This is a very serious problem that is surely underestimated in its negative societal impacts. Children lacking empathy grow into adults lacking it. Once in adulthood, empathy is much harder to teach and appreciate. More focus needs to be placed on this with children, teenagers, and really, all of us. Its a tremendous part of humanity.
New York Times
Research shows that we are each born with a given number of neurons that participate in an empathetic response. But early life experience shapes how we act on it.
As the year’s end approaches, most Americans get bombarded by emailed and snail-mailed requests for donations to all manner of charities, A to Z.
I’m an easy target, a softy readily seduced by impassioned pleas to help improve the well-being of people, animals and the environment, and I often respond to more appeals than my earnings warrant.
This year will be different, thanks to advice from one of the leading experts on empathy, Dr. Helen Riess, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of a new book, “The Empathy Effect,” that explores the neuroscience behind concern for others and offers advice on how to nurture and implement it most effectively.
Instead of a scattershot of small gifts to a dozen or more charities, Dr. Riess suggested in an interview that I “pick one or two where a more substantial contribution can really make a difference.” She told me to use “cognitive empathy,” a more rational, less emotional approach. Empathy doesn’t mean saying “yes” to every request, she emphasized. “Recognize that you can’t save the world, and give to organizations that are most important to you.”
Let something from your own life experience determine which issues are closest to your heart and most deserve your money, she suggests in her book. For me, that would be education and food security; I’ll leave it to others to save abandoned pets and the planet this year.
Perhaps no one knows the importance of balancing feelings with thoughts better than Dr. Judith Orloff, a Los Angeles-based psychiatrist and the author of “The Empath’s Survival Guide.” Her book can help highly sensitive people avoid taking on everyone else’s needs and problems, which Dr. Riess says can lead to “compassion fatigue” and burnout.
“There’s healthy giving and there’s unhealthy, codependent giving that can ultimately make you feel worse,” Dr. Orloff said in an interview. “It’s important to be empathetic but also to set healthy limits and boundaries rather than being a doormat. If you’re a highly sensitive person, you have to learn how to channel your energy. Healthy empathy is when you give from your heart, but not martyr yourself.”
She added, “You have to practice self-care. ‘No’ is a complete sentence — no explanation needed.” If that seems too abrupt, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do that’ is a reasonable add-on.
While overly empathetic individuals can be their own worst enemy, more distressing to me, at least, are people who seem deficient, even devoid, of empathy. They are self-focused, narcissistic, always thinking about what’s in it for them and never recognizing and responding to the needs of others, a deficit that can undermine human survival, which depends on community support.
Research by Dr. Riess and her collaborators has shown that we are each born with a given number of neurons that participate in an empathetic response. But whether this potential to care appropriately for one’s fellow beings is realized or undermined is largely molded by early life experiences, starting at birth and continuing throughout childhood.
How, then, can a healthy degree of empathy be instilled in a child? “Empathy is a mutable trait, it can be taught,” Dr. Riess told me. “We’re all born with a certain endowment, but it can be dramatically up-regulated or down-regulated depending upon environmental factors,” especially, she said, by the examples set by a child’s caregivers.
Dr. Riess urges parents to be role models who show respect and caring for others: “Billy scraped his knee. Let’s go get a Band-Aid for him,” or “Mrs. Jones just came home from the hospital. Let’s take her some soup.”
Teachers and caregivers in child care and pre-K settings can foster empathy by acknowledging rather than dismissing a child’s distress or by bringing a toy or doll to comfort a child who is upset or injured. Libraries and bookstores are replete with stories in print and video that demonstrate the giving and receiving of empathy for children at different age levels. Among the many choices: “I Am Human,” “What’s Wrong with Timmy?” and a personal favorite, “Wonder,” which was also made into a popular movie last year.
Dr. Riess has vivid memories of how her parents demonstrated empathy, by bringing turkeys before Thanksgiving to the homes of people who had almost nothing. “Kids tend to focus on what they don’t have — this exposes them to people who have so much less and gives them the gift of being a giver.”
She told me of a program called Cradles to Crayons, in which volunteers package up donated items for children in need. The program, currently operating in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago, provides essential items for needy children from birth through age 12.
With older children, parents might take them to help out in a soup kitchen or visit a nursing home, Dr. Riess suggested. “It’s never too late to guide a child toward greater appreciation of others’ feelings,” she wrote.
Equally important is for parents to demonstrate empathy with their own children by acknowledging their concerns and feelings and recognizing their need for security. For example, she said, “When a child is fearful of a dog, instead of saying ‘Don’t be afraid, he won’t bite you,’ say ‘Are you scared of the dog? What scares you?’ This validates the child’s fears rather than negating them.”
At the same time, Dr. Riess said, parents should not overreact by being intolerant of “a single second of unhappiness in their child’s life” lest such misguided empathy deprive the child of developing the grit, perseverance and resilience that is essential to a successful life.
Parents can talk to their children about other people’s feelings. If a child breaks another child’s toy, Dr. Riess suggests that instead of saying “‘Why did you do that? That was bad,’ say ‘Sara is sad because you broke her toy. What can we do to make up for that?’ which leaves the door open for an apology.”
Also helpful is to “validate your child’s difficult emotions instead of being judgmental,” she said. “If the child says ‘I hate Tommy,’ rather than say it’s wrong to hate, ask what makes the child feel that way. Explore what’s behind the feelings, the back story.”
For very young children, stuffed animals or puppets can be used to help them act out different stories, Dr. Riess suggested.
The Sarah Cannon Research Institute, based in Nashville, received nearly $8 million in payments from drug companies on behalf of its president for clinical operations, Dr. Howard Burris, largely for research work. Dozens of his articles published in prestigious medical journals did not include the required disclosures of those payments and relationships. – William DeShazer for The New York Times
“Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business.”
At this point in the medical news stream, this is a big Duh, to anyone with eyes open, who has read about this subject in the last oh, I dunno, twenty years, It is why the onus of responsibility, and making an intelligently calculated risk decision of whether to take (especially newly marketed) medication, or agree to any procedure, or have surgery, is on us, the patient. Trust your doctor, if you can, but, if you don’t know the bigger reality in the business of healthcare, you could suffer needlessly.
By Charles Ornstein and Katie Thomas, Via NYTimes Dec. 8, 2018
This article was reported and written in collaboration with ProPublica, the nonprofit journalism organization.
One is dean of Yale’s medical school. Another is the director of a cancer center in Texas. A third is the next president of the most prominent society of cancer doctors.
These leading medical figures are among dozens of doctors who have failed in recent years to report their financial relationships with pharmaceutical and health care companies when their studies are published in medical journals, according to a review by The New York Times and ProPublica and data from other recent research.
Dr. Howard A. “Skip” Burris III, the president-elect of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, declared that he had no conflicts of interest in more than 50 journal articles in recent years, including in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
However, drug companies have paid his employer nearly $114,000 for consulting and speaking, and nearly $8 million for his research during the period for which disclosure was required. His omissions extended to the Journal of Clinical Oncology, which is published by the group he will lead.
In addition to the widespread lapses by doctors, the review by The Times and ProPublica found that journals themselves often gave confusing advice and did not routinely vet disclosures by researchers, although many relationships could have been easily detected on a federal database.
Medical journals, which are the main conduit for communicating the latest scientific discoveries to the public, often have an interdependent relationship with the researchers who publish in their pages. Reporting a study in a leading journal can heighten their profile — not to mention that of the drug or other product being tested. And journals enhance their cachet by publishing exclusive, breakthrough studies by acclaimed researchers.
In all, the reporting system still appears to have many of the same flaws that the Institute of Medicine identified nearly a decade ago when it recommended fundamental changes in how conflicts of interest are reported. Those have yet to happen.
“The system is broken,” said Dr. Mehraneh Dorna Jafari, an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. She and her colleagues published a study in August that found that, of the 100 doctors who received the most compensation from device makers in 2015, conflicts were disclosed in only 37 percent of the articles published in the next year. “The journals aren’t checking and the rules are different for every single thing.”
Calls for transparency stem from concerns that researchers’ ties to the health and drug industries increase the odds they will, consciously or not, skew results to favor the companies with whom they do business. Studies have found that industry-sponsored research tends to be more positive than research financed by other sources. And that in turn can sway which treatments become available to patients. There is no indication that the research done by Dr. Burris and the other doctors with incomplete disclosures was manipulated or falsified.
Journal editors say they are introducing changes that will better standardize disclosures and reduce errors. But some have also argued that since most researchers follow the rules, stringent new requirements would be costly and unnecessary.
The issue has gained traction since September, when Dr. José Baselga, who was the chief medical officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, resigned after The Times and ProPublica reported that he had not revealed his industry ties in dozens of journal articles.
[Read more about doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering and their financial relationships with companies.]
Dr. Burris, president of clinical operations and chief medical officer at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, referred questions about the payments to his employer. It defended him, saying the payments were made to the institution, although The New England Journal of Medicine requires disclosure of all such payments.
Other prominent researchers who have submitted erroneous disclosures include Dr. Robert J. Alpern, the dean of the Yale School of Medicine, who failed to disclose in a 2017 journal article about an experimental treatment developed by Tricida that he served on that company’s board of directors and owned its stock. Tricida, which is developing therapies for chronic kidney disease, had financed the clinical trial that was the subject of the article.
Dr. Alpern said in an email that he initially believed that his disclosure — that he had been a consultant for Tricida — was adequate. However, “because of concerns recently raised about disclosures,” he said he notified the publication, The Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, in October that he also served on Tricida’s board and had stock holdings in the company.
The journal initially told Dr. Alpern that his disclosure was sufficient. But after The Times and ProPublica contacted the publication in November, it said it would correct the article.
Dr. Howard A. Burris III
“The failure to disclose this information at the time of peer review is a violation of our policy,” Dr. Rajnish Mehrotra, the journal’s editor in chief, said in an email.
He later said that an additional inquiry had revealed that all 12 of the article’s authors had submitted incomplete disclosures, and that the journal planned to refer the matter to the ethics committee of the American Society of Nephrology. Dr. Mehrotra also said that the journal had decided to conduct an audit of some recent articles to evaluate the broader issue.
Dr. Carlos L. Arteaga, the director of the Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center in Dallas, said he had “nothing to disclose” as an author of a 2016 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine of the breast cancer drug Kisqali, made by Novartis. But Dr. Arteaga had received more than $50,000 from drug companies in the three-year disclosure period, including more than $14,000 from Novartis.
In an email, Dr. Arteaga described the omission as an “inexcusable oversight and error on my part,” and subsequently submitted a correction.
Dr. Jeffrey R. Botkin, an associate vice president for research at the University of Utah, recently argued in JAMA, a leading medical journal, that researchers should face misconduct charges when they do not disclose their relationships with interested companies. “They really are falsifying the information that others rely on to assess that research,” he said. “Money is a very powerful influencer, and people’s opinions become subtly biased by that financial relationship.”
But Dr. Howard C. Bauchner, the editor in chief of JAMA, said that verifying each author’s disclosures would not be worth the time or effort. “The vast majority of authors are honest and do want to fulfill their obligations to tell readers and editors what their conflicts of interest could be,” he said in an interview.
As the debate continues, an influential group, the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, is considering a policy that would refer researchers who commit major disclosure errors to their institutions for possible charges of research misconduct.
Concerns about the influence of drug companies on medical research have persisted for decades. Senator Estes Kefauver held hearings on the issue in 1959, and there was another surge of concern in the 2000s after a series of scandals in which prominent doctors failed to reveal their industry relationships.
Medical journals and professional societies strengthened their requirements. The drug industry restricted how it compensates doctors, prohibiting gifts like tickets to sporting events or luxury trips — although evidence of kickbacks and corruption continues to surface in criminal prosecutions. And a 2010 federal law required pharmaceutical and device makers to publicly report their payments to physicians.
Questioned about omissions on his disclosure forms accompanying research articles, Dr. Burris submitted new disclosures to the New England Journal of Medicine showing his ties to many drug and health care companies.
Despite these changes, the system for disclosing conflicts remains fragmented and weakly enforced. Medical journals and professional societies have a variety of guidelines about what types of relationships must be reported, often leaving it up to the researcher to decide what is relevant. There are few repercussions — beyond a correction — for those who fail to follow the rules.
For example, the American Association for Cancer Research has warned authors that they face a three-year ban if they are found to have omitted a potential conflict. But the group’s policy on conflicts of interest contains no mention of such a penalty, and it said no author had ever been barred. Dr. Baselga’s failure to disclose his industry relationships extended to the association’s journal, Cancer Discovery, for which he serves as one of two editors in chief. The association said it is investigating Dr. Baselga’s actions.
Most authors do seem to disclose their ties to corporate interests. About two-thirds of the authors on the Kisqali study, for example, reported relationships with companies, including Novartis. But the researchers who did not included Dr. Arteaga, Dr. Burris and Dr. Denise A. Yardley, a senior investigator who works with Dr. Burris at Sarah Cannon.
The Tennessee-based research center received more than $105,000 in fees for consulting, speaking and other services on Dr. Yardley’s behalf in the three-year period in which she declared no conflicts.
The Sarah Cannon institute said it switched over a year ago to a “universal disclosure” practice promoted by ASCO, the cancer group that Dr. Burris will lead. That requires doctors to disclose all payments, including those made to their institutions.
“We believe we adhere to the highest ethical standards in the industry by not allowing personal compensation to be paid to our leadership physicians,” the center said.
ASCO said it would post corrections to Dr. Burris’s disclosures in The Journal of Clinical Oncology for the past four years. The group said that in the fall of 2017 — as Dr. Burris was seeking a leadership role in the organization — it began working with him to disclose all his company relationships, including indirect payments. Dr. Burris will become president in June 2019.
“Disclosure systems and processes in medicine are not perfect yet, and neither are ASCO’s,” the group said in an email.
Dr. Burris, Dr. Yardley and Dr. Arteaga submitted updated disclosures to The New England Journal of Medicine, which posted them on Thursday.
Dr. Burris’s new corrections to his disclosure forms that were posted by the New England Journal of Medicine show payments to his employer from Novartis, among other companies, for his work.
Dr. Burris’s updated disclosure listed relationships with 30 companies, including that he provided expert testimony for Novartis.
Jennifer Zeis, a spokeswoman for the journal, said that it was contacting those studies’ authors, and that it now asked researchers to certify that they had checked their disclosures against the federal database.
Some institutions have pushed back, arguing that the journals’ inconsistent rules make it difficult for even well-meaning researchers to do the right thing.
In a letter last month To the New England Journal of Medicine, Memorial Sloan Kettering objected to the treatment of one of its top researchers, Dr. Jedd Wolchok. When he tried to correct his disclosures, the journal shifted its position, from saying its editors were satisfied with his disclosures to saying he had failed to comply with the rules, the center said in citing communications with the journal.
To clarify reporting requirements, several publications are attempting only now to do what the Institute of Medicine recommended in 2009. The New England Journal is testing a new system in partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges that would act as a central repository for reporting financial relationships.
This year, JAMA began requiring authors to confirm multiple times that they had nothing to disclose. ASCO has a centralized system for reporting conflicts to all of its journals and speaker presentations.
Dr. Bernard Lo, the chairman of the 2009 Institute of Medicine panel, said journals have only begun to confront some of the systemic flaws. “They’re certainly not out in front trying to be trailblazers, let me just say it that way,” he said. “The fact that it hasn’t been done means that nobody has it on their priority list.”
Charles Ornstein is a senior editor at ProPublica.
This is a complicated situation that warrants intense scrutiny. Not only for the sanctions violations, but increasingly, the security issues. Technology is (about to be) everything in today’s world economies, political an social structures. In other words, everything about everything. Whether it’s this situation with China, or others with Russia, or the U.S., the way this cookie crumbles will foretell things to come. Do I have confidence this administration will get ahead of it, intelligently, responsibly, and make the right moves to protect what’s left to protect? Ask me something else.
It is one of China’s proudest corporate success stories, a colossus in cutting-edge technology that elbowed out Western rivals to become the biggest supplier of the hardware that connects our modern world.
Now, all around the globe, the walls are going up for Huawei.
The United States, which for years has considered the Chinese telecommunications giant a security threat, aimed a straight shot at the company’s leadership when it secured the arrest, in Canada, of Huawei’s chief financial officer.
But lately, Huawei’s setbacks have come on multiple fronts, from New Zealand and Australia to Britain and Canada. China sees the company as a pivotal driver of its ambitions for global technological leadership. Increasingly, much of the rest of the world sees it as a potential conduit for espionage and sabotage.
Huawei said Thursday that it was not aware of any wrongdoing by its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who is a daughter of the company’s founder, and that it complied with the law wherever it operated. The company has long denied that it spies on behalf of Beijing.
For many years, the fog of distrust surrounding Huawei was a problem largely confined to the United States. Large American mobile carriers such as AT&T have avoided using Huawei’s equipment in their networks ever since a 2012 congressional report highlighted the security risks.
In response, Huawei focused its business efforts elsewhere. Its success in wealthy places such as Europe has helped it become the planet’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, as well as its No. 2 smartphone brand. Of the more than $90 billion in revenue it earned last year, more than a quarter came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Now, a wider patch of the world appears to be siding with Washington against Chinese technology. A turn en masse against the company, led by governments in many of its most important markets, would have grave implications for its business.
Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and a daughter of its founder, was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States.
Australia barred Huawei this year from supplying technology for the country’s fifth-generation, or 5G, mobile networks. New Zealand last week blocked one of its leading mobile carriers from buying Huawei’s 5G gear. Britain’s intelligence chief, in a rare public appearance this week, said that the country had a difficult decision to make on whether to allow Huawei to build its 5G infrastructure.
And Canada’s top spy echoed those concerns, without naming Huawei or China, in a speech on Tuesday. Huawei has tested 5G equipment with major mobile carriers in both Canada and Britain.
Behind the tariff fight that has engulfed Washington and Beijing lies a deeper contest for leadership in future technologies such as supercomputing, artificial intelligence and 5G mobile internet. For many people in China, the contest feels not merely commercial, but civilizational. At stake is the country’s ability to claim its rightful place as a superpower.
“The Chinese government and Chinese companies must face these new circumstances, take up new countermeasures and get through this stage of crisis,” Fang Xingdong, the founder of ChinaLabs, a technology think tank in Beijing, said on Thursday. “This is a necessary rite of passage for China’s global technological rise.”
Huawei has tried to avoid being pulled into this fight. In an internal memo from January that was reviewed by The New York Times, Ren Zhengfei, the company’s founder, outlined a strategy for navigating these uncertain times.
The key, he wrote: Keep adapting. But do so quietly.
“Sometimes, it’s better to find a safe place and wait for stormy weather to pass,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Europe was one such place, Mr. Ren said. Huawei has cultivated political friendships and invested heavily in places like Britain. “Eventually, through years of effort, our goal is for Europeans to perceive Huawei as a European company,” Mr. Ren wrote.
Canada seemed to be another safe harbor. “The Canadian government is very sensible and open, giving us enormous confidence in our investments in this country,” Mr. Ren wrote.
This was all before Washington nearly put out of business Huawei’s main Chinese rival, ZTE.
In April, the Commerce Department barred ZTE from using components made in the United States after saying the company had failed to punish employees who violated American sanctions against Iran and North Korea. The move was effectively a death sentence because ZTE relied heavily on American microchips and other technology.
When the Commerce Department first announced its findings against ZTE in 2016, it released an internal ZTE document illustrating best practices for evading American sanctions.
In describing the approach, the document cited a company it nicknamed F7 as a model for how to pull it off. The description of F7 in the document matched Huawei.
A few months later, the Commerce Department subpoenaed Huawei and requested all information about its export or re-export of American technology to Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, according to a copy of the subpoena seen by The Times.
The inquiry widened this year when the Treasury and Commerce Departments asked the Justice Department to investigate Huawei for possible sanctions violations. Prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York took on the case.
Eventually, the Trump administration decided to ease its punishment of ZTE, in an effort to cool tensions with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, ahead of a historic North Korea meeting. But the power that Washington wielded over the fates of Chinese tech companies had been made very clear to people on both sides of the Pacific. In October, the Commerce Department imposed export controls on Fujian Jinhua, a state-backed semiconductor company that has been accused of stealing American chip designs.
Should Huawei be subjected to a ban on using American technology, the consequences would be significant, though perhaps not as life-threatening as they were for ZTE.
One crucial difference is that Huawei, unlike ZTE, does not depend extensively on outside vendors such as Qualcomm for the main chips in its smartphones. Around two-thirds of the handsets that Huawei sells contain chips made in-house, said Sean Kao, a hardware analyst at the research firm IDC.
Still, American firms supply other kinds of chips in Huawei’s gear as well as optical equipment for its fiber cable networks and other specialized parts.
“I don’t know exactly how many suppliers are affected,” said Stéphane Téral, senior research director at the data provider IHS Markit. But one thing is certain, he said: “They won’t be easily substitutable.”
I have to say, that growing up, I felt really unattached to the smarty nerds in my classes. all through grade school, junior and high school and through college. Maybe I just didn’t connect with any of them as role models. Fair enough, and I did get into trouble instead of make it through higher ed unscathed. Not by a long shot. So there is that. But, still, I found most of them remote, far too cloistered in study, study, study, books, books, books, and well, just boring. What they ended up doing, I have no idea. Sure there were/are gifted ones that glided through and still managed to have fun and live a balance life growing up, I had a few of my own gifts for subjects here and there. But, I’m not talking about those exceptions. I’m talking about teeth to the grindstone nerdiness-gotta get my 4.0 types.
The article below takes my shallow observations steps deeper into the future of the young adults and beyond,as they grow up.
I think this article is excellent, and on target. Have a read!
What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
If you always succeed in school, you’re not setting yourself up for success in life.
By Adam Grant, NYTimes
Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist and a contributing opinion writer.
A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking.
Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers.
I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.)
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem — it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.
In a classic 1962 study, a team of psychologists tracked down America’s most creative architects and compared them with their technically skilled but less original peers. One of the factors that distinguished the creative architects was a record of spiky grades. “In college our creative architects earned about a B average,” Donald MacKinnon wrote. “In work and courses which caught their interest they could turn in an A performance, but in courses that failed to strike their imagination, they were quite willing to do no work at all.” They paid attention to their curiosity and prioritized activities that they found intrinsically motivating — which ultimately served them well in their careers.
Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality. In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
If your goal is to graduate without a blemish on your transcript, you end up taking easier classes and staying within your comfort zone. If you’re willing to tolerate the occasional B, you can learn to program in Python while struggling to decipher “Finnegans Wake.” You gain experience coping with failures and setbacks, which builds resilience.
Straight-A students also miss out socially. More time studying in the library means less time to start lifelong friendships, join new clubs or volunteer. I know from experience. I didn’t meet my 4.0 goal; I graduated with a 3.78. (This is the first time I’ve shared my G.P.A. since applying to graduate school 16 years ago. Really, no one cares.) Looking back, I don’t wish my grades had been higher. If I could do it over again, I’d study less. The hours I wasted memorizing the inner workings of the eye would have been better spent trying out improv comedy and having more midnight conversations about the meaning of life.
So universities: Make it easier for students to take some intellectual risks. Graduate schools can be clear that they don’t care about the difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9. Colleges could just report letter grades without pluses and minuses, so that any G.P.A. above a 3.7 appears on transcripts as an A. It might also help to stop the madness of grade inflation, which creates an academic arms race that encourages too many students to strive for meaningless perfection. And why not let students wait until the end of the semester to declare a class pass-fail, instead of forcing them to decide in the first month?
Employers: Make it clear you value skills over straight A’s. Some recruiters are already on board: In a 2003 study of over 500 job postings, nearly 15 percent of recruiters actively selected against students with high G.P.A.s (perhaps questioning their priorities and life skills), while more than 40 percent put no weight on grades in initial screening.
Straight-A students: Recognize that underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life. So maybe it’s time to apply your grit to a new goal — getting at least one B before you graduate.
Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton and contributing opinion writer, is the author of “Originals” and “Give and Take” and is the host of the podcast “WorkLife.”
The Trump administration is giving schools more flexibility in the meals they serve. Critics say the rollback on school lunch rules is bad for kids’ health.
I don’t read a shred of rational logic in any part of this decision. It’s nearly incomprehensible that this rollback could be justified by anyone with a straight face. When the logic is hard to see, the real reason is almost always one thing. Money.
School lunches are healthier than they were five years ago. But Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue says schools need more flexibility in serving meals that kids will eat.
“If kids are not eating what is being served, they are not benefiting, and food is being wasted,” Perdue said in a statement announcing a rule that is set to be published later this month.
The rule will give administrators more leeway in serving up white breads, biscuits, tortillas and white pastas by requiring that only half of the grains served in school meals each week be whole-grain rich. Currently schools are only allowed to serve whole grain-rich breads and pastas unless they get a waiver. In addition, the administration is putting the brakes on the targets developed during the Obama administration to cut back on sodium.
On Twitter over the weekend, the television writer Bryan Behar did something unconscionable.
He praised George H.W. Bush.
The former president had just died. In Behar’s view, it was a moment to recognize any merit in the man and his legacy.
Many of his followers disagreed. They depended on Behar for righteous liberal passion, which left no room for such Bush-flattering adjectives and phrases as “good,” “decent” and “a life of dignity.” How dare Behar lavish them on a man who leaned on the despicable Willie Horton ad, who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, who did too little in the face of AIDS, whose privilege often blinded him to need.
They lashed out at Behar. They unfollowed him. And they demonstrated the transcendent curse of these tribal times: Americans’ diminishing ability to hold two thoughts at once.
Bush has indelible stains on his record. He also has points of light. At times he failed the responsibilities of leadership. At times he did right by them. He showed folly and he showed wisdom, cowardice and courage, aloofness and kindness.
Accentuating the positive, especially in the hours after his death, didn’t eliminate the negative.
Behar said as much in that tweet, beginning it by alluding to disagreements with Bush’s agenda. No matter. The blowback came anyway, and he felt compelled, in a subsequent tweet, to explain, elaborate, justify.
“I’m not endorsing Bush’s AIDS policies,” he wrote. Nor, he added, was he expunging Willie Horton. “I found both to be repugnant. Nevertheless I sensed a fundamental goodness in his post-presidential life & wish his family compassion.”
And in another tweet: “I can’t believe the number of followers I’ve lost tonight for benignly expressing sorrow about President Bush’s passing. Apparently, to them, I failed some ultraprogressive litmus test.”
Should it be this hard? This tortured? I don’t know Behar or follow him on Twitter, but the reaction to his initial Bush tweet and his response to that became a kind of cause célèbre among some people I do know. They talked or tweeted about the whole episode as an example of how fractiously far we’ve fallen. The television commentator Nicolle Wallace, the former United States attorney Preet Bharara and Lanny Davis, the prominent Democratic lawyer who represents Michael Cohen, all publicly expressed support for Behar.
The tussle over remembrances of Bush echoed the tussles over remembrances of Senator John McCain, when detractors howled about any framing of him as a hero — McCain, who was captured and, for years, tortured by the North Vietnamese and who refused early release unless his fellow prisoners were also freed.
Yes, there were issues, grave ones, to be taken with his positions on American military intervention and with his domestic record. But there was valor galore, across decades of public service, and it’s possible, even imperative, to acknowledge and celebrate that.
That’s not to say that Bush or McCain, even in death, warrants only tributes. A mix of appreciations and censorious assessments is in order, and it’s very much arguable that the first wave of takes on Bush, including one that I wrote for The Times, tilted excessively toward the complimentary.
But too many of us tend to interpret events, political figures and issues in all-or-nothing, allies-or-enemies, black-and-white terms, blind to shades of gray.
A person can find Christine Blasey Ford credible, believe that Brett Kavanaugh lacks the temperament for the Supreme Court and also worry about a pile-on against him that laid waste to the concepts of due process and presumption of innocence. But the public battle lines were drawn in a way that left little room for that.
For that matter, a person can detest the conservative stacking of the court — and seethe over the manner in which Mitch McConnell blocked Merrick Garland — and accept that Trump, in elevating Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, didn’t commit some treachery or abuse his office. He fulfilled campaign pledges and reminded us that elections have consequences.
A person can deplore Trump’s recklessly inflammatory characterizations of illegal immigration and treatment of migrants while acknowledging that secure borders are a legitimate concern. But that’s not an analysis I hear often on cable news.
We like our villains without redemption and our heroes without blemish, and we frequently assign those roles in overly strict alignment with our ideology. Behar’s tweets about Bush broke from that.
And some of his followers didn’t mind. He even gained new ones — proof that all isn’t lost.
But we do seem to be getting worse at complexity. At nuance. At allowing for the degree to which virtue and vice commingle in most people, including our leaders, and at understanding that it’s not a sign of softness to summon some respect for someone with a contrary viewpoint and a history of mistakes. It’s a sign of maturity. And it just might be a path back to a better place.
This article touches on a single issue regarding the erection and political effects of border walls and/fences. The issue explained highlights a valid grievance from author, , but, the way I see it, no matter what the argument is on asylum, or immigration, the deeper question at hand, is whether a country has open borders, or not. I’ve always found it uncomfortable and intimidating to contemplate the closed border concept in general. Yes, there are bad, or unstable people, who have bad intentions, no matter where they are, where they go, but controlling that element seems fairly straightforward in screening procedures. Even so, I don’t believe that percentage of bad immigrants, illegal or otherwise, comes close in proportion to the amount of home grown troublemakers and damaged people on our own soil. No system is perfect, but, given any border approach to balance risk and outcome, there are options that reflect a gesture of good will and welcome, and options that say, stay away, we really don’t want you here.
There’s No Real Difference Between Border Walls and Border Fences
By Scott Nicol
December 3, 2018 | 5:45 PM
Courtesy ACLU News
Democrats, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, are playing word games when it comes to funding Trump’s border wall. Sometime between now and Dec. 7, when the current appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security will expire, Congress needs to provide the agency with another’s year’s funds. A single word has become a sticking point for the politicians who will vote on that funding: “wall,” as in President Trump’s border wall. Read the full story>
These two guys with nuclear bombs in their hands. Yea, this is good.
It is only a surface observation to make this a conversation about two men. I was probably six years old when I decided that nuclear bombs had no rational place in humanity. Soon after, as I realized the magnitude of nuclear weapons on our planet, and reflected on the wars after wars that killed its people, I concluded the human animal was, if nothing else, an irrational, flailing form of so-called intelligent life. How else could it be oblivious to its own self destruction?
(CNN)North Korea will not relinquish its nuclear weapons until the US eliminates its own “nuclear threat,” according to a commentary published by state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
“The proper definition of denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is completely eliminating the American nuclear threat to North Korea before eliminating our nuclear capability,” the commentary says.
The US and North Korea are deadlocked in negotiations over how Pyongyang will denuclearize in return for the easing of sanctions.
Seven years ago, a former aide to Ralph Reed — who also worked, briefly, for Paul Manafort — published a tawdry, shallow memoir that is also one of the more revealing political books I’ve ever read. Lisa Baron was a pro-choice, pro-gay rights, hard-partying Jew who nonetheless made a career advancing the fortunes of the Christian right. She opened her book with an anecdote about performing oral sex on a future member of the George W. Bush administration during the 2000 primary, which, she wrote, “perfectly summed up my groupie-like relationship to politics at that time — I wanted it, I worshiped it, and I went for it.”
It’s not exactly a secret that politics is full of amoral careerists lusting — literally or figuratively — for access to power. Still, if you’re interested in politics because of values and ideas, it can be easier to understand people who have foul ideologies than those who don’t have ideologies at all. Steve Bannon, a quasi-fascist with delusions of grandeur, makes more sense to me than Anthony Scaramucci, a political cipher who likes to be on TV. I don’t think I’m alone. Consider all the energy spent trying to figure out Ivanka Trump’s true beliefs, when she’s shown that what she believes most is that she’s entitled to power and prestige.
Baron’s book, “Life of the Party: A Political Press Tart Bares All,” is useful because it is a self-portrait of a cynical, fame-hungry narcissist, a common type but one underrepresented in the stories we tell about partisan combat. A person of limited self-awareness — she seemed to think readers would find her right-wing exploits plucky and cute — Baron became Reed’s communications director because she saw it as a steppingstone to her dream job, White House press secretary, a position she envisioned in mostly sartorial terms. (“Outfits would be planned around the news of the day,” she wrote.) Reading Baron’s story helped me realize emotionally something I knew intellectually. It’s tempting for those of us who interpret politics for a living to overstate the importance of competing philosophies. We shouldn’t forget the enduring role of sheer vanity.
That brings us to Monday’s New York Times article about Bill White and his husband, Bryan Eure, headlined “How a Liberal Couple Became Two of N.Y.’s Biggest Trump Supporters.” The answer: ego. A former big-ticket Democratic fund-raiser, White went straight from Hillary Clinton’s election night party to Donald Trump’s when he realized which way the wind was blowing. (“I didn’t want to be part of that misery pie,” he said of the dreary vibe at the Clinton event.) Another turning point came earlier this year when, he claims, Chelsea Clinton snubbed him at Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar in Manhattan, leading him to call Donald Trump Jr., who offered to come to him right away.
This story, like Baron’s book, is arresting in its picture of shameless, unvarnished thirst. White and Eure mouth some talking points about disliking “identity politics” and valuing “authenticity.” Like a lot of Trump apologists, White insists the president isn’t racist because African-American employment figures have improved during his administration. But the lurid opportunism that’s driving him and his husband to embrace Trump is obvious. Such opportunism is far from rare; it’s just not often that we see it exhibited so starkly.
Trump is hardly the first politician to attract self-serving followers — White and Eure, after all, used to be Clintonites. (The guest list at their lavish wedding, The Times once wrote, “read like a telephone book, if the White Pages printed a version containing only the rich and influential.”) But Trump is unique as a magnet for grifters, climbers and self-promoters, in part because decent people won’t associate with him. With the exception of national security professionals sticking around to stop Trump from blowing up the world, there are two kinds of people in the president’s orbit — the immoral and the amoral. There are sincere nativists, like Bannon and senior adviser Stephen Miller, and people of almost incomprehensible insincerity.
