In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Lydia Lunch! Lydia is a singer, poet, writer, actress, and self-empowerment speaker. She got her start as the leader, singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, one of the four bands to appear on the compilation No New York, and moved on from there to a long career in which she’s managed to maintain the raw intensity and outsider quality that she started with. Her later projects include the bands Beirut Slump, 8 Eyed Spy, among many others, and then a long solo career, as well as many other bands and collaborations, doing music and spoken word. She’s also an author: her books include Paradoxia, The Gun is Loaded, Lydia Lunch Will Work for Drugs, and So Real it Hurts. Lydia has also acted in many films, and in 2019 Beth B, a filmmaker who started with Lydia in the no wave scene, released a film about her, entitled Lydia Lunch: The War is Never Over. Adam and Lydia talk about Sumner, and Lydia encourages Adam to do more with this project than just a podcast. You can find more about Lydia at lydia-lunch.net. This conversation was recorded in August 2024.

Photo of Lydia by Jasmine Hirst.

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with photographer and graphic designer Julia Gorton about her experiences in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, and they share memories of Sumner. With Rick Brown, Julia produced the fanzine Beat It in the late 1970s, and that got her into shows free so that she could photograph people at CBGBs and Max’s and so on. She became friends with the no wave bands, and with Sumner in particular, joining adventures with him and Rudolph Grey, such as interviewing catholic schoolgirls in Brooklyn, and recording them for posterity. Many years later, after a long career as a designer and educator, Julia pulled her old photos out of the drawer, and they became part of the revival of interest in no wave. Her photos, including several of Sumner, appeared in Thurston Moore and Byron Coley’s book No Wave: Post-Punk. Underground. New York 1976-1980, and then she started putting them on social media and showing them in galleries. More recently she has published her own book, Nowhere New York, with new original essays by many important participants from the time as well as many beautiful photos, and re-released all the issues of Beat It in an anthology. These volumes, and Julia’s photos, are among the most definitive, compelling and beautiful visual documents of the no wave scene in general and Sumner in particular during this time. You can find Julia’s books, t-shirts, and more at www.juliagorton.com. This conversation was recorded in July 2024.

In this first proper episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Mark Cunningham, the bass player in Mars and one of two surviving members of the band. Mark also played brass instruments on John Gavanti, and that record was released on Mark’s own label, Hyrax. Mark has had a long career since then, with bands including Don King, Raeo, Convolution, Bestia Farida, and Blood Quartet, as well as two recent solo albums, Odd Songs and Blue Mystery. Adam and Mark talk about Mark’s life and career trajectory, including a detailed chronology of Mars from start to end. You can find much more about Mark’s music and other works at markcunningham.cat and much of the music itself at markcunningham1.bandcamp.com. This conversation was recorded in July 2024.

This episode launches a new series about the artist and musician Sumner Crane (1946-2003). Scientist Adam Sobel — Sumner’s nephew, and the host of this series as well as the podcast Deep Convection, out of which it grows — introduces the whole thing, explaining who Sumner was, why he (Adam) is doing this, and how it came to be.

Image credit: collage with photo of Sumner Crane, by Julia Gorton.

Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Frank has been instrumental in advancing our understanding of hurricanes and improving their forecasts.
Frank’s journey with HRD, including two decades as its director, has been dedicated to unraveling the inner workings of hurricanes, with the objective of improving their forecasts (which are not made by the HRD, but by the National Hurricane Center). This pursuit has led Frank to fly through the eyes of over 100 different storms, crossing the eye of a hurricane more than 500 times.

“Sitting at a desk and writing papers and doing analysis, that’s also enjoyable, but there’s nothing like getting out in the environment […] I always try and encourage even my numerical modeling partners to come on a flight so they can see what it takes to get the information that they need , and almost all of them step away from that with a different perspective. […] There’s nothing like breaking out into the eye and seeing mother nature in all her glory or just flying to the storm and seeing the halos from the rain falling down. The natural beauty is there, and the thing about a hurricane is, you go from the most wonderful weather into the worst thing you can imagine in a very short time, and out the other side, and you do that repeatedly.”

