Exciting news is on the horizon for commuters in the Santa Barbara and Goleta area! After years of planning and anticipation, the Metrolink commuter train service is set to launch this fall, providing a new, efficient way to travel between Ventura County and Santa Barbara County. With the increasing focus on alternative transportation options, this project represents a significant step forward for our communities and environment.

The Journey Begins

The Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) is at the forefront of this initiative, fulfilling a promise made to voters who approved a funding tax aimed at both widening the freeway and exploring innovative transportation alternatives. Originally considered along with Amtrak, the decision to partner with Metrolink emerged, as their schedules proved more conducive to the commuter needs of the area.

Metrolink’s plan is to operate a streamlined route starting from Moorpark, with stops in our beautiful Santa Barbara and Goleta, avoiding the timing conflicts that hampered the Amtrak discussions. Aaron Bonfilio, SBCAG’s Director of Multimodal Programs, emphasized the importance of this collaboration, saying, “working with them to develop this agreement is critical to the next step. And that’s what this is all about.”

A Convenient Ride

Imagine leaving Oxnard at a crisp 7 a.m. and arriving in Santa Barbara by 7:51 a.m., or reaching Goleta shortly after at 8:03 a.m. The convenience of this service is striking, with additional afternoon departures that will surely benefit daily commuters. Goleta Mayor Paula Perotte expressed her enthusiasm, stating, “Oh, that’s totally reasonable,” highlighting the strategic scheduling designed to meet local needs.

Riders can look forward to a brand new train depot in Goleta, currently under construction, with daily bus connections to enhance accessibility. Bonfilio mentioned the multiple options available through the Coastal Express, providing around 20 trips in both directions each morning and afternoon.

An Affordable and Productive Commute

The introductory round-trip fare of just $10, or $5 in each direction, is a refreshing incentive intended to encourage residents to leave their cars behind. It’s not only planet-friendly but wallet-friendly, too! For those opting to work during their commute, Mayor Perotte noted that riding the train may even allow workers to log their commute time since they can be productive on their laptops while on board.

Initial projections show around 200 daily riders, and with a capacity for over 500, there’s plenty of room for growth. “I think once people get used to riding the train, they’re going to love it,” said Mayor Perotte, sharing her vision of creating a new commuting habit that moves people away from sitting in traffic.

Ready to Roll

SBCAG is currently finalizing agreements to ensure everything is in place before the fall launch, paving the way for an exciting new chapter in commuting for Santa Barbara and Goleta residents. This initiative not only represents a practical solution to transportation challenges but also offers a glimpse into a future where public transit continues to evolve.

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In closing, let’s prepare to say goodbye to traffic woes and hello to the ease and joy of train travel. Get ready to hop on the Metrolink and enjoy the ride into a more connected and sustainable future! 🚆✨

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Cassandra Chapman, The University of Queensland

In late 2019 and early 2020, a series of devastating wildfires, known as the “black summer” bushfire disaster, left Australia reeling: More than 20% of the country’s forests burned.

As a scholar of the psychology of charitable giving, I have long been interested in the unique emotional response that disasters evoke – often generating an urgent and visceral wish to help.

I wanted to understand how and why people respond to a crisis of this magnitude. For the project, I teamed up with three Australian environmental psychology and collective action experts: Matthew Hornsey, Kelly Fielding and Robyn Gulliver.

We found that international media coverage of disasters can help increase donations. Our findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed academic journal Disasters in 2022, are relevant to the situation in Los Angeles, where severe fires destroyed thousands of homes and businesses in January 2025, devastating many communities.

That recovery could take years.

5 key factors affect generosity

All told, Australian donors gave more than US$397 million, or $640 million in Australian dollars, to support the recovery from the black summer bushfire disaster. The international community also rallied: U.S. and U.K. donors contributed an additional US$2.6 million. These donations were used to fund evacuation centers, support groups for victims, and cash grants for repairs and rebuilding, among other things.

