Americans are spending a lot and saving very little, according to a recent poll by GOBankingRates. Time reports that GOBankingRates recently asked 7000 Americans how much money was in their savings account, and the results were more than a little concerning: 69 percent of Americans polled reported having less than $1000 in their savings accounts, while a full 34 percent reported having $0 saved up.
Unsurprisingly, results of the poll varied by income and age: By and large, young Millennials (those between age 18 and 34) and people with lower incomes had saved the least, while seniors and people with higher incomes saved the most. For instance, while 37 percent of people making between $25,000 and $50,000 reported having no savings, only 6 percent of people making more than $150,000 reported the same.
Results of the poll were worrying across the board. Even for older adults and the relatively well-off, savings were surprisingly low. Certified financial planner Brandon Hayes speculates that this may be, in part, because cashless payment options make it too easy to spend money. “Our issue is we’re spending before we even save and then never look back,” he told GOBankingsRates. “With a cashless society, it’s tough to appreciate a dollar when you never see one.”
However, CFP Michael Hardy admits that part of the problem may be the myriad financial pressures Americans are currently facing. He explains, “Many people save too much for things like retirement, college savings, or investments and squeeze themselves too tightly financially, leaving little room for spending or building of their emergency fund.”
By now, you’ve likely heard about how much less expensive it is to forgo your cable package and fulfill your television needs with streaming services—heck, your friend/neighbor/cousin/chatty coworker has been droning on about it for months. You’re finally ready to take the plunge; but where do you start?
First, make sure your router is up to the task: Don’t invest time and money in setting up new subscriptions and gadgets only to wind up with buffering video. Look for routers with dual-band connectivity; Netflix recommends a download speed of at least 5 Mbps (Megabits per second) for HD quality video, and over 25 Mpbs for Ultra HD. Then, substitute your cable or satellite provider for one or a combination of these 12 options.
1. THE BIG THREE
Often referred to as “The Big Three,” Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon Prime are considered the cream of the crop in online streaming because they offer outstanding original programming in addition to large catalogs of existing shows and movies. Subscriptions to all three start at around $25 per month total, which is cheaper than most cable packages available.
2. FLAT ANTENNAS
Since 2009, television stations have been required to broadcast exclusively in digital, rendering old-fashioned “rabbit ears” obsolete. Now, you can watch live shows on networks like NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox, PBS, The CW, and others by installing a flat antenna in your home. Models by Mohu (starting at $19.95) and Channel Master ($10) are affordable and easy to install.
3. OTHER-THE-AIR DVR
The one drawback to relying on a flat antenna is that you must watch your shows in real time, with no fast-forwarding, pausing, or rewinding. Solve this issue with an over-the-air (OTA) DVR. Services like Tablo or Plex DVR allow you to record live TV shows and then store them on an external hard drive for delayed streaming. (The catch is, some of these services require you to purchase a corresponding device—they won’t work with just any antenna.)
4. SLING TV
Want more TV channels than are available through your antenna? For $20 a month, you can subscribe to Sling TV to get 28 live-streaming cable channels, such as AMC, CNN, TNT, Comedy Central, and the History Channel. A $40 monthly subscription will give you access to over 40 channels, including ESPN. In fact, Sling TV is the easiest way to get ESPN without cable.
5. SPECIALIZED SUBSCRIPTIONS
If you have more unique tastes than even Netflix can account for, chances are there is a specialized streaming service that can give you what you want. Fans of British television should check out Acorn TV, which allows you to watch episodes of Jeeves and Wooster and the original Prime Suspect on your smart TV or mobile device for only $5 a month. If anime is your thing, Crunchyroll professes to be “one of the few legal, official anime and drama streaming sites out there,” with premium subscriptions starting at $7 a month. Cinephiles have a few choices for popular art house and indie movies: Check out Mubi and Fandor for starters, and keep an eye out for the Turner Classic Movies/Criterion Collection streaming service FilmStruck, which is launching soon.
