to learn something about the natural world. That’s got to be worth something in our culture.”

Photos by Carrie Rosema

The stretch of Foothill Boulevard near the corner of Osborne Street in the northeast San Fernando Valley has been infamous for nearly 25 years. It was there in 1991 that Rodney King was brutally beaten by Los Angeles Police officers after a high-speed chase that ended with the unemployed 25-year-old parolee being kicked, tasered and battered with batons, all captured on videotape by a nearby resident. One year later, the officers’ acquittal sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots that left 53 dead, 2,300 injured and caused $1 billion in property damage.

Today near that spot, children roam the striking, angular modern building that houses the new Discovery Cube Los Angeles, a hands-on museum aimed at teaching young people about science, technology, engineering and math, often referred to by the acronym ‘STEM.’

Inside, Kafi Blumenfield ’93, executive director of the year-old museum, kneels to join a small child sweeping his hands through the sand of an interactive exhibit that displays the resulting changes in topography on a digital map.

To Blumenfield, this is about more than science. She sees the museum as a catalyst for change in the community, a way to build a better Los Angeles by starting near the place known for the traffic stop that changed the history of a city.

“We are in a neighborhood that is full of kids with potential but lacking in resources,” Blumenfield says. “So many of our kids go jobless. They’re strong, eager, talented kids, but they’re jobless. Overlay that with the fact that we have a gap in our pipeline of young people who are ready and willing and able to enter the STEM jobs. So this is a natural fit. If we can provide these kids with additional educational support to encourage them to enter these types of jobs, it will not only make their lives and their households better, but this whole region better.”

Running a children’s science museum might seem an unlikely role for a vibrant, well-connected civic leader whose first job after majoring in politics at Pomona was as a White House intern. (She served in the Clinton Administration two years before the most famous intern in history arrived in Washington.) After earning a law degree from UCLA and working at various jobs related to such issues as housing and the environment, Blumenfield’s most recent role was president and CEO of the Liberty Hill Foundation, an L.A. nonprofit that gives about $5 million a year in grants to grass-roots organizations promoting social causes.

She has strong political ties, both professionally and personally: Her husband is Los Angeles Councilman Bob Blumenfield, a former member of the California State Assembly whose West Valley council district includes Woodland Hills, where the couple lives with their two elementary-aged children.

It was one of Blumenfield’s personal/political connections that led her to Discovery Cube LA. She was having lunch last fall with Wendy Greuel, the former Los Angeles City Controller who ran for mayor against Eric Garcetti in 2013. Greuel, then a consultant for Discovery Cube LA and now vice chair of the board, suddenly envisioned a match between the museum and Blumenfield, who had planned to take a year off to reflect on the next step in her career after leaving Liberty Hill.

“As we were talking about life transitions and things to do in the future,” Greuel says, “I heard how she cared about kids and about how to make a difference in their lives at this age, around elementary school. So I said, ‘Would you ever think about this?’ Because it was outside the box.

“But as she met with the team, you saw that she saw it as more than a building and more than a children’s science museum. She saw it as a way to train teachers to teach science, and a way to excite young girls about science. She sees it as part of a way to seek social justice. She frequently talks about this being the corner where Rodney King was beaten. I’m inspired by her when she gives those tours.

“She gets it. She gets that it’s transformative, not only for the kids who come in, but for the neighborhood. This is a community that wants to be known for something more than where Rodney King was beaten. This is something that’s a spark.”

Among the sparks for Blumenfield were conversations with her daughter, now 9, and her 6-year-old son.

“I was shocked when last year my daughter told me that she was not good at math and science,” Blumenfield says, even though the family had a tradition of outings they called Science Saturdays. “I said, ‘Why do you say that?’ She said, ‘Well, there are not a lot of girls in my class that like math and science.’ We hear that all too often. She was a big part of this project because we really want to see more young girls engaged in science, as we do with young boys.”

Her son, though, “sealed the deal,” Blumenfield says, when the family visited Santa Ana’s Discovery Cube Orange County, the well-established older sister of the two museums. (Together, the museums drew 631,045 visitors in the last fiscal year. About 220,000 have visited Discovery Cube LA since it opened last November, including 34,500 students on field trips.)

“He was 5 at the time, and I couldn’t get him out of the building,” Blumenfield says. When she cautiously broached the topic of going back to work sooner than planned to head Discovery Cube LA, her son’s response was emphatic. “‘We are in!’ he said,” she remembers with a laugh. “So they’re here a lot.”

