Author: Art Diamond

Firm Revives Cassette Tape Production

(p. A1) SPRINGFIELD, Mo.— Steve Stepp and his team of septuagenarian engineers are using a bag of rust, a kitchen mixer larger than a man and a 62-foot-long contraption that used to make magnetic strips for credit cards to avert a disaster that no one saw coming in the digital-music era.

The world is running out of cassette tape.

National Audio Co., where Mr. Stepp is president and co-owner, has been hoarding a stockpile of music-quality, ⅛-inch-wide magnetic tape from suppliers that shut down in the past 15 years after music lovers ditched cassettes. National Audio held on. Now, many musicians are clamoring for cassettes as a way to physically distribute their music.

The company says it has less than a year’s supply of tape left. So it is building the first manufacturing line for (p. A10) high-grade ferric oxide cassette tape in the U.S. in decades. If all goes well, the machine will churn out nearly 4 miles of tape a minute by January. And not just any tape. “The best tape ever made,” boasts Mr. Stepp, 69 years old. “People will hear a whole new product.”

. . .

Cassettes are cool again, particularly with listeners raised on earbuds, MP3s and streaming music. Sales are small but rising, according to Nielsen Music data.

. . .

Nostalgia and analog chic aside, cassettes solve two dilemmas: the high cost of making vinyl records and getting fans to buy digital downloads, particularly when bands are touring. A hundred cassettes packaged with download coupons can be made in a few weeks for a few hundred dollars, compared with months and thousands of dollars for vinyl. They often sell at retail for as little as $5 each.

“Plus, tapes fit in your breast pocket, which is pretty great,” says Mr. Miranda, the “Hamilton” composer.

. . .

Mr. Stepp’s company has had to rely on repurposed equipment, including an 80-year-old machine built to seal cigarette packs with cellophane. It was modified to wrap cassettes. National Audio has a Noah’s ark of spare parts to keep what Mr. Stepp calls its “orphaned” gear running.

. . .

Mr. Stepp, who owns National Audio with his wife and adult children, hopes to ship the first cassettes made with the new tape by January [2018]. After that, he plans to start selling bulk tape to other cassette makers.

He is working the phones to promote the new product and take orders. Mr. Stepp says he treats every customer alike, whether they order 50 cassettes or 15,000, recalling that the company’s first order from Joyce Meyer Ministries brought in just $35.

“You never know who you’re dealing with or who that person will become,” he says.

For the full obituary, see:

Ryan Dezember and Anne Steele. “Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Has Cassette Lovers Reeling.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, November 4, 2017): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 3, 2017, and has the title “A Global Shortage of Magnetic Tape Leaves Cassette Fans Reeling.” The final sentences of the online version, which are quoted above, contain several more words, and one more sentence, than the final sentences of the print version.)

Sister Jeanne Defended the Freedom of Elian Gonzalez

(p. A25) Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, who was thrust into national prominence in 2000 during a tumultuous custody battle between the Cuban father of a 6-year-old refugee, Elian Gonzalez, and the boy’s relatives in Miami, died on Tuesday [June 18, 2019] in Adrian, Mich.

. . .

In early 2000 she sought in vain to ensure that Elian could stay temporarily with his Miami relatives instead of being returned to his father, who had remained in Cuba, divorced from his wife, after Elian and his mother fled in a rickety boat on Nov. 21, 1999.

His mother, Elizabeth Brotons Rodriguez, died when the boat capsized in the Atlantic. Elian was found in the water off Fort Lauderdale on Nov. 25 clinging to an inner tube, and his miraculous survival all but elevated him into a religious figure in South Florida’s Cuban-exile community.

. . .

In an Op-Ed article for The New York Times, she compared the “strong bond” that had developed between Elian and the Miami cousin who was caring for him with the absence of his father.

“It troubles me that Elian’s father has not come to the United States,” she wrote. “What, if not fear, could keep a person from making a 30-minute trip to reclaim his son? And what might Elian’s father fear, if not the authoritarian Cuban government itself?”

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, Advocate in Cuban Boy’s Custody Fight, Dies at 90.” The New York Times (Friday, June 21, 2019): A25.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date June 20, 2019, and has the title “Sister Jeanne O’Laughlin, 90, Voice in Cuban Boy’s Custody Fight, Dies.”)

Genetic Diversity Limits Number of Patients for Large Randomized Trials

(p. A9) . . . in the era of personalized medicine, where care can be tailored to a person’s genetic make-up and doctors analyze a patient’s DNA to figure out treatments, big trials are falling out of favor.

