captioning sponsored by wnet on this edition for sunday, april 21: deadly blasts rock sri lankan churches and hotels on easter sunday. the creator of the comic strip" cathy" on the "grown-up years." and, an uncommon library, preserving living history. next, on pbs newshour weekend. >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: dbernard ene schwartz. sue and edgar wachenheim iii. seton melvin. the cheryl and philip milstein family. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. e j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter. rbara hope zuckerberg. corporate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual

and group retirement products. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support hasedeen provy: and by the corporation for public broadcasting, andy contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. from the tisch wnet studios at lincoln center in new york, hari sreenivasan. >> sreenivasan: good evening and thanks for joining us. as worshippers gathered for easter services in christian churches in sri lanka this morning, a wave of bombings killed more than 200 people, including several americans. police there say it was a coordinated terrorist attack carried out by suicide bombers at churchesnd hotels in three cities. at least 207 people were killed, and 450 wounded in eight sarate bomb blasts. in sri lanka's largeo, city of coloombs went off at a catholic church, and at three luxury hotels. a few hour church in the city of negombo, a

bomb killed at least 67 people and in the eastern city of batticaloa, 27 people died in a stbombing at a proteant church. it was the deadliest terrorhe attack since tnd of the countr ago.vil war, ten years >> ( translated ): i see this tu a serious siion aimed at destabilizing the country and the economy. i strongly condemn this attack aimed at religious institutionsn and some hotelhe capital. >> sreenivasan: three police officers were also killed during a raid on a suspected safe house just outside the capital, when another bomb detonated. at least seven suspects have been arrested, but no grouhas claimed responsibility. authorities have imposed a nationwide curfew until da tomorrow, and a temporary social media ban to prevent the spread of misinformation. pope francis condemned the violence in sri lanka in his traditional easter sunday address this morning. >> ( translated ): i learned with sadness and sorrow the news

of the grave attacks that today, on easter day, have brought grief and sorrow to churches and other community places in sri lanka. >> sreenivasan: speaking to a crowd of about 70,000 people in peter's square, the pope also urged politicians to welcome refugees, and fo can end flicts in syria, libya and venezuela. >> sreenivasan: next friday rymarks an anniverhat is sometimes overlooked. it will be 33 years since the chernobyl nuclear power plant-- thn, in the former soviet un now in ukraine-- blew apart after annexpected power surge. the soviet government initially remained silen but within days of april 26, 1986, hundreds of thousands of peoplwere evacuated. dozens died in the months following, and radiation contaminated a huge area that remains uninhabited today.e arlier this weekend, i spoke with adam higginbotham, author

of "midnight in chernobyl: the untold story of the world's greatest nuclear disaster." >> sreenivasan: this is almost 33 years agond here you are putting out a book now. what is untold about it? >> well, i would s that the principle aspects of what is untold about it is this version of the story is true. s enivasan: what did we get wrong? >> well, because the soviet government did such an excellent job of attempting to cover up the truth at the beginning, you enow, most people's conception of what ha are kind of rooted in the initial propaganda that the soviet union put out, and also the misinformation that resulted from the lack of information. so for example, you know, a lot of people still think that tense 0 of thousandle died almost immediately as a result of this accident. >> sreenivasan: that's not the se. >> >> that's not the case but part of the reason for that is because western correspondent moscow weren't allowed access to any information so they did their best with rumor and

hearsay. with a result that i think within a week of the accident the "new york post" was reporting that 15,000 people had died andheir bodies buried in a nuclear waste dump somewhere in the ukraine. >> sreenivasan: when in fact it was what. >> srivasan:. >what. >> ? when the death toll by that point was two? two? >> one died in the initial explosion and a second man died by dawned that day by explosions. sreenivasan: and how do but calculate the ones that got horrible cancers? >> thefficial figures within five months another 29 people died as a result of radiation exposure ty received. in those few hours after the first explosion. buthen when you start to try to attribute cancers directly to the results to accident, things get a lot trickier because of the complexities of epidemiology but also because of the extent of the attempt ofer covup by the soviet government. >> sreenivasan: you know, in a way when you look at this in a larger picture, this is almost coe of the things i think that

