I was waiting to link to the piece here at my main blog until I had the time to put together a giant list of the 70 or 80 links I read in preparation of writing The Guardian piece but I just haven’t had time. Maybe next week!

Here’s an excerpt from my Guardian piece: Why has America lost interest in the West, Texas fertiliser explosion?

Another reason the national media may not be paying much attention to West is that a lot of it is a Texas story. Conservative politicians have responded as many expected – that there is no reason to increase regulation or oversight – thus feeding an idea that this tragedy could only happen there (or in states with similar permissive laws).

There are no state laws in Texas that regulate how close buildings, including residences and schools, can be constructed around a potentially dangerous site like the one in West. Local governments make those decisions.

The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Steve McCraw, testified before the Texas House Committee on Homeland Security and Public Safety on 1 May and told them that it is not his agency’s job to alert residents of those possible dangers. That is up to local officials. When pushed on existing oversight, McCraw told the committee, “too many threats and too little time”. Within the state of Texas, 112 facilites house ammonium nitrate or ammonium nitrate-based chemicals, 44 have significant amounts of the former (at least 10,000 pounds), and 2 sites have as much ammonium nitrate on site as the plant in West did (over 500,000 pounds). On top of it all, a significant amount of plants at risk for explosion have never been inspected by state or federal agencies for emergency preparedness.

I also wrote a piece on West this week for the Austinist. On Thursday, investigators who have been working the scene since the explosion occurred gave a press conference to update the public on what they know. And while they know a lot, the one thing they do not know is what actually sparked the explosion:

Officials determined that two explosions, milliseconds apart, occurred on April 17 around 7:50 p.m. in a room they called “the seed room.” They do know that the fire before the explosion caused the temperature of a small amount of ammonium nitrate to rise, increasing the pressure around the chemicals, and changing the state of the ammonium nitrate. When that small amount exploded, it caused a much larger amount to then explode. In total, they believe 28 to 34 tons (56,000 to 68,000 pounds) of ammonium nitrate exploded. There was another 20 tons in building that did not react and another 100 in a nearby railcar that was sparred.

In total, the site had 150 tons (300,000 pounds) of ammonium nitrate on site, not 270 tons as much of the media was reporting. At the least, 18 percent of the ammonium nitrate on site exploded. It is good that it was not a bigger disaster but it is also worrying that a much smaller than expected amount was what caused the 10-foot deep crater that stretches 93-feet wide.

Well, I got that time over the last two days. And I’m really proud of the result.

For now, the first episode is available at Power Forward. I am working on getting it on iTunes and Stitcher.

I want to give a HUGE thank you to my friend Brandon de la Cruz (whom I’ve known since 7th grade!) who composed the music for the podcast. The music is so excellent and really sets the tone for the entire podcast.

On the first episode of the Power Forward podcast, I talked with writer and editor T. F. Charlton about Jason Collins, Brittney Griner, and Tim Tebow. We’ll tackle the subjects of race, gender, religion, and sexuality in sports. And I discuss these five sports stories that piqued my interest this week:

• Rutgers has hired a new athletic director
• The Patriots fired a player for having diabetes
• Andy Murray is out of the French Open due to injury
• Donovan McNabb retires
• Brittney Griner works out with a legend

Listen or download here (scroll to the bottom of the linked page)!

My latest at The Atlantic is about all the press that Jimmy Connors has gotten in the last week or so after word came out that he tells Chris Evert’s abortion story from 1974 in his new biography, a story he did NOT have permission to tell.

I talk about ethical storysharing with abortion: who can tell someone else’s abortion story and when.

Jimmy Connors Shouldn’t Be Talking About Chris Evert’s Abortion (it’s a long piece so this is just a small sliver of it):

For Exhale Pro-Voice, the entire reason for practicing “ethical storysharing” when it comes to telling another’s abortion story is to “make sure that the person [who had the abortion is in] the center of the storytelling process and ensures that her rights, needs, and leadership are supported and respected throughout the process.” Sherman says that anyone who tells someone else’s abortion story as Connors has done can make the person who had the abortion “feel violated and adds to the shame that folks who have had abortions may already feeling.” Beyond that, it can have real-life consequences. “When someone shares your experience for you,” Sherman says, “especially without your permission, they put you and your story out into the world in a way that could have grave consequences—family shaming, intimate partner violence, mental health stress, loss of a job, etc.”

