Deep Convection

Photo by Alon Koppel.

Connie Burg, aka China Burg, Don Burg, and Lucy Hamilton, had never played the guitar before she joined Mars. But that didn’t stop her from developing a uniquely original style that became a defining feature of Mars’ sound, and that in turn influenced all the No Wave music that came afterwards. Connie went on to learn another brand new instrument, the bass clarinet, for Sumn...

In Adam’s memory, Sumner’s life is divided into the pre-Sue and Sue eras, with Sue being Susan Lehman, aka Sue Crane, aka Aunt Sue to Adam and his sister. Sue came originally from California, moved around in her youth, wound up in New York by the mid-1980s, and met Sumner sometime around 1990, right when he moved up to the Catskills for a few months to take care of his dying father. Not too long after that, ...

Cynthia Sobel, born Cynthia Schoenwetter, is Adam’s mother, and Sumner’s sister. So she knew Sumner from the very beginning of his life to the end, and there’s no one else alive who remembers the things about him that she does. She talks at length about their parents, Charles and Sylvia Schoenwetter, and their childhoods in Elmhurst, Queens — essential context for understanding Sumner’s lif...

As the front man in DNA, Arto Lindsay was one of the core No Wave figures from the start, and he and Sumner were good friends from the mid-1970s, when Arto arrived in NYC (along with Mark Cunningham and Connie Burg, from Eckerd College in Florida), into the 1980s and beyond. Arto played on Sumner’s opera record John Gavanti, and in the early 1980s Arto, Sumner and Rudolph Grey formed a visual art trio, signing the...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with painter David Reed. David’s paintings have been shown in galleries and museums in the US and Europe from the 1970s to the present, in venues including the Guggenheim, Gagosian New York and Basel, Neues Museum Nürnberg, Häusler Contemporary, Zurich, and most recently at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Paris. David’s work is abstract, and as critic John Yao wrote...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Lydia Lunch! Lydia is a singer, poet, writer, actress, and self-empowerment speaker. She got her start as the leader, singer and guitarist of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, one of the four bands to appear on the compilation No New York, and moved on from there to a long career in which she’s managed to maintain the raw intensity and outsider quality that she started wit...

In this episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with photographer and graphic designer Julia Gorton about her experiences in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, and they share memories of Sumner. With Rick Brown, Julia produced the fanzine Beat It in the late 1970s, and that got her into shows free so that she could photograph people at CBGBs and Max’s and so on. She became friends with the no wave bands, and with Su...

In this first proper episode of the Sumner Files, Adam talks with Mark Cunningham, the bass player in Mars and one of two surviving members of the band. Mark also played brass instruments on John Gavanti, and that record was released on Mark’s own label, Hyrax. Mark has had a long career since then, with bands including Don King, Raeo, Convolution, Bestia Farida, and Blood Quartet, as well as two recent solo album...

This episode launches a new series about the artist and musician Sumner Crane (1946-2003). Scientist Adam Sobel — Sumner’s nephew, and the host of this series as well as the podcast Deep Convection, out of which it grows — introduces the whole thing, explaining who Sumner was, why he (Adam) is doing this, and how it came to be.

Image credit: collage with photo of Sumner Crane, by Julia Gor...

Shortly after Hurricane Otis hit Mexico in late October 2023 after a very rapid (and poorly forecast) intensification, Adam sat down with Frank Marks from NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division (HRD) for the last episode of this season. Frank is one of the central figures in the world of hurricane science. With a career spanning over four decades at the Hurricane Research Division (HRD) of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adm...

Bjorn Stevens’ main scientific interest is in the role of clouds in the climate system. He established himself early in his career as a leader in the study of marine stratus-topped boundary layers. That eventually led him to a broader climate research agenda. And since about 2008, Bjorn heads one of the world’s most prominent climate modeling labs, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. In that position, with his team...

Arlene Fiore got interested in air pollution first as a kid in the Boston suburbs, partly because she suffered from bad asthma, and that taught her that the air can be harmful. Even though her interest in the Earth’s atmosphere was there from an early age on, the path that led her to her current position as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences was, in her own words, a circuitous one, partly b...

Aglaé Jézéquel’s journey began surrounded by books, in a home where knowledge was cherished. Aglaé shared her parents’ passion from an early age on, but while her family was more into literature, she fell in love with science. Her academic path has led her to her current position as a scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where she does research spanning climate scien...

Sarah Kapnick’s journey in the climate world has not been a conventional one. Starting as a “math nerd in the Midwest”, her path meandered through investment banking, back to academia for a PhD., and now to one of the most influential positions in US climate science and policy – Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Sarah’s initial foray into the world of financ...

Growing up outside Braunschweig, just on the west side of the border with East Germany during the Cold War, Tapio Schneider spent a lot of his teenage years doing sports, and skiing (often just meters away from the East German border patrol) became a large part of his life.
He also had a keen interest in science and a desire to understand the world around him, and so he decided to study physics and math—he did that at the Uni...

In keeping with this season’s excursions away from Deep Convection’s traditional focus on climate science, this episode features Abhisheik Dhawan. While he’s not a climate scientist, his innovative ideas intersect with climate change, development, and finance in a unique way. He is currently a Sustainable Finance and Partnerships Specialist at the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), an organization that focuses o...

Bob Kopp’s academic roots lie in the realms of paleoclimate, paleobiology, and ecology. But, inspired by a legacy of public service passed down from his parents, he soon gravitated towards areas where science meets actionable change. Over the course of his career, he has learned to master the dance of blending use-inspired, policy-oriented research with traditional academia.

Today, Bob is a professor in the Department of Earth &...