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Selasa, 25 Februari 2020

Every 'Bachelor' Contestant Should Follow Madison On Fantasy Suite Sex - The Federalist

Every future “Bachelor” contestant should follow Madison Prewett’s lead and demand the object of their affection abstain from sex during the competition. As Madison noted on Monday’s episode, if she were to win the show, Peter would be proposing marriage after having slept with her costar(s) only six days prior. That’s a perfectly reasonable line to draw.

Madison reluctantly told Peter he would need to fight the temptation of the Fantasy Suites if he truly wanted to “move forward” with her. “If next week you were to, like, sleep with somebody else, it would be really hard for me to really, like, move forward in this,” she said. After dates with each of the final three women—and despite professing his love for Madison—Peter admitted to having been “intimate” with another contestant on the show. “I can’t lie to you about that,” he told her.

“I literally can’t talk to you right now,” Madison replied, getting up from the table to walk outside.

Whether Madison left the show over Peter’s decision is still unclear. But her request was entirely fair, and highlights “The Bachelor’s” seedy structure, which encourages men and women to a) pursue marriage while b) potentially enjoying “Fantasy Suites” with each contestant shortly before proposing to one of them. That’s disgusting, and Madison was right to be uncomfortable with the setup. (It’s also worth noting she knew what she was signing up for.)

I don’t like “The Bachelor,” but I understand why millions of people tune in every week. The whole ordeal is too performative for my liking, and the Corinnes are few and far between, mostly because the show needs to cast people plausibly suited for its likable stars. (Who thought Pete was likable, I do not know.) Still, “The Bachelor” deserves credit for casting contestants representative of the Christian community, whose struggles with the temptations of premarital sex are ignored in most of popular culture.

Christian or not, the Fantasy Suite option is gross. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Windmill Pete is genuinely in love with three different women. Sex will not clarify their feelings, it will confuse them. Aside from being a reasonable way to test Peter’s devotion, Madison’s request was in everyone’s best emotional interest.

Producers’ unprecedented decision to have the women share a suite during the overnight date week helps prove that point. If the possibility of Pete’s intimacy with multiple women was uncomplicated and meant little, it would hardly be worth emphasizing the discomfort induced by close quarters. But we know sex is not meaningless, and we know Peter decided to be “intimate” with another contestant after Madison said it could cost him their potential future.

I have no idea where Peter’s heart lies, and I fully understand that it must be odd to have a stable of attractive mates vie desperately for your hand. In terms of ending up together, Pilot Pete told Madison on Monday’s episode, “coming into this week, I could see that with other people, too.” It’s a strange situation, which is precisely what keeps viewers coming back for more.

Nevertheless, every future contestant should do exactly as Madison did and ask their bachelor to abstain from intimacy in the Fantasy Suites. It will mitigate his own pain and amplify his own joy, while also instructively testing his potential spouse, and contributing to the creation of a culture that mitigates the personal pain of their viewers.

If such a request is rooted in faith, that’s great. But religion or not, it’s just common sense. Pete may believe he loves Madison, but if he respected her, he would have been able to exercise some self-control. Hopefully she learned from his decision. Hopefully future contestants did too.

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2020-02-25 12:08:50Z
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Harvey Weinstein found guilty of 2 out of 5 charges in monumental trial | Nightline - ABC News

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Harvey Weinstein found guilty of 2 out of 5 charges in monumental trial | Nightline ABC News
Judge Napolitano calls Weinstein verdict a 'monumental setback' for government Fox News
Stunned Harvey Weinstein jailed after guilty verdict | WNT ABC News
The Harvey Weinstein Verdict Is a Watershed — and a Warning The New York Times
The Weinstein verdict is a huge win for #MeToo – but what's next? The Guardian
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2020-02-25 12:00:04Z
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Placido Domingo Abused His Power And Sexually Harassed Women, Investigation Finds - HuffPost

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — An investigation into legendary singer Placido Domingo by the U.S. union representing opera performers found more than two dozen people who said they were sexually harassed or witnessed inappropriate behavior by the superstar when he held senior management positions at Washington National Opera and Los Angeles Opera, according to people familiar with the findings.