apsed the soviet union, this catastrophe and what they had to pay to try to clean this up. i mean, i don't know what the rest of the soviet economy was t doing at te, but it was really startling. >> yes. i an the cost of the accident certainly didn't help an already staggering soviet economy. >> sreenivasan: right. >> but i think the me significant impact it had in contributing to the collapse of the empire was the way it changed gorbachev's mind, he was pursuing these ideas of gas new orleans saints and perestroika aneconomic reform quite softly in the lead up to the accident, it was only aft crnobyl he only realized how exactly how deephhe rot went ine system that he inherited and that seemed to have encouraged him to kind of plunge into these economic reforms at quite reckless speed. >> sreenivasan: yes. >> and as a result those reforms were botched.

that really destroyed the soviet union. >> sreenivasan: this isn't a book that is necessarily against nuclear technology or for. it seems to be more about how we collectively put so much faith in tecology. >>hink that's right. i mean, i have tried to show the facts of what happened rather than, you know, including any 0 polemic that is either pro or anti-nuclear energy. i think the wider lesson of the story is one of overconfidence in technology ich i think is really obviously still with us today. >> sreenivasan: yes, besidokes facee are talking about big data, we are not as conscious of, articial intelligence. >> exactly. and we are assuming it is always improving our lives rather than perhaps, you know, controlling and altering the way things happen. >> sreenivasan: all right. adam higginbotham, midnight in chernobyl is the name of the book, thank you so much. >> thank you.

>> >> >> sreenivasan: the popular anmic strip "cathy" chronicled one single w struggles with love, food and her mother for more than three decades. it was based loosely on the life of its creator, cathy guisewite, who's out with a new bk, a collection of funny essays about the struggles of the next chapter of life. newshour weekend's megan thompson has more. >> thompson: in 1976, cathy guisewite was 26 years old and already a vice president at a detroit ad agency. but, she secretly felt miserable about not achieving some more traditional goals, like finding a boyfraend. >> my geon was right in between the two bettys-- betty crocker and betty friedan. and i wanted to be both of them. be-- and a lot of women did at that time. it was-- and i literally gained 40 pounds on one betty's chocolate fudge layer cake mix, while reading the other betty's "feminine mystique."

d a lot of women, i think, found themselves like the place i was in. >> thompson: how did cathy start? rt after college, i was working ss an ading agency. i was very sucl and i was feeling the ll frustration of the success of my job and the failure of my relationships. so, i wrote about it in my journals. and one night, it look-- i felt so pathetic writing and eating everything in the waiting for the wrong-- mr. wrong to call, that i drew a picture of what i looked like. hat drawing home to mom. and mom, who had told me to never share anything publicly, said, "oh, this could be a comic strip for millions of people to enjoy." so mom went to the library, researched comic strip syndicates, sent me a list of who to approach. and just to get mom off my back, i sent some scribbles, not in comic strip form, to the name at the top of her list. >> thompson: the scribbles worked. universal press syndicate, a national syndicator of comics oand newspaper columnered

guisewite a contract. had you had any training in drawing or cartooning? >> i had zero training in-- in art. i-- when i received the contract back to do rest of my life, i-- it came with a note saying they were sure i would learn how to draw if i had to do it 365 days a year. >> thompson: and you did. >> and i did. >> " thompsothy" was brutally honest about the life of a real woman. and, it was a hit. it debuted in 1976, and at peak distribution, appeared in 1,400p newers around the country. >> cathy is a hopeful character who dealt with-- i used to say she dealt with the four basic guilt groups: food, love, mom, and career. andem trying to juggle ll and find her way; navigate life through those things. >> thompson: the comic chronicled thcartoon character's quests to find a flattering swimsuit,nd find a huand, all while negotiating her beloved and badgering fictional mother. "cathy" wawildly popular. i mean, why do you think it resonated so much with so many

