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War is celebrating the 50th anniversary of their hugely successful third studio album, The World is a Ghetto. The milestone will be marked on Friday, November 24, with the Record Store Day Black…

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New Jersey’s U.S. Senate Democratic primary, likely the end of the road for twice-indicted Robert Menendez, will be shaped by similarly distasteful machine politics.

by Ken Armstrong

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Serial podcast series “The Kids of Rutherford County” begins with a hum. It’s a low hum, sort of ominous, that lasts for two or three seconds before the podcast’s host, Meribah Knight, comes in with, “It was a March afternoon in Rutherford County, Tennessee …”

The hum is a bass note, a low F, the lowest note J.R. Kaufman can play on his accordion in the Los Angeles home-slash-studio he shares with his half-brother and bandmate Justin Rubenstein. Once Knight begins speaking, Kaufman’s note slips beneath her voice, still there, but in the background.

The stories investigative reporters tell have drama. They have tension and tragedy, a natural fit for orchestration. (See, for example, “The Night Doctrine,” an animated film from ProPublica with music by Afghan composer Milad Yousufi.) Words and instruments work in tandem, as evidenced by the opening of “The Kids of Rutherford County.”

That March afternoon, Knight says, school was out for the day, “and a dozen or so little kids were playing a game of pickup basketball in someone’s backyard.” An upright bass comes in, doubled with Moog synthesizer, making four low thumps. “And then, as kids do, one said something about another kid’s mom,” Knight says. A Juno synthesizer runs through a bunch of guitar pedals, and then a high, oscillating melody arrives, from flutes and clarinets. The insult leads to shoving, Knight says, and shoving leads to a couple of feeble punches. Enter trumpet, harp and electric bass, all still in the background, kind of hidden, the music swirling, in step with the story.

Knight introduces the series, “This is ‘The Kids of Rutherford County,’” and as she finishes speaking, the music comes out of hiding; drums kick in, there’s guitar, a dash of pedal steel, and an explosion of trumpet, trombone and saxophone. It is here, for about 25 seconds, that the listener gets to appreciate the name of Rubenstein’s and Kaufman’s band — The Blasting Company — before the music slips back beneath the surface of the words.

This podcast series originated with a print story that Knight, a reporter at Nashville Public Radio, did in partnership with ProPublica. The story detailed how Rutherford County, southeast of Nashville, had illegally jailed hundreds, if not thousands, of children. After that story published in 2021, ProPublica and Nashville Public Radio partnered with Serial and The New York Times to produce a four-part podcast.

For ProPublica, partnering with Serial meant we got to watch colleagues do something we rarely do. We saw them set investigative reporting to music.

Between the two of them, Rubenstein and Kaufman play at least 22 different instruments on the podcast. Those instruments include the expected (violin, piano) and the less expected (pedal steel guitar). Rubenstein plays a lot of brass and strings, Kaufman a lot of woodwinds and keyboards. They also brought in five friends to play. Kaufman, asked to describe the podcast’s music, says, “I was calling it minimalist country classical synth music, and then Justin added, ‘with maximal tendencies.’”

In an Instagram post, Rubenstein and Kaufman joke that the music reflects their “super inclusive musical methodology: All instruments, everywhere, at all times.”

Rubenstein and Kaufman did not study music at a conservatory. Their education was more organic. Both played cello as kids, and it kind of rolled from there. “I basically learned the piano by not practicing cello,” Kaufman says. Rubenstein picked up the guitar because it was cool. As a young adult, Rubenstein, with a friend, bought a short school bus for $2,000, converted it to run on vegetable oil, and then moved into it with his brother. They lived on the bus while busking across the country, Kaufman on accordion, Rubenstein the trombone. The brothers formed The Blasting Company 15 years ago.

While Kaufman and Rubenstein are the composers, the conductor is Phoebe Wang, Serial’s senior sound designer and mixer. She finds the musicians and commissions the score, working with the musicians on the mood she’s looking for. Then she stitches and weaves the music throughout the story.

With “The Kids of Rutherford County,” Wang wanted the music to convey a sense of place. At the same time, “I didn’t want it to sound like a caricature of southern culture,” she says. She wanted music that isn’t too cleaned up or precious, that makes people feel something.