Despite the STEM focus, Discovery Cube LA is about more than academics and career-related science. It has an additional emphasis on environmental stewardship and healthy living issues of particular importance in the San Fernando Valley, where air quality and aquifer contamination are significant concerns.

The “Aquavator” is an exhibit that simulates descending deep into the earth’s crust in a special elevator to view geological layers while learning about underground water aquifers.

In “Race to Zero Waste,” visitors stand alongside a moving conveyor belt, trying to correctly sort recyclables from other waste to divert trash from landfills. “Look, it’s the trash game,” a woman says as a child runs up to it.

Elsewhere in the museum, a faux market offers healthy local produce, green cleaning products and an opportunity for children to “shop” and check out with their selections.

Another exhibit features a portion of a built-to-scale California home, complete with solar panels. Visitors can go on a sort of scavenger hunt using handheld devices, seeking out opportunities to save energy and water. They find home computer monitors left on when not in use, becoming “energy vampires” that waste power. A kitchen faucet is programmed to intermittently drip, and observant visitors can hear the sound of the bathroom toilet running too long. (Eventually, museum staff found it necessary to screw down the lid. “You can imagine, with a bunch of potty-trainers,” Blumenfield says with a laugh.)

Playfulness aside, “we’re trying to address some of the problems of the day but do it in a very affirming way that allows people to see how they can actually effect change,” Blumenfield says. “I think that’s really important because some of the problems we’re faced with, particularly from the kids’ vantage point, it can all seem so overwhelming. They really don’t know what they can do in their little lives to make a difference. So here, they get to see it in some very practical ways.”

On the job since last August, only a few months before the November opening of a museum that earlier had stalled because of financial issues, Blumenfield is clearly in her element. She oversees a budget of about $5.3 million as well as a staff of 67 full-time and part-time workers, plus a large group of volunteers who range from teenagers to retirees. Walking the museum, she greets visitors brightly and calls workers by name.

Touted as the first major museum in the San Fernando Valley, an area with a population of more than 1.75 million, Discovery Cube LA is a new anchor in the Lake View Terrace neighborhood, a demographically diverse community with large Latino and black populations. The most visible landmark has long been the Hansen Dam Recreation Area, with its large sandy-beach manmade pool.

“It’s both very urban in ways you would expect an urban community to be, and at the same time, there’s some—I don’t know—country living, right outside our doors,” Blumenfield said. “Summer camps are tending to come here for half a day, and then they go to the pool for half a day, so it’s a great combination of science and nature.”

The community has moved on from the notoriety of the Rodney King incident, though it will be the subject of retrospectives as the 25th anniversary approaches in March. Two of the acquitted officers later served prison time after being convicted of violating King’s civil rights in a subsequent federal trial. King himself died in a backyard pool in 2012 at the age of 47.

Almost a quarter-century later, children inside the Discovery Cube museum learn about the solar system or earthquakes or how the ice on a hockey rink is made. For Blumenfield, instead of putting the funding into social change, now she is putting the fun into it.

“For me, it’s all the same thing,” she says. “It doesn’t matter if I’ve been in a legal organization, a social services organization or here, an education center, or a foundation. My career has been dedicated to providing opportunities to those who don’t have the same resources as those who have more. And to try to help people succeed, no matter if they live in downtown L.A. or here in the beautiful northeast San Fernando Valley. I think every child deserves the absolute best education, and there are many ways to go about that.

“So I don’t see the different stations that I’ve been in life, I don’t see them being that different. The beautiful thing about this place that is different, though, is I get to walk the halls, and I get to see the people that we are trying to serve. That lights me up. It gives tremendous meaning to see, every day, people who want to succeed.”

In person, Dan Weinand ’16 is a polite, soft-spoken Pomona College senior. But put him onstage and he is someone else altogether. He’s a hostile loudmouth being interrogated for a crime. He’s a laidback traveler with a Jamaican accent. He’s a TV show host who waxes poetic about the wonders of trash.

He is all of these things in a recent performance by Without a Box, the improvisational comedy group composed of students from the five Claremont Colleges. Their improv shows are a long-running tradition: Pitzer College student David Straus formed the group in 1989. Team members graduate each year, but the group endures, adding new students to the mix.

Without a Box performs about once a month during the school year, at various locations on the five campuses. Weinand, a double major in math and computer science, says it’s a kick to perform in front of fellow students—especially the Claremont crowd, who share a certain frame of reference. “I just love that only on the 5Cs can I make a linear algebra joke,” he says.