However, reducing Frank’s career to just these flights would be an understatement. He is a distinguished scientist with 139 published papers to his name and a mentor who has guided many junior scientists. His contributions to the field have earned him numerous accolades, reflecting his deep and broad contribution to hurricane science.

One of Frank’s most notable achievements has been the development and application of airborne Doppler radar technology. This innovation has allowed for an unprecedented view of hurricane structures, playing a crucial role in improving hurricane intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, which Frank conceived and led. This project represents a significant national effort to tackle the challenge of predicting hurricane intensity more accurately, a crucial factor in safeguarding lives and property.

Frank’s conversation with Adam traces his path from his early interest in meteorology as a high schooler in New York’s Hudson Valley, through his graduate studies at MIT, and on to his long-standing tenure at NOAA since 1980. Frank’s story is not just about the science; it’s also about the institutions, the art of scientific communication, and his approach to addressing some of the more outlandish ideas about hurricane intervention (like using nuclear weapons).

Throughout the discussion, Frank’s humility shines through. He continually acknowledges the contributions of his mentors, colleagues, and team members, emphasizing the collaborative nature of scientific progress. He attributes his success to not only his own efforts but also to being at the right place at the right time and seizing the opportunities presented to him.

The interview with Frank Marks was recorded in October 2023. Image credit: NOAA

Bjorn Stevens’ main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world’s most prominent climate modeling labs, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In that position, with his team there and many collaborators, he has produced an enormous volume of important research, and that’s not to mention the countless additional studies that use the data his lab contributes to the CMIP archives.
Bjorn’s personal story is as fascinating as his professional achievements. Born in Germany, he first moved to the US when he was only a few months old, and from then on he and his family kept moving a lot for his father’s work. Because of that, his education ended up being “a bit of a patchwork”, but he soon realized that he felt drawn to the beauty of math and science:

“Science opened itself up as something that I seemed reasonably good at, and I felt the rewards of doing it. It had this wonderful mix of being creative work, and it had an aesthetic to it. It involved many different skills from writing to analyzing to programming, so it was just something I […] realized and enjoyed, and I had a certain amount of success that allowed me to continue.”

Bjorn did indeed continue, from his PhD at Colorado State and early career at NCAR and UCLA, to his current position as managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. His research covers many topics, but a particular focus have been clouds—he has studied them as a modeler and as a theorist, and he has led many field campaigns to collect data that improve our understanding of these elusive yet critical components of the climate system.

“How does precipitation affect the clouds? There were some simple hypotheses at the time […] which didn’t make sense to me, and so I tried to understand how drizzle affects the development of the cloud layer. So that was mostly my PhD thesis, and at that time I was really concerned with how to use models to come up with ideas that we could test in observations. So I think that’s also an enduring aspect of the way I think about things, which is not to use models to provide answers but to use models to tell us how to look at nature differently.”

Bjorn’s leadership role in the global climate science community goes well beyond his astonishing scientific productivity. He has a unique gift for starting, leading and facilitating important and sometimes difficult scientific conversations.
And currently, Bjorn is doing this in a bigger way than ever before, as he leads an international effort to develop the Earth Virtualization Engine, or EVE. EVE is conceived as a large international collaboration, taking CERN—the particle physics facility—as a model. EVE’s proposed mission is to develop kilometer-scale, that is, ultra high-resolution global climate models, using the biggest computers that exist, and use them to support climate services worldwide. You’ll hear Adam and Bjorn spend quite a bit of time talking about that towards the end of their conversation.

The interview with Bjorn Stevens was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: MPI-M, D. Ausserhofer

Adam answers listener questions!

In this episode we take a break from guest interviews. Instead, Adam explains in detail how the podcast got started, how and why we do it, and who is involved. Just like when you go to any web site or anything and there’s an “About” link, this is that, except via 40 minutes of talking.

