School

“Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill

“There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” - G.K. Chesterton

What Do Schools Do?

Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.

What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?

Context

This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.

Thesis

Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent…except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.

The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school.” Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.

Motivation for What?

So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?

by Anonymous, ASX |  Read more:

Drowning in Sludge

That Dropped Call With Customer Service? It Was on Purpose.

In hindsight I’ll say: I always thought going crazy would be more exciting—roaming the street in a bathrobe, shouting at fruit. Instead I spent a weary season of my life saying representative. Speaking words and numbers to robots. Speaking them again more clearly, waiting, getting disconnected, finally reaching a person but the wrong person, repeating my story, would I mind one more brief hold. May my children never see the emails I sent, or the unhinged delirium with which I pressed 1 for agent.

I was tempted to bury the whole cretinous ordeal, except that I’d looked behind the curtain and vowed to document what I’d seen.

It all began last July, here in San Francisco. I’d been driving to my brother’s house, going about 40 mph, when my family’s newish Ford Escape simply froze: The steering wheel locked, and the power brakes died. I could neither steer the car nor stop it.

I jabbed at the “Power” button while trying to jerk the wheel free—no luck. Glancing ahead, I saw that the road curved to the left a few hundred yards up. I was going to sail off Bayshore Boulevard and over an embankment. I reached for the door handle.

What followed instead was pure anticlimactic luck: Ten feet before the curve in the road, the car drifted to a stop. Vibrating with relief, I clicked on the hazards and my story began.

That afternoon, with the distracted confidence of a man covered by warranty, I had the car towed to our mechanic. (I first tried driving one more time—cautiously—lest the malfunction was a fluke. Within 10 minutes, it happened again.)

“We can see from the computer codes that there was a problem,” the guy told me a few days later. “But we can’t identify the problem.”

Then he asked if I’d like to come pick up the car.

“Won’t it just happen again?” I asked.

“Might,” he said. “Might not.”

I said that sounded like a subpar approach to driving and asked if he might try again to find the problem.

“Look”—annoyed sigh—“we’re not going to just go searching all over the vehicle for it.”

This was in fact a perfect description of what I thought he should do, but there was no persuading him. I took the car to a different mechanic. A third mechanic took a look. When everyone told me the same thing, it started looking like time to replace the car, per the warranty. I called the Ford Customer Relationship Center.

Pinging my way through the phone tree, I was eventually connected with someone named Pamela—my case agent. She absorbed my tale, gave me her extension, and said she’d call back the next day.

Days passed with no calls, nor would she answer mine. I tried to find someone else at Ford and got transferred back to Pamela’s line. By chance—it was all always chance—I finally got connected to someone with substantive information: Unless our vehicle’s malfunction could be replicated and thus identified, the warranty wouldn’t apply.

“But nobody can replicate the malfunction,” I said.

“I understand your frustration.”

Over the days ahead, and then weeks, and then more weeks, I got pulled into a corner of modern existence that you are, of course, familiar with. You know it from dealing with your own car company, or insurance company, or health-care network, or internet provider, or utility provider, or streaming service, or passport office, or DMV, or, or, or. My calls began getting lost, or transferred laterally to someone who needed the story of a previous repair all over again. In time, I could predict the emotional contours of every conversation: the burst of scripted empathy, the endless routing, the promise of finally reaching a manager who—CLICK. Once, I was told that Ford had been emailing me updates; it turned out they’d somehow conjured up an email address for me that bore no relationship to my real one. Weirdly, many of the customer-service and dealership workers I spoke with seemed to forget the whole premise and suggested I resume driving the car.

“Would you put your kids in it?” I’d ask. They were aghast. Not if the steering freezes up!

As consuming as this experience was, I rarely talked about it. It was too banal and tedious to inflict on family or friends. I didn’t even like thinking about it myself. When the time came to plunge into the next round of calls or emails, I’d slip into a self-protective fugue state and silently power through.

Then, one night at a party, a friend mentioned something about a battle with an airline. Immediately she attempted to change the subject.

“It’s boring,” she said. “Disregard.”

On the contrary, I told her, I needed to hear every detail. Tentatively at first, she told me about a family trip to Sweden that had been scuttled by COVID. What followed was a protracted war involving denied airline refunds, unusable vouchers, expired vouchers, and more. Other guests from the party began drifting over. One recounted a recent Verizon nightmare. Another had endured Kafkaesque tech support from Sonos. The stories kept coming: gym-quitting labyrinths, Airbnb hijinks, illogical conversations with the permitting office, confounding interactions with the IRS. People spoke of not just the money lost but the hours, the sanity, the basic sense that sense can prevail.

Taken separately, these hassles and indignities were funny anecdotes. Together, they suggested something unreckoned with. And everyone agreed: It was all somehow getting worse. In 2023 (the most recent year for which data are available), the National Customer Rage Survey showed that American consumers were, well, full of rage. The percentage seeking revenge—revenge!—for their hassles had tripled in just three years.

I decided to de-fugue and start paying attention. Was the impenetrability of these contact centers actually deliberate? (Buying a new product or service sure is seamless.) Why do we so often feel like everything’s broken? And why does it feel more and more like this brokenness is breaking us?

Turns out there’s a word for it.