Wang found The Blasting Company courtesy of Spotify, when their hauntingly gorgeous song “Candy” popped up in her Discover Weekly mixtape. For Kaufman and Rubenstein, getting noticed in roundabout ways is kind of a thing. They got hired to score “Over the Garden Wall,” an animated miniseries on Cartoon Network, after one of the show’s writers heard them busking at the Hollywood Farmers Market. For this podcast, providing a sense of place would not be a reach. The two were born and raised in Nashville, next to Rutherford County.

Julie Snyder is Serial’s executive editor and its co-creator. She says that when scoring a podcast, she wants the music to help with comprehension most of all. These are long stories. There’s a lot of talking. Music can act like a cue for your brain. When music starts, you pay attention. When it stops, you pay attention. Music can be used in the same way that a section break is used in print.

With “The Kids of Rutherford County,” the score can be traced to a spirit of experimentation. On Zoom calls with Wang and Daniel Guillemette, a senior producer for Serial, the two musicians had woodwinds, horns, keyboards and whatnot scattered about, visible in their background. Rubenstein remembers the pair from Serial spying different instruments and saying, “Try that thing, try that.”

“We were game to try anything,” Rubenstein says.

In the end, Serial used close to 20 tracks that The Blasting Company created for the show.

Wang, asked to illustrate how she used particular tracks in the podcast, highlighted three:

Listen to “Mother’s Children”

“Mother’s Children” is the podcast’s theme song. It’s the track described at the top of this story and used in the beginning of the podcast’s first episode, as a childhood scrap blows up into something more. Wang calls it a “beautiful, ambient track” that is a slow burn. “It feels like it’s setting something up.” Since it moves slowly, she wanted it to deliver a real payoff — and that payoff is the blast that comes when Knight finishes her introduction. “It’s like the world is opening up to you,” Wang says of that moment.

For Kaufman and Rubenstein, that moment in the song is memorable because it’s the one time they were asked to go bigger. Most other times, with most other tracks, they were asked to be more restrained. But in this instance, as Wang kept requesting more, Rubenstein kept layering in trombones and trumpets while Kaufman added saxophones.

Listen to “Stone Door”

The “Stone Door” track — named for a hiking trail in Tennessee’s South Cumberland State Park, is threaded throughout the show. It was inspired by chamber music — a piece for a string quartet by Maurice Ravel, specifically — to which the composers added a clarinet section reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, then layered in electric guitar and rock drums. For Wang, this track provided “a feeling that something is off.” And that’s what The Blasting Company was going for. While scoring the podcast, Rubenstein says, “we’re thinking of the cognitive dissonance in the show, that things are always on the verge of falling apart.”

In Episode 1, the song starts within the first 10 minutes, as a child is writing down names for a police officer. (This will lead to all kinds of trouble.) In Episode 2, the track plays as a lawyer, flabbergasted at what’s before him, looks around a courtroom and thinks, “What the hell are you people doing?” In the third episode, the song comes in as Knight describes the tension between two realities: what the lawyers see (an illegal operation) and what the judge sees (a system with sound criteria). And in the final episode, the track appears one last time, as lawyers who have sued the county are driving around, searching, futilely, for potential plaintiffs who stand to be compensated, if only they can be found.

Listen to “Rites of Passage”

Kaufman remembers sitting on the floor, on a yoga mat as Rubenstein began playing a beautiful melody on the violin that would become “Rites of Passage.” It was “bendy” and “slidy,” Kaufman says. They added guitar, flute, other strings and drums, and sent it to Wang. Wang remembers listening to the song for the first time. “This is a special track,” she thought to herself. The strings were enveloping. Listening, she got a sense of place. She wound up using the track in a special spot at the end of Episode 1. The track plays as Knight describes how Rutherford County has been jailing a staggering number of children, so many that for the county’s kids, getting jailed was “almost a rite of passage.” The end of an episode is one of Wang’s favorite places for her favorite pieces of music, because the listener sits with the song. It’s a place for the music to shine.

An updated document from the Office of Management and Budget will make it easier to enact regulations.

by ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. This podcast was created with Serial/The New York Times and WPLN/Nashville Public Radio.

When a video surfaced of an after-school scuffle, 11 Black children were arrested. Their crime: not stepping in to stop a fight. The arrests set off a firestorm of controversy — and an investigation into the juvenile justice practices in one Tennessee county.