The group generally consists of anywhere from five to 10 students. However, when the 2015–2016 school year starts, Without a Box is down to three: Weinand; Lauren Eisenman, a Scripps College sophomore majoring in neuroscience; and Matthew Roberts, a Pitzer senior and history major.

Despite the small number, the crew is in fine form at the September show, held at Pitzer’s Benson Auditorium. More than 100 people are in attendance, and they look to be having a blast. The three performers wear blue Without a Box shirts, and stage props consist of little more than two chairs.

There are topical references (the Pope, Donald Trump), pantomimed actions (smoking, using a cell phone), and a spirit of play throughout. Audience interaction is a big part of the show, with members suggesting scenarios and providing snippets of dialogue. In one skit, two volunteers jump onstage to join Weinand and Roberts.

Here’s the twist: the two students move the bodies of the two performers, as if manipulating human puppets, and the dialogue flows from the movements. The scene starts with Weinand and Roberts facing each other, then Roberts is turned in the opposite direction, to which Weinand cries, “Don’t leave me!” A lovers’ spat emerges, and limbs fly every which way.

Like all good improv performers, Without a Box members embrace the “Yes, and … ” principle: the idea that you accept whatever your scene partner throws your way, however far-fetched, and build on it. As they set up the show’s final scenario—Weinand and Eisenman are co-hosts of an early-morning public access program; Roberts is the guest—they ask the audience to select a name for the TV program. The winner: “Garbage Connoisseurs.”

The two hosts gush about thrown-away toys in trash bins, exquisite finds like the tossed bodies of Barbie dolls. In comes Roberts, an authority on discarded Transformers. Then, a change of direction: the expert is uncovered as a fraud, a betrayer of garbage dreams.

Audience members eat up the show’s quirky, quick-shifting action. “It’s cool that it’s unpredictable and different,” Jonah Grubb, a Pomona senior, says afterward. “With improv, you never know what you’re going to get.”

Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts say they’re not just winging it onstage—they hone their skills through rehearsal. The group practices three times a week, doing exercises in improv game-playing, physical humor, and character work. “Doing improv might be scary if I didn’t feel comfortable with the other performers,” says Weinand. “But I totally do.

“Trust is a really big part of it,” adds Eisenman.

Growing the Group

The trio knows that Without a Box needs to get bigger to be at its best, so a week after its September show it holds auditions for new members. Eighteen students show up on a Saturday at Scripps’ Vita Nova Hall. Then that group is winnowed down to nine students invited for callbacks the next day.

Among the hopefuls is Pomona sophomore Zach Miller. In one exercise, he is asked to stand outside while Weinand, Eisenman and Roberts set up a scene with three of the students. Each is given a character feature. One is a ghost, another has a tail, and the third one’s foot is on fire. Miller comes back inside. His task: to guess what distinguishes each of the three, all of whom he is hosting at a party.

Miller is an agile performer. By the end of the scene, he has figured out each one’s crazy feature. Guessing the ghost mystery, he quips, “Say hi to Casper for me.”

Weinand says Without a Box selects performers based on their comedic abilities, physical skills, character range and “how well they keep scenes feeling real.”  The group also wants a diverse mix of students who are passionate about improv, he adds.

The Schumer Effect

Another aspiring member is Cassie Lewis, a junior at Claremont McKenna College whose parents are both Pomona alums (Kara Stuart Lewis ’88 and Gordon Lewis ’87). During a lunch break, she talks of how she discovered the edgy comedy of Amy Schumer over the summer, a revelation that has inspired her to pursue a career in stand-up comedy. Cassie, the vice president of CMC’s theater group Under the Lights, says she saw Without a Box perform a while ago and was “blown away by how they came up with really funny jokes.” So here she is, eager to become part of the group.

“You can’t be a comedian without doing improv,” she explains.

In one exercise during callbacks, Cassie plays off of Marisa Galvez, a CMC freshman. The setting for their scene is a motel continental breakfast. The two verbally spar as Lewis’s character steals apples and stuffs them into her pants.

Both young women are confident and creative. For most people, speaking off the cuff is daunting. A script provides a security blanket. Yet Lewis, Galvez and the others seem fearless, perfectly comfortable to perform without a net—or a box, if you will.

Galvez says she follows the motto of the improv company Upright Citizens Brigade: “Don’t think. Just act.”