In the 2008 best seller Nudge, the legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein and the economist Richard H. Thaler marshaled behavioral-science research to show how small tweaks could help us make better choices. An updated version of the book includes a section on what they called “sludge”—tortuous administrative demands, endless wait times, and excessive procedural fuss that impede us in our lives.

The whole idea of sludge struck a chord. In the past several years, the topic has attracted a growing body of work. Researchers have shown how sludge leads people to forgo essential benefits and quietly accept outcomes they never would have otherwise chosen. Sunstein had encountered plenty of the stuff working with the Department of Homeland Security and, before that, as administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. “People might want to sign their child up for some beneficial program, such as free transportation or free school meals, but the sludge might defeat them,” he wrote in the Duke Law Journal.

The defeat part rang darkly to me. When I started talking with people about their sludge stories, I noticed that almost all ended the same way—with a weary, bedraggled Fuck it. Beholding the sheer unaccountability of the system, they’d pay that erroneous medical bill or give up on contesting that ticket. And this isn’t happening just here and there. Instead, I came to see this as a permanent condition. We are living in the state of Fuck it.

Some of the sludge we submit to is unavoidable—the simple consequence of living in a big, digitized world. But some of it is by design. ProPublica showed in 2023 how Cigna saved millions of dollars by rejecting claims without having doctors read them, knowing that a limited number of customers would endure the process of appeal. (Cigna told ProPublica that its description was “incorrect.”) Later that same year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ordered Toyota’s motor-financing arm to pay $60 million for alleged misdeeds that included thwarting refunds and deliberately setting up a dead-end hotline for canceling products and services. (The now-diminished bureau canceled the order in May.) As one Harvard Business Review article put it, “Some companies may actually find it profitable to create hassles for complaining customers.”

Sludge can also reduce participation in government programs. According to Stephanie Thum, an adjunct faculty member at the Indiana Institute of Technology who researches and writes about bureaucracy, agencies may use this fact to their advantage. “If you bury a fee waiver or publish a website in legalese rather than plain language, research shows people might stay away,” Thum told me. “If you’re a leader, you might use that knowledge to get rid of administrative friction—or put it in place.”

Fee waivers, rejected claims—sludge pales compared with other global crises, of course. But that might just be its cruelest trick. There was a time when systemic dysfunction felt bold and italicized, and so did our response: We were mad as hell and we weren’t going to take it anymore! Now something more insidious and mundane is at work. The system chips away as much as it crushes, all while reassuring us that that’s just how things go.

The result: We’re exhausted as hell and we’re probably going to keep taking it.

by Chris Colon, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Timo Lenzen

[ed. Coming to Medicaid and SNAP offices soon.]

What is Downforce?

Each minute exterior detail on top-tier consumer performance cars like a McLaren 620R and professional race cars like an IndyCar or Formula 1 car is designed to make mechanical physics work to the driver’s advantage. Every millimeter of bodywork makes a difference in how the vehicle drives and performs, and the car’s relationship to the air it’s cutting through is paramount. A crucial part of this relationship is downforce, which can be harnessed and applied by aerodynamic parts throughout the car’s shape. The science of downforce can get fairly deep, but we’re here to give an overview of what it means and a breakdown of why it’s important to driving execution.

To define downforce with just a couple of words, it is vertical load created by a vehicle’s aerodynamic parts as it’s in motion. To boil it down even further, a car’s exterior components split, route, and direct airflow in a way that pushes the vehicle down and increases traction and stability. Front splitters, canards (also known as dive planes), rear spoilers, front spoilers, those massive adjustable air foils that Chaparral affixed to their badass Can Am race cars back in the day, and other aerodynamic bits all create downforce. Downforce keeps cars planted on the road at speed and ensures the tires are pressed firmly onto the road for maximum grip.

What’s cool about downforce is it can be used at both high and low speeds relative to the capabilities of the vehicle. Downforce is often associated with high-speed driving, especially cornering, such as an IndyCar that needs every teeny bit of grip it can muster as it courses through the Long Beach Grand Prix circuit. The Dallara-designed chassis is a prime example because of its heavy use of aerowork.

However, downforce plays into low-speed performance, too—this is why you’ll often see heavily modified autocross cars with massive wings. Despite autocross courses often featuring low-speed sections in their tight courses, cars with wings that have a lot of surface area can still use that air to help stay planted and shave thousandths of a second off of their run times.

by Peter Nelson, The Drive |  Read more:

Image: Peter Nelson

 

Lovers Kissing In Tiananmen (2006)
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Everyone Should Order These 25 Italian Dishes At Least Once

 

Everyone Should Order These 25 Italian Dishes At Least Once (Daily Meal)
Images:Framarzo/Shutterstock; Io Giloso/Facebook
[ed. Endorsed by Frank Bruni, former food critic for the NY Times.]

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Recent Supreme Court Decisions

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
― Jonathan Swift

~ US court strikes down ‘click-to-cancel’ rule designed to make unsubscribing easier:

A federal rule designed to make canceling subscriptions as easy as signing up for them has been struck down by a US federal appeals court just days before it was scheduled to take effect.

The US court of appeals for the eighth circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have required companies to allow consumers to cancel subscriptions using the same method they used to sign up, after finding that the commission behind it failed to follow required procedures under the FTC Act during the rule-making process.

