As Jay Leno Goes, Late Night Seems Poised To Return To White Dudes, Suits, And Desks

Over at Buzzfeed, Adam B. Vary is absolutely right to suggest that, as the late-night television lineup seems poised for another reshuffle as NBC’s relationship with Jay Leno deteroirates, it would be awfully nice if the networks considered candidates for the positions about to be opened up who aren’t the interchangeable white men who have largely dominated those time slots since time immemorial, or at least since Johnny Carson. And I think it’s worth making a larger point in conjunction with his argument: it’s going to be disappointing if the spaces opened up by Leno’s canning and subsequent reshuffling produce not just the same faces, but the same formats, particularly given the waves of experimentation that have been taking place outside of the major networks for years.

There’s the political model, which started in its current incarnation over at Comedy Central. Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert may not hail from exactly the same schools of comedy as David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, and Jay Leno, but they’re marked by the same general demographics. It’s what they’ve done behind the desks on their respective sets that’s different. While Stewart and Colbert take on a wide array of topics, they’re doing so not from a general interest perspective but from carefully honed political ones. Their business model aims for ferocious loyalty among a segment of the population they’ve chosen to pursue specifically, rather than pulling from across the political spectrum as a whole. It’s worldview, rather than schtick that’s the initial selling point, Stewart’s righteousness and Colbert’s gleeful satire rather than signature bits like David Letterman’s top ten lists or Jimmy Fallon’s rapport with his musical guests, though of course Stewart and Colbert sold those, too. FX has subsequently taken a step beyond the innovation that Colbert and Stewart represented with Totally Biased With W. Kamau Bell, the intensely political African-American comic who honed his act in the Bay Area stand-up scene before moving to late-night, where he’s ditched the suits and the presumption of white dudeness, and brought along correspondents who don’t look much like the men in ties who largely dominate Stewart and Colbert’s shows, too, like lesbian comic Janine Brito.

And Bell isn’t the only person of color in late night in recent years, nor is Brito the only woman or only non-straight person. Vary called out George Lopez’s TBS show, cancelled when Conan O’Brien moved to the network, as an example of innovation both with hosts and format. T.J. Holmes is attempting to make a go of it on BET. And Arsenio Hall is rolling out a new late-night talk show that will be distributed through CBS syndication sometime later this fall. Wanda Skyes had her shot at late-night hosting in 2010. Chelsea Handler and Kathy Griffin have hosted late-night talk shows, if not the conventional late-night variety standards. And over at Bravo, Andy Cohen has built a successful franchise out of his Watch What Happens Live recap show, which features Bravo talent as well as other guests, and is known for a boozy, playful atmosphere—one of his bits of schtick is to have visitors play games with Cohen as a way of loosening them up. The fact that show has worked is one of the reasons we’ve seen things like The Talking Dead on AMC: as is the case with political shows, other niche late-night programming that lets fans process ideas they’re intensely interested in has become a viable alternative to the general interest show. But these alternative experiments in late night programming seem to be off in their own world, rather than acting as a farm team for the existing business model, which means that diversity of format as well as of hosts is off percolating elsewhere, rather than rising to the networks.

Laura Bennett is right, of course, that the internet and the possibility of content going viral has had an enormous influence on the way late night shows structure their bits—it’s almost a reverse response to Daniel Tosh’s clip shows, where the late night hosts want to manufacture the videos that go huge, rather than discuss and drive traffic to someone else’se work. Jimmy Fallon’s recruitment of The Roots was probably the biggest staffing innovation in recent years, a reason to come for the house band rather than just the host, and in keeping with Fallon’s determination to be a musical tastemaker, rather than simply responding to musical trends. It makes sense that late night hosts would want to be drivers of the culture, active aggregators and curators, rather than simply party hosts riding the hot new trend—you’ve got a better argument that audiences should tune in during the time slot if they might witness the emergence of Odd Future on the national stage, rather than if your’e going to interview Tyler The Creator six months after he emerges onto the national consciousness. But I’m curious to see what different kinds of hosts would choose to elevate if given the chance, and curious for someone who’s going to offer a new way to stage those debuts. Suits, desks, and white guys are all fine on their own. But they aren’t the only way to do things.

