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Reader’s note: last year, to honor the anniversary of the Mann Gulch wildfire, we posted the below note, along with an excerpt from Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire. Today marks 67 years since the events of August 5, 1949, so in tribute, we repost the excerpt and its accompanying introduction. More on the matter, of course, can be gleaned from Maclean’s singular work, while additional background on its author can be found in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where a piece on fly-fishing in Montana turns into a meditation on Maclean’s writing and life.

***

August 5, 2015, marks the 66th anniversary of the Mann Gulch wildfire, which eventually spread to cover 4,500 acres of Montana’s Gates of the Mountain Wilderness in Helena National Forest, and claimed the lives of 12 of the 15 elite US Forest Service Smokejumpers, who acted as first responders in the moments before the blaze jumped up a slope and “blew up” its surrounding grass. Haunted by the event, Montana native, author, and former University of Chicago professor Norman Maclean devoted much of his life’s work to researching and writing an account of the events that unfolded that first week of August 1949, which would met publication posthumously two years after Maclean’s death as Young Men and Fire. The book, now considered a classic reconstruction of an American tragedy and a premier piece of elegiac memoir qua historical non-fiction, went on to win a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992. Below follows an excerpt.

***

Then Dodge saw it. Rumsey and Sallee didn’t, and probably none of the rest of the crew did either. Dodge was thirty-three and foreman and was supposed to see; he was in front where he could see. Besides, he hadn’t liked what he had seen when he looked down the canyon after he and Harrison had returned to the landing area to get something to eat, so his seeing powers were doubly on the alert. Rumsey and Sallee were young and they were crew and were carrying tools and rubbernecking at the fire across the gulch. Dodge takes only a few words to say what the “it” was he saw next: “We continued down the canyon for approximately five minutes before I could see that the fire had crossed Mann Gulch and was coming up the ridge toward us.”

Neither Rumsey nor Sallee could see the fire that was now on their side of the gulch, but both could see smoke coming toward them over a hogback directly in front. As for the main fire across the gulch, it still looked about the same to them, “confined to the upper third of the slope.”

At the Review, Dodge estimated they had a 150- to 200-yard head start on the fire coming at them on the north side of the gulch. He immediately reversed direction and started back up the canyon, angling toward the top of the ridge on a steep grade. When asked why he didn’t go straight for the top there and then, he answered that the ground was too rocky and steep and the fire was coming too fast to dare to go at right angles to it.

You may ask yourself how it was that of the crew only Rumsey and Sallee survived. If you had known ahead of time that only two would survive, you probably never would have picked these two—they were first-year jumpers, this was the first fire they had ever jumped on, Sallee was one year younger than the minimum age, and around the base they were known as roommates who had a pretty good time for themselves. They both became big operators in the world of the woods and prairies, and part of this story will be to find them and ask them why they think they alone survived, but even if ultimately your answer or theirs seems incomplete, this seems a good place to start asking the question. In their statements soon after the fire, both say that the moment Dodge reversed the route of the crew they became alarmed, for, even if they couldn’t see the fire, Dodge’s order was to run from one. They reacted in seconds or less. They had been traveling at the end of the line because they were carrying unsheathed saws. When the head of the line started its switchback, Rumsey and Sallee left their positions at the end of the line, put on extra speed, and headed straight uphill, connecting with the front of the line to drop into it right behind Dodge.

They were all traveling at top speed, all except Navon. He was stopping to take snapshots.

•

The world was getting faster, smaller, and louder, so much faster that for the first time there are random differences among the survivors about how far apart things were. Dodge says it wasn’t until one thousand to fifteen hundred feet after the crew had changed directions that he gave the order for the heavy tools to be dropped. Sallee says it was only two hundred yards, and Rumsey can remember. Whether they had traveled five hundred yards or two hundred yards, the new fire coming up the gulch toward them was coming faster than they had been going. Sallee says, “By the time we dropped our packs and tools the fire was probably not much over a hundred yards behind us, and it seemed to me that it was getting ahead of us both above and below.” If the fire was only a hundred yards behind now it had gained a lot of ground on them since they had reversed directions, and Rumsey says he could never remember going faster in his life than he had for the last five hundred yards.