“While we certainly do not endorse the use of unfair and deceptive practices in negative option marketing, the procedural deficiencies of the Commission’s rulemaking process are fatal here,” the court wrote, adding that “vacatur of the entire Rule is appropriate in this case because of the prejudice suffered by Petitioners as a result of the Commission’s procedural error”.

The vacated rule meant to go into effect on 14 July would have covered all forms of negative option marketing – programs that allow sellers to interpret customer inaction as acceptance of subscriptions, often leading to unintended charges. The FTC’s original 1973 rule only covered limited forms of these practices.

It would have also stopped businesses from forcing customers through lengthy chat sessions with agents or creating other barriers to cancellation.

by Joseph Gedeon, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: filadendron/Getty Image

***

~ US supreme court clears way for Trump officials to resume mass government firings:

Justices lift lower court order that froze ‘reductions in force’ federal layoffs while litigation in case proceeded.

The US supreme court has cleared the way for Donald Trump’s administration to resume plans for mass firings of federal workers that critics warn could threaten critical government services.

Extending a winning streak for the US president, the justices on Tuesday lifted a lower court order that had frozen sweeping federal layoffs known as “reductions in force” while litigation in the case proceeds.

The decision could result in hundreds of thousands of job losses at the departments of agriculture, commerce, health and human services, state, treasury, veterans affairs and other agencies. (...)

Illston had argued in her ruling that Trump had exceeded his authority in ordering the downsizing, siding with a group of unions, non-profits and local governments that challenged the administration. “As history demonstrates, the president may broadly restructure federal agencies only when authorized by Congress,” she wrote.

The judge blocked the agencies from carrying out mass layoffs and limited their ability to cut or overhaul federal programmes. Illston also ordered the reinstatement of workers who had lost their jobs, though she delayed implementing this portion of her ruling while the appeals process plays out.

Illston’s ruling was the broadest of its kind against the government overhaul pursued by Trump and Doge. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programmes or have been placed on leave.

The administration had previously challenged Illston’s order at the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals but lost in a 2-1 ruling on 30 May. That prompted the justice department to make an emergency request to the supreme court, contending that controlling the personnel of federal agencies “lies at the heartland” of the president’s executive branch authority. (...)

On Tuesday the Democracy Forward coalition condemned the supreme court for intervening in what it called Trump’s unlawful reorganisation of the federal government. It said in a statement: “Today’s decision has dealt a serious blow to our democracy and puts services that the American people rely on in grave jeopardy.

“This decision does not change the simple and clear fact that reorganizing government functions and laying off federal workers en masse haphazardly without any congressional approval is not allowed by our Constitution.”

by David Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Anadolu/Getty Images

Alaska’s War on Grizzly Bears

The attention focused on the spectacle of state wildlife biologists flying around in helicopters shooting every grizzly bear they can find (186 killed so far plus 5 black bears and 20 wolves) on the calving grounds of the Mulchatna Caribou Herd in Southwest Alaska should not obscure the geographically much larger campaign against grizzly bears being conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the Alaska Board of Game.

This war, often termed “intensive management,” is being conducted through decades of liberalized bear hunting regulations motivated by the desire to reduce bear numbers in the hope this will result in more moose and caribou for harvest by hunters (most of whom live in urban areas).

The Mulchatna program is officially defined as being “predator control” because it involves aerial shooting of bears by Fish and Game staff. The geographically much larger effort to reduce bear abundance using regulation liberalizations is not defined as predator control. This lawyerly sleight-of-hand by definition allows Fish and Game to misleadingly claim that predator control on bears (and wolves) is occurring only in the relatively small portions of Alaska where aerial shooting of bears is ongoing. The opposite is true using a commonsense definition of predator control, which is to achieve declines in predator numbers.

We are four retired Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologists who have published one or more peer-reviewed papers documenting this effort to reduce grizzly abundance through regulation liberalizations. We documented this in an area that represents approximately 76% of Alaska; the area where liberalizations of bear hunting regulations are most aggressive. This is everywhere except in Southeast Alaska, Kodiak, Prince William Sound and the Alaska Peninsula, where bears are large and are still managed for sustainable trophy harvests. It includes all areas where moose and/or caribou are common. Some elements of the liberalizations in this area include:

• Liberalized regulations in a Game Management Subunit a total of 253 times and made more conservative only six times. This contrasts dramatically with the pattern prior to passage of the Intensive Management law in 1994, when regulation changes were equally balanced between small tweaks in either direction.

• Increasing the bag limit from one bear every 4 years (everywhere in 1980) to 1 or two bears per year. In 2005, 5% of the area had an annual bag limit of 2 per year but this increased to 45% by 2020 and to 67% by 2025.

• Longer open hunting seasons to include periods when hides are in poor condition and bears are in dens. The whole area had hunting seasons totaling less than 100 days in 1975; by 2015, 100% of the area had seasons longer than 300 days (20% longer than 350 days).

•Grizzly bears could not be baited anywhere in 2010 but, by 2022, grizzlies could be baited in 75% of the area (essentially everywhere except north of the Brooks Range).

• In 1975, all resident hunters were required to purchase a $25 tag prior to hunting grizzly bears but this is now routinely waived everywhere.

• Regulations designed to incentivize killing more grizzlies even include allowing hunters to sell the hides and skulls of bears they kill (nowhere prior to 2010, 26% of the area in 2016 and 67% in 2025). Allowing these sales is, effectively, a bounty on bears and is contrary to one of the basic principles of the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation against the commercialization of hunted wildlife.

