Outstanding piece by Jamie Lauren Keiles.Well worth your time.
By Jamie Lauren Keiles, via NYTimes
Nick Walters listens to a bunch of different podcasts, but none speak to him the way “Failing Upwards” does. The weekly show, hosted by the men’s-wear enthusiasts and self-proclaimed “grown dirtbags” Lawrence Schlossman and James Harris, undertakes to navigate the “millennial male zeitgeist.” Mostly, they talk about clothes and New York.
Walters, a 24-year-old commercial banker, lives in Cleveland. He first heard about the show from a friend and recognized himself not just in the hosts but also in its community of listeners — mainly guys on Instagram who share his perspective on fashion and life. “If I know that another guy listens to ‘Failing Upwards,’ we’re going to talk about it,” he says. “It’s kind of like a TV show, like if you’re into ‘Game of Thrones.’ ”
Much like “Game of Thrones,” “Failing Upwards” claims its own extended universe. Fans are known to one another as the Fail Gang. They worship the same streetwear god (Jonah Hill) and a sartorial ritual known as “the fit check,” hypebeast-speak for “Who are you wearing?” Walters fantasizes about going on the show and already knows what he would wear: a pair of Yeezy Boost 700 Wave Runners, a John Elliott hoodie and Eric Emanuel basketball shorts. He likes these clothes, but just as important, he believes that this outfit would impress Schlossman and Harris. “I want to meet the hosts so bad,” he admits. “I want to be friends with them.” He plans on moving to New York someday, and he told me that if they cross paths, he believes that could happen. “We have enough similar interests and a similar sense of humor that, yeah, I think we would hit it off.”
All across the podcast realm, from the heights of self-help to the depths of true crime, imagined relationships are blossoming. Listeners may press play for the content, but many of them eventually come to nurture something like a one-way friendship with the hosts. This kind of daydreaming is an in-joke of the form, best articulated by a popular meme: On first glance, it appears to be a picture of a kid eating ice cream with his friends. Upon closer inspection, he’s actually alone; the three laughing women are models printed on a billboard advertising ice cream. The caption: “How it feels to listen to podcasts.”
Among sociologists and armchair theorizers, this unique type of pining is known as a parasocial relationship — a term coined in 1956 to describe the connection between television viewers and a new class of entertainment personalities, including announcers, game-show hosts and anyone else who spoke in direct address to the camera. “The spectacular fact about such personae is that they can claim and achieve an intimacy with what are literally crowds of strangers,” the sociologists Richard Wohl and Donald Horton wrote in Psychiatry. “This intimacy, even if it is an imitation and a shadow of what is ordinarily meant by that word, is extremely influential with, and satisfying for, the great numbers who willingly receive it and share in it.”
Parasocial relationships are, by definition, one-sided, but like normal friendships, they can deepen over time, enriched by the frequent and dependable appearance of the charming persona on the television set. Podcasts, with their own unique set of formal quirks, are perhaps even better poised to foment this kind of bond. An ideal complement to multitasking, the podcast is ingrained in daily household chores, the morning commute, the bedtime routine. A two-way conversation can be taxing. Podcasts allow us to get to know someone else without all the stress of making ourselves known. If listening demands anything at all, it’s only a bit of imagination. As hosts chatter on, we might picture their faces, their posture, their clothes, the empty cans of seltzer on the table, perhaps even their off-air lives beyond the show. “The host is this disembodied voice that is pervading your intimate spaces, so there’s kind of that room for imaginative bonding between the listener,” says Gina Delvac, producer of the friendship podcast “Call Your Girlfriend,” hosted by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow. “You have to remember that there’s no fourth wall. When you’re talking to someone, you’re whispering in their ear. You’re in the shower with them. You’re on their commute to work.”
Over hours of listening, the asymmetry increases. Hosts begin to feel like dear friends, while listeners remain eternal strangers. For the hosts themselves, and other figures who exist within the extended universe of a show, the lopsidedness can feel awkward or uncanny. When Delvac — a silent but known character in the “Call Your Girlfriend” universe — meets fans on the street, she’s often consumed by a feeling of amnesia. “They’re like: ‘Oh, my God. We know each other. We know each other so well!’ And I’m like, ‘Did we go to school together?’ Was she, like, my sister’s friend? ‘How do I know you?’ I’m, like, racking my brain,” she explains. “It can seriously feel sometimes, from the producer or podcaster end, like having a brain injury or some weird sci-fi disease.”
This sense of connection to a distant stranger begins, unsurprisingly, with religion. Fanaticus, the Latin origin of “fan,” was used to describe female temple attendants driven into frenzy by devotion to the gods. This type of chaotic piousness, as a secular behavior, might be traced to the mid-1800s, a time when mass culture was on the rise. In a recent New Yorker article, “Superfans: A Love Story,” the writer Michael Schulman finds early examples in the concert-hall frenzy known as Lisztomania and the protests in England that followed the fictional death of Sherlock Holmes. The shortened word “fan” first appeared around 1900 in reference to the enthusiastic crowds at baseball games. Throughout the 20th century, the term would grow in scope to include worshipers of any entertainment figure — from matinee idols to Elvis to the Beatles. At that point, such devotion was a personal affliction, enjoyed alone in an adolescent daydream. Though fans might write letters, attend concerts or join clubs, the ability to band together as a group was still somewhat limited by the bounds of time and space.
Our modern sense of “fandom” — not just 50 million Elvis fans, but a community of 50 million Elvis fans — most likely began with the Star Trek conventions of the 1970s, which helped create a new infrastructure for fan engagement. These early gatherings of a few thousand people in a rented hotel ballroom would eventually give rise to phenomena like ComicCon, enormous gatherings that have reconceived fans not just as passive viewers but as active, and highly integral, participants. They are no longer merely worshipers of a top-down product but creators and stewards of a shared, bottom-up identity.
Today’s fandom is more like a stateless nation, formed around a shared viewing heritage but perpetuated through the imaginations and interrelations of those who enjoy and defend it. When their common cause comes under threat — through chart competition, cancellation or critique — fans can organize to increase streams, denigrate critics and rally executives to right perceived wrongs. Often they even resort to using the tools of politics while seeking redress. After this year’s disappointing “Game of Thrones” finale, more than 1.7 million fans signed a Change.org petition to remake Season 8 with “competent writers.” (So far, no change has been made.)
In an age defined by political dysfunction, the appeal of any sort of democratically secured victory — however small, however pathetic — isn’t hard to understand. Now that the fandom template has been cemented, it has begun to attach to more obscure or arcane media enterprises: indie-pop artists like Charli XCX, faceless meme makers and even podcasts. The profit model of the podcast world is arranged, perhaps serendipitously, to capitalize on this type of fan relationship. Justin Lapidus, vice president of growth marketing and digital products for the direct-to-consumer linen brand Brooklinen, says podcast listeners are a perfect match for the company’s core demographic: 18-to-54-year-olds with “higher household incomes.” When he looks for shows to advertise on, he tends to make “efficient” plays for smaller, but more committed, audiences. “It doesn’t really matter what genre their podcast is in,” he says. “Whatever they buy, their listeners will buy, for the most part.”
Beyond advertising, podcasts that achieve solvency tend to do so through a stitched-together network of social-media hustles, the sum of which serves to cultivate and monetize an audience’s sense of connection. Though large podcasts often enjoy financial support from traditional media companies and emergent podcast networks, many small and midsize shows — arguably those most indicative of the form — have come to rely on Patreon, a membership platform that invites fans to become financial supporters of creative projects in exchange for a tiered benefits package of the creator’s invention. At the lowest membership tiers, usually $1 to $5 per month, podcast supporters receive benefits like bonus episodes or access to V.I.P. chat rooms. As the tiers increase in price, the rewards grow more substantial, often involving direct engagement with the hosts or entry into the universe of the show itself.
Through these high-tier benefits, the parasocial bond can take on a degree of two-sidedness, absorbing qualities of conventional friendship, but only in a partial, commoditized way. For $51 per month, the hosts of “Dumb People Town,” a comic “celebration of dumb people doing dumb things,” will visit your social-media profile, then film themselves reacting to your life in the same way they break down stories on the show. For $100 per month, the host of “McMansion Hell” will make fun of “a building of your choice”; the hosts of “Mueller, She Wrote” will invite you on the podcast to “share your fantasy indictment league picks.”
According to Wyatt Jenkins, senior vice president for product at Patreon, podcasts are the second-largest category on the site, and the fastest-growing. In the past three years, the number of Patreon pages for podcasts has quadrupled, while revenue intake in the category has increased eightfold. “Roughly 40 percent of our members — this is a guess — are probably doing it altruistically,” he says. “As a vertical, podcasting communities retain memberships very, very well. A lot higher than some other verticals. They release regular weekly content, and they create this incredibly strong bond.”
Because both Patreon pages and ads depend on a sense of personal connection, podcast hosts benefit further when an audience corrals itself into something like a community. This most often occurs in Facebook groups, Discord servers or subreddits — online forums that transform isolated passive listeners into active participants. Some podcast tribes even claim their own names: There are the naddpoles (“Naddpod”) and the MBMBAMbinos (“My Brother, My Brother and Me”). There’s the Scoop Troop (“Hollywood Handbook”), the Wholigans (“Who? Weekly”) and Baby Nation (“The Baby-sitters Club Club”). Fans of “Pod Save America” can be recognized by their T-shirts, which proudly proclaim “Friend of the Pod.”
When these online communities are especially successful, they tend to spin off into subsidiary forums. The wildly popular true-crime podcast “My Favorite Murder” supports a vast constellation of unofficial Facebook groups, many only tenuously connected to the subject of the show. Listeners, who self-describe as Murderinos, can now join “My Favorite Curls” (for murder fans with curly hair), “My Favorite Murder Disnerderinos” (for fans who love murder and Disney), “My Favorite Skin Condition” (for Murderinos with eczema and psoriasis) and “My Favorite Free Emotional Labor” (for calling out and educating problematic Murderinos). In one metagroup, called “My Favorite Thunderdome,” members can tag Murderinos from other subgroups and sub-subgroups for the sole purpose of arguing. This group puts out a regular roundup, “The Weekly Thunder,” which summarizes drama from elsewhere in the “My Favorite Murder” Facebook universe. Once you’re this many layers deep, the podcast itself becomes something of an afterthought — just one moving part in the more complex Murderino ecosystem. “Some of them are people who are, like, too into murder,” says Sophia Carter-Kahn, a frequent lurker in the group who listens to the show only occasionally. “I’ve seen people who are like, ‘I bought this tooth online that’s from this, like, murder victim.’ ”
At the furthest end of this fandom paradigm, the community itself is large enough to begin to overtake the very podcast it came from. The subreddit forum for the left-wing comedy podcast “Chapo Trap House” is, at least in name, a forum for discussing the weekly show. In practice, it serves as an erratic clearinghouse for whatever content its fans feel moved to post: socialist memes, cringe-worthy right-wing tweets and, very often, objections to the show itself. Even among fans, such critiques are numerous, prone to rebuking the show’s overwhelming whiteness, its inconsistently calibrated irony and its outsize reputation on the left. (The show takes in about $142,000 per month on Patreon.) Critiques of the show itself are so frequent that they’ve now become a kind of meme on the subreddit.
In one semi-sarcastic post calling for a “Chapo General Strike,” fans joked that they would cancel their subscriptions unless the show met certain demands: a single nonwhite guest, equity for the producer Chris Wade, the host Felix Biederman’s naming four women he likes who aren’t in his immediate family. Among the more serious, and more ubiquitous, demands was a call for the show to cancel, denounce or otherwise divorce itself from the host Amber A’Lee Frost, who regularly transgresses the discursive norms of the online left. (Frost most recently drew flak for giving a flippant interview to the British website Spiked, which ran under the headline “Meet the Anti-Woke Left.”)
Frost, for her part, has called the show’s subreddit an “incubator of smug, joyless, antisocial sanctimony,” which raises the question: What, exactly, are its members really fans of? If a podcast is not its particular content, and the certain set of people who choose to make that content, then what exactly is a podcast at all?
A few years ago you might have said podcasting was just radio for the internet. Today, the audio is almost beside the point. Today’s podcast hosts are not just on-air personae, but community managers, designers of incentives, spokespeople for subscription toothbrushes and business-to-business software. The worth of a podcast is no longer just its content, but rather the sum of the relations it produces — fan to host, fan to fan, fake friends eating ice cream on billboards together.
Jamie Lauren Keiles is a writer who lives in Ridgewood, Queens. She last wrote about Mike Gravel’s presidential campaign.
Illustrations by Mrzyk & Moriceau. Photo illustration by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari
I’ve heard many times how the young new age minds and voters ultimately triumph over the anachronistic old guard trying desperately to maintain power and political influence.
This may be true, in concept, without the substantial presence of other interference to subvert those younger minds. But, as you read this article, consider how powerful a focused, deeply mission-based subversive campaign can actually be against any audience, from either direction. Most especially when that audience is the younger minds themselves at their most impressionable.
Sure, the young thinkers can, and could ultimately direct future trends, of all thoughts. But if those developing, newly growing thoughts are shaped by contrarian adults, aggressive enough to manipulate others by any means necessary, then, those young minds will not, in fact, direct future trends. They will merely be pre-conditioned messengers of the stauts quo old guard.
Young hearts and minds tend to have a promising outlook and view on life and humanity. Until they are messed with by adults who can’t imagine them growing up without following the same dogma and narrow, fear-based belief systems they did. In the past, the main reason for conservative triumph has been due to lack of resources and concerted financial backing behind mobilized young progressive voters. Recently, that metric seemed to be shifting with the advent of powerful social media technology at the hands of anyone, of any age. But, witness how that same technology can now be used by the same powers who have always resisted progressive thoughts in the past.
A cynic’s view of all this could very well be, that while youth can make a lot of noise and drama in the political and social arenas, and even affect some changes in large urban areas, they rarely affect “significant” full landscape change in politics or religion. Great swaths of this country, if not all the great lands on our planet earth, are painted by adults. For better or worse, they are still holding the biggest paint brushes.
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Right-Wing Views for Generation Z, Five Minutes at a Time
Dennis Prager believes teenagers are more open to conservative ideas than millennials. With PragerU, he’s making a play to get around their professors.
Will Witt of PragerU conducting an interview at the University of California, Berkeley, on the topic of gender.
By Nellie Bowles Jan. 4, 2020
BERKELEY, Calif. — Will Witt walked through the University of California campus doing what he does professionally, which is trolling unwitting young liberals on camera.
He approached students who seemed like good targets: people with political buttons on their bags, androgynous clothing, scarves. It was safe to say that the vast majority here in the heart of progressive culture would be liberal. Mr. Witt, whose bouffant and confident smile make him look like a high school jock from central casting, told the students that he had a question for them. If they agreed to answer, and they usually did, the game was on.
“How many genders are there?” Mr. Witt asked before turning and staring deadpan at the camera. Some people laughed and walked away. Most, knowing the camera was rolling, engaged.
“As many as you want?” a recent Ph.D. student responded, a little confused to be confronted with this question.
After some of the footage was edited in the back of an S.U.V. in a parking lot nearby, the video headed to Prager University, a growing hub of the online right-wing media machine, where Mr. Witt is a rising star and the jokey, Ray-Ban-wearing embodiment of the site’s ambitions.
Last year PragerU videos racked up more than one billion views, the company said. The Prager empire now has a fleet of 6,500 high school and college student promoters, known as the PragerForce, who host on-campus meetings and gather at least once a year for conventions. And this year, the company is expanding its scope. PragerU executives are signing stars of the young new right to host made-for-the-internet shows to fuel 2020 content, including a book club and a show geared to Hispanics called Americanos.
The goal of the people behind all of this — Dennis Prager, the conservative talk show host and impresario of this digital empire, and the venture’s billionaire funders — seems simple: more Will Witts in the world. More pride in American history (and less panic over racism), more religion (specifically in the “Judeo-Christian” tradition), less illegal immigration, more young people laughing at people on the left rather than joining them.
Mr. Witt, 23, said he was raised in a relatively liberal home by his mother, and when he arrived at the University of Colorado in Boulder, he was already leaning conservative. But he found his zeal for the culture war on campus. One of his classes offered students extra credit for going to a political protest. Mr. Witt submitted that he would go to a nearby speech hosted by the right-wing star Milo Yiannopoulos. The teaching assistant told him that would not count, he said.
He was frustrated, feeling lonely and at home watching videos on YouTube. The site prompted him with a bright animation made by PragerU. He can’t remember the first video he saw. Maybe railing against feminism, he said.
“I must have watched every single one that night,” Mr. Witt said. “I stopped going to class. Pretty much all the time I was reading and watching.”
He did not graduate from college.
The videos are five minutes each, quick, full of graphs and grand extrapolations, and unapologetically conservative. Lessons have titles like: “Why Socialism Never Works” (a series), “Fossil Fuels: The Greenest Energy,” “Where Are the Moderate Muslims?” and “Are Some Cultures Better Than Others?”
To the founders and funders of PragerU, YouTube is a way to circumvent brick-and-mortar classrooms — and parents — and appeal to Generation Z, those born in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
Mr. Witt dropped out of college after watching PragerU videos that railed against campus politics.
Mr. Prager sees those young people as more indoctrinated in left-wing viewpoints than any previous generation, but also as more curious about the right. For these teenagers, consuming conservative content is a rebellion from campus politics that are liberal and moving left.
“We find more of them are open to hearing an alternative voice than many of their elders,” Mr. Prager wrote in an email. “Many suspect they have been given only one view, and suspect that view may often be absurd.”
“They take old arguments about the threat of immigration but treat them as common sense and almost normative, wrapping them up as a university with a neutral dispassionate voice,” said Chris Chavez, the doctoral program director at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication.
PragerU’s website has a fine-print disclaimer that it is not an actual academic institution.
“PragerU’s ‘5 Minute Ideas’ videos have become an indispensable propaganda device for the right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center warned on its blog, citing videos like “Blacks in Power Don’t Empower Blacks,” hosted by the Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley, who is black.
Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies, said he has noticed an impact from PragerU’s content. “It sits at this border between going off a cliff into conspiracy thinking and extreme kinds of prejudices in the name of anti-political correctness,” he said.
On PragerU’s website, there is little differentiation between its video presenters. So the late Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer appears on the same page as Michelle Malkin, the commentator who has defended overtly racist elements of the right. There’s Bret Stephens, the New York Times Op-Ed columnist; Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host; George F. Will, the anti-Trump conservative commentator; and Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader. For a teenager approaching the site, each headshot in the same size circle, it would be hard to tell the difference between them all.
‘Give us five minutes’
PragerU began in 2009 as a nonprofit to promote the conservative religious values of Mr. Prager, a popular talk radio host and author of books on Judaism. Originally, the idea was to build an actual physical university. Allen Estrin, his producer, would spearhead it.
But a physical building was prohibitively expensive.
“Just to get started would be $250 million,” Mr. Estrin said recently while driving through Los Angeles. “You have to buy property, a building, do a faculty, years to start, years to raise money, and then at the end what do you have? One thousand students in the first graduating class?”
Allen Estrin getting his makeup done before taping a show at PragerU.
Mr. Estrin had another idea. He was obsessed with internet video. Mr. Estrin taught screenwriting, but the conservative content he saw online was rambling and baggy. The sets were bad (a lot of old men at whiteboards). He pitched the early PragerU group: They could make a right-wing university online, in tight five-minute courses.
“We used to say in the early days, ‘Give us five minutes, and we’ll give you a semester,’” Mr. Estrin said.
Marissa Streit, who had been a Hebrew tutor for another PragerU backer, joined as the company’s chief executive in 2011, and videos started going out.
“We released a video and had 35,000 views,” Ms. Streit said, “and I still remember Allen looked over to Dennis and said, ‘Can you imagine a classroom of 35,000 people?’”
Dan and Farris Wilks, hydraulic-fracturing billionaires from Texas, came in with donations. The conservative-leaning Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation joined, too — their goal in funding education is, in part, to “promote the teaching of American exceptionalism.”
PragerU started to spend on marketing on Facebook and YouTube.
“We just kept throwing more coal into the furnace,” Mr. Estrin said. “And we realized that we had created a distribution platform.”
In 2019, PragerU raised $22 million; next year, it estimates it will raise $25 million. Its budget comes almost entirely from donor contributions.
The ‘macro values’ of President Trump
PragerU has expanded Dennis Prager’s reach, but it has not fundamentally changed his days.
One recent morning, Mr. Prager was recording an “Ultimate Issues Hour” radio segment. He’s written eight books (one is “The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code”), and since 1999 has hosted “The Dennis Prager Show” on the conservative Christian radio syndicate Salem.
Mr. Prager is 6-foot-4 and imposing, in a white button-down shirt, hunched over the microphone.
He read some promos for his sponsor Blinds.com. He took calls from listeners. He talked about the importance of children respecting parents (very important) and about how parents should not want their children to be the smartest in the class, but rather the most moral.
He carefully threaded the needle for listeners as he made the argument for Mr. Trump as a values leader. There are two types of values, micro and macro, he argued. One seems to do with the minutiae of one’s life (marital fidelity, religiosity, respect); the other, he says, is more important and relates to the general effect of one’s life.
“Donald Trump may not have terrific micro values, but I think he has terrific macro values,” Mr. Prager said.
When it comes to politicians, he said he marks a sharp divide between political life and personal life, and he argues that the president’s personal behavior is irrelevant to his public message.
This is a new line of argument for Mr. Prager, who spent much of his career focusing on those micro values. He is a longtime opponent of same-sex marriage, which he considers an effort to “destroy the foundation of our Judeo-Christian civilization.” An episode in his “Same Sex Issues” collection is titled, “Love Is Not Enough.”
Former fans of Mr. Prager’s work say they are confused by his Trumpist turn.
“In terms of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ of watching people become more Trumpian, these moral icons becoming shills, he is way up there,” said Charlie Sykes, the author of “How the Right Lost Its Mind,” and a former radio host who used to occasionally substitute on Mr. Prager’s show. “Now you have to put PragerU in the category of other very successful meme machines and low-rent conservative grifting.”
Mr. Prager’s desk is stacked with items including a refrigerated lunchbox, open and showing a slice of lemon cake, but he cannot eat it. He often fasts 20 hours a day. His back is bad, and he is in considerable physical pain as he moves through the world.
As he prepared to leave, he unzipped a large rolling suitcase. It was almost entirely full of old newspapers. He added the day’s Wall Street Journal and headed to the airport. He does not want to do an interview in person. He wants to email, and so he does. His answers are long and lucid and full of biblical references.
Mr. Prager, who is Jewish, sees his mission as spreading the message of one God, which he articulates as a cure for humans who are “basically not good.” He measures success in how well he spreads this cure.
“Radio, writing, and now the internet have made making this cure known beyond my dreams,” he wrote. “Only God knows how successful I will have been; Moses did not get into the Promised Land, nor will I. But I am not naïve. I obviously recognize that a billion views a year means more influence than a million views.”
A billion views
The people chasing those billion views are in the PragerU headquarters in Los Angeles.
The office is typical millennial chic, full of midcentury modern sofas, standing desks and just a few hints at what’s made there, including a portrait of Ronald Reagan.
The team is about 50 people. The average staff member is about 30 years old. The site’s rapid growth puts desk space at a premium, but with a reporter visiting, few people were in the office.
“A lot of people stayed home because they were scared of being identified as working for Prager,” said the company’s chief marketing officer, Craig Strazzeri, laughing as he showed off another empty room.
Craig Strazzeri, PragerU’s chief marketing officer, in his office.
By the reception desk is a bowl of Prager-themed buttons. One features the outline of a man’s hair, glasses, wide tie and cigar — enough to indicate it is Mr. Prager. Another features a small American flag. These few in the bowl are the last of the pins.
“The pin maker won’t make more,” said Ms. Streit, the chief executive. “Economic protest.”
This is an example of what the staff would call the intolerance of the left, a common theme of PragerU videos. But Prager leaders maintain that they are unfazed by it. For them, the work happens online, and it happens with people younger than the pin makers, younger even than their staff’s friends. The target audience is Generation Z.
“I feel somewhat sorry for millennials,” said Mr. Estrin. “They truly were indoctrinated. Now kids have access to a different point of view. It’s as close as their computer or their phone.”
He is right that Generation Z is a wary group. Young people are significantly less trusting of institutions and one another than older generations. About half are categorized broadly as “low trusters,” according to a 2018 survey by the Pew Research Center, while only 19 percent of adults 65 and older fall into that category.
“Our generation is whiny,” said Candace Owens, who is 31 — a millennial — and one of the right-wing stars who has found a home with PragerU. “We’re constantly complaining. Our generation is suffering from peace. We create meaningless problems.”
“Gen Z has a better sense of humor,” she said. “They love the memes.”
And the meme battle — the culture war — is where Ms. Owens sees her chance.
“If conservatives don’t jump into culture headfirst, we’re not going to make much of a difference,” she said, “and PragerU understands that.”
How Prager works
Prager leaders say many of their young fans come from liberal homes, and the key for their mission is to reach these people and rescue them from what they describe as liberal indoctrination.
Leaders in the Prager universe describe the current landscape like this: Young people in America today are being told that they need to learn to “check your privilege” — a phrase popularized by progressives. They are taught the bad parts of American history before the good parts.
Crew members preparing to film a new show at PragerU.
The PragerU viewer is a young American who is vaguely annoyed by all of this — the trigger warnings or the female “Star Wars” heroine — and is sick of being told to apologize. PragerU validates those feelings.
“What they’re trying to do is get away from this narrative that’s really out there that America’s bad, and it’s just this negative thing,” said Trevor Mauk, a 19-year-old Cal-Berkeley sophomore from Barstow, Calif., and a fan of PragerU. “They give the reasons why it’s good to be proud of the country and proud of where you’re from and who you are.”
He added, “They’re talking about things I was never taught.”
Until PragerU came along, some of the biggest platforms for young conservatives looking for content were Fox News and online message boards, where fringe conspiracy theorists reign.
PragerU’s own experience with Big Tech has only fueled its fans’ perceptions that conservatives are the losers of the culture war. The company is suing Google, which owns YouTube, arguing that the platform is suppressing its content by marking some of its videos as restricted — and in doing so, lumping videos about the Ten Commandments in with violent or offensive content.
In PragerU’s corner is Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube employee turned whistle-blower who says liberal employees at YouTube had the ability to censor conservative content creators.
Mr. Vorhies has promoted conspiracy theories like QAnon and spread anti-Semitic messages, a pattern first reported by The Daily Beast. He is not an employee of PragerU, but they count him as a supporter, an example of the soft barrier between PragerU’s mainstream conservative allies and fans and the vast land of right-wing conspiracy.
“PragerU was one of the reasons I blew the whistle on Google,” said Mr. Vorhies, who attended a recent hearing in PragerU’s ongoing court battle against Google, which has said the allegations in the suit are without merit.
The campus fight
In the physical world, the battlefront of the culture war is almost always the quad. PragerU’s leaders hope to turn the PragerForce, their college clubs, into an on-the-ground college outrage content machine, making videos and working to organize on-campus conservative counterprogramming.
Those on the left at a place like Berkeley are largely unfazed by these skirmishes.
“Billionaires have spent a fortune to promote this group, and yet it’s completely marginal, at most an annoyance,” said James Kennerly, the Cal Young Democratic Socialists of America co-chair.
But PragerU is gaining traction.
Cody Thompson is a 26-year-old undergraduate at Augsburg University in Minneapolis. He considered himself such a strong social justice-oriented leftist, he said, that when he once saw someone walking around campus wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, he alerted student affairs, saying he felt unsafe.
As he tells it, Mr. Thompson was with a conservative childhood friend who showed him a 2017 PragerU video, “The Inconvenient Truth About the Democratic Party,” hosted by Carol Swain, who at the time was a professor of political science at Vanderbilt University and is now retired.
Mr. Witt rallying with PragerU supporters after a hearing at the Santa Clara Superior Courthouse
“The Democratic Party defended slavery, started the Civil War and opposed Reconstruction,” Ms. Swain, who is black, says in the video. She speaks slowly and straight to the camera as graphics flash by in the usual Prager style.
“I don’t know what it was, but when I watched that video I wanted to watch more,” Mr. Thompson said.
He talks about PragerU videos like a religious revelation. He said they opened his mind and repaired his relationship with his parents, made him anti-abortion and supportive of a border wall.
And when he went to see Mr. Witt speak, that sealed his new politics.
A few days after the Prager journey through Berkeley, the student Mr. Witt had buttonholed — the one who said there could be as many genders as he wanted — was still confused about the encounter.
“I was just hanging out on campus, getting the Berkeley energy,” said Pau Guinart, a 36-year-old from Barcelona who recently completed a doctorate in Latin American literature at Stanford. “When I started to sense what they were getting at, I was like, ‘Dude, you’re in the wrong place.’”
He hoped he had said the right thing, then asked: “Do you know where the video goes?”
A growth in impostor local news that promotes ideological agendas.
Americans express greater trust in news from local television and newspapers than national outlets, research shows. Credit: Etienne Laurent/EPA.
By Brendan Nyhan, Via NYimes
Oct. 31, 2019
The nature of the news misinformation problem may be changing. As consumers become more skeptical about the national news they encounter online, impostor local sites that promote ideological agendas are becoming more common. These sites exploit the relatively high trust Americans express in local news outlets — a potential vulnerability in Americans’ defenses against untrustworthy information.
Some misinformation in local news comes from foreign governments seeking to meddle in American domestic politics. Most notably, numerous Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency were found to have impersonated local news aggregators during the 2016 election campaign.
A recent Senate Intelligence Committee report found that 54 such accounts published more than 500,000 tweets. According to researchers at N.Y.U., the fake local news accounts frequently directed readers to genuine local news articles about polarizing political and cultural topics.
Domestically grown dubious outlets are also proliferating. Last week, The Lansing State Journal reported the existence of a network of more than 35 faux-local websites across Michigan with names like Battle Creek Times, Detroit City Wire, Lansing Sun and Grand Rapids Reporter.
These sites mix news releases and town announcements with rewritten content derived from other sources, including the Mackinac Center, a conservative think tank in the state, and the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington.
All of them originate with a company called Locality Labs L.L.C., which created similar networks of questionable local websites in Illinois and Maryland, and state and local business and legal sites around the country. There’s little information about these sites. They typically lack mastheads, local addresses and clear disclosure of their ownership or revenue sources.