In many ways, the insincere Trumpists are the most frustrating. Because they don’t really believe in Trump’s belligerent nationalism and racist conspiracy theories, we keep expecting them to feel shame or remorse. But they’re not insincere because they believe in something better than Trumpism. Rather, they believe in very little. They are transactional in a way that makes no psychological sense to those of us who see politics as a moral drama; they might as well all be wearing jackets saying, “I really don’t care, do u?”
Baron’s book helped me grasp what public life is about for such people. “I loved being in the middle of something big, and the biggest thing in my life was Ralph,” she wrote in one of her more plaintive passages. “Without him, I was nobody.” Such a longing for validation is underrated as a political motivator. Senator Lindsey Graham, another insincere Trumpist, once justified his sycophantic relationship with the president by saying, “If you knew anything about me, I want to be relevant.” Some people would rather be on the wrong side than on the outside.
Protestors holding pictures of people who died from use of paint removers, including Drew Wynne, protest outside a Portland, Maine, Lowe’s store on May 10, 2018. They were trying to persuade the retailer to stop selling paint strippers containing methylene chloride
The voluntary action of large retailers is a positive sign for consumers concerned if their health in light of inaction by the government. The takeaway of this fragmented outcome of action is an old one. Corporate money is powerful. Corporate fiscal interests outweigh public health. Most unfortunately, and disappointedly, the human instinct to protect one another is overpowered by the capitulation to greed and fear of losing political stature by government employees and elected officials.
All of this is most evident in the current administration, but it’s nothing new.
Via NPR
In October 2017, Drew Wynne collapsed inside a walk-in refrigerator at his coffee business in North Charleston, S.C. By the time his business partner found him crumpled on the floor, Wynne was dead. He had suffocated on a chemical called methylene chloride.
The 31-year-old’s death is one of dozens blamed on popular paint removers sold under the brand names Goof-Off, Strypeeze, Klean Strip and Jasco among others.
In recent months, some retailers have said they will stop selling products that contain methylene chloride, also known as DCM, and a second chemical, N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, or NMP. But under the Trump administration, federal regulators have repeatedly delayed a ban that has been in the works for years.
The EPA began a risk assessment of methylene chloride in 2014. In January 2017 the agency proposed banning the use of methylene chloride and NMP in paint removers. In the proposed rule, the agency wrote that the chemicals posed “unreasonable risks” to consumers.
Since 1980, more than 50 deaths had been attributed to methylene chloride, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity and Slate.
Proponents say Washington State is a good place to try out carbon reduction ideas because it has abundant hydropower and a waning reliance on fossil fuels. The coal-fired power plant near Centralia, Wash., is scheduled to start shutting down in the next few years.
Thing about these initiatives is that they are rooted in the idea of big coal funding worthwhile projects towards conservation and other programs that are designed to bring money back to the states and communities they serve. Naysayers don’t get this because of mistrust of government spending. Call it a tax. Call it a fee. The concept is the same. It’s smart and makes sense. There’s lots of money out there to be had from the coffers of these big company fat cat polluters who have sucked this country dry and lied and exploited people and this planet long enough. Voters and residents in these states need to understand that sometimes a smaller sacrifice can yield much higher benefits for all. If not right away, then often in the nearer future. The lack of true education of issues with voters in this country is a critical reason smart legislation often doesn’t get done. It’s not just politics. It’s about intelligence.
By Kirk Johnson, NYTimes
CENTRALIA, Wash. — The last coal mine in Washington State closed down about a decade ago in Centralia, about 65 miles south of Seattle, leaving scars on the land and the local economy. Now, a solar electricity project — perhaps the largest in the state — is planned for the same location, by the same company that once ran the mine.
Bob Guenther sees that as a sign that the struggling stretch of Washington State where he has lived most of his life can find a new way forward.
“That’s the vision, a clean energy hub,” said Mr. Guenther, 74, who worked for three decades at a coal-fired power plant in Centralia that is scheduled to start shutting down in a few years. “It’s time for a new economy, and we’re going to have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and do everything we can to get it.”
One piece of that transformation, Mr. Guenther said, will be decided on Election Day by people across the state, who will vote on whether to charge companies and utilities for their carbon emissions. The proposed carbon fees, aimed at curbing climate change by making the burning of fossil fuels more expensive, would be the first such state initiative in the nation, and other states are closely watching the election outcome.
The issue here, the answer, and the question, lies in demand. It is the end user, the consumers, who will dictate the success or failure of this potential reality of tech growth. If you look around, interview, or talk, to people, your friends, family, those in all age groups, and demographics, the clues to why this is happening, and perhaps, bound to get much worse, are evident. People. Buyers. They don’t care. They don’t see the threat. They don’t understand the threat. Not to extrapolate too much, but I am quite sure, that if we examine the age range, education, and the psychological profiles of these type of tech/appliance buyers, we will find answers, not only, for why this grim invasive tech reality is upon us, but also, why many other destructive societal, political, and environmental crises are headed our way.
More than 40 years ago, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft with a vision for putting a personal computer on every desk.
No one really believed them, so few tried to stop them. Then before anyone realized it, the deed was done: Just about everyone had a Windows machine, and governments were left scrambling to figure out how to put Microsoft’s monopoly back in the bottle.
This sort of thing happens again and again in the tech industry. Audacious founders set their sights on something hilariously out of reach — Mark Zuckerberg wants to connect everyone — and the very unlikeliness of their plans insulates them from scrutiny. By the time the rest of us catch up to their effects on society, it’s often too late to do much about them.
It is happening again now. In recent years, the tech industry’s largest powers set their sights on a new target for digital conquest. They promised wild conveniences and unimaginable benefits to our health and happiness. There’s just one catch, which often goes unstated: If their novelties take off without any intervention or supervision from the government, we could be inviting a nightmarish set of security and privacy vulnerabilities into the world. And guess what. No one is really doing much to stop it.
The industry’s new goal? Not a computer on every desk nor a connection between every person, but something grander: a computer inside everything, connecting everyone.
Cars, door locks, contact lenses, clothes, toasters, refrigerators, industrial robots, fish tanks, sex toys, light bulbs, toothbrushes, motorcycle helmets — these and other everyday objects are all on the menu for getting “smart.” Hundreds of small start-ups are taking part in this trend — known by the marketing catchphrase “the internet of things” — but like everything else in tech, the movement is led by giants, among them Amazon, Apple and Samsung.
For instance, Amazon last month showed off a microwave powered by Alexa, its voice assistant. Amazon will sell the microwave for $60, but it is also selling the chip that gives the device its smarts to other manufacturers, making Alexa connectivity a just-add-water proposition for a wide variety of home appliances, like fans and toasters and coffee makers. And this week, both Facebook and Google unveiled their own home “hub” devices that let you watch videos and perform other digital tricks by voice.
You might dismiss many of these innovations as pretty goofy and doomed to failure. But everything big in tech starts out looking silly, and statistics show the internet of things is growing quickly. It is wiser, then, to imagine the worst — that the digitization of just about everything is not just possible but likely, and that now is the time to be freaking out about the dangers.
“I’m not pessimistic generally, but it’s really hard not to be,” said Bruce Schneier, a security consultant who explores the threats posed by the internet of things in a new book, “Click Here to Kill Everybody.”
Mr. Schneier argues that the economic and technical incentives of the internet-of-things industry do not align with security and privacy for society generally. Putting a computer in everything turns the whole world into a computer security threat — and the hacks and bugs uncovered in just the last few weeks at Facebook and Google illustrate how difficult digital security is even for the biggest tech companies. In a roboticized world, hacks would not just affect your data but could endanger your property, your life and even national security.
Mr. Schneier says only government intervention can save us from such emerging calamities. He calls for reimagining the regulatory regime surrounding digital security in the same way the federal government altered its national security apparatus after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Among other ideas, he outlines the need for a new federal agency, the National Cyber Office, which he imagines researching, advising and coordinating a response to threats posed by an everything-internet.
“I can think of no industry in the past 100 years that has improved its safety and security without being compelled to do so by government,” he wrote. But he conceded that government intervention seems unlikely at best. “In our government-can’t-do-anything-ever society, I don’t see any reining in of the corporate trends,” he said.
Those trends are now obvious. It used to be difficult to add internet connectivity to home devices, but in the last few years the cost and complexity of doing so have plummeted. Today, off-the-shelf minicomputers like the Arduino can be used to turn just about any household object “smart.” Systems like the one Amazon is offering promise to accelerate the development of internet-of-things devices even further.
At a press event last month, an Amazon engineer showed how easily a maker of household fans could create a “smart” fan using Amazon’s chip, known as the Alexa Connect Kit. The kit, which Amazon is testing with some manufacturers, would simply be plugged into the fan’s control unit during assembly. The manufacturer also has to write a few lines of code — in the example of the fan, the Amazon engineer needed just a half-page of code.
And that’s it. The fan’s digital bits (including security and cloud storage) are all handled by Amazon. If you buy it from Amazon, the fan will automatically connect with your home network and start obeying commands issued to your Alexa. Just plug it in.
This system illustrates Mr. Schneier’s larger argument, which is that the cost of adding computers to objects will get so small that it will make sense for manufacturers to connect every type of device to the internet.
Sometimes, smarts will lead to conveniences — you can yell at your microwave to reheat your lunch from across the room. Sometimes it will lead to revenue opportunities — Amazon’s microwave will reorder popcorn for you when you’re running low. Sometimes smarts are used for surveillance and marketing, like the crop of smart TVs that track what you watch for serving up ads.
Even if the benefits are tiny, they create a certain market logic; at some point not long from now, devices that don’t connect to the internet will be rarer than ones that do.
The trouble, though, is that business models for these devices don’t often allow for the kind of continuing security maintenance that we are used to with more traditional computing devices. Apple has an incentive to keep writing security updates to keep your iPhone secure; it does so because iPhones sell for a lot of money, and Apple’s brand depends on keeping you safe from digital terrors.
But manufacturers of low-margin home appliances have little such expertise, and less incentive. That’s why the internet of things has so far been synonymous with terrible security — why the F.B.I. had to warn parents last year about the dangers of “smart toys,” and why Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, has identified smart devices as a growing threat to national security.
An Amazon representative told me that the company was building security into the core of its smart technologies. The Connect Kit, the company said, lets Amazon maintain the digital security of a smart device — and Amazon is very likely to be better at security than many manufacturers of household appliances. As part of its cloud business, the company also offers a service for companies to audit the security of their internet-of-things services.
The Internet of Things Consortium, an industry group that represents dozens of companies, did not respond to an inquiry.
Mr. Schneier is painting government intervention not as a panacea but as a speed bump, a way for us humans to catch up to the technological advances. Regulation and government oversight slow down innovation — that’s one reason techies don’t like it. But when uncertain global dangers are involved, taking a minute isn’t a terrible idea.
Connecting everything could bring vast benefits to society. But the menace could be just as vast. Why not go slowly into the uncertain future?
I’ve believed in this a long time. Exercise and training is a monotonous bore fest only accomplished through discipline and cold commitment. Not the most inspiring motivators. Sports and games are actually “fun!” They build camaraderie, healthy (hopefully) competitive spirit, and social connections.
Ryan “China” McCarney has played sports his entire life, but sometimes he has to force himself to show up on the field to play pick-up soccer with his friends.
“I’m dreading and I’m anticipating the worst. But I do it anyway. And then, it’s a euphoric sensation when you’re done with it because you end up having a great time,” says McCarney.
McCarney was just 22 when he had his first panic attack. As a college and professional baseball player, he says getting help was stigmatized. It took him six years to get professional support. He still struggles with depression and social anxiety, but says exercising helps him — especially when it’s with his teammates.
Research shows exercise can ease things like panic attacks or mood and sleep disorders, and a recent study in the journal, Lancet Psychiatry, found that popular team sports may have a slight edge over the other forms of physical activity.
The researchers analyzed CDC survey data from 1.2 million adults and found — across age, gender, education status and income — people who exercised reported fewer days of bad mental health than those who didn’t. And those who played team sports reported the fewest.
One of the study’s authors, Adam Chekroud, an assistant adjunct professor at Yale’s School of Medicine, thinks team activity could add another layer of relief for sufferers of mental illness.
He says there are biological, cognitive and social aspects to mental illness.
“Some sports might just be hitting on more of those elements than other sports,” he says. “If you just run on a treadmill for example, it’s clear that you’re getting that biological stimulation. But perhaps there are other elements of depression that you’re not going to be tapping into.”
Now, this study only shows an association between group exercise and improved mental health, and can’t prove that the one causes the other. But, given what is known about depression in particular, it adds up, says Jack Raglin, a professor in the department of kinesiology in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, Bloomington.
People who are depressed often isolate themselves, he says, so exercising in a group setting, “can help alleviate symptoms and deal with this very pernicious symptom of depression.”
Group exercise or team sports might also have an edge over other forms of exercise because they add an element of accountability, says Raglin. He did a study finding that couples who started an exercise program together had a lower dropout rate than those who started one on their own.
The study showed that “very simple forms of social support can be beneficial,” he says.
Scientists don’t know the exact mechanism that makes exercise elevate mood and decrease anxiety, but there is a body of research to show that it does work on the short and long term.
“If you conceptualize exercise as a pill it means, well it’s a rather small pill and easy to take and easy to tolerate,” says Raglin.
One limitation of the Lancet Psychiatry study is the data is based on patients self-reporting their symptoms. Dr. Antonia Baum, a psychiatrist and the past president of the International Society for Sports Psychiatry says patients don’t always give an accurate picture of their mental health. She says the study is an important step in this research field, but the conclusions shouldn’t be taken as scientific gospel.
“We are animals. We are meant to move and if we don’t, a lot of systems slow down, including our mood and cognition,” says Baum. “So it makes intuitive sense that exercise is beneficial, but it’s nice to try to start to wrap our arms around being able to quantify and qualify that in some ways.”
Baum says she works with each of her patients to incorporate exercise into their lives. And she says this study will be a good jumping off point for more research on team sports and mental illness.
But, Baum and other researchers say getting someone who is depressed to start exercising is easier said than done.
“It’s all well and good to conclude that exercise whether it’s done as a solo or a group pursuit is beneficial, but to get patients to do it is another matter and when you have a depressed patient motivation is often lacking,” she says.
Chekroud says getting patients in general to stick to any kind of therapy is challenging.
“It’s not just exercises that people stop doing, they also stop taking medications. They stopped showing up for therapy,” he says. “Adherence is a big problem in health care right now,”
He says the study’s findings could lead to more tools to help people reduce the overall burden of mental illness, now the leading contributor to the global burden of disability.
“The field is really crying out for things that we can do to help people with mental health issues,” says Chekroud.
For McCarney, team sports have helped him get a handle on his symptoms, he says. Before social gatherings, he often feels claustrophobic and panicked, but when he works through the anxiety and gets onto the field, he says it’s always worth it.
“It just gets you around people which I think is another huge thing when you’re trying to maybe break out of a depressive cycle,” he says.
How to get started
For some people, the idea of joining a team or any kind of group fitness activity is terrifying. Here are a few tips for getting started.
Find a sports ambassador. Raglin recommends finding a “sports ambassador,” a friend who can connect you with a group sport or activity. The friend can get you up to speed on the sport and what’s expected of you. Team sports may feel like a leap of faith, says Baum. But, she says the rewards are worth it. “It’s like playing in an orchestra — the sum being greater than the parts — truly thrilling when it all comes together,” she says.
Match your skill level. It’s not hard to find amateur sports teams to join, on sites like meetup.com. A lot of workplaces also have team sport activities, but Raglin says you make sure the skill level is right for you. You’re more likely to have a good experience and want to go back. “There is nothing worse than being on a team where the skill or intensity of the players is way above or below your own level or the level of competition you were looking for,” Raglin says.
Join a run or bike club. If you’re not into team games, go to your local run shop or bike shop to find run communities, bike clubs or community rides to join. Raglin recommends the November Project, which is a free fitness program with chapters in major cities around the world that hosts workouts.
Put money on the line. If you really aren’t into team activities, Baum says getting a personal trainer or signing up for a gym can “help add a social element, and that all important accountability.”
Try the obvious thing first. Baum says to look at the activities you’ve done throughout your life and think about which ones worked best for you. She says she sometimes takes her patients running or walking with her for a therapy session to start modeling the types of exercises that could work for them.
Banded bullfrogs, native to Southeast Asia (and not yet endangered), on their thrones of chanterelle, lobster and shiitake mushrooms.
For ages, they have been symbols in human culture — of fertility, gastronomy and now the alt-right movement. But these noble amphibians are declining in numbers.
The headline is, at once, depressing, serving as one of the many coals on the simmering fire that will burn together to end our planet. It’s a good read anyway. Colorful, and uncommonly deep, on the subjects of conservation, respect for living things, and endangerment. All too familiar, and, like most outcomes of the past, likely to get worse.
By Ligaya Mishan, Via NYTimes
THE DUSKY GOPHER FROG, once endemic to the longleaf pine savannas of Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana — and now listed among the 100 most endangered species on earth — is tiny, dark and warty. The creature is often described as both secretive and shockingly loud, with a rumbling, back-of-the-throat mating call that is uncannily close to the human snore. It hides from the sun almost its whole life, finding shelter in burned-out tree stumps. And although it’s armed against danger (its glands secrete poison), in the presence of a predator, the three-inch-long frog lifts its front legs to cover its eyes, like a child pretending to be invisible: You can’t see it if it can’t see you.