Most of the students have previous experience with improv, evidence of its growing popularity. Many high schools now have improv teams or clubs. There are improv-based companies like The Second City, Upright Citizens Brigade and ComedySportz, and TV shows such as Whose Line Is It Anyway?

Stretching their improvisational muscles serves students well even beyond the stage. Morgan Blevins, a Harvey Mudd freshman who is a bright light at the callbacks, was on her high school’s improv team and says, “I’m so glad I did improv before I did my college interviews.”

Decision Time

A couple of days after callbacks, Without a Box taps its new members. Miller is selected, as is Lewis, Galvez and Blevins. Also chosen are Pomona sophomore Sean Gunther and Pitzer first-year Eli Fujita.

Miller says he’s excited about performing and “bringing the audience into the absurd scenes that we invent.”

Weinand, who has performed in Without a Box since his freshman year and will soon be applying to graduate schools, echoes the sentiment. “I love making people laugh,” he says. “That makes me really happy.”

What if the fine structure constant of the universe were changing?

BY BRYAN PENPRASE
Frank P. Brackett Professor of Astronomy

This question is not idle speculation. In fact, it is at the center of a recent controversy in the field of physics and astronomy that is relevant to a topic I have done some research on—quasar absorption lines.

The controversy revolves around the idea that the fine structure constant—usually represented by the Greek letter ‘a’—might be changing with time. The fine structure constant is a dimensionless number that arises from a combination of physical constants and has a big role to play in determining how strongly atoms interact with light. Its value is very close to (but not exactly) 1/137.

The quasar absorption line community has been dealing with this controversy for a couple of decades, and it revolves around a very exacting study of ratios of line strengths in quasar light from very different cosmic times. Some preliminary data from an astronomer named John Webb (then at Cambridge, now in Australia) indicated that he had some evidence for a very microscopic change in this fundamental constant, by about one part  in a million.

If found to be true, this slight shift in the fine structure constant would have little impact on our everyday lives, but it would have huge implications for science. For example, it could explain some of the mysteries of astrophysics, such as the phenomenon of “dark energy,” which has vexed astronomers for over a decade (and which won some of the astrophysicists who discovered it a Nobel Prize).

At the same time, the idea that fundamental constants can change with time would completely change how the science of astronomy and astrophysics operates. We postulate that the laws of physics—and the behavior of space and time—are the same everywhere. Known as the “Cosmological Principle,” this idea enables us to use atoms in the laboratory and atoms 10 billion light years away to study nature, since we know these atoms are all the same and obey the same physical laws.

Thankfully (from my point of view, anyway), in 2005 a new study with better and more complete data was able to demonstrate that there was not a change in this value. So the Cosmological Principle is safe after all—at least for now.

 
What if a better choice of words could have prevented the Hiroshima A-Bomb?

BY SAM YAMASHITA
Henry E. Sheffield Professor of History

At noon on August 15, 1945, the Japanese government officially surrendered to the Allies, ending a horrific conflict that caused the deaths of nearly 15 million people in Asia and the Pacific. The surrender, however, should not have been a surprise. By the spring of 1945, it already was clear that Japan was losing the war. In fact, it was so clear that I have wondered whether the war needed to end in the way that it did, with the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities—Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Could the war have ended earlier, without the dropping of two atomic bombs?

The leaders of the three major Allied countries—the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union—met at Potsdam, Germany, in late July 1945. They were meeting for several reasons: first, to get the Soviets to agree to enter the war as a way of tying down Japanese forces in Manchuria and north China; second, to decide what to do with a defeated Germany; and third, to devise a plan to end the war with Japan.

President Harry Truman went to Potsdam with the news that an atomic bomb had been successfully tested in New Mexico. So as Truman, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin discussed the invasion of Japan—scheduled for 1946—they knew they had an ace up their sleeve: the atomic bomb. Even as they planned for the invasion, they hoped that the threat of this new bomb would lead the Japanese to surrender. This was the thinking behind the Potsdam Declaration, the communication sent to the Japanese on July 26, 1945.

The declaration included the following seven points: first, now that Germany had surrendered, the Allies would turn their full attention to Japan; second, this would mean the destruction of Japan; third, the Japanese people must free themselves from the control of their “self-willed militaristic advisers … who had deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest”; fourth, Japan would be occupied by the Allied forces; fifth, Japan’s armed forces would be disarmed and demilitarized; sixth, Japan would lose its territorial possessions; and finally, the last article of the document read: “We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.”