Voters could easily become confused about the origins of information from these seemingly innocuous local-sounding outlets. In 2016, for example, websites in the Illinois network interviewed Republican candidates favored by a conservative state political committee, which then paid to mail print newspaper versions of the sites to voters without identifying them as political advertising.
A similar pattern cropped up in Tennessee, where a website called the Tennessee Star began publishing political news in 2017 without disclosing its funders or staff. One headline was featured in an ad by a member of Congress running for re-election. Readers and viewers had no way of knowing the Tennessee Star was actually a conservative site run by commentators and activists. This group has since started companion sites called the Minnesota Sun and Ohio Star; each draws heavily on syndicated content from conservative sources like The Daily Caller.
These three sites now attract substantial engagement on Facebook. CrowdTangle data shows they are frequently linked on public pages with millions of followers and have generated more than 100,000 interactions. In August and September, President Trump’s official Facebook page linked three times to the Minnesota Sun, which had published commentaries by the leader of the state’s Republican Party and the chief operating officer of the Trump re-election campaign.
As the tactic has become more common, political leaders have also created or promoted seemingly independent local websites. For instance, a website called the California Republican, which appeared in 2018, describes itself on Facebook as providing “the best of U.S., California and Central Valley news, sports and analysis.” But it was paid for by the campaign committee of Devin Nunes, a Republican congressman from California. Kelli Ward, a Republican representative from Arizona, promoted an election endorsement from the Arizona Monitor, another pseudo-local site. And in Maine, a website called the Maine Examiner, which published leaked emails from a Democratic candidate, was revealed to have been created by the state Republican Party’s executive director.
Covertly ideological local sources aren’t exclusively online. The media giant Sinclair has similarly blurred the lines between local and national journalism in television news. When local stations are acquired by Sinclair, a recent study shows, their news content becomes more nationally focused and more conservative. The company often issues so-called must-run national segments, such as a recent commentary that sought to blame illegal immigration for sexual violence against children. And in March 2018, Sinclair directed local stations to air a promotional clip in which anchors read a company script denouncing “the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news” as if they were using their own words, a tactic that was exposed in a viral clip.
All of these outside groups seem to be trying to capitalize on people’s trust in local news. In the 2018 Poynter Media Trust Survey, the political scientists Andy Guess, Jason Reifler and I found that Americans express greater trust in news from local television and newspapers than from national outlets. This is especially true of Republicans, the partisan group that is most skeptical of the national media.
The differences in trust we observe translate into differences in interest and consumption preferences. First, a Pew survey found that three in four Americans say they follow local news somewhat or very closely — the same fraction as those who report following national news closely.
Moreover, what people say in surveys tracks their behavior under controlled conditions. In the 2019 Poynter Media Trust Survey (which found similarly high levels of trust in local news), we asked a representative sample of Americans to repeatedly indicate which of two articles they would prefer to read.
Each article summary included a randomly assigned headline, date, author and source type, which varied between a local television station, radio station or newspaper; national newspapers and broadcast networks; and national online-only outlets. This approach allowed us to account for differences in topics between national and local news.
Over all, we found that people preferred to consume local news most. Holding other factors constant, Americans were 11 percentage points more likely to choose articles from local news sources than ones from online-only national outlets — precisely why dubious websites might impersonate local news sources. This differential was largest among Republican identifiers and people with a negative view of the news media.
The prevalence of these impostors is likely to increase as the 2020 election approaches, threatening to mislead more voters and to promote greater skepticism toward all news media, including the local outlets that so many Americans rely on and trust.
Brendan Nyhan is a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
If you have seen the 1995 movie Casino, the fate of Joe Pesci’s character gives a fairly good sense of how Donald Trump might eventually be impeached and removed from office. If you haven’t seen Casino, Pesci’s character, Nicky Santoro, is basically the same as his GoodFellas character: a mobster so violent and erratic he scares the other mobsters. Throughout the film, the narrator tells us that the Mafia bosses disapprove of Santoro’s out-of-control behavior but let him operate anyway because he keeps sending suitcases full of cash back home every month. Their tolerance appears to be infinite, until eventually they reach a breaking point and bury him in a cornfield.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, I’ve dismissed the possibility that he could be removed from office. In all likelihood, the Senate will come nowhere close to mustering the 67 votes needed to do so. But over the past few weeks, the outline of a removal scenario has begun to take shape. The prospect is no longer a fantasy.
The Republican Establishment has largely submitted to Trump, and its acquiescence has come to seem like an immutable fact of this partisan age. But the alliance between Trump and the Republican Congress has visibly fragmented in recent weeks. Last week, the House voted 354-60 to condemn Trump’s Syria policy. Mitch McConnell has promised an even stronger resolution of disapproval in the Senate. Internal pressure from Republicans forced Trump to reverse his plans to hold the G7 summit at a Trump property, a crushing defeat for a president who despises both outward signs of weakness and missed chances to profit.
Senate Republicans may both fear Trump and use him for their own ends, but they have very little love for him. Almost all of them would privately vote for an act-of-God scenario where Trump drops dead — not violently but peacefully, without suffering, ideally surrounded in his bed by a loving retinue of Fox News personalities, Ivanka, and perhaps a tasteful array of magazine covers bearing his likeness. The trouble for the Republican Senate has always been how they get from here to there.
The near-certainty that the House will vote to impeach Trump this year sets in motion events that could lead to removal. Initially, many analysts predicted the Republican Senate would either do nothing in the face of an impeachment vote or hold a perfunctory vote to dismiss the charges. But McConnell has, somewhat surprisingly, announced his intention to hold a real trial. Either McConnell takes the charges against Trump seriously or, more likely, his hand has been forced by a small number of vulnerable or dissident members who are demanding serious proceedings. Whatever the explanation, McConnell is not going to simply ignore impeachment like it’s a Merrick Garland nomination.
As of now, Mitt Romney is the only Republican senator making a case for conviction. But his colleagues are mostly refraining from defending Trump’s behavior outright or echoing his ever-shifting lines of defense. McConnell has blasted the House investigation as a partisan process. “I don’t think many of us were expecting to witness a clinic in terms of fairness or due process,” he complained, “but even by their own partisan standards, House Democrats have already found new ways to lower the bar.”
Yet for all his typical disingenuous smarm, denouncing the process in the other chamber is much weaker brew than defending Trump’s conduct, which he has largely failed to do. Indeed, McConnell’s argument opens the door to finding guilt through a “fair” process McConnell runs. Even the sycophantic Lindsey Graham left the door open more than a crack when asked by Jonathan Swan if he could imagine voting to convict. “Sure. I mean … show me something that … is a crime,” he said. “If you could show me that, you know, Trump actually was engaging in a quid pro quo, outside the phone call, that would be very disturbing.” A “very well-connected Republican in Washington” estimated to Chris Wallace that there is a 20 percent chance the Senate votes for removal.
And what if it did? The power dynamic between Trump and Senate Republicans is oddly asymmetrical. Trump has the power to end the career of dissidents, and he has flaunted it, forcing once-safe figures like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker to retire when they defied him. But his power lies only in the ability to pick off heretics one by one. The Senate Republicans can band together to vote him out, and Trump would have little recourse.
Trump would, to be sure, rage furiously against a party that betrayed him and try to whip up his followers against them in 2020, perhaps even running an independent campaign. But his power relies on the support of the conservative media apparatus, which is loyal to the Republican Party. Fox News fell behind Trump because his interests dovetailed with those of the GOP as a whole. If the two began to work at cross-purposes, it would likely turn on him as rapidly as it fell in line after he won the nomination. The cult of personality around Trump is a creation of the party-controlled media. To assume Republican voters would remain loyal to a Trump who has turned against the party extends them too much credit. They will follow whomever they are told to follow. If that leader is Mike Pence, they will learn to adore his steadfast qualities of leadership, steely devotion to the timeless principles of Reaganism, and weird shoulder fetishism.
To be sure, throwing out Trump entails a lot of risk. To date, Republicans have taken the safer course of sticking with him despite all his counterproductively repellent behavior. To outsiders, their alliance with Trump appears immutable. But on the inside, the picture may be more fluid. The Republican Establishment took great comfort in the presence of John Kelly, James Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and other staid figures who quietly assured official Washington they could restrain the president’s destructive impulses. Their departure has given Trump a freer hand to seize the powers of his office and act out in ways that evade any means of control.
The Syria debacle is genuinely alarming to the party, because it shows Trump unleashing a strategic catastrophe, leading to thousands of escaped terrorists, through a simple phone call the implications of which he seems not to have understood. The up-front costs of ripping off the Band-Aid and removing Trump might seem less risky than allowing another year of a completely unconstrained toddler president.
In Casino, the bosses accepted a lot of erratic and risky behavior from Nicky Santoro because he was ultimately a useful ally. They didn’t care that he was a violent criminal — they were violent criminals, too. But they eventually decided that his flamboyant and uncontrollable behavior put their whole racket at risk. And when their calculation of his value tipped from acceptable risk to unacceptable risk, the end came swiftly and unexpectedly.
The Republican Establishment doesn’t have hit men, but it does have a constitutional process at its disposal that is being helpfully initiated by House Democrats. That its members would band together to cast out a president adored by their party’s base seemed until recently unthinkable. Now it is not.
Democrats and Republicans all think the other party is composed of extremists.
Accuracy is often as easy as opening your eyes. Herewith, a quick study at where we are, and where we’re headed. I’ve bolded some key passages. Btw, I like both donkeys and elephants. 😉
Via New York Magazine, Ed Kilgore, 10/21/19
That the American political system has recently been characterized by intense partisan polarization is hardly breaking news. It’s not entirely news, either, since it has been underway since the two parties began realigning ideologically in the 1960s, mostly because of the civil-rights revolution. The fact that we are in an era of (mostly) close partisan parity matters too; that raises the stakes of elections and drives sharp partisan differentiation.
Still, there’s “partisan polarization,” and then there’s the kind of bitter division normally associated with things like the Spanish Civil War. The latest edition of the American Values Survey from the Public Religion Research Institute shows pretty clearly that partisans subscribe to extremist characterizations of what makes the other side tick. Putting aside whether these are true (we’ll return to that topic later), it’s amazing how little Democrats have in common with Republicans, and vice versa, in how they view the other party.
The survey asks whether the Democratic Party is “trying to make capitalism work for the average American” or “has been taken over by socialists.” Self-identified Democrats agree with the former description over the latter by an 83-15 margin, but self-identified Republicans agree with the latter over the former by an 82-17 margin. This probably isn’t just a vestige of the era of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, by the way; you may recall there was a serious effort ten years ago to get the Republican National Committee to constantly refer to the Donkey Party as the “Democrat Socialist Party” shortly after the centrist Barack Obama took office.
Meanwhile, the PRRI survey asked if the GOP is “trying to protect the American way of life against outside threats” or “had been taken over by racists.” Republicans chose the former characterization by a 94-5 margin, while Democrats chose the latter by an 80-17 margin.
Some may object that to some extent these findings simply reflect the tendency of partisans to choose less-disreputable labels for themselves and more-disreputable labels for the Other Team. But still: The extreme disconnect in perceptions has to mean something.
And that leads one back to objective reality and the need to resist the temptation to see partisan polarization through the lens of false equivalence. Have Democrats really been “taken over by socialists?” Well, all I know is that the currently preeminent lefty candidate for president embraces the capitalist label regularly and enthusiastically — as do all but one of her nomination-contest rivals, not to mention the vast majority of Democrats in Congress and in statehouses around the country. Even the nation’s most prominent self-identified “democratic socialist,” Bernie Sanders, stands for an ideological tradition borrowed mostly from FDR, not from some alien anti-capitalist tradition.
Now it’s true that most Republicans strongly resist the racist label too. But it’s also true that the maximum leader they adore has embraced racist expressions for most of his career. And the same PRRI survey that documents partisan polarization also shows that 69 percent of self-identified Republicans agree that “discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.” You probably need to be at least a wee bit racist to believe that howler.
False equivalence aside, these findings add to our understanding that the 2020 elections are going to represent an apocalyptic clash of cultures and perceptions. Taking perceptions of the opposition as they exist and ratcheting them up into the insane level they are likely to achieve when the deal goes down is going to make this feel like a fight between the Klan and Commies. And unlike some political systems, ours has no mechanism to create a coalition government. It will be all or nothing for both sides, at least when it comes to the executive branch and the judicial branch the president’s party will dominate via appointments — and perhaps the legislative branch shaped by straight-ticket voting. Gird up your loins.
The real question in the room. Will enough of the same people who voted him into office, vote him back in anyway?
Some surely will not. There actually are people who admit they made a mistake in 2016, and may sit out 2020. But, given the broken electoral college system, and the in-your-face rigging of it by political gerrymandering, it is quite conceivable this man will gain enough votes again.
Of course, there’s more to the odds than just that. There’s the strength and electability of the opposition candidate, and there’s Russian interference, to name two major factors.
Right now, just a year away from the election, without a sea change in support from his base, a strong, scandal free, broadly accepted front runner emerging as a challenger, and quite likely, legislation banning him from running again, if he even is impeached, which is already unlikely to happen, Trump is President again in 2020.
Via NYTImes, By Jack Nicas, Karen Weise and Mike Isaac
Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google have been the envy of corporate America, admired for their size, influence and remarkable growth.
Now that success is attracting a different kind of spotlight. In Washington, Brussels and beyond, regulators and lawmakers are investigating whether the four technology companies have used their size and wealth to quash competition and expand their dominance.
The four firms are lumped together so often that they have become known as Big Tech. Their business models differ, as do the antitrust arguments against them. But those grievances have one thing in common: fear that too much power is in the hands of too few companies.
The attorney general of New York, Letitia James, said Friday that the attorneys general in eight states — she and three other Democrats, plus four Republicans — and the District of Columbia had begun an antitrust investigation of Facebook.
On Monday, a separate bipartisan group led by eight attorneys general is expected to announce an investigation of Google, according to two people familiar with the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity before the official announcement.
And in Washington on Thursday, the House antitrust subcommittee is scheduled to hold its third hearing on the impact of competition on data and privacy.
Here is the case against Big Tech — and what Big Tech has said in response.
Amazon: Favoring its own products?
Antitrust scrutiny of Amazon centers on whether the company improperly favors its own products over those of third-party sellers.Credit: Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times
Over the years, politicians and regulators have floated the idea of breaking up of Amazon. That included spinning off its hugely profitable cloud computing business or rolling back its acquisition of Whole Foods.
But much of the recent scrutiny of Amazon in Europeand Washington centers on whether the company improperly favors its own products over those of third-party sellers, which depend on sales from the e-commerce giant. Regulators are also looking at whether sellers need to use certain Amazon services, like ads and its fulfillment network, to sell their products.
When Amazon began, it was mostly structured like a traditional retailer, buying products from brands and manufacturers at a wholesale price and selling the items to consumers.
Amazon has expanded what’s available on its site by having third-party merchants sell products directly to customers. By 2015, more than half the sales on Amazon — 51 percent — were made by these outside sellers. Last year, that grew to 58 percent.
One line of antitrust questioning looks at the products that Amazon sells under its own brands, like AmazonBasics for batteries or Mama Bear for diapers and wipes. Amazon has more than 140 private labels, according to TJI Research.
Lawmakers have asked if Amazon takes advantage of data it collects from sellers to develop its own offerings. They have also questioned whether Amazon’s products get preferential promotion on its site.
Amazon has told Congress that it uses aggregated data like overall sales, not information “related specifically to individual sellers,” and that private-label products make up about 1 percent of total sales.
Italy’s antitrust authority is looking into whether Amazon gives better visibility and search rankings to sellers that ship products through its vast fulfillment network, which sellers pay to use. Lawmakers in Washington have asked similar questions.
Amazon counters that products sold via its logistics network do well in its algorithms because it provides a better and more reliable shipping experience for customers.
Amazon also faces questions about its growing advertising business, which had more than $10 billion in revenue this past year. Much of that came from product ads that show up high as sponsored listings in search results.
At a House hearing in July, Representative Val B. Demings, a Democrat from Florida, asked a lawyer for Amazon what prevented it “from using ads as another way to charge a toll for using its platforms.”
The lawyer, Nate Sutton, who used to work at the antitrust division of the Justice Department, responded that the ads were “an optional service” and that the large majority of products sold on Amazon were not sold through advertisements.
Apple: The power of the App Store
Scrutiny of Apple focuses on how the company controls its App Store. Credit: Emma Howells/The New York Times
Apple’s critics have homed in on its control of the App Store, the digital marketplace for apps on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. The App Store has become a crucial way for digital businesses to reach customers, and Apple exerts strict control over which companies can appear in the store and how.
Apple says it has the right to “curate” the App Store to ensure high quality and to rid the store of fraud. As a result, Apple’s store generally includes fewer fraudulent apps than Google’s.
But while Apple is the App Store’s sole referee, it is also one of the biggest competitors on it. Apple has bet its future on getting customers to spend more on its apps and services, and that relies in part on people opting for them over the apps of rivals.
For years, venture capitalists and tech strategists across Silicon Valley have admired Mark Zuckerberg’s foresight.
While many industry experts wondered during Facebook’s early years whether it would turn out to be the next MySpace, Mr. Zuckerberg was always searching for an edge to stave off any threats of digital irrelevance for his company.
His efforts have worked — perhaps too well. The Federal Trade Commission is investigating what some have called Facebook’s “program of serial defensive acquisitions,” a method of maintaining the company’s dominance in social networking.
Regulators could claim the acquisitions were a violation of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts — two laws that have been foundational in the past century of federal antitrust prosecutions.
That could include some of Facebook’s largest acquisitions, like Instagram, the photo-sharing network that it bought for $1 billion in 2012. At the time, it was an enormous sum for a smartphone app. Just two years later, Facebook spent $19 billion for WhatsApp, the global messaging application used by more than a billion people.
Competitors believe that long before Facebook bought either of those companies, Mr. Zuckerberg kept a close eye on start-ups that could pose a threat to his company. Facebook has acquired more than 70 companies over roughly 15 years.
For investigators, one other eyebrow-raising acquisition was Facebook’s purchase of Onavo, a mobile analytics company, in 2013.
Onavo’s apps were marketed as free products that allowed consumers to manage and compress their data and download rates, a cost savings for people who live in countries where unlimited data plans aren’t common. But the service also gave Facebook insight into what new competitors were doing.
Facebook walked away from at least one acquisition late last year, the social video app Houseparty, for fear of attracting antitrust scrutiny from regulators in Washington, according to two people familiar with the matter.
It has also taken steps to improve its user data policies as a result of a previous Federal Trade Commission investigation into Facebook’s privacy practices. The social network reached a settlement with the agency in July, paying $5 billion in fines and agreeing to some concessions involving improved oversight of the company.
Facebook has made the case that it faces stiff competition both at home and abroad, pointing to fast-rising competitors like Apple in the United States and WeChat in China. Further, as it testified before Congress in the summer, the company claims that the barriers to starting a would-be challenger to its business are lower than ever. Start-ups like Snapchat, TikTok and others have sprung up quickly over the past 10 years, snapping up early adopters and teenagers, a youthful demographic that Facebook — and its advertisers — value immensely.
Google: What appears in search results
How Google, which sells everything from smartphones to business services, presents search results could be an area of interest for regulators. Credit: Damien Maloney for The New York Times
Google is dominant in several different markets and could face antitrust claims in multiple jurisdictions.
One battle is likely to be in search. When Google debuted in 1996, its search results were a simple list of 10 blue links to websites it believed could answer the user’s query. “We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible,” Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, said in an interview with Playboy in 2004.
Years later, Google has changed from sending users elsewhere to answering their questions itself. It has crowded its search results with its own products and services, such as Google Maps, Google Images and Google Flights. Google has gotten so good at answering users’ questions, more than half of Google searches now end on Google, without a click to another site, according to a recent analysis by Rand Fishkin, an online-search analyst.
Google’s new approach has given users quicker answers. But some competitors argue that Google is abusing its dominance in search and inducing internet users to not click beyond Google, which starves those competitors of customers for their products or users to see ads on their sites.
How Google presents its search results could be subject to antitrust laws because it has an effective monopoly, handling more than 90 percent of searches worldwide, according to some estimates. Because Google has become the primary way customers find businesses, steering users to its own products could be considered anticompetitive behavior under some laws.
The Federal Trade Commission investigated Google for such a practice. They settled, and the agency did not conclude there was harm to consumers. In 2017, the European Union fined Google $2.7 billion for favoring its shopping service over rivals in search results.
While Google is predominantly known for search, it makes most of its money on digital ads. It dominates that market, too.
Over two decades, Google has built a complex web of services that underpin the sale of most ads on the internet. Google is the biggest seller of digital ad space. It is among the biggest providers of digital-ad analytics. And it is, in effect, the broker in most digital-ad transactions.
Competitors say Google has leveraged that control of the internet’s ad ecosystem to push companies to use its advertising technology and buy its ads.
Brian O’Kelley, the former chief executive of the ad-technology firm AppNexus, said Google had undercut his business. He argued that Google forced advertisers to use Google’s competing ad technology if they wanted to work with other Google-owed services. And this year, the European Union fined Google $1.7 billion for imposing unfair terms on companies that used its search bar on their websites in Europe.
Google said in response to the fine that it had made several product changes to increase the visibility of competitors. “We’ve always agreed on one thing 一 that healthy, thriving markets are in everyone’s interest,” the company said.
Google’s Android software backs at least three of every four of the world’s smartphones, according to analyst’s estimates. Google has achieved such scale by giving Android away for free — almost. In return for handset makers’ use of its version of Android, Google has required them to place its search engine front and center on their phones and preinstall a series of other Google apps.
The strategy has helped Google broaden its dominance in online search, reach more than a billion monthly users across nine separate services and continue to expand its advertising business.
Regulators are considering whether Google unfairly leverages Android’s dominance. Handset makers are effectively locked into Android because it is the only available smartphone software that hosts the apps that users demand, like Instagram and Uber. (Apple’s software also hosts the apps but is exclusively for iPhones.) With that leverage, Google imposes unfair terms on the handset makers, critics have argued.
Some of the greatest gains are seen when people shift from being sedentary toward ambling for even one extra hour each day.
Via NYTimes, By Gretchen Reynolds
Men and women who move around throughout the day, even if they just stroll or clean the kitchen and do not formally exercise, are less likely to die prematurely than people who almost never leave their chairs, according to a heartening new study of physical activity and mortality. The study, the largest of its kind to date, finds that any activity, no matter how modest, can reduce mortality risks, with some of the greatest gains seen when people shift from being almost completely sedentary toward rising and ambling for even an extra hour each day.
By now, none of us should be surprised to hear that movement and exercise are good for us. Many studies show links between activity and longevity, with more moving almost always tied to longer life spans.
A limitation of these past studies, however, is that in many of them, researchers asked people how active they had been in recent days or weeks, and few of us can recall in detail how we spent our time. In particular, most of us cannot accurately report how many minutes and hours we spent sitting or completing gentle, everyday activities like cooking and cleaning.
Some of those past studies, however, did equip people with activity trackers to objectively monitor their days. But most of those have tended to be small or focused only on men, women or the elderly, making their results difficult to interpret for the general population.
To start, the researchers turned to online libraries containing studies about exercise and longevity during which volunteers wore accelerometers. Out of dozens of studies, eight passed the researchers’ strict criteria for methodology and reliability.
Those eight studies used slightly differing statistical methods and definitions of what constituted easy or moderate exercise and activities, though. So, the researchers contacted the authors of these studies and asked if they would reanalyze their original data, using standardized statistical methods and activity definitions.
They all agreed, and the researchers now wound up with data covering 36,383 middle-aged or older men and women from the United States, Britain or Europe who had worn an accelerometer for several days. The data also covered each participants’ general health, body mass, smoking history and other aspects of their lives.
The researchers also had information about participants’ deaths. Each of the eight earlier studies had followed people for an average of about six years, checking their names against national death records.
Now, to tease out the links between how much people moved and how long they lived, the researchers divided the 36,383 men and women into four categories, based on how often and intensely they moved. People who sat for long hours and almost never formally exercised constituted the least-active group. Those who moved about for approximately an hour more each day, even if their activities were untaxing, made up the second-least-active group, and so on.
The researchers next compared activity levels and mortality and found, to no one’s surprise, that the men and women who were the most active were the least likely to have died. That group’s risk of premature death was about 60 percent lower than for the men and women in the most-sedentary group.
More unexpected, people in the second-least-active group also were significantly less likely to have died than those in the least-active group, even though their activities consisted primarily of moseying, housecleaning, cooking or gardening.
Over all, the researchers found, someone’s chances of dying prematurely continued to drop the more he or she moved, up to a plateau at about 25 minutes per day of moderate exercise, such as brisk walking, or 300 minutes a day of light, gentle activity. Beyond that point, people did not gain additional longevity benefits, although their risks of premature death did not rise either.
The relationship between moving more and living longer remained strong even when the researchers controlled for body mass, smoking, diets and other factors and excluded data from anyone who had died during the first two years of the follow-up period, since they might have been inactive because of an underlying illness.
Of course, this was an observational study, and does not show that being active causes us to live longer, only that the two are associated. It also looked almost exclusively at Caucasian adults.
But the findings are encouraging, says Ulf Ekelund, a professor at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, Norway, who led the new study. They suggest that “all activity counts” in terms of reducing our risk of dying early, he says.
“So, walk,” he advises. “Take the stairs rather than escalators. Use your bike if possible for transportation. Sit less, move more and move often.”
Studies have shown that those who listen have more successful relationships.
Diana Raab Ph.D., Via Psychology Today
For the most part, in all relationships there’s one person who speaks and one who listens. But . . . is the listener really listening? Many people think they’re better listeners than studies show they actually are.
The goal of deep listening is to acquire information, understand a person or a situation, and experience pleasure. Active listening is about making a conscious decision to hear what people are saying. It’s about being completely focused on others—their words and their messages—without being distracted.
It’s been said that one of the most common reasons why people see therapists is to have their stories heard. In order to have your story heard, you need to have a listener. Listening and empathy skills are the hallmarks of good communicators, leaders, and therapists. Listening skills can be learned, but the reality is, some people just tend to be better listeners than others.
The importance of listening in interpersonal relationships cannot be overemphasized. One study conducted by Faye Doell (2003) showed that there are two different types of listening: “listening to understand” and “listening to respond.” Those who “listen to understand” have greater satisfaction in their interpersonal relationships than others. While people may think they might be listening to understand, what they’re really doing is waiting to respond.
And, when individuals try to “fix” other people, they are most often responding to their own need to influence. The same study showed that couples who have undergone therapy together tend to be better listeners than others because they’ve picked up some valuable tips along the way. It’s been said that women usually want to be heard, and men want to fix or respond.
According to psychologist Carl Rogers, active or deep listening is at the heart of every healthy relationship. It’s also the most effective way to bring about growth and change. Those who are heard tend to be more open, more democratic in their ways, and are often less defensive. Good listeners refrain from making judgments, and provide a safe environment and container for speakers.
By listening carefully when someone speaks, we’re telling them that we care about what they’re saying. It’s also important to remember that listening is contagious. When we listen to others, then chances are they will be more inclined to listen to us.
The good news is that we can learn to be better listeners; however, listening takes practice. The more we do it, the better we get at it, and the more positive our interpersonal relationships will be. As Jon Kabat-Zinn says in his book Wherever You Go You Are There, everything takes practice. We need to just keep at it.
Here are some tips for becoming a better listener:
Pay attention to the feelings associated with the words.
Notice the speaker’s tone and inflection.
Repeat in your own words what someone has told you (empathetic reflection).
Acknowledge that you’re listening by nodding or saying “Uh-huh.”
Occasionally summarize others’ comments when given the chance.
References
Doell, F (2003). “Partners’ listening styles and relationship satisfaction: listening to understand vs. listening to respond.” Graduate thesis. The University of Toronto Psychology Dept
Grogan, J. (2013). “It’s not enough to listen.” Psychology Today. March 11.
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go You Are There. New York, NY: Hyperion.
Rogers, C. R. & R. E. Farson. (1987). “Active Listening.” Communicating in Business Today. New York: D.C. Heath & Co.
I Shared My Phone Number. I Learned I Shouldn’t Have.
NYTImes Personal tech columnist asked security researchers what they could find out about him from just his cellphone number. Quite a lot, it turns out.
By Brian X. Chen, Via NYTimes
For most of our lives, we have been conditioned to share a piece of personal information without a moment’s hesitation: our phone number.
We punch in our digits at the grocery store to get a member discount or at the pharmacy to pick up medication. When we sign up to use apps and websites, they often ask for our phone number to verify our identity.
This column will encourage a new exercise. Before you hand over your number, ask yourself: Is it worth the risk?
This question is crucial now that our primary phone numbers have shifted from landlines to mobile devices, our most intimate tools, which often live with us around the clock. Our mobile phone numbers have become permanently attached to us because we rarely change them, porting them from job to job and place to place.
At the same time, the string of digits has increasingly become connected to apps and online services that are hooked into our personal lives. And it can lead to information from our offline worlds, including where we live and more.
In fact, your phone number may have now become an even stronger identifier than your full name. I recently found this out firsthand when I asked Fyde, a mobile security firm in Palo Alto, Calif., to use my digits to demonstrate the potential risks of sharing a phone number.
Emre Tezisci, a security researcher at Fyde with a background in telecommunications, took on the task with gusto. He and I had never met or talked. He quickly plugged my cellphone number into a public records directory. Soon, he had a full dossier on me — including my name and birth date, my address, the property taxes I pay and the names of members of my family.
From there, it could have easily gotten worse. Mr. Tezisci could have used that information to try to answer security questions to break into my online accounts. Or he could have targeted my family and me with sophisticated phishing attacks. He and the other researchers at Fyde opted not to do so, since such attacks are illegal.
“If you want to give out your number, you are taking additional risk that you might not be aware of,” said Sinan Eren, chief executive of Fyde. “Because of collisions in names due to the massive number of people online today, a phone number is a stronger identifier.”
There is no simple solution to this. In some situations, giving your digits to institutions like your bank provides an extra layer of security. But in most cases, the potential dangers and annoyances of handing out your number outweigh the benefits, as you will read below.
How your phone number exposes you
It took only an hour for my cellphone number to expose my life.