6. CHROMECAST
Google’s Chromecast ($35) quickly turns any HD TV into a smart TV. Just plug the Chromecast dongle into your TV’s HDMI port and connect it to your home Wi-Fi network. Now you can stream various apps (including Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO Now, YouTube, Pandora, Spotify, and more) onto the TV in your living room, while using your Android or iOS device as a remote control.
7. ROKU
Roku is a little black set-top box that connects your TV to the internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. It comes with a simple remote control and features more video streaming content than any other device or media streamer. You can even plug in a USB drive to play your own video and music files on your TV. Available in a number of models, including a USB stick version (starting at $49.95), many experts consider it the best and most reliable streaming device on the market today.
8. APPLE TV
If you’re an iTunes user who owns an iOS device and a MacBook, then Apple TV might be the best choice for you. Like Chromecast and Roku, Apple TV gives you easy access to the Big Three as well as HBO and Showtime; what sets it apart for Apple users is its seamless integration of iTunes and other Apple apps. It also comes with a nifty touch-surface remote that lets you swipe or use Siri to surf channels. With prices starting at $149, it’s the most expensive set top-streaming box for cord cutters, but it will be well worth the cost if you already live in the Apple ecosystem.
9. PLEX
If you already have a large digital movie, music, and TV library, you can use Plex to easily watch your media files from your computer or television. Sign up for and install the Plex Media Server (it’s free!) on your computer and it will catalog, organize, and label your files into a user-friendly interface that’s watchable on Apple TV, Roku, Chromecast, Android and iOS devices, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
10. STANDALONE PREMIUM NETWORK SUBSCRIPTIONS
In the past, if you wanted premium cable networks like HBO and Showtime, you’d have to include it to your cable subscription package at an additional cost. But the networks have gotten hip to the cord-cutting trend and now offer standalone subscriptions. HBO offers HBO Now for $14.99 a month, while Starz recently introduced a streaming service for $8.99 a month that is compatible with Apple TV, Android, Roku, and Chromecast. Showtime offers streaming for $10.99 a month, or you can add Showtime to your Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime accounts for an extra $8.99.
11. DIGITAL NEWS OUTLETS
There are also great streaming options for news junkies. While CNN and MSNBC don’t have standalone streaming services, the cable news networks are available on Sling TV. News outlets like CBS News, Sky News, ABC News, Bloomberg TV, Fusion, and Newsy, meanwhile, all offer free live streaming services for Roku and Apple TV.
12. SPORTS PASSES
For some people, watching live sporting events has been one of the biggest barriers to completely canceling their cable subscriptions. But over the years, major sports leagues and entertainment venues have started to cater to the demands of cord cutters. Now you can watch live, out-of-market Major League Baseball games on MLB.tv, hockey with the NHL GameCenter Live, and basketball with NBA League Pass. The NFL and DirecTV are now offering NFL Sunday Ticket to non-DirecTV customers, so more people can watch live, out-of-market NFL games every Sunday. You can even subscribe to the WWE Network for $10 a month for access to an extensive back catalog library and every new pay-per-view event.
They may not look it, but pigeons are surprisingly smart birds. With a little help from humans, they can learn to deliver messages, spot cancer cells on a mammogram, and even distinguish between the paintings of Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. Now, the latest study on pigeon intellect, published in the journal PNAS, finds that the remarkably bright birds can even distinguish between written words and nonsensical strings of letters.
Researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany trained pigeons to peck four-letter English words as they appeared on a screen, or peck a separate symbol when a four-letter nonsense term appeared. Over time, they trained four pigeons to build “vocabularies” of between 26 and 58 written words. They found that not only could the pigeons successfully identify the words they’d learned, they could often identify new words they’d never seen.
Though they lacked decoding skills, the study concluded that the birds were capable of processing orthographic information. That is, though the birds were unable to read and understand the words they saw, they were still able to successfully identify visual patterns (or “orthographic properties”) that defined words. For instance, researchers observed that the pigeons could recognize “bigrams” (letter pairs) that were associated with words. They learned to distinguish bigrams commonly used in words (for instance, “AL” and “EL”) in order to distinguish words from nonsense.