We know now that the last sentence—“the alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction”—referred to the atomic bomb.

The Japanese authorities studied the document, but in the end the Suzuki cabinet decided to ignore it, “to kill it with silence” (J. mokusatsu). One of the sticking points may have been the following reference to the emperor in a follow-up message from the Allies: “From the moment of surrender the authority of the emperor and the Japanese government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers.”

The phrase “shall be subject to” was variously translated: the Foreign Ministry translated it as seigen no shita ni okareru, “will be placed under the restrictions” of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. The War Ministry rendered it as reizoku sareru, or “be subordinated to,” the implied subordination being like that of a vassal to his lord. The War Ministry’s translation may explain the Suzuki cabinet’s decision “to kill [the invitation to surrender] with silence” and the reluctance of so many at the highest levels of the Japanese government to accept the Potsdam Declaration.

The Allies responded by dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and then another on Nagasaki on August 9. Is it possible that the dropping of the first atomic bomb could have been averted if a key phrase in the Potsdam Declaration had been rendered differently in English?

What if the Athenians had not invented democracy in 508 B.C.?

BY BENJAMIN KEIM
Assistant Professor of Classics 

Twenty-five centuries after the battlefields fell silent, echoes of the Persian Wars still resonate. Out of those heroic struggles arose an unparalleled cultural efflorescence, rooted within Athenian theatres and thinkeries, that would first blossom across the Mediterranean and then be grafted into the stock of world civilization.

Speculations about these battles and their ramifications may be traced all the way back to Herodotus’ Histories, and historians continue to ask serious questions about Athenian policies and personnel today. The most significant element underlying Athenian strength and Greek victory, however, was political: the Athenians’ revolutionary move to democratic governance.

Prior to 508 B.C., Athens had accomplished very little of note on the Greek stage, despite her great territorial and demographic advantages. That year, however, after deposing one tyrant and resisting Sparta-led efforts to install another, the Athenians embraced the equality of all citizens, and the effects of this revolutionary constitutional change were felt immediately. Carefully re-organized by Cleisthenes’ democratic institutions and strongly motivated by their newfound freedom and opportunity, the Athenians poured out their blood and treasure for the sake of freedom.

On papyrus, the Persian forces were overwhelmingly superior. The Achaemenid Dynasty ruled a cosmopolitan empire of unrivaled wealth, its 70 million subjects spread from the shores of the Mediterranean to the Himalayan heights. When Darius first gazed westwards in 493 B.C., scores of Greek city-states immediately pledged their fealty. But not all Greeks would “Medize’ so easily. The Spartans and the Athenians, asked for the earth and water that symbolized submission, foreshadowed their unwavering resistance by throwing the unlucky heralds into nearby wells.

At Marathon in 490 B.C., nearly half the Athenian citizenry mobilized, 10,000 hoplites fighting with barely any allied support against 30,000 Persians. Advancing rapidly into the fray, the Athenians drove their enemies out of Greece. However, Xerxes redoubled his efforts, and his vengeance seemed assured. Under the Great King’s watchful eye the Persians marched into Greece in 480 B.C., annihilated the Spartans at Thermopylae, then occupied Athens and razed the Acropolis. Bent but unbroken, the Athenians responded vigorously: Themistocles drew the Persian navy into the straits off Salamis, then led the Greek fleet, featuring 200 crack Athenian triremes, to victory. After their defeat at Plataea the following summer, the Persians retreated and never again campaigned in mainland Greece.

Athens’ starring role within these victories enhanced her prestige and led her to challenge Sparta for hegemony over Greece. Without their earlier embrace of democracy, however, the Athenians would neither have withstood the Persians nor flourished so brilliantly. As a result, both the political landscape and the cultural heritage of the ancient Mediterranean would have been dramatically altered. Historically, there would have been no Greek victory at Marathon, much less Salamis or Plataea. Although the Spartans might well have resisted to the death, neither their numbers nor their tactics could delay Persian capture of the Peloponnese. Greece would have become yet another Persian satrapy in 490 B.C.

No matter how benevolent Achaemenid rule really was, the Athenians would not have enjoyed the power and profits that accrued from their own fifth-century naval empire and that underwrote the ‘Golden Age’ of Pericles. Shorn of their freedom, the Athenians would not have had the opportunity to refine those political and economic institutions that, taken up by Philip and Alexander, allowed the Macedonians to conquer first Greece and then the Persian Empire. Without Marathon, then, there would be neither Alexander the Great nor the Romans as we know them.