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NYPD Poised To Make Its 5 Millionth Stop-And-Frisk Today

The New York Police Department is on track to make its 5 millionth stop-and-frisk today, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The controversial program, which directs police to stop suspicious-looking people on the street and frisk them for weapons or drugs, has come under fire for disproportionately targeting minorities, while showing little discernible impact on crime.

Since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took office in 2002, NYPD officers have stopped 4.4 million innocent people, the vast majority of whom were black or Latino:

About 4.4 million of the stop-and-frisk encounters, or 88 percent, were of innocent people as they did not result in an arrest or summons. More than 86 percent of people stopped were black or Latino.

At 5 million, the NYPD has stopped more than the combined populations of Baltimore, Boston, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington DC. The racial bias is glaringly obvious; in 2011, the police stopped young black men more times than the total number of young black men in New York City.

The NYPD’s relationship with minority communities has become especially strained by the program’s overzealous targeting of young black and Latino men, culminating in the death of a 16-year-old boy, Kimani Gray, last weekend. Gray. Police stopped Gray for suspiciously adjusting his belt. Gray then allegedly pulled a gun on the officers, forcing them to shoot him multiple times. However, the autopsy found several bullets hit Gray from behind, and eyewitnesses claim Gray was unarmed.

Stop-and-frisk is not only harming New Yorkers’ trust in the police — it’s also using their money. Stop-and-frisk cost New York City taxpayers $22 million in civil rights lawsuits last year.

On Monday, a federal district judge will hear the broadest legal challenge to stop-and-frisk yet, and could decide to do away with the program entirely.

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New Zealand Poised To Legalize Marriage Equality

MP Louisa Wall

This week, the New Zealand Parliament had its second vote — the most crucial of three — and approved marriage equality with a vote of 77 to 40. Typically the third vote is just a formality, suggesting the country is about to become the 12th on the planet to allow the freedom to marry for same-sex couples. The first vote took place back in August, when equality advanced with a slightly wider margin of 80-40.

The bill’s sponsor, Labour MP Louisa Wall, implored the lawmakers to stand against the prejudice that LGBT people experience, and even quoted hip-hop artist Macklemore:

WALL: The agony and hardship that so many who bravely made submissions have had to face is unreasonable. But what’s totally unacceptable, is the state perpetuating that agony and hardship by not issuing marriage licences to loving, consenting and eligible non-heterosexual couples. [...]

“And I can’t change/ Even if I tried/ Even if I wanted to/ I can’t change…” I hope the House will give a message to all young people. You don’t have to change. You can be who you are and we, as a society, will value who you are.

Prime Minister John Key has promised his support for marriage equality and even participated in a mock gay wedding this past December. In addition, the youth wings of all eight political parties support the freedom to marry.

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Historic Blizzard Poised to Strike New England: What Role Is Climate Change Playing?

An epic blizzard is bearing down on New England — fed in part by relatively warm coastal waters.

I asked Dr. Kevin Trenberth, former head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, to comment on the role climate change has on this storm. He explained:

This is a perfect set up for a big storm, with the combination of two parts: a disturbance from the Gulf region with lots of moisture and a cold front from the west.Ingredients for a big snow storm include temperatures just below freezing. In the past temperatures at this time of year would have been a lot below freezing but the ability to hold moisture in the atmosphere goes down by 7% per degree C (4% per deg F), and so in the past we would have had a snow storm but not these amounts.The moisture flow into the storm is also important and that is enhanced by higher than normal sea surface temperatures (SSTs). These are higher by about 1 deg C [almost 2°F] than a normal (pre-1980) due to global warming and so that adds about 10% to the potential for a big snow.

Every storm and “event” is unique. It always has unique ingredients. So it is hard if not impossible to take apart, because any piece missing means the storm behaves differently. So event attribution is not well posed. Instead we look for the environment in which the storm is occurring and how that has changed to make conditions warmer and moister over the oceans.