Dodge testifies that this was the first time he had tried to communicate with his men since rejoining them at the head of the gulch, and he is reported as saying—for the second time—something about “getting out of this death trap.” When asked by the Board of Review if he had explained to the men the danger they were in, he looked at the Board in amazement, as if the Board had never been outside the city limits and wouldn’t know sawdust if they saw it in a pile. It was getting late for talk anyway. What could anybody hear? It roared from behind, below, and across, and the crew, inside it, was shut out from all but a small piece of the outside world.

They had come to the station of the cross where something you want to see and can’t shuts out the sight of everything that otherwise could be seen. Rumsey says again and again what the something was he couldn’t see. “The top of the ridge, the top of the ridge.

“I had noticed that a fire will wear out when it reaches the top of a ridge. I started putting on steam thinking if I could get to the top of the ridge I would be safe.

“I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe… I forgot to mention I could not definitely see the ridge from where we were. We kept running up since it had to be there somewhere. Might be a mile and a half or a hundred feet—I had no idea.”

The survivors say they weren’t panicked, and something like that is probably true. Smokejumpers are selected for being tough, but Dodge’s men were very young and, as he testified, none of them had been on a blowup before and they were getting exhausted and confused. The world roared at them—there was no safe place inside and there was almost no outside. By now they were short of breath from the exertion of their climbing and their lungs were being seared by the heat. A world was coming where no organ of the body had consciousness but the lungs.

Dodge’s order was to throw away just their packs and heavy tools, but to his surprise some of them had already thrown away all their equipment. On the other hand, some of them wouldn’t abandon their heavy tools, even after Dodge’s order. Diettert, one of the most intelligent of the crew, continued carrying both his tools until Rumsey caught up with him, took his shovel, and leaned it against a pine tree. Just a little farther on, Rumsey and Sallee passed the recreation guard, Jim Harrison, who, having been on the fire all afternoon, was now exhausted. He was sitting with his heavy pack on and was making no effort to take it off, and Rumsey and Sallee wondered numbly why he didn’t but no one stopped to suggest he get on his feet or gave him a hand to help him up. It was even too late to pray for him. Afterwards, his ranger wrote his mother and, struggling for something to say that would comfort her, told her that her son always attended mass when he could.

It was way over one hundred degrees. Except for some scattered timber, the slope was mostly hot rock slides and grass dried to hay.

It was becoming a world where thought that could be described as such was done largely by fixations. Thought consisted in repeating over and over something that had been said in a training course or at least by somebody older than you.

Critical distances shortened. It had been a quarter of a mile from where Dodge had rejoined his crew to where he had the crew reverse direction. From there they had gone only five hundred yards at the most before he realized the fire was gaining on them so rapidly that the men should discard whatever was heavy.

The next station of the cross was only seventy-five yards ahead. There they came to the edge of scattered timber with a grassy slope ahead. There they could see what is really not possible to see: the center of a blowup. It is really not possible to see the center of a blowup because the smoke only occasionally lifts, and when it does all that can be seen are pieces, pieces of death flying around looking for you—burning cones, branches circling on wings, a log in flight without a propeller. Below in the bottom of the gulch was a great roar without visible flames but blown with winds on fire. Now, for the first time, they could have seen to the head of the gulch if they had been looking that way. And now, for the first time, to their left the top of the ridge was visible, looking when the smoke parted to be not more than two hundred yards away.

Navon had already left the line and on his own was angling for the top. Having been at Bastogne, he thought he had come to know the deepest of secrets—how death can be avoided—and, as if he did, he had put away his camera. But if he really knew at that moment how death could be avoided, he would have had to know the answers to two questions: How could fires be burning in all directions and be burning right at you? And how could those invisible and present only by a roar all be roaring at you?