The findings are significant, not only because they show pigeons shouldn’t be dismissed as “bird-brained,” but because they reveal that orthographic learning isn’t unique to humans and other primates. In a statement, researcher Onur Güntürkün said, “That pigeons—separated by 300 million years of evolution from humans and having vastly different brain architectures—show such a skill as orthographic processing is astonishing.”
June 20, 2007 was a landmark date in weather history. During a thunderstorm over Oklahoma, a lightning bolt extended 199.5 miles from outside Tulsa to the border of Texas. As Smithsonian reports, the spectacular phenomenon was recently confirmed by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) as the longest lightning streak on record.
This particular bolt of lighting wasn’t what meteorologists are used to seeing from thunderstorms. The vast majority of lightning can be classified as “negative lightning”—this occurs when a negative charge strikes the ground from a cloud, typically spanning 6 miles at most.
The record-breaking Oklahoma bolt belonged to the 5 percent of lighting created by a positive charge. Positive lighting contains 10 times the energy of a negative bolt and generally spans up to 25 miles. As the Oklahoma case shows, extreme examples are sometimes produced under the right conditions. When the 200-mile bolt lit up the sky, it could be seen from as far away as Colorado.
The super-sized lightning wasn’t the only record recently recognized by the World Meteorological Organization. They also named a 7.74-second flash observed over Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur, France on August 30, 2012 as the longest lightning duration ever recorded.
These electrifying events mark the first time lightning has made it into WMO’s Archive of Weather and Climate Extremes. They’ve also changed the way the organization defines the phenomenon. According to the report from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the WMO committee has unanimously recommended revising the definition of lightning from a “series of electrical processes taking place within one second” to a “series of electrical processes taking place continuously.”
Better understanding what lightning is capable of can also help experts recommend more accurate safety guidelines in the face of extreme weather. The number of annual lightning deaths has been steadily declining since the 1940s, and that’s partly due to a raised awareness of weather safety. For now, the experts at WMO still recommend “when thunder roars, go indoors” as a universal rule of thumb.
Created by Steven Bochco, the mind behind one of the most innovative network shows ever in Hill Street Blues, and Terry Louise Fisher, a former entertainment lawyer, novelist, and Cagney & Lacey writer/producer, L.A. Law ran for eight seasons on NBC from 1986 to 1994, collecting 15 Emmy Awards during its run. The series—which premiered 30 years ago, on September 15, 1986—centered around the ambitious (and horny) lawyers and junior staff of the Los Angeles law firm McKenzie, Brackman, Chaney and Kuzak. The attorneys tackled then-hot-button issues and made American television history while doing so.
1. COMPOSER MIKE POST WROTE THE THEME MUSIC AROUND A CAR TRUNK SLAMMING.
Steven Bochco told composer Mike Post that he wanted to start the opening sequence with a car trunk slamming shut. Post, who had worked with Bochco on Hill Street Blues (and also created the iconic theme music for Law & Order) wrote the L.A. Law theme based on that directive.
2. CORBIN BERNSEN HAD TROUBLE FIGURING OUT HIS CHARACTER.
Corbin Bernsen’s first audition with Bochco in New York didn’t go very well. He auditioned for the role of Michael Kuzak (which eventually went to Harry Hamlin) and was suffering from the flu. Bochco thought it was a “little disappointing” because he thought Bernsen was good-looking. The actor went to Los Angeles and caught a woman with blonde hair turning her head to watch him run down Mulholland Drive, which is when he locked into who the character of Arnie Becker was. Bernsen said it was smooth sailing after that. “I went in the next day and essentially the day after I got the job.”
