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journalism

The Newseum, Holocaust museums

Once again I went to a museum that was seemingly designed for my nerdiness. I’ve never been to The Newseum before. The first time I was in D.C., 10 years ago this summer, it was closed in preparation for the move to the new location on Pennsylvania Avenue. And so, finally, after years on their site, having lunch with their executive director and so on, I’m finally here.

They have a large section of the Berlin Wall. The side facing East Berlin was painted white — the better to spot people on. The side facing West Berlin often looked like this. Vandals had to actually stand in the eastern sector to cover the wall, so they faced considerable danger in making their statements and art.

The microphone tour continues — I should start a subsection on the site, I guess. This WTOP is a DC operation. It is one of the few major markets where I was never on the air:

Another CBS flag, another supposedly used by FDR for his fireside chats. I bet all the microphones from the 1930s, when they get together at microphone reunions, say that they were there. The stopwatch, before software, was a big part of the backtiming enterprise:

Radio Free Europe, a station set up to send a broadcast over the Berlin Wall. That’s the famous Brandenburg Gate in a photo in the background:

This is a reporter’s notebook used to cover the famous 1963 church bombing in Birmingham that killed four little girls one beautiful Sunday morning. Denise McNair, whose name you see there, was one of them. Her father tells the story so beautifully. I interviewed him several times in 2001 during the Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry trials over the bombing. A former Jefferson County commissioner, as of this writing McNair is in jail on a bribery conviction.

(Update: Less than three weeks later a federal judge ordered McNair released for health considerations.)

This 1950s-60s teletype is part of a JFK display. They have it loaded with the first flashes of the story. That’s how newsrooms once received reports from far away, kids. The first report was that three shots rang out in Dallas:

In that same 1963 sliver of time, this camera was considered top of the line. Technology is grand:

Found this in the Newseum’s incredibly impressive newspaper display. I’ve always thought it was one of the best mastheads in the nation’s history. It was first published in April 1789 as a biweekly rag friendly to the George Washington administration, back when publications were more obviously partisan.

This is the first issue of the New York Times. Founded by Henry Jarvis Raymond and George Jones, the paper announced “We publish today the first issue of the New-York Daily Times, and we intend to issue it every morning (Sundays excepted) for an indefinite number of years to come.”

The Neosho Times here was a sample of advertising on the front page — which is no new thing. I include it because my family was related to Jesse James. The Missouri Historical Society, a good one, has six years of the Neosho paper digitized. The Missouri town these days is served by the Neosho Daily News. Newspapers.com tells us the Times ran at least until 1939.

A nice little Frederick Douglass display:

And the increasingly rare Double V campaign:

This was worth coming to see all by itself. This is Ernie Pyle’s typewriter. He carried that into Europe and the Pacific islands and typed his stories right there. Ernie Pyle. This is the Pyle book you want to read, by James Tobin.

Benjamin Harrison started a paper in London in 1679 and, later opened North America’s first paper, Publick Occurrences in 1690. This is that paper. It was shut down by authorities after just one issue. He wrote a piece that accused the king of France having an affair with his daughter-in-law. Ahead of his time?

The Newseum is contemporary too. This is less than a week old:

They have some rare books. This is a 1774 reprint of Letters From a Pennsylvania Farmer. It is hard to overstate the importance of this book in colonial America. It has has somehow escaped common history tellings. Scholars have likened it to Milton, Swift and Burke or Cato’s Letters or Cicero:

After the 2011 tsunami in Japan the local newspapers were offline. This is how one staff kept the news going. Heroic, in its own way, if you ask me:

This is a Pulitzer Prize winning photograph. The subject is Auburn’s gold medalist, Rowdy Gaines. Three photographers from The Orange County Register were up against bigger papers with huge staff, so they started looking for something unusual, heretofore unseen. They wanted readers to see an image they hadn’t watched on television the night before. (Novel approach, right?) Rowdy had just won the gold in the 100-meter free and was celebrating with his swim teammates, and this was the iconic picture. Golden-haired All-American speed demon does good, wins a paper, and photographer Hal Stoelzle, the prize.

