Inside Tennessee’s Push To Bring Thousands Of NASCAR Fans Together During A Pandemic

September 18, 2020

Tik Root & Mark Greenblatt | HuffPost | Video: Newsy

Worried officials in Sullivan County, Tennessee, called a press conference on July 10 to address the county’s spiking number of COVID-19 cases. “Only this week have we seen those double-digit increases,” said Mayor Richard Venable, who instituted a mask mandate to try to slow the spread. “We find it necessary for government to take this action.”

What state and local leaders didn’t do, however, was change their plans for hosting NASCAR’s All-Star Race. Just five days away, the event was slated to bring up to 30,000 people to Bristol Motor Speedway.

The race would be the largest gathering in the U.S. since the coronavirus pandemic began, held at a time when other sports leagues like the NBA, MLB and NHL were all preparing to operate in hermetic bubbles or stuffed-animal lined stadiums. But to Tennessee officials, the speedway touted the potential of a multimillion-dollar economic boost from the 19,800 fans it estimated would come from out of state.

New documents and emails obtained through public records requests paint the clearest picture yet of how Tennessee brought thousands of fans back to large live events — and raise questions about whether officials prioritized possible economic benefits over health risks.

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Battle for the Waves

July 1, 2020

Tik Root | Marie Claire | Video: Newsy

Over millennia, the waters off the northwest coast of Maui have sculpted Honolua Bay into a surfer’s dream. The jungle sweeps down to rocky cliffs, where the water crashes across a jetty of boulders—a point break. If the swell arrives off kilter, it gets blocked by looming Molokai, another of Hawaii’s 137 islands. But when conditions align, the waves of paradise pump. And here to tame them are the best female surfers on earth.

Cars start arriving around 6 a.m., well before the late-November sunrise. Brazilians, the ever-strong Australians, and athletes from sundry other countries bounce down the dirt access road, parking by the cliff. But it is the Americans who garner the most attention. Holding the top three spots in the World Surf League Championship Tour (“CT” for short) standings, starting at the top, are Carissa Moore, Lakey Peterson, and Caroline Marks. They are the only surfers left in contention for the world title, clustered so close that a three-way tie is possible. Any small slip could mean elimination. And as if that weren’t enough pressure, the last stop on this year’s CT comes with a novel twist.

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Airlines Are Setting Their Own Rules And Packing More People Onto Flights

June 4, 2020

New data shows that, without limits on how packed planes can be during the pandemic, flights have gotten more than five times as full since April. ----------...

Tik Root | HuffPost | Video: Newsy

As America creeps — or in some cases, sprints — back to business amid an ongoing pandemic, there’s at least one industry that’s largely charting its own course through the crisis: airlines.

Like most industries, the coronavirus has hit airlines hard, and they are eager to return to normal. But unlike many others, the companies have received billions in dedicated relief funding with very little federal oversight on how to ramp up operations safely.

Three Days in a Detroit Funeral Home Ravaged by the Coronavirus

May 1, 2020

Three days inside a Detroit funeral home, where COVID-19 is pushing death care workers to their limit. ------------------------------------- Newsy is your so...

Tik Root | TIME | Video: Newsy

On April 29, Stephen Kemp arrived at his office just outside Detroit to a perplexing silence. Since COVID-19 hit the city, the phones at his funeral home had been ringing nonstop. Now, nothing.

Kemp’s wife and colleague, Jacquie, soon popped into his office with an explanation: Comcast was down. No phones, no Internet. The outage lasted until early afternoon—a stretch in which the home put on two funeral services and received one more body. When the deceptive calm finally broke, the bad news began pouring in at the torrential pace that had become the Kemps’ new normal.

The most pressing problem was the local crematory, which had stopped taking bodies for the second time in less than a week. “Closed until Monday,” Kemp explained, leaving a voicemail as he exasperatedly called around in search of a solution—to little avail. All the other nearby crematories were full too. “We’re making it up as we go.”

How The Small Donor Boom Drives Millions To Credit Card Processors

November 25, 2019

A Newsy analysis found that the small donor revolution has also helped direct millions of dollars to the middlemen that process donations. ------------------...

Tik Root | Politico | Video: Newsy

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have eschewed big-dollar fundraising events to support their 2020 campaigns, instead turning to their grassroots supporters for small-dollar contributions. It’s central to both candidates’ appeal: the idea that everyday people, not big financial institutions or wealthy and powerful interests, are financing—and benefiting from—their efforts.

Donors have responded in droves— donating tens, hundreds or even thousands of times, in amounts as small as $1. But what these grassroots supporters may not realize is that, in making small, repeated contributions, they have, in aggregate, delivered a huge payday for the middlemen, often large banks and financial institutions that process those payments.

Ghost Forests Are Visceral Examples of the Advance of Climate Change

October 7, 2019

This story was published in partnership with TIME. As sea levels rise, trees die off and leave behind eerie remnants of a once healthy forest. Now found all ...