3. JILL EIKENBERRY WAS BATTLING BREAST CANCER DURING THE SHOW’S FIRST SEASON.
Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images
After shooting the pilot, Jill Eikenberry—who played Ann Kelsey—was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her husband, Michael Tucker (Stuart Markowitz on the show), called Bochco to say the two couldn’t do the show because of it, but Bochco assured them that Eikenberry would be off the set by 5 p.m. every day to go to UCLA for radiation treatments. Going against their publicist’s advice, Eikenberry revealed the ordeal in 1988. (They later fired the publicist.)
4. SUSAN DEY AUDITIONED IN AN ODD PLACE.
Susan Dey read for Grace Van Owen at a grammar school picnic. (Both Dey and Bochco’s children were there).
5. THEY SPENT MORE THAN $1 MILLION ON THE SETS.
Three sets were built for L.A. Law—including an exact replica of a Los Angeles courtroom, complete with a removable jury box and a courtroom elevator—to the tune of more than $1 million. Keeping the cast in designer duds was no cheap affair either; the wardrobe budget was about $40,000 per episode.
6. HARRY HAMLIN IS EATING SOMETHING IN EVERY CONFERENCE ROOM SCENE.
“If you go back and watch the pilot as the very first conference room scene ends, I reach over and pull a sandwich toward me,” Hamlin told the Los Angeles Times. “I picked it up as they were shooting my last bit. I had my mouth full of food. We shot another conference room scene, and there was a plate of croissants. I thought, ‘I will make this a thing.’ If you look go back and look, I will be eating in every conference room scene. It became a running gag with the prop department.”
7. TERRY LOUISE FISHER MADE UP THE VENUS BUTTERFLY.
In the ninth episode of the series, titled “The Venus Butterfly,” Stuart (Tucker) wins Ann (Eikenberry) over with his mysterious sex move, known as The Venus Butterfly. Bochco initially told Eikenberry about the idea late one night over the phone while she was visiting her mother in Wisconsin, but it was Fisher who wrote that part of the episode, which would later win the co-creators the Emmy for Outstanding Writing in a Drama Series. Fisher insisted she had just made it up, but viewers wrote in and begged the writers to tell them what it was. A perfume company and erotic toy manufacturer asked Bochco to purchase the rights to the name “Venus Butterfly,” but he turned them down.
8. BOSTON ATTORNEY DAVID E. KELLEY CAME ON AS A WRITER DURING THE FIRST SEASON.
While working as a lawyer in Boston, David E. Kelley wrote the movie From the Hip (1987) in his free time, which landed him an agent and caught the attention of Bochco, who hired him as a writer for L.A. Law after reading just the first 30 pages of that script. Kelley asked for a five-month leave of absence from his law firm, but L.A. Law quickly turned into a full-time job. After Bochco left the show atthe end of the third season, Kelley was promoted to executive producer.
9. BOCHCO LIKED TO PUNISH HIS BROTHER-IN-LAW’S CHARACTER.
Vince Bucci/Getty Images
Douglas Brackman, Jr. was played by Alan Rachins, who is married to Joanna Frank, Bochco’s sister (who played Brackman, Jr.’s wife, then ex-wife, Sheila on the series). In 1990, The New York Times listed some of the things poor Douglas went through on L.A. Law:
“During the five seasons that ‘L.A. Law’ has been broadcast, the boorish, balding Douglas—in addition to being hung upside down in a hospital room with skin grafts on his posterior—has had a Slinky caught in his braces, has engaged the services of a sex therapist because sex gives him gas and makes him faint, flipped his toupee in aerobics class while trying to impress the young instructor, discovered he has a pair of boorish, balding half-brothers, been arrested in a sushi bar and has voted himself out of the senior partnership at the firm that bears his father’s name.”
It was enough that the third season was devoted to bringing Douglas “back to normalcy,” to counteract his many humiliations from season two.
10. THE SHOW INFLUENCED ACTUAL LAW, FOR GOOD AND BAD.
In 1990, a lawyer in Miami Beach argued to an (unconvinced) judge that the jury had acquitted the doctors in his client’s malpractice suit because a very similar case was a storyline in the previous night’s episode of L.A. Law, where the doctor defendant had also been found free of guilt (the judge had not seen the episode). In that same New York Times article, it was reported that L.A. Law was responsible for increased applications to law schools, and that attorneys had changed their approach to their attire and the way they talked to juries.