We’re now making the joke public, apparently. In one of the Newseum’s three — count ’em, three — gift shops:

We’re all about the second amendment too:

We had lunch at Merzi, best described as an Indian Chipotle. And it was delicious. And then we visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum. It is a no pictures place. I wanted to take two, but I only had the opportunity for one, with no flash:

The wall reads:

We are the shoes, we are the last witnesses.
We are shoes from grandchildren and grandfathers,
From Prague, Paris and Amsterdam,
And because we are only made of fabric and leather
And not of blood and flesh, each one of us avoided the hellfire.
— Moishe Shulstein

And you are in a world where people’s fillings were extracted, property stolen auctioned, people were worked to death and their hair shorn, so it could be sold to serve as stuffing for mattresses, socks, boat bumpers, thread and anything else hair can be used for.

There’s a lot of grim life and death in this museum, and precious few smiles. But they stand out just because they are there.

There are two walkways where the glass is simply etched with the names of towns that were raided and disappeared. The photograph I wanted to take was a three-floor room of nothing but photographs. I’m drawn to old photos anyway, of course, and these were no different. Four photographers had documented the village of Eishishok in modern Lithuania for decades. Scholarship says Jews had been there for 900 years and, in 1941, they were wiped out in two days. And they are on display there, all of them ghosts. Some of them died from ill health or old age or pure evil. And they’re all looking out, staring at you.

It was singularly one of the most curiously haunting experiences I’ve ever encountered.

They call it the Tower of Faces, but there’s no name strong enough.

One last look at the Capitol, because it is from a angle three degrees different from the last one:

Here’s a building of the National Bank of Washington, one of those boom-and-bust organizations that so readily speaks to the banking condition. You can read all about it here. It was a PNC bank recently, but that’s gone now too. The National Registry of Historic Places document is a good read.

Look who made another great trip possible! She’s the best trip designer ever, even if I have to sell my feet at the airport for a new pair:

We’re going up into the light! Did pretty well on the Metro, I came home with a card holding five extra bucks. Who is going to DC soon?

And here’s the sunset we watched most of the way home. I’ll have a video about this tomorrow:

Great trip. Wonderful weekend. Hope your weekend was even better than mine.

Auburn / football / Friday / journalism / links / things to read — Comments Off
2
Aug 13

Things to read

You may all relax. Congress has gotten their reprieve from the paradoxically named Affordable Healthcare Act:

The problem was rooted in the original text of the Affordable Care Act. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) inserted a provision which said members of Congress and their aides must be covered by plans “created” by the law or “offered through an exchange.” Until now, OPM had not said if the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program could contribute premium payments toward plans on the exchange. If payments stopped, lawmakers and aides would have faced thousands of dollars in additional premium payments each year. Under the old system, the government contributed nearly 75 percent of premium payments.

Obama’s involvement in solving this impasse was unusual, to say the least. But it came after serious griping from both sides of the aisle about the potential of a “brain drain.” The fear, as told by sources in both parties, was that aides would head for more lucrative jobs, spooked by the potential for spiking health premiums.

Meanwhile, over at the IRS:

The head of the agency tasked with enforcing ObamaCare said Thursday that he’d rather not get his own health insurance from the system created by the health care overhaul.

“I would prefer to stay with the current policy that I’m pleased with rather than go through a change if I don’t need to go through that change,” said acting IRS chief Danny Werfel, during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing.

Well now that’s odd.

Meanwhile, in Georgia:

GEORGIANS WHO will be forced to buy health insurance under Obamacare later this year should be prepared to dig deeply into their wallets — then hold on for dear life.

That’s because of heart attack-inducing sticker shock.

The premiums for the five health insurers that will be offering policies in Georgia’s federally run insurance exchange are “massive,” according to Georgia Insurance Commissioner Ralph Hudgens.

“Insurance companies in Georgia have filed rate plans increasing health insurance rates up to 198 percent for some individuals,” Mr. Hudgens wrote in a July 29 letter to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the president’s point person on Obamacare.

I couldn’t afford a 198 percent increase of anything. Then there’s the question of work hours:

Admittedly, it takes a little detective work, but if we systematically review the available empirical evidence in an even-handed fashion, the conclusion seems inescapable: Obamacare is accelerating a disturbing trend towards “a nation of part-timers.” This is not good news for America.

None of that looks good, does it? Hyper-partisan Sen. Richard Shelby calls it all a failure:

“I find it deeply troubling that perhaps the best thing President Obama has done for American business during his time in office is to provide a brief reprieve from his own signature achievement,” Shelby said during the 17-minute speech.

“I welcome any relief from ObamaCare for anyone. But why should such relief not apply to individuals and families as well? If the administration hasn’t gotten its act together by now, what leads us to believe that it ever will?”

