PITTSBURGH /PRNewswire/ — As we celebrate Black History Month, we take an important look back at what life was like during the Jim Crow period. Bill Steigerwald’s startling book, 30 Days A Black Man, takes us back to 1948 in the Deep South. While the year is now 2023, we are not far removed from the extreme racism of that time. Let’s look back, lest we forget…
“I quit being white, and free, and an American citizen when I climbed aboard that Jim Crow coach…I was Black, and in bondage – not quite slavery but not quite freedom, either.” – Ray Sprigle, 1948
30 Days A Black Man recounts the story of Ray Sprigle, a star reporter for the Post-Gazette – and he was White. Sprigle made the audacious choice to disguise himself as a Black man for 30 days and traveled alongside John Wesley Dobbs, a Black civil rights pioneer from Atlanta. His purpose: to experience what it was really like to be Black living in the South, and to bring greater awareness to the injustices Black people lived through daily.
Bill Steigerwald provides a vivid account of Sprigle’s journey. Sprigle witnessed the injustices faced by Black leaders, sharecroppers and family members of lynching victims; saw the inequities in education; and encountered a separate set of rules Black people had to follow under Jim Crow, such as: sitting in the back seat of vehicles; never calling a white man by his name, but calling him “mister”; or being prohibited from trying on clothes in a clothing store. He opened the eyes of White people in the North who were unaware of the unfair practices against Black people in the South.
30 Days A Black Man, a retelling of Sprigle’s encounters with racism, reminds us all to be vigilant in our efforts to seek justice for all people. Released in 2017, the book is relevant today as America continues to experience racial tension.
“Ray Sprigle and Bill Steigerwald were both reporters for the Post-Gazette. 30 Days A Black Manis an important resource as we dialogue about race in America and continue to work toward justice,” says John Block, publisher of the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Sprigle’s descriptions and undisguised outrage at “the iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid. Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven years before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen years before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.
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30 Days A Black Man by Bill Steigerwald is available on Amazon.
About Block Communications: Block Communications, Inc., (BCI) is a 118-year-old privately held diversified media holding company headquartered in Toledo, OH. It has primary operations in cable television, newspaper publishing, high-speed Internet and residential telephone services. Publications owned by Block Communications, Inc. include The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Toledo Blade.
In that first movie, “Episode IV,” Luke Skywalker’s Uncle Owen was a farmer on the planet of Tatooine. He farmed water from air in the middle of a desert.
It might sound impossible, but it’s exactly what experts discussed at the second International Atmospheric Water Harvesting Summit hosted by Arizona State University in March 2025.
Each day, a human needs to consume about the equivalent of 0.8 gallons of water (3 liters). With more than 8 billion people living on the planet, that means engineers need to produce nearly 2.6 trillion gallons (10 trillion liters) of clean drinking water every year. Taken globally, rainfall would be enough, but it’s distributed very unevenly – including landing in the oceans, where it immediately becomes too salty to drink safely.
Deserts, which cover about one-fifth of the Earth’s land area, are home to about 1 billion people.
Researchers at places such as Berkeley have developed solar-powered systems that can produce clean drinking water from thin air. In general, they use a material that traps water molecules from the air within its structure and then use sunlight to condense that water out of the material and into drinkable liquid. But there is still a ways to go before they are ready for commercial distribution and available to help large numbers of people.
Researchers can harvest water from air in the desert, in a process powered only by the Sun.
Space debris
When the second Death Star was destroyed in “Return of the Jedi,” it made a huge mess, as you would expect when blowing to smithereens an object at least 87 miles across (140 kilometers). But the movie’s mythology helpfully explains a hyperspace wormhole briefly opened, scattering much of the falling debris across the galaxy.
As best as anyone can tell, a hyperspace wormhole has never appeared near Earth. And even if such a thing existed or happened, humans might not have the technology to chuck all our trash in there anyway. So we’re left with a whole lot of stuff all around us, including in space.
According to the website Orbiting Now, in late April 2025 there were just over 12,000 active satellites orbiting the planet. All in all, the United States and other space-faring nations are trying to keep track of nearly 50,000 objects orbiting Earth. And there are millions of fragments of space debris too small to be observed or tracked.
Just as on Earth’s roads, space vehicles crash into each other if traffic gets too congested. But unlike the debris that falls to the road after an Earth crash, all the bits and pieces that break off in a space crash fly away at speeds of several thousand miles per hour (10,000 to 30,000 kph) and can then hit other satellites or spacecraft that cross their paths.
This accumulation of space debris is creating an increasing problem. With more satellites and spacecraft heading to orbit, and more stuff up there moving around that might hit them, space travel is becoming more like flying the Millennium Falcon through an asteroid field every day.
Engineers at NASA, the European Space Agency and other space programs are exploring a variety of technologies – including a net, a harpoon and a laser – to remove the more dangerous pieces of space junk and clean up the space environment.