•

On the open slope ahead of the timber Dodge was lighting a fire in the bunch grass with a “gofer” match. He was to say later at the Review that he did not think he or his crew could make the two hundred yards to the top of the ridge. He was also to estimate that the men had about thirty seconds before the fire would roar over them.

Dodge’s fire did not disturb Rumsey’s fixation. Speaking of Dodge lighting his own fire, Rumsey said, “I remember thinking that that was a very good idea, but I don’t remember what I thought it was good for.… I kept thinking the ridge—if I can make it. On the ridge I will be safe.”

Sallee was with Rumsey. Diettert, who before being called to the fire had been working on a project with Rumsey, was the third in the bunch that reached Dodge. On a summer day in 1978, twenty-nine years later, Sallee and I stood on what we thought was the same spot. Sallee said, “I saw him bend over and light a fire with a match. I thought, With the fire almost on our back, what the hell is the boss doing lighting another fire in front of us?”

It shouldn’t be hard to imagine just what most of the crew must have thought when they first looked across the open hill-side and saw their boss seemingly playing with a matchbook in dry grass. Although the Mann Gulch fire occurred early in the history of the Smokejumpers, it is still their special tragedy, the one in which their crew suffered almost a total loss and the only one in which their loss came from the fire itself. It is also the only fire any member of the Forest Service had ever seen or heard of in which the foreman got out ahead of his crew only to light a fire in advance of the fire he and his crew were trying to escape. In case I hadn’t understood him the first time, Sallee repeated, “We thought he must have gone nuts.” A few minutes later his fire became more spectacular still, when Sallee, having reached the top of the ridge, looked back and saw the foreman enter his own fire and lie down in its hot ashes to let the main fire pass over him.

***

To read more about Young Men and Fire, click here.

For Manissa Maharawal, the struggle for housing justice is personal. When her own father got displaced from his apartment in Prospect Heights—his home since moving from India to the States some thirty years before, in which he raised his family—she was struck by his unstoppable urge to tell the story over and over again.

The post Not just dots on a map: life histories alleviate spatial amnesia in San Francisco appeared first on OUPblog.

“The Winds of Winter,” the finale to the sixth season of HBO’s Game of Thrones was one of the most thrilling episodes of television ever. It was triumphant, revelatory, sad, powerful – all the feels. Ramin Djawadi’s score was extraordinary, and brought a tear to my eye. And after six years we started to see […]

The precarious humanitarian situation at Europe's borders is creating what seems to be an irresolvable tension between the interests of European states to seal off their borders and the respect for fundamental human rights. Frontex, EU's External Border Control Agency, in particular has been since its inception in 2004 embroiled in a fair amount of public controversy.

The post Human rights and the (in)humanity at EU’s borders appeared first on OUPblog.

People don’t exist as isolated entities, and social programs, movements, or data analytic methods that assume they do are not aligned with reality—and may be doomed to fail. We all know that providing therapy or tutoring to a child may be less effective than hoped if the child’s parents, peers, school, and neighborhood are not also operating in a way that’s conducive to the child’s growth and well-being.

The post Why the future of social change belongs to community research appeared first on OUPblog.

Protecting children from maltreatment is one of the most challenging responsibilities in social and health services. Most CPS investigations and resulting service delivery are helpful to children and families and occur without incident.

The post Rising to the challenge: innovations in child protective services appeared first on OUPblog.

When a major obstacle is removed to our progress, idealist intellectuals like myself rejoice. I was introduced to one such obstacle in the early l970s, when a woman hiding from her abusive husband in our home told us “violence wasn’t the worst part.” Like the millions of other victimized women we have served in the ensuing years, she understood that the prevailing equation of partner abuse with domestic violence has little relation to her lived experience of oppression.

The post From domestic violence to coercive control appeared first on OUPblog.