people? >> life is a balance between you know, our dreams, and our fantasies, and our hopes for ourselves and the reality of what happens in the day. i thin a lot of things stack up on us and in us that we don't even know, tngs that work on us, that chip away at our time, our-- our-- sense of ourself, our sense of competence so thatt the-- eve days that start triumphant, kind of end, you know, with a box of frozen coo-- girl scout cookies. i think that a lot of women went through the same things, and are still going through the same things today. and that the comic strip character is a friend to them. that's the most common thing i ever heard from people is, "i feel like you know me. you know my friend.e cathy is i feel like we're soul sisters." and i loved getting to be that for pe >> thompson: but it wasn't all popularity. "cathyre" had han its share of critics. some people said, you know, "this wis a charact's just obsessed with her weight, and , and relationships, a

maybe not the most feminist, in that respect." >> i ws surprised by the criticism a bit, because i felt like, when i was writing about shopping-- and i wrote about shopping a lot-- i wrote about it because it was a microcosm of the extra expectations and the extra stuff tt comes on women. just the simple act of buying a white shirt for a woman is like a 15-department, you know, styles, cs, fabric, manufacturers. you have to try everything on. a man just goes in and buys a white shirt off the rack. so it wasn't me writing about shopping, it was writing about what shopping did to women. >> thompson: guisewite's "cathy" comic strip ran for 34 years before she retired, in part to end more time with her aging parents. but now, guisewite is back, wit w book of humorous essays: "50 things that aren't my fault." it chronicles what happened after guisewite's retirement. >> thompson: you write about,

sort of, again, being caught in the middle now, in this-- in this stage of life. >> well, people call this the sandwich generation. and it squashed than that. i feel-- i call it the panini genion. because, on one hand, i'm caring for aging parents who d m't listen and on the other hand, an aging daughter who doesn't listen to me. and t i'm squashed middle, in an aging body that definitely does not listen to me. and aware, like so many of my generation are, that we're running out of time to do all ught wengs that we tho still want to do. >> thompsogu in the book, ewite tries to convince her 90-year-old parents to wear emergency alert pendants. and then, there's trying to understand the world of her daughter, now in her 20s. >> bk in the '70s, our big dream was to be able to have a career and have a family at once. that was having it all. for my daughter's generation, aving ait all is career, having a family, having a social media presence, having a yoube channel, having a blog, having-- being a community activist, being a global

enlight-- you know, a force for global change. and she has, like, 10,000 more things to feel like that she can do, but to feel like she should be doing to keep up with everybody. and i think at the end, way less freedom to say that she's ovtstressed or can't handle or feels bad about herself. my dream for "50 things that aren't my fault," it will-- is that it will be a friend to women the same way that the ocomic strip was a friend women; that it will help women feel like they're not alone; tlphat it will omen laugh at the little things so we can all kind of have the strength and energy to get on to the big things; and that it will also help womk backward with a little bit of grace and forgiveness and look-- and look forward, face the future knowing there are a lot of things that aren't our fault.

reenivasan: when is an o home movie of interest to anyone beyond the immediate family? an be found in a digital archive run by a san francisco-based couple who are compiling and curating the work of thousands of amaur filmmakers and turning it into living history. and, that's not all they're doing. correspondent joanne elgart nnings has our report. >> reporter: for anybody, this would be an credible find. a 70-year-old reel of home movie footage that had been hidden in an attic. >> oh, it's all going so fast, but these are the family. that's my mother. if i'm not mistaken, that's the only home movie footage i've ever seen of my mom, which is astonishing. my mother died in 2002, and this is a part of her life that we d't know much about, but she waras in europe after the w. >> reporter: for rick prelinger, it's particularly poignant. he has spent a career peering into other people's pasts, using home movies as his lens on