In other unhappy news The Cleveland Plain Dealer cut a third of their staff. Gannett canned more than 200 across their company this week, with more expected next week. They’ve cut more than 40 percent of their employees in the last eight years.

Senators? They’re not sure what or who journalists are just now. There’s going to be a lot to that story in the near future.

Happier news, then. Google killed their RSS reader, to the chagrin of pretty much everyone who used it. And that unfortunate death has actually opened up the RSS market. Why? There is a demand. Google didn’t see it, or didn’t need it, but there are people who use RSS, may it always thrive.

Digital media use will outpace television consumption this year, according to eMarketer. I am vaguely listening to the television in the background as I type this. Also, my phone is frequently distracting me. So, yeah.

Remembering Skylab, the first space station was an Alabama idea:

NASA is pausing today to remember Skylab, the orbiting 1970s laboratory that paved the way for the International Space Station. The laboratory, built from a Saturn V rocket third stage, was conceived in Huntsville and saved by quick-thinking engineers and brave astronauts after things went very wrong on launch day 40 years ago.

You can see some photographs from the mission here. Everything was from the 1970s.

Finally, Quan Bray is one of those young men you can’t help but to cheer for:

Bray has rarely talked about his mother’s death since arriving at Auburn, granting only a single interview to Columbus-based TV station WLTZ in his two seasons with the Tigers.

“For me to talk about it with y’all right now is really crazy,” Bray told reporters during Auburn’s reporting day Thursday. “I don’t mind talking about it now. Talking about it relieves me a lot.”

Back on July 3, 2011, Bray was out of town in Atlanta and missed a call from his mother while sleeping, only to call back and get no answer. When he got back to LaGrange, he told the TV station last February, he went to his grandmother’s house and saw his mom’s car in the middle of the road.

Bray did not go into the rest of the details during Thursday’s interview, but the Georgia courts have pieced together what happened.

On that day, Jeffrey Jones – Quan’s father – sent a string of threatening text messages to Tonya Bray, then chased her as she drove down Ragland Street in LaGrange and shot her several times.

That young man basically lost both parents in the same moment and all he’s done is excel in school, help raise his younger brother and become a leader of others. Tough kid and he deserves some success.

Ireland / journalism / Monday — Comments Off
1
Jul 13

The last Irish post

Since it was a travel day, and since I’d been saving this one up …

When we were in that restaurant and pub on Inisheer in the Aran isle I found this newspaper story framed on the wall. I read it over a steaming bowl of beef stew and thought I’d like to share it. There’s no masthead or other note about where the story was published, but it appears several years old. He wrote a fine tale, which was titled “The landlord that time forgot.” It has a second deck headline: “Heard the one about the island with no police and the pub that never closed?”

Geraint Jones writes:

The switchboard light flashed angrily at the Aran Islands’ only police station. Sergeant JJ Bourke stiffened when he heard the voice at the other end. “Yes sir. We’ll get something done straight away. Leave it to us now.” JJ looked hard at the young constable who shared his office. “Sean, it’s those Sandies on Inisheer again,” he said. “The Super wants a result. I think it’s a job for you.”

Ad so, here in their station at Inishmore, the largest island, the two policemen hatched their plan. One that would ensure Garda Sean McCole’s place in the rich folklore of Inishmore, Inishmaan and Inisheer, the three lumps of limestone off Ireland’s remote west coast that make up the Aran isles.

Over the centuries the islanders, a robust and independent breed, have learnt to put up with just about everything – grinding poverty, winds from hell, and the British, to name but a few. But through it all, one cherished pastime remained secure. A drop of something to cheer was always available, be it morning, noon, night or well into the wee small hours of the following day. The men of Aran like a drink. And they don’t like anyone telling them when they should stop.

So when JJ Bourke told Sean McCole how the Superintendent in Galway was tired of getting phone calls from Inisheer women complaining that their menfolk were seeing more of the inside of Padraic Conneely’s bar than of their own homes, Sean said he would do whatever was required. Sean, a strapping 30-year-old, is new to the islands. He came a year ago, after a stint patrolling the mean streets of Dublin, and he believes the law is the law. As he says: “Once you start choosing which bits to enforce and which not to bother with, you’re lost.”