All that Mr. Tezisci, the researcher, had to do was plug my number into White Pages Premium, an online database that charges $5 a month for access to public records. He then did a thorough web search and followed a data trail — linking my name and address to information in other online background-checking tools and public records — to track down more details.
In an hour, this is what came up:
My current home address, its square footage, the cost of the property and the taxes I pay on it.
My past addresses from the last decade.
The full names of my mother, father, sister and aunt.
My past phone numbers, including the landline for my parents’ home.
Information about a property I previously owned, including its square footage and the mortgage taken out on it.
My lack of a criminal record.
While Fyde declined to hack into my accounts using the obtained information and my number, the company warned that there was plenty an attacker could do:
A hacker could try to reset my password for an online account by answering security questions like “What is your mother’s maiden name?” or “Which of the previous addresses did you live at?”
An attacker could use the personal information linked to my phone number to trick a customer service representative for my phone carrier into porting my number onto a new SIM card, thus hijacking my digits — a practice called SIM swapping.
A hijacker with control of my phone number could then break into my accounts if I had mechanisms in place to receive a security code in a text message when logging in to an online account.
A scammer could also use my hijacked phone number to trick members of my family into sharing their passwords or sending money.
A scammer could also target my phone number with phishing texts and robocalls.
An intruder could use knowledge of my phone number to call my voice mail inbox and try to crack the personal identification number to listen to my messages.
Marketers could also take advantage:
An ad tech agency could add my number to a detailed profile about me, linked to other information about my identity and web-browsing activities.
If I signed up for an internet service with my phone number, a brand that bought my digits from an ad firm could upload them into an ad tech tool to correlate the number with my online profile and serve targeted ads.
A shady marketing agency could add my number to a database to blast me with spam calls and text-messaged promotions.
When it’s wise to share your number (and when it’s not)
There are some situations when sharing your phone number is reasonable.
When you enter your user name and password to get into your online banking account, the bank may call or text you with a temporary code that you must enter before you can log in. This is a security mechanism known as two-factor verification. In this situation, your phone number is a useful extra factor to prove you are who you say you are.
“A phone number is a better identifier than just your name, but sometimes you want that,” said Simon Thorpe, director of product for Twilio, a communications company that works with phone carriers on combating robocalls.
But which companies should you trust with your phone number? Here’s where things get tricky.
Plenty of tech companies let you use your phone number to protect your accounts from unauthorized access. But even some legitimate brands like Facebook have been scrutinized for improper use of phone numbers.
Last year, a study by the tech blog Gizmodo found that after a Facebook user set up two-step verification with his phone number, advertisers that uploaded his digits into Facebook’s database could match them to his Facebook profile and serve targeted ads. Separately, some people complained this year that the social network allowed them to look up a person’s Facebook profile just by typing a phone number into its search bar.
The company has removed the ability to find people’s profiles by entering their phone number, said Rochelle Nadhiri, a Facebook spokeswoman. She added that when a user set up two-step verification with a phone number, the company would not use the information to serve targeted ads.
But when large companies like Facebook abuse your digits, whom do you trust?
Unfortunately, there is no neat solution. It all involves work.
That includes first asking yourself whether the benefits of giving out your phone number outweigh the potential risks.
You might also want to set up a second phone number to cloak your personal digits altogether. You could share this second phone number with people and brands you don’t entirely trust. Apps like Google Voice and Burner let you create a different number that you can use for calls and texts.
Here’s a bonus piece of advice. If you have business cards with your personal number printed on them, shred them and order new ones with just your office line.
Eventually, I spoke to Mr. Tezisci about his experience tracking me. He said he was surprised by how easily a person could be targeted with a single set of numbers.
“I only spent an hour, and I was able to see all your addresses and all phone numbers,” he told me. “I think that’s scary, isn’t it? And I selected the legal options. If I were a scammer, I would have gone for your relatives.”
Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix, a column about solving tech-related problems.
You’d be forgiven to not believe rumors before reading this article, but this actually happens a lot. One angle that is missing from this coverage, however, comes from the American preoccupation with providing food at every turn of real estate where any sizable crowds converge.
I know it’s unrealistic to peg this all on food concessions, but if American mainstream culture wasn’t so steeped in limitless food consumption at every special event, occasion, celebration, physical area where any gatherings in general occur, the over saturated food vendor operations of every stripe, and growing, wouldn’t exist in the first place.
So much food is wasted in this country, whether directly from unbalanced crop management, commercial buyers, and dispensation to the public, or by sheer disregard for food portioning and value on a individual basis. Whole nations starve, or at best, struggle, while getting aid in the form of low quality carbohydrate staples, and/or, access to junk food, while we scare off seagulls so we feast and drink on a whim, at any moment, wherever we are, and then throw out half our food anyway.
Flying Assassins Are Called In to Combat Aggressive Gulls
A Jersey Shore town has come up with a creative but costly way to tame its marauding gulls.
Eric Swanson, the owner of East Coast Falcons, released a falcon, one of the birds of prey that are being used to frighten gulls in Ocean City, N.J.
By Nick Corasaniti, NY Times
OCEAN CITY, N.J. — They are deft predators of the French fried potato, able to pluck a fresh wedge in the milliseconds it takes a single fry to travel from its container to a human mouth.
Though gulls are as core to the Jersey Shore as a stereo blasting “Born to Run,” the birds that have been hunting the food stalls lining the boardwalk in Ocean City possess an extra level of voracious hunger, a fever pitch of aggression that stands out even in a state where pugnacity is considered a plus.
Their behavior has turned this popular oceanfront destination into a Hitchcockian dystopia of divebombing birds.
“I’ve seen them take on an entire pizza,” said Tom Baglini, 71, who lives in Ocean City with his wife, JoAnn. “I saw the guy and he had the box, and he took one slice out, and the bird came down, hit the slice, then hit the box, and the pie hit the ground, and then, like hundreds of birds just swarmed.”
Deciding it had had enough, Ocean City turned to an army of winged bouncers.
The city unleashed a posse of raptors — four hawks, two falcons and an owl — to take on the unruly gulls.
“It’s reached a point where you can’t eat on the boardwalk or beach without birds flying at your hands and face. It truly has become a safety hazard,” said Ocean City’s mayor, Jay A. Gillian. “I remain committed to doing whatever it takes to make sure the boardwalk and beach experience in Ocean City is safe, family friendly and enjoyable.”
Diana Juleg and her grandchildren listened as a falconer explained how the birds patrol the skies over the boardwalk. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
One of the few towns along the Jersey Shore where alcohol is not sold, Ocean City attracts roughly 150,000 visitors every summer to a beach idyll: a wide boardwalk filled with ice cream and pizza stands, fudge shops and salt water taffy stores, where the chatter of conversation is occasionally drowned out by the squeals from nearby amusement rides.
The squawk of gulls circling potential meals is a less welcome part of the background noise. But these days, the gulls must also keep an eye out for the sharp-clawed raptors roaming the skies.
Using birds of prey to control avian populations is a common tactic — deployed not just at beaches, but at airports, among other places — and is praised by many environmental groups as a humane way of taming out-of-control behavior.
“The best way to put nature back into balance is to bring back predators,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club. “Whether it’s hawks or falcons in urban areas to reduce pigeon populations, or sea gulls along the coast, it makes a lot more sense.”
Ocean City is paying $2,100 a day through Labor Day for the use of the trained raptors, which are provided by East Coast Falcons. Though the raptors are certainly capable of killing gulls, these have been trained just to frighten the gulls away. The program, which started in early August, has been effective enough that the hours the raptors are on duty each day has been extended.
“It’s reached a point where you can’t eat on the boardwalk or beach without birds flying at your hands and face,” said Jay A. Gillian, the Ocean City mayor. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
Erik Swanson, the owner of East Coast Falcons, has been training birds of prey for nearly 30 years. His animals have helped to clear out geese and other birds from flight paths near Kennedy International Airport, reduced a starling population that was threatening a blueberry farm and scattered pigeons and other birds away from landfills.
But the belligerence of the gulls in Ocean City surprised even this veteran bird expert.
“If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I don’t know if I would have even believed it,” Mr. Swanson said. “We were sitting there talking with the town manager and this girl walked out with a bucket of chicken or something, and she literally had more than 20 birds just start mobbing her.”
Fueled by the constant availability of food, Mr. Swanson said the gulls have developed advanced tactics.
Some of the gulls have learned to attack people, who drop their food once bitten.
“And then when the one does that, you have about 40 of them that all run in and try to eat the food,” Mr. Swanson said.
Though falcons can kill gulls, the birds from East Coast Falcons have been trained not to do so. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
Just about every regular visitor to Ocean City seems to have a gull story.
Darcy Krause, who lives in Philadelphia and has been visiting Ocean City for about 10 years, said a gull swooped down between her hand and her face and snatched a Wheat Thin cracker from her fingers without leaving a mark.
Ellen Ilconich, who lives in Marlton, N.J., had a gull hover over her sandwich and pluck out the deli meat inside.
The Baglinis watched the other day as a few gulls huddled under a beach umbrella, dug into an open beach bag while the owners were away, pulled out a bag of chips and enjoyed a feast on the sand. Two weeks earlier, a gull clutching an entire hero sandwich landed near their lawn.
Sue Lyons-Joell, who has been coming to Ocean City for more than 30 years, has developed a gull-proof system when she orders anything at the boardwalk: Cover the food, stay close to the stalls and never eat anything out in the open.
“A couple of years ago it got so bad we had to put a sign up at the register basically warning customers of the sea gulls stealing their food,” said Randy Levchuk, an owner of Jilly’s, a family-run business in Ocean City that manages a popular French fry stand, as well as several T-shirt shops.
Ocean City is paying $2,100 a day through Labor Day for the use of the trained raptors. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
His T-shirt business has also been affected by the gull invasion.
“People are coming because they got pooped on by one of the birds, and they have to buy a new shirt now,’’ Mr. Levchuk said. “It’s not a good experience for the person in Ocean City with how bad it’s gotten.”
The summer crowds will be gone after Labor Day, but the gulls are not just seasonal visitors.
Eric Stiles, the president and chief executive of New Jersey Audubon, said focusing on the summertime is a short-term “winnable solution.”
“But it’s not a perennial solution,” he said. “It’s not something you do for 30 days and the problem is solved forever.”
Still, so far, the introduction of the raptors seems to have improved the conduct of the gulls.
Families were enjoying soft-serve cones near a Kohr Bros Frozen Custard shop on a recent day, and the few gulls perched on the edge of the store roof were leaving them alone — for now.
Nearby, P.J. Simonis, a falconer who is part of Mr. Swanson’s team, was carrying a 17-week-old Harris hawk on his arm. The bird had just finished eating food left inside a cage, which was placed in clear view of the gulls.
“Just this bird feeding on the boardwalk,’’ he said, “has freaked them out.’’
The introduction of the raptors seems to have improved the behavior of the gulls. Credit: Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times
I like who I am. I don’t have major issues of character or personality problems. I’m guilty of no great transgressions, emotional assaults, nor profound negative behavior towards anyone in my life. Certainly nothing consciously deliberate. I think I am a pretty damn decent good person.
The enduring struggles and areas in my life that could use improvement are things I clearly recognize and don’t like about myself, nor my trajectory to date. Being introspective from adolescence, its always been tough absorbing my own levels of self generated personal critique, Still, to survive with any sense of emotional stability, and to avoid damaging depression, I’ve had to forgive myself as I move along life’s timeline. I really have no choice if I want to maintain purposeful self esteem going forward.
I try to space out these type of posts as follows below. There are more than enough of self help lectures out there for all of us, but this particular offering speaks to me right now..
If you’re struggling with anything, or many things, and find yourself slipping into guilt, lack of self worth, or repressing important feelings due to fear of judgement, or rejection from others, try reading the content that follows written by Sarah Steckler, who I randomly discovered recently.
From her pics and limited background info, Sarah seems remarkably young to have the insight she presents here. So much so, that I actually consider/ed her being a marketing prop to pull traffic and business from the target demographic she represents. Is this far fetched? Maybe. Maybe not. Nothing is beyond online dishonesty these days. Nothing. So why not this?
But, here’s the thing. what’s written here, whether by Sarah, or someone else behind her, is good stuff. Its valuable. That matters. If you need something, someone, to help you feel okay about yourself, try reading.
Post below copied from Mindful Productivity Blog
Why I no longer focus on gratitude lists or being more “positive”
Oh the controversy!
Gratitude lists are everything right now.
Feeling blue?
Write down 3 things you’re grateful for
Really upset about something?
Focus on the positive and everything you DO have
Research studies like this one have even proved that we can rewire our brains by thinking more positive thoughts.
So why on earth am I writing a blog post / rant about something that’s been scientifically PROVEN to be beneficial to us?
Like most people I’ve been through a slew of ups and downs, horrible experiences, terrible times, really low lows, and some really high highs, but I’ve noticed something about the way others treat me through all of these – and how we react to others when they aren’t being positive, grateful, and “spreading love and light” all over social media.
We seem to have this visceral reaction to negative things.
So much so that websites and even news organizations have devoted themselves to “good” and “positive” only stories.
This isn’t a bad thing especially when mainstream media and news can tend to err on the side of doomsday stories.
We all need a little reminder that the humanity side of things still exists and that not everything is going completely wrong.
The issue is that we’ve taken a full swing into a dangerous territory. There’s a sense of safety and comfort in only listening to the good, focusing on the positive, and quite frankly, avoiding the negative, and sometimes even avoiding the reality of things.
And chances are that you’ve experienced this or been a part of the problem (don’t worry, I have, too).
Post anything positive and inline with what “mainstream happiness” might look or feel like and the likes will POUR in.
Get real with something, express frustration, and people get uncomfortable.
In fact, we get so uncomfortable with other people’s “negativity” that we start shaming them in indirect ways.
We say things like:
“Look at the bright side”
“This won’t matter in 5 years so don’t worry about it now”
“You should be more positive”
“You really have nothing to complain about”
“Be grateful for what you have”
All of these comments tend to come from a good place. But for a moment let’s examine the root of where they exist.
They are ego driven. Meaning we typically want other people to feel better not because of their situation but more often because their negativity, or the ways in which they are sharing their personal experience is uncomfortable to us.
I lost my Dad when I was 23 and for the 8 or so months following his death I went on a positivity rampage. I pushed all of my pain, anger, and fear aside and decided to make it my mission to show anyone and everyone that death doesn’t have to mean sadness.
I lost 50lbs, I went out with friends non-stop, I posted endless Pinterest quotes and told everyone that everyday they have a choice to feel happy.
And for a while it worked…. kind of.
The trouble began when I realized that I was suppressing certain emotions, I was “dealing” with my grief instead of experiencing it and allowing it.
I broke out in hives anytime I was alone from the stress and grief alone and quickly took benadryl and returned to Pinterest land to make them go away.
I endured extreme stomach pains and had a hard time eating for months after his death and instead of really diving deep into the pain, I told myself to be stronger and drank bottles of Pepto.
Here’s the thing about human emotions, they exist and one isn’t any better than the other.
Also, all of them are fleeting so saying things like “happiness is a choice” is silly in a lot of ways because that choice often results in the denial of other emotions that are present.
It’s a lot like saying “holding your breath is a choice” – you can hold your breath right now, anytime really. When you’re sad when you hear something you don’t like, when you stub your toe, when someone dies. It’s always your choice to do so but you’re also cutting off your oxygen supply and you can’t do it forever.
There are some great ways to reframe things and gratitude plays an important role in creating more sustainable happiness in our lives but if it’s done in a way that excludes all of the other endless human emotions and experiences, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
It’s really hard to run while holding your breath and it’s really hard to move through grieve, adapt to change, and work through frustration if you try to sugarcoat it with striving to choose happiness over giving yourself permission to feel various emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
My husband and I move a great deal. I’ve moved over 17 times in the past 10 years. Every time we experience change, remove someone from our lives, and someone new, try something new, start a new job, move to a new part of the country, or out of the country for that matter, our mind, body, and soul needs time to adjust.
Heck even if you never move, life will present situations and circumstances that put you outside of your comfort zone.
And when those things happen and all you hear is “be more positive” or “keep your newsfeed clear or negative things” it becomes increasingly isolating and depressing to try and navigate.
I see this happen often. The people that post the good things and never share the bad. Not just on their Facebook account but in real life. We think that people will only value our existence or welcome our presence if we’re always positive, if we never complain, if we always have something good to share and bring to the conversation.
True happiness isn’t the act of choosing to be happy, it’s the art and allowance of accepting human emotions, observing them, and being okay with them being a part of our lives.
Emotions are beautiful signs and signals from our bodies and minds. They let us know when boundaries are being pushed that we didn’t know existed. They alert us to pain that still needs to be taken care of, soothed, and mended. They remind us that suffering and sadness are just as much a part of existing as joy, compassion, and love.
Which brings me to some major myths and assumptions we make all the damn time:
Myth #1: If you have something good, you can’t have something bad
Just because you have things to be grateful for doesn’t mean you can’t have things that feel off, upsetting, uncomfortable, or not aligned with what you truly want.
Myth #2: If you have something that someone else doesn’t, you should never complain
After losing my Dad I had people apologize to me when they’d complain or mention their alcoholic father, or the lack of relationship with their Dad. They’d say things like “shit I’m sorry, here I am complaining about my Dad and he’s still alive.
I would say “just because your Dad is still alive doesn’t mean you can’t experience grief from your relationship with him, and it also doesn’t mean your feelings aren’t valid.”
Myth #3: The best way to feel better is to focus on the positive
While there are solid and scientifically founded ways of creating neural pathways in your brain that habitually lean toward the positive, the only way out of things is through them.
Your broken leg won’t heal by merely wishing it to do so (although maybe a bit faster – who knows). Incorporating the positive can definitely boost your experience, but focusing on the positive and ignoring the rest takes away the experience of learning how to cope, adapt, and improve on handling difficult emotions and circumstances.
Myth #4: If you’re not happy, something is wrong with you
There’s such a big push for happiness these days. Endless books on how to be happier, how to be a certain % happier, how to be happier in different locations. And while I won’t discredit the merit within those books and that many of those things do in fact help and improve life, it can start to make you feel like there’s something wrong with you if you’re not happy.
How often do you hear yourself saying “I just feel so off, I don’t know what’s wrong with me!”
Hint: Nothing is wrong with you. You’re a human being who is human being, feeling, and experiencing.
I’m guilty of this too, though. We assume that feeling upset, irritable, aggravated, or less than stellar means we’re doing something wrong. I have so much to be grateful for, how in the world could I ever feel anything but happy?!
Yet we don’t ask ourselves the same question for other emotions.
:: I’m not angry today! What is wrong with me?
:: I’m not crying right now, what did I do?!
Happiness is an emotion NOT a destination.
Striving for endless happiness will in fact, make you more unhappy. Being in denial that other emotions and human experiences exist will make you endlessly miserable.
Myth #5: If you’re not happy, you’re choosing it
I really don’t know if there’s a sentiment I hate more than “choose happiness” – it sounds so easy, so fluffy, and so naive.
I’m sure people will disagree with me.
I know there are ways to “manifest” abundance and happiness.
But if you think for one moment that if you’re not happy, it’s your choice, you’re forgetting about the fact that the world also does happen TO you.
And yes I’m pushing back on this. I’ve read endless books about how the universe is always happening “for” us. Shifting your perspective can make a huge difference and I truly believe I’ve manifested many things in my life.
However, a lot of people take this to another extreme where they think that if anything bad happens it’s their fault. Or that they “attracted” it.
Self-fulfilling prophecy is a hell of a lot different than tragedy, psychopaths, and circumstances that flat out suck. In other words, thinking you can’t do something and then not trying is a way of “attracting” a result or lack of one whereas someone being an asshole or hitting your car is a circumstance and an event.
This could be a whole other blog post. My point is that we cannot choose our emotions. They happen, what we can choose is how we react to them. So in a nutshell, you cannot choose happiness, but you can choose how you react to emotions that lead to a more fulfilling life.
It’s a matter of prolonging a state of mind when we feel good and observing, resolving, and letting go of things when they don’t serve us.
Myth #6: If it won’t matter 5 years from now, it shouldn’t matter now
I’ve started saying this more lately and then realized how shitty it can sound on the other end. There are definitely things that don’t need to be complained about. Small things, things you CAN choose to let go of that don’t involve ignoring signals from your psyche. Like some jerk cutting in front of you in line.
But then there are things that in the present moment really DO suck and that require time to process, that sometimes mean sharing that experience, and that become a lot more difficult when others tell us we shouldn’t be feeling it or expressing it.
This act by the way, of people telling others to “be more positive” or “think about how they attracted something” or my all time favorite “I’m so sorry for your loss but they are in a better place now” is called Light Washing or whitewashing negative thoughts. It’s a pretty shitty way of victim blaming especially when people are going through heavy emotions, tragic events, or need time to process.
I bring this up not because I think everyone who says these cliche statements is an A-hole (I’ve said them, too) but because we need to raise awareness that there’s a collective fear of the negative when really it’s just the human experience and it’s not all that bad.
I’ve said things before like “fear doesn’t serve us” when really it actually…DOES. So does guilt, anger, resentment, and so forth. The key is knowing HOW to observe them, how long to stay with them, and learning how to navigate them instead of letting them take over the steering wheel.
So what do I do instead of endless gratitude lists?
For the record I do still write down things I’m grateful for and I do still reframe “negative” things.
But instead of sugar coating them with positivity or ignoring the difficult things, I get real with the reality of all of them.
Here’s my process: (something I’ve been doing since I was 10 years old, seriously, although I didn’t call it a *$&% it list” back then)
1 Write a “Fuck it” list
Sometimes these lists get REALLY long. I list out things that really bother me, things I can’t seem to get un-angry about, things I wish would change, things I don’t like about my current situation, new place of residence, or how I’m being treated. I go WILD, no apologies, no worry over feeling guilty about being so “negative” – I just let it ALL out.
2 Cross off things I can immediately let go of after acknowledging them
After going through this process I feel lighter, more at ease, and after a few minutes of huffing and puffing I have a solid awareness of what I can really let go of and what really doesn’t matter. In other words, things I don’t have to give a fuck about or give any more mental energy to.
3 Highlight the things that REALLY still bug me
Some things aren’t so easy to let go of. I highlight these.
4 Make a sub list of what I can do about the things that stick
From here I take the top 3 things that are really pissing me off (that I still GAF about) and write down ways I can feel better or things I can do to take ACTION toward improving them.
This does a few things:
It puts me back into a state of empowerment
It gives me the power of choice and decisiveness which reduces overwhelm
It shows me what’s possible and takes away most feelings of defeat or helplessness
An excellent and important read to understand where we are as a country on this subject, and where we could/should be. Big as California is, they can’t get everything right.
In the big picture, successes and failures combined, California tries harder than most, if not all, of the other states in this country, to make their general population’s health and welfare a priority.
The rest of the country could follow that model to the benefit of us all. It needn’t take so long for Federal officials to figure things out.
Why Is America So Far Behind Europe on Digital Privacy?
Legislators should seize the moment to pass meaningful protections for the digital age.
In the past year, Congress has been happy to drag tech C.E.O.s into hearings and question them about how they vacuum up and exploit personal information about their users. But so far those hearings haven’t amounted to much more than talk. Lawmakers have yet to do their job and rewrite the law to ensure that such abuses don’t continue.
Americans have been far too vulnerable for far too long when they venture online. Companies are free today to monitor Americans’ behavior and collect information about them from across the web and the real world to do everything from sell them cars to influence their votes to set their life insurance rates — all usually without users’ knowledge of the collection and manipulation taking place behind the scenes. It’s taken more than a decade of shocking revelations — of data breaches and other privacy abuses — to get to this moment, when there finally seems to be enough momentum to pass a federal law.
Congress is considering several pieces of legislation that would strengthen Americans’ privacy rights, and alongside them, a few bills that would make it easier for tech companies to strip away what few privacy rights we now enjoy.
American lawmakers are late to the party. Europe has already set what amounts to a global privacy standard with its General Data Protection Regulation, which went into effect in 2018. G.D.P.R. establishes several privacy rights that do not exist in the United States — including a requirement for companies to inform users about their data practices and receive explicit permission before collecting any personal information. Although Americans cannot legally avail themselves of specific rights under G.D.P.R., the fact that the biggest global tech companies are complying everywhere with the new European rules means that the technocrats in Brussels are doing more for Americans’ digital privacy rights than their own Congress.
The toughest privacy law in the United States today, is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which is set to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Just like G.D.P.R., it requires companies to take adequate security measures to protect data and also offers consumers the right to request access to the data that has been collected about them. Under the California law, consumers not only have a right to know whether their data is being sold or handed off to third parties, they also have a right to block that sale. And the opt-out can’t be a false choice — Facebook and Google would not be able to refuse service just because a user didn’t want their data sold.
While the California Legislature is still working out the precise details of the law and its implementation, other states — including New York — are hard at work on their own privacy legislation. The prospect of a patchwork of state-level rules explains why tech companies are suddenly eager for Washington to step in to set a national standard.
If a weak federal privacy law pre-empts state law, it would roll back the protections that Californians are supposed to get — and it would make it impossible for other states to set the bar even higher. That’s exactly what’s going on with privacy bills introduced by Senator Marco Rubio (the American Data Dissemination Act) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (the Balancing the Rights of Web Surfers Equally and Responsibly Act). Both offer weak privacy protections bundled with federal pre-emption. If passed, they would gut the California law. In the House, Representative Suzan DelBene’s Information Transparency and Personal Data Control Act also pre-empts state law, while offering a respectable amount of privacy protection, like a requirement for companies to secure opt-in consent before collecting user data. Still, even that bill lacks some rights that the California law provides.
The Senate bills that take privacy seriously do not contain pre-emption clauses. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto’s DATA Privacy Act, for instance, bears similarities to the California law and to the G.D.P.R., as does Senator Ed Markey’s significantly more ambitious Privacy Bill of Rights Act. Although Ms. Cortez Masto’s bill does not create a private right of action — that is, the ability for consumers to sue tech companies for privacy violations — Mr. Markey’s does, and invalidates arbitration clauses that could otherwise shield companies from individual lawsuits. Consumer lawsuits are a hot-button issue — in the California law, the private right of action exists only in a limited form thanks in part to corporate lobbying. Most interestingly, Mr. Markey’s bill requires the creation of a public list of data brokers in the United States — third party companies who buy and sell your data.
Not all bills on the table take an omnibus approach. Some appear to be highly specific swipes at Facebook. For example, a social media privacy bill introduced by Senators Amy Klobuchar and John Kennedy does not add very much to consumer privacy, but each of its provisions — like one that forbids a change to a product that “overrides the privacy preferences of a user” — seems to be a reference to something Facebook has done in the past. Senators Mark Warner and Deb Fischer have introduced a bill circumscribing experimentation on users without their consent. It might seem shocking that any company would do such a thing, but, in fact, Facebook tinkered with its News Feed in 2014 to test whether it could alter its users’ emotions. (The bill also bars designing sites targeted at children under the age of 13 “with the purpose or substantial effect of cultivating compulsive usage, including video auto-play functions initiated without the consent of a user” — a provision aimed at YouTube and its effect on children.)
Where the Warner/Fischer bill looks to alleviate the harmful effects of data collection on consumers, Senator Josh Hawley’s Do Not Track Act seeks to stop the problem much closer to the source, by creating a Do Not Track system administered by the Federal Trade Commission. Commercial websites would be required by law not to harvest unnecessary data from consumers who have Do Not Track turned on.
A similar idea appeared in a more comprehensive draft bill circulated last year by Senator Ron Wyden, but Mr. Wyden has yet to introduce that bill this session. Instead, like Mr. Warner, he seems to have turned his attention to downstream effects — for the time being, at least. This year, he is sponsoring a bill for algorithmic accountability, requiring the largest tech companies to test their artificial intelligence systems for biases, such as racial discrimination, and to fix those biases that are found.
A grand bargain privacy bill is said to be in the works, with a handful of lawmakers from both parties haggling privately over the details. Forward-thinking legislation — and the public hearings that would inform its passage — are urgently needed. Americans deserve a robust discussion of what privacy rights they are entitled to and strong privacy laws to protect them.
Congress’s earliest attempts to regulate computing in the 1980s and 1990s were embarrassing. The Congressional Record shows that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984, for instance, was prompted by a fantastical Hollywood film about a boy hacker. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 — many sections of which were deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the following year — had its origins in a moral panic about internet pornography touched off by questionable research. All this lent support to the received wisdom that the tech industry is best left to its own devices without the interference of a clueless legislature. More recent attempts, like the abortive Stop Online Piracy Act, an overbroad piece of copyright enforcement legislation that was killed in 2012 after furious backlash from internet users, have not instilled much confidence in Capitol Hill’s understanding of technology. But encouragingly, many of the privacy bills introduced this session show a sophisticated understanding of the market for personal information, the nation’s woefully inadequate cybersecurity and the many dangers posed by a sector of the economy that has proved itself incapable of self-regulation. Legislators have stepped up their game.
A single bill is of course not the end of government’s responsibilities to its citizens. Any regulation must evolve alongside technology to safeguard fundamental freedoms. But a strong law would be a welcome start. The California privacy law will go into effect in less than seven months. Congress should seize the moment and the public momentum to enshrine digital privacy rights into federal law.
Well-kept parks, clean air and water, safe and friendly neighborhoods: these and many other factors outside our control contribute to health. | WIN-Initiative/Getty Images/WIN-Initiative RM
Book Reviews
Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health
Via NPR, Stephanie O’Neill
The typical American conversation about health focuses on personal choice as a key driver — the foods we choose to eat, the number of steps we log each day, the doctors we visit and the medicines we take. But epidemiologist Sandro Galea says that way of thinking is the wrong way.
In his new book, Well: What We Need To Talk About When We Talk About Health, the dean of Boston University School of Public Health says not only does the belief in the power of personal choice fail to fix America’s health crisis, it also diverts us from real issues underlying our nation’s poor health.
“We can choose the food we eat, but our options are limited by what we can afford and by what kinds of food are available for purchase near our home,” he writes. “These factors, in turn, depend on the quality of our neighborhood and the size of our income, which depends on larger social economic forces over which we have little control.”
The notion that one creates good health just by choosing to do so makes it easy to stigmatize obesity, addiction and other chronic conditions as byproducts of laziness or moral weakness, further obscuring their actual causes, he warns.