. . .

To Ursula Matulonis, who treats ovarian cancer and other women’s cancers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, the debate over trial size has a special urgency: Many of her patients are desperately sick.

“You can’t wait years to get these medications approved. What we are dealing with are women with cancers and their lifespans are limited. They need medications and they need them now, and they are not looking to wait for five years,” says Dr. Matulonis, chief of gynecologic oncology.

That is why flexibility in a trial’s size is crucial, she contends. “As we become more genetically astute, and understand a type of cancer better, I think those large randomized trials will be hard to do. There won’t be that many patients,” that fit into one big group, she added.

One of her patients, Janet Sheehan, is grateful for the small clinical trial she has taken part in for the past five years. Ms. Sheehan, a 63-year-old nurse near Boston, was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer a dozen years ago. It has come back three times, and at one point she learned that she had a mutation in the BRCA1 gene which indicates a strong predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer. Dana-Farber suggested in 2013 that she go on a randomized 90-person trial for a drug named Olaparib that showed promise among women with a BRCA1 gene mutation.

She has been taking capsules twice a day and going for check-ups every 28 days since then. Despite side-effects, she has been able to work and carry on. “I have seen my children [grow] and I have seen grandchildren I didn’t have then,” she says. Ms. Sheehan was on a randomized trial where both groups of patients received treatment with Olaparib. One group got the drug only, the other received Olaparib in combination with another drug, her doctor said, adding, “there was no placebo.”

In remission, Ms. Sheehan has become a fan of small trials that offer women such as herself options. She also is a realist. If Olaparib fails, she hopes other trials now going on may yield treatments for her.

For the full commentary, see:

Lucette Lagnado. “Is the Big Clinical Trial Obsolete? The New York Times (Wednesday, May 30, 2018): A9-A10.

(Note: ellipses added; bracketed word in original.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 29, 2018, and has the title “Are Big Clinical Trials Relevant? Researchers Disagree.” The sentence that starts with “In remission,” was in the online version, but not the print version. )

Boston Brahmins Invested in Western Industrialization

(p. A13) One of history’s ironies is that, even though New England birthed the abolition movement, many of Boston’s most prominent families offered less than total support for freeing the slaves. Their prosperity required a steady supply of cotton to feed New England’s growing textile industry. Even after slavery ended in 1865, wealthy Bostonians were reluctant to abandon their traditional business. Henry Lee Higginson, 30 years old and freshly discharged from the Union Army, bought with his partners a 5,000-acre plantation in Georgia with the goal of turning a profit by growing cotton. But the 60 former slaves living on the plantation thought the wages and terms offered to be grossly inadequate; the land they had worked in chains for generations, they believed, should belong to them. The enterprise soon collapsed.

As similar episodes played out across the South, Boston’s business elites looked for new places to invest their money. “They began to reenvision American capitalist development, not in modifying and salvaging the arrangements of earlier decades but in a far more ambitious program of continental industrialization,” Noam Maggor writes in “Brahmin Capitalism.” “They retreated from cotton and moved into a host of groundbreaking ventures in the Great American West—mining, stockyards, and railroads.”

. . .

Especially representative of the Bostonians’ transformative influence was Higginson’s next enterprise. Far removed from Georgian cotton, his interests landed on a copper mine in northern Michigan’s remote Keweenaw Peninsula. Copper had been discovered there 20 years earlier, but extraction had been small-scale and labor intensive; the high cost per unit meant that mining was profitable only for veins that contained at least 40% copper. In a short time, high-yield mines in the area began to show signs of depletion. But with Higginson’s capital—alongside investments from other Brahmins—large-scale copper extraction could take place as a continuous operation, making mining profitable on belts that contained only 2%-4% copper. In this way, Higginson’s Eastern capital transformed Western mining and launched a career that would make him one of Boston’s leading financiers.

For the full review, see:

John Steele Gordon. “BOOKSHELF; Enterprising Bostonians; Contrary to stereotype, the Brahmins of New England crisscrossed the continent and took bold risks in search of higher yields.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 26, 2017): A13.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 25, 2017, and has the same title as the print version.)

The book under review is:

Maggor, Noam. Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.

How Drinking Coffee Makes Us Younger and More Open-Minded

(p. C2) . . . , if a baby monkey heard a new sound pattern many times, her neurons (brain cells) would adjust to respond more to that sound pattern. Older monkeys’ neurons didn’t change in the same way.