history. >> you c't distill history down to a few ideas. it isn't true that things were sisampler anr and people were friendlier in the old days. it c's infinitely omplex. >> reporter: prelinger and his wife megan have amassed 17,000 hom, e movime 1,200 hours of foota. it's all contained in a digital libra archives, which makes most of its footage available for free tothe public. >> he's kind of a cult character actually, among filmmakers, e stock you can now h footage f free. i think it's also not just for documtarians. it's the next generation. a very visual generation. so they want to see what the 20th century looked like and felt like. >> reporter: brewster kahle founded san francisco's non- profit internet archive, which digitizes the prelinger material r free. it includes not just home movies, but also some 5,000 industrial and educational films. kahle says those help give a

truer picture of the past than anhing created by big movie studios. >> hollywood is sort of a little edited, and so, these old industrial films, training filmsov, home ms, they're more raw. they're kind of more of what real life was like, and you can relate to it. >> reporter: from major finds to tiny details, prelinger knows tta contents of his vast di archive intimately. >> again, this is 1928. it's a very charismatic and very beautiful family. >reporter: but he's done more than just collect and catalogue the footage. pre hling used it to craft a unique film sers called "lost landscapes." the carefullyprdited montages sent the life of a city across 100 years, in the span of about an hour. so far, he's created films about new york, detroit, oakland, los angeles, and san francisco. th year, the series has gained quite a following. a screening in january packed e internet archive's

auditoriumn san francisco. this film has no narration. barely any audio, in fact. >> you are the soutrack. this is crucially important. i'm going to give you some background, and i'm goinntto do some iications, and if you're quiet, i'm going to try to antagonize you, so you speak up. >> reporter: prelinger guides the audience to yell out and reactions as the images roll by. >> crowd: ohhh, there'the newsboy! >> there is something amazing about giving people the opportunity to violate the rules and talk during the movie. i think it's really a f people owning history in a way that they wouldn't if they were told what to think and what to feel. >> reporter: prelinger also provides s e live narration of his own. >> this is the bass tub. its skipper is taking native activists to alcatraz for the

occupation. >> reporter: this scene shows native american activists heading to a protest on alcatraz island in san francisco bay. >> this was shot by a man named oswald skyes in 1970. eporter: oswald sykes is the kind of filmmaker the prelinger archives specie in, an amateur with a keen ey >> his daughter kim is in the audience tonight. >>neporter: kim sykes has b attending "lost landscapes" for years, but for a long time, she felt som was missing. >> i hadn't seen people of color in a lot of the footage, in the s yeat i've gone to the show. >> reporter: so she convinced her father tmake his footage available. >> these are african americans coming out of the fairmont hotel, so i thought it was important to show that, you knsaow, francisco was very diverse. >> reporter: prelinger says home movies show much more diveity than the commercial film record. >> beginning in the '30s when 8mm was developed, it was sufficiently inexpensive that almost everybody could shoot me movies. you've seen farmers shooting home movies, young people shooting films, latinx people shooting films. it's this great sort of a

flowering of democratic expression. >> reporter: in addition to documenting the 20th century's human experience, prelinger's films show how dramatically our urba landscapes have changed. >> so, this is the sunset district before it u s built up. ee it's all dunes. the western side of san francisco was built on the dunes. you know, when the places we live change rapidly, we notice the incremen we notice the short term changes, but we don't always get a chance to sit back and think about how they've accumulated, how mucgeh a place has ch maybe in 20, 30, 40, 50 years. >> reporter: in the 2017 film," lost landscapes of new york," viewers travel from the apression era with" hoovervilles" a garment worker strike, to desperate housing conditions in har0sm in the 194 >> so the el is being torn down >> reporter: there's also a ride on t third avenue elevated train, the last piece of a that once ran the len of manhattan before it was torn