Sociologist Jonathan R. Wynn went live in the Guardian last week with piece coincident with the 29th annual SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas—in which he articulated the role festivals like SXSW play in urban infrastructure, as they replace previously staid (and spatially permanent) cultural institutions, all the while playing an increasingly major socioeconomic role, especially in terms of gentrification and symbolic impact. All of this draws on the research behind Wynn’s recent book Music/City, which considers the expansive and shifting roles played by these kind of festivals in contemporary urban and cultural life. In a brief excerpt from the Guardian piece below, he explores how previous mayor Will Wynn’s strategy of nurturing SXSW as a crucial part of the city’s downtown development played out of the course of several years:

There are direct and indirect costs and benefits to Wynn’s strategy. While Austin’s downtown has seen robust growth, its inner core has gentrified, homeownership has risen well above the city’s median income, and the city’s poor have moved to Austin’s outer ring.

Downtown condo, hotel and residential growth has boomed. When I returned to the Mohawk two years later, for example, I saw that the onetime dirt lot across the street had transformed into a 120-unit luxury apartment complex called The Beverly.

At the same time, musicians and other creatives feel they have become victims of the successes they played a part in. Musicians and venue owners claim they aren’t seeing the benefits of Austin’s boom. In 2011, the owner of Emo’s and co-owner of Antone’s – two downtown Austin standbys – felt the pressures of these changes, evoking the gentrification of New York’s East Village to claim his venues were priced out of the downtown core, telling Billboard: “We were going the way of CBGB.” Perhaps more vitally, Austin’s downtown has grown, but it has also become richer, and whiter. A team of sociologists from the University of Texas at Austin have tracked the multiple effects of these economic changes for those on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder in Invisible in Austin: Life and Labor in an American City.

Austin is the model of a Music City. As the mayors of cities like Phoenix, Portland, and Kansas City leave SXSW after their “secret” meeting on Stem-fueled (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math ) economic development, they should learn from Austin’s events-based cultural policy as well. Festivals can be the foundation of a low risk urban cultural policy with long-term rewards, including promoting arts education, developing local media, stimulating tourism development and crystallizing a city identity. But these urban cultural policies need to be held to a high standard. They must attract capital to a city while also maintaining an economic and symbolic responsibility to its local communities.

As the 29th SXSW kicks off this week, the Music City will be on full display, hitting both high notes and low. Festivals will increasingly be a part of our city culture. Just as the first SXSW was designed to be a showpiece for Austin talent, these large-scale events can and should maintain that commitment to their localities.

To read Wynn in full at the Guardian, click here.

To read more about Music/City, click here.

Financial entitlement is one domain of financial exploitation. In 2010 Conrad and colleagues defined financial entitlement as: a belief held primarily by adult children that they can take their older parent(s)’ money to spend on themselves without permission. Although some adult children argue that the money is their inheritance and thus already earmarked for them, using an older person’s money without permission is exploitation.

The post Preventing financial exploitation of older adults appeared first on OUPblog.

If someone were to tell you that the restaurant industry is one of the lowest paying sectors in the US economy, the types of jobs that might come to mind include those in the fast food segment. Not surprisingly, workers from all parts of the restaurant industry—tipped and non-tipped—live in poverty.

The post Disparity in the restaurant industry [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

On 11 August 1965, the Watts Riots exploded in Los Angeles taking the nation by surprise. Sparked by an arrest that escalated into a skirmish between local residents and police, the riots lasted six days. They laid bare the seething discontent that lay just beneath the surface in many black communities.

The post Watts Riots: Black Families Matter appeared first on OUPblog.

Can solidarity exist? Or is it just a fantasy, a pious dream of the soft of heart and weak of brain? Gross inequality, greed and prejudice: these manifestations of selfishness which stalk our world may seem to invite our condemnation and to call for an alternative – but what if they are part of the natural order?

The post Solidarity: an art worth learning appeared first on OUPblog.

On leaving school, my advisor reminded me to always take time to think. That seemed like a reasonable suggestion, as I trudged off to teach, write, and, of course, think. But the modern academy doesn’t share this value; faculty are increasingly prodded to “produce” more articles, more presentations, more grant applications, and more PhD students.