The investigation, conducted by lawyers hired by the American Guild of Musical Artists, concluded that the accounts from 27 people showed a clear pattern of sexual misconduct and abuse of power by Domingo spanning at least two decades, according to those who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the findings.

The union’s investigation was the first of two independent inquiries launched after multiple women accused Domingo of sexual harassment and abusing his power.

In response to a request for comment from the AP, Domingo issued a statement saying:

“I have taken time over the last several months to reflect on the allegations that various colleagues of mine have made against me. I respect that these women finally felt comfortable enough to speak out, and I want them to know that I am truly sorry for the hurt that I caused them. I accept full responsibility for my actions, and I have grown from this experience.”

The union’s investigation was the first of two independent inquiries launched after multiple women accused Domingo of sexual harassment and abusing his power in two AP stories published last year. The second inquiry, still ongoing, was launched by LA Opera, where Domingo had been general director since 2003 before resigning in October.

According to the people familiar with the contents of the union’s investigation, lawyers from the firm Cozen O’Connor interviewed 55 people from September until late December. In addition to the 27 who said they experienced or witnessed sexually suggestive behavior on the part of Domingo in the 1990s and 2000s, 12 others said they were aware of the star’s reputation and that it was common knowledge at the two companies.

Mirroring AP’s reporting last year, the investigation found that the allegations included unsolicited physical touching that ranged from kisses on the mouth to groping, late-night phone calls in which Domingo asked women to come to his residence, and inviting women to go out with him socially with such persistence that some felt they were being stalked.

Two of the women told investigators that they had sexual relations with Domingo, saying they felt compelled to submit because of his position of authority and potential to damage their careers, according to the people familiar with the investigation.

In the rest of his statement to the AP, Domingo said, “I understand now that some women may have feared expressing themselves honestly because of a concern that their careers would be adversely affected if they did so. While that was never my intention, no one should ever be made to feel that way.

“I am committed to affecting positive change in the opera industry so that no one else has to have that same experience. It is my fervent wish that the result will be a safer place to work for all in the opera industry, and I hope that my example moving forward will encourage others to follow.”

Union officials would not directly address the contents of the report, which has not been made public. But the union’s national executive director, Leonard Egert, issued a statement to the AP saying, “AGMA salutes the brave people across all our industries and encourages them to continue speaking out against wrongdoing. We call upon management, and pledge to work collaboratively with them, to get at the root causes that have allowed this behavior to occur, and go unaddressed, in opera, dance, and choral cultures for far too long.”

Egert, other senior union leaders and the investigators briefed the union’s Board of Governors on the findings Monday.

The people familiar with the investigation said Domingo, now 79, had reiterated his denials of wrongdoing to investigators and contended that he did not occupy a position of power over his colleagues and their careers. They said he told investigators he had engaged in flirtatious behavior but did not cross a line into inappropriate touching or behavior like asking colleagues to meet privately in his residence.

They said the investigators characterized Domingo’s conduct as inappropriate workplace behavior under the norms of the 1990s or by today’s #MeToo standards.

The investigators said that they found the witness accounts to be credible based on the number of people who came forward, the similarities of their stories, corroborations of their accounts, and the common theme that Domingo’s behavior and reputation were such widespread knowledge that women at his companies were warned to avoid being in close contact with him.

The union announced its investigation in September, shortly after the publication of AP’s stories, saying it did not trust the industry to police itself. Most of the harassment alleged in AP’s stories occurred at LA Opera and at Washington opera, which has repeatedly declined to say if it would investigate the claims. LA Opera has not said when or if it will make its findings public.

In the AP stories, more than 20 women accused Domingo of sexual harassment or other inappropriate behavior in encounters taking place from the late 1980s to the 2000s. Dozens more said his behavior was an open secret in the industry.

A number of U.S. companies canceled Domingo appearances and he withdrew from others under pressure. But no European performances have been affected.

Domingo has been one of the opera’s most beloved and successful figures, admired as an ambassador for the art form and valued for his enduring talent and ability to attract sellout crowds in an era of diminishing ticket sales.

He also was a prolific conductor and powerful administrator, which his accusers told the AP gave him the power to make or break careers and behave with impunity. In addition to heading Los Angeles Opera, he served as general director at Washington Opera from 2003-2011.