Inisheer, at only two miles long, is the smallest of the islands. There are just 270 people, one shop and three pubs. But this pimple on the ocean has an intelligence network to rival that of Josef Stalin. Nobody arrives or leaves Inisheer without everybody knowing about it. Since there is no police presence on the island, the Gardai have to rely on a less-than-regular ferry from Inishmore to get there. JJ knew that if Sean went over in uniform the words immortalised during the days of illicit poteen – “Ta an garda ag teacht” (the policeman is coming) – would be ringing in the ears of the island’s three landlords long before yer man stepped off the boat. By the time he arrived at the pubs, everything would be “in order.”

The police plan was for Sean to travel to Inisheer undercover, disguised as a backpacker, one of hundreds that visit the island in summer. To cover his tracks, Sean would take the ferry from County Clare on the mainland and not the one from Inishmore, where spies abound.

It was a balmy Saturday evening in August when the cheery traveler set foot on the white sands of the island which give its people their nickname – Sandies. Sean went to the campsite, pitched his tent and waited. At 12:55 a.m. he strolled along the moonlit beach to Padraic’s bar. There was a crowd outside, singing the old songs of Aran under the stats. He went in. The tourists were enjoying themselves noisily. In the recesses, ruddy-cheeked locals wrapped fingers the size of Cumberland sausages round their glasses and supped with a silent rhythm.

Nobody paid the stranger any attention when he left a few minutes later. Sean went back to his tent, pulled his uniform out of his backpack, smoothed out the creases as best he could, and strode purposefully back to Padraic’s. It was 2:20 a.m. The night air was still full of songs and the drink was flowing. Until, that is, they saw the police uniform. Ignoring suggestions that he would be better employed fighting crime than stopping people enjoying themselves, Sean completed the formalities of the charges and left.

(Caption: No man is an island, but landlord Padraic Conneely and locals like Eanna O’Conghaile remain defiant of the law.)

The island’s other two pubs also received a visit, and their landlords, Mairtin Flaherty and Rory Conneely, met the same fate. Each was fined by Judge John Garavan at Kilronan District Court on Inishmore last month. Padraic was hit with 100 pounds, Rory 30, and Mairtin, who refused to appear in court, was given a 200 pound penalty. No Aran Island pub had ever been raided by the police before.

“It’s not our job to make the law, only to enforce it,” says Sean McCole. “Also, there are two sides to every story. You have to remember that for every 60 men sitting on the tall stools, there are 60 wives back home waiting for them.” He cannot stop a smile of satisfaction creeping across his face as he recalls the reaction of the drinkers to his uniform. “They were so shocked. They couldn’t believe what was happening.”

And what of Padraic Conneely and the men who enjoyed a pint? And what of their wives back home? Who was it who blew the whistle? At Conneely’s bar the questions are debated with gusto. Padraic – slight, dark and eloquent – is the spokesman for his florid-faced, luminous-eyed companions who depart from their native Gaelic tongue only when absolutely necessary. “Fancy coming here undercover … it’s ridiculous,” he says. There are nods of approval from the locals at the bar.

These men are proud of their island, its heritage, and, most of all their independence. Outsiders have not done much to help them over the years, they say, so why do they want to interfere when the locals are only trying to help themselves? As Padraic explains: “We have a short summer season. You have to make your money while you can. If I tried to close at 11 o’clock, the customers would laugh at me. There’s nowhere else for people to enjoy themselves and they know full well there isn’t a police man on the island.

“It’s not as if I run a disorderly house. There’s no trouble here. People just like a drink and a singsong and the crack. I do try to get them out eventually. Then they take their drinks outside and sing under the stars and I pick the glasses up in the morning. This way everyone is happy.”

Not quite everyone is happy though. Galway police apparently received several complaints from wives on Inisheer. But true to the islanders’ tight-knit traditions, no one will admit to spilling the beans. “No one will want it said that his wife is giving him trouble over him liking a few drinks,” says Padraic. “Me? I’ve got no clue.”

Anyway, Padraic wants the good Gard to know that there will be no more late drinking at his bar. He has learnt his lesson. He has bought one of those clocks where the numerals go backwards. “Now,” he says, his eyes twinking, “the longer we drink, the earlier it gets.”

journalism / movies / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
21
May 13

I watched a video and saw a movie

Journalists: Remember your humanity. Remember that, when someone’s life has absolutely been turned upside down, one piece of normalcy makes a difference.

And put the microphone down and help the lady.This is remarkable in that random way that you find lot of the things that happen during and after a cataclysmic event. What a story. And the reporter is … very poor. “Are you able to comprehend yet what happened here?”