The post No time to think appeared first on OUPblog.

The controversy surrounding Alice Goffman’s On the Run is nothing new—the book’s appearance was met with both laudatory curiosity and defensive criticism, from within and outside academic sociology. On the Run offers an ethnographic account based on Goffman’s work in the field—and the field happens to be a mixed-income, West Philadelphia neighborhood, whose largely African American residents lived their lives under the persistence presence of the cops, whose pervasive policing left Goffman’s subjects, the members of her community, caught in a web of presumed criminality. The elephant(s) in the room: how does a privileged white woman engage in this kind of (often passé) participant-observer research without constantly self-checking her positionality? How can this type of book—and its more sensational elements—be true to the word? Who has permission to write about whom? And what happens when these questions leave the back-and-forth behind the closed doors of the academy and bring up very real suggestions about legal culpability, fabrication, and the politics of representation?

In a long-form piece for the New York Times Magazine, Gideon Lewis-Kraus assesses Goffman’s predicament and how her personal experiences shaped several of the more controversial aspects of the book’s account. All the while, he traces the book’s emergence during a crucial (and heated) moment for the history of sociology, when data-driven analysis has bumped the hybrid reportage/qualitative ethnography favored by Goffman into the margins of social science, and considers how the events following its publication played out in the media—and what all of this might mean for Goffman’s own future (and those of her subjects, neighbors, peers) and that of her discipline.

Following this excerpt, you can read the piece in full here.

***

But what her critics can’t imagine is that perhaps both of the accounts she has given are true at the same time — that this represents exactly the bridging of the social gap that so many observers find unbridgeable. From the immediate view of a participant, this was a manhunt; from the detached view of an observer, this was a ritual. The account in the book was that of Goffman the participant, who had become so enmeshed in this community that she felt the need for vengeance ‘‘in my bones.’’ The account Goffman provided in response to the felony accusation (which read as if dictated by a lawyer, which it might well have been) was written by Goffman the observer, the stranger to the community who can see that the reason these actors give for their behavior — revenge — is given by the powerless as an attempt to save face; that though this talk was important, it was talk all the same.

The problem of either-­or is one that is made perhaps inevitable by the metaphor of ‘‘immersion.’’ The anthropologist Caitlin Zaloom, who studies economic relationships, explained to me that it’s a metaphor her own field has long given up on. The metaphor asks us to imagine a researcher underwater — that is, imperiled, unreachable from above — who then returns to the sun and air, newly qualified to report on the darkness below because the experience has put a chill in her bones. This narrative of transformation is what strikes critics like Rios as so patronizing and self-­congratulatory. But Goffman herself never understood her work to be ‘‘immersive’’ in that way. The almost impossible challenge Goffman thus set before herself is the representation of both these views — of drive as manhunt and drive as ritual — in all their simultaneity.

Goffman could have covered herself by adding another paragraph of analysis, one that would have contextualized but also undercut the scene as the participants experienced it. Almost all of her early readers thought she should do that. It would have made her life easier. But she didn’t. This was a book about men whose entire lives — whose whole network of relationships — had been criminalized, and she did not hesitate to criminalize her own. She threw in her lot.

To read more about On the Run, click here.

For some time now, I have been among those who have argued that the fandom associated with the Star Wars franchise is akin to a religion. There are those who will quarrel with the word choice, but it is hard to gainsay the dedication of fans to the original films

The post Mythology redux: The Force Awakens once again appeared first on OUPblog.

Recently, debates about inequality have risen to the forefront in academic and public debates. The publication of the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013 did not, to say the least, go by unnoticed. And many other prominent economists have partaken in the debate about global inequality: Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Angus Madison, just to name a few.

The post The business of inequality appeared first on OUPblog.

Do DUI prevention laws actually deter driving under the influence? Authors Lorne Tepperman and Nicole Meredith argue that punishments like fines, imprisonment, and license suspension are not as effective as we like to think. They have found that people are more likely to be changed by constructive influences (e.g., alcohol counseling) and social taboos than they are by threats of punishment.