Culturally, democratic Athens encouraged the free speech and debate that enabled the philosophic enquiries of Socrates and Plato, the critical historiography of Herodotus and Thucydides, the artistic perfection of Pheidias and the Parthenon, and the tragedies that continue—as with this autumn’s staging of Luis Alfaro’s Mojada: A Medea in Los Angeles—to provoke and inspire. It was the military and intellectual strength of democracy that enabled Athens to become first the ‘School of Hellas,’ then of the Mediterranean, and thereafter the entire world.

What if math were not required in K-12 education?

BY GIZEM KARAALI
Associate Professor of Mathematics

Let me turn this around and ask what if all kids were forced to take regimented and stifling music classes through their K–12 years? What if they were tested yearly, through multiple-choice high-stakes tests, in their music skills? What if students of music were not allowed to listen to a real musical composition until they could “appreciate it”—which would, of course, be in college, only if they made it that far, of course… What if students were not even allowed to touch a real musical instrument until they learned all the basics—you know, the notes, the chords, the names of famous composers and all that stuff? What if government bodies and corporate entities alike kept pushing for more and higher standards to ensure that our nation’s competitive advantage, musical potential, would not disappear?

If you’re up for it, also try the artist’s nightmare for size. Imagine a world where young children are not allowed to touch crayons, water colors, even a colored pencil, before they learn all their primary and secondary colors, their hues and tones, their shades and perspectives, and all that which could conveniently be tested in a high-stakes test, to be systematically administered yearly of course… This would be justified by policy statements urgently calling for improvements in the nation’s art education, for of course, our students could not fall behind students of all those other nations, or else our competitive edge, our creative potential, would be compromised!

Math teacher Paul Lockhart writes in A Mathematician’s Lament that the current state of mathematics education is analogous to the above two scenarios. Math in K-12 is taught out of context, without regard to intellectual need and curiosity, and in a uniformly linear fashion. School math often leaves out the cool stuff, the fun stuff, the naturally interesting and absolutely fascinating parts, and focuses almost exclusively on what can be tested. Students are “assessed” regularly and classified into those who can and those who cannot do math. Various entities whose existential purposes have nothing to do with the education of the nation’s future generations pontificate recklessly about how best math teachers should perform their craft.

And so we get students who arrive at college with no idea what math really is about. Some like it that way, but many have been totally turned off. All have concluded, through extensive experience that does not yield to any alternative readings, that math is about rules to be memorized and regurgitated when requested. That there is only one answer to each question and that there is only one best way to get at it. That some are naturally born with the math gene and others remain hopeless no matter what they do.

At Pomona, it is our pleasure to disabuse those unlucky to have gone through a standard K–12 education of these beliefs. We love to help students discover for the first time what math is really about (hint: it has more to do with playful curiosity and stubborn stick-to-itiveness than memory). How math is really expansive and accessible to anyone who wishes to learn more. How math does not really have to be linear (there are multiple entry points to our curriculum and not much that is linear in our major at Pomona). Why math can actually be fun (Tetris, Sudoku, and that 2048 game are addictive; what math is hidden in your favorite pastime?). But wouldn’t it be lovely if we didn’t have to do that? Erasing false beliefs is hard. And it is unpleasant to have to go uphill all the time. Wouldn’t it be lovely if students came in with no pre-conceived opinions of what math is about?

What if all landscaping were done with local-native plants?

BY WALLACE MEYER
Assistant Professor of Biology and Director of the Bernard Field Station

Welcome to the Anthropocene, the current epoch characterized by the significant influence of human activities on Earth’s systems. While this term typically conjures negative aspects of human influence on the world’s ecosystems and the daunting environmental challenges our society is facing (e.g., global climate change, habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, and increased toxin and nutrients inputs), it also highlights that humans have the power to make transformative change.

The task for scientists and policy makers is to develop easy-to-articulate policies that effectively utilize limited resources and transform our understanding of and relationships with our local ecosystems. Unfortunately, too often policies are myopically focused on one resource, undermining transformative change and long-term sustainability.

For example, policies, largely successful from the perspective of water conservation, have asked residents to limit water use to appropriate times and activities and transform landscapes from water extractive lawns to more water-wise gardens. While I applaud the successful efforts of individual residents, these policies have not instituted transformative change.