The woman is looking over the wreckage of her life. Yes, she has a good grasp on things. Based on the reporter’s speechlessness and poor questions I’m guessing she was either in shock herself or well out of her depth. Even still.

I do like that you can clearly hear that lady say to the journalist “Help me.” We all need to hear that now and again.

Sometimes we should reconsider what being a part of the story is. (Stations write promos about this sort of thing after all, “Our community” and all that.) I don’t have a problem with the position of remove, but not every circumstance warrants it. The dog seemed to be fine in the longer video, for example.

But what if that was her grandchild’s arm reaching out?

It is a tricky thing.

Saw Star Trek: Into Benedict Cumberbatch’s World today:

He’s way too good for this film, and the film is pretty good.

It was a nice summer blockbuster type movie. I’m not convinced these are really Trek films — but that is OK, too. I don’t think you could really make a successful movie — or traditional Trek TV — these days.

My biggest things might be more about me than the movies, but the Kirk swagger now seems more of an impetuous teenager than the devil-may-care, I’m-out-on-the-frontier-making-this-up-as-I-go mentality of the old days. Maybe it is just that I watched the old stuff as a child and saw the Wild West Roddenberry was going after whereas now you see all these layers of bureaucracy because that’s what the world is. Also, the 21st century modern conceits sneaking in as futuristic things I’d rather forego for the bygone 1960s bravado. “You were in a firefight? You need a checkup!” Can you imagine Deforest Kelly saying that to William Shatner? But that’s also what the world is, and it will become, no doubt, more so over time.

Karl Urban is terrific, though. And Simon Pegg has his moments. Zachary Quinto would take over Spock if they’d leave Leonard Nimoy out of it — falling back to him thing is just annoying. Every now and then it seems like Chris Pine is getting the Kirk thing, but I think that he’s just going to kind of stay as he is. Which is fine, these movies are movies for movie fans, not just Trek fans. That’s great. Why would you want to try to reproduce Shatner, anyway?

You know what is most interesting about the entire thing is that comic book fans will accept relaunch after relaunch after relaunch, but Trek fans find this to be a non-starter, hence the alt-universe thing. But, if you think about, if you read comics you’re probably watching Trek. So why will people accept some reboots and not in other universes? Isn’t that interesting?

I think it is because that has happened in the comics for forever, but these characters on screens are more real and perhaps more beloved, at least in a parasocial interaction sense. So you can’t just flip this and start over. Not in Trek. Perhaps in Trek the least of anything. What a weird and wonderful thing.

Biggest problem in the movie? They still aren’t making the ship a character. That’s what is missing. They almost did, but not quite, not really.

Auburn / baseball / cycling / Friday / journalism / photo / video — Comments Off
17
May 13

A pitchers’ duel, videos, helmets

One of the more knowledgable people in our section — as opposed to the guy last night that called every ground ball a “can of corn” and his date who thought the umpires should reverse their hand signals for out and safe — said this evening that whomever scored a run would win. And he was right.

Game two of the last series of the season was a fine one. Auburn put Mike O’Neal on the mound. Check out this delivery:

Have you ever seen a pitcher get that low to the ground with an overhand delivery? I’ve seen submariners with scrapped up knuckles, but this is a different thing. That’s long been O’Neal’s style, though, and I’m sure that’s what stymied Florida through nine innings last weekend in the most heart-breaking loss of the season.

But O’Neal shook it off, took the ball and delivered again. Seriously, though, the guy is down if he played college football:

O’Neal allowed four hits and one run through seven innings and 100 pitches. The junior has had some hard luck lately, with a record now sitting at 8-4, but he’s got a great command of the mound.

Tonight he just happened to be facing the guy who is perhaps a first-round pitcher:

Seriously, between Arkansas’ Ryne Stanek and two LSU pitchers, we’ve watched a major league pitching corps this year. Stanek scattered six hits and four walks in seven and two-thirds innings and was never not in control of the game. Just a rock steady performance as Arkansas defeated Auburn 1-0. The guy in our section was right.

Here are the highlights, including a 98 mile per hour fastball from Stanek. He was throwing into the mid-90s in the sixth inning:

Auburn did, by virtue of other teams’ play, manage to secure their 10th seed in next week’s SEC baseball tournament. Now they have to go out and beat Arkansas tomorrow to end the season on a high note.