When we surveyed 949 Australians about what influenced their donations and analyzed news articles about the disaster, we found that coverage of disasters significantly increased generosity and influenced which charities drew donations. This may be because news articles communicated directly the need for charitable support.

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Using this survey data, we identified key factors that influenced how much money, if any, people donated in response to the bushfire disaster appeals. These five were linked with the amounts Australians donated:

• Scale: The sheer scale of the fires.

• Personal impact: Having been personally affected, knowing people who have been affected, or being worried that they will be affected in the future.

• Climate change beliefs: Believing that climate change is impacting the environment.

• News footage: The dramatic footage of the fires they have seen.

• Stories: The stories of those who have been affected.

Three of these factors – scale, news footage and stories – relate to information people were exposed to in media coverage of the disaster. Further, when we asked people how they chose which charities to support, they said that media coverage was more influential than either their friends and family or direct communication from those same charities.

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These findings collectively show how media coverage can powerfully influence both how much people give to disaster relief and which nonprofits they choose to support.

Setting the agenda

In the next phase of our research, we tried to learn how media coverage affects the public’s generosity.

We downloaded every news article we could find about the disaster over the three-month period that fires raged and analyzed the text of 30,239 news articles using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software.

We looked at which kinds of language and concepts were being used in media coverage, and how frequently they were used compared with their use in everyday written language.

In addition to concepts we expected to see, like emergency, heroes and human loss, we found that the concepts of support and money frequently showed up in coverage. Words like “donations,” “help” and “support” occurred in 74% of news articles. Words having to do with money were even more common: They appeared almost twice as often as they do in ordinary written language.

Our findings suggest that news coverage may have helped to set the agenda for the huge charitable response to Australia’s wildfire disaster because the media told people what they should be thinking about in terms of that disaster. In Australia’s case, it was how they could help.

A consideration for the media

We also believe that it’s likely that news coverage of disasters like this one can serve an agenda-setting function by teaching the public how to think about the crisis.

To the extent that news coverage highlights concepts like support, possibly communicating that donating is a normal response to a crisis, it’s reasonable to expect people to donate more money.

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Given that news coverage can influence how much someone donates, as well as which charities they choose to support, nonprofits responding to the Los Angeles fires may wish to encourage media outlets to mention their work in news coverage.

It is likely that being featured in news coverage – especially when calls to action or opportunities to donate are incorporated in an article – would result in more funds being raised for the charity’s response to the disaster.

Cassandra Chapman, Associate Professor, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Rachel Gordan, University of Florida

Eighty years ago, the Jewish American novelist Laura Z. Hobson was contemplating her next writerly move and was seeking a little help from her friends.

“Gentleman’s Agreement,” the story she was drafting, felt like a bold idea. Maybe too bold. In her vision for the novel, reporter Phil Green is assigned to write an article about antisemitism. He pretends to be Jewish so he can experience bigotry firsthand. Readers follow the character as he encounters the prejudice of supposedly good people and learns how to respond to the slights and jabs casually meted out even by Americans who consider themselves liberal.

It was 1944, three years after the United States joined World War II. What prompted Americans to finally fight, however, was the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, not Nazi persecution of Jews and other marginalized groups. Antisemitism in the U.S. remained rampant throughout the early and mid-1940s.

With so many fraught feelings about Jews, and about the war in which American soldiers were risking their lives, Hobson was unsure how a novel about domestic antisemitism would be received. She might have wondered if readers would dismiss the story as a Jewish writer’s “special pleading” on behalf of her own.

Should she move forward with the novel that was bubbling up inside of her? To find her way out of her writing quandary, Hobson did something she had never done before and would never do again in her four decades of writing more than a dozen books: She consulted several friends and colleagues, mailing them her proposal for the novel and a cover letter explaining her quandary.

She did not know it at the time, but Hobson was about to write her most important book – one that would help broaden conversation about prejudice by reaching many more readers than would ever hear a rabbi’s sermon or read a committee’s report on antisemitism.

The right words

When the responses started to come in, it became clear that not all the feedback was of the helpful variety.