It is Evert who will face the heat for Connors’s decision, especially the way that he told it. By saying that he was willing accept responsibility and that she excluded him from helping her make the decision, it implies that Evert was not responsible in her choice and that she is the only party that should face scrutiny for what happened. In the interviews since she released her statement condemning Connors’ decision to tell her story without her permission, he has modified the way he tells the story to make it more about them as a couple. But it is his words on the page that will be preserved for posterity and that will follow Evert around in the future.

The media’s attention to Evert’s abortion story may be a boost for sales of his biography. It has certainly made the release of the book front-page news outside of just the tennis community, though Connors hasn’t even had much of a presence there in the last few years. Connors has not coached a high-profile athlete since his relationship with Andy Roddick ended in 2008 and he has no regular commentating job (while he was hired by the Tennis Channel in 2009, he is no longer listed on their site listing on-screen talent). He wrote the book last year while recovering from two hip replacement surgeries.

Evert is regularly on TV, though. ESPN owns the rights to all four of the tennis grand slam championships and so for eight weeks of the year Evert appears on the screens of U.S. tennis fans’ TVs as an ESPN commentator. And she will be back in public soon. The French Open begins in two weeks and only two weeks after it ends, Wimbledon begins.

The switchboard put me through to the White House Press Office and they added me to their press email list. When the emails went out asking journalists to RSVP for his two main stops (at a local high school and a local high tech manufacturing company), I did. And my credentials were approved.

So, yesterday at 9:30am, I showed up at Manor New Technology High School, four hours before he was scheduled to talk. Bomb-sniffing dogs checked out our bags and the Secret Service actually went through them very thoroughly. We had to be swiped with a metal-detecting wand before we could get in. And, of course, we had to get our credentials. I will keep mine forever.

The speech at Manor New Technology High School was my favorite part because the students were SO excited about being there. Applied Materials, on the other hand, was a totally different feel. For one thing, we were in a huge warehouse-type room that was FREEZING cold. I could barely type because my fingers were so frozen. People were certainly excited to be there but it just didn’t have the same energy that the high school did.

The two speeches were extremely similar in content and they were based on what Obama had said in the State of the Union address. So, that part was not so exciting.

But it was very cool to get to experience what it’s like to be in the press when covering the president. There are so many photographers and journalists (though much less of the latter). Everyone is so intense because there isn’t actually that much to report on so the point for most people is to be the first one to get the picture or the quote out there. I ended the experience thinking that there was a lot of redundancy among the press and that it was, overall, a very boring, long day. But still, not one I’d trade for anything.

Here is my write-up about it at the Austinist: Hello Texas! President Obama Visits Austin. And below is a gallery of images I took with my iPhone and published to my Instagram feed yesterday.

El Albergue is a documentary about Hermanos en el Camino, a shelter for migrants in Oaxaca, Mexico, run by Father Alejandro Solalinde, the winner of Mexico’s 2012 National Human Rights Award. Solalinde is leading an “Interfaith Caravan of Hope for Immigration Reform Beyond Borders” to address the violence and injustices that migrants face on their trek from Latin America into the United States.

The event is sponsored by Austin Tan Cerca, Cine las Americas, the Texas Observer, Mexicanos en Exilio, and the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center.

For more information, Alejandra Spector, mexenex@gmail.com.

Location: Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Cultural Center, 600 River St., Austin, 78701

[Info via Third Coast Activist Resource Center]

I’m excited to say that I am at The Frisky today writing about the semi-controversy around a woman blogger in Houston being fired for an inflammatory blog post about an Oklahoma Thunder Girl’s weight.