Most of Domingo’s accusers were young and starting their careers at the time. Several told the AP that he dangled job prospects as he tried to pressure them into sexual relationships, sometimes punishing them professionally if they rebuffed him. Soprano Angela Turner Wilson said that after weeks of pursuing her, Domingo forcefully grabbed her bare breast under her robe in a backstage room.

The accusations in the union’s report included multiple new accusers not interviewed by the AP, according to the people familiar with its contents.

Investigators said most of the people they interviewed requested anonymity in the final report, fearing professional retaliation or personal embarrassment, highlighting the problem the industry faces in trying to convince victims to come forward.

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2020-02-25 07:50:00Z
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A new version of The Invisible Man makes one of his victims intensely visible - The A.V. Club

The Invisible Man has always been something of an outlier among the storied Universal Monsters. Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and the Wolf Man are all essentially former men whose glimmers of humanity are subsumed in their dramatic transformations. The Invisible Man’s origins, by contrast, are more akin to a second-tier comic book supervillain. He doesn’t become stronger, more toothsome, or undead. He’s a guy who obtains the power of invisibility, and does a bunch of bad stuff with it. Though previous versions of the story have implied that invisibility messes with his brain chemistry, to some degree he’s monstrous by choice, not by chance. This makes him both the most human Universal monster and the least sympathetic.

Leigh Whannell’s extremely effective new thriller The Invisible Man (risen from the ashes of a more lavish Dark Universe initiative) leans into both of those aspects of the character by making him less visible than ever. Following unnerving credits that unfold over black ocean waves crashing against a shoreline, the movie opens on Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), sleepless in the wee hours of the morning. She carefully avoids rousing her mostly unseen bedmate Adrian (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) as she creeps out of their sleek modernist bedroom; Whannell summons so much dread, and Moss’s face is so expressively fraught, that her intentions are immediately clear. This is an escape plan.

Adrian is not invisible yet, though his screen time is scant. At this point, it’s Cecilia who yearns to disappear, and Adrian’s brief glass-smashing appearance explains why, if the ubiquitous menacing security cameras and his girlfriend’s demeanor weren’t enough clues that he’s an abuser. Before long, the universe seems to grant Cecilia a gruesome form of peace. While she’s hiding out with her single-dad friend James (Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (Storm Reid), her sister (Harriet Dyer) shows up to tell her that Adrian has killed himself. Cecilia also learns that he has left her an enormous sum of money.

There isn’t much relaxation time before Cecilia starts to suspect all is not as it seems. She senses she’s being watched. A few objects around the house appear to shift positions. At one point, the barest outlines of footprints seem to materialize in the carpet. Other characters, not privy to Cecilia’s specific experiences (or the title of the movie), think she’s being paranoid, or maybe even acting out. After all, there’s no way Adrian could fake his own death and use his genius-level knowledge of optics technology to make himself disappear, is there? The 2020 version of the Invisible Man knows how to gaslight.

His movie, though, doesn’t completely follow suit with audience mind games. There’s not much ambiguity over whether Cecilia is right about her unseen stalker. Instead, Whannell makes an obvious change that has nonetheless eluded nearly a century’s worth of Invisible Man movies: The identification point here is not the remorseless guy who turns himself invisible but one of his victims, who is left searching frantically for signs of her attacker and ways to defend herself. In place of shots from the point of view of the invisible, the camera pans across rooms or down hallways with an uneasy searching that recalls the kind of refined spookhouse horror that was once stock in trade for Whannell and his former collaborator, James Wan.

Whannell’s Invisible Man is a sleek upgrade of his past horror work—and, for that matter, of Upgrade, the fun genre exercise he concocted a couple of years ago. As bloodier mayhem ramps up, the scares feel less jumpy and cheap than in an Insidious sequel; the cinematography by Stefan Duscio and musical score by Benjamin Wallfisch are polished to a particularly unnerving gleam to match Adrian’s glassy, shadowy compound. That said, the smooth surfaces don’t quite reach the edges of the film, where some of the supporting characters have a B-movie roughness in both their writing and performance. The Invisible Man is striking and tense, but not exactly rich; even some of the warmer characters like James and Sydney are mostly just peril fodder.