“Telling you that you should exercise more when you’re worried about getting out of your house and getting shot; when there is no park around you which has a nice place for you to walk; when you’re working two minimum-wage jobs and you can’t afford gym membership is simply absurd,” he tells NPR.
Galea says understanding that our health is a product of the world around us serves to remove “our reflexive stigmatization.”
And that’s important, he says, because stigma itself is known to erode self-esteem and confidence, which in turn causes social isolation that can further trigger other health problems.
Galea says his book, represents a culmination of 20 years of studying and working in public health. He was motivated to write it by the the huge gap between what the U.S. spends on health care and the relatively low return on that investment.
“Part of my job is to make sure that the world understands what it really takes to generate health,” Galea says.
As he discusses early in the book, the United States spends a whopping $3.3 trillion on health care, according to federal figures from 2016. Yet U.S. life expectancy — which is the lowest among all comparable nations — has actually fallen in recent years. He points out that the lifespan of a baby born in the U.S. today is now five years shorter, on average, than it would be if that baby were born in Japan, a nation that spends half of what we do on health, per person.
“There’s no other sector where we outspend all our peers and we get less for it,” Galea says. “Would you buy a smartphone if it cost you 40% more than the next closest competitor and your phone functioned 40% worse? The answer is no, you wouldn’t.”
To improve the nation’s overall physical and mental health, Galea says we need to understand that a slew of factors that may seem to have little connection to health are actually the drivers of it.
“The lens that we adopt makes a big difference in how we invest our resources and how we tackle this problem,” Galea says.
He says we need to start talking more about some neglected factors that shape health. These include some themes familiar to students of public health — poverty, environment and policies — and some more surprising ones, including fundamental human values that Galea believes deserve more attention. Key drivers of health to pay attention to include:
Acknowledging the past
To fix the flaws in the systems and policies we’ve created, we have to recognize powerful influences from the past, Galea writes. On an individual level, a person’s past plays a role in shaping their present-day health, he says. And nationwide, it means understanding how history affects us today. For example, Galea says, we can trace back to slavery some roots of the discrepancies in health and average lifespan of black Americans today, as compared to white Americans. “These health gaps are neither random nor inevitable,” Galea writes. “They are a consequence of history.”
Seeing the power in a place
It’s not hard to fathom that neighborhoods and environment — air quality, water quality, housing, sanitation and infrastructure — affect our health and well-being. But Galea says the influence of place is about more than physical environment. A community is formed of “cultural, economic and political factors” which can have a real impact on health, he says, including “the economic opportunities we have … the extent to which we invest in reducing domestic violence; the extent to which we invest in having equitable opportunities for people of all genders.”
Understanding no one’s an island
Galea writes about the importance of social interactions to combat loneliness and isolation — conditions that increase the risk of depression, addiction and suicide. He says that’s especially true for older and sicker Americans, as age and disability contribute to social isolation. As the world’s population ages, “it will become ever more critical that we create opportunities for social engagement across generations,” he says.
Cultivating humility
Recognizing what we don’t know about health and medicine is just as important as what we do know. Humility, Galea says, reminds us that health doesn’t happen in a vacuum and that improving the conditions of people around us could be just as important to improving health as the next scientific breakthrough. “We need to have the humility to accept that there is not just one thing we should do, there are many things we should do,” he says.
Deepening compassion
Galea wants to replace short-term acts of empathy with compassion that acts on the root causes of suffering — which “envisions and aspires to a better world.” Empathy might inspire us to help cover someone’s medical costs or donate to victims of a hurricane, but we still “leave in place the structures that create disease,” he writes. He advocates viewing collective-well-being as a responsibility we all should share. “It’s centered around the Martin Luther King version of compassion,” Galea says, “which is you don’t just fling a coin to a beggar but you ask why he’s a beggar to begin with.”
Shifting perspective on death
A shift in our attitude toward death could help us live better, according to Galea. We need to embrace death’s inevitability and then strive to “die healthy,” he says. “Because once you and I say we value living healthy for as long as possible, then we’ve got to stop investing enormous amounts of money into end-stage (treatments) that do nothing to prolong quality of life, let alone longevity.”
Galea predicts a shift in the American health conversation will require a grassroots approach that starts with each of us changing how we talk about health with friends and family; with electing local, state and national leaders who better understand what’s necessary for health in the U.S.; and with supporting a private sector that’s responsible not just to shareholders but to “common good in the world …. to generate health both for its employees and for the world around it.”
“I think if we all did that,” Galea says, “transformation of how we talk about health will happen sooner than we think.”
If you watch one sociopolitical satire and commentary this year, make it this one, and just stop there. It is very very funny, and it is pitch perfect. Watch it. Pay for it. Subscribe to it. Whatever you need to do. Just watch this. >MB
How one molecule from the cannabis plant came to be seen as a therapeutic cure-all.
Excellent coverage, and a must-read for anyone interested in this soon-to-be explosive market.
To access the full feature online, via NYTimes subscription, or complimentary access, please use the direct links below. Otherwise, the full article is pasted-in following the links.
Via NYTimes, By MOISES VELASQUEZ-MANOFF, MAY 14, 2019
When Catherine Jacobson first heard about the promise of cannabis, she was at wits’ end. Her 3-year-old son, Ben, had suffered from epileptic seizures since he was 3 months old, a result of a brain malformation called polymicrogyria. Over the years, Jacobson and her husband, Aaron, have tried giving him at least 16 different drugs, but none provided lasting relief. They lived with the grim prognosis that their son — whose cognitive abilities never advanced beyond those of a 1-year-old — would likely continue to endure seizures until the cumulative brain injuries led to his death.
In early 2012, when Jacobson learned about cannabis at a conference organized by the Epilepsy Therapy Project, she felt a flicker of hope. The meeting, in downtown San Francisco, was unlike others she had attended, which were usually geared toward lab scientists and not directly focused on helping patients. This gathering aimed to get new treatments into patients’ hands as quickly as possible. Attendees weren’t just scientists and people from the pharmaceutical industry. They also included, on one day of the event, families of patients with epilepsy.
The tip came from a father named Jason David, with whom Jacobson began talking by chance outside a presentation hall. He wasn’t a presenter or even very interested in the goings-on at the conference. He had mostly lost faith in conventional medicine during his own family’s ordeal. But he claimed to have successfully treated his son’s seizures with a cannabis extract, and now he was trying to spread the word to anyone who would listen.
The idea to try cannabis extract came to David after he found out that the federal government held a patent on cannabidiol, a molecule derived from the cannabis plant that is commonly referred to as CBD. Unlike the better-known marijuana molecule delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, CBD isn’t psychoactive; it doesn’t get users high. But in the late 1990s, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that it could produce remarkable medicinal effects. In test tubes, the molecule shielded neurons from oxidative stress, a damaging process common in many neurological disorders, including epilepsy.
Jacobson had a Ph.D. in neuroscience. She had started her postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco, by studying how cancer cells metastasize and spread, but after Ben was born, she moved to Stanford and switched her focus to epilepsy — a shift that compounded her anguish. She often wept in the parking lot before heading into the lab, overwhelmed by dread at the prospect of deliberately causing epilepsy in rodents. “I couldn’t watch animals seize all day and then watch Ben seize all night,” she told me. “It was just too much.”
After meeting David and reading through the small body of published work on CBD, Jacobson changed postdoctoral directions once again, from primary research to the study of this community of parents who were treating their epileptic children with cannabis extracts. In reality, she was preparing to join it herself. One small, double-blind study particularly caught her attention. In 1980, scientists in Brazil treated eight epileptic patients with CBD and eight patients with sugar pills as a placebo. For half the group that received CBD, the seizures almost completely disappeared; another three experienced a reduction in the intensity of their seizures. Only one person in the placebo group got better.
The epilepsy drugs that had been approved to date, none of which had helped Ben much, typically targeted the same few ion channels and receptors on the surface of neurons. But CBD worked on different and still somewhat mysterious pathways. If she could find a suitable CBD extract, Jacobson thought, she might have a truly new class of drug for Ben. The other experimental drugs and devices she had heard about at epilepsy conferences were under development, unapproved by the F.D.A. and thus largely unavailable. But medical marijuana had been legal in California since 1996, so CBD was theoretically accessible right away.
Seven years later, cannabidiol is everywhere. We are bombarded by a dizzying variety of CBD-infused products: beers, gummies, chocolates and marshmallows; lotions to rub on aching joints; oils to swallow; vaginal suppositories for “soothing,” in one company’s words, “the area that needs it most.” CVS and Walgreens each recently announced plans to sell CBD products in certain states. Jason David now sells a cannabis extract called Jayden’s Juice, named for his son — one of several extracts on the market, including Haleigh’s Hope and Charlotte’s Web, that are named after children who are said to have benefited from being treated with CBD.
Many of these products are vague about what exactly CBD can do. (The F.D.A. prohibits unproven health claims.) Yet promises abound on the internet, where numerous articles and testimonials suggest that CBD can effectively treat not just epilepsy but also anxiety, pain, sleeplessness, Crohn’s disease, arthritis and even anger. A confluence of factors has led to this strange moment. Plenty of legitimate, if still inconclusive, research is being done on CBD. Many scientists are truly excited about it. The laws governing cannabis and its chemical components have loosened up. And the anecdotes that have emerged from what Elizabeth Thiele, an epileptologist at Harvard, calls the “vernacular” cannabis movement have lent emotional force to the claims made for CBD.
Catherine Jacobson and her son, Ben, at home in Mill Valley, Calif. His seizures have left him with very little ability to communicate, but one of his main ways of showing affection is hugging his mother’s head close to his chest. September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
Jacobson describes her family’s existence as akin to living under the threat of terrorism. Ben’s seizures could strike at any time. He was at high risk of what epileptologists call Sudep, or sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. “I would have done anything to save Ben,” Jacobson told me. And so one day in 2012 she found herself driving her black S.U.V. to a rundown Oakland neighborhood, past a police car, to purchase a kilo of what she had been told was CBD-rich cannabis.
Amid the current deluge of products, it now seems almost quaint that, back in 2012, after deciding to try treating Ben with CBD, Jacobson couldn’t actually locate the stuff. Other parents of epileptic children were using D.I.Y. techniques to treat their children: tinctures; cannabis-infused butter in baked goods; crushed cannabis buds in capsule form; even cannabis suppositories. Some reported positive results. Over the years, Jacobson has had many of these products tested at labs; almost invariably they contained very little or no CBD and too much THC. It has psychoactive effects, and there wasn’t much science suggesting THC could treat seizures.
In the early 1960s, a Bulgarian-born Israeli chemist named Raphael Mechoulam asked a simple question: How does marijuana make you high? The biochemistry of major psychoactive molecules from other recreationally used drugs, like cocaine and opium, was already understood. But scientists still didn’t know how cannabis worked. Mechoulam was the first scientist to map the chemical structure of both cannabidiol and delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC. Two decades later, Allyn Howlett, a scientist then at St. Louis University Medical School, used a radioactive THC equivalent to trace where cannabinoids ended up in the brain and discovered what she would later call CB1 receptors. They were subsequently found in the kidneys, lungs and liver, too. White blood cells of the immune system, the gut and the spleen also have another type of cannabinoid receptor, known as CB2.
There is a long history of scientists gaining insight into human physiology by studying how plants interact with our bodies. Poppy flowers and the opium derived from them led to the discovery of the body’s native opioid receptors, which help regulate pain, stress responses and more. Nicotine, a stimulant found in tobacco, long used by Native Americans, taught scientists about the existence of our own nicotinic receptors, which influence neuronal excitement.
Why plants produce molecules that seem perfectly designed to manipulate human biochemical circuitry is a mystery. It could be a kind of molecular coincidence. But many plants, including cannabis, might make these molecules to defend themselves from other organisms. Modern industrial agriculture employs a whole class of pesticides based on nicotine — the neonicotinoids — meant to repel insects by over-exciting their nervous systems. Cannabinoids display antibacterial, antifungal and insecticidal properties as well.
Their ability to engage our native cannabinoid receptors may be a result of millions of years of biochemical warfare directed at would-be grazers: insects and other creatures that happen to share biochemical signaling pathways with humans. If plants target the cannabinoid receptors of other organisms to protect themselves, it follows that whatever signals those receptors evolved to receive have to be vital for these animals’ physiological health. Otherwise, why interfere with them?
Mechoulam concluded that our bodies must produce their own cannabinoids — endogenous molecules that, like the native opioids and nicotinelike molecules our bodies also make, engage the cannabinoid receptors throughout the human body. In 1992, he identified the first one. Mechoulam, who is often called the godfather of cannabis research — he was a senior scientist on the Brazilian CBD epilepsy trial that inspired Jacobson — and his colleagues christened it “anandamide,” after the Sanskrit word for “supreme joy.” They suspected that the molecule played a role in the formation of emotions.
The native network of cannabinoid receptors and transmitters described by Howlett and Mechoulam is now known as the endocannabinoid system. It’s central to homeostatic regulation, that is, how the body maintains, and returns to, its baseline state after being disturbed. If a person is injured, for example, native cannabinoids increase, presumably in order to resolve the inflammation and other damage signals associated with injury. They also increase after strenuous exercise, another stressor, and some scientists have argued that they, not the better-known endorphins, are really responsible for the pleasant postexercise feeling known as runner’s high.
Endocannabinoids help regulate immune activity, appetite and memory formation, among many other functions. (Heavy marijuana use is associated with memory deficits, possibly because THC short-circuits the formation of memories.) “Perhaps no other signaling system discovered during the past 15 years is raising as many expectations for the development of new therapeutic drugs,” Vincenzo Di Marzo, an endocannabinoid researcher at the National Research Council in Naples, Italy, wrote in 2008, in the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery. But realizing such medical benefits has proved trickier than once imagined.
When scientists at the French pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis (now Sanofi) understood that THC could whet a user’s appetite, they created a weight-loss drug that blocked CB1 receptors, hoping to suppress appetite. Rimonabant was first released in Europe in 2006. Two years later, regulators pulled it from the marketplace because of its severe side effects, including depression and suicidal behavior. The episode seems to exemplify endocannabinoids’ importance to our sense of well-being and the difficulty of manipulating them therapeutically. Attempts to increase native cannabinoids with synthetic drugs have fared no better. In 2016, French scientists halted a study of a drug designed to boost endocannabinoids. For reasons that remain unclear, six patients who took the medicine, meant to treat pain, were hospitalized. One died.
And yet, for millenniums people have used cannabis itself with relatively few side effects. (These can include dry mouth, lethargy and paranoia.) THC hits CB1 and CB2 receptors, but how CBD works is less clear. It seems to interact with multiple systems: increasing the quantity of native cannabinoids in the human body; binding with serotonin receptors, part of the “feel good” molecular machinery targeted by conventional S.S.R.I.s; and stimulating GABA receptors, responsible for calming the nervous system. With more than 65 cellular targets, CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level.
This biochemical promiscuity is one reason CBD seems so medically promising, according to Yasmin Hurd, a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai, in New York. Modern neuroscience often tries to target one pathway or receptor, Hurd told me; that approach is easier to study scientifically, but it may not address what are often network-wide problems. “The brain is about a symphony,” she says. And CBD, she suspects, can “bring the entire symphony into harmony.”
Various products that have been advertised as containing CBD.Photograph above with products that have been advertised as containing CBD. Top row: Meringue cookies, Elite Hemp Products; lollipop, Nova Blis; golden milk powder, Supergood; marshmallow, The Marshmallowist. Second row: skin oil, Herbivore; gummy bears, Just CBD; dog biscuits, Medipets; popcorn, Diamond CBD. Third row: Rainbow gummy, Diamond CBD; mints, Tillmans Tranquils; suppositories, Foria; mascara, Milk Makeup. Fourth row: gumdrops, Lord Jones; chocolate, Grön CBD; gummy candies, Just CBD; bamboo extract, Meds Biotech; melatonin, Meds Biotech; gel capsule, Lord Jones. Jamie Chung for The New York Times. Prop styling by Anna Surbatovich.
Cannabis has beenused medicinally for thousands of years in Asia, where it was probably first domesticated before traveling to, among other places, Africa. It was almost certainly introduced multiple times to the Americas, first from Africa to South America through the slave trade — in Brazil it’s still known by an African name, diamba — but also to the Caribbean. Indian indentured laborers probably brought it to Jamaica, where it’s called by an ancient Indian name, ganja.
White Americans also had some history of using cannabis in tinctures. In the early 19th century, an Irish doctor working in India, William Brooke O’Shaughnessy, had observed that cannabis was used extensively in Indian medicine. He began experimenting and found it quite efficacious not only for infantile seizures but also rheumatism and spasms caused by tetanus. O’Shaughnessy usually gets the credit for introducing the plant to the English-speaking world, but while he popularized its use in Britain, he was not the first European to bring it back to Europe. Garcia Da Orta, a Portuguese physician, had, after living in India, written about cannabis as medicine in the 1500s.
After O’Shaughnessy published his treatises on the plant, its use spread rapidly among physicians. By the late 19th century, cannabis was an important component of British and American physicians’ pharmacopoeia. (Researchers suspect that these older cannabis cultivars, and the tinctures made from them, probably contained much less THC and much more CBD than modern varieties.) Of course, hemp, a variety of cannabis bred not for consumption but for the fiber that goes into ropes and sails, among other things, had been an important crop in Europe and the Americas for centuries. George Washington grew it. The English word “canvas” derives from the Greek kannabis.
But in the late 19th century, our ancient relationship with this plant began to fray. In 1930, Harry Anslinger, a former official at the Bureau of Prohibition, assumed a new job running the Bureau of Narcotics. The Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 had led to waves of immigrants crossing into the United States. Whereas many Americans took their cannabis orally in the form of tinctures, the new arrivals smoked it, a custom that was also moving north from New Orleans and other port cities from which African-Americans were beginning their own migration.
Anslinger disdained Mexican-Americans and African-Americans. He loathed jazz. Modern scholars argue that his demonizing cannabis both justified his position and provided a way for him to gain legal leverage over peoples he despised. The high cost paid by people of color, once he had begun what we now call “the war on drugs,” may not have been an incidental byproduct of his efforts but an unstated goal from the start. His protestations still echo today. Cannabis made people crazy, violent and prone to criminal behavior, Anslinger said.
Yet when 30 American Medical Association members were surveyed, starting in 1929, 29 disagreed with claims about the dangers posed by cannabis. One said the proposals to outlaw it were “absolute rot.” But the hysteria Anslinger helped stir up worked politically. In 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act. High taxes made cannabis much more expensive and difficult to obtain decades before President Nixon — scientists of his era disagreed with him, too, about marijuana’s supposed dangers — signed the Controlled Substances Act of 1970. A plant that people had used medicinally for thousands of years was now driven underground.
Jacobson’s dealer in Oakland seemed to be selling harder stuff as well, which made her very nervous. But her impression was that he was having a difficult time selling this particular product — kilos of California-grown cannabis — precisely because it wouldn’t get anyone very high. With her black-market stash in hand, Jacobson entered what she calls her R.& D. phase. As suspected, the cannabis she had acquired illegally in Oakland was high in CBD and low in THC. She set up a lab in her garage — and then proceeded to fail miserably, for months, to extract anything of much use. Only under the tutelage of two University of California, Davis, scientists did she make progress. The technique she developed required heating cannabis plants in ethanol to extract the cannabinoids. Next, a machine that created a vacuum sucked the green-tinted liquid through a tube filled with carbon powder. The molecules in the extract moved through the powder at different speeds, depending on their weight and other characteristics, yielding different “fractions” that she could test for CBD and THC content. Then she heated the resulting green solution until the alcohol evaporated, leaving a green paste. It took her about six months to perfect the process. Finally, nearly a year after starting, she had a cannabis extract that was high in CBD and lacked measurable THC.
Ben improved somewhat after taking it, but it was another boy with severe epilepsy, 11-year-old Sam Vogelstein, who responded most significantly. Jacobson and Sam’s mother, Evelyn Nussenbaum, had met and become close friends as together they sought a safe and reliable source of CBD for their children. But now Jacobson felt a different sort of pressure. Making the medicine was difficult. Despite all that she had learned, some batches of her extract were unusable. And who knew if the source material she was buying illegally would remain available? If this was to be their sons’ medicine, Jacobson wanted a pharmaceutical-grade product that she could always obtain.
Across the Atlantic, Geoffrey Guy, the founder of a company called GW Pharmaceuticals, had successfully brought one cannabis-derived medicine, called Sativex, to market in Britain and other European countries. The first such medication permitted by a government, it was approved to treat the symptoms of spasticity (as well as pain) caused by multiple sclerosis, a progressive autoimmune disease of the central nervous system. It contained both CBD and THC. Guy was intrigued when, through a mutual acquaintance, a California family seeking CBD to treat epilepsy reached out to him — Evelyn Nussenbaum and her son Sam.
Guy agreed to treat Sam. Jacobson had her extract analyzed and the results sent to Guy. In December 2012, Sam and Nussenbaum flew to London for two weeks to try a purified CBD drug that Guy had created just for him. He started with a small dose and, as it was gradually increased, his seizures faded. Before his trip, Sam was taking three conventional medications and still having dozens of seizures daily. But after he reached the highest daily dose of CBD — 250 milligrams — his seizures stopped almost entirely for a week. He became more articulate and coherent than he had been since he was 5, when his condition took a turn for the worse. He rode a zip line in Hyde Park, took the subway and did other things that Nussenbaum had always avoided for fear that he would seize and hurt himself. Nussenbaum describes that week as “Twilight Zone weird,” as if she had entered a parallel dimension.
The high cost paid by people of color from what we now call “the war on drugs,” may not have been an incidental byproduct but an unstated goal from the start.
After he returned to the United States, it was six months before Sam could take Guy’s extract again. Medical marijuana is illegal under federal law — its designation as a Schedule 1 drug means it is considered to have a high potential for abuse and without any known medical application — but Sam gained access to Guy’s extract through the F.D.A.’s compassionate-use program, which makes still-unapproved drugs available to patients with serious conditions. (In 2015 Sam’s father, Fred Vogelstein, a journalist, detailed Sam’s story in Wired magazine. In 2010, he also wrote in this magazine about using a ketogenic diet, since discontinued, to control Sam’s epilepsy.) With a petition from a U.C.S.F. epileptologist, Roberta Cilio, who was the doctor for both boys, Ben also received the medicine through the F.D.A.’s compassionate-use program. It helped, Jacobson thought, particularly with the most severe fits, which caused him to lose consciousness. But he was by no means seizure-free.
Jacobson and Nussenbaum knew many other families struggling with epilepsy. They were aware of the suffering and desperation of those who belonged to this “club that no one wanted to join,” as Nussenbaum puts it. Many parents lacked the resources and connections they had. Everyone should have access to the drug that had so helped Sam, they thought. But that meant the F.D.A. would have to approve CBD for epilepsy. For that to happen, real trials had to take place. And given the fraught political history of cannabis in the United States and the skepticism they would most likely face, Jacobson knew she would need top epilepsy experts to conduct those trials.
The D.E.A.’s classification of cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, alongside heroin, peyote, ecstasy and LSD, has made it difficult for American scientists to study. Much of the research into its therapeutic potential comes from other countries, including Brazil. In the 1970s, Antonio Zuardi, a neuroscientist at the University of São Paulo, began looking into how cannabinoids affect mental states. Large quantities of THC could cause anxiety and paranoia in volunteers, he discovered, but CBD could attenuate the anxiety-provoking and psychoticlike effects of THC. Later studies by Zuardi and his colleagues showed that a large dose of CBD, when given to volunteers who feared public speaking — that is, who suffer from social anxiety — blunted the flight-or-fight response, measured by increases in heart rate, blood pressure and skin conductivity, prompted by having to address others. These were small studies, and the amount of CBD involved, which was 600 milligrams in the social-phobia study, is greater than what users might consume these days in some CBD gummies, for example, but relieving anxiety is nonetheless one of the most widely reported reasons people use CBD.
CBD may also have antipsychotic properties. In susceptible individuals, its sister cannabinoid THC can, in high doses, induce psychotic symptoms, and heavy marijuana use early in life has been linked to an increased risk of developing psychotic disorders, possibly because it alters brain development. But just as Zuardi discovered that CBD can blunt anxiety, scientists at King’s College London have found evidence that CBD can lessen the psychosis-producing effects of THC and maybe help treat schizophrenia, a disorder whose main symptom is psychosis. The scientists are now testing CBD as a prophylactic to prevent schizophrenia from even emerging.
Many of those who develop schizophrenia first pass through a “prodromal” phase. They suffer from delusions, but they’re still aware that these experiences aren’t real and often seek psychiatric help. A single 600-milligram dose of CBD given to these patients, scientists at Kings College London have found, can partially normalize regions of the brain that have been shown in fMRI visualizations to become dysfunctional during schizophrenic episodes.
A follow-up study will prophylactically treat a large group of these patients thought to be teetering on the edge of psychosis. Current schizophrenia treatments merely attempt to manage the disorder once it has already emerged. A medicine that slows or prevents the disease from taking root altogether, almost like a vaccine, would address a huge unmet need. “If it works, it will be a revolution,” José Crippa, a neuroscientist at the University of São Paulo who is involved in the project, told me.
It’s reasonable to ask why the CBD naturally present in cannabis doesn’t protect recreational users from the negative effects of THC. In older varieties, where the CBD-to-THC ratio was closer to 1-to-1, maybe it did. But today’s strains typically contain about three times as much THC as the cannabis smoked recreationally even as recently as the 1990s, while CBD concentrations have fallen by about half in the same period, according to a recent University of Mississippi study on black-market marijuana. And precisely because the proportions between the two cannabinoids have become so skewed — the ratio of THC to CBD has risen to 80 to 1 from 14 to 1 in two decades — lots of modern cannabis is potentially much more toxic for the brain, says Hurd, who is the director of the Addiction Institute at Mount Sinai.
Some years ago, Hurd discovered that THC could, as opponents of marijuana legalization have long maintained, prompt heroin-seeking behavior in rodents, acting as a proverbial “gateway drug.” But she also found that CBD reduced drug-seeking behavior, which led her to change the focus of her work. Now she studies how CBD could help opioid addicts kick the habit.
Hurd’s research, replicated by others, indicates that CBD might help recovering opioid addicts avoid relapse, perhaps the greatest challenge they face. She’s not sure why but suspects that by reducing anxiety and craving — major triggers of relapse — CBD helps patients stay the course. And because it’s not habit-forming, like other anti-anxiety medications, CBD might be a badly needed new weapon with which to fight an epidemic that claims more than 130 lives daily in the United States.
How could one family of molecules help so many maladies? The most obvious response is that they might not; all this research is preliminary and might not pan out. But scientists often propose a counter-explanation: Many chronic disorders, even though they seem distinct, are characterized by dysfunction in the same few pathways. Inflammation and oxidative stress, for example, occur in schizophrenia, metabolic disorders, heart disease and other ailments. The therapeutic magic of CBD and, in some cases, THC — and maybe some of the more than 100 other cannabinoids in cannabis — may come from the ways that, by tweaking the endocannabinoid system, they push the body away from disease toward the unruffled state scientists call homeostasis.
There are other examples of a single drug being able to help meliorate a variety of conditions. We know aspirin as a treatment for fever and headache, for example, but in low doses it is also used to reduce the risks of stroke, heart attack and pre-eclampsia in pregnant mothers; it even figures as an adjunct treatment for schizophrenia. Aspirin has its own downsides — an elevated risk of bleeding, for instance — but like CBD, its broad utility may be partly explained by its anti-inflammatory effects. Like CBD, aspirin is derived from a plant. The active ingredient in aspirin, salicylate, was first extracted from willow bark and was a folk remedy for thousands of years before scientists finally made a pill from it in the late 19th century. Folk medicine, for all its associations with old wives’ tales, has yielded important medical discoveries in the past, and it may well do so again.
In early 2013, just a few weeks after Sam Vogelstein returned from Britain, Catherine Jacobson organized a brainstorming session at N.Y.U., which included Geoffrey Guy, epilepsy researchers and a consultant with a D.E.A. background, in order to figure out how to make F.D.A.-sanctioned trials happen. What followed the meeting surpassed Jacobson’s expectations. The F.D.A. first expanded the ability of doctors to prescribe CBD and then fast-tracked the approval process. The neurologists who ran the trials included Orrin Devinsky from N.Y.U., Elizabeth Thiele from Harvard and Eric Marsh from the University of Pennsylvania.
In June 2018, just five years after that meeting — an instant in drug-development time — the F.D.A. approved GW Pharmaceutical’s CBD extract as a treatment for two rare forms of epilepsy, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome. And three months later the D.E.A. rescheduled this first CBD drug (but not THC) to Schedule 5, meaning it was now considered to have low potential for abuse.
The drug, called Epidiolex, is not the first cannabis-related drug on the market. Marinol, used to suppress nausea and stimulate appetite, contains THC. But Epidiolex is the first drug that contains only CBD and the first one derived directly from the cannabis plant itself. (The THC in Marinol is synthetic.) As a new class of medicine, Thiele told me, it’s important for the reasons Jacobson recognized years ago: It hits different pathways than do currently available epilepsy drugs, thereby expanding the available treatments for difficult-to-treat childhood epilepsies.
Epidiolex is also noteworthy for its unusual history. Drugs are typically developed in the lab and go through trials before reaching patients. But in the case of Epidiolex, two mothers of epileptic children experimented on their own sons and then helped push a version of what they discovered into the F.D.A. pipeline. “In the modern era, it’s certainly the most striking example of a drug that has gone from patient use to drug development,” Ken Mackie, a neuroscientist at Indiana University, told me. And it’s unlikely to be the last such example. Because so many people already use cannabis and think it helps, patients might be, in effect, pioneering new uses through self-experimentation.
This trend concerns many physicians, who worry that patients may be deluding themselves, but some scientists interested in cannabinoids have begun to look to “vernacular” applications for clues about what to study formally. Users, meanwhile, look to the published literature as Jacobson did for guidance on how to use cannabinoids. The end result is that cannabis science and vernacular cannabis use exist in an uneasy symbiosis. “It’s this completely unprecedented situation,” Jacobson says. “I don’t think there’s another product out there that’s a wellness drug, a pharmaceutical drug for severe disease and a recreational drug.”
CBD is generally considered safe, even at the high doses tested so far — and the quantities in chocolates, teas and other edibles tend to be far below the concentrations tested experimentally. But given that cannabis regulations vary from state to state, scientists and patient advocates worry that consumers may not be getting what they think they’re getting.