My piece uses that as a starting point to talk about how both the NBA and NFL alienate female fans and about misogyny at large in sports culture:

And yet these dance teams and cheerleaders — these very obvious signs of our culture’s unending desire to cater to the sexual fantasies of heterosexual men using a particular type of female body — are being watched by ever-increasing numbers of women. The NFL reports that 45 percent of their audience is women and the NBA estimated in 2010 that 40 percent of all fans of their league are women. The NBA has tried to reach out to women by selling them high heels; the NFL has made a particular effort to appeal to more women by selling merchandise targeted at their female fans and actively supporting the fight against breast cancer (so. much. pink.). Yet besides a few female sideline reporters and some women offering colorful commentary after games, women watching the NBA playoffs that are happening right now won’t see themselves represented on screen except for the fleeting glimpses of the women on the NBA dance teams — women like Kelsey Williams.

Today’s hearing made Texas’ severe lack of regulation of industrial plants and dangerous chemicals abundantly clear. State agency after state agency repeatedly answered questions by saying, ‘We’re not required to do that.’

- Phillip Martin, Political Director of Progress Texas

The entire press release is available at Progress Texas’ site.

I wrote a piece for The Atlantic today comparing Brittney Griner‘s “coming out” and Jason Collins‘: The WNBA Can Teach Male Athletes About Coming Out and Being Allies.

I’m pleased with it. I enjoy working with the editor there. She helped me take complicated ideas and make them more digestible.

It’s hard to see something go up and know that it is there and you can no longer change it. I feel like I could have written 3000 words on this topic and was glad that I was able to get the post as short as it is. So, on some level, even as I tried for nuance and to complicate the way we talk about this issue, a part of me screams that there is yet more nuance that should be addressed. Alas.

I want to give specific credit to Trudy Hamilton for her piece at Gradient Lair that I cross-posted here at Power Forward last week for helping me think through all the different issues at play in the collective shrug that the media did in response to Griner openly discussing her sexuality for the first time. Her piece on this is simply brilliant. And short. How do you do that?

Wesley Morris’ incredible Grantland piece, “Brittney Griner and the Quiet Queering of Professional Sports,” obviously helped me frame this piece (I end the entire thing by borrowing a phrase from his work).

I also owe my friend Travis Waldron lots of thanks both for his piece on Collins at Think Progress and for emailing and tweeting with me about this yesterday.

And here is Jason Collins‘ piece that is worth reading the whole way through. I also really enjoyed Jon Wertheim‘s piece about the interview with Collins.

Here are other links that I used to create this piece (this is not comprehensive because I read a whole lot to prep):

• Why Jason Collins’s Coming Out Is Such a Big Deal by Garance Franke-Ruta at The Atlantic
  
• Two posts by Maya Dusenbery at Feministing (that I come back to often): Gender and empathy: Men shouldn’t need to “imagine if it were your wife/daughter/mother” and The Hunger Games: A story for women and girls that everyone can love
• This post at Sex and Media Blog (h/t Kaeli Taylor) – about a February 2005 article by Tricia Jenkins that I did go read part of in The Journal of Popular Culture

And some links about Collins and/or the history of gay athletes that I think are important:

• 9 LGBT Athletes of Color Who Paved the Way for Jason Collins at Colorlines
  
• Jason Collins Is Not the First Out Gay Pro Athlete at Mother Jones
• Pro Female Athletes Have Been Out For Decades at Buzzfeed
• Jason Collins Has “Reframed the Conversation” Around Sports, Blacks and Homophobia at Ebony
• Dave Zirin’s Jason Collins: The Substance of Change at The Nation

On Wednesday of last week, between the Boston Marathon bombing on Monday afternoon and the violent police chase for the Tsarnaev brothersthrough Watertown, Massachusetts on Thursday evening, a fertilizer plant explosion happened in the central Texas town of West.