Moss, though, classes things up considerably. If there’s something a little bit queasy about turning a Universal monster movie into a domestic abuse/stalker thriller in the Sleeping With The Enemy vein, her performance functions as a dose of anti-nausea medicine. As with her less genre-friendly work with Alex Ross Perry, Moss combines skittish vulnerability with mesmerizing steeliness, the former stabilizing into the latter for moments of cornered resourcefulness. Her targets include some additional non-rampaging men who still earn Cecilia’s ire: She memorably describes one as the “jellyfish version” of her hateful ex. Moss also strengthens the notion that this is a monster movie unusually interested in looking past the toxic-male machinations of its famous character and toward the lasting horrors left in his wake. In other words, the stuff that previous movies, and real life, have sometimes tried to turn invisible.

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2020-02-25 07:00:00Z
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Senin, 24 Februari 2020

Harvey Weinstein Guilty Of Rape And Criminal Sexual Assault; Acquitted On Predatory Charges - Deadline

Harvey Weinstein has been found guilty of rape in the third degree and criminal sexual acts in the first degree, bringing his seven-week New York trial to a conviction in the central criminal case of the #MeToo movement.

Four New York court marshals immediately surrounded Weinstein, seated at the defense table. As many as nine other officers were stationed alongside walls and doors in the Lower Manhattan courtroom.

The first-degree charge, stemming from allegations by former Project Runway production assistant Miriam “Mimi” Haley that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her at his Soho apartment in 2006, could see the Miramax co-creator face up to 25 years in prison, with a minimum of four years.

The third-degree rape count, based on a 2013 rape allegation by Weinstein’s former hairstylist and aspiring actress Jessica Mann, could bring up to four years in prison, though probation on that count is possible.

With the 25 year maximum, the conviction could see 67-year-old Weinstein spend the rest of his life in prison. He also faces a sexual misconduct trial in Los Angeles involving two women, one of whom – Lauren Marie Young – testified in New York to bolster the Haley and Mann cases.

The jury found him not guilty on two counts of predatory sexual assault, apparently dismissing or deadlocking on a rape allegation made by actress Annabella Sciorra. In order to convict on the predatory counts, the jury had to find that Weinstein guilty in the cases of Mann and/or Haley, plus Sciorra.

Weinstein’s New York trial covered five criminal counts, including two of predatory sexual assault, one involving Haley and Sciorra, the other count involving Sciorra and Mann. If the jury had unanimously agreed on either count of the predatory charges, Weinstein could have been sentenced to life in prison.

In addition to the predatory counts, Weinstein was charged with one count of criminal sexual assault (against Haley), and two counts of rape (one in the first degree, one in the third, both involving Mann). Those first-degree crimes carry possible prison sentences of five to 25 years; the third degree crime, up to four years in prison.

Haley, now 42, was a Project Runway production assistant in 2006 when, she says, Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in his Soho apartment on a July night in 2006. (That allegation resulted in a charge of criminal sexual assault in the first degree; Haley’s account of having sex with Weinstein later that month at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel, under duress but not physically forced, did not produce criminal charges.)

Mann, 34, a former actress, model and hairstylist, claimed Weinstein raped her on March 18, 2013 at the DoubleTree Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

Although Sciorra’s rape allegation against Weinstein couldn’t be tried due to exceeding the statute of limitations – she says the incident occurred in her Gramercy Park apartment during the winter of 1993-1994 – New York law allowed her testimony to be used in conjunction with that of Haley and Mann to establish predatory behavior.

Three other women, including Young, testified to their own accounts of sexual misconduct involving Weinstein, as the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office attempted to portray the producer as a longtime abuser who preyed on young woman attempting to gain a foothold in the film industry.

Since deliberations began Feb. 18, jurors repeatedly requested to re-hear testimony and review evidence relating to Sciorra, a possible indication the jury was focusing heavily – and disagreeing – on the predatory sexual abuse charges.