As of 2015, around 135 dusky gopher frogs were estimated to remain in the wild, mostly at a single pond in Mississippi, their breeding sites fragmented by new roads and the timber industry. The fate of the species may lie in the hands of the Supreme Court, which, as it begins a new term in October, will consider as its first case Weyerhaeuser Co. v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service. The lawsuit concerns the government’s designation of privately owned land in Louisiana as a critical habitat for the endangered frogs, setting property rights (and a potential $34 million loss in development value for the $27 billion Weyerhaeuser Company) against environmental conservation.
One study estimates that since the 1970s, around 200 frog species have disappeared, with a projected loss of hundreds more in the next century. Frogs are under threat on nearly every continent: from the French Pyrenees to the Central American rain forests to the Sierra Nevada in California. Some species, like the dusky gopher frog, have been depleted by human encroachment on their habitats. But the decimation that started 50 years ago was largely the work of the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which thickens a frog’s skin, hindering the animal’s ability to absorb water and oxygen and to maintain a balanced flow of electrolytes, leading to heart failure. Once infected, entire populations can collapse in a single season.
No one knows exactly how the disease spread, but it was likely carried unwittingly by humans from one country to the next, or by the female African clawed frogs that were shipped around the world for laboratory experiments and, until the early 1970s, hospital pregnancy tests. (In the test, a frog was injected with a woman’s urine, which, if she was pregnant, would contain an ovary-stimulating hormone that caused the frog to lay eggs.) Live frogs, potential carriers of the disease, continue to be moved across borders into nonnative habitats; in the first decade of the 21st century, the United States imported nearly 48 million pounds of them, some destined to become exotic pets, others winding up on dining tables.
More than three billion frogs are eaten worldwide each year, some 4,000 tons by the French and half that by Americans, who tend to prefer them patted with flour and sautéed in browned butter. These are mostly farmed frogs and thus not as vulnerable to extinction, but the circumstances in which they’re bred and exported may contribute to the spread of disease. And while in some parts of Asia the whole frog — minus the skin, which contains toxins — is submitted to the pot and boiled for soup, in many cases only the hind legs are used for food, meaning the bulk of the body goes into the garbage.
According to one study, around 200 frog species have disappeared since the 1970s.
Photographs by Kyoko Hamada. Styled by Victoria Petro-Conroy.
It’s an ignoble end for an animal that, despite its diminutive size, has held an exalted role over the ages in almost every culture. Frogs have been revered as emissaries of the divine (because of their regenerative powers) and feared as witches’ familiars, noxious and baleful. They have also been beloved as our stand-ins, infiltrating the stories we tell about ourselves, appearing as tricksters and fools, pompous kings and yearning commoners. Their value isn’t merely symbolic: Their croaks were the music in hundreds of early Japanese verses, until the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho gave them physical presence — and comic power — in the famous 1686 haiku: “Old pond / Frog jumps in / Water-sound.” Their omnipresence in our fables speaks to their centrality in sustaining the world around us. In science class, they are our introduction to biology, dissected to reveal life’s inner mysteries. Toxins in their skin may yield new antibiotics and painkillers.
More fundamentally, frogs are linchpins in the ecosystem, both predator and prey. And they are our watchmen, keeping vigil over our ponds, marshes, lakes and streams, our meadows and our woods, the quality of our water and our air. “If they go silent, there could be bad stuff happening,” says Christopher J. Raxworthy, a herpetologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Like honeybees, whose colonies began to collapse en masse across the United States a decade ago, frogs are portents of the greater ills that could befall our environment — and us.
AS AMPHIBIANS, frogs lead double lives, in water and on land, starting out as tadpoles equipped with gills and tails, which are reabsorbed into their bodies as they grow lungs and limbs. The seasonal emergence of frogs prophesies rain, essential for crops and survival, and their role in spring’s awakening may explain why early Christians used images of them to celebrate resurrection. In frogs’ prodigious fertility — they lay tens of thousands of eggs each mating season — the ancient Egyptians saw abundance; the goddess of fertility, Heqet, is often depicted as a frog-headed woman, and the hieroglyph for the numeral 100,000 was a tadpole. But too many frogs, and they become a plague.
It’s this duality that has ultimately endeared them to us, for these creatures hold out the promise of human transformation, the ability to shed an ugly skin and reveal a hidden self. Part of the appeal of Kermit the Frog is his status as an Everyman: small, far from powerful, but pure of heart. Even his latter-day counterpart Pepe the Frog was originally a good-natured slacker, first drawn in a 2005 comic strip by Matt Furie, before being co-opted as a symbol of the alt-right movement, whose members seem to have conflated Pepe with Kek, the frog-headed Egyptian god representing the darkness before the world was born. (Furie killed off Pepe last year to prevent further misappropriation.)
Another cultural invasion of frogs occurred last winter, when one of the most downloaded smartphone apps in Asia was Tabikaeru (Journey Frog), a game featuring an amphibian that spends much of its time reading in a cozy hut, then wanders off for an indeterminate amount of time, occasionally sending home snapshots. This unfolds without any human input; players do little more than pack food for the frog’s journeys and pine for the little nomad to come back — a comforting inevitability, as kaeru, the Japanese word for frog, sounds almost exactly like the word for return. Tabikaeru is particularly popular in China, where the characters for frog and child are both pronounced “wa” in Mandarin, with only a slight difference in tone.
BUT THESE VIRTUAL FROGS may soon be all we have left. The rate of decline is particularly startling given that, until now, amphibians have outlasted most of life on Earth. “They’re survivors,” says Jennifer B. Pramuk, a herpetologist and animal curator at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, Wash. Their ancestors evolved some 350 million years ago, and they have persisted through three global mass extinctions, including the Permian extinction 251 million years ago, which is known among scientists as the Great Dying because of the number of species lost: an estimated 80 to 96 percent in the oceans and 70 percent on land. Frogs — which separated from salamanders and emerged as a distinct order, Anura, between 240 and 275 million years ago — have been resilient, but their permeable skins are highly sensitive to changes in water quality and temperature.
When we grieve over frogs’ loss and the global degradation it suggests, we’re also mourning a kind of strange, singular natural beauty. Among those now extinct is the golden toad, of which the males were orange-skinned and bright as flame, once prolific breeders in the Monteverde cloud forest of Costa Rica. In 1989, a single male was counted. The next year, there were none. The southern gastric brooding frog, indigenous to the mountains of Queensland in eastern Australia, thrilled herpetologists with its unusual reproductive system: Females swallowed their eggs, which hatched in the stomach, only to be vomited into the world as fully formed froglets. The creature’s final appearance was in 1981.
Conservation efforts have succeeded in reviving a few species. Not long after the Kihansi spray toad, sunny yellow and smaller than a postage stamp, lost its home in the misty wetlands of Tanzania to a hydroelectric dam in 2000, 499 of them were airlifted to the Bronx Zoo. Within three years, only two toads were left at the original Tanzanian site. But by 2010, the rescued toads had spawned a thriving 4,000-strong population at the Bronx Zoo and the Toledo Zoo in Ohio; 2,500 were reintroduced to Tanzania two years later. Zoos may be the key to frogs’ survival, not only nurturing but proselytizing for them, so that a charmed public recognizes their worth.
Without frogs as a predator, mosquitoes and other invertebrates, themselves carriers of disease, will multiply. “It’s another chink in the armor of the ecosystem,” Pramuk says. Gone, too, will be the spring choruses, frogs calling for their mates. Pramuk still remembers when she finally made it to the Costa Rican cloud forest in 1995, six years after the sighting of the last golden toad, one of her favorite species, which she’d studied only on paper. She had hope: Sometimes amphibians thought extinct have suddenly reappeared. “You always think, ‘Maybe it will show itself to me,’” she says. So she stood and waited, listening to the silence. Frogs are the heralds of dusk, their evening song laying the day to rest. Without them, it is only night.
Hitler in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935), a “documentary” largely staged. Credit: The Film Preserve
Uh huh…a major buzzkill. But, it happened. Uh huh…yeah. Translation not necessary. Only the stamped memory and awareness of what followed. The 4:43 trailer is all but enough to watch, but there’s nearly two hours more of it in the finished film, reflecting the near decade of real life horror. A cold look at history would show this is just another serving of humanity’s dark side, spanning nothing less than centuries more of equal atrocities. What do we do with that, then?
Critics Consensus: Triumph of the Will is impossible to separate from its repugnant political context — and impossible to deny as a powerfully made piece of cinematic propaganda.
Five years ago, Finca El Valle, a small, family-run coffee farm south of Antigua, Guatemala, was producing 140,000 pounds of superior-quality Arabica for a select handful of America’s premier specialty-coffee roasters.
An outbreak of coffee leaf rust, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, hit the celebrated coffee-producing region in 2012, and by 2014 it had infected the entire farm. That year El Valle harvested a meager 28,000 pounds of coffee, an 80 percent drop. The next harvests were even smaller. With the lowest coffee prices in a dozen years, reviving the farm has been deeply challenging.
“We are in the middle of the biggest coffee crisis of our time,” said the Guatemalan producer and exporter Josué Morales, who works with over 1,300 growers.
Central America, where smallholders with less than 7.5 acres of land produce 80 percent of the region’s coffee, has been particularly hard hit by rust. Some 70 percent of the farms have been affected, and over 1.7 million coffee workers have lost their jobs. Many are leaving the coffee lands to find work elsewhere.
“The problem is not just the rust; it’s the rust and catastrophically low coffee prices,” says Stuart McCook, author of the upcoming Coffee is Not Forever: A Global History of the Coffee Rust. “It’s difficult for farmers to weather both.”
For observers of coffee history such as McCook there are strong parallels to another outbreak.
In 1869, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon) was one of the world’s largest coffee producers, exporting over 100 million pounds annually. A new railway connected the coffee-producing center with the coast, a steady flow of cheap labor was coming from South India, and market prices were high. With a growing global demand for coffee, the future of the island’s principle industry seemed assured.
Louis C.K., the comic who in November admitted to having masturbated in front of female colleagues, tested out new material recently at the Comedy Cellar.
Thoughtfully written. Asks questions that need answering.
He’s baaa-aaack. Louis C.K., the comic who in November admitted to having masturbated in front of female colleagues, climbed back onstage and tested out new material at the Comedy Cellar on Sunday night. “Comeback” is not the right word for what is being floated here. A comeback implies a hero’s journey — an adventure, a transformation, a triumphant return. This feels more like a malignancy. We try to cut men like him out of public life, but nine months later, we get a call with the bad news.
The spotlight Louis C.K. stepped back into must have felt dim enough. He took the stage for 15 minutes in front of 115 people or so. But fame — or infamy — can’t be contained by space and time. The audience for an intimate set is now the world. What he says to the crowd he says to all of us. If we don’t like a television show, we can change the channel, but we can’t turn off our awareness of a media figure, not anymore. The thundering echo chamber built by mass and social media ensures that we’ll be conscious of his every move.
When Louis C.K. performed that set, he slithered back into our minds. He strode into the sightline of his fellow comedians, of the women who have been harassed and belittled and silenced at work, and of all the other people who were just going about their days and minding their own business. He plopped himself right down in the middle of the public consciousness and shared his thoughts about, reportedly, parades. He became a thing we had to deal with.
The burden, of course, weighs heaviest on the women he targeted in the first place. Whenever a harasser resurfaces, his victims’ names are publicly reattached to him, the things he did reanimated and trotted back out. These women are bombarded with demands and threats and inquiries like, Hello, I am a producer from “X Morning Show,” can you please follow me back so that I can formally request that you get into a black car and put on a coral lipstick and tell the cameras about the worst thing that ever happened to you? Does a 7 a.m. call time work?
So what do we do with the men who have scurried out of the limelight since the Harvey Weinstein story broke last fall and the floodgates opened? Anyone who publicly expresses discomfort with Louis C.K.’s reappearance has inevitably been pressured to resolve the entire extrajudicial framework of wrongs in 2018: If he can’t tell jokes at the Comedy Cellar, where can he? Should he just never appear in public again? Stop working? Live under a bridge? Die?
Anyone willing to seriously grapple with these questions should send an invoice to the culture. It’s exhausting to even think about how much effort we will expend puzzling over these glamorous celebrity spokesmen of the offender class. After all, we are only really capable of banishing them to one place, which is a very nice home where they can live out the rest of their days eating their money.
Still, the question is a little bit interesting. These men represent a facet of abuse that we haven’t figured out how to address. It’s not just that these men abused people, or that they abused their power. When a celebrity offends, it affects more than just his direct targets. The act expands and refracts across the culture. All of the energy the public has invested in this person — the time we spent taking his art seriously, laughing at his jokes, growing close to his persona, processing our lives through his stories — curdles into the grotesque realization of our unwitting complicity in his abuse. What do we do with that?
The potential remedies floated by some feminist commentators in recent days are telling. If Louis C.K. is looking for redemption he should go tell his jokes at a “nursing home or a hospital or a homeless shelter.” Or he should give up and apply for a job at the Gap. Banning bad men from creative fields and offloading them on retail workers and the elderly hardly seems like the best way to prevent future harm. There are many shades of power still available to these men and as many methods for them to abuse it. What these provocations do suggest is that we are grasping for a punishment that seeks to mend a more psychic, public wound — a type of harm we are still processing ourselves.
We are, it’s often noted, living in an economy of attention. We assign value to things by allotting our hours and minutes: the videos we watch, the people we notice, the tabs we open and the ones we close. The idea, suggested by some this week, that Louis C.K. has “served his time” is very funny, because of course he hasn’t experienced what that usually means, which is going toprison. But it’s just a little apt, too. When our greatest commodity is attention, one way to conceive of societal payment is for an abuser to simply refrain from calling attention to himself; to give us the time to not think of him at all.
This is why costume jewelry is best avoided. Certainly, anything from China.Stick with quality metals and designs from individual artisans, you know, or at least, have a reputation.
October 11, 2018, CBS News
LOS ANGELES — Jewelry with the toxic metal cadmium is showing up on the shelves of national retailers including Ross, Nordstrom Rack and Papaya, according to newly released test results.
Analysis done for the nonprofit Center for Environmental Health revealed some jewelry sold with women’s dresses and shirts was nearly pure cadmium, which can cause cancer and reproductive harm after prolonged exposure.
Consumer advocates were hopeful cadmium had disappeared from the U.S. jewelry market following changes prompted by a 2010 Associated Press investigation that found Chinese manufacturers were using the metal to make kids’ jewelry. States including California outlawed cadmium in children’s jewelry, and testing by the center found the chemical had virtually disappeared from jewelry by 2012.
No laws address cadmium in adult jewelry, however, and last year the center decided to check those products. Lab testing found 31 adult jewelry items purchased from retail stores were at least 40 percent cadmium, and most were more than 90 percent, according to results shared exclusively with the AP.
California’s law allows no more than 0.03 percent cadmium in children’s jewelry. The precise health risk from the tested jewelry is unclear because researchers did not assess whether small amounts shed when the jewelry is handled and worn.
Over time, cadmium accumulates in the body and can damage the kidneys and bones. Most exposure happens by ingesting small amounts or by breathing it, most commonly through tobacco, which can contain cadmium. Researchers also have documented some absorption through skin contact, though the phenomenon is not well-studied.
Michael Harbut, a practicing doctor who as a university professor has researched cadmium’s cancer-causing properties, noted that contact can trigger skin rashes including psoriasis.
“Cadmium is bad,” said Harbut, who teaches at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine. “Given a choice between wearing something with cadmium in it, or wearing something without cadmium in it, I would take the product without cadmium.”
The Oakland-based nonprofit bought all the test samples in the San Francisco Bay Area this year or last. The extent to which contaminated jewelry is in stores elsewhere isn’t clear, though a national retailer would not typically limit a product to just one region.
The center said the problem should not be underestimated because of the limited market sampling.
“If you’re the person that buys and is wearing that jewelry, you don’t really care whether it’s a common problem or a rare problem,” said Caroline Cox, senior scientist at the center. “You have a problem.”
Brent Cleaveland, executive director of the Fashion Jewelry and Accessories Trade Association, said he does not believe the test results suggest a larger problem. Most major retailers have a stringent system for testing and analyzing what they sell, he said.
Most of the tainted items were sold at Ross, which operates more than 1,400 stores in 38 states. One pendant from a necklace chain was 100 percent cadmium, according to the testing.
In a written statement, Ross said it is committed to protecting its customers and has “addressed this issue with our supplier.” The retailer would not say whether it pulled suspect jewelry from stores.
The brands found with high cadmium levels in Ross stores include Tacera and Vibe Sportswear.
Xinwei Xie, chief executive officer at Trend Textile Inc., which owns Tacera, declined to comment when reached by phone. The Skate Group Inc., which owns Vibe Sportswear, did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Papaya said it considers cadmium in its products a serious problem. It operates more than 100 retail locations nationwide.
Steven Kim, an attorney representing Papaya, said the company has recalled the products where contamination was found and stopped buying from the manufacturer in China.