Background from a piece I wrote at Austinist (updated with correct numbers of the dead):

Just before 8:00pm last Wednesday evening, a fertilizer plant in the small central Texas community of West exploded. It had been burning for at least 20 minutes and volunteer firefighters from the town were on site trying to put out the blaze. Suddenly hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate combusted, creating such a massive explosion that people heard the blast 50 miles away. The explosion left a 22-foot-deep crater at the site. It tore through neighboring buildings, demolishing an apartment complex and a nursing home, and destroying 150 homes in only a few seconds of time. In a town of 2800, roughly 8% of the entire population was either injured or killed with 15 people dying (12 of them first responders) and nearly 200 injured.

There has been very little coverage of the explosion, especially in comparison to the non-stop, wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston bombings. This despite the fact that West killed 5 times as many people and many of those first responders, and injured roughly the same amount. National media is been relatively silent. And I mean relatively: Mike Elk has done good coverage, All In With Chris has covered it, CNN has a small part of their homepage dedicated to West.

But it has mainly been local reporting in Waco, Dallas, Austin, and Houston that has shed light on what happened last Wednesday evening, who was harmed, and why things weren’t handled earlier. Kudos to local news.

Theories about why this is the case (culled from many conversations with many smart people on Twitter):

1) West is about the greed of capitalism and we just don’t have a good narrative in this country to talk about that. If we want to seriously talk about what happened in West, we have to talk about a lot of things people just don’t want to discuss: de-regulation of industry, failure of oversight, workplace safety (again, Mike Elk is amazing on this particular issue). All of these topics are part of our country’s current and on-going obsession with “free market labor practices” that leave much of regulation, oversight, and workplace safety to the owners of these plants, the very people who make more money when they walk the dangerous line between profit and explosion. For example, we’d have to admit openly that 13 people die on the job every day in the US and that most of those deaths go unnoticed and, in fact, are seen as collateral of an otherwise successful industrial, political, and economic systemic.

Terrorism, on the other hand, especially any that we can tie to Islam, has a built-in narrative of “The Other” onto which we can all immediately latch. This was most obvious when the identities of the two bombers were released on Friday and the mainstream media took to calling them “ethnic Chechens,” focusing mainly on their ties to that particularly restless part of the Russian Federation and very little on the 10 years they spent living in the US in the post-9/11 era. Are Chechens Really White? became a valid question, one that pushed on the easy narrative of “Muslim bombers = not American, not us” but one that has not made many inroads in the national media.

[A blogger has taken exception to my phrase "particularly restless part," (which originally read "part of Russia") which you can read here.]

Mike Elk at The Washington Post:

Aaron Albright, who worked on failed mine safety legislation in the wake of the Upper Big Branch mine as an aide to Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), joked on Twitter that the media opted to focus almost exclusively on the Boston bombings because the two stories were like “CSI/Mission Impossible vs. [a] PBS documentary.” The story of alleged terrorists with Chechen links seems far more exotic and threatening than does the story of a workplace disaster that would have been preventable if the company followed the rules.

Yet, death in the workplace is a much more real possibility for almost all Americans than is death at the hands of a terrorist. In 2011,4,609 Americans were killed in workplace accidents while only 17 Americans died at the hands of terrorists — about the same number as were crushed to death by their televisions or furniture. One could argue that terrorists get more attention because they intentionally aim to kill people, but disasters like at Upper Big Branch are also the result of companies violating workplace safety laws.

This is related to telling the stories of Others. When the story is about capitalism and greed, it’s harder to pinpoint a single person and if we do, then we may not like what we learn.

Aleksander Chan points out how little we have talked about the owner of the Fertilizer plant, Donald Adair:

Out of focus for much of the proceedings so far has been the plant’s parent company, Adair Grain. That stands to change and very quickly as lawsuits will likely aim to name the company and its owner, Donald Adair, as defendants in lawsuits. News reports have depicted an unexpected swell of support for Grain, with Reuters penning this story about how the town isn’t holding a grudge against him.

We know almost every detail about the Tsarnaev brothers’ lives and next to nothing about the man who heads a company that just destroyed a huge part of a town, killed first responders and residents, and has left many in the community with injuries that they will deal with for the rest of their lives. I could, if pushed to, probably even pick the mother of the Tsarnaev brothers out of a lineup because her face has been all over the internet and TV.