Reporters Meribah Knight with Nashville Public Radio and Ken Armstrong with ProPublica obtained years’ worth of personnel files, state inspection reports, emails, depositions and other records, and reports from all 98 juvenile courts in the state.

What they discovered was that for more than a decade, Rutherford County had arrested and illegally jailed hundreds of children. And behind those decisions was a powerful judge, Donna Scott Davenport, who went unchecked by higher authorities in Tennessee.

That work, done through ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, led to a series of stories; it also led to an outcry from community leaders and Tennessee lawmakers. The university where Davenport taught a criminal justice class cut ties with her; members of Congress asked the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the county’s juvenile justice system; and Davenport announced that she would step down in 2022 rather than run for reelection.

There was, however, more to tell. In collaboration with Serial Productions and The New York Times, Knight reported and hosted a podcast about the two down-on-their luck lawyers who recognized the broken system and tried to shut it down. “The Kids of Rutherford County” is a four-part narrative series that reveals a juvenile court shrouded by confidentiality rules, illuminating how something so secretive and illegal was allowed to grow. How did this happen? What does it take to stop it? And will the people in charge face any consequences?

Listen to the entire series in the audio player below, or follow the link to your favorite podcast app.

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Amazon Music
• Google Podcasts

Episode 1: The Egregious Video

A video of little kids fighting in Rutherford County, Tennessee, comes to the attention of a local police officer. Her investigation leads to the arrest of 11 kids for watching the fight. The arrests do not go smoothly.

The arrests lead to a public scandal. But there seems to be a difference in how people on the outside of this juvenile justice system see things and how people on the inside do. What the outside world will eventually learn is that this juvenile justice system has been locking kids up illegally.

Episode 2: What the Hell Are You People Doing?

A young lawyer named Wes Clark begins defending kids at the Rutherford County juvenile court. He quickly sees a troubling pattern: kids jailed for minor offenses, even when the law says they shouldn’t be. But he can’t always persuade the juvenile judge to let those kids out.

Wes is frustrated and demoralized, even more so because no one else at the court seems to think there’s a problem with how things are done there.

That is until Wes meets another lawyer who sees things the way he does. When one of Wes’ clients is held in solitary confinement, they both think they have a case that might finally allow them to strike back.

Episode 3: Would You Like to Sue the Government?

After winning their solitary case, Wes Clark and his law partner Mark Downton get a call from the ACLU: Would they like to represent some kids who were arrested for watching a fight? As Wes begins his research into the case, he comes across a line in a police report saying there was a “judicial requirement” to arrest kids. From this he learns some Rutherford County policies for arresting and jailing kids violate the law. He and Mark realize they have a massive class-action lawsuit on their hands.

Episode 4: Dedicated Public Servants

The lawyers settle their case on behalf of the kids wrongfully arrested or illegally jailed by Rutherford County. The county ends its illegal detention policy, and some kids who were wronged by the system get paid. But none of the people behind the illegal policies face serious consequences. So what’s changed in Rutherford County, and what hasn’t?

Listen to “The Kids of Rutherford County”

Toys that move, make noise, and light up are winding up in landfills — but they could be recycled, with better policies.

In an era of rising heat waves, experts weigh in on how to plan for concerts and other large events safely.

I just read yet another review of Ridley Scott's Napoleon, and it made me wonder yet again about biopics. They are always "based on," which is a nice way of saying that they routinely lie about whoever's life they're selling. I gather that Napoleon is especially egregious on this front. But why? Popular biographies in ...continue reading "Why do biopics lie?"

This blog post contains content that may be sensitive in nature. Shortly after noon on November 22, 1963, 35th US President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed while traveling in a motorcade through Dallas, Texas. As part of a campaign tour, the presidential procession had been winding through the crowd-lined suburban streets of Dallas’s …

Continue reading "60 Years Later: The JFK Assassination Unfolds in the St. Louis Newsroom"

Why does so much OpenAI drama happen late at night? We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience ...continue reading "Sam is back"

Tim Stevenson of Washington, MO became a Real Rock Hero in the Real Rock Army today

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The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch award guests one of the best views of St. Louis’ working riverfront, the Gateway Arch and the city skyline.   Narrated by the captain […]

The post St. Louis Riverfront Cruise appeared first on Explore St. Louis.

The woman was pronounced dead at the scene. The man was taken to a St. Louis area hospital where he was later pronounced dead.