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. And like a baseball player on steroids, it’s the wrong question to ask whether a given home run is “caused” by steroids. As Trenberth wrote in his must-read analaysis, “How To Relate Climate Extremes to Climate Change,” the “answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be.”

On the warmer SSTs, Climate Central’s Andrew Freedman explains:

As was the case when Hurricane Sandy struck in late October, sea-surface temperatures are running a couple degrees above average off the East Coast, which according to climate scientists may reflect both natural climate variability and the effects of manmade global warming.

The presence of unusually warm waters could aid in the rapid development of the storm system, and infuse it with additional moisture, thereby increasing snowfall totals.

Heavy precipitation events in the Northeast, including both rain and snowstorms, have been increasing in the past few decades, in a trend that a new federal climate report links to manmade global climate change. As the world has warmed, more moisture has been added to the atmosphere, giving storms additional energy to work with, and makingprecipitation extremes more common in many places.

Sea surface temperature anomalies off the East Coast. Credit Wunderground/NOAA via CC.

The blizzard is also pulling in an extraordinary amount of moisture, which is consistent with recent trends in the Northeast toward more frequent one-day precipitation extremes during the cold season, including snowstorms. The satellite-derived image of total precipitable water shows that the storm has been drawing tropical moisture from the Pacific Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean

Trenberth’s second point is an important one — warmer than normal winters favor snow storms (See “We get more snow storms in warm years“). A 2006 study, “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States“ found we are seeing more northern snow storms and that we get more snow storms in warmer years:

The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000…. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity….

Assessment of the January-February temperature conditions again showed that most of the United States had 71%-80% of their snowstorms in warmer-than-normal years….  a future with wetter and warmer winters, which is one outcome expected (National Assessment Synthesis Team 2001), will bring more snowstorms than in 1901-2000. Agee (1991) found that long-term warming trends in the United States were associated with increasing cyclonic activity in North America, further indicating that a warmer future climate will generate more winter storms.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) U.S. Climate Impacts Report from 2009 reviewed that literature and concluded, “Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent.

So it is no surprise that a 2012 study found extreme snowstorms and deluges are becoming more frequent and more severe. Freedman points out:

For the northern hemisphere as a whole, winter storms have become more common and intense during the past 50 years, according to the draft federal report. Observed changes in winter air circulation in the northern hemisphere, possibly related to Arctic sea ice loss, has been linked to large swings in seasonal snowfall from one winter to the next in the Northeast. Other studies indicate that as global warming continues, nor’easters such as the one about to hit New England may become more frequent in this region, and less common in the Mid-Atlantic states, as storm tracks shift closer to the poles.

Again, the Northeast has been especially vulnerable to deluges and Snowmaggedons, experiencing a sharp increase in one-day precipitation extremes during the October to March cold season:

The other big impact of global warming on the destructiveness of superstorms like this (and Sandy) is sea level rise:

The coastal flooding threat for this storm in New York pales in comparison to what it was during Hurricane Sandy, when large parts of the city’s iconic subway system flooded in the face of a record storm surge, and many New Yorkers drowned in flood waters.

Rising sea levels due to warming seas and melting ice caps are already making typical nor’easters such as the upcoming event more damaging, since they provide the storms with a higher launching pad for causing coastal flooding. According to the draft National Climate Assessment report released in January, even without any changes in storms, the chance of what is now a 1-in-10-year coastal flood event in the Northeast could triple by 2100, occurring once every 3 years, due to rising sea levels.

According to research by Climate Central scientists, the sea level trend in Boston Harbor from 1959 to 2008 in Boston Harbor has been 2.31 milimeters per year, which is slightly below the global average over the same period. In the past 50 years, the water level has risen by about 4.5 inches at that location, although it has increased much more in other spots along the northeastern coast.

On Nantucket Island, where coastal flooding is anticipated from this storm along with hurricane-force winds, the sea level has risen by about half a foot during the past 50 years.

People should take the weather forecasts of this storm seriously and act accordingly.

Similarly, the nation should take seriously the climatic projections of ever worsening storms from global warming — and act accordingly.

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