Nikhil Swaminathan View RSS

Going Green 2 Apr 2017 9:32 AM (8 years ago)

A few days after the Atlanta Falcons’ already legendary meltdown in Super Bowl LI, I caught a morning flight from Oakland to Seattle for a packed day of interviews at the HQ of Grist, the scrappy non-profit environmental news publication that’s been going and going and going for nearly 20 years.

And starting last month, I became a senior editor there, leading Grist’s coverage of environmental justice — basically people’s rights to clean air, clean water, and clean land. It’s important, mission-driven work that combines my experience in science journalism with the accountability-type work I did at Al Jazeera America and via my Ida B. Wells fellowship. And with the Trump administration’s apparent eye toward rolling back environmental regulations, this feels like it could be my most impactful gig to date.

My first day wasn’t just packed with normal onboarding. Instead, I spent an hour or so talking to Mustafa Santiago Ali, the recently resigned head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s environmental justice program. Ali packed his bag after decades of service at the agency because he doesn’t see the EPA administrator Trump installed, Scott Pruitt, as a kindred soul. (Click here to read an edited transcript of my interview with Ali.)

Should I share the heartbreak of being an Atlanta sports fan with my son? 7 Feb 2017 7:46 AM (8 years ago)

For much of the last month, I’ve been trying to get my one-year-old son to say, “Rise Up,” the ubiquitous, and admittedly a little cloying, slogan of the Atlanta Falcons. He hasn’t really come close. And maybe that’s for the best.

When my father and I FaceTimed with my son roughly 24 hours after Sunday’s Super Bowl kickoff, I didn’t bother prompting him to say anything. I just wanted to see his smiling face. I knew it would cheer me up. My dad, on the other hand, couldn’t help himself. “Can you say, ‘Rise Up? Fall Down?’” he asked. (Before my kid’s face popped up on my phone screen, I wouldn’t have found that joke very funny at all. But I managed a chuckle.)

The game had left me catatonic for much of Monday, and I still can’t really talk about it. My dad said he woke up every 30 minutes Sunday night analyzing how a 25-point could slip away in less than a half. Messages of stunned sadness streamed to my iPhone from shell-shocked Falcons fans I’d grown up with, as did plenty of notes of sympathy from people who just wanted the preternaturally successful Patriots to go down in flames.

Monday night, as we went out to dinner, I asked my dad if I should try to pass on my unflinching love for Atlanta’s hapless sports franchises to my son. “God, no,” was his response. “Please don’t.” I’ve only been a father for barely a year, but if there’s one overwhelming objective to my new role, it’s to protect my son from anything that could hurt him. And being an Atlanta sports fan definitely hurts, more acutely this week than normal.

I’ve put in nearly a hundred seasons of near-die-hard support for these franchises. I’ve celebrated only one championship, the 1995 Atlanta Braves. That’s a terrible ROI, especially when you compare it to the spoils of the teams in a city like Boston (ironically, where my sports-uninterested wife grew up). I could get my son into Atlanta sports, I thought, or, I guess, I could just wait and introduce him to heroin when he’s a little older.

But it’s going to be hard to protect him. I go through great pains to watch every Falcons game, most Hawks tilts, and a good chunk of a Braves season (even during the recent tear down). I flew to Atlanta from my home in Oakland, California, on a redeye the night before the Super Bowl because I truly believed the Falcons had a shot to give my hometown its second championship. And I wanted to share it with my old friends and fellow Falcons fans. I wanted to party in the streets. I wanted to go to a parade. (I’d missed the 1995 because I had to go to school.)

Thrity-plus years of rooting for Atlanta teams gave me pause. I knew hopping on that flight might be totally in vain, but I couldn’t stomach the idea of not being home if the pattern of coming up short was somehow broken. Cleveland had done it. The Chicago Cubs had done it. And man, for a while it seemed like we would, too.

My mom, who like the rest of us didn’t foresee a Super Bowl run this season, booked a trip to India to visit family that started a few days before the game. She woke up before dawn to watch the game from Mumbai, and she called me at halftime to recap the first half, which ended with the Falcons up 21-3. We were heartened by how things were going, but we knew the game wasn’t over. And we knew Atlanta’s reputation. As I said to friends who texted me ready to crown the Falcons Super Bowl Champs midway through the third quarter, “I’m still nervous. It’s not over.”

My caution proved both prophetic and totally predictable. I keep trying to recall the moment after Falcons’ Tevin Coleman leaked out of the backfield on a play from the Pats’ six-yard line, caught a pass from NFL MVP Matt Ryan, and scurried into the end zone to put the Dirty Birds up 27-3 with 8:31 left in the third quarter. At the packed Midtown bar where I was watching, I bounced my shoulders like I was in a hip-hop video and bear hugged both the best men from my wedding. We couldn’t believe it. Our eyes had to be deceiving us.