The post The reality of DUI prevention laws [infographic] appeared first on OUPblog.

Canadians have a vast lexicon of phrases they use to diminish accidents and their negative consequences. We acknowledge that “accidents will happen,” and remind ourselves that there’s “no use crying over spilled milk.” In fact, we’ve become so good at minimizing these seemingly random, unpredictable incidents that they now seem commonplace: we tend to view […]

The post Rethinking the “accidents will happen” mentality appeared first on OUPblog.

In 1933 in the midst of Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first inaugural address, wisely stated, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” That wisdom has as much relevance today as it did during the Depression.

The post “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” appeared first on OUPblog.

Excerpt:
Masters of Uncertainty: Weather Forecasters and the Quest for Ground Truth 

by Phaedra Daipha

***

PRODUCING THE WEATHER FORECAST

Protecting America’s life and property against the calamities of the weather is a daunting task to manage, above and beyond the formidable meteorological challenges involved. There is a tremendous range of “weather” for the NWS to keep an eye on: land weather, airport weather, marine weather, fire weather, hydrologic weather. To properly protect America’s life and property against the calamities of the weather, therefore, NWS forecast offices are operational around the clock.“The weather never sleeps and neither do we” is the usual stock phrase Neborough forecasters use to enlighten outsiders about their schedule and, by extension, their importance.

The primary responsibility of an NWS forecast office, of course, is to advise and alert about the potential for hazardous weather. Only when hazardous weather warning requirements have been met do forecasters turn their attention to routine products and services. Indeed, during a hazardous weather event, the NWS becomes transformed into what Fine (2007, 40) calls an“activated organization . . . verging on being overwhelmed and understaffed, until routine can again be established.” In this, NWS forecasters readily resemble firefighters, paramedics, and other first responders— primed for hazardous weather, they seem perpetually caught in a lull before the storm. But pushing the analogy any further may be misleading. In contrast to firefighters (cf. Desmond 2007, 81ff.) and other emergency professionals, NWS forecasters experience little or no workload downtime.11 In 2008, five years after the implementation of the IFPS, with the work schedule radically revamped to accommodate for the realities of the new forecasting process and the new forecasting process already an old routine, Neborough forecasters were still struggling to keep up with the weather. To be sure, their workload has been exacerbated by an expanding list of IFPS-driven forecast responsibilities, which, coupled with a series of staff cutbacks due to a shrinking budget, force offices to “do more with less,” to use another favorite NWS catch phrase. What drives this heavy workload in the first place, however, is the fact that we have come to recognize “the weather” not as a finite phenomenon, like a wildfire or a robbery, but as ever present and relevant. As competition among the various weather forecast providers emboldens our appetite for more, faster, better weather information, what counts as the weather further expands in detail and significance. And so, too, does the charge of NWS forecasters. NWS forecast offices more closely resemble a newsroom in this respect—busy during routine operations, verging on understaffed during emergency conditions.

It is this trait of the weather that, in the context of NWS operations, makes weather forecasting an auspicious case study for probing the process of decision making in multiple decision- making regimes. But first, the basics. By way of an introduction to the process of meteorological decision making, the remainder of this chapter goes over the main components of a typical shift at the Neborough office: data analysis; deliberation; and finally, the actual doing of the forecast. In practice, of course, these components are thoroughly intertwined. There is no actual moment when diagnosis ends and prognosis begins. Rather than constituting the means and ends, respectively, of forecasting action, diagnosis and prognosis are in fact“two names for the same reality” (Dewey 1922, 36). Ne-borough forecasters never switch from a diagnostic to a prognostic frame of mind—they just continue making increasingly more consequential decisions as the forecast submission deadline draws nearer. If anything, meteorological prognosis analytically precedes diagnosis, as will become evident in the following pages. This empirical reality of NWS forecasting, while unintelligible from a rational choice perspective, is entirely consistent with pragmatist accounts of the decision-making process. “We do not use the present to control the future,” writes Dewey (1922, 322); “We use the foresight of the future to refine and expand present activity.” The formal distillation and ordering of the NWS forecasting routine into a diagnostic, a deliberative, and a prognostic component denotes therefore the temporal, or processual, unfolding of forecasting action rather than its analytic structure.