Tik Root | TIME | Video: Newsy
As Matt Kirwan walks through Maryland’s Blackwater National Refuge, his rubber boots begin to squish. With each step the land beneath him turns from dry ground to increasingly soggy mud. The trees around him go from tall and full of leaves or needles to short, bare and pale white.

Partway out, ankle deep in water, Kirwan stops. “At this point we’ve transitioned from being in the forest, to actually being in a full-fledged marsh,” explains the Virginia Institute of Marine Science ecologist. “This ground is now too salty and too wet to support living trees.”

Kirwan is standing in the midst of what is known as a “ghost forest.” These swaths of dead, white, trees are created when salty water moves into forested areas, first slowing, and eventually halting, the growth of new trees. That means that when old trees die, there aren’t replacements.

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Tires: The plastic polluter you never thought about

September 20, 2019

Tik Root | National Geographic

In 2014 biologist John Weinstein and his graduate students went looking for microplastics—the small bits of degraded plastic that researchers have discovered are spread throughout the environment.

The team was based at The Citadel military college in Charleston, South Carolina, where Weinstein is a professor. Working in a coastal city, they expected to find at least some evidence of microplastics, which are swept into the ocean. And sure enough, samples kept turning up.

The Race to Build the World's First Commercial Octopus Farm

August 21, 2019

Tik Root | TIME | Photo: Jake Naughton for TIME

For decades, my father taught biology at Middlebury College in Vermont. One of his signature courses focused on invertebrates and, as a kid, I’d often tag along on class field trips to the Maine coast. Students would fan out across the rocky shore at low tide and count as many spineless creatures as they could—which, as it turns out, was pretty easy. There were dozens of invertebrate species to be found, including snails, crabs, starfish and, of course, lobster.

I didn’t lay eyes on an octopus, however, until I was about 8. My dad sporadically hosted a lunch for his class, to which he brought an assortment of invertebrates. Students would discuss each specimen, identify its various parts, and then eat it. That year there happened to be leftovers, which my dad brought home for dinner. He reached into a plastic bag, pulled out a greyish-pink gelatinous blob, and put it on our kitchen table.

My sister and I took note of the eight arms covered in dozens of tiny suckers, slowly realizing what was happening, as my dad fought to cut the meat, which had been poorly cooked, into manageable portions. It tasted like salty bubble gum, and my sister and I spat it out.

In early 2017, some 20 years after first encountering an octopus, I went to Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula to meet Carlos Rosas, a biologist who aims to revolutionize how those gelatinous blobs wind up on dinner tables.

Inside the Long War to Protect Plastic

May 16, 2019

New York’s Suffolk County had a trash problem. Facing brimming landfills and public pressure, legislators took a first-in-the-nation step: They banned plastic bags. But what the county saw as part of the solution, the plastics industry took as a threat.

“We had never seen lobbyists like this before,” said Steven Englebright, the chief sponsor of the bill. “The B.S. came in by the shovel-load.”

That was in 1988. Soon, Suffolk County — on Long Island — inspired similar initiatives in municipalities across the country. As one lawyer for the industry wrote in an internal memo from the time: “Several years from now we may look back on 1988 as the opening round in a solid waste/packaging war.”

The Man Who Raised a Fist, 50 Years Later

September 10, 2018

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Tik Root | The Atlantic (October 2018 Issue)| Photo: Associated Press

In the boyle heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, tucked between a gas station and what looks to be an abandoned warehouse, sits a former ceramics factory that now houses the studio of Glenn Kaino, a prominent conceptual artist. One morning in April, Kaino opened the back door and ushered inside the Olympic gold medalist Tommie Smith; Smith’s wife, Delois; and me. We were greeted by an imposing stack of 70 or 80 cardboard boxes. “What are those?” asked Smith, who at 6 foot 4 towers above Kaino. “Arms,” Kaino responded. “Those are all arms?” Delois exclaimed.

The arms are not just any arms, but fiberglass casts of Smith’s actual right arm, made from a silicone mold that Kaino took a few years back. Dozens of replicas are now strewn across the studio, in various states of preparation. Each one extends from the shoulder to a gloved fist, every vein and ripple of muscle discernible along the way. When any of the arms is held upright, its significance is immediately evident.

Why Are Millions Paying Online Tax Preparation Fees When They Don’t Need To?

June 18, 2018

Tik Root | ProPublica | Image: Tomasz Walenta

Few taxpayers use the Free File system — intended to help moderate- and low-income filers — and that benefits companies like Intuit and H&R Block. Now Congress is moving to make the program permanent.

How Belize Is Restoring Its Coral Reefs and Damaged Ocean

April 11, 2018

Tik Root | National Geographic | Photo: Brian J. Skerry/National Geographic Creative

BELIZE CITY – The Astrum helicopter company launches from a base less than five miles from where Belize City meets the Caribbean. In the backseat, to my left, is Belizean Senator Valerie Woods. Across from us are two representatives from international ocean protection organization Oceana, which organized the flight. The country’s minister of state, Carla Barnett, climbs into the front seat.

“I haven’t been in a helicopter for a long time,” she mutters, pulling on her headset. The doors shut, and we’re off.