Still, many who have direct experience with CBD, including a few scientists, do not think it should be available only by prescription. They point out that long before the 1970 Controlled Substances Act, which made marijuana illegal, people used the plant medicinally. Cannabis should not only take its place as an F.D.A.-approved drug, they contend. It should also reclaim its role as a folk remedy.
From left: Margarita Sanchez, Ben’s nanny, Ben and Catherine at home. Ben wears a strap to prevent him from falling when he has his seizures. September Dawn Bottoms for The New York Times
If there is a Patient Zero in the vernacular cannabis movement, that person is a girl in Colorado named Charlotte Figi. Her seizures began at 3 months, as Ben Jacobson’s had. Doctors diagnosed Dravet syndrome, in her case caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation. By the time she was 5, she was wheelchair-bound, receiving sustenance through a feeding tube, seizing about 350 times per week, and on several occasions she had to be shocked back to life after her heart stopped. Doctors once recommended a medically induced coma just so her body could rest.
In 2011, as a last resort, Charlotte’s mother, Paige, gave her a CBD-rich extract, acquired from a local grower, via feeding tube. (Medical cannabis has been legal in Colorado since 2000.) The seizures almost entirely disappeared. Word of this success spread through the network of medical-marijuana professionals, and early in 2013, someone called on behalf of the CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta. Gupta, who is a neurosurgeon, had previously argued against the legalization of medical cannabis, but he now wanted to do a show on it. After much discussion, Paige Figi and Joel Stanley, the Boulder-based cannabis grower who had produced the extract for Charlotte, decided to invite Gupta to tell their story. If it came from a skeptic of his standing, people might actually believe it.
Gupta visited the Figi home, watched old videos of Charlotte seizing, looked at family photos, and saw the Charlotte before him as a playful little girl of 6. At one point, Paige Figi told me, Gupta, who has daughters of his own, requested that the cameras be turned off, and cried.
He came away a convert, convinced of medical cannabis’s effectiveness. And the show, which aired in August 2013, catapulted Charlotte’s story to national prominence and Figi into a new, unexpected phase in her life. Within days of Gupta’s report, people began showing up at the Figi family’s door, desperate parents of epileptic children from elsewhere in the country who picked up and moved to Colorado in the hope of acquiring medical cannabis. Figi fed them. Some stayed a few nights. One family ended up living with them for a year. A community began to coalesce in Colorado Springs, made up of epileptic children and their families.
Around the same time, Figi, Stanley and Heather Jackson, another mother whose epileptic son had benefited from CBD, founded a nonprofit called Realm of Caring. It helped families relocate to Colorado and offered them advice on how to negotiate the state’s medical- cannabis environment.
This was also a period of some tension and confusion. Stanley couldn’t keep up with the surge in demand. He kept long waiting lists of hopeful parents. Westword, a Denver-based paper, published a story in which parents — some of whom didn’t seem to realize that Realm of Caring did not provide cannabis products — vented about feeling ignored. One father, whose very sick son had benefited from Stanley’s cannabis extract but then suddenly died, wondered obliquely if he had contributed to his child’s death. (Stanley’s company responded with a statement saying that elements of the Westword story were inaccurate.)
Figi and Stanley eventually left Realm of Caring to avoid conflicts of interest. In 2017, the F.D.A. sent a letter to Stanley and Realm of Caring warning them to stop making medical claims about treating specific disorders. (Both say they updated their websites.) Today, Stanley is the chairman of Charlotte’s Web, a company named after Charlotte Figi. Last fall, the business went public in Canada; it projects more than $120 million in sales this year, more than triple its 2017 sales.
Where Jacobson and Nussenbaum saw their role as helping a cannabis-derived drug get F.D.A. approval, Figi focused on legislation, becoming a kind of CBD ambassador. She testified before State Legislatures and helped draft a 2017 House bill that, if it hadn’t died, would have legalized CBD nationally.
Figi, who says she switched her party affiliation from Republican to Democrat after Donald Trump was elected president, even considered running for elected office and making access to CBD part of her platform. Given CBD’s many therapeutic benefits, she reasons, the cannabinoid should be legally available for use without prescription. And that access should not depend on whether recreational cannabis is also legal. “I’m just trying to help these kids,” she told me this past winter. “We can do something for them now. Why hold them hostage?”
One reason some physicians look askance at the vernacular cannabis movement is that it can, in its sometimes quasi-religious devotion to the plant, seem almost cultlike. Kristen Park, an epileptologist at Children’s Hospital in Colorado, told me that after Gupta’s CNN story aired, patients from around the country seeking medical cannabis inundated the hospital. She had no data at that point on its efficacy and did not recommend it. The Epidiolex trials have provided some evidence of effectiveness, Park told me, but she still frets over the phenomenon. Sometimes parents of patients refuse established epilepsy treatments in favor of cannabis products, she says, because these are perceived as somehow natural and thus superior to standard medicines. Other parents insist cannabis is helping their children when, in her view, it clearly isn’t — and they refuse to stop using it when they should move on to other treatments. “Because of all the hype, people somehow think this is a cure-all and a treatment that will fix everything,” she told me. What’s lost on many, she says, is that even if CBD helps, it’s still just another drug, and no drug works for everyone all the time.
‘Because of all the hype, people somehow think this is a cure-all and a treatment that will fix everything.’
Nor are most drugs completely free of side effects. In the standard drug-approval process, observed side effects are noted on the packaging. If new ones show up after F.D.A. approval, they can be added later. As Ken Mackie, from Indiana University, told me, there’s no mechanism to do this in the vernacular movement, no central repository of interactions and side effects.
CBD has known side effects. Elizabeth Thiele, the epileptologist at Harvard, says that some children, for reasons that aren’t clear, undergo mood changes on some nonprescription CBD oils. (These issues might be caused by different cannabinoids or terpenes, another type of biologically active molecule produced by plants.) CBD can also interfere with how quickly the body breaks down other medications.
The greatest concern, however, and one I heard repeatedly from parents and physicians, is quality control. In 2015, the F.D.A. found that many CBD-labeled products actually contained very little CBD. It sent out a flurry of letters warning companies not to make medical claims. Two years later, a study published in JAMA documented that, in 84 products sold online, 26 percent had less CBD than advertised and 43 percent had more. And the cannabis plant can absorb toxic substances like heavy metals or pesticides as well as carry infective agents. In 2017, a California man undergoing chemotherapy, whose immune system was weakened, died from a fungal infection that his physicians suspect he acquired from the cannabis he smoked to ease his symptoms.
Last year, California legalized recreational marijuana and phased in a series of stringent quality controls, including tests for various microbes, pesticides and heavy metals. Customers who buy cannabis from licensed California dispensaries can now be reasonably confident that they’re getting what they think they’re buying and that it’s safe to consume. This goes for some other states as well.
Even as a wave of entrepreneurs has founded companies already worth millions in what’s often called “the green rush” — the explosion of cannabis-related business — many people of color remain incarcerated for marijuana-related crimes. Some states and cities are moving to correct this. For example, last year Denver’s mayor announced that more than 10,000 convictions for low-level marijuana crimes, going back to 2001, would be eligible for expungement.
At the same time, confusion about the federal legality of CBD-related commerce remains widespread. The 2018 Farm Bill legalized hemp, a low-THC, potentially high-CBD variety of cannabis, meaning that CBD from hemp is now theoretically legal nationwide. But there’s a wrinkle: The F.D.A. says that because CBD is also an approved drug (Epidiolex), the cannabinoid can’t be considered, as some argue it should be, a nutraceutical or dietary supplement. The companies that ship CBD products across state lines — an activity subject to F.D.A. enforcement — may be doing so illegally. Yet even though the F.D.A. has the authority to clamp down on CBD-related products and interstate commerce, it can choose not to do so. F.D.A. enforcement action depends on, among other things, available resources and the perceived threat to public health. (An F.D.A. spokesman declined to comment.)
J. Michael Bostwick, a psychiatrist at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minn., who has written about cannabis, calls the hodgepodge of conflicting rules regarding cannabis “idiotic.” He told me that even physicians willing to oversee patient cannabis use, who live in states where it’s legal, can be reluctant to do so because it remains illegal under federal law. A doctor’s license to practice medicine comes from the state, but because the license that allows doctors to prescribe medicine is federal, involvement with cannabis could lead to revocation of that license. “There’s a lack of clarity about what playing field we’re on,” Bostwick says.
One obvious solution to the uncertainties around legality, quality and safety of CBD products would be to force all CBD into the F.D.A. drug-approval pipeline, making it a prescription drug only. Somewhat surprisingly, Catherine Jacobson does not want that to happen. Her thinking on this issue has evolved, she told me. Early on, she thought all medical cannabis products should go through the F.D.A.’s approval process. But she realized that her primary concern, quality, could be assured without this expensive, time-consuming undertaking. In Germany, for instance, doctors have been able to prescribe cannabis since 2017, and patients get a pharmaceutical-grade product, because a federal agency oversees the medical-marijuana industry.
Jacobson, who lives in Mill Valley, Calif., now works remotely for a Canadian-based company that has also, she thinks, solved the quality problem. She’s vice president of regulatory-and-medical affairs for Tilray, which produces medical-grade cannabis products and flowers and ships them wherever they’re federally legal (and so not to the United States).
What about the uncertainties over whether CBD works for a given illness? Jacobson didn’t necessarily see the lack of evidence of effectiveness as a problem. When it comes to diseases like intractable epilepsy, she said, doctors often do their own experimenting. They try standard treatments first, but when those fail, as they did in Ben and Sam’s cases, they turn to drugs that might not be approved for epilepsy or even for children. Some of these drugs might cause severe side effects, including fits of rage or sedation so extreme that, as one mother described it to me, “the light goes out” in a child’s eyes.
A bottle of Tilray’s C100, developed for treating seizures. Jamie Chung for The New York Times
Jacobson and other parents I spoke with argue that in difficult medical cases, doctors are already tinkering with potentially toxic drugs, so why can’t they — the parents or the patients — experiment with a less-toxic product? Why can’t everyone? Scientists could search for signals on what to study in this sea of self-experimentation. Realm of Caring, still run by Heather Jackson, is already doing this in partnership with academic researchers, sharing data from a 55,000-person registry that includes information on what people are using cannabis for and what side effects and benefits they see.
One scientist is doing something similar with herself as a subject. In 2017, Diana Martinez, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, found out she had breast cancer and started chemotherapy with taxane, a class of drug known to cause nerve damage. Martinez began to hear ringing in her ears, feel pins and needles in her hands and lose feeling in her lower limbs. Eventually she could barely swallow, started to fall while walking and ended up concussed. In up to 80 percent of women who use taxane, these symptoms persist. Martinez decided that even if the drug helped her beat the cancer, the symptoms, which were likely to get worse, were unendurable. Over her family’s objections, she quit the chemo.
Then a colleague reminded her that she had always wanted to study CBD for nerve pain. Why not try it herself? Martinez ordered CBD extract from a place in Colorado that seemed reputable — Charlotte’s Web, it turned out. After about six weeks on the oil, the ringing in her ears disappeared and the other symptoms began to fade. “I could swallow,” she told me. “I could walk down the street, type on a computer. It was gone. It seemed fairly miraculous. It still does.” She completed the chemo, this time with fewer side effects.
Martinez, inspired by her own experience, has since started a trial with her colleague, a neurobiologist at Columbia named Margaret Haney, that will target taxane-induced neuropathy in breast-cancer patients with a pill containing both THC and CBD. The cannabinoids may work better together for some conditions, especially when pain is a factor. (Jacobson’s continued behind-the-scenes influence is evident here as well. Tilray created the formulation for Martinez’s trials.) If it helps, the cannabinoids might save lives not because they cure cancer — although others are studying that possibility as well — but because they might assist women in completing otherwise intolerable courses of chemo.
And the only reason she’s pursuing this line of inquiry, Martinez points out, is that a quality, CBD-rich hemp extract was readily available when she needed it. “I’m grateful for Charlotte’s Web,” she told me. Prospective users need to do their homework and research product quality, but “when people want to take CBD,” she added, “I’m like, ‘Go for it.’ ”
CBD is not always an unqualified success, even in the best-known case studies. For Sam Vogelstein, the inspiration behind Epidiolex, it helped control his seizures for years, limiting them to around six per day. But in the fall of 2015, Sam began suffering from a new type of seizure. These were more severe, causing him to fall to the floor writhing, which hadn’t occurred in the past. “You instantly understand why people used to say that people who have epilepsy are possessed by the devil,” Fred, Sam’s father, told me, “like some external force has taken control of this person.”
Higher doses of Epidiolex didn’t help, so Sam’s doctor, the neurologist Roberta Cilio, recommended an anti-seizure drug called Depakote. He had taken it before, without benefit, but this time, in combination with Epidiolex, it worked wonders: Sam has been completely seizure free for more than three and a half years. He’s a tall, lanky 17-year-old who likes to fence, run and engages in “normal aggravating boy teenager stuff,” his father says — and “cause for celebration,” both parents say.
Ben Jacobson’s condition is more ambiguous. In an effort to stop the seizures, doctors surgically removed half of Ben’s parietal lobe in 2015, but the procedure didn’t mitigate the epilepsy. His doctor, Cilio, didn’t think the Epidiolex was aiding him, either, and recommended he stop taking it. Jacobson, who like many mothers of epileptic children keeps a detailed diary about seizure activity, disagreed. By her count, the number of Ben’s seizures had declined by 40 percent while on Epidiolex, particularly the severe grand mal seizures that caused him to stop breathing.
This disagreement between doctor and mother prompted Jacobson to find a new neurologist who, she told me, took one look at Ben and told her to do whatever she felt might help. Except for a few breaks, Ben, who’s now 10 and can’t walk unaided, has remained on Epidiolex, but his prognosis isn’t great. “He’s still going downhill,” Jacobson told me. “His life expectancy is short enough that we don’t like to think about it.”
Charlotte Figi, now 12, continues to be almost entirely seizure-free. She’s developmentally delayed, Paige Figi told me. And she suffers from osteoporosis caused, Figi thinks, by the high doses of steroids she took to control seizures at a young age. But she is otherwise a happy, playful girl, Figi says. And what Figi discovered about CBD on Charlotte’s behalf came in handy for Charlotte’s fraternal twin sister, Chase.
Two years ago, Chase, who until then had exhibited no problems, began to have seizures out of the blue.
Figi didn’t even bother with allopathic drugs this time. She turned straight to the Charlotte’s Web CBD extract, and the seizures stopped. “If I hadn’t done this,” Figi says — that is, experiment with CBD extracts on Charlotte — “Charlotte would be dead. And Chase would now be starting all those drugs.”
Meanwhile, as the science inches forward, CBD has become a pop-culture phenomenon. Kim Kardashian recently hosted a CBD-themed baby shower. In April, Carl’s Jr. tested a CBD-infused burger in Colorado.
Some scientists are concerned by how far the CBD craze has moved beyond the science. But Staci Gruber, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, does not think the two are necessarily in conflict. This might seem odd, given her work. She has found that recreational users, particularly those who begin using cannabis earlier in life, exhibit some cognitive difficulties and altered brain structure and function.
In 2014, Gruber started the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery, or MIND, program to examine the effects of medical cannabis, and so far, she has found exactly the opposite in people who use cannabis as medicine. Their cognitive function appears to improve over time and preliminary evidence suggests that, after initiation of medical-cannabis treatment, their brain activity begins to normalize.
Although Gruber is not certain what accounts for the contrasting effects, she has several theories. Seeking a euphoric high, recreational users often gravitate toward products higher in THC. Medical patients, meanwhile, want to control symptoms and may thus seek whole-plant products that not only contain more CBD than what recreational users typically encounter but also other potentially healthful cannabinoids. Medical users tend to be older, too, and some evidence suggests that THC is less toxic to older brains than younger and may in some cases benefit older brains.
Gruber has likewise observed that medical cannabis patients tend to reduce their use of conventional medications over time, which might itself be beneficial to brain structure and function. Whatever the explanation, Gruber believes greater scientific engagement with the CBD phenomenon is as important as more careful regulation. “People have been using cannabis forever,” she told me. “The question now is, How do we as scientists catch up?”
Moises Velasquez-Manoff is a contributing Op-Ed writer for The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about tick-borne meat allergies.
Gummy Bear image: Concept and diagram by Paul Sahre. Photo illustration by Jamie Chung. Prop styling by Anna Surbatovich.
Political prudence isn’t in vogue, but it should be.
Via NYTimes, By Greg Weiner
A quarter-century later, as Lincoln prepared a bold stroke that helped define his own legacy — the Emancipation Proclamation — his annual message to Congress spoke of historical circumstances more grandly: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
Those poles of Lincoln’s politics — modesty in ordinary times and boldness when required — illustrate the essence of prudence. The gateway to prudence is accurately gauging the character of one’s moment in history. That should be a topic of debate in 2020. Both sides can agree that Mr. Trump is a political anomaly; the question that can distinguish Democrats and Republicans is whether the nation’s situation requires anomalous measures. To justify his leadership style, Mr. Trump’s partisans must establish that his actions are prudent because a pivotal period in history demands them. The sharpest contrast to that view would be a call for normalcy fitted to normal times.
Yet for all the polarization in our politics, Mr. Trump and many of his Democratic challengers agree on the core claim that we live in the throes of a historical crisis. They concur that economic dislocation has ravaged the middle class: many of them might have uttered Mr. Trump’s inaugural proclamation of “American carnage.” All speak of constitutional crises — Mr. Trump of the excesses of the administrative state, Democrats of his violations of longstanding norms.
But the erosion of the middle class is not an acute ailment: It is a gradual, nearly half-century phenomenon that is susceptible only to gradual solutions as well. As for the supposed collapse of American government promulgated by the bureaucracy, the truth is much less dramatic: The administrative state is the product of an eight-decade consensus dating to the New Deal, not an emergent calamity. It can be unwound, but 80 years of practice will not yield to sudden solutions.
The quadrennial inflation of political problems to catastrophic status is a form of historical narcissism, according to which the era in which we live is always grave, earth-shattering, consequential. This raises Lincoln’s question: Who benefits from the claim that these are end times for the republic? The answer is messianic politicians, especially presidents, to whom we give additional power to rescue us. It is therefore no surprise that those who seek the office tend to speak in grandiose terms.
Barack Obama, accepting the Democratic nomination in 2008, proclaimed “one of those defining moments” requiring “a new politics for a new time.” Four years later, Mitt Romney said the 2012 election would “shape great things, historic things, and those things will determine the most intimate and important aspects of every American life and every American family.”
In 2016, Mr. Trump’s supporters said his outsized style was necessary to “drain the swamp” and reorder American politics. On the substance, there has been less reordering or disaster than either his defenders or critics are willing to concede. Wage growth at the bottom half of the economy is climbing, as it has been since roughly Mr. Obama’s second term. The number of troops deployed overseas, an index of conflict, has been declining since 2010.
Voters might reasonably credit Mr. Trump with accelerating those trends, just as they might reasonably dislike his approaches to doing so. But the inflated, world-historical narrative that surrounds both his adversaries and him obscures what might be clarifying differences in the 2020 campaign. If the contest is about who can most shrilly characterize the nation’s condition as opposed to whose politics are best suited to the actual needs of the moment, the candidates will be difficult to distinguish. The sole question will be which extravagant leader we need.
Because it can draw sharp distinctions between candidates, prudence can be a political asset. Yet American politics has comprehensively rejected prudence. Historical rankings of presidents routinely lionize leaders who presided over emergencies, a dynamic that, as Lincoln predicted in 1838, generates a constant demand for and corresponding supply of emergencies. These rankings inevitably consign to oblivion presidents who simply governed according to the circumstances of their times.
Similarly, cable news stations attract more viewers with the breathless chyron “breaking news” than they would with one reading “keep this in perspective.” For their part, voters have an endless appetite for transformative change that leaders, obsessed with their legacies, are eager to sate. The White House hopeful who promises simply to govern is doomed. Instead, the formula for presidential success is change divided by time: The president who alters the nation’s politics the most in the shortest period ranks the highest.
Prudence would question whether a given moment requires transformation or mere governance — whether we are actually hurtling toward the abyss or whether these are more commonplace times. As that inquiry, and Lincoln’s career, demonstrate, prudence does not demand Pollyannas. In genuine emergencies, boldness is prudent. But most political problems, including serious ones, fall short of tragic dimensions. In these situations, prudence counsels moderation.
Before claiming instead that every election revolves around a crisis, political leaders should embrace what Edmund Burke called “a moral rather than a complexional timidity.” Voters ought to share Lincoln’s skepticism of the rhetoric of catastrophe. That would be a prudent response to our grandiose politics and the grandiose politicians who peddle it.
To rein in monopolies, maybe we need to rethink what a monopoly is.
Via NYTimes, By Kara Swisher
In a tech galaxy that now seems far, far away, everyone was terrified of Bill Gates. He was the Apex Predator of Tech.
You wanted to make software? Microsoft would crush you. You wanted to start an online service? Microsoft would decimate you. You wanted to make a browser to navigate the World Wide Web? Chomp!
It was that last one that finally stopped Mr. Gates and Microsoft. The government accused the company of being a monopoly and of engaging in anticompetitive practices against Netscape and its Navigator browser. In 2001 the government won a landmark case against the company that required it to submit to more oversight and make it easier for other companies to offer competing software.
The Sherman Antitrust Act had prevailed over the leading power in tech, and what happened after was a resurgence of innovation that ushered in a spate of new companies and ideas. You can draw a pretty straight line from that decision to the growth of Google and Amazon and Apple, the explosion of Facebook and the introduction of start-ups like Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and Slack.
In recent years tech has backtracked, except this time we have several Apex Predators instead of just one. Google and Facebook are the most obvious. More and more people in the media and in politics, as well as consumers, have become fearful of these companies for the damage they can do and the unregulated power they wield.
Something has to be done, but what? Even as distrust of big tech companies increases and governments move to control them, their businesses have never been more successful.
One option is privacy legislation. Europe passed such a law in 2016. While there is no national privacy law in the United States, California will soon have a state-level law, and other states are considering similar reforms. The idea of restricting tech companies’ use of personal data becomes more popular with every hack and every instance of abuse. Still, the likelihood of the United States passing a national privacy law with teeth is small.
Then there are the fines, such as a multibillion-dollar one that the Federal Trade Commission is considering to punish Facebook for privacy violations. While the fine would be the largest the agency has ever levied, it would also be far too small to make a difference. When Facebook announced it might have to hand over $5 billion as its get-out-of-jail-free card, Wall Street cheered and Facebook stock rose.
Meanwhile, there’s a lot of talk about the ways that countries can work together to improve the online ecosystem. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand met with President Emmanuel Macron of France last week, for example, about creating an intergovernmental effort to end online extremism. While laudable in theory, very little of this hand-wringing is likely to result in any rules with heft. In addition, the prospect of governments making rules around the restriction of speech is rife with ethical dilemmas.
Finally there’s the biggest gun: Using antitrust law to break up big tech companies. Calls for antitrust action have become increasingly loud, most notably in a recent essay in this paper by the Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes. His statement that the company should be broken up attracted a lot of attention, especially after he called the power held by Mark Zuckerberg, his former college roommate, “un-American.” That had to hurt, even if the blow is likely to be glancing, since antitrust cases are slow-moving and hard to pull off.
And yet the idea of using antitrust to rein in these companies got a significant boost recently with the Supreme Court’s decision to allow a lawsuit from consumers aimed at how Apple runs its App Store to proceed in a lower court.
Breaking with the more conservative wing of the court in a 5-4 decision, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the majority opinion that Apple’s arguments that it wasn’t subject to a lawsuit over its app prices “disregard statutory text and precedent, create an unprincipled and economically senseless distinction among monopolistic retailers and furnish monopolistic retailers with a how-to guide for evasion of the antitrust laws.”
Apple has and will continue to argue that it is not a monopoly in either hardware and software — which is true. But the case, though narrow, is still a flashing neon sign of change. It centers on rethinking the idea of what a monopoly is with an eye to the power of the network effect. Even if a company doesn’t completely dominate its sector, if its platform can exercise what amounts to an iron-fisted control over consumers, perhaps it should be considered a monopoly after all.
Google and Facebook are good examples, because they hold sway in all kinds of ways that make it hard for other companies to compete and for consumers to escape. Google’s share of the search market allows it to dominate mapping, recommendations, email, video, documents and more, while Facebook rules the social media world through its main app along with Instagram and WhatsApp.
None of this is good for consumers, except perhaps by the measure of convenience, because the choices they have are limited and never likely to challenge the status quo. In other words, these companies are Apex Predators, too. You don’t have to be as powerful as Bill Gates once was to be just as harmful.
The question now is: How do we get consumers on top of the food chain for once?
Kara Swisher, editor at large for the technology news website Recode and producer of the “Recode Decode” podcast and Code Conference, is a contributing Opinion writer.
Studies have shown that the levels of THC, the main psychoactive compound in pot, have risen dramatically in the U.S. from 1995 to 2017.
As more states legalize marijuana, more people in the U.S. are buying and using weed — and the kind of weed they can buy has become much stronger.
That concerns scientists who study marijuana and its effects on the body, as well as emergency room doctors who say they’re starting to see more patients who come into the ER with weed-associated issues.
Some 26 million Americans ages 12 and older reported being current marijuana users in 2017, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health. It’s not clear how many users have had serious health issues from strong weed, and there’s a lot that’s still unknown about the potential risks. But scientists are starting to learn more about some of them.
The potency of weed depends on the amount of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the main compound responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects. One study of pot products seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration found the potency increased from about 4% THC in 1995 to about 12% in 2014. By 2017, another study showed, the potency of illicit drug samples had gone up to 17.1% THC.
“That’s an increase of more than 300% from 1995 to about 2017,” says Staci Gruber, director of the Marijuana Investigations for Neuroscientific Discovery (MIND) program at the Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. “I would say that’s a considerable increase.”
And some products with concentrated forms of cannabis, like hash and hash oil, can have as much as 80% to 90% THC, she adds.
“I think most people are aware of the phenomenon that ‘this is not your grand daddy’s weed,’ Gruber says. “I hear this all the time.”
Daily Marijuana Use And Highly Potent Weed Linked To Psychosis
But people might not be aware of the potential health risks of highly potent weed. “The negative effects of cannabis have primarily been isolated and localized to THC,” says Gruber. “So it stands to reason that higher levels of THC may in fact confer a greater risk for negative outcome.”
“In general, people think, ‘Oh, I don’t have to worry about marijuana. It’s a safe drug,’ ” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. “The notion that it is completely safe drug is incorrect when you start to address the consequences of this very high content of 9THC.”
Pot’s paradoxical effects
THC can have opposite effects on our bodies at high and low doses, Volkow says. Take anxiety levels, for example.
“When someone takes marijuana at a low [THC] content to relax and to stone out, actually, it decreases your anxiety,” she says. But high concentrations can cause panic attacks, and if someone consumes high-enough levels of THC, “you become full-blown psychotic and paranoid.”
Weed can have a similar paradoxical effect on the vascular system. Volkow says: “If you take low-content THC it will increase your blood flow, but high content [THC] can produce massive vasoconstriction, it decreases the flow through the vessels.”
And at low concentrations, THC can be used to treat nausea in cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy. But Volkow says that “patients that consume high content THC chronically came to the emergency department with a syndrome where they couldn’t stop vomiting and with intense abdominal pain.”
It’s a condition called cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome.
“The typical patient uses [inhales] about 10 times per day … and they come in with really difficult to treat nausea and vomiting,” says Andrew Monte, an associate professor of emergency medicine and medical toxicology at the University of Colorado’s school of medicine. “Some people have died from this … syndrome, so that is concerning.”
Scientists don’t know exactly how high levels of THC can trigger the syndrome, but the only known treatment is stopping cannabis use.
While the number of people who’ve had the syndrome is small, Monte says he and his colleagues have documented a rise in the number of cases at emergency rooms in Colorado since marijuana was legalized there five years ago. A study by Monte and his team found that cyclical vomiting cases made up about 18% of inhaled cannabis-related cases at his ER.
They also found that statewide, the overall number of ER cases associated with cannabis use has gone up. And Monte says his ER has “seen an approximately a three-fold increase in emergency department visits just by frequency. It doesn’t mean we’re getting overwhelmed by these visits due to cannabis, it’s just that means that there are more patients overall.”
Most people show up at his emergency department because of “intoxication” from too much pot, either straight or mixed with other drugs, Monte says. The bulk of these cases are due to inhaled cannabis, though edibles are associated with more psychiatric visits.
“We’re seeing an increase in psychosis and hallucinations, as well as anxiety and even depression and suicidality,” Monte says.
He thinks the increased potency of marijuana plays a role in all these cases. “Whenever you have a higher dose of one of these types of drugs, the patient is at a higher risk of having an adverse drug event. If the concentration is so much higher … it’s much easier to overshoot the low-level high that they’re looking for.”
Not everyone is at equal risk, Monte adds. “Many many people use cannabis safely,” he says. “The vast majority don’t end up in our emergency department.”
Different risks for users
Some people are more vulnerable than others to the potential negative effects of high THC cannabis.
Adolescent and young adults who use recreationally are especially susceptible because their brains are still developing and are sensitive to drugs in general, says Gruber of the MIND program. In a recent review of existing studies, she found that marijuana use among adolescents affects cognition — especially memory and executive functions, which determine mental flexibility and ability to change our behavior.
Medical marijuana users can face unexpected and unwelcome effects from potent weed. “It’s very important for people to understand that they may not get the response they anticipated,” Gruber notes.
Studies done on the medical benefits of pot usually involve very low doses of THC, says Monte, who adds that those doses “are far lower than what people are getting in a dispensary right now.”
David Dooks, a 51-year-old based in the Boston area turned to marijuana after an ankle surgery last year. “I thought that medical marijuana might be a good alternative to opioids for pain management,” he says.
Based on the advice at a dispensary, David began using a variety of weed with 56.5% THC and says it only “exacerbated the nerve pain.” After experimenting with a few other strains, he says, what worked for him was one with low (0.9%) THC, which eased his nerve pain.
‘Start low, go slow’
Whether people are using recreationally or medically, patients should educate themselves as much as possible and be cautious while using, Monte says.
Avoiding higher THC products and using infrequently can also help reduce risk, Volkow adds. “Anyone who has had a bad experience, whether it’s psychological or biological, they should stay away from this drug,” she notes.