TAKING OVER THE HOT SEAT

No shift can start without a briefing by the outgoing forecaster to get the incoming forecaster up to speed with the big weather picture and developing concerns. As in any other work setting whose rhythm is dictated by a shift schedule, weather briefings form an essential, organic part of the forecasting routine as they allow for efficient resource management, minimize duplication of effort, and promote forecast-to-forecast continuity. Weather briefings almost always occur right at the workstation of the outgoing forecaster. Indeed, if the incoming forecaster does not find the outgoing forecaster at his desk as she walks in, she will seek him out in his cubicle and, together, they will walk back to the operations deck to begin the briefing. This is not a mere formality but a testament to the role of screenwork—that is, the processing of information via computer screens— as the organizing principle of meteorological expertise (Daipha 2013). As already noted, if they cannot see it, forecasters cannot think, never mind talk, weather. The departing forecaster relies on the computer screens to make a case for his forecasting decisions, reasoning through the assortment of weather displays he flags as pertinent. For her part, the incoming forecaster relies on the computer screens to keep up with the action, to bring into focus what portends to be the weather forecasting problem of the day. As will become apparent time and time again, screenwork forms the backbone of every aspect of the meteorological decision-making task.

A briefing is in reality two briefings in one, a briefing about forecast concerns and a briefing about technology malfunctions, and forecasters at Neborough will invariably cue “weather wise” and “equipmentwise” to signal the end of the initial pleasantries and the start of the briefing or to segue into the next section. Depending on the weather situation du jour and the familiarity of the incoming forecaster with the current weather system—in other words, depending on whether she has worked that desk the previous day—briefings may last from several seconds to over ten minutes, not infrequently turning into protracted meteorological discussions on model performance and biases or similar past weather events. Throughout, the two forecasters will be poring over the computer screens, the outgoing forecaster guiding the action with the computer mouse. Anything and everything deemed relevant information can be included in the weather briefing: model(s) of choice and reasoning behind it, forecast dilemmas and ultimate decisions, remarkable personal weather observations and puzzling spotter reports, verification concerns, deliberations with neighboring offices, weather features to watch out for, upcoming hazards and how they have been addressed so far, interoffice coordination issues. The conversation is relaxed and collegial, a good-natured back and forth. Yet, even between forecasters who know each other well and have a high regard for each other’s forecasting skill, the exchange is clearly underwritten by a handing off the baton dynamic: the outgoing forecaster is eager to make his forecast stick, especially if he is coming back in a few hours, while the incoming forecaster is intent on not missing a beat but not necessarily committed to the particulars of the existing forecast.

Margaret (short-term desk, day shift): So you guys still thinking some action today?

Dick (short-term desk, midnight shift): Yes. Yes. Todd [at the neighboring office to the southwest] and I were talking it over, and there’s just enough cold air advection aloft, and it’s a sharp enough upper trough, that I was not going to go against tit . . . But, as you can see here, there’s a fair amount of action upstream right now in [adjacent states to the southwest], and the potential is there for all that to work in and just stabilize the air mass out of all severe possibility. So, it’s not something I’m entirely confident in, but with the other factors in place I just showed you . . .

Margaret: So, it must be all instability aloft, because it feels pretty comfortable out there.

Dick: Yeah . . . I mean, see here, we are eventually looking at a minus twelve [degrees Celsius] at 500 [millibar atmospheric pressure level]. But it’s going to be this evening before it gets down into our part of the Northeast . . . so, that’s part of the problem, too, that . . . if anything busts the forecast is that the cold pool . . .

Margaret: Takes forever?