down in tt 1950s. >> ias noisy. it was dirty. it blocked people's view and sunlight. >> reporter: in addition to the digital film archive, prelinger and his wife megan have created a physical archive called the prelinger library. it's devoted to what they term "ephemera." >> our culture leaves a great deal of ephemeral material behind. but it inrns out to be edibly illuminating evidence of how we lived, how we worked, how we played, what was important to us. >> reporter: one example: a collection of u.s. department of agriculture documents that spans the 19th and 20th centuries. megan prelinger explains how that relic of the past might help illuminate the present.>> nd information, for instance, about insect populatiof nse 1880s might not have been interesting in 1950, but today, with a crisishe inealth of worldwide insect populations, it becomes urgent. r orter: the prelinger library has become a communal space for dartists researchers from all around the

country. >> this is great. >> good. well, we aim to please. >> repoer: jeremy farris is working on an illustrated book about the history of pollution along the hudson river in upstate new york. >> oh, yeah, this is the e i was looking for. a lot of these maps and, like, kind arof obsolete reports really great to have inand. >> reporter: and once a month, the library hosts artist-led talks. >> so, the dalia is the official flower of san francisco. er> reporter: rick prelingays that building community, both here in the library and through the digital film archive, i part of what he calls an historic intervention. >> a place like this helps you not take the present for granted. a place like this helps you step back from at we assume to be true, and think about alternatives. a place like this helps you think about the continuing presence of history, and how we have the opportunity to change history on our own. >> this is "pbs newshour

weekend," sunday. >> sreenivasan: in iisly, archaeol are uncovering more treasures from the city of pompeii, where thousands were killed when mount vesuvius suddenly erupted in the year a.d. 79. pompeii's ruins cover close to 165 acres, and one-third of thel site is buried under the volcanic ash and sotne, making ita popular tourist attraction and an active excavation sitin the latest f include two complete houses with brilliantly-colored wall paintings of greek godand mythological figures. >de> it was wul, because it is very beautiful and in very good condition, so the colors are very bright. and so the rest of the room is very good for decoration. >> sreenivasan: the colors faded after ash was removed and moisture on the surface of the wall dried out, but restoration is underway. >> we wil clean this and we will protect it and so we will

get the beautiful colors back. >> sreenivasan: the new discovies are part of the final stages of what italy calls the "great pompeii project." it was launched in 2012, after a series of collapses and flooding over the centuries destroyed some of pompeii's fragile walls and buildings. teams of construction workers are now shoring up mounds of earth that threaten to crush ruins where the newly discovered art is being restored on fragile walls. >> in the past, they preferred to excavate vast areas, but especially in the 18th century, this caused the disruption of many houses that were not preserved. there was no restoration. >> sreen say the newly-uncovered homes with their paintings may be fully uncovered aned to the public within the next two years.

>> sreenivan: finally tonight, ukraine's president petro poroshenko conceded to challenger volodym zelenskiy in a runoff election today. according to exit polls, zelenskiy, a 41-year-old comic actor with no previous political experience defeated poshenko by a margin of more than three to one. pbs newshour special correspondent simon ostrovsky recently visited zelenskiy on his set and spoke with him about his chances of winning. to see the full segment, go to www.pbs.org/newshour. tt'all for this edition of pbs newshour weekend. ini'm hari sreevasan. thanks for watching. have a good night. captioning sponsored by wnet captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org >> pbs newshour weekend is made possible by: bernard and irene schwartz.

suand edgar wachenheim iii. seton melvin. erthe and philip milstein family. dr. p. roy vagelos and diana t. vagelos. the j.p.b. foundation. rosalind p. walter barbara hope zuckerberg. ate funding is provided by mutual of america-- designing customized individual aennd group retirproducts. that's why we're your retirement company. additional support has been provided by: rand by the corporation public broadcasting, and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. be more. pbs.

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