They were.

My dad called the Super Bowl “the most devastating game he’d ever seen.” And this from a guy who got on a charter flight from Atlanta to Minneapolis to watch Game 6 of the 1991 World Series between the Braves and the Minnesota Twins. He had a broken wrist and a custom-made, handle-less tomahawk he’d fashioned to chop in the nosebleeds as the Braves possibly gave his adopted hometown its first ever championship. Instead, the Braves, up 3-2 in the series, would send him back home on a late-night flight heartbroken when pitcher Charlie Liebrandt gave up an extra inning home run to Twins legend Kirby Puckett.

It was one of a number of brutal moments that dotted my childhood. There’s been a lot written about the ignominy of Atlanta sports in the last few weeks, so you probably know many of the others, which include: New York Yankees catcher Jim Leyritz’s home run that turned the 1996 World Series, Mike Vick’s arrest on dogfighting charges, the Falcons surrendering a 17-point halftime lead in the 2013 NFC Championship Game, the 60-win Atlanta Hawks ending their best season ever in 2014 by being swept by Lebron and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the team’s first Eastern Conference Finals appearance.

Prior to settling in the Bay Area, I lived in New York for nearly a decade. During that period, the Giants won two Super Bowls—both against the team that just hijacked the Lombardi trophy from the Falcons—and the Yankees won one, as well. But I didn’t take joy in any of that. The only Knicks and Brooklyn Nets games I went to were when the Hawks were in town. And I routinely attended multiple installments of the Braves yearly four-game stand against the Mets. Since moving west coast four years ago, I have seen local squads win two titles. Still, I only have eyes for the largely undecorated teams I grew up supporting.

Sportswriters love to criticize Atlanta fans. They’re fair weather. They arrive at late to games. It’s a city of transplants, so when teams with national followings come to town, stadiums fill with surprising numbers of their fans. Sometimes I feel like I left the city on a one-man mission to chip away that impression with my unflinching homerism. (Maybe a three-man mission, along with prominent writers Rembert Browne and Lang Whitaker.) I remember the excitement I’d feel if I saw another Falcons fan at sports bars in New York on Sunday. So it’s weird to be questioning whether or not force my son to bond with me over the Braves, Falcons, and Hawks. Isn’t the best way to change Atlanta’s sport culture to pass reverence for those teams to younger generations? It’s definitely a key to my close relationship with my folks.

But my son was born less than 10 miles away from Oracle Arena, where the Golden State Warriors practice a rarefied brand of basketball that has made them one of the two dominant NBA franchises of the current era. In the period since the Atlanta Braves and Falcons started play, in 1966—the Hawks relocated from St. Louis shortly after, in 1968—Oakland has celebrated nine championships. That’s hardly an embarrassment of riches, but it is when you compare it to Atlanta’s haul. And it’s not unreasonable to expect that the Bay Area could be home to a few more titles in the next few years, between the dominant Dubs, resurgent Raiders, and the seemingly charmed San Francisco Giants.

Maybe my kid will choose to align with the winning culture we live amid, as opposed to the tradition of gut-wrenching disappointment that I cannot seem to shake. If I’m being honest, it will likely break my heart more than this Super Bowl collapse if he went his own way. And ultimately, that fact is what ensures that I will keep dressing him in Atlanta sports gear, will tell him about how much I loved Dale Murphy, will explain that the Brooklyn band I played in was named after Dominique Wilkins, will teach him about the rise and fall of Mike Vick. In a few years, we’ll go home, and I’ll show him the seat I personally licensed at the new Falcons stadium.

As I waited to board my flight back to the west coast a couple days after the Super Bowl—I’d stayed until Tuesday evening hoping to catch a victory parade—I saw a plush Julio Jones doll in an airport newsstand. Without thinking, I bought it for my kid. And when I give it to him, I know exactly what I’ll ask him: “Can you say, ‘Rise up?’”

Ida B. Wells Fellow 3 Jul 2016 8:41 AM (9 years ago)

So that whole Al Jazeera experiment didn’t work out. I did some work I’m very proud of and got to work with some really talented journalists who I’m proud to call my friends. But launching a broadcast-focused media brand is just a heavy lift in today’s market.

While I was sad to see the channel go, I was totally distracted by Sid’s birth and the first few months of his life. But by March, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with literally months of reporting on a controversial guest worker program.

Enter The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, which was looking for four people of color to help with their first long-term investigative project. I applied wondering if the legwork I’d done might give me a leg up on other candidates. And he we are a few weeks later, and I got the fellowship!