More impactful would be a policy that required all urban/suburban areas be landscaped with only local native plants. I use the term “local-native” to distinguish from the commonly used term “native.” Local-native plants are plants that are native to a particular area. In Southern California’s low-elevation areas, local plants would include white sage and elderberry, not a redwood tree, which would be considered a California native.

Such a policy would differ from the one that only requires water reductions because local-natives have evolved to cope with the abiotic conditions (temperature, water availability, etc.), and do not require any water inputs once established. Second, local-native plants support local animals and fungi. Since the native ecosystem type (California sage scrub) in SoCal’s low-elevation areas is endangered and many species require it for their survival, significant conservation progress may be achieved. Third, policy focused only on water resources ignores other complex interactions that occur when people modify the landscape. For example, increased use of mulch to reduce water loss facilitates establishment of non-native arthropod species (isopods and Argentine ants) by providing a moist habitat, and potentially represents a significant source of CO2 through UV photo-degradation.

This “local-native” regulation would also transform our eco-literacy. Many residents have never heard the term California sage scrub but need to understand this habitat and become familiar with the species that inhabit it, if we genuinely intend to build a sustainable future with diverse biotic/regional communities that can provide us valuable services (e.g., carbon storage). Long-term sustainability requires a holistic approach incorporating climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation, wise use of vital resources and an educated public. In the Anthropocene, human actions will decide the future. If you intend to be part of the solution, some good initial steps in its construction would be to: (1) learn about your amazing local-native plants (my favorite is royal penstemon), (2) re-envision/plant your landscape and have it teach you and others about adaptation to and survival in the local conditions, and (3) make it beautiful to inspire others to follow your lead.

What if Keynesian ideas had shaped policy during the Great Depression

BY JAMES LIKENS
Professor Emeritus of Economics

Before the publication of John Maynard Keynes’ great treatise, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, in 1936, conventional economics held that discretionary economic policy could not affect the real economy. Intervention would not help overcome unemployment, and naïve attempts to do so would actually undermine the effective workings of markets. Keynes, in contrast, showed the way to contain economic recessions through stimulating aggregate demand. His insights revolutionized economics.

The Great Depression began in the United States in 1929 with the collapse of the stock market, which set off a wave of bankruptcies and defaults that spread rapidly around the world. Germany and to some extent Great Britain, which were the most indebted to the U.S., were hit the hardest.

What if the Keynesian insights of The General Theory had been understood by policy makers as early as 1928? There doubtless would have been a serious recession in the U.S. and abroad, but not the disaster of the 1930s that actually occurred. Policy makers in the 1930s would have followed Keynesian practices and stimulated aggregate demand through discretionary fiscal policy. This would have reduced both the length and severity of that depression.

After World War I, Germany suffered from heavy reparation payments and hyperinflation, so it had lots of problems. But wise Keynesian countercyclical policy probably could have helped its economy to recover. Also important, the economic contagion from the United States would also have been less severe in Germany had the U.S. itself been following Keynesian practices. Unemployment in Germany consequently would not have reached 30%, as it did in 1932, to usher Hitler and the Nazis into power.

There still might have been wars. Italy and Japan would probably still have set out as colonial powers to conquer new territory. But had the insights of Keynes been available 10 years earlier and embraced by the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations and the Fed, Hitler and the Nazis might well have never come to power, and there would have been no World War II in Europe.

As Keynes said, “…the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else.”

What if the Electoral College didn’t exist?

BY SUSAN McWILLIAMS
Associate Professor of Politics 

In one very real sense, the Electoral College doesn’t exist: It has no location. Its members—the 538 electors, who are chosen by and bound to a hodgepodge of state-level rules—never gather as a single body.

Instead, during presidential election years, on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December, the electors meet in their respective states and cast votes, on separate ballots, for president and vice president. Shortly thereafter, on January 6, a joint session of Congress oversees the counting of electoral votes by state. The sitting vice president, acting in his (or someday, God willing, her) capacity as president of the Senate, then announces the results of the ballots and who, if anyone, has received the necessary 270 electoral votes to be named the next president and vice president of the United States, respectively.

It’s a weird enough seeming system that there are always proposals to dismantle it, usually in the name of democracy or transparency. Currently, the National Popular Vote movement tries to do an end run around the Electoral College by asking state legislatures to pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.

So: what if the Electoral College really didn’t exist?

The obvious thing to say is that if the Electoral College didn’t exist, the presidency and vice presidency would be chosen by a simple majority of American voters.