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth’s atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was, in her own words, a circuitous one, partly because of life’s inherent unpredictability and coincidences, but also because of Arlene’s wide array of interests. When it came to thinking about what to do in college, she struggled to make a decision:

“And then when I was thinking about college I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I mean, I really had broad interests—I liked history, I liked math and science, I liked English. […] The things that I started thinking about though were really probably more geared towards engineering, and that was because my dad was an engineer.

I was [also] pretty serious about track and cross country running, [and so] I was trying to find places where I could run and do all these things. In the end I applied to a bunch of places, and my mom had really wanted to see if I could get into Harvard, and so I applied there and I vividly remember telling her she was wasting her $50 application fee because there was no way.”

Those $50, as history would have it, became a pivotal investment in Arlene’s life—she got into Harvard, where it was eventually the earth and planetary science courses that captivated her, and where she soon started to do research in atmospheric chemistry in Daniel Jacob’s group.

She ended up staying at Harvard for a PhD, a decision that had taken some nudging by those around her, who saw Arlene’s potential more clearly than she saw it herself.

Arlene has become an expert in atmospheric chemistry, air pollution, atmospheric transport, and climate. She uses numerical models to understand all the different factors that influence the concentration of constituents that affect human health, especially ozone. Her early work was about defining the “background” ozone that sets the floor for air quality regulations, and especially understanding the role of long-range transport of ozone itself as well as its precursors. Her work has uncovered linkages between air quality and climate change, for example by highlighting the role of methane, a greenhouse gas, in regulating ground level ozone. And she’s made important contributions on a range of other topics, including not just chemistry but, more lately, physical climate, including extreme events.

From the beginning Arlene’s research has had direct implications for policy. Translating between the abstract world of atmospheric chemistry and the concrete realities of policy and regulation, Arlene has been working with a range of stakeholders to influence regulation and practice at the federal, state and local levels.

Yet she does this stakeholder-engaged policy work while remaining a highly productive basic researcher whose work contributes to fundamental understanding. Listening to Arlene, you’ll notice that she has a rare combination of personal talent and a profound commitment to collective scientific progress, and an ability to shine while ensuring others do too.

The interview with Arlene Fiore was recorded in September 2023. Image credit: Steph Stevens

Aglaé Jézéquel’s journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents’ passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she does research spanning climate science and social science. She is not a climate scientist whose work extends into social science, or a social scientist who collaborates with climate scientist—no, she’s genuinely a physical climate scientist and a social scientist at the same time. Her PhD thesis had roughly equal components of both, and she writes legitimate research papers in both.

It’s not just methodological, though. When Aglaé talks, her scientific curiosity comes across as inextricable from her desire to do something about the climate problem, and as part of that, to understand both the earth system and the human, social processes involved. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective.

Aglaé has worked a lot on extreme event attribution, that is, the science of relating individual extreme weather events to climate change. She has made multiple substantive contributions to the methodology, both its statistical aspects, and meteorological questions like how to characterize the atmospheric circulation of events in a way that makes attribution more effective.

But she has also studied how attribution science is used by those outside the scientific community, and in the space between the physical and social science dimensions, Aglaé has contributed in major ways to the discussion about the relationship between the two major types of attribution, “storyline” and “risk” approaches.

For many in the climate science field, there’s a palpable tension between pure scientific curiosity and the aspiration to effect real-world change. Thanks to her natural ability to integrate these two spheres, this tension seems to be much less present for Aglaé—and probably also for many young scientists of her and future generations.

“One thing I’ve realized is that you have two different motivations as a scientist […], one is curiosity and the other one is social usefulness, and they generally don’t really align. And you have to be okay with that. They can align to a point but they don’t entirely, and I think it’s important to be aware of that. And then […] I try to think not only as myself, but as what does a society wants from scientists and why are we paid by the state to do science. […] I [try to be] relevant as a scientist for society.”

The interview with Aglaé Jézéquel was recorded in August 2023.