Lee Wright, Hobson’s editor at Simon & Schuster, seemed not to have fully grasped that writing fiction was a matter of placing oneself in the shoes of someone else. The editor advised Hobson that she was ill-suited to write from a gentile’s perspective because Hobson herself was Jewish. Further, Wright cautioned, Hobson should not attempt to write from a man’s perspective.

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Hobson’s publisher and friend, Richard Simon of Simon & Schuster, was also skeptical. He did not believe that novels were the way to fight antisemitism or bigotry. And then Simon did that worst thing an editor could do: He reminded Hobson that her last novel, “The Trespassers,” had been a commercial disappointment.

Hobson stewed over these replies, as evident from her autobiography and letters archived at Columbia University, which I found while researching my first book, “Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American.” As Hobson later noted in her autobiography, her publisher’s less-than-enthusiastic reply sapped some of her confidence. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to continue with her writing.

It was one of Hobson’s closest female friends, Louise Carroll Whedon, whose letter offered just the right words of encouragement. Known as Carroll to her friends, she was married to TV writer John Whedon – and the family’s writing success would continue with their grandson Joss Whedon, of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “The Avengers” fame.

Familiar with the ups and downs of the writing life, as well as Hobson’s insecurities, Carroll replied with the enthusiasm that Hobson needed. “Let me say right away that I think the book ought to be written,” Whedon assured her, “and the sooner the better – not to highlight the plight of the Jew, but to examine the even more appalling plight of the non-Jew, and what the seeping poison of prejudice can mean to America.”

The Americans who really needed “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Whedon argued, weren’t the extreme antisemites, but the people hoping that “if you just pretend it isn’t there, maybe it will go away.” Otherwise, she warned, that willful ignorance and passivity could destroy the country – “at least the America that most people want to believe exists.”

Whedon did not deny the risks. But she wasn’t willing to watch her friend doubt her abilities – or her insights as a Jewish woman who had experienced antisemitism firsthand, and observed casual antisemitism from her non-Jewish friends. That Whedon was one of Hobson’s non-Jewish friends made her enthusiasm for a novel about antisemitism especially valuable to Hobson.

“It’s a controversial subject, Babe, and there’ll be arguments who should do it and when and how it should be done no matter what comes of it,” Whedon concluded. “For me, I think you’re in a singularly good spot to write it – in hot anger, sure – but in cold truth as well.”

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Whedon had brought Hobson back to herself. Now, it was time to write.

Instant success

In a few years, the book stuck in Hobson’s mind would become a sensation. First published as a series in Cosmopolitan magazine, “Gentleman’s Agreement” was then printed by Simon & Schuster in 1947. It became a bestseller and later an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck.

“Required reading for every thoughtful citizen in this parlous century” was how The New York Times described the novel. Because of Hobson’s readable style and romance, the novel received attention from a wide range of publications, from the Saturday Review of Literature to Seventeen magazine. From books like Hobson’s, Americans were learning “how we could be humane, as well as human, beings,” Times reviewer Charles Poore wrote in a December 1947 roundup of the year’s top books.

“Gentleman’s Agreement” was never perceived as “just” a Jewish novel – mostly because readers mistakenly assumed an author named Hobson was not Jewish. Even for critics, the book broadcast a new openness toward discussing antisemitism. It was a story full of teachable moments.

Hobson’s novel was part of a wave of 1940s fiction against antisemitism. Some of these novels were written by Jewish authors who were beginning to form the nucleus of postwar American literature, such as Saul Bellow and Arthur Miller. Others were by writers who made their mark during the 1940s, but whose names have faded over the decades, such as Gwethalyn Graham and Jo Sinclair. But Hobson’s was the most popular of its time.

If it weren’t for Whedon’s encouragement, though, “Gentleman’s Agreement” might never have been finished. If every friend of a writer said just the right thing – offering the needed encouragement or tough love – it would not feel like such profound treasure to spy a pearl of encouragement. But nobody gets all the encouragement they need, and writers are no exception.

Rachel Gordan, Assistant Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies, University of Florida

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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