Throughout this entire area of our analysis, there has been only one scientific study with new information on grizzly bear numbers or trends. In Subunit 13A, Fish and Game biologists reported a decline in bear density of 25%-40% during 1998-2012; results from a follow-up ADFG study in the same area 5 years ago have not been analyzed. It is scientifically irresponsible to conduct a study like this with (in all likelihood) more than $200,000 of public funds expended and not analyze and report the results. Declines in grizzly bear density similar to or greater than those found in 13A have probably occurred throughout Alaska correlated with the regulation liberalizations (and documented increases in grizzly bear harvests). Nobody can say this for sure however, because the state has not done any studies. Short of avoiding extirpation, it is hard not to conclude that the BOG and the leadership of ADFG does not care what is happening to grizzly bear populations in most of Alaska.

This aggressive management of bears is largely driven by the 1994 Intensive Management Law (IM). This law set a wildlife management priority for human consumptive use of moose, caribou, and deer. Under the IM law, state managers are effectively required to conduct predator reduction efforts wherever hunter demands for more moose or caribou harvests exceed the supply.

Nowhere in Alaska since the passage of the IM law has there been any scientifically-documented “success” showing increased hunter harvests of moose, caribou or deer that is significantly correlated with the predator reduction programs. One of us (Sterling Miller) co-authored the only peer-reviewed paper on this topic since passage of the IM law; this paper concluded that 40 years of wolf and bear reduction efforts in GMU 13 were not correlated with increased hunter harvests of moose. We are saddened to see the agency in which we once proudly served the Alaska public now reduced to shooting bears (and wolves) from helicopters in some areas while misleading Alaskans about the true extent of the war on bears that is occurring in Alaska and its “effectiveness”.

by Sterling Miller, PhD; John Schoen, PhD; Charles C. Schwarz, PhD; and Jim Faro, MS, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Image: NPS

[ed. Esteemed former collegues and world-class research and management biologists, all. ADF&G itself was once considered world-class, one of Alaska's oldest and most venerated institutions (beginning in territorial days, pre-statehood). But during the late 90s/early 2000's, politics began intruding and now it's just...eh. I've known the current Commissioner all his career (a fish biologist), and let's say none of this is surprising.]

Pat Metheny Group

[ed. Insane. Live version here (no piano, but this: 330-434). See also: Pat Metheny: How to Build a Solo on James (Beato).]

How We Stopped Caring About “Selling Out”

I know, deep down in my heart, that Matthew McConaughey is not my friend. Despite my lingering soft spot for his charming Texan accent, his role in my life amounts to nothing more than pixels on a screen. Still, that did little to ease the pang of betrayal I felt after spotting the actor in this commercial for the software company Salesforce, bemoaning a broken arm in the back room of an overcrowded hospital:

 

“If my healthcare provider had AgentForce, the powerful AI from Salesforce, an AI agent would have automatically paired me with the right specialist hours ago,” he mutters, that sweet, sweet Texan drawl camouflaging the dystopian premise of the ad. (Apparently, in America’s dysfunctional hospital system, your odds of healing a broken bone depend on the use of a new AI program.)

I couldn’t help but conjure a word from deep within my psyche, one I hadn’t heard in eons: sellout.

In recent years, our pop culture landscape has become so dominated by athletic-wear brand deals and laxative pill endorsements that it’s hard to remember an alternative. A-listers now seem to treat art like a side hustle, and advertising as their main career. It’s not enough for McConaughey to earn millions by smoldering through the window of a luxury Lincoln SUV, or lounging shirtless for Dolce & Gabbana cologne. He just had to become the creative director for Wild Turkey Bourbon, launch his own “Pantalones Organic Tequila” brand, and now, lend his rugged charisma to AI platforms.

A few decades ago, the very idea of an artist using their platform to shill products was not only considered tacky, but a moral failing—a betrayal of one’s fanbase and a stain on their integrity.

That’s why American stars travelled to Japan to film commercials; the shame of being caught in an advertisement could dissolve years of goodwill they’d built with the public. (Just look at Tommy Lee Jones. Stateside, he’s known for his Oscar-winning gravitas, but overseas, he’s been the face of Suntry canned coffee since 2006.) It’s the whole premise of Lost in Translation: a washed up, ashamed Bill Murray has to hide out in Tokyo just to promote a whiskey brand. Today, he’d proudly name it “Murray Malört” and slap his own face on the bottle. (...)

Celebrities are no longer scared to trade the public’s admiration for a paycheck, because they no longer have to trade. Sure, McConaughey could live indefinitely off the dividends from Interstellar. But if he’ll face zero backlash for shamelessly hawking liquor and AI platforms, why wouldn’t he?

To understand how we lost our dignity, we need to trace the mass commercialization of art—and with it, the disappearance of American counterculture. After all, if everything is for sale, there’s no such thing as a “sellout.” (...)

When Music Television burst into American homes, it ushered in an entirely new era for advertising. The 24-hour TV channel didn’t just kill the radio star—it also birthed the corporate celebrity. With the click of a remote, companies were given access to a direct line of information on what the youth found cool. Soon, advertising execs began to copy the DIY aesthetics of the underground. (...)