At least part of the reason for this lies in neurotransmitters, chemicals that help to connect one neuron to another. Young animals have high levels of “cholinergic” neurotransmitters that make the brain more plastic, easier to change. Older animals start to produce inhibitory chemicals that counteract the effect of the cholinergic ones. They actually actively keep the brain from changing.

. . .

In the new research, Jay Blundon and colleagues at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., tried to restore early-learning abilities to adult mice. As in the earlier experiments, they exposed the mice to a new sound and recorded whether their neurons changed in response. But this time the researchers tried making the adult mice more flexible by keeping the inhibitory brain chemicals from influencing the neurons.

In some studies, they actually changed the mouse genes so that the animals no longer produced the inhibitors in the same way. In others, they injected other chemicals that counteracted the inhibitors. (Caffeine seems to work in this way, by counteracting inhibitory neurotransmitters. That’s why coffee makes us more alert and helps us to learn.)

In all of these cases in the St. Jude study, the adult brains started to look like the baby brains.

For the full commentary, see:

Alison Gopnik. “MIND & MATTER; How to Get Old Brains to Think Like Young Ones.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 8, 2017): C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 7, 2017, and has the same title as the print version.)

The article co-authored by Jay Blundon and mentioned above,is:

Blundon, Jay A., Noah C. Roy, Brett J. W. Teubner, Jing Yu, Tae-Yeon Eom, K. Jake Sample, Amar Pani, Richard J. Smeyne, Seung Baek Han, Ryan A. Kerekes, Derek C. Rose, Troy A. Hackett, Pradeep K. Vuppala, Burgess B. Freeman, and Stanislav S. Zakharenko. “Restoring Auditory Cortex Plasticity in Adult Mice by Restricting Thalamic Adenosine Signaling.” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 30, 2017): 1352-56.

Entrepreneurs Make Millions from Selling Cheaper Ice Cream

(p. A25) Curtis and S. Prestley Blake opened Friendly (the chain became Friendly’s in 1989) with a $547 loan from their parents in their hometown, Springfield, Mass., in the summer of 1935. With the Depression gripping the country, the brothers enticed customers by selling two scoops of ice cream for a nickel, about half the price their competitors charged (and the equivalent of about 95 cents today).

“Our customers didn’t have any money, and neither did we,” Mr. Blake told The Republican, a Springfield newspaper, in 2017.

Their shop was an instant success, with a line out the door on opening night. But it required constant labor.

. . .

Mr. Blake and his brother sold Friendly to the Hershey Foods Corporation in 1979 for about $164 million (nearly $580 million in today’s dollars).

For the full obituary, see:

Daniel E. Slotnik. “Curtis Blake Dies at 102; Built a Friendly Empire From Nickel Ice Cream.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 2, 2019): A25.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 30, 2019, and has the title “Hong Kong Protesters Descend on Airport, With Plans to Stay for Days.”)

“For This Hong Kong, We Fight. We Shall Never Surrender.”

(p. A6) HONG KONG — Thousands of black-clad antigovernment protesters demonstrated at Hong Kong’s international airport on Friday [Aug. 9, 2019], taking aim at both a global transit hub and the city’s closely guarded reputation for order and efficiency.

. . .

The airport protest began in the early afternoon, as demonstrators in black T-shirts and face masks nearly filled the cavernous arrivals hall, chanting “Hong Kongers, keep going,” a rallying cry for the two-month-old protest movement.

“You’ve arrived in a broken, torn-apart city, not the one you have once pictured,” read a pamphlet that protesters offered to arriving travelers. “Yet for this Hong Kong, we fight. We shall never surrender.”

As of Friday night, the demonstration remained peaceful, and there had been no reports of arrests or disruptions of flights. Protesters were careful to leave a path clear for travelers, some of whom recorded the demonstration on their phones or helped themselves to pamphlets.

. . .

Miki Ip, a real-estate agent who attended the demonstration, said she came partly to refute unproven claims by the Chinese government that the civil disobedience had been led by foreign forces who wanted to undermine Beijing’s authority.

“China has told us so many lies, and we lack a government that really works in our interests,” Ms. Ip, 38, said in the arrivals hall. “The living conditions facing youngsters nowadays are harsh, and they feel a lack of ownership over their hometown, both economically and politically.”

For the full story, see:

Katherine Li and Mike Ives. “Protesters in Hong Kong Choke Airport Terminal.” The New York Times (Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019): A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 9, 2019, and has the title “Hong Kong Protesters Descend on Airport, With Plans to Stay for Days.”)