That change would in turn spur changes in presidential campaigns. Today, under the Electoral College system, candidates try to maximize their chances of winning by focusing their campaigns, especially their late-stage campaigns, in a series of “swing states” which have significant numbers of electoral votes and a mixed electorate—the states that thus might be the determining factor in an election (like, recently, North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana).

Were there no Electoral College, campaigners would calculate differently. Most likely, we’d see presidential candidates focus on high-density urban areas and power centers. After all, in cities you can access the most voters, most efficiently—not to mention the most wealth. So campaigns would likely home in on places like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston. We’d see little late-stage campaigning in Ohio. And we’d hear ever more about issues that concern residents (and especially elite residents) of large cities. There would be a lot less discussion of agriculture policy; that’s for sure.

It’s also imaginable that absent an Electoral College, a candidate might choose to focus on just one section of the country. It’s impossible to win with that approach in the current system, but under simple majority rules, a candidate can win by dominating the vote in a limited region. Consider 1888, when my distant cousin Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College. That happened because cousin Grover had disproportionate support in the South but pretty much nowhere else. (This is the kind of thing that defenders of the Electoral College imagine when they say that in a simple majority system, it’s much easier to win by catering to ideological extremes.)

Those shifts in campaigning would, in turn, change other aspects of how we think about American politics. We’d hear less red-state/blue-state talk, since votes would no longer be organized at the state level. We’d have more neglect of, and alienation in, rural America (which already has a poverty rate higher than that of urban America). We’d see the further weakening of our already weakened political parties, with a corresponding growth in the already grown influence of corporate and personal wealth in politics; that’s because candidates would depend less on state-level party organizations in particular, while they’d depend more on raising money to mount their own, individual campaign strategies. (Note that although a majority-vote system would be a formally more democratic system of governance, a majority-vote system also leads to consequences that create effectively less democratic governance.)

One thing, though, above all is sure: If there were no Electoral College, we’d spend a lot less time listening to political scientists talk about the Electoral College. That, at the very least, might be a thing worth imagining.

What if Pomona had not built a strong endowment?

BY KAREN SISSON ’79
Vice President and Treasurer

Where would we be if Pomona had never changed the way it managed its endowment? In the late 1970s, then Treasurer Fred Moon approached President David Alexander about a “new” approach to investing the College’s endowment. The traditional investment formula at that time was to invest a college endowment in a combination of stocks and bonds. Typically, a higher percentage would be invested in stocks. Treasurer Moon suggested that a different approach might result in better returns on the College’s investments. Moon was acquainted with an investment advisor at Harvard who had formed his own firm and was recommending an “asset allocation” approach to investments. A more quantitative approach, the idea was to create a portfolio of diversified investments over a wide variety of asset classes—real estate, commodities, private equity, venture capital, stocks and bonds—that would be less volatile than a typical stock and bond mix but also yield better returns.

President Alexander and the Board of Trustees agreed and a long and productive relationship with Cambridge Associates and the implementation of the asset allocation strategy began. Since that time the endowment has grown from approximately $117 million in 1985 to over $2 billion today, fueled not only by outstanding investment performance but also by new gifts from donors and the reinvestment of earnings. Today, income from the endowment funds over 40 percent of the College’s operating budget, including 35 percent of faculty salaries through donor-endowed chairs and 40 percent of the College’s financial aid to students. Needless to say, the endowment is what has made it possible for Pomona to stay need-blind in admissions, package financial aid without loans and meet each student’s full financial need.

You can also see the endowment at work in Pomona’s campus—new sustainable buildings like the LEED Gold Studio Art Hall, the new LEED Platinum Millikan Laboratory and Andrew Science Hall, LEED Gold Pomona and Sontag halls all were paid for with contributions from endowment income in addition to generous donor contributions. Due in large part to the endowment, sustainable building practices and landscaping are the norm on the Pomona campus. The renovation of buildings bordering the Peter Stanley Academic Quadrangle and the repurposing of parking lots to create new open spaces like those between Mudd-Blaisdell Hall and Harwood Court and the Big Bridges North Portico patio also benefitted from endowment income. That income also provides generous support to the Claremont Colleges library materials budget as well as research and materials for numerous College departments through donor-restricted gifts.

It is hard to find a part of the Pomona community that has not benefitted from the endowment. When we celebrate our outstanding faculty and small class sizes, the beauty of our sustainable campus and the richness of our student body, we should keep in mind the contribution of donors over time and that first conversation between Fred Moon and President David Alexander.