Things to read and watch: This video is described as “A crowd-funded video trailer boosting America’s future in space” which is in the trailer package of the new Star Trek movie. It was shot in Huntsville, which is reason enough to watch it I guess. I share it because it looks pretty awesome, and someone booked Optimus Prime to do the v/o.

In 1910 the USS Birmingham was the first warship to launch an airplane, which would be cool enough to say since the ship was named for Birmingham. Today the navy is launching and landing UAVs via aircraft carrier.

Murder rates? Early data suggests way down. How far down? Century-record lows. There’s an interesting hypothesis:

Analytically speaking, murder is an especially interesting crime because we have pretty good homicide statistics going all the way back to 1900. Most other crimes have only been tracked since about 1960. And if you look at the murder rate in the chart below (the red line), you see that it follows an odd double-hump pattern: rising in the first third of the century, reaching a peak around 1930; then declining until about 1960; then rising again, reaching a second peak around 1990. It’s been dropping ever since then.

This is the exact same pattern we see in lead ingestion among small children, offset by 21 years (the black line). Lead exposure rises in the late 1800s, during the heyday of lead paint, reaching a peak around 1910; then declines through World War II; and then begins rising again during our postwar love affair with big cars that burned high-octane leaded gasoline. Lead finally enters its final decline in the mid-70s when we begin the switch to unleaded gasoline.

This is powerful evidence in favor of the theory that lead exposure in childhood produces higher rates of violent crime in adulthood.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. …

If you’ve been glossing over the IRS hearings, that’s a good place to start.

Meanwhile, also in Washington, D.C. …

My second-favorite part of that Eric Holder press conference, after when he ignored a reporter’s question of about if the attorney general can see how the media “would find this troubling” was that claim about national security. That, with the actual timeline in place, stood up to scrutiny for several full minutes:

(I)t seems fairly clear that the claim that this leak was among the most damaging in American history simply doesn’t add up. If that’s the case, then why would the CIA have told the AP that the national security concerns it had previously expressed were “no longer an issue?”

All of this took about six seconds to become political. There was probably never a time when we seized on things purely in the pursuit of good governance, but I wish that time were now.

Finally, I’ve probably talked about helmets and bicycle crashes enough here in the past year. The farther removed from all of the events of last summer the more convinced I am about how lucky I was, head trauma-wise, and how bad that hospital was, head trauma-wise. (Here’s my helmet after the crash. The sum total of my head exam was telling a triage nurse I was cognitively fine. That’s it. Frightening. I have some generally spotty recollections of things between the trauma and the surgery and the recovery. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to hear about things I don’t remember, or read things I have no recollection of writing after the fact. And my old helmet, by definition, more or less completely did its job.) Anyway, this is one more story worth reading, and probably Bicycling’s best piece in some time:

If you crash and hit your head, there are two types of impacts. One is known as linear acceleration. That’s the impact of skull meeting pavement. Today’s helmets do an excellent job of preventing catastrophic injury and death by attenuating that blow.

The second type is known as rotational acceleration. This is where things get tricky. Even if the skull isn’t damaged, it still stops short. That causes the brain to rotate—the technical term is inertial spin—which creates shear strain. Imagine a plate of fruit gelatin being jarred so hard that little cuts open throughout the jiggly mass. That strain can damage the axons that carry information between neurons.

There are other factors involved, but research has consistently pointed to rotational acceleration as the biggest single factor in a concussion’s severity. The CPSC helmet benchmark is based solely on linear acceleration. There’s never been a standards test, required or voluntary, for rotational acceleration.

[…]

A report last year by the International Olympic Committee World Conference on Prevention of Injury and Illness in Sport summed up the state of the art in a sentence: “Little has changed in helmet-safety design during the past 30 years.”

[…]

There may never be an improved government standard for bicycle helmets. Experts may never come to a consensus on a standard for testing the forces most closely associated with concussions. But one test can be administered now: the market test. After all, new technology costs more. “Adding that upcharge to a $50 helmet,” Scott Sports designer John Thompson told me, “is a harder sell.”

This is the bike-helmet industry’s air-bag moment. The new rotation-dampening systems may not be perfect, but they are the biggest step forward in decades. The choices cyclists make with their money matter. You can pretend to protect your brain, or you can spend more money and get closer to actually doing it.

The science isn’t settled by a longshot, the industry is filled with legal frights and there are all kind of marketing concerns. But there’s also plenty to consider in that full piece, which is worth a cyclist’s time.