Before long, it became difficult to tell where MTV’s music programming ended and their commercial breaks began. Philip B. Dusenberry, an advertising executive for Pepsi-Cola and Apple Computer, admitted that the channel had profoundly shaped young consumers’ habits.

''MTV's impact, first and foremost, is as a teacher,” he told the Times. “It has educated people, particularly young people, to accept lots of information in a short period of time.'' (...)

Not every artist was eager to embrace the era of the endorsement deal. Neil Young fired back in 1988 with This Note’s for You:

“Ain’t singin’ for Pepsi / Ain’t singin’ for Coke / I don’t sing for nobody / Makes me look like a joke.”

MTV banned the video. The blacklist only made Young’s point clearer: the industry had chosen a side, and it wasn’t with the holdouts.

Maybe no one embodied the tension between anti-corporate ideals and mainstream success more than Nirvana. When the band left their small Seattle label Sub Pop to release Nevermind with Geffen Records—one of the “big six” corporate labels at the time—Kurt Cobain acknowledged complaints from the purist faction of his fanbase.

“I don’t blame the average seventeen-year-old punk-rock kid for calling me a sellout,” he told Rolling Stone. “I understand that. And maybe when they grow up a little bit, they’ll realize there’s more things to life than living out your rock & roll identity so righteously.”

It’s almost nostalgic to think that Nirvana’s version of “selling out” meant signing to a major record label, instead of naming their fourth album 0% APR Discover Credit Card, the way a band might today.

By the end of the 20th century, the corporate capture of counterculture had entered its final phase. The clearest symbol of that shift came in the year 1999, when promoters tried to resurrect the spirit of Woodstock. Instead, they created Woodstock ‘99, a festival so nakedly commercialized and mismanaged it felt like a parody of the original.

Sponsored by Hot Topic, Pepsi, and AT&T, the event charged hefty ticket prices and quickly descended into chaos. Water supplies dwindled by the first day, and under the blistering, 100-degree heat, vendors charged $4 a bottle—the equivalent of $8 today—to dehydrated, sunburned attendees. Some people reported paying up to $50. Three people died. Rampant sexual assaults and rioting marred the weekend—which was broadcast live on MTV, via pay-per-view, starting at $60 a package.

by Emily Topping, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young
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Nature Writing is Survival Writing: On Rethinking a Genre

If there were a contest for Most Hated Genre, nature writing would surely take top honors. Other candidates—romance, say—have their detractors, but are stoutly defended by both practitioners and fans. When it comes to nature writing, though, no one seems to hate container and contents more than nature writers themselves.

“‘Nature writing’ has become a cant phrase, branded and bandied out of any useful existence, and I would be glad to see its deletion from the current discourse,” the essayist Robert Macfarlane wrote in 2015. When David Gessner, in his book Sick of Nature, imagined a party attended by his fellow nature writers, he described a thoroughgoing dud: “As usual with this crowd, there’s a whole lot of listening and observing going on, not a lot of merriment.”

Critics, for their part, have dismissed the genre as a “solidly bourgeois form of escapism,” with nature writers indulging in a “literature of consolation” and “fiddling while the agrochemicals burn.” Nature writers and their work are variously portrayed, fairly and not, as misanthropic, condescending, and plain embarrassing. Joyce Carol Oates, in her essay “Against Nature,” enumerated nature writing’s “painfully limited set of responses” to its subject in scathing all caps: “REVERENCE, AWE, PIETY, MYSTICAL ONENESS.”

Oates, apparently, was not consoled.

The persistence of nature writing as a genre has more to do with publishers than with writers. Labels can usefully lash books together, giving each a better chance of staying afloat in a flooded marketplace, but they can also reinforce established stereotypes, limiting those who work within a genre and excluding those who fall outside its definition. As Oates suggested, there are countless ways to think and write about what we call “nature,” many of them urgent. But nature writing, as defined by publishers and historical precedent, ignores all but a few. (...)

Any genre can only stretch so far, though, and the limitations of nature writing are inscribed in its very name. Nature writing still tends to treat its subject as “an infinite variety of animated scenes,” and while the genre’s membership and approaches have diversified somewhat in recent years, its prizewinners resemble its founders: mostly white, mostly male, and mostly from wealthy countries. The poet and essayist Kathleen Jamie calls them Lone Enraptured Males. (...)

Today, the nature-writing genre reminds me of the climate-change beat in journalism: the stakes and scope of the job have magnified to the point that the label is arguably worse than useless, misrepresenting the work as narrower than it is and restricting its potential audience. The state of “nature,” like the state of the global climate, can no longer be appreciated from a distance, and its literature can no longer be confined to a single shelf. If we must give it a label, I say we call it survival writing. Or, better yet, writing.

by Michelle Nijhuis, Lit Hub | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Essential Skills for the Training of Conservation Social Scientists

Abstract

Since 2000, the field of biodiversity conservation has been reckoning with the historical lack of effective engagement with the social sciences in parallel with rapid declines in biodiversity and escalating concerns regarding socioecological justice exacerbated by many common conservation practices. As a result, there is now wide recognition among scholars and practitioners of the importance of understanding and engaging human dimensions in conservation practice. Developing and applying theoretical and practical knowledge related to the social sciences, therefore, should be a priority for people working in biodiversity conservation. We considered the training needs for the next generation of conservation social science professionals by surveying conservation professionals working in multiple sectors. Based on 119 responses, the 3 most cited soft skills (i.e., nontechnical abilities that facilitate effective interpersonal interaction, collaboration, and adaptability in diverse contexts) were cultural awareness and the ability to understand the values and perspectives of others, people management and conflict resolution skills, and the ability to develop and maintain inter- and intraorganizational networks and working relationships. The 3 most cited technical skills were expertise in behavior change expertise, expertise in government and policy, and general critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Overall, we found that current conservation social scientists believe students and early career conservationists should prioritize soft skills rather than technical skills to be effective. These skills were also correlated with the skills considered hardest to acquire through on-the-job training. We suggest early career conservationists develop essential soft and technical skills, including cultural awareness, networking, critical thinking, and statistical analysis tailored to sectoral and regional needs.