I’m excited and humbled by the opportunity. And I’m hoping to live up to the woman whom the fellowship is named after, a daring investigative reporter and newspaper publisher who exposed the use of lynching in the Deep South not as a tool to punish the crimes of black people but to intimidate them and keep the community as a whole down.

Fatherhood. 1 Feb 2016 1:41 PM (9 years ago)

The middle week in January was a real roller coaster for me. On Wednesday, January 13, I found out the cable network where I’d been working for the past two years, Al Jazeera America, was shutting down in late-April.

That news was barely digested when, on Friday, my wife, Kiera, went into labor.

Siddhartha Reyes Swaminathan was born in the wee hours of Saturday, January 16, overshadowing any other event that took place early that week and more or less all of them before it (at least in my life).

I Was on the Paul Finebaum Show 30 Aug 2015 12:00 PM (10 years ago)

A lot of people call into the Paul Finebaum Show daily to talk about SEC football, so it’s not necessarily that big a deal to be on it. But I was an invited guest this past Thursday.

Paul or one of his producers wanted me to discuss my Atlanta Magazine article on UGA Head Football Coach Mark Richt. It was pretty difficult trying to stay cogent and not ramble during the five to 10 minutes that I was on with Paul. But I was really excited to be featured, and I hope I one day get to do it (and other radio spots) again.

The highlights of the interview are here.

The Moral Victor 29 Aug 2015 2:44 PM (10 years ago)

Over the past 15 years or so, I’ve spent an obscene amount of time thinking about Mark Richt. For the previous 14 seasons, he’s been the head coach of the University of Georgia football team, whose games I grew up watching with my parents.

Richt is a complex figure in an increasingly monied and cutthroat sport. He’s seen as a “molder of men,” who cares about the person under the helmet, as much as he cares about his team’s on-field results. It’s led many to question whether he’s too virtuous to win on the biggest stages college football has to offer—despite the fact that he’s paid $4 million per year to do just that. And that’s the premise of the feature I wrote for Atlanta Magazine about him.

Read: “Hail Mark.”

The Death of Aging 17 May 2015 2:32 PM (10 years ago)

This past week, the first TV show that I helped produce aired on Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English. It was an episode of “Fault Lines” titled “The Death of Aging.” and it explores technology billionaires’  funneling millions of dollars toward several efforts at reversing aging and increasing human longevity.

It was an amazingly fun project to work on, especially thanks to the production team of Sweta Vohra, Josh Rushing, and Joel Van Haren. I was lucky enough to get a co-production credit and was able to help on a number of fronts, from researching, reporting, setting up shoots, holding light reflectors, writing interview questions, scripting, and perhaps most importantly, hounding J. Craig Venter’s wife (who is also his publicist) until she agreed to let us go behind the scenes of his new venture Human Longevity, Inc.

Watch it:

The First Americans 17 Aug 2014 11:46 AM (11 years ago)

In late-2010, I knew nothing about archaeology. After three-plus years as a senior editor at Archaeology, I consider myself knowledgeable on at least one arcane subject: the peopling of the Americas.

I just finished a large project that I spent a lot of the last year reporting for Archaeology. It included meeting a lot of great characters, as well as a trip to the Paleoamerican Odyssey conference in Santa Fe, NM, last October. It was an occasionally testy meeting with prominent archaeologists whose theories had been summarily dismissed for decades by their peers finally having their day in the sun.

I would have never guessed it, but I find this topic really exciting.

Read: “America, in the Beginning.”

Knot. Tied. 26 Jul 2014 1:14 PM (11 years ago)

Kiera and I met nearly a decade ago. We took the protracted route, but I couldn’t be more pleased that we finally got here. (Even if it took me having to leave my beloved NYC.)

Happily married. Officially.

Oh, and we just made Kiera a new website since she has a book coming out this fall. Check it out.

Turtle Power! 15 Jun 2014 11:11 AM (11 years ago)

When my old friend Steve, who is now the editor in chief of Atlanta Magazine got in touch last summer with the idea of writing about sea turtles on the Georgia coast, I jumped at the chance to revisit some places that I haven’t been since I was a kid, like Jekyll and St. Simon’s Islands.

Probably the coolest part of reporting this story was getting to go on to a Georgia barrier island that very few people get to go to. Ossabaw Island is essentially a barely inhabited sanctuary maintained by the state. Mark Dodd of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources was nice enough to drive me around the island until we got to see one of the feral pigs that have overrun Ossabaw since the Spanish brought them in the 1500s.

Another cool piece of trivia: One of the few people I know who have ever been to Ossabaw is actually my wife, Kiera. She went pig-hunting on the island in 2011 on assignment for Mother Jones.

Read: “Guarding the Nest.”