After Abby Perkins fought to regain custody of her son on the show, an attorney sent a letter to Michele Greene (the actress who portrayed Perkins) telling her that the storyline had affected the outcome of a child-abuse case in Texas.
11. EVEN DIANA MULDAUR WAS SHOCKED AT HER ELEVATOR DEATH.
Kelley explained that Diana Muldaur’s character, Rosalind Shays, was a “finite” character, because he never wanted her to become nicer over time or lose her edge. The more the writers thought about having her fall down an empty elevator shaft, the more it made sense to them. Kelley said that while he didn’t tell the actress she was going to perish before sending her the script to season five’s “Good to the Last Drop,” he had warned Muldaur in the past that her character wasn’t long for this world. In an interview, Muldaur claimed she had no idea Shays was going to die until reading the script. She refused to do the stunt herself; her stunt double needed 10 takes to get it right.
12. HOMER SIMPSON MADE AN APPEARANCE.
Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, played a man fired from playing Homer Simpson at a theme park in the season seven premiere “L.A. Lawless.” He was hidden underneath a crude Homer costume. “Usually I don’t want to associate myself on camera as the voice of Homer Simpson,” Castellaneta said. “But this was so cool that I had to do it.”
13. IT FEATURED THE FIRST LESBIAN KISS ON AMERICAN NETWORK TELEVISION.
While Amanda Donohoe (who played C.J. Lamb) and Michele Greene’s kiss was groundbreaking, Greene revealed it was a sweeps stunt. “I think it was a positive step, especially at that time,” she said. “Now we have gay and lesbian characters having relationships on mainstream TV shows like Will & Grace and that is a big step from the days of Abby and C.J. Lamb. On L.A. Law they never intended to explore the issue of a relationship between two women; it was about ratings during sweeps so I always found it a bit cynical.” Some advertisers pulled their commercials for the episode, “He’s a Crowd,” but NBC simply replaced them and no money was lost.
14. TWO CHARACTERS TRANSFERRED FROM ANOTHER SHOW ON ANOTHER NETWORK, MAKING A DIFFERENT KIND OF TV HISTORY.
Civil Wars, an ABC series, was canceled, allowing lawyer Eli Levinson (Alan Rosenberg) and legal secretary Denise Iannello (Debi Mazar) to pop up on L.A. Law and join the cast in its final season. It was the first time primetime characters moved from one drama series to another network’s non-spinoff series. On L.A. Law, it was explained that Levinson was Stuart Markowitz’s cousin.
15. THERE’S A REBOOT IN THE WORKS FROM BOCHCO.
YouTube
Original writer Bill Finkelstein told Bochco of an idea he had for a potential new version of the series. “I called my friends at Fox, because they own the show, and they were very interested in having a conversation, and so Billy and I sat down and we sort of reconceptualized what L.A. Law would look like and be about over 30 years later,” Bochco told Variety earlier this year. Bochco reported that Fox is “very enthusiastic” about doing it.
As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, September 20.
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Since Berlin began welcoming Syrian asylum-seekers in 2015, the city is continuing to go above and beyond to make refugees feel more at home. As The Art Newspaper reports, an integration effort from the German city is offering free museum tours in Arabic.
Multaka, Arabic for “meeting place,” is a cultural program designed for and led by refugees. More than 20 trained tour guides from Syria and Iraq conduct tours twice a week in four museums around Berlin. The institutions they visit might showcase Islamic art or artifacts from German history. According to Stefan Weber, director of the Museum of Islamic Art and one of the initiators of the project, guides are usually attracted to pieces they find meaning in.
“With the help of objects from our past, questions from our present are debated,” he told Le Journal des Arts. “Museums become spaces of reflection on collective identities.”