Introduction

(...) The growing recognition of the importance of social sciences to conservation stems from an increasing awareness among policy makers, practitioners, and scientists of the tight connections between human dimensions of conservation and their effectiveness and ethical dimensions (Moon et al., 2019; Sala & Torchino, 2020). Integrating social science insights in conservation science, policy, and practice, can make conservation more inclusive and equitable and thus foster improved collaboration among scientists, policy makers, and communities (Evans, 2021). The historical neglect of social science perspectives often resulted in conservation measures that overlooked the complex sociocultural dynamics affecting local communities (West & Brockington, 2006). Connecting ecological objectives with the lived experiences of those affected by conservation policies is pragmatic, because successful conservation frequently relies on community support and participation (Armitage et al., 2020; Berkes, 2004), and ethical, because it involves the moral imperatives in conservation, including acknowledgment and protection of the rights and livelihoods of local populations crucial to conservation outcomes (Miller et al., 2011). This approach not only enhances the sustainability of conservation programs, but also aligns them with broader ethical commitments to social justice and equity.

However, the use and application of social science in conservation by those lacking appropriate training remains problematic (Martin, 2019; St John et al., 2010). Social sciences are absent in the core curricula of the majority of conservation education programs (Slater et al., 2024). Moreover, there has been limited exploration into which specific social science skills are the most sought after—or most necessary—in the conservation professional workforce. To address the pressing need for socioecological justice and achieve conservation outcomes that genuinely integrate people's central role in conservation, alongside the increasing demand for expertise in conservation social science, it is critical to enhance training for social science students (Newing, 2010). (...)

This lack of emphasis on skills development for professional practice (e.g., leadership, communication, and management skills) underscores a tension between cultivating technical skills and soft skills (Bickely et al. 2013). Technical skills encompass disciplinary expertise and knowledge required for methodological proficiency or a deep understanding of a topic, including theoretical and applied aspects, such as human−wildlife interactions, statistical analyses, and geographic information systems. Soft skills, essential for effective interaction and collaboration, include interpersonal abilities, communication skills, emotional intelligence, adaptability, and cultural competency. Although technical skills are critical for practicing rigorous conservation social science, quantitative and qualitative soft skills are vital to fostering cross-cultural understanding, collaboration, and effective communication in diverse work environments. These skills are also invaluable for career advancement, leadership, and overall workplace success because they enable individuals to navigate complex interpersonal dynamics, build strong relationships, and adapt to change. Slater et al. (2024), however, found that fewer than half of the conservation courses they reviewed prioritized the development of interpersonal or project management skills. They further noted a deficiency in social science methodology training across most conservation undergraduate programs in Australia and the United Kingdom. (...)

Discussion

Overall, we found that current conservation social scientists believe students and ECCs should prioritize soft skills rather than technical skills to be effective. These skills were also correlated with the skills considered hardest to train on the job. Additionally, we observed variation in the importance of soft and technical skills by institution and region. The soft skills identified as most critical for the sector include cultural awareness and ability to understand the values and perspectives of others, people management and conflict resolution, and developing and maintaining inter- and intraorganizational networks and working relationships. The top 3 technical skills were behavior change expertise, government and policy expertise, and general critical thinking and problem-solving skills. (...)

The growing preference for soft skills among conservation social scientists highlights a critical shift in the understanding of what it takes to navigate the complex social processes inherent in conservation projects. Although knowledge of ecology and social sciences provides a solid foundation, we found that it is often the interpersonal qualities—such as empathy, cultural competency, and the ability to communicate effectively across different knowledge systems (Knight et al., 2019; Redpath et al., 2013)—that could determine the success of conservation efforts. Conservation contexts are inherently diverse, including a multitude of stakeholders ranging from Indigenous communities and local people to forest managers and researchers, each with unique backgrounds, cultures, and training. This diversity presents a challenge and an opportunity because it necessitates a nuanced understanding of different ontologies and epistemologies—the fundamental ways in which individuals and communities perceive and understand the world around them (Kohn, 2015). Skills, including cultural awareness, people management, and maintaining interorganizational networks, are crucial for navigating the diverse landscapes of stakeholders integral to successful conservation efforts. These skills improve engagement by fostering social capital and facilitate more effective negotiations with various groups, from local communities to governmental bodies and nonprofit organizations, thus significantly increasing the likelihood of project success (Pretty & Smith, 2004). Emotional intelligence and the ability to adapt to changing contexts also empower and support others, identify and manage their own emotions and stress, and maintain motivation among team members (Rice, 2022). In this context, therefore, soft skills become more than just an add-on; they are integral to the very fabric of successful conservation practice. They allow conservationists to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and real-world application to ensure that conservation strategies are not only ecologically sound, but also socially just and culturally relevant. This shift toward valuing interpersonal and cultural competencies reflects a broader recognition that the success of conservation initiatives depends as much on mutual understanding and respect as it does on ecological understanding.