As we rise above the trees, Belize City starts to spread out in front of us. But that’s not our destination. Side-skirting downtown, we head out over the water—where the true treasures lay.

Paint Fight

March 1, 2018

Tik Root | Mother Jones | Graphic: Selman Design

In 1998, Fidelma Fitzpatrick, a young associate at the Motley Rice law firm, was wrapping up her work on the groundbreaking $246 billion national tobacco settlement when a new case landed on her desk. The state of Rhode Island—which had a disproportionate number of children with elevated blood lead levels—wanted her firm’s help suing the paint industry.

So began a decadeslong legal battle to hold paint manufacturers accountable for cleaning up old houses still coated in toxins. Fitzpatrick played a key role in the Rhode Island case and now spearheads her firm’s involvement in similar litigation. And the argument she proposed using to take on the paint companies is being applied to a widening array of state and local public health lawsuits—especially important given the Trump administration’s apparent reluctance to regulate industries.

2018 PyeongChang Olympic Coverage

February 25, 2018

Fireworks explode during the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, South Korea. (Christian Hartmann/REUTERS)

I covered the PyeongChang Olympics primarily for The Washington Post. I spearheaded The Post's daily Olympics newsletter, as well as wrote features, sport guides and interviews both during and prior to the Games.

A few of my favorite pieces were about a the man who sharpens U.S. figure skates, the U.S. women's cross country team, comentators Tara Lipinsky & Johnny Weir, and the twentieth anniversial of a backflip.

In total, I produced more than three dozen stories, which were shared tens of thousands of times. Below are links to that work.

A Descendant of Robert E. Lee Speaks Out

December 28, 2017

Tik Root | The New Yorker | Video: Paul Rosenfeld, Tik Root, Charlie Weber

Rob Lee had a very busy 2017. His first book, “Stained-Glass Millennials,” about young people and the church, came out in January. In May, he graduated from Duke Divinity School. Later that month, he got married. Then, in August, the Unite the Right Rally descended on Charlottesville, Virginia.

Saving BASE Jumping’s Most Famous Party

December 21, 2017

Tik Root | Outside Magazine | Video: Paul Rosenfeld, Tik Root

Since about 1977, West Virginia’s New River Gorge Bridge has been the site of Bridge Day, an iconic BASE jumping party that’s seen some rough years lately. Will this most storied of adrenaline-junkie events survive?

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The Jamaican Apple Pickers of Upstate New York

October 9, 2017

Tik Root | The New York Times | Photo: Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist

Seth Forrence is the fourth-generation manager of his family’s apple farm, Forrence Orchards, in Peru, N.Y. He is only 41, but the business, he said, has changed drastically during his lifetime. Traditional varieties like McIntosh and Cortland are slowly giving way to the sweetness of Honeycrisp and SnapDragon, and the trees are getting smaller; up to 1,200 can be packed into one acre. But there has been one constant during his time on the farm: the Jamaicans.

Doctors Are Prescribing Park Visits to Boost Patient Health

June 29, 2017

Tik Root | National Geographic | Photo: Corey Arnold/National Geographic Creative

South Dakota doctors routinely write prescriptions for everything from painkillers to ointments. This year, however, they’ll have a more novel option at their disposal: park prescriptions. Printed on a notepad with an “Rx” symbol in the top-left corner, a park prescription instructs a patient to take one free day at “any South Dakota state park or recreation area.”

Doctors get these prescriptions through a new program run by the South Dakota Game, Fish and Parks and the state‘s Department of Health. Although the initiative was piloted in 2015, this is the first year that prescriptions will be available statewide.

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Changing the Face of National Parks

February 1, 2017

Tik Root | National Geographic | Video: Paul Rosenfeld, Tik Root

Ollie Simmons first met Kieonne Dawson on the uphill leg of California’s Mission Peak trail. “She was looking kind of nervous because the route was so steep,” he remembered of the wet and dreary trek a few years back. Striking up a conversation, the two exchanged numbers, kept in touch and were soon dating.

Mountaintop love stories are rare. And, for a black couple, they’re practically unheard of. While the National Park Service (NPS) turned 100 last year, African Americans still represent only about seven percent of park visitors. In comparison, they make up thirteen percent of the national population. Latinos, Native Americans, and other non-white visitors are similarly underrepresented. The rest—some 78 percent—are white.

Start-Ups For the State

June 26, 2016

Tik Root | Foreign Policy | Photo: Juan Herrero

In a village on the road to Musanze, Rwanda, a group of teenagers is gathered along a dirt embankment. Among them is Jean Damour Nshimiyimana, 19, who dropped out of school and has been earning what he can as a bicycle courier. He’s lounging with his friends but would prefer to be working. Business is slow. “Getting a job isn’t easy,” he said. “No matter how small.”

He’s far from alone. Youth make up some forty percent of the population here and, of them, nearly half are either unemployed or underemployed. And while the problem isn’t unique to Rwanda, or even to Africa, the government’s proposed solution is.