“Our manufacturers are required to represent and warrant that their products are in legal compliance,” Kim said. “Papaya is very strict and stops doing business with any manufacturer which fails to comply.”Nordstrom spokeswoman Emily Sterken said the company is “reaching out to these vendors to make them aware of the situation and get more information on these items.”The Center for Environmental Health has long used California law to force companies to reduce levels of harmful materials in consumer products, including cadmium and lead in jewelry.
Under the state’s Proposition 65, businesses must inform consumers about significant exposures to chemicals that cause cancer or other reproductive harm. The nonprofit has settled Proposition 65 claims against 36 companies, including Gap Inc. and Target Corp., which agreed to not sell jewelry with more than 0.03 percent cadmium.
That limit for children’s jewelry took effect after the AP reported in 2010 that some Chinese jewelry manufacturers were substituting cadmium for lead, the use of which Congress clamped down on following a string of imported-product safety scandals.
The jewelry industry helped write voluntary U.S. standards following the AP investigation, but the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission did not mandate any cadmium limits.
What the world needs now? Handwritten cards and letters.
No other written method of communication shows you care as much about connecting personally, than pen, ink, and, when called for, a stamp. It asks for more of us, more time, more creativity, and more commitment. That’s a good thing. Whether we realize it or not. Sadly, it appears that most people don’t realize it, haven’t been taught it, or, have long forgotten it.
Besides fame and success, what do all of these people have in common?
Something surprisingly unglamorous and gloriously analog: a love of physical cards and letters. Of notes that need a lick and a stamp instead of a click and a swoosh.
Over the past decade, the number of first-class mail items sent through the Postal Service has dropped by more than 50 percent. Not counting holiday cards and invitations, the average American household receives just 10 pieces of personal mail per year. Nearly half of British children, according to one survey, have never sent a handwritten letter.
In an age of torrential email, incessant group texts and lackadaisical Facebook birthday posts, snail mail has become quaint, almost vintage. But that doesn’t mean its days are over. As a recent CityLab story pointed out, we can save snail mail — if we want to.
David Sedaris, the best-selling author and humorist, is known for writing letters to his fans, his boyfriend and everyone he works with on book tours. He will also send a thank-you note if you have him over for dinner.
“I just feel like it’s classy to do it with real mail,” he said. “It’s too easy to do it on email. And it also doesn’t mean as much.” Not to mention, he added, “It’s nice to be thought of as classy.”
Whether it’s to say thank you, hi or I’m sorry — or to send a Q-tip attached to a sheet of paper, as Mr. Sedaris’s pen pal, the late comedian Phyllis Diller, once did — here’s why it’s time to bring snail mail back.
Writing by hand feels good.
When we write by hand, we retain information better and may even boost our creativity. Plus, because we do it so rarely these days, it can be a welcome respite from typing.
“It’s more fun,” said Margaret Shepherd, a professional calligrapher and author of “The Art of the Handwritten Note.” “It is such a delight to see that ink go on that beautiful paper — to pick out a stamp, to slow down and realize you thanked or consoled somebody in the best way possible.”
The warm fuzzies that accompany writing are more than anecdotal. In one study, Steven Toepfer, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Kent State University at Salem, asked participants to compose three “letters of gratitude” over the span of a month.
They could write to anyone, as long as the content was positive. With each letter, the writers experienced higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, and lower levels of depressive symptoms.
Mr. Toepfer said we all have a base of gratitude inside us, which can lead to positive psychological effects. “But we have to tap into it — and use it — to get its benefits,” he explained. “I think writing letters does that.”
Handwritten notes spread love.
If you want to show you care, snail mail is an effective method. Think about the last time you received a hand-addressed missive — didn’t it make you smile?
Saeideh Heshmati, assistant professor of positive psychology at Claremont Graduate University, recently researched what makes people “feel loved.” She found that “small gestures in everyday life,” like people supporting you without expecting anything back or showing compassion during tough times, were what participants most agreed upon as “loving.”
Since cards require more effort than email, Ms. Heshmati said recipients will likely “feel more loved because you took the time to do that for them.” She added, “It’s the care that comes with it that signals the love.”
Snail mail is, well, slow (and unique).
Whereas emails are something to rush through on the way to Inbox Zero, cards and letters are something to cherish; to set on a desk, to stick to a fridge, to bind into a book for future generations.
In the digital age, we are “assaulted by a barrage of information — much of it having little or no importance,” Florence Isaacs wrote in her book “Just a Note to Say.” “Yet personal words on paper often are saved in a shoe box, becoming a memory to be revisited through the years.”
For proof, look to Letters of Note, a popular site that offers an intimate window into history and the characters who shaped it. While there may someday be an “Emails of Note,” it wouldn’t impart the same romance. After all, the swirl of the letters, the smudges of ink and the pastiche of paper are what brings us into each writer’s world.
You don’t have to be a writer or an artist to send meaningful notes.
Because of snail mail’s novelty, what you say — and what it looks like — often matters less than the act itself.
“My husband sends handwritten notes scratched out with a pencil, and people just sit up and sing,” said Ms. Shepherd, the calligrapher. “They’re so happy to get something in the mail, even if it doesn’t have a lot of production value.”
If you find yourself struggling to find the appropriate words, she recommended keeping it simple and writing as though you are talking to your recipient. If you don’t know who to write, start with the children in your life or reach out to deserving strangers through initiatives like More Love Letters or Operation Gratitude.
When one of Mr. Sedaris’s friends comes out with a new book or play, he sends a card with specific details like: “I loved it on Page 38 when you did this.”
“I just realize how much it means when somebody goes into details,” he said. “I know it makes me feel good, and it’s not that hard. … A little effort is all it takes.”
Getting started is easier than you think.
Mr. Sedaris is right: Although snail mail requires more work than its digital kin, it’s still not hard.
Avoid the agony of scouring last-minute, overpriced $5 cards in the drugstore by purchasing a set of blank cards to keep at home. Craft fairs and farmers’ markets usually have lovely handmade ones, and even the dollar store sells passable sets. If you have a favorite artist or illustrator, they may have an Etsy or Gumroad shop where you can buy their work printed on blank cards.
Then grab a book of stamps and a nice pen and toss it all into a shoe box. Now you’re ready for snail mail — with minimal hassle. (You can even batch cards at the beginning of each month by scanning your calendar for upcoming birthdays and celebrations.)
The next time you’re tempted to send a congratulatory email or a digital birthday message, try a card instead. If you’re looking for an event to kick you off, consider making this holiday season the one where you offer friends a chance to get on a holiday card list — no strings or reciprocation attached (if that’s O.K. with you) — and send a personal note to each loved one who signs up.
“There’s something permanently charming about getting an envelope in the mail,” said Ms. Shepherd. “It’s as if somebody gift wrapped their words for you.”
Laura Nolan, a software engineer in Ireland, left Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense.
Really important! This is exactly how to truly evaluate a company’s real values, if not, their moral position towards development technologies.
By Kate Conger and Cade Metz, NYTimes Oct. 7, 2018
SAN FRANCISCO — Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, recently became alarmed by reports that the company was developing a search engine for China that would censor content on behalf of the government.
While Dr. Poulson works on search technologies, he had no knowledge of the product, which was code-named Dragonfly. So in a meeting last month with Jeff Dean, the company’s head of artificial intelligence, Dr. Poulson asked if Google planned to move ahead with the product and if his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance in China.
According to Dr. Poulson, Mr. Dean said that Google complied with surveillance requests from the federal government and asked rhetorically if the company should leave the United States market in protest. Mr. Dean also shared a draft of a company email that read, “We won’t and shouldn’t provide 100 percent transparency to every Googler, to respect our commitments to customer confidentiality and giving our product teams the freedom to innovate.”
The next day, Dr. Poulson quit the company. Mr. Dean did not respond to a request for comment, and Google declined to comment.
Across the technology industry, rank-and-file employees are demanding greater insight into how their companies are deploying the technology that they built. At Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as at tech start-ups, engineers and technologists are increasingly asking whether the products they are working on are being used for surveillance in places like China or for military projects in the United States or elsewhere.
That’s a change from the past, when Silicon Valley workers typically developed products with little questioning about the social costs. It is also a sign of how some tech companies, which grew by serving consumers and businesses, are expanding more into government work. And the shift coincides with concerns in Silicon Valley about the Trump administration’s policies and the larger role of technology in government.
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” said Laura Nolan, 38, a senior software engineer who resigned from Google in June over the company’s involvement in Project Maven, an effort to build artificial intelligence for the Department of Defense that could be used to target drone strikes.
All of this has led to growing tensions between tech employees and managers. In recent months, workers at Google, Microsoft and Amazon have signed petitions and protested to executives over how some of the technology they helped create is being used. At smaller companies, engineers have begun asking more questions about ethics.
Jack Poulson, a Google research scientist, quit the company when he found out his work would contribute to censorship and surveillance
And the change is likely to last: Some engineering students have said they are demanding more answers and are asking similar questions, even before they move into the work force.
“What people are looking for — not just employees — they are looking for some clarity,” said Frank Shaw, a Microsoft spokesman. “Are there principles that get applied? Even if you don’t agree with the decision that gets made, if you understand the thinking behind it, it helps a lot.”
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.
The lack of information about what tech employees are working on was recently evident at Clarifai, an artificial intelligence start-up in New York City.
Last year, a small team of Clarifai engineers began working on a project inside a private room at its downtown New York office, said three people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition that they not be identified for fear of retaliation. Paper covered the windows, and employees called the room “The Chamber of Secrets,” in a sly reference to the second Harry Potter novel. Even the eight engineers and researchers working inside the room did not entirely realize the nature of the project, the people said.
When employees asked about the project in meetings, Clarifai’s chief executive, Matt Zeiler, said it was a government project related to “analytics” or “surveillance” and would “save lives,” according to the people.
After employees read documents posted to Clarifai’s internal systems, it became clear that the company had won a contract for Project Maven and that workers were creating something for the Defense Department, the people said. One engineer quit the project immediately after a meeting with the Defense Department where killing was discussed in frank terms, they said.
A Clarifai spokesman said that at the very beginning of the project, the company sat down with those chosen for it to brief them on the nature of the work, and one employee quit the project then. “Every member of Clarifai’s Project Maven team agreed to work on the project, and the two people who chose not to participate were assigned to different efforts across the company,” the spokesman said.
Dr. Poulson, whose work involved incorporating a variety of languages into Google search, said he did not initially think his research could be involved in Dragonfly — until he noticed Chinese had been added to a list of languages for his project.
“Most people don’t know the holistic scope of what they’re building,” said Dr. Poulson, 32, who worked at Google for over two years. “You don’t have knowledge of where it’s going unless you’re sufficiently senior.”
“You can think you’re building technology for one purpose, and then you find out it’s really twisted,” Ms. Nolan said.
The difficulties of knowing what companies are doing with technologies is compounded because engineers at large tech companies often build infrastructure — like algorithms, databases and even hardware — that underpins almost every product a company offers. At Google, for example, a storage system called Colossus is used by Google search, Google Maps and Gmail.
“It would be very difficult for most engineers in Google to be sure that their work wouldn’t contribute to these projects in some way,” said Ms. Nolan, who helped to keep Google’s systems running online smoothly. “My personal feeling was that if the organization is doing something I find ethically unacceptable, then I was contributing to it.”
Yet executives at tech companies have claimed that complete transparency is not possible.
“We’ve always had confidential projects as a company. I think what happened when the company was smaller, you had a higher chance of knowing about it,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said at a staff meeting in August, according to a transcript provided to The New York Times. “I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues.”
Such policies have rippled beyond tech companies. In June, more than 100 students at Stanford, M.I.T. and other top colleges signed a pledge saying they would turn down job interviews with Google unless the company dropped its Project Maven contract. (Google said that month that it would not renew the contract once it expired.)
“We are students opposed to the weaponization of technology by companies like Google and Microsoft,” the pledge stated. “Our dream is to be a positive force in the world. We refuse to be complicit in this gross misuse of power.”
Alex Ahmed, a doctoral candidate in computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, said she organized a student discussion on campus this month to debate whether they should work for tech companies that made decisions they believed to be unethical.
“We’re not given an ethics course. We’re not given a political education,” Ms. Ahmed, 29, said. “It’s impossible for us to do this unless we create the conversations for ourselves.”
Over the summer, she said, students at Northeastern also protested the school’s multimillion-dollar research contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under which it would provide research on technology exports to the agency. A Northeastern spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Bridget Frey, the chief technology officer at the online real estate company Redfin, said job candidates had increasingly raised ethical questions in interviews. This summer, interns questioned Redfin’s chief executive, Glenn Kelman, about whether the way the site displays school information and test scores could contribute to socio-economic divides in neighborhoods. In response, the company said it planned to add more context about the test score information early next year.Employees are now frequently asking, “If you don’t share the information with me, how can I make sure this isn’t happening here?” Ms. Frey said.
As good a read as it is difficult to execute. Take the headline itself, which contains the word, if not offered remedy, contentment. Well, that’s not loaded. Is it? Thing is, its a tough proposition for most (not all) people, at any age, say…over…50? Give or take? Why? Number of reasons. may justified. Really.
Why are they justified? Because life is just hard-ER, without certain things in our lives. Those “things” are another article, another essay. Lets just say, when it comes to these things, where there is more agreement, than disagreement, among rationally, realistically thinking human beings, there’s more truth, than fabrication.
With that, comes the real challenge. Its not going to be the pursuit of a spiritual zen-like stance that magically overcomes the lack of these things, but, a deliberate, almost forced acceptance, and yes, begrudging, acceptance of the particular, but common shortcomings any one of us may feel slighted from. This includes the wealthy, who are not immune to feeling the lack of things beyond the grasp of what money can buy.
Finally, the idea of rising above health problems has always been its own thing. To fight that adversity off even as we age into more physical frustrations and battles is, ironically, easier to do than most of us, or others think. Why? Because its not really in our control. at least, not once it happens. At that point, its in medicine’s hands, doctors, hospitals, viatical oddsmakers, and fate. Where do we go from there? Contentment? Hmmm. Not sure I can work with the one word alone. Too tidy. If only…
The body text is helpful, just not, the quick fix hook in the headline. Look for kinship among positive leaning souls of a like mind. A full sentence that says more to me.
The Secret to Aging Well? Contentment
“Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.”
By Robert W. Goldfarb, NYTimes
At 88, I remain a competitive runner, always sprinting the last hundred yards of a race to cross the finish line with nothing left to give. The finish line of my life is drawing close, and I hope to reach it having given the best of myself along the way. I’ve been training my body to meet the demands of this final stretch. But, I wonder, should I have asked more of my mind?
I have no trouble taking my body to a gym or starting line. I’ve done a good job convincing myself that if I didn’t exercise, I would unleash the many predators that seek their elderly prey on couches, but not on treadmills. The more I sweated, the more likely it was my internist would continue to exclaim, “Keep doing what you’re doing, and I’ll see you next year.” It was my way of keeping at bay the dreaded: “Mr. Goldfarb, I’m afraid I have some bad news.”
My mind, on the other hand, seems less willing to yield to discipline, behaving as though it has a mind of its own. I have dabbled in internet “brain games,” solving algebraic problems flashing past and rerouting virtual trains to avoid crashes. I’ve audited classes at a university, and participated in a neurofeedback assessment of my brain’s electrical impulses. But these are only occasional diversions, never approaching my determination to remain physically fit as I move deeper into old age.
Despite having many friends in their 70s, 80s and 90s, I’ve been far too slow to realize that how we respond to aging is a choice made in the mind, not in the gym.
Some of my healthiest friends carry themselves as victims abused by time. They see life as a parade of disappointments: aches and ailments, confusing technology, children who don’t visit, hurried doctors.
Other friends, many whose aching knees and hips are the least of their physical problems, find comfort in their ability to accept old age as just another stage of life to deal with. I would use the word “heroic” to describe the way they cope with aging as it drains strength from their minds and bodies, though they would quickly dismiss such a term as overstatement.
One such friend recently called from a hospital to tell me a sudden brain seizure had rendered him legally blind. He interrupted me as I began telling him how terribly sorry I was: “Bob, it could have been worse. I could have become deaf instead of blind.”
Despite all the time I spend lifting weights and exercising, I realized I lack the strength to have said those words. It suddenly struck me I’ve paid a price for being a “gym rat.”
If there is one characteristic common to friends who are aging with a graceful acceptance of life’s assaults, it is contentment. Some with life-altering disabilities — my blind friend, another with two prosthetic legs — are more serene and complain less than those with minor ailments. They accept the uncertainties of old age without surrendering to them. A few have told me that the wisdom they’ve acquired over the years has made aging easier to navigate than the chaos of adolescence.
It was clear I lacked, and had to find, the contentment those friends had attained. The hours I spent exercising had given me confidence, but not contentment.
The 30-pound weight I no longer attempt to lift reminds me that not far off is the day when lifting anything, or running anywhere, will be asking too much of my body. My brain would have to become the muscle I counted on to carry me through these final years with the peace and purpose others had found. Aging had to be more than what I saw in a mirror.
But rather than overhauling my life completely in the hopes of undertaking a fundamental change in the way I confronted aging, I felt the place to begin would be to start small, adopting a new approach to situations I encountered every day. A recent lunch provided a perfect example.