Our survey findings revealed that the most necessary soft skills were also among the hardest to train on the job, underscoring the limitations of conventional training programs in imparting such skills and highlighting the value employers place on these skills because they seek individuals who can navigate complex social situations effectively from the start. 

by Laura Thomas-Walters, Francisco Gelves-Gomez, Stephanie Brittain, Lily M. van Eeden, Nick Harvey Sky, Amit Kaushik, Kaylan Kemink, Patricia Manzano-Fischer, Kyle Plotsky, Matthew Selinske, Conservation Biology | Read more:

Image: Conservation Biology

[ed. Good Advice. People have strong connections the land and its natural resources.]

Marvin Gaye

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Trapped in Work Mode

The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It’s Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional

My father was a brilliant man with many interests. We was a superb craftsman. He made my sister a play-pen for her dolls. He made it from wood, and made it so you could fold it up, just like real playpens. It was, oh, 30 to 36 inches square when opened up. The real marvel was that he’d cut the letters of the alphabet, and the numerals 0-9, into the slats on the sides. He outlined each letter on the slat. Drilled a hole inside the letter. Put the blade of a coping saw through the hole and then reattached the blade to the saw frame. Then stroke by stroke he sawed out the letter or number. When that was done he used small pieces of sandpaper to finish the edges. But that’s only one of many things he built in his workshop.

He also collected stamps, thousands upon thousands of them. He played golf, a game he loved deeply. He liked music, liked to read, and was a good bridge player.

But when he had his time back, when he didn’t have to go into work five days a week, he filled these blocks of time with solitaire. Not with those other things he had previously reserved for evenings and weekends when he was not working.

In time, over the months and, yes, years, he cut back on the solitaire. He never did much, if any, wood working; the tools in his shop lay dormant. He played more golf and spent more time collecting stamps. The sale of his collection (after he’d died) was a minor event in the stamp-collecting world. He found some guys to play bridge with. And bought some records.

The solitaire never left him. Always the well-worn decks of cards. Hours and hours.

Why?

For one thing, work has you interacting with other people, a circle of people who interact with, day in and day out. When you’re retired, that’s gone, especially if you move away from your place of work. But there’s another problem; it has to do with what I’ve been calling behavioral mode. Work requires and supports a certain ecology of tasks, an economy of attention. You train your mind to it – though you might want to think of breaking a horse to saddle. When the job’s gone, that attention economy is rendered useless. But you’ve devoted so much time to it that you don’t know how else to deploy your behavioral resources. 

The rise of retirement coaches (...)

More recently Hannah Seo wrote in Business Insider (December 11, 2024).

Dee Cascio, a counselor and retirement coach in Sterling, Virginia, says the growing urge to work in retirement points to a larger issue: Work fulfills a lot of needs that people don’t know how to get elsewhere, including relationships, learning, identity, direction, stability, and a sense of order. The structure that work provides is hard to move away from, says Cascio, who is 78 and still practicing. “People think that this transition is a piece of cake, and it’s not,” she says. “It can feel like jumping off a cliff.” […]

The idea that our personal worth is determined by how hard we work and how much money we make is deeply embedded in US work culture. This “Protestant work ethic” puts the responsibility of attaining a good quality of life and well-being on the worker — if you don’t have the time or resources for leisure, it’s because you haven’t earned it. […] This pernicious way of thinking prevents people from seeing purpose or value in life that doesn’t involve working for a paycheck.

What is going to happen as AI displaces more and more people from productive work? Sure, AI will create new jobs, but we have no reason that new job creation will be able, in the long run, to make up for displacement. For one thing, the new jobs will be quite different in character from the ones made obsolete. People who have lost their jobs to AI will not be able simply to switch into one of these new jobs. Retraining? For some of them, perhaps. But not for all of them?

What about universal basic income (UBI), where people without employment are given a no-questions-asked income sufficient to take care of basic needs? As this Google Ngram chart shows, here’s been a lot of interest in it in recent years, especially since 2015:

That’s not going to solve the problem we’ve been discussing. Retirement coaching is not cheap, $75 to $250 an hour. UBI is not going to pay for that. In our present circumstances I fear that UBI is likely to become an indirect subsidy for the drug industry, either legal or illegal. As a culture we are addicted to work. By releasing us from work, I fear that AI will simply place us at the mercy of the worst aspects of that addiction. Will UBI in fact just be an indirect means of subsidizing drug industry, whether legal or illegal?

Keynes Diagnoses the Problem

Back in 1930 John Maynard Keynes saw the problem in his famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.” He predicted that we’d have a 15-hour work week.

For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich today, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!

We’re nowhere close to that. Families where both adults have jobs are common, with one or both often working more than 40 hours a week. And yet they can’t make ends meet. And while AI holds out the possibility of changing that, perhaps in the mid-term, certainly in the long term, we’re not ready for it.

Keynes saw the problem clearly:

Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, to occupy himself, especially if he no longer has roots in the soil or in custom or in the beloved conventions of a traditional society.