Ask for as much information as possible before buying. “You have to know what’s in your weed,” Gruber says. “Whether or not it’s conventional flower that you’re smoking or vaping, an edible or tincture, it’s very important to know what’s in it.”
And the old saying “start low, go slow,” is a good rule of thumb, she adds. “You can always add, but you can never take it away. Once it’s in, it’s in.”
Militia leader Ammon Bundy, famous for leading an armed standoff in Oregon, had a tender moment in November of last year. He recorded a Facebook post saying that perhaps President Trump’s characterization of the migrant caravan on the U.S.-Mexico border was somewhat broad. Maybe they weren’t all criminals, he said. “What about those who have come here for reasons of need?”
Bundy did not say he was breaking with Trump. He just asked his followers to put themselves in the shoes of “the fathers, the mothers, the children” who came to escape violence. It was a call for a truce grounded in empathy, the kind you might hear in a war zone, say, or an Easter Sunday sermon. Still, it was met with a swift and rageful response from his followers, so overwhelming that within days, Bundy decided to quit Facebook.
In an earlier era, Bundy’s appeal might have resonated. But he failed to tune in to a critical shift in American culture — one that a handful of researchers have been tracking, with some alarm, for the past decade or so. Americans these days seem to be losing their appetite for empathy, especially the walk-a-mile-in-someone’s-shoes Easter Sunday morning kind.
When I was growing up in the ’70s, empathy was all the rage. The term was coined in 1908; then, social scientists and psychologists started more aggressively pushing the concept into the culture after World War II, basically out of fear. The idea was that we were all going to kill each other with nuclear weapons — or learn to see the world through each other’s eyes. In my elementary school in the 1970s, which was not progressive or mushy in any way, we wrote letters to pretend Russian pen pals to teach us to open our hearts to our enemies.
And not just enemies. Civil rights activists had also picked up on the idea. Kenneth Clark, a social scientist and civil rights activist, half-jokingly proposed that people in power all be required to take an “empathy pill” so they could make better decisions. His hope was that people with power and privilege would one day inhabit the realities of people without power, not from the safe, noblesse oblige distance of pity, but from the inside. An evolved person was an empathetic person, choosing understanding over fear.
Then, more than a decade ago, a certain suspicion of empathy started to creep in, particularly among young people. One of the first people to notice was Sara Konrath, an associate professor and researcher at Indiana University. Since the late 1960s, researchers have surveyed young people on their levels of empathy, testing their agreement with statements such as: “It’s not really my problem if others are in trouble and need help” or “Before criticizing somebody I try to imagine how I would feel if I were in their place.”
Konrath collected decades of studies and noticed a very obvious pattern. Starting around 2000, the line starts to slide. More students say it’s not their problem to help people in trouble, not their job to see the world from someone else’s perspective. By 2009, on all the standard measures, Konrath found, young people on average measure 40 percent less empathetic than my own generation — 40 percent!
It’s strange to think of empathy – a natural human impulse — as fluctuating in this way, moving up and down like consumer confidence. But that’s what happened. Young people just started questioning what my elementary school teachers had taught me.
Their feeling was: Why should they put themselves in the shoes of someone who was not them, much less someone they thought was harmful? In fact, cutting someone off from empathy was the positive value, a way to make a stand.
So, for example, when the wife of white nationalist Richard Spencer recently told BuzzFeed he had abused her, the question debated on the lefty Internet was: Why should we care that some woman who chose to ally herself with a nasty racist got herself hurt? Why waste empathy on that? (Spencer, in a court filing, denies all her allegations.)
The new rule for empathy seems to be: reserve it, not for your “enemies,” but for the people you believe are hurt, or you have decided need it the most. Empathy, but just for your own team. And empathizing with the other team? That’s practically a taboo.
And it turns out that this brand of selective empathy is a powerful force.
In the past 20 years, psychologists and neurologists have started to look at how empathy actually works, in our brains and our hearts, when we’re not thinking about it. And one thing they’ve found is that “one of the strongest triggers for human empathy is observing some kind of conflict between two other parties,” says Fritz Breithaupt, a professor at Indiana University who studies empathy. “Once they take the side, they’re drawn into that perspective. And that can lead to very strong empathy and too strong polarization with something you only see this one side and not the other side any longer.”
A classic example is the Super Bowl, or any Auburn, Alabama game.
But these days in the news, examples come up every day: the Kavanaugh hearings, emergency funding for a wall, Spike Lee walking out of the Oscars, the Barr report, Kirstjen Nielsen, every third thing on Twitter.
Researchers who study empathy have noticed that it’s actually really hard to do what we were striving for in my generation: empathize with people who are different than you are, much less people you don’t like. But if researchers set up a conflict, people get into automatic empathy overdrive, with their own team. This new research has scrambled notions of how empathy works as a force in the world. For example, we often think of terrorists as shockingly blind to the suffering of innocents. But Breithaupt and other researchers think of them as classic examples of people afflicted with an “excess of empathy. They feel the suffering of their people.”
Breithaupt called his new book The Dark Sides of Empathy, because there’s a point at which empathy doesn’t even look like the kind of universal empathy I was taught in school. There is a natural way that empathy gets triggered in the brain — your pain centers light up when you see another person suffering. But out in the world it starts to look more like tribalism, a way to keep reinforcing your own point of view and blocking out any others.
Breithaupt is alarmed at the apparent new virus of selective empathy and how it’s deepening divisions. If we embrace it, he says, then “basically you give up on civil society at that point. You give up on democracy. Because if you feed into this division more and you let it happen, it will become so strong that it becomes dangerous.”
We can’t return to my generation’s era of empathy innocence, because we now know too much about how the force actually works. But we can’t give up on empathy either, because empathy is “90 percent what our life is all about,” Breithaupt says. “Without it, we would be just alone.”
In his book Breithaupt proposes an ingenious solution: give up on the idea that when we are “empathizing” we are being altruistic, or helping the less fortunate, or in any way doing good. What we can do when we do empathy, proposes Fritz, is help ourselves. We can learn to see the world through the eyes of a migrant child and a militia leader and a Russian pen pal purely so we can expand our own imaginations, and make our own minds richer. It’s selfish empathy. Not saintly, but better than being alone.
Our individualistic culture inflames the ego and numbs the spirit. Failure teaches us who we are.
Via NYTimes, By David Brooks
Mr. Brooks is an Opinion columnist. This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life.”
April 6, 2019
Many of the people I admire lead lives that have a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career, started a family and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb — I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a doctor, a cop. They did the things society encourages us to do, like make a mark, become successful, buy a home, raise a family, pursue happiness.
People on the first mountain spend a lot of time on reputation management. They ask: What do people think of me? Where do I rank? They’re trying to win the victories the ego enjoys.
These hustling years are also powerfully shaped by our individualistic and meritocratic culture. People operate under this assumption: I can make myself happy. If I achieve excellence, lose more weight, follow this self-improvement technique, fulfillment will follow.
But in the lives of the people I’m talking about — the ones I really admire — something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.
Some of them achieved success and found it unsatisfying. They figured there must be more to life, some higher purpose. Others failed. They lost their job or endured some scandal. Suddenly they were falling, not climbing, and their whole identity was in peril. Yet another group of people got hit sideways by something that wasn’t part of the original plan. They had a cancer scare or suffered the loss of a child. These tragedies made the first-mountain victories seem, well, not so important.
Life had thrown them into the valley, as it throws most of us into the valley at one point or another. They were suffering and adrift.
Some people are broken by this kind of pain and grief. They seem to get smaller and more afraid, and never recover. They get angry, resentful and tribal.
But other people are broken open. The theologian Paul Tillich wrote that suffering upends the normal patterns of life and reminds you that you are not who you thought you were. The basement of your soul is much deeper than you knew. Some people look into the hidden depths of themselves and they realize that success won’t fill those spaces. Only a spiritual life and unconditional love from family and friends will do. They realize how lucky they are. They are down in the valley, but their health is O.K.; they’re not financially destroyed; they’re about to be dragged on an adventure that will leave them transformed.
They realize that while our educational system generally prepares us for climbing this or that mountain, your life is actually defined by how you make use of your moment of greatest adversity.
So how does moral renewal happen? How do you move from a life based on bad values to a life based on better ones?
First, there has to be a period of solitude, in the wilderness, where self-reflection can occur.
“What happens when a ‘gifted child’ finds himself in a wilderness where he’s stripped away of any way of proving his worth?” Belden Lane asks in “Backpacking With the Saints.” What happens where there is no audience, nothing he can achieve? He crumbles. The ego dissolves. “Only then is he able to be loved.”
That’s the key point here. The self-centered voice of the ego has to be quieted before a person is capable of freely giving and receiving love.
Then there is contact with the heart and soul — through prayer, meditation, writing, whatever it is that puts you in contact with your deepest desires.
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us,” Annie Dillard writes in “Teaching a Stone to Talk.” “But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other.”
In the wilderness the desire for esteem is stripped away and bigger desires are made visible: the desires of the heart (to live in loving connection with others) and the desires of the soul (the yearning to serve some transcendent ideal and to be sanctified by that service).
When people are broken open in this way, they are more sensitive to the pains and joys of the world. They realize: Oh, that first mountain wasn’t my mountain. I am ready for a larger journey.
Some people radically change their lives at this point. They quit corporate jobs and teach elementary school. They dedicate themselves to some social or political cause. I know a woman whose son committed suicide. She says that the scared, self-conscious woman she used to be died with him. She found her voice and helps families in crisis. I recently met a guy who used to be a banker. That failed to satisfy, and now he helps men coming out of prison. I once corresponded with a man from Australia who lost his wife, a tragedy that occasioned a period of reflection. He wrote, “I feel almost guilty about how significant my own growth has been as a result of my wife’s death.”
Perhaps most of the people who have emerged from a setback stay in their same jobs, with their same lives, but they are different. It’s not about self anymore; it’s about relation, it’s about the giving yourself away. Their joy is in seeing others shine.
In their book “Practical Wisdom,” Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe tell the story of a hospital janitor named Luke. In Luke’s hospital there was a young man who’d gotten into a fight and was now in a permanent coma. The young man’s father sat with him every day in silent vigil, and every day Luke cleaned the room. But one day the father was out for a smoke when Luke cleaned it.
Later that afternoon, the father found Luke and snapped at him for not cleaning the room. The first-mountain response is to see your job as cleaning rooms. Luke could have snapped back: I did clean the room. You were out smoking. The second-mountain response is to see your job as serving patients and their families. In that case you’d go back in the room and clean it again, so that the father could have the comfort of seeing you do it. And that’s what Luke did.
If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.
On the first mountain, personal freedom is celebrated — keeping your options open, absence of restraint. But the perfectly free life is the unattached and unremembered life. Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in; it is a river you want to cross so that you can plant yourself on the other side.
So the person on the second mountain is making commitments. People who have made a commitment to a town, a person, an institution or a cause have cast their lot and burned the bridges behind them. They have made a promise without expecting a return. They are all in.
I can now usually recognize first- and second-mountain people. The former have an ultimate allegiance to self; the latter have an ultimate allegiance to some commitment. I can recognize first- and second-mountain organizations too. In some organizations, people are there to serve their individual self-interests — draw a salary. But other organizations demand that you surrender to a shared cause and so change your very identity. You become a Marine, a Morehouse Man.
I’ve been describing moral renewal in personal terms, but of course whole societies and cultures can swap bad values for better ones. I think we all realize that the hatred, fragmentation and disconnection in our society is not just a political problem. It stems from some moral and spiritual crisis.
We don’t treat one another well. And the truth is that 60 years of a hyper-individualistic first-mountain culture have weakened the bonds between people. They’ve dissolved the shared moral cultures that used to restrain capitalism and the meritocracy.
Over the past few decades the individual, the self, has been at the center. The second-mountain people are leading us toward a culture that puts relationships at the center. They ask us to measure our lives by the quality of our attachments, to see that life is a qualitative endeavor, not a quantitative one. They ask us to see others at their full depths, and not just as a stereotype, and to have the courage to lead with vulnerability. These second-mountain people are leading us into a new culture. Culture change happens when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy them. These second-mountain people have found it.
Their moral revolution points us toward a different goal. On the first mountain we shoot for happiness, but on the second mountain we are rewarded with joy. What’s the difference? Happiness involves a victory for the self. It happens as we move toward our goals. You get a promotion. You have a delicious meal.
Joy involves the transcendence of self. When you’re on the second mountain, you realize we aim too low. We compete to get near a little sunlamp, but if we lived differently, we could feel the glow of real sunshine. On the second mountain you see that happiness is good, but joy is better.
David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and the forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks
Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, decided to downgrade her tech two years ago. It has worked out, with paper and DVDs instead of the latest apps and gizmos.
“I find that many new technologies are actually far less efficient than the tools they attempt to replace,” said Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Via NYTimes, Featuring Pamela Paul
How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, discussed the tech she’s using.
About two years ago, you wrote an article about how you downgraded all your tech. How did you downgrade? What do you love about having done that?
It’s easier than you might think because you can pretty effectively downgrade merely by neglecting to upgrade. You just naturally find yourself sliding backward. In my case, this shift has been deliberate, but more about making a mental adjustment than about deactivating existing technology. (Though I did permanently jettison the electric toothbrush.)
There’s a prevailing assumption that just because there’s a new high-tech version of something previously handled in a low-tech way, one should adopt that technology. I come at it from a different angle, which is to start with the need or problem and ask myself: Will this new technology substantively help? And if the upside is speed or information, my next question is: What’s the trade-off? What do I lose along with this gain, and on balance, do the gains outweigh the losses? (Possibly the only thing I learned from Econ 111.)
Quite often, I find that it doesn’t. What lands in the loss column may have to do with process, and the process of doing something can be just as valuable as the end result. I read this book last year, “Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.” I am in no way crafty, but this book had me yearning to thatch my own roof just to be in touch with the physical and attendant mental labor of putting something useful together. (That said, I haven’t lifted a finger.)
On the flip side, I find that many new technologies are actually far less efficient than the tools they attempt to replace. A Nook or a Kindle or iPad is, for my purposes, unequivocally worse than a printed book. You can’t flip back and forth to the photo inserts or skim easily through the index; you have no sense of page count (percentages, really?). You lose the design of the product, which is often beautiful, down to the weight of the paper and the choice of typeface. You’d have to pay me a very fancy salary to give up print for a year.
The vast majority of reviewers do, too, she said. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Same thing with paper calendars; they’re just better. I get irrationally impatient with the slowness with which people tap meetings into their calendars on the phone. It is at least 30 seconds faster to write it in an old-timey agenda (Levenger here). My Google calendar will always play second fiddle to this far more detailed agenda, supplemented by Post-its and a Moleskine to-do list. I trace this obsession with efficiency to the children’s book “Cheaper by the Dozen,” about a couple of efficiency experts and their brood, which I took way too literally.
Given all this, what does your tech setup look like for doing your work?
My personal life, techwise, operates in sharp contrast to and in part as ballast against my professional life. Despite working on what one might consider the most low-tech of beats, we are in a tech-oriented workplace, and our content is delivered through high-tech platforms to tech-savvy readers.
That means doing everything I can while at work to understand, adopt and assess the same tools our newsroom colleagues and our readers are using, and figure out how they can materially enhance our journalism. We were actually the first desk to have a podcast (now in its 15th year) and are part of the pilot program for Alexa, which adapts our audio content for voice users. While at work, I have 12 windows and tabs open, toggling madly between laptop and phone like every other digital drone.
As an aside: I have the ugliest but best low-tech phone case for klutzes like me who drop their phones all the time. It costs 3 euros from Ale-Hop in Madrid, and you can order it online. You will look ridiculous carrying it around but triumphant picking it up.
Ale-Hop makes “the ugliest but best low-tech phone case for klutzes like me.” Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
What’s your advice for others who want to downgrade their tech?
In general, when I hear the phrase “There’s an app for that,” my first question is, “Does there need to be?” The vast majority of new technologies are developed with a profit motive. So each new form of tech raises the question: Is this something I’m willing to pay for, whether the cost is in terms of dollars or privacy? Like many people, I chafe at the notion of my personal life being monetized.
How has the book industry’s shift toward digital publishing changed the way that The Times reviews books? And what hasn’t changed?
Strictly in terms of review process, our desk hasn’t changed much — because the vast majority of our editors and reviewers prefer to work in print.
It’s easier for an editor to assess a book without reading it in its entirety by dipping in and out. Reviewers like to mark up their galleys, which are early review copies.
That said, PDFs make fact-checking far easier and speed our process for embargoed books. We can also see early editions of visual books that aren’t available in galleys (the printing costs are too high) without having to wait for finished physical copies. And we can more readily get access to audiobooks digitally than we ever could with CDs.
“You’d have to pay me a very fancy salary to give up print for a year,” Ms. Paul said. Credit: Krista Schlueter for The New York Times
Outside of work, what low-tech product are you currently obsessed with?
I am fairly confident that I’m the last DVD subscriber to what was once called Netflix and is now DVD.com, and my queue is maxed to the 500. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, nor does our television have an antenna set up for network TV.
This makes my decision around what to watch really easy: There are only four choices. When I go somewhere with multiple streaming subscriptions, there’s actually nothing I want to watch. As Barry Schwartz wrote in his persuasive 2004 book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” we become easily overwhelmed and paralyzed when faced with too many possibilities (at least I do). It’s also easier to find old and foreign movies on DVD.
I do, however, like tech that narrows choice down. One app we recently used with much success was Happy Cow, which locates vegan dining options. It was seriously useful while traveling in Germany last summer with our 13-year-old vegan daughter.
I still regret uploading all my CDs at the behest of my husband, who is far techier than I am. Recently, I bought portable CD players for two of my kids. I think about digging out the vinyl again. Maybe I’ll pick up a “new” record player one of these days.
Pamela Paul is the editor of the Book Review and oversees books coverage at The Times. She is the author of five books, “By the Book,” “Parenting, Inc.,” “Pornified,” “The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony” and most recently, “My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues.”
Here is an article and POV that presents a clear set of ideas that are supposedly going to address a suicide problem. According to the way it is written, suicide is not primarily an inherent mental health problem, but a situational problem.
With all due respect to Dr. Barnhorst’s sympathies, I find it hard to accept her position.
Take this sweeping statement of hers:
“We need to address the root causes of our nation’s suicide problem — poverty, homelessness and the accompanying exposure to trauma, crime and drugs.”
I’m not a doctor, nor have I delved deeply into the study of suicide. I do however, possess a deeply felt core belief on the causes of suicide. I refer to causes NOT involving religious fanatical or martyrdom scenarios, assisted suicide of terminally ill, suffering patients, and cases of exceptionally damaging early childhood abuse.
With these exclusions, my belief on suicide causes and attempts is grounded mostly in biological mental illness. Whether it starts, or ends, in a profile of poverty, homelessness, unemployment, or broken families, the final act, or attempt, of taking one’s own life, can not be responsibly assessed outside of a serious mental illness that lives in its own vacuum.
Dr. Barnhorst makes some good points about the complexity of suicide prevention, citing the frequent lack of clear advance signals, the dearth of community mental health resources, and need for more research, but she also implies that health providers are guilty for understating the risk by writing…
“…mental health providers perpetuate the narrative that suicide is preventable, if patients and family members just follow the right steps.”
I believe this is an unfair overstatement without supportive data. It is, after all, only her opinion. I do not believe mental health providers as a whole, perpetuate this narrative. Its not that easy to categorize their settled positions, with such a tidy statement.
She also writes: “If we ignore all this, and keep telling the story that there is a simple solution at hand…”
Again, this is an unfair assessment of the professionals in the field underestimating a complex problem with simple approaches.
There’s also this piece of data she draws from: “According to a 2016 study, almost half of people who try to kill themselves do so impulsively. One 2001 study…found that roughly a quarter considered their actions for less than five minutes.”
Does this mean they are free of pre-existing mental illness? I think not. In cases where they thought about it for less than five minutes. So what? Five minutes, Five hours, Five days. Five months. The logical profile is that they are pre-disposed to begin with. Just because they survive and function to that point, doesn’t mean there’s not an underlying problem waiting for the right trigger
While it is simple to prescribe medication and hope for the best, I don’t believe the vast majority of professionals treating mental health, think there is a “simple solution” to suicide. Its an exaggerated statement that is guilty itself of simplifying the situation
Dr. Barnhorst’s essay wanders off its own intended focus. Several paragraphs can be taken independently as a counter argument to the paragraph preceding it, or the one following. One could swap the sequence of them, and come up with a different conclusion and final headline.
In digesting the entire piece, what the good doctor ironically does, is illustrate just how easy it is to make arguments for addressing mental illness to prevent suicide before going on to societal causes.
Suicide prevention is a tough subject to tackle, precisely because it doesn’t make sense to rationally thinking people. Any more so than explaining a cold blooded murder. This is not to say that life is not difficult, tremendously difficult, for some people, who live with chronic depression, or manage levels of desperation o a day to day basis.
What I think happens sometimes, in all of us, is to try and explain destructive human behavior with reasoning, where no reasoning exists. Arguably, that is why mental illness is not easy to treat in the first place. You can’t have a brain swapped out for a fresh one. You can’t pull out and plug in a defective gene or brain part as needed. It’s mental illness.
Many of Dr Barnhorst’s observations are on target, but, the brains and minds that trigger suicidal thoughts and actions, on their own, with or without, external triggers, do exist. They are their own thing. They are part of the mix of the same humanity that, thankfully, gives us far far more who choose to go on living, in spite of hardships, or challenges.
After reading this article, I spoke at length with two people on the subject. One who had lived through a close friend’s attempted suicide, and another who has studied statistics on the odds of attempted suicide. I learned how complex the road to vulnerability can be in people who contemplate, or carry out their suicide. The question of determining a pre-existing mental illness feeding that vulnerability, is loaded with risk of unfairly labeling people, or worse, missing high risk individuals entirely.
Maybe, the conversation is better served by not describing mental illness to assess risk, but, by describing vulnerability instead. Hard enough.
For those without a subscription, article pasted in below.
The Empty Promise of Suicide Prevention
Many of the problems that lead people to kill themselves cannot be fixed with a little extra serotonin.
Via NYTimes, By Amy Barnhorst
April 26, 2019
SACRAMENTO — If suicide is preventable, why are so many people dying from it? Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and suicide rates just keep rising.
A few years ago, I treated a patient, a flight attendant, whose brother had brought her in to the psychiatric crisis unit after noticing her unusual behavior at a wedding. After the ceremony, she quietly handed out gifts and heartfelt letters to her family members. When her brother took her home, he noticed many of her furnishings and paintings were missing. In her bathroom he found three unopened bottles of prescription sleep medication.
He confronted her, and she admitted that she had donated her possessions to charity. She had also cashed out her retirement account and used the money to pay off her mortgage, her car loan and all of her bills.
When I interviewed her, she said that for the last four months, doing anything — eating, cleaning her house, talking to her neighbors — had taken colossal effort, and brought her no joy. She felt exhausted by having to live through each day, and the thought of sustaining this for years to come was an intolerable torment.
After evaluating her, I told her that I thought she was experiencing an episode of bipolar depression, and needed to be committed to the hospital while we started treatment. She shrugged and gave me her most troubling response yet: “I don’t care.”
One of the reasons I remember this woman so well is that, of all the patients I have evaluated for suicide risk, she was an anomaly. She had a sustained and thought-out commitment to ending her life. Fortunately, that allowed her to be discovered, and her family was able to quickly get her into emergency care. She responded well to lithium, one of only two psychiatric medications shown to reduce suicide (the other is an antipsychotic, clozapine). Her depression lifted slowly and she began to remember the things that made her life worth living.
She was exactly the kind of suicidal person that psychiatrists are set up to help — someone with an undiagnosed but treatable mental illness who just needs to be kept safe from herself until an effective medication kicks in.
Most suicidal patients I see follow a different pattern, like the one a resident presented to me recently. A middle-aged woman with no psychiatric history was brought in after overdosing on ibuprofen. She had recently become homeless. After seven years of sobriety, she had relapsed, taking methamphetamine to stay awake at night after she was sexually assaulted in the park where she had been sleeping. She had no supportive family, no insurance, no source of income and no education beyond high school.
She didn’t see a way out of her situation. So she walked into a pharmacy, grabbed a bottle of ibuprofen and went into the bathroom, where she choked down as many pills as possible before someone walked in.
I asked the resident how he planned to help her while she was in the hospital. After a pause, he suggested meekly, “Start her on an antidepressant?”
I could tell he knew how ridiculous it sounded.
As doctors, we want to help people, and it can be hard for us to admit when our tools are limited. Antidepressants may seem like an obvious solution, but only about 40 percent to 60 percent of patients who take them feel better. And while nearly one in 10 Americans uses antidepressants, there is very little convincing evidence to show that they reduce suicide.
This is because many of the problems that lead to suicide can’t be fixed with a little extra serotonin. Antidepressants can’t supply employment or affordable housing, repair relationships with family members or bring on sobriety.
Suicide prevention is also difficult because family members rarely know someone they love is about to attempt suicide; often that person doesn’t know herself. The flight attendant’s extensive planning is unusual; much more common is the grabbing of whatever is at hand in a moment of despair.
According to a 2016 study, almost half of people who try to kill themselves do so impulsively. One 2001 study that interviewed survivors of near-lethal attempts (defined as any attempt that would have been fatal without emergent medical intervention, or any attempt involving a gun) found that roughly a quarter considered their actions for less than five minutes. This doesn’t give anyone much time to notice something is wrong and step in.
Nonetheless, mental health providers perpetuate the narrative that suicide is preventable, if patients and family members just follow the right steps. Suicide prevention campaigns encourage people to overcome stigma, tell someone or call a hotline. The implication is that the help is there, just waiting to be sought out.
But it is not that easy. Good outpatient psychiatric care is hard to find, hard to get into and hard to pay for. Inpatient care is reserved for the most extreme cases, and even for them, there are not enough beds.
Initiatives like crisis hotlines and anti-stigma campaigns focus on opening more portals into mental health services, but this is like cutting doorways into an empty building.
And yet there are things we can do to prevent suicide. One of the few tried-and-true strategies is reducing people’s access to lethal tools, so that if they do sink into hopelessness, any attempt they make most likely won’t be fatal. If my first patient had had a gun in her house, she wouldn’t have made it to me. If my second patient had grabbed acetaminophen instead of ibuprofen, she might not have either. Averting death in that impulsive moment of despair is crucial to reducing suicide rates. Contrary to popular opinion, only a small fraction of people who survive one serious suicide attempt go on to die by another.
The decision to stop living is one that people arrive at by different paths, some over months, but many in a matter of minutes. Those people won’t be intercepted by the mental health system. We certainly need more psychiatric services and more research into better, faster-acting treatments for severe depression and suicidal thoughts, but that will never be enough.
We need to address the root causes of our nation’s suicide problem — poverty, homelessness and the accompanying exposure to trauma, crime and drugs. That means better alcohol and drug treatment, family counseling, low-income housing resources, job training and individual therapy. And for those at risk who still slip past all the checkpoints, we need to make sure they don’t have access to guns and lethal medications.
If we ignore all this, and keep telling the story that there is a simple solution at hand, the families of suicide victims will be left wondering what they did wrong.
[If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.]
Amy Barnhorst is the vice chairwoman of community psychiatry at the University of California, Davis.
Whether you’re already a Buttigieg booster, or, you’re not, or, you’re on the fence, please take the time to read this. It’s excellent perspective, and underscores the importance of doing real comparative study on political candidates before jumping on a bandwagon after digesting short media clips and rehearsed controlled interviews. I’ve heard Buttigieg several times, and find him likeable, but clearly, gauging likeability is not the point of this piece.
By the way, I’m running for President.
MB
A lot of would-be presidents are clever people. Few have a cleverness so well targeted toward liberal intellectuals.
How Pete Buttigieg’s Meaningless Erudition Made Him the ‘Smart’ Candidate
Via NYTimes, by Jay Caspian Kang
April 24, 2019
Late this March, a Norwegian news outlet sprang a surprise question on Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., and candidate for president. The previous week, the writer Anand Giridharadas, who has close to half a million Twitter followers, tweeted that he met Buttigieg and introduced him to a Norwegian friend. “Instantaneously,” he wrote, “Mayor Pete starts talking to her in Norwegian, like a magic trick.” Apparently Buttigieg had read a Norwegian novel in translation and been so taken by it that he learned the language just to finish the author’s untranslated works.
The Norwegian crew wanted to hear it for themselves. In a video that circulated on social media, the reporters smile like proud parents as Buttigieg haltingly says, in Norwegian, “I’ve forgotten so much Norwegian,” followed by a few words about a book and a Norwegian pastor and then an apology, in English: “Sorry, I just ran out of Norwegian.”
The footage, shot by The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel, meets all the demands of social-media authenticity — it was shot on a phone, with the terrible audio, pixelation and skewed perspective that assure you a real human has captured a spontaneous moment. It traveled the same viral routes as Giridharadas’s tweet, acting as evidence that Buttigieg was the cleverest man ever to run for president. It hardly mattered that the main thing Buttigieg seemed able to say in Norwegian was that he had forgotten a lot of Norwegian.
As these stories spread, accompanied by more video evidence, Buttigieg became a case study in what a friend of mine calls “internetty smarts” — intelligence reduced down to a collection of references and images. Like all internetty things, this type of intelligence plays to the viewer’s vanities and prejudices. In this case, it seemed driven by the sorts of people who study literature, read magazines like this one and wring their hands about public-school segregation while quietly sending their kids to elite private schools. Did you know Mayor Pete can speak eight languages? (At least enough, according to his memoir, to order a sandwich.) Did you know he was a Rhodes scholar? Journalists leaned into the image. Ryan Lizza of Esquire asked Buttigieg if running for president was more like “Ulysses” or “Finnegans Wake”; Buttigieg’s answer was mostly incoherent, but to be fair, the question didn’t make much sense either. After watching Buttigieg speak, The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik gushed: “Damned if he isn’t just as impressive as people say: people-smart and policy-smart and funny and eloquent and can cite Joyce without reaching. … The Harry Potter for our Voldemort? Ah! Hope.”