I’ve always found it extremely difficult to concentrate when I’m in a noisy setting. At this lunch with a friend in an outdoor restaurant, a landscaper began blowing leaves from underneath the bushes surrounding our table.
Typically, after such a noisy interruption, I would have snapped, “Let’s wait until he’s finished!” then fallen silent. When the roar eventually subsided, my irritation would have drained the conversation of any warmth. The lunch would be remembered for my angry reaction to the clamor, and not for any pleasure it gave the two of us.
It troubled me that even a passing distraction could so easily take me from enjoying lunch with a good friend to a place that gave me no pleasure at all. I wanted this meal to be different and decided to follow the example of friends my age who know they are running out of joyous moments and will let nothing interfere with them. They simply speak louder, accepting the noise for what it is, a temporary irritant.
My years in gyms had taught me to shake off twinges and other distractions, never permitting them to stop my workout or run. I decided to treat the noise as though it were a cramp experienced while doing crunches. I would shake it off instead of allowing it to end our conversation.
I continued talking with my friend, challenging myself to hear the noise, but to hold it at a distance. The discipline so familiar to me in the gym — this time applied to my mind — proved equally effective in the restaurant. It was as though I had taken my brain to a mental fitness center.
Learning to ignore a leaf blower’s roar hardly equips me to find contentment during my passage into ever-deeper old age. But I left the lunch feeling I had at least taken a small first step in changing behavior that stood in the way of that contentment.
Could I employ that same discipline to accept with dignity the inevitable decline awaiting me: frailty, memory lapses, dimming sound and sight, the passing of friends and the looming finish line? Churning legs and a pounding heart had taken me part of the way. But now the challenge was to find that contentment within me. Hoping that contentment will guide me as I make my way along the path yet to be traveled.
Robert W. Goldfarb is a management consultant and the author of “What’s Stopping Me From Getting Ahead?”
The General James M. Gavin Power Plant, a coal-fired facility in Cheshire, Ohio. New rules would weaken restrictions on mercury emissions from coal-burning plants.
Trump Administration Prepares a Major Weakening of Mercury Emissions Rules
By Coral Davenport, NYTimes
The Trump administration has completed a detailed legal proposal to dramatically weaken a major environmental regulation covering mercury, a toxic chemical emitted from coal-burning power plants, according to a person who has seen the document but is not authorized to speak publicly about it.
The proposal would not eliminate the mercury regulation entirely, but it is designed to put in place the legal justification for the Trump administration to weaken it and several other pollution rules, while setting the stage for a possible full repeal of the rule.
Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who is now the acting administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is expected in the coming days to send the proposal to the White House for approval.
The move is the latest, and one of the most significant, in the Trump administration’s steady march of rollbacks of Obama-era health and environmental regulations on polluting industries, particularly coal. The weakening of the mercury rule — which the E.P.A. considers the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth in terms of annual cost to industry — would represent a major victory for the coal industry. Mercury is known to damage the nervous systems of children and fetuses.
The details of the rollback about to be proposed would also represent a victory for Mr. Wheeler’s former boss, Robert E. Murray, the chief executive of the Murray Energy Corporation, one of the nation’s largest coal companies. Mr. Murray, who was a major donor to President Trump’s inauguration fund, personally requested the rollback of the mercury rule soon after Mr. Trump took office, in a written “wish list” he handed to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
The proposal would also hand a victory to the former clients of William Wehrum, the E.P.A.’s top clean air official and the chief author of the plan. Mr. Wehrum worked for years as a lawyer for companies that run coal-fired power plants, and that have long sought such a change.
A spokesman for the E.P.A. did not respond to a request for comment.
The proposal also highlights a key environmental opinion of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, the embattled Supreme Court nominee, whose nomination hearings have gripped the nation in recent days.
The coal industry initially sued to roll back the mercury regulation, and in 2014 its case lost in the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. However, Judge Kavanaugh wrote the dissenting opinion in that case, highlighting questions about the rule’s cost to industry.
Should the legal battle over the proposed regulatory rollback go before the Supreme Court, some observers expect that Judge Kavanaugh, if elevated to a seat on the high court, would side with the coal industry.
Specifically, the new Trump administration proposal would repeal a 2011 finding made by the E.P.A. that when the federal government regulates toxic pollution such as mercury from coal-fired power plants, it must also, when considering the cost to industry of that rule, take into account the additional health benefits of reducing other pollutants as a side effect of implementing the regulation. Under the mercury program, the economic benefits of those health effects, known as “co-benefits,” helped to provide a legal and economic justification for the cost to industry of the regulation.
For example, as the nation’s power plants have complied with rule by installing technology to reduce emissions of mercury, they also created the side benefit of reducing pollution of soot and nitrogen oxide, pollutants linked to asthma and lung disease.
The Obama administration estimated that it would cost the electric utility industry an estimated $9.6 billion a year to install that mercury control technology, making it the most expensive clean air regulation ever put forth by the federal government. It found that reducing mercury brings up to $6 million annually in health benefits — a high number, but not as high as the cost to industry. However, it further justified the regulation by citing an additional $80 billion in health benefits from the additional reduction in soot and nitrogen oxide that occur as a side effect of controlling mercury.
The new proposal directs the E.P.A. to no longer take into account those “co-benefits” when considering the economic impact of a regulation.
Should the proposal become final, it would mean that the mercury rule would, on paper, incur far greater economic cost than it would provide quantifiable health benefits. The Trump administration would then be legally justified in weakening the rule.
And that change could also give companies like Murray Energy a legal justification to sue for its deletion entirely, while giving the E.P.A. the legal basis to craft weaker pollution regulations that no longer take into account the co-benefits of eliminating additional pollutants.
“This is a sweeping attack on considering the benefits of cutting hazardous pollution from coal plants,” said John Walke, a legal expert on the Clean Air Act with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an advocacy group that expects to take a lead role in the legal effort to uphold the mercury standard. “This is the first legal step toward eliminating the standard entirely.”
A spokesman for Murray Energy cheered the expected move.
“E.P.A.’s proposal to revisit the outsized role that so-called ‘co-benefits’ play in the cost-benefit analyses used to justify costly regulations targeting pollutants such as mercury is appropriate and long overdue,” wrote the spokesman, Cody Nett, in an email. He said the process is “nothing less than double-counting,” since the E.P.A. already controls pollutants such as soot and nitrogen oxide in other regulations. He also called on the E.P.A. to review what he called “the questionable scientific foundation” for calculating the co-benefits.
Supporters and opponents of the proposal believe that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold it, particularly if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed. In his 2014 dissent to the mercury ruling, he wrote, “The benefits of this rule are disputed.” He added: “Industry petitioners focus on the reduction in hazardous air pollutant emissions attributable to the regulations, which amount to only $4 to $6 million dollars each year. If those figures are right, the rule costs nearly $1,500 for every $1 of health and environmental benefit produced.”
The following year, in a decision that echoed Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent, the Supreme Court blocked the Obama-era mercury rule, ordering the E.P.A. to conduct a new cost analysis. The Obama administration did so, and ultimately reinstated the rule in 2016.
Murray Energy then sued to block it, but last year, the E.P.A.’s administrator at the time successfully petitioned the United States Circuit Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia to delay the oral arguments for that case, as the Trump administration sought to rewrite the rule entirely.
Singing hymns at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., before an appearance by Donald Trump in 2016.
A nicely written essay on the challenges between well meaning people and our imperfect, if not broken, political system.
The example of the traveler to Scotland, illustrates one of the primary, most enduring themes of how a single individual, and any of us, can be deeply affected and changed by meaningful exposure to other people who live elsewhere.
The historical Christian positions on social issues don’t match up with contemporary political alignments.
By Timothy Keller
Mr. Keller is the founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York.
What should the role of Christians in politics be? More people than ever are asking that question. Christians cannot pretend they can transcend politics and simply “preach the Gospel.” Those who avoid all political discussions and engagement are essentially casting a vote for the social status quo. American churches in the early 19th century that did not speak out against slavery because that was what we would now call “getting political” were actually supporting slavery by doing so. To not be political is to be political.
The Bible shows believers as holding important posts in pagan governments — think of Joseph and Daniel in the Old Testament. Christians should be involved politically as a way of loving our neighbors, whether they believe as we do or not. To work for better public schools or for a justice system not weighted against the poor or to end racial segregation requires political engagement. Christians have done these things in the past and should continue to do so.
Nevertheless, while believers can register under a party affiliation and be active in politics, they should not identify the Christian church or faith with a political party as the only Christian one. There are a number of reasons to insist on this.
One is that it gives those considering the Christian faith the strong impression that to be converted, they need not only to believe in Jesus but also to become members of the (fill in the blank) Party. It confirms what many skeptics want to believe about religion — that it is merely one more voting bloc aiming for power.
Another reason not to align the Christian faith with one party is that most political positions are not matters of biblical command but of practical wisdom. This does not mean that the church can never speak on social, economic and political realities, because the Bible often does. Racism is a sin, violating the second of the two great commandments of Jesus, to “love your neighbor.” The biblical commands to lift up the poor and to defend the rights of the oppressed are moral imperatives for believers. For individual Christians to speak out against egregious violations of these moral requirements is not optional.
However, there are many possible ways to help the poor. Should we shrink government and let private capital markets allocate resources, or should we expand the government and give the state more of the power to redistribute wealth? Or is the right path one of the many possibilities in between? The Bible does not give exact answers to these questions for every time, place and culture.
I know of a man from Mississippi who was a conservative Republican and a traditional Presbyterian. He visited the Scottish Highlands and found the churches there as strict and as orthodox as he had hoped. No one so much as turned on a television on a Sunday. Everyone memorized catechisms and Scripture. But one day he discovered that the Scottish Christian friends he admired were (in his view) socialists. Their understanding of government economic policy and the state’s responsibilities was by his lights very left-wing, yet also grounded in their Christian convictions. He returned to the United States not more politically liberal but, in his words, “humbled and chastened.” He realized that thoughtful Christians, all trying to obey God’s call, could reasonably appear at different places on the political spectrum, with loyalties to different political strategies.
Another reason Christians these days cannot allow the church to be fully identified with any particular party is the problem of what the British ethicist James Mumford calls “package-deal ethics.” Increasingly, political parties insist that you cannot work on one issue with them if you don’t embrace all of their approved positions.
This emphasis on package deals puts pressure on Christians in politics. For example, following both the Bible and the early church, Christians should be committed to racial justice and the poor, but also to the understanding that sex is only for marriage and for nurturing family. One of those views seems liberal and the other looks oppressively conservative. The historical Christian positions on social issues do not fit into contemporary political alignments.
So Christians are pushed toward two main options. One is to withdraw and try to be apolitical. The second is to assimilate and fully adopt one party’s whole package in order to have your place at the table. Neither of these options is valid. In the Good Samaritan parable told in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus points us to a man risking his life to give material help to someone of a different race and religion. Jesus forbids us to withhold help from our neighbors, and this will inevitably require that we participate in political processes. If we experience exclusion and even persecution for doing so, we are assured that God is with us (Matthew 5:10-11) and that some will still see our “good deeds and glorify God” (1 Peter 2:11-12). If we are only offensive or only attractive to the world and not both, we can be sure we are failing to live as we ought.
The Gospel gives us the resources to love people who reject both our beliefs and us personally. Christians should think of how God rescued them. He did it not by taking power but by coming to earth, losing glory and power, serving and dying on a cross. How did Jesus save? Not with a sword but with nails in his hands.
Timothy Keller, founder of the Redeemer Presbyterian churches in New York City, is the author of “Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God’s Mercy,” from which this essay is adapted.
People who ask more questions are better liked by their conversation partners, researchers say.
Many people I have known don’t ask lots of questions in social conversations. Its as if they don’t see the value or potential in attempting to learn something of their conversational partner beyond small time banter. I wonder if they are just self centered, and not really curious about anything or anyone. Personally, I go by the following mantras. 1) Be curious, or be dead; 2) Ask questions, or learn nothing.
For many of us, meeting new people can be an anxiety-inducing affair.
Am I talking too much? Was my handshake too weak? Did I make too much eye contact? Too little? Am I boring? Are they boring, but they’re boring because I’m boring?
It can be a mess! All of our worst social paranoias contained in a single interaction.
But there’s an easy way to get around this, simultaneously coming off as more likable while working to build a deeper, more genuine connection with someone: Ask questions.
A study published last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology analyzed getting-to-know-you conversations between platonic conversation partners, along with face-to-face speed-dating conversations, and found that in both settings “people who ask more questions, particularly follow-up questions, are better liked by their conversation partners.” (It even led to an increase in second dates among the speed-daters.)
Those follow-up questions, the study found, are especially helpful to increase how much we are liked because they show that we are listening sincerely and trying to show we care.
Imagine that! Being a genuine, sincere conversation partner makes people like you more. What a world.
Even more good news: Although people generally tend to reflect on an initial conversation with someone as a negative experience — like ruminating on those “Did I make enough eye contact?” type of questions — it’s thankfully all in our heads, according to a new study published in Psychological Science.
A team of researchers from Yale, Harvard, Cornell and the University of Essex found that after initial interactions “people systematically underestimated how much their conversation partners liked them and enjoyed their company.”
This is called the liking gap, or the difference between how much we think people like us and how much people actually like us.
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The study looked at how relationships evolved between new acquaintances and found that the anxiety and self-doubt of meeting someone new can pervade in any type of relationship, sometimes lasting for months.
“People are often biased by their own internal monologues, which, after social interactions, can be remarkably self-critical and negative,” the authors wrote. They added that people “tend to compare themselves unfavorably with their ideal version of themselves,” torturing themselves with worst-case scenarios and obsessing about how to make things better — even though there’s nothing to make better because it’s all in our heads.
“People can be their own greatest critic, but what is hard for people to see is that others do not have this same perspective on their faults,” the authors wrote.
The lesson: Remember that it’s all in your head. Simply having the knowledge that any self-doubt about an interaction with a new person is unwarranted is a powerful shift in the way we approach new connections. If you feel like someone dislikes you based on a single meeting, odds are that’s just not the case (and they’re probably thinking the same thing).
Just keep asking those questions, listening to the answers and being as genuine as possible. Yes, it’s that easy.
I still drink, but way less than I used to. I started gradually to move away from it some two years ago. I love a good red, but more than a glass is a rarity for me these days. Martinis? Mixed drinks? Beer? Love’em all, but I just get plastered so easily with two or more of anything, that, I started wondering, what am I doing this to myself for? I feel better without the levels I used to consume. Better 24/7.
I think the research and connections are coherent. The risk is there, and I think it is better to err on the side of caution all around. Alcohol is a toxin. Plain and simple.
Sooo, after you read the NIH guidelines, what this means is, almost every martini is going to count as two drinks, and, you can bet the farm that any glass of wine you pour yourself at home will count as two drinks. Read on and then ask yourself if you are considered a moderate or heavy drinker? Whaaahahahahaha! 😀 😀
According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, a standard alcoholic drink in the United States contains 14.0 grams (0.6 ounces) of pure alcohol. Generally, this amount of pure alcohol is found in
12 ounces of beer
8-9 ounces of malt liquor
5 ounces of wine
1.5 ounces, or a “shot,” of 80-proof distilled spirits (liquor)
These amounts are used by public health experts in developing health guidelines about alcohol consumption and to provide a way for people to compare the amounts of alcohol they consume. However, they may not reflect the typical serving sizes people may encounter in daily life.
According to the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2015-2020, individuals who do not drink alcohol should not start drinking for any reason. It recommends that if alcohol is consumed, it should be done in moderation and defines moderate alcohol drinking as up to one drink per day for women and up to two drinks per day for men. Heavy alcohol drinking is defined as having 4 or more drinks on any day or 8 or more drinks per week for women and 5 or more drinks on any day or 15 or more drinks per week for men. Binge drinking is defined as consuming 4 or more drinks for women and 5 or more drinks for men in one sitting (typically in about 2 hours).
Be genuine. Be interested. And stop hogging the conversation.
Don’t enter a conversation with the intent of leaving everyone in stitches, unless you’re a professional comedian.
Recognizing a person who practices conversation etiquette is often as simple as noticing just one or two things. They listen, and pay attention. Not so easy to find, and all the more reason it is so precious to meet those who do.
We all want to be charming, witty conversationalists who can work a room and give people the comfort that they’ve been truly listened to.
But how?
Jen Doll, friend of S.L. and one of my absolute favorite writers, wrote this guide that has everything you’ve ever wanted to know about being better at parties. In it is some of the wisest advice on being an engaged conversation partner you’ll find anywhere.
Being someone people enjoy talking with really boils down to being genuine and being genuinely interested. But that’s much easier said than done, so here are three concrete tips from Jen that will help you become a more engaged — and enjoyable — conversation partner.
1. Know the three tiers of conversations
Tier one is safe territory: sports, the weather, pop culture, local celebrities and any immediate shared experience.
Tier two is potentially controversial: religion, politics, dating and love lives. “Test the waters, and back away if they’re not interested,” one expert told Jen.
Tier three includes the most intimate topics: family, finance, health and work life. “Some people love to talk about what they do and their kids, but don’t ask a probing question until the door has been opened,” said Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert and the great-great-grandson of Emily Post.