Such is the case today. Social structures and institutions in the developed world are predicated on the centrality of work. Work provides most men and many women with their primary identity, their sense of meaning and self-worth. Without work we are greatly diminished.

The real challenge that AI presents to us, I believe is thus a challenge to our values. We live in a society organized to fit the needs of Homo economicus, economic man. Our best chance, perhaps our only chance, of realizing the value of AI and of reaping its economic benefits is to rethink our conception of human nature. Who is doing that? What think tanks have taken it on as their mission? What foundations are supporting the effort and trying to figure out how to turn ideas into social and political practice?

by William Benzon, 3 Quarks Daily |  Read more:

Image: the author/ChatGPT

July 4th, 2025

Profiles in cowardice.

Images: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP; AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson; uncredited
[ed. Do any of these people look like they give a shit about anything but pleasing their Dear Leader (and protecting their asses)? Fuck 'em all. See also: Fake Patriots Are Destroying Everything That Made America Great (Nation).]

Spineless Republicans Are Part of a Bigger Problem

At every level of the three branches of government, there’s rot working its way through the system and eroding protections previously guaranteed by the Constitution. This week’s shameful passage of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” in the Senate says it all. The bill will strip millions of people of access to Medicaid and millions more of access to other health insurance policies via the provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and will take nutritional assistance away from millions of Americans. If you thought the safety net systems fought for, and secured, during the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society, were a mainstay of modern society, think again. If you thought that after a decade-plus of sparring, the increased healthcare coverage generated by the Affordable Care Act was now an generally accepted part of the social fabric, you were, it appears, sorely mistaken.

It turns out that, under Trump, the GOP is gunning for pretty much every social program, no matter how much popular support those programs have, nor even how many voters in GOP states are affected.

I’m far too cynical at this point to think that the Grand Old Party will ever take the morally right route when presented with a choice between decency and depravity. Even so, let’s pause a moment and at least name-check Senator Lisa Murkowski for her truly craven display this week.

Every so often, Murkowski gets props for saying she is horrified or appalled by one authoritarian action or another; yet, when it came to voting on what may be the most consequential and destructive piece of legislation in Trump’s second term, she held out for a few carve outs to protect Alaskans from the ravages being inflicted on residents of every other state before voting in favor of the legislation. Contrast her miserable behavior with that of late Senator John McCain, when he refused to be the deciding vote to topple the Affordable Care Act with no replacement program ready to catch those who would lose their health care.

Media outlets reported the vote as being decided by Vice President JD Vance, who stepped in to break the tie. That is technically true. But since everyone knew that Vance was a “yes” on this, it’s more accurate to say that Murkowski, the supposed grown-up in a room full of MAGA nutcases, was the tiebreaker here.

The Alaskan knew, as soon as she had done it, that she had done a very bad thing. Like a wayward child looking for a moral free pass from her parents, she promptly sought to exculpate herself by saying it was “agonizing” to vote for the bill. One assumes it wasn’t as agonizing for her as the consequences of this vote will be for the tens of millions of already low-income Americans whose lives are about to get a whole lot worse. One assumes her mental anguish won’t be as pronounced as it will be for the millions of immigrants, including refugees, suddenly blocked from accessing safety net programs. One assumes, too, that her anguish at transferring tens of billions of dollars away from environmental, health, nutritional, and educational programs, and into policing and incarcerating undocumented immigrants won’t quite match the experiences of hard-working men and women caught up in the accelerating ICE sweeps that this bill so copiously funds and sent to such places as Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz.” One assumes her anguish at hugely increasing the national debt so as to channel trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the super-wealthy won’t rise to the same levels of pain as will the pain of those students who can no longer access affordable loans for their graduate studies, or those renewable energy businesses that will now be destroyed because of the industry-killing taxes targeted against them by the authors of this malicious legislation.

In short, Murkowski’s faux anguish rings as hollow as did Susan Collins’ self-serving rationale for voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

Collins said she had been promised Kavanaugh would respect precedent and wouldn’t rip up established rules of the road. That, of course, didn’t last long, as evidenced by the Dobbs ruling. Murkowski went one better than Collins: she didn’t even get fake promises from MAGA Republicans not to hurt poor people; all she got were a few minor carve outs regarding precisely how many poor people in Alaska would be fed into the woodchipper and at what speed.

In short, if you are looking for GOP “moderates” to ride to the rescue, you are setting yourself up to be disappointed. Murkowski won’t save America, just like Susan Collins didn’t save abortion rights. This generation of GOP political figures has utterly dirtied itself in the Trumpian mud. You want change? Vote the bums out. Every single last one of them. Campaign against Murkowski just as hard as you would against any other MAGA enthusiast. Sure, Murkowski occasionally talks the talk. But when it comes to walking the walk, it turns out that, as with the Master of the House in Les Miserables, “there’s not much there.”

by Sasha Abramsky, The Nation | Read more:
Image: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
[ed. 100 percent. My former senator when I lived in Alaska. What a disgrace. Her father Frank (failed bank president) held the same seat for many years before resigning to run for governor (and appointed her to his vacant senate position) and was much, much worse, but that's not saying much. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Alaskans should never forget. Let's get Mary Peltola (former US representative who lost to another brain-dead MAGA bozo in the last election) to run against her next time around, I think everyone knows clearly by now who she really is (and isn't). UPDATE: Looks like I was right.]

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