What does Donald Adair look like? I could not begin to say. I cannot find an image of him anywhere online.

A fire burns in a destroyed apartment complex, near a fertilizer plant that exploded in West, Texas, on April 18, 2013. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

Adair did release a statement 6 days ago (his heart is broken, by the way).

We’ve since found out that OSHA last visited the plant in 1985, that in 2006 it was cited and fined by government agencies for multiple issues, and as the Huffington Post reports, “in June 2011 — less than two years before the explosion — the private company that owns the plant, the West Fertilizer Co., filed an emergency response plan with the Environmental Protection Agency stating that there was “no” risk of fire or explosion at the facility.” Bryce Covert writes that “West Fertilizer Co. failed to report to the Department of Homeland Security how much ammonium nitrate it had on hand, despite the fact that it had far more than is required to report.” (Covert’s rundown of all the arms of oversight and when they last inspected, cited, or fined the West Fertilizer Co is spectacular.)

Donald Adair and his life will not fit a narrative that lets us wall him off from “us”. Most people in this country buy so hard into the “free market/whatever it takes” view of capitalism and Donald Adair will probably just look like a guy who was doing what the system allowed and plenty will ask themselves, “would I really have done anything differently?”

And so, we should be talking about this as a nation and as a society.

Why do we find creating pressure-cooker bombs in our house and planting them in a crowd unimaginable but stockpiling the very chemical that blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City and not answering for that even when federal agencies said you needed to shrug-worthy?

How did we get these priorities?

WHY ARE WE FOCUSING ON THE CASE THAT PROBABLY ISN’T NEARLY AS PREVENTABLE? I want to yell that loudly through a megaphone on air at MSNBC all day tomorrow.

It is a reminder (not that we need one, really) of how powerful the ability to place someone in a category of “other” is in shaping how we deal with tragedy and our willingness to really talk about the causes of those tragedies (that’s why anytime someone uses a legal semi-automatic weapon to shoot up a public place we have to immediately qualify them as “crazy,” so we can distance their reality from our own and see them as something that is not part of “us,” the rational and compassionate ones).

There are two other reasons I believe that West hasn’t received much coverage and they have to do with two other specific “othering”s that happen within the media and our national narratives.

2) West happened in Texas, the marathon bombings in a northeastern state.

And as I have often remarked on, when things happen in Texas (especially things that people can relate directly to Texas politicians), people in other parts of the country just don’t care. There are two reasons for this.

First, most of our major media in this country is created in New York and DC, then over on the west coast in the Bay area and Los Angeles. When things happen in those places they are, for much of the media, “close to home.” Texas is not.

Aerial view of the damage left behind by a massive explosion at the West Fertilizer Company, on April 18, 2013. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Second, it’s a, “well, the people in the state voted for those people so what did you expect” kind of response. And I mean this literally: people (liberals, in fact) have been coming into my mentions on Twitter over the last week to tell me this almost verbatim whenever I wonder why no one cares about what happened in West.

Of course, no one ever really wants to talk about the way that the DNCC dispenses money, leaving those of us in red states that are considered “not winnable” to fend for ourselves when it comes to financing campaigns. Or the way in which redistricting laws (which, thankfully, have been deemed unconstitutional here) seriously damage the ability of anyone other than the GOP to win here. Or that the line of “your vote doesn’t really matter because of where you live” creates voter apathy. Or that liberals only really ever talk about us down here when it is to disparage us, tapping into long-used stereotypes about “The South.”

As soon as a preventable fatal disaster happens here in Texas, there is a nod to the casualties and then a shrug, writing us off as deserving idiots who asked for this when we went (or did not go) to the ballot box. That becomes the SINGLE cause of this disaster, one that could have been prevented if us in Texas didn’t live up to the low expectations of liberals in the rest of the country.

Boston, on the other hand, is a tragedy without cause. We need it to be that Islam is radical and foreign. Or that these men were angry because they were raised to be. Or, as Putin will tell us, Chechnya just produces violent people. Or that the brothers were sociopaths. Because what else could it be?