In his weeks on the national scene, Buttigieg has built a brand squarely aimed at a certain kind of liberal intellectual — the type whose prose-driven, subjective, humanist view of the world has lately fallen out of style, replaced by data analysis and ideology. His unassuming face now seems to be everywhere. The blitz has felt less like a presidential campaign than a liberal-arts variety show — a best-case scenario for what happened to Max Fischer from “Rushmore.” A few weeks after the musician Ben Folds told a story about playing a duet with the candidate, a Buttigieg adviser tweeted a video of Mayor Pete “tickling the ivories” before a talk at Scripps College. Even his choice of song — Spoon’s “The Way We Get By” — fit the brand, nailing a demographic of upper-middle-class dads who wax nostalgic about their college radio shows and the professors who taught them to love James Joyce. As Notre-Dame burned, Buttigieg offered his sympathies in French.
I don’t doubt that Mayor Pete, a Harvard graduate and the son of two professors, is genuinely smart. Nor do I think the excitement about his candidacy has been driven entirely by the polyglot fetishes of my media colleagues. He speaks in a calm, thoughtful manner with a touch of a young Dustin Hoffman’s charm. The candidacy of an openly gay man has genuine symbolic importance. And while he has yet to produce meaningful policy ideas, he has drawn some cultural lines by playing up his Midwestern roots, gently scolding “coastal elites” and the left’s obsession with “identitarianism.”
But “internetty” intelligence, like all memes, turns a human being and a lifetime of experiences into a matching game: You see a photo of a bookshelf, recognize the titles of books you wished you had read and conclude that the man standing in front of them must be smart in the way you want to be smart. This connection is not about politics or electoral outcomes; it lies in a more personal space. Imagining yourself in a book club with Pete Buttigieg becomes this election’s having a beer with George W. Bush. If the news media has an “identitarianism” problem, it’s not so much that people bunker down into racial, gender or sexual groups, but that a whole class of journalists and thinkers never seems to be able to wander out past its own pool of references — all so admiring of the same things that some are blinded to the similar backgrounds of almost every other Democratic candidate for president.
Julián Castro — a former mayor of San Antonio, a city roughly 15 times the population of South Bend — went to Stanford and Harvard Law School. Cory Booker was a Rhodes scholar, too. Amy Klobuchar went to Yale, and Kirsten Gillibrand, another Ivy Leaguer, speaks Mandarin much better than Buttigieg speaks Norwegian. (For all the Buttigieg fans gushing about Harvard, it seems worth pointing out that our current president also attended an Ivy League institution, as did Bush.) But to a certain kind of liberal, none of those bona fides seem to matter quite like a casual reference to “Ulysses” and a few words in an unexpected language. Gillibrand’s Mandarin can be written off as the résumé-building accomplishment of a striver, while Norwegian, which has no practical value for an American president, is taken as a sign of intellectual curiosity and authenticity — the sort of whimsical surplus achievement that often upstages workaday accomplishments.
Elections, of course, aren’t about qualifications. Each of our last two presidents spoke to some furtive aspiration among the electorate, embodying a general style voters were eager to identify with. Buttigieg does this for a narrower audience: With his air of decency and grab bag of gifted-and-talented party tricks, he doesn’t so much represent the will of the Democratic electorate but rather the aspirations of its educated elite, maybe especially those who see a shrinking market for their erudition.
This form of identity politics has its consequences. We are constantly arguing over the workings of American meritocracy, in schools and then colleges and then jobs: How do we get past the old networks of privilege and prejudice and accurately evaluate people’s abilities? Is the answer hard numbers and standardized tests? Or is it some “holistic” view of each person, which scrutinizes their spark and talent the same way a college applicant’s extracurricular activities are evaluated for sincerity? Who gets to make those calls?
My fear is that such a system might look a bit like Buttigieg mania: an insidious game in which entire lives of experience, or even exactly matching credentials, get overshadowed by the dilettantish longing of the upper middle class. The Mayor Pete bubble should serve as a portent of what might happen if we strip away every objective measure of merit, however problematic or biased, in favor of how someone’s idiosyncratic talents make us feel. Consider that the person Giridharadas and others have described as the opposite of Donald Trump isn’t Elizabeth Warren, a self-made public intellectual and policy expert from a more rural and blue-collar background than Buttigieg’s campus roots, but an erudite 37-year-old mayor who seems most intent on dazzling the country with his academic feats of strength.
Introspection is the examination of one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies exclusively on observation of one’s mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one’s soul. Introspection is closely related to human self-reflection and is contrasted with external observation.
Introspection generally provides a privileged access to one’s own mental states,not mediated by other sources of knowledge, so that individual experience of the mind is unique. Introspection can determine any number of mental states including: sensory, bodily, cognitive, emotional and so forth.
Introspection has been a subject of philosophical discussion for thousands of years. The philosopher Plato asked, “…why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?”While introspection is applicable to many facets of philosophical thought it is perhaps best known for its role in epistemology; in this context introspection is often compared with perception, reason, memory, and testimony as a source of knowledge.
Movie 43 is an acquired taste, to say the least. Mostly inconsistent, but in between the misses, there were hits that almost broke me in two. Watch Jeremy Allen as the abused and irreparably confused son. Don’t try and look away. It doesn’t work. 😀
I am not an avid YouTuber, which leaves me fraught with conflict about why I haven’t taken advantage of it. Because there’s money to be made out there with material as written about here, that honestly, I find dumbfounding. But, no more dumbfounding than a million other sites, and postings that are just as puzzling.
Having spent so many years in advertising, sales and marketing, I have an instinctive belief to how these things seed, grow, and take shape for popular consumption. As always, as it was then, that is entirely what the money goal is about. Its not so much about memberships, or paid views. its about advertising revenue. Eyes, Minds, Pocketbooks, Wallets, and today, selling off your privacy as well.
Considering the demographic of most hyper active Youtuber viewers (not producers), I woudl venture to guess, they have either no clue about how much they give up of their privacy, or they just don’t care, waving it off as part of their life culture, as if its some type of generational badge of their moment in time. Sort of like saying, “we can’t beat’em, so lets join’em, stop being suspicious and paranoid, and assume the best for our interests is in the hands of every advertiser, and exploitative entity that has our info. Its rosy, but naiive to the nth degree.
The story below on A.S.M.R reflects one of many more similar stories in our current technoculture. I read it in full, decided it was a fad, an opportunity to make money based on the strange traction things of little importance can pick up today. But, as often happens after reading articles and reporting of quality depth and observation, I came away with two paragraphs that stuck with me, and made the whole effort worthwhile.
They are highlighted below, they are my takeaway:
Intimacy is a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
(If online link is restricted to subscribers, full text is pasted below.) Also, some YouTube samples are included below.
How A.S.M.R. Became a Sensation
The brain-tingling feeling was a hard-to-describe psychological oddity. Until, suddenly, it was a YouTube phenomenon.
Via NYTimes Magazine, By Jamie Lauren Keiles
April 2019
When Jennifer Allen watched videos of space, she sometimes felt this peculiar sensation: a tingling that spread through her scalp as the camera pulled back to show the marble of the earth. It came in a wave, like a warm effervescence, making its way down the length of her spine and leaving behind a sense of gratitude and wholeness. Allen loved this feeling, but she didn’t know what caused it. It was totally distinct from anything she’d experienced before. Every two years or so she’d take to Google. She tried searching things like “tingling head and spine” or “brain orgasm.” For nine years, the search didn’t turn up anything.
Then, around 2009, it did. As always, Allen typed her phrases into Google, but this time she got a result on a message board called SteadyHealth. The post was titled WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD:
i get this sensation sometimes. theres no real trigger for it. it just happens randomly. its been happening since i was a kid and i’m 21 now. some examples of what it seems has caused it to happen before are as a child while watching a puppet show and when i was being read a story to. as a teenager when a classmate did me a favor and when a friend drew on the palm of my hand with markers. sometimes it happens for no reason at all
The poster went on to demand an explanation. In the discussion, nobody had one, but many described a similar feeling — a “silvery sparkle” inside the head, a euphoric “brain-gasm” or a feeling like goose bumps in the scalp that faded “in and out in waves of heightened intensity.” Many people agreed that the sensation was euphoric. (“Aside from an actual orgasm, it’s probably the most enjoyable sensation possible,” one user wrote.) Its triggers were as varied as watching someone fill out a form, listening to whispering sounds or seeing Bob Ross paint landscapes on TV.
Allen scrolled through pages and pages of discussion.
Oh my gosh, she remembers thinking. These people are talking about exactly what I experience.
In time, that post begot a second post: WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – PART 2. As discourse on the unnamed feeling evolved, users shared accidental triggers found online — a man unlocking a damaged padlock, someone brushing her hair. These videos had a gentleness in common that many of the users found hard to describe. Some spoke of the need for a research group to better understand the sensation. Still others expressed fear over social repercussions: Were they perverts? Were they sick? Were they indigo children? Pleasure is rarely consequence-free.
“People had been told they were on drugs or that they had lice — things like that,” Allen says. “And then there was the factor of people calling it a ‘brain orgasm’ and it sounding like some sort of erotic fetish kind of thing.”
Allen had invested a lot in the discussion, even expressing interest in the fledgling research effort. She saw how the feeling had improved her sense of calm, but she worried that the subtext of a “tingling sensation” would hold the group back from legitimacy. The whole thing sounded too hokey — or too horny. If they wanted to generate scientific interest, they needed a more scientific-sounding name.
And so in February 2010, she sat down to brainstorm some ideas. Others had tried to describe the weird sensation, but spacey nicknames like “attention-induced head orgasm” had never quite caught on. Allen felt a debt to the feeling’s New Age fans, but she also saw the usefulness of more clinical language. When no existing term could meet both conditions, she made up a new one: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or A.S.M.R. She started with “autonomous” because it was a feeling from within; “sensory” was self-explanatory. “Meridian” worked triple duty, suggesting peak but also orgasm and the energy pathways of traditional Chinese medicine. “Response” was just to say that it was not a constant state; it happened in reaction to a set of stimuli, like whispering, gum chewing and tapping.
“I wish I’d made it a little shorter,” Allen says. But at least it sounded better than “brain-gasm.”
She debuted the new name on the SteadyHealth board by announcing the “ASMR Group” she had registered on Facebook. Discussion-board users migrated en masse, and soon membership spanned six continents: a blogger in South Africa, an artist in Detroit, an ethnobotany researcher working in Australia. They started sharing links to videos again — not the accidental triggers of before but a new genre created for the express purpose of inducing A.S.M.R. These videos often featured anonymous women delivering soft-spoken voice-over narration. According to message-board lore, the first of this type was a video titled “Whisper 1 – hello!” It was posted in 2009 but languished in the algorithmic scrap heap of YouTube on account of its weak, unsearchable title. Now, under the search-engine-friendly banner of A.S.M.R., this new genre offered an on-demand way to trigger the once-serendipitous sensation. A new crop of YouTube creators emerged to serve up the feeling to those who knew they felt it — at that point, a small but growing subset of the public.
Around the time when Allen found SteadyHealth, there were, by one count, 12 whispering channels on YouTube; three years later, that number had more than tripled. Soon a hard-won Wikipedia page would further extend the reach of the term — and further enshrine the new video genre. By 2015, the ASMR Group had made itself irrelevant. When Allen set out to name the weird sensation, she thought she was simply describing what she felt. She couldn’t foresee that her term would enable a whole new form of entertainment — or possibly something that transcended entertainment — born of the kismet of algorithmic fate as it brushed up against the crossed wires of the brain.
Todaythe action of A.S.M.R. plays out almost exclusively on YouTube, where legions of (mostly female) creators release, by my count, around 500 new videos each day. Over the course of reporting this article, I spent at least 200 hours on the site, watching women chewgum, swallow octopus sashimi, simulate eyeexams, turn pages ofbooks and peel dried glue off artificial ears. I watched a teenage girl role-play as a 14th-century nun, treating me for the bubonic plague. I watched a two-hour recording of hair-dryer sounds.
In the A.S.M.R. scene, new trends evolve quickly, driven by the spirit of innovation, corporate product-placement deals and a process of human-algorithm interaction that pushes the best new material to the top. Any trigger that starts to find fans is endlessly taken up and reperformed — ripped off by different channels for ad dollars — at least until the next trigger takes its spot. One month, cranial nerve exams are in. The next month, creators are all shaving bars of soap, chewing bricks of raw honeycomb or eating buckets of KFC. The feeling that fuels this growth is little understood, like the dark energy pushing our universe outward.
The internet is vast, but it brings like minds together. At its best, it serves to unite kinky freaks, dissidents of oppressive regimes and sufferers of obscure diseases. At the same time, this tendency can serve the cruel or misinformed — giving shared language to Nazis and incels and other bleak dopes who were once kept mercifully isolated from one another. This feature of the internet is, at best, value-neutral; in any case, A.S.M.R. tests its limits. The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.
Thinkers since ancient Greece, if not before, have found themselves obsessed with the true nature of the senses; even modern philosophers get tripped up discussing qualia, the irreducible stuff of consciousness. Subjectivity is hard to isolate, by definition, and examples of new metaphysical sensations are not exactly a regular occurrence. Synesthesia, often experienced as associating numbers with colors, is one of the rare examples. Though individuals since at least the 19th century have reported tasting words, seeing sound or hearing colors, it took until the 1980s for scientists to prove that the shared experience actually correlated with real, observable activity in the brain.
Thanks to the internet, A.S.M.R. seems to have leapfrogged the science entirely. Like synesthesia, it was first discovered by way of individual reports. Unlike synesthesia, it has not depended on brain imaging for cultural acceptance. Our foremost “proof” of A.S.M.R. comes from some people searching for the term and others making videos to populate those searches. All these YouTube users may be right that the feeling is real, but the scientific research still lags far behind.
Craig Richard, a professor of physiology at Shenandoah University in Virginia, first heard the term in 2013, on a podcast. “I’m listening to the beginning of this episode thinking, ‘This is a bunch of woo-woo bunk!’ ” he told me. Just as he went to turn the podcast off, the subject changed to the painter Bob Ross — by then, a well known A.S.M.R. trigger. Richard’s eyes lit up. In childhood, he spent afternoons watching Ross paint landscapes on TV. He remembered caring more about the painter than the painting. “It was his demeanor. It was the sounds he made and the way he talked — the way he looked in the camera.”
When the episode was over, Richard went to his computer to look up the research on A.S.M.R. At that point, he found nothing academic — only websites and forums that led him to the Facebook group. He reached out to Allen, and in collaboration with a graduate student and member of the community named Karissa Burnett, they conducted an informal online survey that, over time, has received more than 25,000 voluntary responses. (Where do you feel tingles? Head, neck, arm? Do you feel relaxed? Do you feel aroused?) Richard also started ASMR University, an online archive that today remains a useful clearinghouse of research on the topic.
Still, scientific understanding has moved slowly. Funding for A.S.M.R. research is hard to justify, and the diverse nature of A.S.M.R. triggers can lead to “noisy” data. To date, ASMR University lists just 10 peer-reviewed papers. More than half of these were published in author-pay journals. The most rigorous studies use f.M.R.I. to map the activity of blood flow in the brain as participants report feeling the tingles. Outcomes have suggested, in very small samples, that A.S.M.R. might have something to do with socially bonding “affiliative behaviors,” known to release feel-good hormones like oxytocin.
Richard, for his part, considers these outcomes from an evolutionary-biology perspective. He believes that the tingles of A.S.M.R. are meant to assist in reproduction and survival, and points out that triggers like grooming, whispering and eye gazing all bear strong resemblance to the ways that humans soothe infants. In adulthood, a range of similar behaviors contribute to intimacy between mates. This may be the case, but our current understanding still leaves behind more questions than answers: If A.S.M.R. plays (or played) a key survival role, why does it seem that only some people can feel it? Why should it come to our attention only now?
It does not seem very likely that the pace and scope of research will ever catch up to the cycle of new content. For now, our chief authorities on A.S.M.R. are women and girls, alone at their computers, manipulating objects for a faceless, growing public.
Around the time that “Whisper 1 – hello!” was picking up speed in Allen’s Facebook group, Gibi — today one of YouTube’s top “A.S.M.R.tists” — was a sophomore in high school. (I’ve withheld her last name here for below-explained reasons.) Like many teenagers these days, she often had trouble falling asleep. Sometimes she would sneak her phone into her room and watch YouTube videos to relax her mind. This habit evolved by a haphazard process, led by the whims of an infinite sidebar. Makeup tutorials segued to massage, which soon gave way to A.S.M.R.
Since that fateful discovery, Gibi has watched A.S.M.R. videos every single night. The ritual followed her off to college, where the videos became a kind of white noise while she studied. A.S.M.R. was, by that point, not just for those who experienced the tingles. The genre had begun to find broader appeal as a sleep aid, an alternative to guided meditation and a drug-free, online version of Xanax. The medium had developed its own microstars, women with handles like Gentle Whispering ASMR and ASMRrequests, who filmed themselves crinkling paper, tapping their nails on large wooden bowls, dealing cards, brushing hair and pouring cold milk into bowls of Cocoa Krispies. One of Gibi’s favorites, Heather Feather ASMR, went beyond mere sound effects, performing full-scale role-play scenes infused with attentive, deliberate sound. In one, Heather administered a colorblindness test, tapping her wand on a laminated chart. In another, she played as a tattoo artist, trying on a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Watching Heather’s videos made Gibi feel as if her “brain was swimming, in a good way.” She played the same scenes over on repeat, returning to parts that gave her the tingles.
At that point, in June 2016, many A.S.M.R.tists treated YouTube like a hobby. Across channels, production value varied wildly. A creator might post the perfect tapping video, then disappear from the site forever. Gibi thought that maybe, with regular effort, she could produce a better product — a quality channel with a regular schedule that tested out new, creative triggers on a regular basis. And so, in the summer before her senior year, she started her own channel, Gibi ASMR. Six months after graduation, she was earning enough in ad revenue to treat it as her full-time job. Today she has about 1.8 million subscribers on YouTube.
I first met Gibi in Los Angeles at Daiso, the kind of Japanese discount store that sells lots of things that you didn’t know you needed. Our plan was to shop for some tingly props — any little odd or end that might yield good, recordable sound. Gibi was in town for a public appearance. That day, a video from her account was trending globally on YouTube, a role-play called “The ASMR Sleep Clinic | Tingle Experiment.” She scrolled through the trending tab on her phone, rifling through the other clips in the Top 10:
“… Ellen DeGeneres, bowling ball-versus-bulletproof glass, ramen, iPhone stuff. …”
If most entertainment aims to shock or delight, then A.S.M.R. is barely entertainment at all. It’s more like a massage for the mind. Gibi’s main goal is to relax her fans.
“If you fall asleep during my video, that’s a compliment,” she said. Sleeping fans tend to leave videos running — a boon on a platform that pays dividends for view length. In this way, for Gibi, the most valuable engagement is actually a near-total lack of engagement. Even when viewers stay awake, straightforward entertainment remains somewhat beside the point. On Gibi’s channel, some of the most-requested content is not a character or joke but the sound of fingers tapping on a bread-shaped piece of cork. Fans request the “toaster coaster” by name — the closest thing A.S.M.R. has to “Free Bird.” That day, she was searching for similar objects, made of soft, dull wood or thick glass. We entered the store to the whir of air-conditioning. Gibi made a beeline toward a rack of piggy banks.
“Whenever I pick something up, I’m always listening to it,” she said, tapping her nails on a piggy bank’s candy-coated glaze. The lacquer made a dainty, plinking sound, like the loose filament of a shaken, burned-out light bulb. She moved on to rustle a strand of orange tinsel, then brushed her hand against the grain of a vellum birthday card. We turned down an aisle of fake plastic swords.
“When I hit 300,000 subscribers, I did a 300 role play, of Queen Gorgo, Leonidas’s wife,” she recalled. “That one was really cool, but people were kind of like, ‘What is going on here?’ Sometimes I’m like, Why do I even try to put effort into a big role-play, or something like that, when I can pick something up and be like, ‘O.K., here’s an hour of me tapping,’ and I’ll get like, three million views?”
Gibi is the LeBron James of touching stuff. She touches things professionally. As she paused to fondle a makeup brush, I heard the grip of her finger pads reluctant to give up the cellophane wrapper. When she smoothed the fleece of a microfiber towel, I cringed at the drag of rough callus against terry cloth. Gibi moves with the demonstrative intent of a former high school theater kid. (She is one.) She is hot in the way of a friend’s older sister, projecting an air of humble self-assuredness.
“I think a lot of what has to do with why my channel has become popular is because I do put a lot of my personality — oh, my God!” She stopped to interrupt herself and crinkled a plastic package of pens. “I put a lot of my personality into my videos,” she said.
For those who watch her at home, this apparent emotional availability can foster a range of attachments. Gibi says that most of her viewers are kind and effusive. Under her videos, they leave thousands of comments, appreciating the sound of her voice and its power to alleviate their insomnia, anxiety and P.T.S.D. (“SHE CAN M AKE ADS RELAXING!” one fan delighted.) For others, the tender tone can be misleading.
Unloading her shopping basket at the till, she told me the story of one obsessive fan who believed she was talking directly to him. He sent her tens of thousands of messages, she said, and she filed a police report. Other fans have pried into her past, digging up old records from high school. Creepiness and harassment are widespread problems for the young female creators of the A.S.M.R. world. Gibi takes extreme precautions to protect her own privacy. She doesn’t share her last name, or her relationship status, or even what city she lives in. When she films in an airport, she is careful to choose an unplaceable background. If she happens to meet a fan on the street near her house, she pretends that she’s there on vacation.
“I’ve learned a lot about cybersecurity,” she said. “If you ever want to start a YouTube channel, delete everything, and then go back and delete more. Make everything private. Act like you have five million subscribers when you’re starting, because you can’t go back.”
Outside the store, Gibi laid her purchases out on the pavement. We surveyed the haul: the ceramic piggy bank, the strand of orange tinsel, a thick glass jar with a plastic lid, a stress ball shaped like a bakery bun and a random assortment of candy and snacks. Gibi unwrapped a pack of Hi-Chews and popped a fruit-flavored cube in her mouth.
“People are naturally curious,” she said, deforming it against the hollow of her cheek. The suction made a spitty sound. When she livestreams, she went on, she even gets nervous about the weather giving away her location. “They can look up if it’s raining where I am.”
“That’s scary,” I said.
“It’s scary,” she agreed, but all I could hear was the sound of her tongue, working the last bit of taffy from her teeth.
Intimacyis a human need, but the ways we fulfill it are historically contingent. Of course there are explicit means like friendship and sex, but we also have all kinds of rituals that provide human connection as a second-order perk. When I go to the hair salon, I am there to get my hair cut, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t like the attention. When I listen to a podcast, I enjoy the information, but I can’t deny that I also like the sound of friends inside my house. Lots of things in everyday life throw off incidental rays of affirmation. Often, these second-order perks are so ingrained in first-order activities that we do not think to express them as desires. You might enjoy having your feet touched, but you don’t go to the shoe store just for fun. Our culture has names for people who do — freaks, kooks, eccentrics, even perverts.
When is something sexual? Somehow, we Americans have spent decades debating sexual gray areas without sufficient language to describe the different shades. Is a back massage sexual? What about texts from a married man? Is it sexual to lie on the floor of a yoga studio with 20 total strangers? To show someone your penis in a comedy club? To let a tailor measure your inseam? To enjoy it? A lot of times, when we talk about sex, what we mean to discuss is all the stuff around it — loneliness, passion, intimacy, connectedness, power or lack thereof.
It’s hard to talk about A.S.M.R. without nuanced language for the things that come near sex. In the absence of such terms, the genre seems doomed to appear sexual — a suspect jumble of tingles and pleasure and subservient women you watch alone at your computer. Who, in our time, can look at a video of a young woman doing anything and not wonder who else is watching — and why? Are those who feel the tingles just a bunch of repressed weirdos? Questions like these have plagued A.S.M.R. ever since Jennifer Allen first cringed at the word “brain-gasm.”
“A lot of the visuals you might see” in A.S.M.R. videos “relate to how you might visualize what happens during healthy foreplay,” Craig Richard says. “People talking gently to each other, people touching each other lightly, gazing into each other’s eyes, expressing physical or vocal care for each other — making the other person feel safe.” If A.S.M.R. is not sexual itself, then Richard believes it might still belong to a general complex of safety, caring, connectedness and trust. “It could heighten a sexual moment, in a way the same way that massage oil can heighten a sexual moment, but oil by itself is not sexual,” he says. “We get most of our nutrition from our food, but we may supplement with vitamin pills. That’s how I view A.S.M.R. videos. There are very few people that are probably going to substitute real-world relationships.”
Every activity has a threshold of acceptable intimacy. For most people in the United States, it is normal to express that you like having your hair shampooed in a salon. It is less normal to say that you derive pleasure from taking an eye test or by making eye contact with an inquisitive waitress. These affective norms can be counterintuitive, especially considering how many of our jobs require employees to feign loving attention. Still, they exist for a reason. It is one thing to ask someone to fit your shoes; it’s another to enlist them in your search for human comfort.
Part of the joy of A.S.M.R. is the way it allows us to invert the equation. In A.S.M.R. videos, people engage in regular tasks while drawing those second-order pleasures to the fore. The usual priorities of the eye test are distorted; now it’s less about nearsightedness and more about whispered instruction and warm light. A.S.M.R. combines the one-way sociality of podcasts with the outcome-driven imperative of porn. In an age defined by loneliness and dislocation, it’s a lot to ask someone to turn that away.
Nevertheless, the gender imbalance of performers seems suspect. The viewing pattern even looks similar to porn, but this perhaps goes beyond mere horniness. For much of human history, women have been cast into care-taking roles. With centuries of imbalance, it makes plenty of sense that our brains would find peace in these strange and gendered invocations of comfort. Is that healthy? Is that normal? Really, who can say? Sitting alone in front of a screen, nothing seems that weird anymore.
Here, I suppose is the place to come clean and admit that I’ve never felt A.S.M.R. In watching those hours of YouTube, I often felt calm (and I sometimes felt horny), but not even once did my brain let loose a tingle. By the end, I found myself feeling isolated — confusingly excluded from a mass phenomenon beloved for its success at assuaging loneliness. In a last-ditch attempt to feel it for myself, I flew up to Oakland to meet Melinda Lauw, co-creator of the service Whispers on Demand and a provider of one-on-one A.S.M.R. experiences.
Lauw grew up in Singapore and studied fine art and art history at Goldsmiths in London. She first got involved with A.S.M.R. through Whisperlodge, an immersive theater piece she produced with the playwright Andrew Hoepfner. Whispers on Demand grew out of that project — less theatrical, more therapeutic. Lauw’s clients were mostly women, many in the tech industry. The sessions cost $150 per hour.
Our meeting was held on a morning in September in a rent-by-the-hour conference room. I was invited to take off my shoes. In advance of the session, I’d filled out a form, confessing my tingle virginity. Lauw had arranged a pile of maybe-triggers in the style of a surgical instrument tray. The session began with us sitting side by side, and soon she was using each object on my body — rubbing the lavender oil on my wrist, crinkling the tissue paper near my head and pulsating my knee with the metal tuning fork.
I lay down on the couch, and she styled my hair with a wide cotton band, then let my hair down, then styled it again. She polished my ear with a ridged cotton swab. It felt nice to be touched, if just by way of a Q-tip, but only one time did I maybe feel a tingle. As the tip of a small, clean makeup brush outlined the greasy crease of my nose, I felt something creep on the side of my head, like a cold millipede crawling underneath my scalp — were these the famed tingles of A.S.M.R.?
Maybe so, but I pushed them away. I am not so libertine or well adjusted to make use of pleasures beyond a social script. Though Lauw was a calming and trustworthy guide, a few times I thought I might scream for no reason.
Soon enough, our session was over. We both stood up and walked to use the bathroom. Lauw waited for me outside the stall. When I was done, I leaned on the sink and offered a few words of thanks for the session. Lauw didn’t ask if I’d felt anything, and for this omission, I was grateful. Usually paid intimacy concludes with some kind of definitive transaction. I’d paid online, so I offered her a hug. We stood for a moment, embracing in the bathroom. Then I pulled away, thanked her again and returned to the noisy city streets, alone.
“A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity,” John Gray writes.
Really, really good. A lengthy read, but deservedly, requires it.
Ask me about my own views on this subject, or religion in general, and I will answer for as long as your attention span allows, perhaps in ways that will make your eyes glaze over. Then you will still ask me what my position is, or what I follow, and I will not be able to answer.
Articles, books, thinkers like those attached here, are what I am drawn to in trying to answer the question for myself. It has never been easy, and I don’t plan on it getting easier. To a fundamentalist, or deeply religious person believing in a divinity or creator, that is simply a statement of non faith. To which I ask, faith in what, exactly? To which their answer is the usual creator based template. To which, I would then reply with the usual challenge templates that “questioners” have been asking for centuries. There are several written in this article.
I used to make glib statements like “I respect all religions, except those that involve gunpowder.” Its still true, but, of course, as I have aged, I think more about this stuff in a serious way about where religion has its best place in our lives. Where does it help us most?
In spite of our cultural differences, and ways of deifying people, unseen/seen forces, or ethereal entities that have supposedly been here with us from the “beginning”, I have always chosen to believe, have faith, if you will, that all of them, have a common thread that connects every single, last one of our breathing earth bound souls. That common thread is about overcoming our collective fear of the unknown, and somehow finding peace with what we can know, do know, for sure, concretely, about ourselves here and now. That is a tall order as it is, but it draws us together. In spite of the tragic wars, the blinded rage of conflicts based on paranoias and fears from one another.
When I go to sleep and find myself thinking about these things, I find this belief is what helps me get through the nights easier, the mornings after, and each day after that. This is my religion, such as it is.
Balanced, scholarly writings on history, as well as thoughtful analysis, are tremendously valuable in helping provide contextual background to deep subjects like this. The subject deserves no less, as does our criteria on what decision we make for ourselves.
I’ve highlighted a few passages, but the final words sum up beautifully a lot of what I feel.
“All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to.”
Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism?
Two new books explore what unbelievers actually believe.
Via New Yorker Magazine, By Casey Cep
Daniel Seeger was twenty-one when he wrote to his local draft board to say, “I have concluded that war, from the practical standpoint, is futile and self-defeating, and from the more important moral standpoint, it is unethical.” Some time later, he received the United States Selective Service System’s Form 150, asking him to detail his objections to military service. It took him a few days to reply, because he had no answer for the form’s first question: “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?”