Since the initiative launched in fall of 2015, more than 4000 museum guests have taken part. For some, the Multaka program marked their first visit to a museum.
The program has also provided a valuable opportunity for migrants coming to Germany from professional backgrounds. Displaced refugees with advanced degrees often struggle to find work in their field, and Multaka has given work to 25 tour guides with experience in a variety of disciplines. And as DW reported earlier this year, the Syrian and Iraqi tour guides are paid the same as their German peers.
With two awards under its belt, Multaka has already proven to be a success. In April, the Federal Ministry of Culture granted the program €85,000 (or nearly $95,000) to launch its next phase: intercultural studios that encourage exchange between locals and refugees.
In January 1939, an ordinary American couple, Waitstill and Martha Sharp, said yes to a mission that 17 others in their Unitarian congregation in Wellesley, Massachusetts had refused. Their willingness to step up would go on to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany before and during World War II. The Sharps’ grandson, Artemis Joukowsky, has co-directed a documentary about his grandparents’ heroic past, called Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War, with renowned filmmaker Ken Burns, to be aired on PBS on September 20.
Joukowsky, a filmmaker and private investor, didn’t know much about his grandparents’ remarkable past until the ninth grade, when he had to interview a person of moral courage for a high school project in New York City. His mother suggested his maternal grandmother, Martha. “Little did I know my grandmother had worked in the underground, that she had evaded and defied Nazi officials, that she had this whole life with my grandfather I had never known about,” Joukowsky tells mental_floss.
When the Sharps said yes to their mission, billed as an “intervention against evil,” it was only supposed to last several months; after all, they would have to leave behind their two young children and a comfortable life in Wellesley, where Waitstill was a Unitarian minister and Martha a former social worker. Instead, their mission would continue on and off for several years—and inform their work for the rest of their lives.
While it may seem odd that a couple with no Jewish ancestry themselves would undertake such a monumental task, Joukowsky says, “Unitarians view Jews very much as their brothers and sisters, because Jesus was a Jew.” In his view, Unitarianism is like a Christian version of reform Judaism. His grandparents, he says, “were active humanists in the sense that everyone is valued and important.”
When they arrived in Prague, Czechoslovakia on February 23, 1939, the Sharps found themselves in a train station teeming with crying women and children whose only hope of rescue was that their husbands could get out of the country and send for them later. By then, Germany was urging Jews to leave the country, and more than 200,000 of the more than 500,000 Jews that had lived in Germany in 1933 had left. Many were stuck in stop-over European countries, including Czechoslovakia, still seeking a final home, while thousands of others were already being sent to concentration camps.
Joukowsky says that judging from his grandmother’s journals from the time, the couple understood the magnitude of the work ahead of them. Working with Czech Unitarians and other refugee supporters, they quickly learned techniques for deciphering cryptic memos in German; how to destroy incriminating messages that they sent to each other; how to evade Gestapo who followed and spied on them; and how to falsify and forge papers and documents necessary to get people out of the country. Martha put her own life at risk when, along with the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, which ran its own underground, she rode a train full of Jewish women and children with falsified papers straight through the heart of Nazi Germany itself, en route to the Dutch border. They were followed, searched, questioned, and under constant scrutiny.
Had they been caught, the consequences of their actions would have been at least imprisonment and more likely execution. Yet they persisted in their efforts until August 1939, when Waitstill was denied re-entry from Geneva, and Martha got word through her underground network that she would be arrested if she stayed in Prague. A few days later, they were on a ship back to the U.S. when Germany invaded Poland and Britain declared war, putting their ship in danger as a potential target of German warships.
They made it back to the U.S. for a brief reunion with their children, who in their absence had been cared for by friends, but they weren’t home for long. By the spring of 1940, the president of the American Unitarian Association, Frederick Eliot—who was also a friend—contacted the Sharps. Eliot insisted they return to Europe, where the refugee crisis had only worsened.