On the day of the West, Texas Memorial Service to honor those who died last week, people went to the opening of George W. Bush’s Presidential Library and with an astonishing collective amnesia, discussed his presidency as if the policies he helped to enact as President, the wars he started, and the mindset he encouraged did not lead – at least in part – to last Monday’s bombings. As if his own radical religion played no role in his Presidency, politics, and decisions to blow up a lot of people in another part of the world.

Nope.

Texas politicians (one of those being Governor George W. Bush) are the issue for and the cause of West’s explosion but the bombings in Boston are solely about sociopathic individuals involved in a radical religion. We are easy to understand in Texas: we make poor political choices. The Boston bombers are complete mysteries and their motives shrouded. As if this country didn’t re-elect George W. Bush and us all play some collective role in fostering anti-US sentiment.

In the end, it also comes down to something Melissa McEwan wrote at Shakesville:

Of course is to say nothing of the zoning laws that allowed a fertilizer plant to exist in such close proximity to residences and schools. Many residents say they saw it coming, and, naturally, because we live in a garbage culture full of victim-blaming and tasking individuals with solutions for systemic problems, there is already a lot of “why didn’t they move?” where “this plant was irresponsible and deregulation is a fucking nightmare” should be.

Anyone who lives in a space where they are the political minority and they talk to someone who  agrees with their politics but lives in a place where those politics are in the majority have heard the “why don’t you just move?” as if that is a viable or useful response. It is an excuse that refuses to take into account at all people’s lived experiences, their desires to be near family or friends, the pressing issue of finding a new job in a new place, or people’s complete inability economically to just pick up and move (to be able to do that is a privilege). It is a conversation killer and, as McEwan wrote, victim-blaming.

3) West happened in a rural space while Boston has been an urban center in this country since the earliest days of European settlement.

In one sense, it is simply easier to report on Boston. There are already built-in resources for reporting – news stations, equipment, reporters – in Boston that do not exist in West.

The explosion destroyed this playground across the street, shown from the air on April 18, 2013 in West, Texas. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

We also have lots of ideas about people who live in rural places. They are dumber (which is the reason why news of Honey Boo-Boo’s mom investing money in her children’s future was met with complete disbelief and some chuckling) and they are old-fashioned and conservative (i.e. not progressive, not modern). Or as Obama once famously said while trying to explain why we should care more about small town people in the US and do better to understand their way of life, “it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, and they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or, you know, anti-trade sentiment [as] a way to explain their frustrations.” Unlike Obama, though, much of the mainstream media doesn’t want to take the time to understand these people. It is easier to laugh at them, see them as “strange,” paint them with broad strokes, and, if necessary, simply ignore them all together.

In conclusion, the reasons that there isn’t more media coverage of the explosion that happened in West are because it  happened at a bad time (competing with the easy-to-latch-onto narrative of “Muslim terrorists”), in a bad place (rural Texas), and its causes too much a part of the fabric of the myths we tell ourselves about the greatness of our country and the the greatness of our economic system.

For more:

• My link roundup on West (with plenty of ways to help listed near the top)
• Richard Kim at The Nation: Boston, West, Newtown: For Whom the Bells Toll, For Whom the Alarms Ring
• Mike Elk at Washington Post: The Texas fertilizer plant explosion cannot be forgotten

Donations for the Victims of the West Explosion via Point West Bank.

How you can help West, Texas (KVUE)

Help Guide for West Texas (Waco Tribune)

West, TX Disaster Response FAQs from the American Red Cross.

Governor of Texas’ Information Page on how to help West, Texas.

Places to Donate:

• American Red Cross Heart of Texas Chapter
• Salvation Army in Waco
• Waco Foundation’s West, Texas Disaster Relief Efforts Fund
• Baylor University’s West Relief Fund
• Campaigns at Give Forward

Caption on the photo: The West Fire Department has arrived outside the Ferrell Center in Waco for #WestTx memorial service.

See #WestMemorial for more.