Note also that while “So, what do you do?” is a pretty common and acceptable question in America, in Europe it’s as banal as watching paint dry. Instead, ask “What keeps you busy?”
Debra Fine, a speaker and the author of “The Fine Art of Small Talk,” has another basic rule: “Don’t ask a question that could put somebody in a bad spot: ‘Is your boyfriend here?’ ‘Did you get into that M.B.A. program?’” Instead try: “Catch me up on your life” or “What’s going on with work for you?”
2. Be more interested to be more interesting
Don’t enter a conversation with the intent of leaving everyone in stitches, unless perhaps you’re a professional comedian.
“If you just talk a lot you might get exhausted, but if you ask questions and listen and draw people out, they’ll think you’re a great conversationalist,” she said.
“For me it comes down to being aware that I should be more interested than I should be interesting,” said Akash Karia, a speaker and performance coach who has written books including “Small Talk Hacks: The People Skills & Communication Skills You Need to Talk to Anyone & Be Instantly Likeable.”
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He brought up a study in which two researchers from the psychology department at Harvard found that talking about yourself triggers the same pleasure sensation in the brain as food. “People would forgo money in order to talk about themselves,” he said. You can use this to your advantage simply by listening.
3. Don’t be a conversation hog
We’ve all been involved in those irritating conversations where we can never get a word in edgewise. Unfortunately, we may have been on the other side, too. Mr. Post Senning said it was crucial to “share the conversation pie. Share half if there are two of you, a quarter if there are four. The share of the pie is never as large as what involves you listening.”
To be a true conversation superstar, try these tips:
Be attentive and give eye contact.
Make active and engaged expressions.
Repeat back what you’ve heard, and follow up with questions.
If you notice something you want to say, don’t say it. Challenge it and go back to listening.
For bonus points, wait an hour to bring up that thing you didn’t say earlier.
And keep in mind that when you say something declarative, seek out the other person’s opinion as well.
“If I say, ‘The Jets don’t stand a chance,’ I’m entitled to my opinion, but I have to say, ‘What do you think?’ afterward,” Ms. Fine said. “You don’t want to be a conversational bully.”
What makes a storm a hurricane, a typhoon or a cyclone? It comes down to location. They all refer to tropical cyclones — low-pressure circular storm systems with winds greater than 74 miles per hour that form over warm waters — but different terms are used in different parts of the world.
The word “hurricane” is used for tropical cyclones that form in the North Atlantic, northeastern Pacific, the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Typhoons are storms that develop in the northwestern Pacific and usually threaten Asia.
The international date line serves as the Pacific Ocean’s dividing marker, so when a hurricane crosses over it from east to west, it becomes a typhoon instead, and vice versa.
The same storms in the Southern Hemisphere are easier to keep straight. In the Bay of Bengal or Arabian Sea, both in the northern Indian Ocean, they are simply called “cyclones.” In the southern Indian Ocean and South Pacific, they are “tropical cyclones” or “severe tropical cyclones.”
All these storms exist to move heat energy from the tropics toward the poles, helping to regulate climate.
Seasonal differences for storms
Aside from having different names, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones also have different seasons. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30. The Pacific season started slightly earlier. Typhoons can form year-round but are most common from May to October. The cyclone season in the South Pacific will begin on Nov. 1 and end on April 30.
In the southern Indian Ocean, the season begins two weeks later and ends at the same time except in Mauritius and the Seychelles, where it ends on May 15. Cyclones are concentrated from May to November in the northern Indian Ocean, which has no official season.
Whatever they’re called, tropical cyclones generally become weaker after they arrive on land, since they draw their energy from the evaporation of water in the oceans below them. But they can make it quite far past the coast and wreak havoc through wind damage, torrential rains, flooding and storm surges.
Tropical cyclones around the world are named according to a list maintained by the World Meteorological Organization. The names of the deadliest storms, like Typhoon Haiyan or Hurricane Katrina, are retired.
Grading a storm’s intensity
Hurricanes are categorized 1 to 5 according to the Saffir-Simpson scale, which is based on wind speed. According to the National Hurricane Center, storms in Category 3 or higher, which have wind speeds of at least 111 miles per hour, “are considered major hurricanes because of their potential for significant loss of life and damage.” (Florence was a Category 4 as of early Wednesday.)
Typhoons are monitored by the Japan Meteorological Agency, which classifies them as “typhoon,” “very strong typhoon” or “violent typhoon,” depending on sustained wind speeds. Storms with wind speeds of less than 74 miles per hour are labeled “tropical depressions,” “tropical storms” or “severe tropical storms.”
The Joint Typhoon Warning Center, a United States military command in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, also issues storm advisories using the designations “tropical depression,” “tropical storm,” “typhoon” and “super typhoon.”
Typhoon Jebi, which killed 11 people in Japan, was this season’s third super typhoon, meaning a typhoon with sustained surface winds of at least 150 miles per hour. It is the equivalent of a Category 4 or 5 hurricane in the Atlantic. This week, Southeast Asia and southern China are bracing for Super Typhoon Mangkhut.
Cyclones in the Indian Ocean are classified according to two intensity scales depending on where they are, with names like “very intense tropical cyclone” and “super cyclonic storm.” Australia rates cyclones from categories 1 to 5.
So why the three different words? Storm terminology has been highly influenced by the histories and cultural interactions of different regions. “Hurricane” appeared in English in the 16th century as an adaptation of the Spanish “huracán.” “Typhoon” is variously described as coming from Arabic (“tafa”) or Chinese (“taifeng”), perhaps both. “Cyclone” was coined in the late 18th century by a British official in India, from the Greek for “moving in a circle.”
But a storm by any other name should still be taken seriously.
A disgusting man who is stealing money or withholding it from government funds that should be helping people, not serving political purposes or lining one’s pockets.
Central American migrants at the border in Tijuana. The money from the Trump administration will help Mexico increase deportations of Central Americans.
Via NYTimes, Gardiner Harris and Julie Hirschfeld Davis
Sept. 12, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump has promised for years that Mexico would pay for a vast border wall, a demand that country has steadfastly refused. Now, in the Trump administration’s campaign to stop illegal immigration, the United States plans instead to pay Mexico.
In a recent notice sent to Congress, the administration said it intended to take $20 million in foreign assistance funds and use it to help Mexico pay plane and bus fare to deport as many as 17,000 people who are in that country illegally.
The money will help increase deportations of Central Americans, many of whom pass through Mexico to get to the American border. Any unauthorized immigrant in Mexico who is a known or suspected terrorist will also be deported under the program, according to the notification, although such people are few in number.
Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the program was intended to help relieve immigration flows at the United States border with Mexico.
“We are working closely with our Mexican counterparts to confront rising border apprehension numbers — specifically, a 38 percent increase in families this month alone — directly and to ensure that those with legitimate claims have access to appropriate protections,” Ms. Waldman said. A spokesman for the Mexican Embassy did not immediately respond Wednesday to a request for comment.
The plan, which has been debated internally for months, is part of a broader push by the Trump administration to redirect billions in foreign assistance to other priorities. The administration has yet to spend nearly $3 billion in foreign aid, money allocated last year by Congress with broad bipartisan support. Hundreds of millions of dollars meant to help stabilize Syria and support Palestinian schools and hospitals has already been redirected.
While the administration has made several announcements about not spending on priorities Congress intended, it has mostly kept quiet about what it will do with the money. But it has long been frustrated that Congress provides billions for foreign aid while refusing to fund its immigration priorities. The money will be transferred from the State Department to the Department of Homeland Security, and then sent to Mexico.
“Congress intended for this money to lift up communities dealing with crime, corruption and so many other challenges, not to expand this administration’s deportation crusade,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “I want answers about why the State Department thinks it can ignore Congress and dump more cash into deportation efforts. Until then, I’ll do whatever I can to stop this.
The maneuver is the latest by the administration to reduce the number of immigrants crossing the southwestern border. The most prominent piece of the effort has been the “zero tolerance” policy to criminally prosecute any immigrant who enters the country without authorization. That led to the widely criticized practice of separating children from their parents at the border, which spurred a humanitarian and political crisis for Mr. Trump.
But the president’s advisers have also employed other strategies to deter immigrants, including revamping the rules surrounding who can qualify for asylum and trying to strike an agreement with Mexico that would disqualify any migrant who had not sought asylum there from claiming it in the United States.
Under the program, Mexico would be responsible for detaining and providing judicial review of immigrants before deporting them. The sometimes cumbersome and lengthy legal process in the United States to deport asylum seekers has long frustrated Mr. Trump, who has often said the laws must be changed to speed deportations. Getting Mexico to do deportations instead would bypass that process.
Immigrant advocacy groups called the deportation aid for Mexico a misguided and wasteful use of money that would fail to address the problems prompting migrants to travel to Mexico and the United States in the first place.
“We shouldn’t be paying another country to do our dirty work; we should actually be fixing our immigration system and helping these countries get back on solid footing,” said Ali Noorani, the executive director of the National Immigration Forum. “It smacks of desperation.”
Anti-Trumpers long ago stopped needing reasons to reject this presidency and it’s administration. Most saw it coming from day one of his candidacy. Let alone nearly two years in.
Excellent. To be understood by anyone still puzzled and looking for answers.
The thing with every shocking revelation about Trump is that it’s already baked into his image. I’ve never met a Trump supporter who did not know exactly who he is.
RIDGWAY, Colo. — It’s different in the West. It’s easier to feel in touch with some essence of what America is. The space, so much of it still, so empty, so awe-inspiring, speaks of American possibility. The boundlessness invites reinvention and prickly individualism. Here in Colorado, purple state, split between gun lovers and legal marijuana lovers, the libertarian streak runs strong.
That’s the bit of the United States the rest of the world finds hardest to fathom. Why the scorn for handouts, the equating of universal health care with socialism, the obsession with self-reliance, the refusal to see that a profusion of guns leads to a profusion of mass shootings? Of course a crowded Europe with its wounds seeks solidarity in the name of stability, while America with its wide-open spaces embraces the right to be left alone (at least until you need Medicaid) and the right, whatever its risks, to the next frontier.
I said it’s different in the West. It’s not so different in the West, it’s just that you see more clearly what the country stood for in its own mythologized self-image, what it was to be an American, what it was to aspire to some new and exemplary measure of freedom, and how far things have fallen to produce President Donald Trump.
No part of the country today is immune to American fracture or the squalid Trump wars, to cultural confrontations over identity and gender and race, to the effects of stagnant incomes over decades, or to the narcissism of modernity.
In a purple state, unlike in Brooklyn, N.Y., or Palo Alto, Calif., these differences press in on each other. Conversations occur that break through ideological lines. Grand Junction, in western Colorado, voted for Trump at the last election. There, I spoke to Robert Babcox, a pastor, who praised the president for sticking to his campaign promises and, “for all the bravado,” getting the economy revved up.
Babcox called the ban on high-capacity gun magazines that hold more than 15 rounds, signed into law by John Hickenlooper, the Democratic governor who has presidential aspirations, “a silly law.” The pastor said he could drive across the nearby border into Utah and buy a high-capacity magazine. He said the Second Amendment was designed to create a militia “equal to the government to ensure self-reliance,” and that therefore the ban on the magazines should be overturned. He said, “If I can limit somebody on what weapons they can buy, why would I not be able to limit what you can say about me under the First Amendment? When we endanger one right, we endanger them all.”
Words don’t kill, I said. Some things are worse than death, he said. So, I asked, Trump’s great? No, the pastor said. He only trusted Trump “to a degree.” Someone should take away his cellphone, he said. Americans can come together, he said, praising John F. Kennedy. “I served in the Navy,” he said. “I saw so many taken before their time — white, black, Hispanic. It all hurt me just the same, and they all bled red, and that lesson stayed with me.”
The thing about all the shocking Trump revelations — Michael Cohen’s about violating campaign finance laws by paying hush money to two women in coordination with a “candidate for federal office” being the latest — is that they are already baked into Trump’s image. His supporters, and there are tens of millions of them, never had illusions. I’ve not met one, Babcox included, who did not have a pretty clear picture of Trump. They’ve known all along that he’s a needy narcissist, a womanizer, a lowlife, a liar, a braggart and a generally miserable human being. That’s why the “Access Hollywood” tape or the I-could-shoot-somebody-on-Fifth-Avenue boast did not kill his candidacy.
It’s also why the itch to believe that the moment has come when everything starts to unravel must be viewed warily. Sure, Trump sounds more desperate. But who’s the enforcer if Trump has broken the law? It’s Congress — and until things change there (which could happen in November) or Republicans at last abandon a policy of hold-my-nose opportunism, Trump will ride out the storm.
There’s a deeper question, which comes back to the extraordinary Western landscape and the high American idea enshrined in it. Americans elected Trump. Nobody else did. They came down to his level. White Christian males losing their place in the social order decided they’d do anything to save themselves, and to heck with morality. They made a bargain with the devil in full knowledge. So the real question is: What does it mean to be an American today? Who are we, goddamit? What have we become?
Trump was a symptom, not a cause. The problem is way deeper than him.
For William Steding, a diplomatic historian living in Colorado, American individualism has morphed into narcissism, perfectibility into entitlement, and exceptionalism into hubris. Out of that, and more, came the insidious malignancy of Trump. It will not be extirpated overnight.
Roger Cohen has been a columnist for The Times since 2009. His columns appear Wednesday and Saturday. He joined The Times in 1990, and has served as a foreign correspondent and foreign editor. @NYTimesCohen
Another excellent essay on what’s happening. I only wish the amount of people behind this man was subject to reduction of any amount. Even the slightest migration of heretofore supporters away from Trump has the potential to build to a tipping point and puncture this nightmare from inflating to dire proportions.<MB
Everyone and everything he touches rots.
By Peter Wehner Mr. Wehner served in the previous three Republican administrations and is a contributing opinion writer. Aug. 25, 2018
There’s never been any confusion about the character defects of Donald Trump. The question has always been just how far he would go and whether other individuals and institutions would stand up to him or become complicit in his corruption.
When I first took to these pages three summers ago to write about Mr. Trump, I warned my fellow Republicans to just say no both to him and his candidacy. One of my concerns was that if Mr. Trump were to succeed, he would redefine the Republican Party in his image. That’s already happened in areas like free trade, free markets and the size of government; in attitudes toward ethnic nationalism and white identity politics; in America’s commitment to its traditional allies, in how Republicans view Russia and in their willingness to call out leaders of evil governments like North Korea rather than lavish praise on them. But in no area has Mr. Trump more fundamentally changed the Republican Party than in its attitude toward ethics and political leadership.
For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life. They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong.
Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”
All that has changed with Mr. Trump as president. For Republicans, honor and integrity are now passé. We saw it again last week when the president’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen — standing in court before a judge, under oath — implicated Mr. Trump in criminal activity, while his former campaign chairman was convicted in another courtroom on financial fraud charges. Most Republicans in Congress were either silent or came to Mr. Trump’s defense, which is how this tiresome drama now plays itself out.
It is a stunning turnabout. A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president. Some of the men who have been elected president have been unscrupulous in certain areas — infidelity, lying, dirty tricks, financial misdeeds — but we’ve never before had the full-spectrum corruption we see in the life of Donald Trump.
For many Republicans, this reality still hasn’t broken through. But facts that don’t penetrate the walls of an ideological silo are facts nonetheless. And the moral indictment against Mr. Trump is obvious and overwhelming. Corruption has been evident in Mr. Trump’s private and public life, in how he has treated his wives, in his business dealings and scams, in his pathological lying and cruelty, in his bullying and shamelessness, in his conspiracy-mongering and appeals to the darkest impulses of Americans. (Senator Bob Corker, a Republican, refers to the president’s race-based comments as a “base stimulator.”) Mr. Trump’s corruptions are ingrained, the result of a lifetime of habits. It was delusional to think he would change for the better once he became president.
Some of us who have been lifelong Republicans and previously served in Republican administrations held out a faint hope that our party would at some point say “Enough!”; that there would be some line Mr. Trump would cross, some boundary he would transgress, some norm he would shatter, some civic guardrail he would uproot, some action he would take, some scheme or scandal he would be involved in that would cause large numbers of Republicans to break with the president. No such luck. Mr. Trump’s corruptions have therefore become theirs. So far there’s been no bottom, and there may never be. It’s quite possible this should have been obvious to me much sooner than it was, that I was blinded to certain realities I should have recognized.
In any case, the Republican Party’s as-yet unbreakable attachment to Mr. Trump is coming at quite a cost. There is the rank hypocrisy, the squandered ability to venerate public character or criticize Democrats who lack it, and the damage to the white Evangelical movement, which has for the most part enthusiastically rallied to Mr. Trump and as a result has been largely discredited. There is also likely to be an electoral price to pay in November.
But the greatest damage is being done to our civic culture and our politics. Mr. Trump and the Republican Party are right now the chief emblem of corruption and cynicism in American political life, of an ethic of might makes right. Dehumanizing others is fashionable and truth is relative. (“Truth isn’t truth,” in the infamous words of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.) They are stripping politics of its high purpose and nobility.