In addition to requesting to re-hear the January 24 testimony of actress Rosie Perez – including her account of a phone call in the early 1990s in which her friend Sciorra spoke of the rape – the jury requested all Sciorra-related emails, including those between Weinstein and his private investigators Black Cube and Guidepost Solutions. The Miramax co-creator hired the companies in 2017 to investigate Sciorra and other women he suspected were co-operating with Ronan Farrow for what turned out to be the journalist’s blockbuster Weinstein exposé in The New Yorker.

Once one of Hollywood’s most powerful producers of Oscar-winning fare and and critically adored indie films, Weinstein’s world was blown apart in October 2017 when exposés in The New Yorker and The New York Times reported that scores of women claimed to have been the victims of Weinstein’s sexual misconduct.

This story is breaking. More to come…

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2020-02-24 16:42:00Z
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Katherine Johnson, legendary NASA mathematician, dies at 101 - WMUR Manchester

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2020-02-24 15:45:00Z
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Katherine Johnson Dies at 101; Mathematician Broke Barriers at NASA - The New York Times

They asked Katherine Johnson for the moon, and she gave it to them.

Wielding little more than a pencil, a slide rule and one of the finest mathematical minds in the country, Mrs. Johnson, who died at 101 on Monday at a retirement home in Newport News, Va., calculated the precise trajectories that would let Apollo 11 land on the moon in 1969 and, after Neil Armstrong’s history-making moonwalk, let it return to Earth.

A single error, she well knew, could have dire consequences for craft and crew. Her impeccable calculations had already helped plot the successful flight of Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when his Mercury spacecraft went aloft in 1961.

The next year, she likewise helped make it possible for John Glenn, in the Mercury vessel Friendship 7, to become the first American to orbit the Earth.

Yet throughout Mrs. Johnson’s 33 years in NASA’s Flight Research Division — the office from which the American space program sprang — and for decades afterward, almost no one knew her name.

Mrs. Johnson was one of several hundred rigorously educated, supremely capable yet largely unheralded women who, well before the modern feminist movement, worked as NASA mathematicians.

But it was not only her sex that kept her long marginalized and long unsung: Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson, a West Virginia native who began her scientific career in the age of Jim Crow, was also African-American.

In old age, Mrs. Johnson became the most celebrated of the small cadre of black women — perhaps three dozen — who at midcentury served as mathematicians for the space agency and its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.

Their story was told in the 2016 Hollywood film “Hidden Figures,” based on Margot Lee Shetterly’s nonfiction book of the same title, published that year. The movie starred Taraji P. Henson as Mrs. Johnson, the film’s central figure. It also starred Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe as her real-life colleagues Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson.

In January 2017 “Hidden Figures” received the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

The film was nominated for three Oscars, including best picture. Though it won none, the 98½-year-old Mrs. Johnson received a sustained standing ovation when she appeared onstage with the cast at the Academy Awards ceremony that February.

Of the black women at the center of the film, Mrs. Johnson was the only one still living at the time of its release. By then, she had become the best-known member of her formerly unknown cohort.

In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, proclaiming, “Katherine G. Johnson refused to be limited by society’s expectations of her gender and race while expanding the boundaries of humanity’s reach.”

In 2017, NASA dedicated a building in her honor, the Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility, at its Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

That year, The Washington Post described her as “the most high-profile of the computers” — “computers” being the term originally used to designate Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues, much as “typewriters” was used in the 19th century to denote professional typists.

She “helped our nation enlarge the frontiers of space,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said in a statement on Monday, “even as she made huge strides that also opened doors for women and people of color in the universal human quest to explore space.”

As Mrs. Johnson herself was fond of saying, her tenure at Langley — from 1953 until her retirement in 1986 — was “a time when computers wore skirts.”

For some years at midcentury, the black women who worked as “computers” were subjected to a double segregation: Consigned to separate office, dining and bathroom facilities, they were kept separate from the much larger group of white women who also worked as NASA mathematicians. The white women in turn were segregated from the agency’s male mathematicians and engineers.

“As Good as Anybody”

But over time, the work of Mrs. Johnson and her colleagues — myriad calculations done mainly by hand, using slide rules, graph paper and clattering desktop calculating machines — won them a level of acceptance that for the most part transcended race.