Unsatisfied with the two available options—“Yes” and “No”—Seeger finally decided to draw and check a third box: “See attached pages.” There were eight of those pages, and in them he described reading Plato, Aristotle, and Spinoza, all of whom “evolved comprehensive ethical systems of intellectual and moral integrity without belief in God,” and concluded that “the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven, and the essence of His nature cannot be determined.” For good measure, Seeger also used scare quotes and strike-throughs to doctor the printed statement he was required to sign, so that it read, “I am, by reason of my ‘religious’ belief, conscientiously opposed to participation in war in any form.”
By the time Seeger submitted his form, in the late nineteen-fifties, thousands of conscientious objectors in the U.S. had refused to fight in the two World Wars. Those who belonged to pacifist religious traditions, such as Mennonites and Quakers, were sent to war as noncombatants or to work as farmers or firefighters on the home front through the Civilian Public Service; eventually, so were those who could prove their own independent, religiously motivated pacifism. Those who could not were sent to prison or to labor camps. But while Selective Service laws had been revised again and again to clarify the criteria for conscientious objection, they still did not account for young men who, like Seeger, refused to say that their opposition to war came from belief in a Supreme Being.
Over time, draft boards came to resemble freshman philosophy seminars in their attempts to decide who did and did not qualify for C.O. status. A Jewish socialist who ran an engraving business did not, but a pulp artist and atheist who appealed to the idea of secular humanism did; some members of the Ethical Culture Society qualified, but not others; Jehovah’s Witnesses initially did not, on the theory that someone willing to fight the Devil during Armageddon ought to be willing to fight America’s enemies during a war; a writer turned financial consultant who belonged to no church but had read “philosophers, historians, and poets from Plato to Shaw” was granted C.O. status after two contradictory close readings of his antiwar play. Different boards reached very different conclusions, various appeal boards upheld and reversed those decisions without much consistency, and, inevitably, some of those appeals ended up before federal courts. When Seeger’s local board was unmoved by his argument, he took it all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1965, the Justices found unanimously that a draftee did not need to believe in God in order to have a conscience that could object.
Seeger’s victory helped mark a turning point for a minority that had once been denied so much as the right to testify in court, even in their own defense. Atheists, long discriminated against by civil authorities and derided by their fellow-citizens, were suddenly eligible for some of the exemptions and protections that had previously been restricted to believers. But, in the decades since U.S. v. Seeger, despite an increase in the number of people who identify as nonbelievers, their standing before the courts and in the public sphere has been slow to improve. Americans, in large numbers, still do not want atheists teaching their children, or marrying them. They would, according to surveys, prefer a female, gay, Mormon, or Muslim President to having an atheist in the White House, and some of them do not object to attempts to keep nonbelievers from holding other offices, even when the office is that of notary public. Atheists are not welcome in the Masonic Lodge, and while the Boy Scouts of America has opened its organization to gays and to girls, it continues to bar any participant who will not pledge “to do my duty to God.”
Such discrimination is both a cause and an effect of the crude way in which we parse belief, which has barely changed since Daniel Seeger completed his C.O. application: check “Yes” and endless questions follow; check “No” and the questioning ends. Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile. This is especially true in America, where an insistence on the idea that we are a Christian nation has tied patriotism to religiosity, leading to such strange paroxysms as the one produced by President Trump at last year’s Values Voter Summit: “In America, we don’t worship government—we worship God.”
As that remark suggests, the one wall the current Administration does not want to build is the one between church and state. The most evident manifestation of this resurgence of Christian nationalism has been animosity toward Muslims and Jews, but the group most literally excluded from any godly vision of America is, of course, atheists. Yet the national prejudice against them long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe.
American antipathy for atheism is as old as America. Although many colonists came to this country seeking to practice their own faith freely, they brought with them a notion of religious liberty that extended only to other religions—often only to other denominations of Christianity. From John Locke they inherited the idea that atheists cannot be good citizens and should not be brought into the social contract; in “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” Locke had written, “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God.”
True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged. Yet, surprisingly, no atheist was ever executed. According to the Cornell professors R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick, the authors of the new book “Godless Citizens in a Godly Republic: Atheists in American Public Life” (Norton), that is only because no atheists presented themselves for execution. Nonbelievers were either few and far between in Colonial America or understandably cautious about making themselves known; clergy and magistrates rarely bothered to mention them, even derisively.
One of the few who did was Roger Williams, who, after he was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for spreading “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions,” offered a view of the separation of church and state so extreme that it seemed to accommodate atheists. In his book “The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution, for Cause of Conscience,” published in London in 1644, Williams wrote that “a pagan or Antichristian pilot may be as skillful to carry the ship to its desired port, as any Christian mariner.” He was referring to the ship of state, but his tolerance was never fully tested: no atheist ever tried to hold office in Rhode Island, the colony that he founded. Still, his argument was audacious for an era when most colonies had established churches and collected ecclesiastical taxes to support them.
It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. There would be no government church, no state religion, and, except for being signed in the Year of our Lord 1787, no mention of God in America’s founding text. Religious freedom was formally established in the Constitution’s First Amendment. “The Godless Constitution,” as Moore and Kramnick called it in a previous book, was mostly the product of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who fought to keep God out of the document. But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power.
It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Thomas Paine, whose “Common Sense” had sold half a million copies the year that the United States declared its independence, died an outcast because of a later pamphlet he wrote on religion. Attacking the King of England was fine, but when Paine, in “The Age of Reason,” set his sights on the King of Kings, he was derided as a “loathsome reptile” and a “filthy little atheist.” It didn’t matter that Paine, like Jefferson, actually identified as a Deist, or that his text opens with the blunt declaration “I believe in one God”; his criticisms of Christianity were so scandalous that he was written into history as a nonbeliever.
Such is the slippery label of “atheist” in the American context: slapped on those who explicitly reject it, eschewed by unbelievers who wish to avoid its stigma. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons. Some atheists try to claim as one of their own everyone, dead or alive, who has ever thought twice about religion—and there’s a bit of this slippage in Moore and Kramnick, where the religiously unaffiliated (the so-called “nones”) are all equated with the unbelieving. Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree.
For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public. In the nineteenth century, Robert Ingersoll, “the Great Agnostic,” charged a dollar a head to the thousands who gathered to hear him critique Christianity; believers and skeptics had months-long exchanges in the pages of newspapers; and debates between the likes of the secularist J. Spencer Ellis and the theist Miles Grant packed venues the way that Sam Harris vs. William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham do today.
With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. Blasphemy laws were enforced against those who insulted God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Bible. A former Baptist minister turned freethinker named Abner Kneeland was arrested in Massachusetts for an article that he wrote explaining why he no longer believed in a monotheistic God; not even the prominent Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing or the former Unitarian pastor Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom rose to Kneeland’s defense, could spare him jail time. In New York, a man named John Ruggles was sentenced to three months for insulting Jesus; in Pennsylvania, another man, Abner Updegraph, was fined for calling the Bible “a mere fable” that contained “a great many lies.” (Laws against blasphemy, though rarely enforced, still exist in Massachusetts, Michigan, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wyoming.) All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. (Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday.) One Jewish merchant took his case all the way to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, only to be denied an exemption because, in the words of the court, “Whatever strikes at the root of Christianity tends manifestly to the dissolution of civil government.”
Few, if any, of those prosecuted for violating Sabbatarian or blasphemy laws actually identified as atheists, but that didn’t stop their critics from denouncing them as such. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s agnosticism and Ernestine Rose’s atheism were held against the early suffragists, and after eight allegedly godless anarchists were convicted of killing eleven people during Chicago’s Haymarket affair and President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist who had rejected Catholic teachings, atheism became linked, in the popular imagination, with domestic terrorism. “Public attacks on religion,” Moore and Kramnick write in their account of how atheism became un-American, “were presumed to lead to the advocacy of other dangerous ideas.”
That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. It wasn’t politics or economics, some said, that distinguished America from its enemies—it was religiosity. “From the root of atheism stems the evil weed of communism,” the Catholic congressman Louis Rabaut declared, on the floor of the House of Representatives. Two centuries after the Founders wrote a godless constitution, the federal government got religion: between 1953 and 1957, a prayer breakfast appeared on the White House calendar, a prayer room opened in the Capitol, “In God We Trust” was added to all currency, and “under God” was inserted into the Pledge of Allegiance. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause. They succeeded, albeit at a price: the courts upheld references to God in pledges, oaths, prayers, and anthems on the ground that they were not actually religious. The phrase “ceremonial deism” was coined by a Yale Law School dean in 1962, and in the decades since it has been used by court after court to explain exceptions to the First Amendment. Like saying “God bless you” when someone sneezes, the courts concluded, these “under God”s and “In God We Trust”s are innocuous; they belong to the realm of patriotism, not prayer.
Not surprisingly, neither believers nor nonbelievers believe this. Every such ruling is a Pyrrhic victory for the devout, for whom invocations of God are sacred, and no victory at all for atheists, for whom invocations of God, when sponsored by the state, are obvious attempts to promote religion. Legal challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, in particular, persist, because nonbelievers are concerned about its prominence in the daily lives of schoolchildren. Lawsuits to end the recitation of the Pledge in public schools began almost as soon as the words “under God” were added, and while “ceremonial deism” long thwarted those challenges, nonbelievers have lately begun to pursue a different strategy. Instead of arguing that the Pledge violates the First Amendment’s establishment clause, they have started arguing that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal-protection clause, because it presents an occasion for nonbelieving children to be ostracized. David Niose, the legal director of the American Humanist Association, is one of many who have suggested that atheists might even be a suspect class, the sort of minority who deserve special protections from the courts.
But are atheists a suspect class, or just a skeptical one? Unlike racial minorities, their condition is not immutable, but, like many religious minorities, they are subject to hostility and prejudice. Atheism, however, is not a single identity, ideology, or set of practices, and to speak of it that way is as reductive as speaking of “religion” rather than of Judaism, Buddhism, or Christianity—or, even more usefully, of Reform Judaism, Mahayana Buddhism, or Pentecostalism. “Atheisms” is a more precise concept, as the philosopher John Gray demonstrates in his new book, “Seven Types of Atheism” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), and one that could help Americans move beyond their intractable fight over the existence of God.
Gray, who taught at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, and the London School of Economics before turning full time to writing, starts by offering a highly provisional and idiosyncratic definition of “atheist”: “anyone with no use for a divine mind that has fashioned the world.” As he concedes, that makes the category so capacious that it includes some of the world’s major religions: neither Buddhism nor Taoism features a creator god. Yet that capaciousness is appropriate, because it suggests, correctly, that there is no single atheistic world view. Much of the animosity and opprobrium directed at nonbelievers in America comes from the suspicion that those who do not believe in God could not possibly believe in anything else, moral or otherwise. The reason that atheists were not allowed to testify in court for so long was the certainty that witnesses who were unwilling to swear an oath to God had no reason to be truthful, since they did not fear divine judgment. Gray’s survey, while not comprehensive, is a welcome corrective to that ungenerous view.
It is also a refreshing look beyond the so-called “new atheists” who have lately dominated the conversation surrounding unbelief. Gray does not brook what he describes as their “tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion,” and, in contrast to Moore and Kramnick, who believe that new atheists like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have generated an “Atheist Awakening,” Gray dismisses them in a single chapter. “New atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he writes. By Gray’s account, they ignore polytheism and animism almost entirely, while insisting on reading verses of Genesis or lines of the Nicene Creed as if they were primitive scientific theories. Not all monotheists are literalists, and, for many of us, both now and throughout history, the Garden of Eden is not a faulty hypothesis about evolution but a rich symbolic story about good and evil.
Gray’s larger complaint is that the new atheists fail to offer a more coherent moral vision than the one they want to replace. The strategy they champion, scientific ethics, has been tried before, with a notable lack of success. Auguste Comte and his fellow nineteenth-century positivists envisioned a Grand Pontiff of Humanity who would preside alongside scientist-priests; unfortunately, scientists at the time were practicing phrenology. Later on, evolutionary humanists and monists replaced God’s order with “scientific” anthropologies, then constructed racial hierarchies and put white Europeans on top. Today, the voguish version of science as religion is transhumanism, which claims that technology will overcome human limitations both physical and mental, perhaps through bioengineering or artificial intelligence or cyborgs that can carry around the contents of our brains. Gray is not sanguine about such developments, should they ever occur, because we already have a model of the mayhem that takes place when some mortals are granted godlike powers: “Anyone who wants a glimpse of what a post-human future might be like should read Homer.”
On the whole, Gray is a glass-half-empty kind of guy, and what others regard as novel or promising he often sees as derivative or just plain dumb. He argues, for instance, that secular humanism is really monotheism in disguise, where humankind is God and salvation can be achieved through our own efforts rather than through divine intervention. Unlike the linguist—and new atheist—Steven Pinker, Gray regards the idea that the world is getting better as self-evidently silly. “The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics,” he points out. Religions are still thriving, as are wars between them, and secular regimes have wrought as much, if not more, havoc under the auspices of Jacobinism, Bolshevism, Nazism, and Maoism.
Gray is especially interested in those atheists who, in addition to having no faith in the divine, have none in humanity. (Given his own intellectual bent, one suspects him of delighting equally in their pessimism and their unpopularity.) These aren’t misotheists—those who hate God, like the Marquis de Sade, many new atheists, and the literary critic William Empson, whose “Seven Types of Ambiguity” Gray cites as an influence. They are thinkers like George Santayana, a thoroughgoing materialist who scoffed at human progress to the point of indifference to human suffering yet loved Catholic traditions so much that he chose to live out the end of his days in the care of nuns. Similarly, the novelist Joseph Conrad had no faith in God, and lost his faith in progress after witnessing the colonization of Congo, but he wrote beautifully about those who faced their empty fate head on: sailors surviving the indifference of the sea. Such men—and almost all the atheists in Gray’s book are men—would not recognize the hopeful atheism that is all the rage today. (Gray does make space for Ayn Rand, who briefly steals the show, as her followers raise their cigarette holders in tandem with hers, marry mates chosen by “the Collective,” and tap-dance at their weddings because Rand deemed it the only truly rational form of dance.)
Gray is equally interested in, and especially drawn to, those who practice what he calls “the atheism of silence.” These atheists, like those who reject the notion of human progress, don’t often attract large followings. Instead of seeking surrogates for God, they try to acquiesce in something that transcends human understanding. Gray admires the mystical atheist Arthur Schopenhauer, who didn’t believe in God and didn’t particularly believe in reality, either. Gray also includes in this category thinkers who were clearly devout, such as Spinoza, who rejected a creator God but saw God as an eternal substance in all creation, and the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov, who wrote that reason had to be overcome in order for us to know God, and that revelation “carries us beyond the limits of all human comprehension and of the possibilities that comprehension admits.”
This kind of apophatic theology has a lot in common with godless mysticism, Gray argues, because saying that God does not exist is not so different from saying that we cannot comprehend God’s existence. In both cases, the material world may be characterized by limited understanding and limitless wonder. That is the charity so seldom extended to atheists in America: the notion that they, too, may be awed by and struggling to make sense of the human and the cosmic. “A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think,” Gray writes.
Cosmologies, in other words, can make for strange bedfellows, and some of what Gray does best in “Seven Types of Atheism” is not only to draw distinctions among atheists but to make connections between nonbelievers and believers. Christians ignorant of their own history, for instance, will be surprised to learn that their earliest ancestors in the faith were themselves ridiculed as “atheists” because they refused to participate in polytheistic worship: in Greek, atheos means “without gods,” not anti-God. Meanwhile, those who came to atheism via the new atheists might be startled to find that many of their intellectual forebears did not wage war on religion, or even feel any distaste for it.
In fairness, contemporary American atheists may be inclined to wage war on religion because religion has been waging war on them for so long. A brief truce was reached at the end of the Obama Administration, when Congress passed, and the President signed, a new version of the International Religious Freedom Act that officially included nonbelievers. “The freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs and the right not to profess or practice any religion,” the law was revised to read
That law extended important new protections to atheists. Still, as Gray might have predicted, it is difficult, in this particular political moment, to believe that the circle of rights is expanding for atheists or for anyone else. Moore and Kramnick, who have written a thorough and useful history of the legal and political status of atheists in America, unsurprisingly believe that such work is salvific—that understanding the bias against atheists in the past can help end it in the future. Gray holds no such hope, and yet his book offers a way forward. In it, he helps us understand how those who do not believe in God, or, for that matter, those who do, have oriented themselves in the universe. Faith, after all, drove the Puritans to Plymouth Rock but then led them to execute three of their Quaker neighbors; it inspired American slavers but also American abolitionists; and, whatever else atheism is accused of doing in this country, it sustained the scientific curiosity and profound pacifism of the two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling, the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie, and the art and activism of Lorraine Hansberry. All of us, nihilists included, believe something—many things, in fact, about ourselves, the cosmos, and one another. In the end, the most interesting thing about a conscience is how it answers, not whom it answers to. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the October 29, 2018, issue, with the headline “Without a Prayer.”
Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Her first book, “Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee,” will be published in 2019.
While it may seem that heaps of plastic from meal kit delivery services like Blue Apron make them less environmentally friendly than traditional grocery shopping, a new study says the kits actually produce less food waste. Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images
Meal Kits Have A Smaller Carbon Footprint Than Grocery Shopping, Study Says
The study is weak on enough fronts that the headline is misleading. I don’t like this article.
First, the NPR sponsor tie-in is a factor. Sorry. It just is.
Secondly, the article author, and one particular researcher, gloss over any meaningful consumer behavior towards freezing. They simply dismiss it as a non factor due to the inevitability of discarded freezer burnt frozen food.
Wrong. That is only true if people don’t ever eat it. If you actually wrap food well, and actually thaw it properly, and actually eat it in the not too distant future, freezing is perfectly fine, and an excellent way to manage eating/cooking/conservation habits.
If people don’t know how to freeze food properly, that’s an education problem that can be overcome with more guidance. Freezer burn and food waste is a weak, unsubstantiated reason to justify and “sell” the meal kit concept. Especially if it’s put forth by vested interests in the business of selling it, or, by funded researchers.
Not to mention, .the excessive cost of figuring pre-made meal kits into your budget. Not to mention the industrial energy used in mass production lines to being said meal kits to you by mail, delivery, or pick up somewhere.
Carbon Footprints and energy usage contributing to global warming, or just the study of overall energy usage is a work intensive and complicated matter to calculate fairly, That is why there is often only partial studies done with disclaimers all over the place, that represent a vested interest somewhere along the line.
At least NPR mentions the sponsorship connection in the article. I should’ve stopped reading right there.
Measles Cases Surpass 700 as Outbreak Continues Unabated
The outbreak is now the worst in decades. Children under age 5 account for about half of the cases.
Via NYTimes, By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
Measles continues to spread in the United States, federal health officials said on Monday, surpassing 700 cases this year as health officials around the country sought aggressive action to stem the worst outbreak in decades.
In New York, an epicenter of the outbreak, city officials closed two more schools for Orthodox Jewish children for failing to comply with an order to exclude unvaccinated children.
In California, hundreds of students and staff members at two universities remained under quarantine following possible exposure to the virus.
And with measles spreading globally, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have urged Americans traveling abroad to make sure they are immunized against the disease. On Monday, the agency renewed an urgent call for parents to get their children vaccinated.
Heidi Clarke held her son, Micah Risner, 5, as a nurse, Ann Rowland, administered immunizations in Portland, Ore. Federal officials now fear that measles may regain a foothold in the United States.Credit: Alisha Jucevic for The New York Times
“The outbreaks in New York City and New York State are the largest and longest-lasting since measles elimination in 2000,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the C.D.C.’s director for immunization, said at a news conference.
“The longer this continues, the greater the chances that measles will again get a foothold in the United States,” she said.
More than 500 of the 704 cases recorded as of last Friday were in people who had not been vaccinated, the C.D.C. reported. While there have been no deaths, 66 people have been hospitalized, a third of them with pneumonia.
The outbreak in New York, the nation’s biggest city, has been concentrated in Orthodox Jewish communities in Brooklyn and Rockland County.
The city reported on Monday that there had been 423 cases since the virus appeared in October. State officials reported another 236 in counties north and east of the city.
Officials in New York City have now closed seven Orthodox schools for failing to comply with vaccination orders; five have reopened after providing records showing that they were turning unvaccinated students away.
The city has also issued summonses to 57 residents of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood — where more than 80 percent of the city’s cases have occurred — for refusing to get themselves or their children vaccinated.
Each summons can lead to a fine of up to $1,000 — or double that if the person it is issued to does not appear in court.
“The longer it takes schools and individuals to comply with our order, the longer this outbreak will continue,” Dr. Oxiris Barbot, the city’s health commissioner, said.
California has had a low-intensity epidemic with a handful of new cases each week, punctuated by occasional scares about widespread exposure at airports or on university campuses.
Franz Hall at U.C.L.A.’s campus. Hundreds of students and staff members were quarantined at the university following possible exposure to measles. Credit: Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times
Last week, nearly 800 students and staff members at California State University, Los Angeles, and the University of California, Los Angeles, who may have been exposed to measles on their campuses were quarantined under orders to stay home and not ride public transportation.
As of Monday, more than half of them were cleared after showing proof that they had either had two measles shots or were immune because they had caught the disease in childhood.
About 370 remained in quarantine, mostly at Cal State, Los Angeles.
On Monday, signs reading “POSSIBLE MEASLES EXPOSURE” were posted at the entrance to Cal State’s John F. Kennedy Memorial Library. Anyone who visited on April 11, when a student with measles apparently passed through, was warned to check his or her vaccination records.
Aliyah Johnson, 22, a senior, said she first heard of the scare when her mother called to check on her. “Out of sight is out of mind,” she said. She has had her shots, Ms. Johnson added.
At U.C.L.A., some students were unaware that the possible exposure on their campus had been traced to the very lecture halls they were entering. Still, some said they were more worried about upcoming exams.
Gianna Jimenez, a sophomore studying molecular biology, said she and her peers were disturbed by the spread of unscientific theories, such as the notion that vaccines cause autism.
“People just believe whatever they see on the internet whether it’s true or not,” she said. “The fact that it’s 2019 and we’re dealing with this is outrageous and ridiculous.”
Universities in New York are required by state law to make sure their students are vaccinated against measles.
At New York University, incoming freshmen do not get dorm keys until they produce persuasive evidence of immunization or get vaccinated at the student health center, said John Beckman, a university spokesman.
The university, he added, has just told all students with medical or other exemptions that, if the school has a case, they may be barred from campus.
More than 94 percent of American parents vaccinate their children against measles and other diseases, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., said on Monday.
About 100,000 children in this country below age 2 have not been vaccinated, he said, meaning they are vulnerable in this outbreak.
Some infants are not immunized because their parents avoid vaccination. Others cannot be protected either because they are allergic to components of the vaccine or for other medical reasons.
This year’s outbreak, the C.D.C. said, was sparked by 126 infections acquired by travelers overseas since early 2018. The bulk of them occurred in Israel, Ukraine and the Philippines, but cases have also come from Thailand, Germany, Britain and other countries.
Of the 44 cases imported so far this year, the C.D.C. said, 34 were not in immigrants or foreign visitors, but in Americans who had traveled overseas.
Even with modern medical care, the disease normally kills about one out of every 1,000 victims, according to the C.D.C.
Pneumonia and encephalitis — swelling of the brain — are the most common severe complications. Epidemics among malnourished children who cannot get modern hospital care have mortality rates of 10 percent or more, according to the World Health Organization.
Measles is among the most contagious of diseases. Virus-laced droplets can hover in still indoor air for up to two hours after someone infected has coughed or sneezed. Up to 90 percent of people who are exposed will catch the virus if they are not immunized.
The vaccine is considered very safe, and two doses are about 97 percent effective at conferring immunity. The vaccine is normally given at ages 1 and 5, but during outbreaks pediatricians may give it to healthy children as young as six months old.
But two years ago, cases began rebounding, driven by a combination of poverty, warfare, tight vaccine supplies and, in some countries, hesitation about vaccination.
Earlier this month, the W.H.O. said there were three times as many measles cases around the world this year as there were in the first three months of 2018.
Before measles vaccination became widespread in the United States in 1963, up to four million Americans got measles each year, the C.D.C. said. Of the roughly 500,000 cases that were reported to medical authorities annually back then, about 48,000 were hospitalized, 4,000 developed encephalitis, and 400 to 500 died.
The C.D.C.’s case count on Monday said 503 of the 704 measles infections were in people who were not vaccinated. Of the remaining 201 cases, vaccination status was unknown for 125 patients, meaning that 76 patients said they had been vaccinated but got sick anyway.
The agency does not yet know how many shots each of those 76 had, “but under extreme disease pressure we know there can be vaccine failures,” Dr. Messonnier said.
She suggested that adults likely to encounter the virus, including health workers, travelers and anyone in affected neighborhoods, get a blood test that can show how immune they are to measles, mumps and rubella.
Anyone born before 1957 is assumed to have had the measles as a child and therefore immune.
Americans born between 1957 and 1989 are in a middle ground. Some got the early “killed virus” vaccine, which later proved to be too short-lived and was replaced by a “weakened virus” vaccine.
Until 1989, it was routine to give one shot; now children get two. One shot of the new vaccine provides 93 percent immunity in the overall population, while two shots drive that up to 97 percent, which is considered more than enough to keep the virus from spreading.
Vaccination levels vary from state to state, largely dependent on how easy state legislatures make it to get exemptions. All states permit exemptions for children who are allergic to the vaccine, have a compromised immune system or have another medical reason to avoid it.
Some states permit religious exemptions, even though no major religion opposes vaccination, and a few states also permit “philosophical” or “personal choice” exemptions.
Some states with high vaccination rates have “pockets of unvaccinated people,” the C.D.C. said. At various times, some religious minorities like Orthodox Jews and the Amish in Ohio have had low vaccination rates.
Some wealthy liberal communities, like Vashon Island in Washington State, have also had low rates. Recently conservative groups opposed to vaccines have sprung up, such as Texans for Vaccine Choice, which is associated with the Tea Party.
Julie Turkewitz contributed reporting from Denver, Jose Del Real from Los Angeles and Dana Goldstein from New York.
Jared Kushner spoke about Russian election interference during the Time 100 Summit 2019 in New York City. Credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images for Time
I’m pretty much done characterizing Donald Trump. There’s long been nothing more to learn about this man that people don’t already know.
Jared Kushner, on the other hand, is a different story. He lays low and has an ounce of measured judgement about when to open his mouth in public. Combine that with his immediate proximity to Trump on all fronts, and the curiosity of his influence, if any, is strong.
To date, Kushner has done nothing to distinguish himself from the tribe. That does not mean he isn’t instrumental behind the scenes, and a meaningful influencer of how our country moves forward, or backward.
At best, he is what he projects-a docile, entitled elite, with little more than a dilettante’s interest in mixing it up with politics or governance. At worst, he is a charade of a diplomat concealing a hard-core, cold blooded capitalist with malleable ethical and legal boundaries, and questionable instincts to anchor thoughtful judgement on complex issues.
Even if he is parts of both, his rare public comments are not encouraging.
FACT CHECK: Russian Interference Went Far Beyond ‘Facebook Ads’ Kushner Described
Via NPR, Miles Parks
In a rare public appearance on Tuesday, Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and one of his closest advisers, said that the multiple investigations into Russian election interference have been more harmful to American democracy than the original interference itself.
“The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country,” Kushner said at a Time magazine event in New York City. “You look at what Russia did — buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it’s a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that’s happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy.”
In describing Russia’s efforts leading up to the 2016 election, Kushner emphasized what he called the relatively small amount of money Russian agents spent advertising on social media.
“They said they spent $160,000. I spent $160,000 on Facebook in three hours during the campaign,” Kushner said. “If you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country.”
Fact check: Were Facebook ads the extent of Russian election interference?
The short answer: No.
The long answer: The redacted version of Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller’s report revealed a years-long plot by the Russian government to interfere in the U.S. that investigators called “sweeping and systemic.”
As to the amount of money expended on Facebook ads, the company said Russian operatives did spend less than $200,000 on advertising on the platform — but that doesn’t account for the organic content the operatives created and shared.
Not only were influence specialists within Russia’s Internet Research Agency purchasing normal advertisements, they were authoring their own posts, memes and other content as they posed as American users.
They also reached out to politically active Americans, posing as like-minded supporters, and helped organize rallies and other events in the real world.
Facebook says the Internet Research Agency may have reached as many as 126 million people. Separately, Twitter announced that about 1.4 million people may have been in contact with IRA-controlled accounts.
The social media aspect of the interference was just one dimension. Cyberattackers also went after political victims in the United States — whose emails and other data were released publicly to embarrass them — and state elections officials and other targets. And there may have been other avenues of interference as well.
The origins of the scheme
Russian operatives lied to get into the U.S. as early as 2014 on “intelligence-gathering missions.” They traveled across the country to get the lay of the land before ramping up efforts to try to interfere with American politics.
By September 2016, two months before the U.S. presidential election, the Internet Research Agency was working with an overall monthly budget that reached over $1.25 million. It employed hundreds of employees, a graphics department, a data analysis department, a search-engine optimization department, an IT department and a finance department, according to an indictment filed last year by Mueller’s team.
And it hasn’t stopped.
The U.S. military reportedly blocked the Internet access of the IRA during last year’s midterm elections to keep it from interfering with the midterm election. U.S. Cyber Command also targeted Russian cyber operatives, according to a report by The New York Times, with direct messages letting them know that American intelligence was tracking them.
And in October, a Russian woman was accused, according to a criminal complaint filed in federal court, of conspiring to sow discord and division in the U.S political system.
That conspiracy, the complaint said, “continues to this day.”
Beyond advertising, podcasts that achieve solvency tend to do so through a stitched-together network of social-media hustles, the sum of which serves to cultivate and monetize an audience’s sense of connection. Though large podcasts often enjoy financial support from traditional media companies and emergent podcast networks, many small and midsize shows — arguably those most indicative of the form — have come to rely on Patreon, a membership platform that invites fans to become financial supporters of creative projects in exchange for a tiered benefits package of the creator’s invention. At the lowest membership tiers, usually $1 to $5 per month, podcast supporters receive benefits like bonus episodes or access to V.I.P. chat rooms. As the tiers increase in price, the rewards grow more substantial, often involving direct engagement with the hosts or entry into the universe of the show itself.