Despite misgivings about leaving their children yet again, they returned to the continent, this time setting up camp in Lisbon, Portugal, and working to help refugees fleeing occupied France. Perhaps as penance for her own left-behind children, Martha eventually became heavily involved in helping children flee, and she stayed in Europe for several months after Waitstill returned to the U.S. The children she helped were eventually able to emigrate to the United States.
Though it is impossible to count the exact number, since many documents were destroyed, Joukowsky estimates they saved “hundreds” of refugees from their deaths, many of whom were children. Yet despite all they did, for every person they helped flee the Nazis—not all of whom were Jewish—there were thousands more they couldn’t help, which Joukowsky says caused them great anguish and guilt. “They were devastated by all the people they couldn’t help,” he says. “They were angry at the U.S. government for being so anti-Semitic.”
Even after they both returned home in 1941 and got back to the task of raising their two children—and though their marriage suffered—they continued to work with refugees and other political causes for the rest of their lives. After the war, Martha stayed active in her causes, and even mounted a failed campaign for Congress; she was defeated by Joseph W. Martin Jr., a Massachusetts Republican who became Speaker of the House the following year. She later worked for the National Security Resources Board under the Truman Administration. And she kept up the work of social justice on behalf of Jews, helping to found “Children to Palestine,” an interfaith effort to bring European Jewish refugee children to new homes in what is Israel today. She died in 1999. Waitstill continued to work as a Unitarian minister and gave his support to a number of organizations. He passed away in 1984.
On June 13, 2006, the Israeli government honored the Sharps with its special title, “Righteous Among the Nations,” given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. The Sharps were only the second and third U.S. citizens, after Varian Fry, to receive this title.
When Joukowsky sent a rough cut of his film to Ken Burns for potential collaboration, he knew he was taking a big risk. Burns tells mental_floss that he is “bombarded all the time” by “tubs” of DVDs and films that people hope he’ll screen, comment on, and collaborate on. He rarely has time to offer feedback.
However, Burns immediately felt a spark while watching Defying the Nazis. “It was clearly a good, complicated story, and there at its beating heart was this fundamental question that the Sharps presumed everybody would [do what they did],” he says. “I loved this existential question: Would I be able to do the kinds of things the Sharps did in service of other people they had no idea about?”
He agreed to work on the project as co-director, re-editing the film and bringing Tom Hanks on to do the voiceover narration of Waitstill.
The questions the documentary raised for Burns are the same ones that have informed Joukowsky’s entire life. When he was diagnosed at 14 with spinal muscular atrophy, his grandmother Martha would come to the hospital and say, “You’re not going to feel for sorry for yourself. Let’s get out and help other people,” he recalls. “She really taught me to go outside myself—to not focus on my own troubles or my own issues.”
Joukowsky partnered with the Facing History and Ourselves project to teach a unit on his grandparents and explore ideas of moral courage. Through his foundation, the Joukowsky Family Foundation, he created The Sharp Prize, a social justice award that “promotes humanitarian work in the example of Waitstill and Martha Sharp and seeks to empower rescuers today who are risking their lives for others.” In 2015, it gave out its first prize of $10,000 to Marina Goldman, of the Katanya Women’s Development Association, for her community work with women and children in Sierra Leone, and this year awarded $25,000 to Team Woodhouse, an organization that raised funds to send rescue workers directly to Lesvos, Greece, where they provided food, clothing, and shelter to more than 1000 Syrian refugees.
Joukowsky feels Defying the Nazis is relevant to today’s political and cultural climate. “I think the most beautiful part of this story is that it really resonates with today in a way that’s almost uncanny in terms of the isolationism of America, the confusion about race in America, the xenophobic taunting of Muslims,” he says. “I think it’s a very timely conversation.”
Burns concurs. “We see demagoguery today, we see the impulse to go [to] the basest parts of ourselves—and we also see ourselves being called by what Lincoln said were the better angels of our nature,” he says. “The Sharps were about that.”
All images: screencaps from PBS’s trailer for Defying the Nazis: The Sharps’ War