“NASA was a very professional organization,” Mrs. Johnson told The Observer of Fayetteville, N.C., in 2010. “They didn’t have time to be concerned about what color I was.”

Nor, she said, did she.

“I don’t have a feeling of inferiority,” Mrs. Johnson said on at least one occasion. “Never had. I’m as good as anybody, but no better.”

To the end of her life, Mrs. Johnson deflected praise for her role in sending astronauts into space, keeping them on course and bringing them safely home.

“I was just doing my job,” Ms. Shetterly heard her say repeatedly in the course of researching her book.

But what a job it was — done, no less, by a woman born at a time, Ms. Shetterly wrote, “when the odds were more likely that she would die before age 35 than even finish high school.”

Creola Katherine Coleman was born on Aug. 26, 1918, in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., the youngest of four children of Joshua and Joylette (Lowe) Coleman. Her mother was a schoolteacher, her father a farmer.

From her earliest childhood Katherine counted things: the number of dishes in the cupboard, the number of steps on the way to church and, as insurmountable a task as it might pose for one old enough to be daunted, the number of stars in the sky.

“I couldn’t wait to get to high school to take algebra and geometry,” Mrs. Johnson told The Associated Press in 1999.

But for black children, the town’s segregated educational system went as far as only sixth grade. Thus, every fall, Joshua Coleman moved his family 125 miles away to Institute, W.Va.

In Institute, Katherine’s older siblings, and then Katherine, attended the high school associated with the West Virginia Collegiate Institute, a historically black institution that became West Virginia State College and is now West Virginia State University.

Mr. Coleman remained in White Sulphur Springs to farm, and, when the Depression made farming untenable, to work as a bellman at the Greenbrier, a world-renowned resort there.

Katherine entered high school at 10 and graduated at 14. The next year she entered West Virginia State. By her junior year, she had taken all the math courses the college had to offer.

Her mentor there, William Waldron Schieffelin Claytor, only the third black person to earn a doctorate in mathematics from an American university, conceived special classes just for her.

“You would make a good research mathematician,” he told his 17-year-old charge. “And I am going to prepare you for this career.”

“Where will I find a job?” Katherine asked.

“That,” he replied, “will be your problem.”

After graduating summa cum laude in 1937 with a double major in mathematics and French, she found, unsurprisingly, that research opportunities for black female teenage mathematicians were negligible. She took a job as a schoolteacher in Marion, Va.

In 1940, she was chosen by the president of West Virginia State to be one of three black graduate students to integrate West Virginia University, the all-white institution in Morgantown.

Two years earlier, ruling in the civil-rights case Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, the United States Supreme Court held that where comparable graduate programs did not exist at black universities in Missouri, the state was obliged to admit black graduate students to its white state universities. In the wake of that decision, West Virginia’s governor, Homer Holt, chose to desegregate public graduate schools in his state.

Now married to James Francis Goble, a chemistry teacher, she entered West Virginia University in the summer of 1940, studying advanced mathematics.

“The greatest challenge she faced,” Ms. Shetterly wrote, “was finding a course that didn’t duplicate Dr. Claytor’s meticulous tutelage.”

But after that summer session, on discovering she was pregnant with her first child, she withdrew from the university. She returned with her husband to Marion and was occupied with marriage, motherhood and teaching for more than a decade.

NASA Opens to Women

Then, in 1952, Katherine Goble heard that Langley was hiring black women as mathematicians.

The oldest of NASA’s field centers, Langley had been established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1917. In 1935, it began hiring white women with mathematics degrees to relieve its male engineers of the tedious work of crunching numbers by hand.

Within a decade, several hundred white women had been employed as computers there. Most, unlike the male scientists at the agency, were classified as subprofessionals, paid less than their male counterparts.

In June 1941, as the nation prepared for war, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, barring racial discrimination in the defense industry. In 1943, with the wartime need for human computers greater than ever, the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, as the research facility was then known, began advertising for black women trained in mathematics.

Among the first hired was Dorothy Vaughan who began work that year. In 1951, Mrs. Vaughan became the first black section head at NACA, as the advisory committee was known, when she was officially placed in charge of Langley’s West Area Computing Unit, the segregated office to which the black women were relegated.