Dodging obstacles in space is no picnic.
Dorothy Allison channeled her impoverished childhood into a richly crafted world that retained its gritty origins. Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images
Growing up poor in Greenville, South Carolina, Allison endured abuse of all kinds before becoming the first in her family to finish high school and college. As a lesbian, she faced additional challenges and hurdles. Before she achieved literary fame with her first novel, Allison ran a feminist bookstore and a women’s center. She was broke when she finally sold “Bastard Out of Carolina.”
To me, Allison is a shining exception in a long line of authors who have attempted to write about poverty but fail to accurately capture it.
Most readers are probably familiar with the standard tropes in these works: violence, sexual abuse, addiction, filth and degradation. Allison was decidedly not in that camp.
She broke that mold by finding beauty in her impoverished surroundings and focusing on love, humor and family bonds.
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Beauty in a hopeless place
Even though “Bastard out of Carolina” ultimately deals with physical and sexual abuse – which, of course, is not confined to poor people – this merely constitutes one element of a broader emotional and physical landscape.
Allison’s hometown of Greenville is also the setting of the novel – and it’s a place that the novel’s young narrator, Bone, describes as “the most beautiful place in the world.” She adds:
“Black walnut trees dropped their green-black fuzzy bulbs on Aunt Ruth’s matted lawn, past where their knotty roots rose up out of the ground like the elbows and knees of dirty children suntanned dark and covered with scars. Weeping willows marched across the yard, following every wandering stream and ditch, their long whiplike fronds making rents that sheltered sweet-smelling beds of clover.”
Extreme hunger, however, is unique to poverty, and something that poor writers often recall with a kind of vividness that can escape middle-class or wealthy writers.
“Hunger makes you restless,” Allison writes. “You dream about food, magical meals, famous and awe-inspiring, the one piece of meat, the exact taste of buttery corn, tomatoes so ripe they split and sweeten the air, beans so crisp they snap between the teeth, gravy like mother’s milk singing to your bloodstream.”
In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Allison doesn’t celebrate hunger. But she is able to find humor in it and show how laughter can be used as a coping mechanism.
In the novel, when Bone complains about being hungry, her mother recounts her own childhood: Back then, there was “real hunger, hunger of days with no expectation that there would ever be biscuits again.” And during those times she and her siblings would concoct fantastical stories of strange dishes: “Your aunt Ruth always talked about frogs’ tongues with dew berries. … But Raylene won the prize with her recipe for sugar-glazed turtle meat with poison greens and hot piss dressing.”
Humor isn’t used to gloss over the seriousness of poverty. Yet Allison is keen to point out that both can exist: They are all wrapped up in a life lived.
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Greenville, S.C., where Dorothy Allison spent the first 11 years of her life, was the setting for ‘Bastard out of Carolina.’ Library of Congress
American delusion
I can’t help but compare Allison’s work with that of an author like JD Vance. In his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance revels in his grandmother’s anger and violence as a sign of her vibrant hillbilly-ness.
On the other hand, in “Bastard out of Carolina,” Bone recalls her mother saying flatly, “Nothing to be proud of in shooting at people for looking at you wrong.”
So many other writers about poverty have characters who pine for the material comforts promised by the American Dream, whether it’s Clyde Griffiths in Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” or George and Lennie in John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
Dorothy Allison worked on ‘Bastard out of Carolina’ for nearly a decade before finding a publisher. Amazon
Allison’s characters, on the other hand, learn to see through this false promise. In one scene, Bone and her cousin break into the local Woolworth’s.
Previously, she had longingly eyed a brimming glass case of nuts. But once she shatters the display case, she realizes “that the case was a sham. There hadn’t been more than two inches of nuts pressed against the glass front, propped up with cardboard.” Her reaction: “Cheap sons of bitches.”
In a display of class consciousness, Bone eventually detects the false allure of cheap commodities. “I looked … at all the things on display. Junk everywhere: shoes that went to pieces in the rain, clothes that separated at the seams, stale candy, makeup that made your skin break out.”
In contrast, she thinks of the value of the home-canned goods made by her aunt. “That was worth something. All this stuff seemed tawdry and useless.”
‘Jealous of you for what you got’
At one point, Bone articulates the concept of poornography without using that term. She talks about “the mythology” that plagues poor people:
“People from families like mine – southern working poor with high rates of illegitimacy and all too many relatives who have spent time in jail – we are the people who are seen as the class that does not care for their children, for whom rape and abuse and violence are the norm. That such assumptions are false, that the rich are just as likely to abuse their children as the poor, and that southerners do not have a monopoly on either violence or illegitimacy are realities that are difficult to get people to recognize.”
In “Bastard out of Carolina,” Bone resents the rich rather than admiring them. In a conversation with one of her aunts, she says she “hates” them. Interestingly, her aunt provides the poor person’s counterpoint to hate.