That’s not all politics is; self-interest is always a factor. But if politics is only about power unbounded by morality — if it’s simply about rulers governing by the law of the jungle, about a prince acting like a beast, in the words of Machiavelli — then the whole enterprise will collapse. We have to distinguish between imperfect leaders and corrupt ones, and we need the vocabulary to do so.
A warning to my Republican friends: The worst is yet to come. Thanks to the work of Robert Mueller — a distinguished public servant, not the leader of a “group of Angry Democrat Thugs” — we are going to discover deeper and deeper layers to Mr. Trump’s corruption. When we do, I expect Mr. Trump will unravel further as he feels more cornered, more desperate, more enraged; his behavior will become ever more erratic, disordered and crazed.
Most Republicans, having thrown their MAGA hats over the Trump wall, will stay with him until the end. Was a tax cut, deregulation and court appointments really worth all this?
The first time you see ‘sand piracy,’ it might sound surreal — a misguided Pixar villain whose lackeys race down the beach with empty buckets and sinister intent, doomed to fail in the face of a resource that spans the whole ocean.
Then you find out about someone stealing 1,300 feet of sand from a beach in Jamaica, or the many sand miners whose dredgers suck sand from the ocean floor by the ton and, suddenly, it doesn’t sound as funny — or as impossible — as it did before.
In The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How it Transformed Civilization, journalist Vince Beiser peppers research with first-person interviews in an engaging and nuanced introduction to the ways sand has shaped the world, and how globalization — both its possibility and its greed — has turned it into one of the most important and most controversial substances on the planet.
Sand (particularly in quartz or water) is a critical component of modern life: concrete for the building you’re standing in, roads for how you got there, glass and microchips for the screen you’re reading this on, fiber-optic cable for the network that sent it.
Like many other natural resources, sand is finite. Like many other natural resources, it’s in trouble. And as with any other necessary commodity, the industries and governments that need it will do whatever it takes to get more.
But this is hardly new; Beiser’s brief history of sand seems designed to make you think about the difficult symbiosis of growth and consumption that creates modern convenience. The numbers can be stunning — as can the ways success came at the expense of sustainable practices in nature, and those whose jobs vanished in its wake. Take the bottle company that automated its glassblowing process in 1903, a tactic an industry magazine praised because it “eliminates all skill and labor” — and a tactic so efficient that in just a year, the demand for the silica sand used to make the glass jumped from 1.1 million to 4.4 million tons.
In Beiser’s hands, that human and natural cost of industry isn’t just an issue of labor or space. It’s a significant undercurrent to all his stories of industrial progress, and affects the modern day as much as any piece of technology. The first-person interludes give these moments a welcome immediacy — say, when he tries to get information from a North Carolina quartz-mining company that hoards both land and information about its practices. Eventually, even his dry humor gets buried under the sense that we’re hurtling toward something unspeakable.
This comes into sharpest focus whenever he turns to the environmental impacts of sand mining. It’s an impossible cost to sustain, and governments worldwide are increasingly being asked to make plans about how to protect their own sand while making sure not to stop the flow of modern conveniences. For this, Beiser steps away from a slightly America-centric history to track sand worldwide, following sales routes, interviewing farmers about fracking, discussing Dubai islands being built atop protected coral reefs, or driving through landscaped deserts in China. He insists on a certain pragmatic understanding that we can’t un-build our cement, but there’s also a sense of genuine alarm. No wonder that when Beiser looks at sand-chewing highway systems that encourage vehicles, the sand-chewing fracking mines that try to extract fuel to power those vehicles, and lenient or corrupt government officials unwilling to enforce regulations, he just sees “sand abetting sand abetting sand.”
It might be strange to think the seemingly endless thing that coats the seas is a fragile resource at a crisis point. Yet in The World in a Grain, the numbers are staggering, the methods are eyebrow-raising, and the implications are dire.
Beiser’s no-nonsense writing makes light reading of a grim subject, but it paints a telling picture of how great a problem lies before us. It’s a topic that begs for deep consideration on a global scale; in the meantime, you’ll never look at a beach the same way again.
Along the back of this field of sugar snap peas, sunflowers and bachelor buttons at Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center is a buffer of maturing big-leaf maples and red-osier dogwoods. It’s a combination of forest and thicket that the farm has left standing to help protect water quality in the river and aquifer. (Oxbow Farm and Conservation Center)
Paul Chisholm
Farmers face a growing dilemma. Specifically, a food-growing dilemma.
How do you feed an increasing number of people without harming the environment?
As it turns out, growing as much food as possible in a small area may be our best bet for sustainably feeding the world’s population, according to new research.
It all comes down to how we manage greenhouse gases and climate change.
People often associate greenhouse emissions with burning fossil fuels, but farming makes a lot of them, too. That’s because farms usually replace natural vegetation, like trees, which store carbon.
Farmers who wish to minimize their carbon footprint have traditionally held two philosophies, says David Williams, the lead author of a paper published last week in the journal Current Biology.
The first philosophy, known as “land-sharing,” involves maximizing the amount of carbon stored on farmland. “This can mean things like planting trees in a field, or maintaining little patches of non-crop habitat on your farm,” explains Williams.
This election is extremely important to the potential of black voters moving towards a Republican agenda. It’s dangerous because many of them will not study the deeper roots of the party’s idealogy, but focus only on a charismatic black voice ostensibly standing behind them. That may suffice for a single race that puts a reasonably sincere politician in office, but it may signal to the broader black voting base, previously apathetic since Obama’s run, to mobilize for the wrong side, against their interests, the country’s, and the planet, for the long run.
Mr. James, 37, is a West Point graduate who spent eight years in the Army. He is the president of his family-run business. And he wants to become a senator.
Nowhere on anyone’s handicapping lists of tossup Senate races will you find Michigan. And nowhere on the roster of A-list Republican challengers would you have found John James.
Until last week. With two tweets and his caps lock on, President Trump endorsed Mr. James in the Michigan Republican primary — “SPECTACULAR!” — giving the underdog campaign a jolt just before voters head to the polls on Tuesday.
…John is strong on crime and borders, loves our Military, our Vets and our Second Amendment. He will be a star. He has my full and total Endorsement!
Now Mr. James hopes he will get the chance to pull off in the general election what he has done in the primary: turn a lopsided race into a very close contest.
It will be difficult — assuming he even makes it out of the primary. His opponent, Sandy Pensler, has been campaigning with the confidence of a front-runner. Mr. Pensler has more money and boasts credentials that include running his own private equity firm and teaching economics at Harvard and Yale.
Come November, the Republican nominee will have to face Senator Debbie Stabenow, a three-term incumbent who won her last re-election by 20 points.
But Mr. James, 37, is a standout. He is a West Point graduate who spent eight years in the Army, including service in Iraq. He is the president of his family-run business, a global provider of logistics support for Fortune 500 companies. He is also black, a rarity in his party today. The Senate has only one black Republican, Tim Scott of South Carolina.
Mr. James, who now lives not far from where he grew up in the Detroit suburbs, says he doesn’t have “a black message, or a white message.” But there is little doubt he would be at a disadvantage competing in Detroit, Michigan’s largest city where the population is 80 percent black. Hillary Clinton carried most precincts in the city with more than 90 percent of the vote.
He talked to The New York Times about his chances of putting another crack in what was once reliably the Democrats’ “blue wall” of Midwestern states that had been a bulwark for the party in presidential elections until Mr. Trump came along.
The following is an edited and condensed version of the conversation.
Q: I grew up not far from you. What high school did you go to?
A: Brother Rice.
Shut up! So did I. What class were you in? (Long pause.) Hello?
Maybe I took that too literally. I graduated 1999.
I graduated in 1998.
How random is this?
(After reminiscing about English teachers, siblings that might know each other and drama class, the conversation moved on to politics.)
Donald Trump came to Michigan in 2016 and asked black voters to support him, saying “What the hell do you have to lose?” His reasoning was that decades of Democratic power in cities like Detroit left them with failing schools, high poverty and rampant crime. Is that the right pitch for Republicans to be making?
I actually went to the NAACP dinner this past spring, and I was pulled aside on two occasions that stick out to me. One lady said that she’d been a resident of Detroit for 45 years and feels neglected by the Democratic Party. Another lady pulled me aside and said that’s she’s never split a ticket in her entire life, and she’s finally looking forward to having a conservative to vote for. And I took that to kind of instruct me.
I was raised by people who, like my father, came out of the Jim Crow South because Michigan was the place that people immigrated to from all over the world to have economic opportunity. And now after marching from Selma to Detroit and rebelling from Watts to Baltimore, people don’t feel like anything has gotten better after 50 years. There’s still trees growing through houses and wild dogs running through the streets in black neighborhoods. And Debbie Stabenow keeps getting re-elected.
I have not. I imagine he’s a pretty busy guy. But his endorsement did mean a lot.
Especially in a Republican primary. It can make or break races. I wonder, though, in the general election, are you going to want to broadcast that to voters, especially voters in Detroit?
I think that those who would prejudge me based on an affiliation are doing themselves a disservice. I believe that through our political process we have an opportunity for people to open their ears, their minds and their hearts to listen. I believe that I can be, should be and will be judged by the competence, credibility and character that I have and that I’m bringing to the race.
And there are going to be some people who are so blinded by their hatred of the president that they’ll miss the opportunity to have someone who will do everything he can to serve everyone in the state of Michigan. I’m looking forward to treating people like independent thinkers.
But would you want him to campaign for you in the general election?
Absolutely. In Michigan, it may not be very clear out on the coast to a lot of folks …
Come on, you can’t say that to me. I grew up there.
I said a lot of people. I didn’t say you. There’s a massive disconnect. People here in Michigan feel disenfranchised and disillusioned with the situations that are going on the coasts.
I actually heard on the trail somebody say Donald Trump is Rust Belt Robin Hood. And I took that to mean that we finally have a president that’s listening to the people in the Midwest.
Rust Belt Robin Hood? I hadn’t heard that one before.
The reason why he won in Michigan, despite what everybody said, is because people went to the polls in a secret ballot and voted for someone who they believed would take care of their personal economy, would help their economy grow, would help their job.
We were told that manufacturing was dead. That 2 percent G.D.P. growth was the new normal. And President Trump said no way. We can do better.
Is the “blue wall” permanently cracked? How do you prevent President Trump’s election from being a fluke?
Michigan voters have the opportunity to basically answer the question. We keep sending lawyers and career politicians to Washington and we wonder why we’re not get anything done.
People want somebody who understands how to run a business before they make regulations that will affect business. They want somebody who understands what it’s like to sign the front and the back of the check.
Journalists at the event noted multiple attendees carrying signs and wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the name “QAnon.”
The shirts and signs are references to a conspiracy theory growing increasingly popular among those on the far-right — and a conspiracy theory about which the White House fielded a question from the media on Wednesday.
What is QAnon?
The conspiracy theory centers on a mysterious and anonymous online figure — “Q.” According to The Daily Beast, “Q” began posting on anonymous Internet message boards in October 2017. The person or persons behind the “Q” persona claim to possess a top-level security clearance and evidence of a worldwide criminal conspiracy.
Anyone involved in, or running a political campaign, especially a non Republican/Conservative, from here on, probably forever more, who doesn’t, at very minimum, use two-factor authentication, plus demonstrate extreme vigilance over their operation and people, is almost guaranteed to suffer the consequences. Perhaps deservedly so.
When Russian hackers targeted the staff of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., they took aim at maybe the most vulnerable sector of U.S. elections: campaigns.
McCaskill’s Senate staff received fake emails, as first reported by The Daily Beast, in an apparent attempt by Russia’s GRU intelligence agency to gain access to passwords. McCaskill released a statement confirming the attack but said there is no indication the attack was successful.
“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy. I will continue to speak out and press to hold them accountable,” McCaskill said. “I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, Putin is a thug and a bully.”
A sneak peek at the Times’s news analysis from Nov. 4, 2020.
President Trump at a Make America Great Again rally in Duluth, Minn., on June 20
Really good.
Are Democratic power brokers and lead pols smart enough to see this now? If not, check back here and see how accurate this forecast was. The idea of Trump getting re-elected is not far fetched. Without impeachment or clearly damning evidence, his base isn’t going to stray. Far more importantly, the stoic, apathetic, disengaged non voters in this country, won’t be swayed either. Their inaction is as much responsible, if not more, for the rise of Donald Trump than his misguided supporters. This non voting group is where I direct most of my contempt.
By Bret Stephens Opinion Columnist • July 26, 2018
In the end, a bitterly fought election came down to the old political aphorism, popularized during Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 run against George H.W. Bush: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This time, however, it was the Republican incumbent, not his Democratic challenger, who benefited from that truism.
Donald J. Trump has been decisively re-elected as president of the United States, winning every state he carried in 2016 and adding Nevada, even as he once again failed, albeit narrowly, to gain a majority of the popular vote. Extraordinary turnout in California, New York, Illinois and other Democratic bastions could not compensate for the president’s abiding popularity in the states that still decide who gets to live in the White House: Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.
Yet, unlike 2016, last night’s outcome came neither as a political upset nor as a global shock. Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have consistently polled ahead of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and her running mate, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, since July. The New York Times correctly predicted the outcome of the race in every state, another marked change from 2016.
Senators Warren and Brown never seemed to find a compelling answer to that question, despite an economy that continues to struggle with painfully slow wage growth, spiraling budget deficits and multiplying trade wars that have hurt businesses as diverse as Ohio soybean farmers and California chipmakers.
Yet both Democrats are also skeptics of trade agreements such as Nafta, which served to mute their differences with the president. And their signature proposals — Medicare for all and free college tuition for most American families — would have been expensive and would require tax increases on families making more than $200,000. Mr. Trump and other Republicans charged they would “bankrupt you and bankrupt the country.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.2 percent in the last quarter, the third consecutive quarter in which growth has exceeded 3 percent. Unemployment remains low at 4.1 percent.
With neither a recession nor a major war to run against, Democrats sought instead to cast the election in starkly moral terms. Yet by Election Day, the charge that Mr. Trump is morally or intellectually unfit for office had been made so often that it had lost most of its former edge among swing voters.
“I don’t care if he lies or exaggerates in his tweets or breaks his vows to his wife, so long as he keeps his promises to me,” Leah Rownan, a self-described social conservative from Henderson, Nev., told The Times, citing the economy and Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominations as decisive for her vote. “And he has.”
Many of Mr. Trump’s supporters also said they felt vindicated by the conclusions of Robert Mueller’s report on Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While the former F.B.I. director painted a damning portrait of a campaign that was riddled with Kremlin sympathizers and a candidate whose real-estate ventures were beholden to Russian investors, no clear evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump and Moscow ever emerged and the president was never indicted.
“It was always a red herring, just like Trump said,” said Bernard Schwartz, a gun store owner from Houston, Tex. “Democrats wasted a lot of ammo on that one.”
Democrats also failed to capitalize on, and may have been damaged by, winning back control of the House of Representatives, but not the Senate, in the 2018 midterms. Mr. Trump proved effective, if characteristically vitriolic, in making a foil of the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. Efforts to impeach the president mainly served to energize his base. Polling surveys suggested that wavering voters saw a Democratic Party more invested in humiliating the president than in helping them.
As is often the case in losing presidential campaigns, it did not take long for campaign aides to Senator Warren to offer damning appraisals of her performance as a candidate. Historical references abounded: The Children’s Crusade; Pickett’s Charge; the McGovern campaign of 1972. The common thread was that the campaign’s moral fervor repeatedly got the better of its message focus.
“Trump succeeded,” lamented one moderate former Democratic lawmaker who asked to speak on background. “He got my party to lose its marbles.” The lawmaker cited calls by party activists to abolish the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency — calls the Warren campaign did not formally endorse but did little to refute — as emblematic of the party’s broader problems.
“What do Democrats stand for?” he asked. “Lawlessness or liberality? Policymaking or virtue signaling? Gender-neutral pronouns and bathrooms or good jobs and higher wages?”
As is his way, Mr. Trump wasted little time rubbing salt into Democratic wounds. “Democrats used to stand with the Working Man,” he tweeted Wednesday morning. “Now it’s the party of Abortion and Amnesty. All that’s missing is Acid. Sad!”
The law can address this situation properly given a wary enough Supreme Court, where this will end up, but it’s not likely to matter anymore than the laws already against illegal gun ownership. The real issue, and cause, for gun violence past, present, and still to come, through DIY means, is what it’s also been. The proclivity of certain human beings, mostly men, and mostly mentally damaged from childhood, violent influences, warped localized cultures, and preexisting derangement, is the root of violence and paranoia towards our fellow man. Cody Wilson, followed by his enabling lawyers and founders, is a poster child example of how disturbed a person can be to take his poisonous vision to an endpoint of such nihilistic proportions.
By Andy Greenberg, Via WIRED
Cody Wilson makes digital files that let anyone 3-D print untraceable guns. The government tried to stop him. He sued—and won.
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin and uploaded the blueprints for the pistol to his website, Defcad.com.
He’d launched the site months earlier along with an anarchist video manifesto, declaring that gun control would never be the same in an era when anyone can download and print their own firearm with a few clicks. In the days after that first test-firing, his gun was downloaded more than 100,000 times. Wilson made the decision to go all in on the project, dropping out of law school at the University of Texas, as if to confirm his belief that technology supersedes law.