It was in this unit that Katherine Goble began work in June 1953, tabulating sheets of data for the agency’s engineers.

By the time she arrived, the company cafeteria had already undergone de facto desegregation: Its “Colored Computers” sign, designating a table in the back for the women, had been a salubrious casualty of the war years. But the separate bathrooms remained.

Quite by accident, Katherine Goble broke that color line herself. While the agency’s bathrooms for black employees were marked as such, many bathrooms for whites were unmarked.

Without realizing it, she had been using a white women’s restroom since her arrival. By the time she became aware of her error, she was set in her routine and disinclined to change. No one took her to task, and she used the white bathrooms from then on.

Two weeks into her new job, she was borrowed by the Flight Research Division, which occupied an immense hangar on the Langley grounds.

There, the only black member of the staff, she helped calculate the aerodynamic forces on airplanes. For that task, as she quickly demonstrated, she came armed with an invaluable asset.

“The guys all had graduate degrees in mathematics; they had forgotten all the geometry they ever knew,” Mrs. Johnson said in the Fayetteville Observer interview. “I still remembered mine.”

She remained in the division for the rest of her career.

By the early 1960s, with the United States provoked by Soviet prowess in space, NASA was under great pressure to launch an astronaut. It fell to the Flight Research Division to do many of the associated calculations.

“Our assignment was the trajectory,” Mrs. Johnson explained to The Associated Press. “As NASA got ready to put someone in space, they needed to know what the launch conditions were. It was our assignment to develop the launch window and determine where it was going to land.”

Clandestine Calculations

Their work was secret — at times even from the mathematicians themselves.

“We were the pioneers of the space era,” Mrs. Johnson told The Daily Press, a Virginia newspaper, in 1990. “You had to read Aviation Week to find out what you’d done.”

She routinely logged 16-hour days, once falling asleep at the wheel of her car and waking up — safe, providentially — at the side of the road.

But the work engaged her deeply.

“I loved every single day of it,” she told Ms. Shetterly. “There wasn’t one day when I didn’t wake up excited to go to work.”

It helped sustain her through the death of her first husband from brain cancer in 1956, leaving her, at 38, a widow with three adolescent daughters. She married James A. Johnson, a United States Army captain, in 1959.

Over the years, Mrs. Johnson published more than two dozen technical papers. She was among the first women at NASA to be a named author or co-author on an agency report.

Ceaselessly curious about the aerospace technology that underpinned her work, she made it possible for women to attend the agency’s scientific briefings, formerly closed-door affairs reserved for male staff members. (“Is there a law against it?” Mrs. Johnson asked, and when her male colleagues, after some head-scratching, concluded that, no, there was no law, they let her in.)

After retiring from NASA, Mrs. Johnson became a public advocate for mathematics education, speaking widely and visiting schools.

Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.

Mrs. Johnson’s colleague Mary Jackson died in 2005; Dorothy Vaughan died in 2008.

In 2016, Mrs. Johnson, self-effacing as ever at 98, seemed somewhat indifferent to the fuss surrounding the feature film about her life.

“I shudder,” she told The New York Times that September, some three months before the film’s release, having heard that the screenwriters might have made her character seem a tiny bit aggressive. “I was never aggressive.” (As things transpired, Mrs. Johnson liked the finished film very much, Ms. Shetterly said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.)

Mrs. Johnson may not have been aggressive, but she was assuredly esteemed. An index of just how esteemed she was came from Mr. Glenn, Mercury astronaut and future United States senator, who died in 2016.

In early 1962, a few days before he prepared to orbit the Earth in Friendship 7, Mr. Glenn made a final check of his planned orbital trajectory. The trajectory had been generated by a computer — not the flesh-and-blood kind, but the electronic sort, which were starting to supplant the agency’s human calculators.

Electronic computation was still something of a novelty at NASA, and Mr. Glenn was unsettled by the use of a soulless mass of metal to divine something on which his life depended.

He asked that Mrs. Johnson double-check the machine’s figures by hand.

“If she says the numbers are good,” he declared, “I’m ready to go.”

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2020-02-24 15:14:00Z
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Selasa, 25 Februari 2020

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