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“Could be they’re looking at you sitting up here eating blackberries … could be they’re jealous of you for what you got, afraid of what you would do if they stepped in the yard.”
Allison shows readers how class resentment can go both ways, and how for all of the contempt directed at poor people from the rich and powerful, there may also be an element of envy and fear at play.
An 83-year-old short story by Borges portends a bleak future for the internet
Fiction has anticipated internet challenges, illustrating potential futures filled with misinformation and inequality. Jorge Luis Borges’ analogue library warns of overwhelming content making meaningful information elusive.
Fifty years before the architecture for the web was created, Jorge Luis Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent. Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images
How will the internet evolve in the coming decades?
Fiction writers have explored some possibilities.
In his 2019 novel “Fall,” science fiction author Neal Stephenson imagined a near future in which the internet still exists. But it has become so polluted with misinformation, disinformation and advertising that it is largely unusable.
Characters in Stephenson’s novel deal with this problem by subscribing to “edit streams” – human-selected news and information that can be considered trustworthy.
The drawback is that only the wealthy can afford such bespoke services, leaving most of humanity to consume low-quality, noncurated online content.
To some extent, this has already happened: Many news organizations, such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, have placed their curated content behind paywalls. Meanwhile, misinformation festers on social media platforms like X and TikTok.
On the surface, chatbots seem to provide a solution to the misinformation epidemic. By dispensing factual content, chatbots could supply alternative sources of high-quality information that aren’t cordoned off by paywalls.
Ironically, however, the output of these chatbots may represent the greatest danger to the future of the web – one that was hinted at decades earlier by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.
The rise of the chatbots
Today, a significant fraction of the internet still consists of factual and ostensibly truthful content, such as articles and books that have been peer-reviewed, fact-checked or vetted in some way.
The developers of large language models, or LLMs – the engines that power bots like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini – have taken advantage of this resource.
To perform their magic, however, these models must ingest immense quantities of high-quality text for training purposes. A vast amount of verbiage has already been scraped from online sources and fed to the fledgling LLMs.
The problem is that the web, enormous as it is, is a finite resource. High-quality text that hasn’t already been strip-mined is becoming scarce, leading to what The New York Times called an “emerging crisis in content.”
This has forced companies like OpenAI to enter into agreements with publishers to obtain even more raw material for their ravenous bots. But according to one prediction, a shortage of additional high-quality training data may strike as early as 2026.
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As the output of chatbots ends up online, these second-generation texts – complete with made-up information called “hallucinations,” as well as outright errors, such as suggestions to put glue on your pizza – will further pollute the web.
And if a chatbot hangs out with the wrong sort of people online, it can pick up their repellent views. Microsoft discovered this the hard way in 2016, when it had to pull the plug on Tay, a bot that started repeating racist and sexist content.
Over time, all of these issues could make online content even less trustworthy and less useful than it is today. In addition, LLMs that are fed a diet of low-calorie content may produce even more problematic output that also ends up on the web.
An infinite − and useless − library
It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop that results in a continuous process of degradation as the bots feed on their own imperfect output.
A July 2024 paper published in Nature explored the consequences of training AI models on recursively generated data. It showed that “irreversible defects” can lead to “model collapse” for systems trained in this way – much like an image’s copy and a copy of that copy, and a copy of that copy, will lose fidelity to the original image.
How bad might this get?
Consider Borges’ 1941 short story “The Library of Babel.” Fifty years before computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee created the architecture for the web, Borges had already imagined an analog equivalent.
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In his 3,000-word story, the writer imagines a world consisting of an enormous and possibly infinite number of hexagonal rooms. The bookshelves in each room hold uniform volumes that must, its inhabitants intuit, contain every possible permutation of letters in their alphabet.
In Borges’ imaginary, endlessly expansive library of content, finding something meaningful is like finding a needle in a haystack. aire images/Moment via Getty Images
Initially, this realization sparks joy: By definition, there must exist books that detail the future of humanity and the meaning of life.
The inhabitants search for such books, only to discover that the vast majority contain nothing but meaningless combinations of letters. The truth is out there –but so is every conceivable falsehood. And all of it is embedded in an inconceivably vast amount of gibberish.
Even after centuries of searching, only a few meaningful fragments are found. And even then, there is no way to determine whether these coherent texts are truths or lies. Hope turns into despair.
Will the web become so polluted that only the wealthy can afford accurate and reliable information? Or will an infinite number of chatbots produce so much tainted verbiage that finding accurate information online becomes like searching for a needle in a haystack?
The internet is often described as one of humanity’s great achievements. But like any other resource, it’s important to give serious thought to how it is maintained and managed – lest we end up confronting the dystopian vision imagined by Borges.
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Daniel B. Oerther, Professor of Environmental Health Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology and William Schonberg, Professor of Civil Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