Dick: . . . takes forever to get in. so that’s something to keep an eye on. . . . Anyway, I did what I could; it’s in your hands now.

“Equipmentwise” the briefing can take up an equal amount of time—hardly surprising given the big science character of NWS forecasting operations. Technology fails forecasters in big and small ways, from the radar going down during a severe storm to the server being slower than usual, and it fails them in multiple ways at once. The log of any given shift during my stay at Neborough contained at least two equipment malfunction entries, with that number doubling during hazardous weather conditions. The weather spares no one, certainly not the people tasked with anticipating its every move.

Finally, a“changing of the guard” of sorts takes place. Throughout the briefing, the outgoing forecaster has remained seated at the desk chair with the incoming forecaster standing or leaning against the desk next to him. The briefing completed, the outgoing forecaster will now stand up and, sometimes with some kind of verbal or nonverbal flourish, he will offer the seat to his relief of the day.

The incoming forecaster is now in charge of the workstation. But not until she has adjusted the computer screens according to the settings stored under her user profile will she have truly taken control of the desk and of the weather. The customized, unique combination of weather display formats, color graphics, and sound alarms effectively transforms the workstation into on’s personal workspace, and Neborough forecasters are quick to switch over to their profile the moment they claim the seat. That is especially so because, stored under a forecaster’s name but accessible by all, is a set of personal “best practices” for looking at weather information: the so- called Procedures, accumulated over one’s career and updated as necessary. To study the wind along the atmospheric column, for example, one forecaster might prefer the 850, the 500, the 250, and the surface millibar height charts, color coded just so, while another might routinely find the 700, the 500, the 200, and the surface charts more insightful. Where the Procedures become truly useful, however, is in their ability to recall elaborate composites of data graphics in a matter of seconds. As a result, the variation among forecaster profiles can appear quite staggering. Yet, despite their seemingly idiosyncratic nature, forecasters’ profiles reflect eminently social decisions, the result of apprenticing at particular meteorology programs and forecast offices, under particular mentors, with particular technologies, and so on (see Daipha 2010). For example, unlike other Neborough forecasters, Biff and Phil have primarily organized their Procedures according to weather scenarios, something they learned to do at X- University, which they attended several years apart. And Margaret and Phil are in the habit of looking at weather data in really busy four-panel displays, something they picked up, as it turns out, while interning in the same forecast office in the Midwest.

To be sure, our forecaster does not, as a rule, have to change the previous weather display settings. Rarely did I witness a Neborough forecaster request that the display settings be changed or explained when hunched over someone else’s workstation— following the weather was straightforward enough. In fact, there is an argument to be made that no profile presets are truly necessary, and that the default settings would more than suffice for the task ahead. Certainly, most forecasters like to claim that relying on their Procedures is only an issue of expediency. In practice, however, temporal constraints and the threat of information overload lead to a near absolute dependency on such preset templates for studying the weather.

2:45 p.m. Phil was working an administrative shift in his cubicle today but has been called on forecast duty because of the potential for severe weather later this afternoon. He logs into one of the vacant workstations, turns to the left graphics screen, goes to File/Procedures/select User ID, selects his user name, clicks on severe Weather Tools from the drop-down menu, and selects to load all six of the included information sources from the new drop-down menu. Repeats the same process for the middle graphics screen, this time clicking on Meso [analysis] stuff and selecting five information sources (mostly guidance products from the storm Prediction Center) out of approximately twenty-five. While waiting for the data to load, he next turns to the right graphics screen but now selects Biff’s user name and clicks on severe_Neborough Radar_Right. He tells me he has been meaning to copy this procedure into his own user profile. He likes how “nice and clean” Biff has set up his radar info for right-moving storms. . . . Within fifteen minutes, in consultation with Tom (short- term desk), Phil is ready to press “send” for the first severe thunderstorm watch of the day. He rubs his hands together in excitement: “And we’re rolling!”

***

To read more about Masters of Uncertainty, click here.

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