Friday Book Club - The Living

by Carol Anshaw

From the first pages of this epic debut novel by the author of the "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," we are thrillingly dropped into a time that stands in exact opposition to our own. We living at the end of this millennium have been made acutely aware of our imposition on a planet we've all but used up. Annie Dillard's characters, settlers opening up the Pacific Northwest in the middle of the 19th Century, are conversely faced with abounding nature--dense, treacherous, daunting and capricious--that begs to be thrashed through, cut down, burnt out, brought to heel by these new arrivals, who view this unfettered landscape as both home and adversary.

Dillard focuses on the settlement of Whatcom and its environs on Bellingham Bay, high up in the northwesternmost corner of the country, a territory that will eventually become the state of Washington. Here cedars and firs choke the ground, grow so thick it takes a day to walk half a mile. The early white settlers--the Rushes and Fishburns and Sharps--come from the East and South, depleted by their long and arduous journeys. Ada and Rooney Fishburn have already lost a child along the way; their boy Charley "fell out of the wagon and their own wheels ran him over, one big wooden wheel after the other, and he burst inwardly and died."

Soon others drop away--Lura Rush in a carriage accident, her oldest boy of "the putrid sore throat." Rooney Fishburn falls dead on his spade in a well hole when he hits a pocket of lethal gas rather than the water he was looking for. Chot Harshaw is cut in two by a fall of slate from a coal mine roof. "Death mowed the generations raggedly, and out of order," the book's narrator informs matter-of-factly, often noting the passing of main characters in a mere phrase. "It was in May that the Sharp family met with an accident; they drowned, except for John Ireland." Later, "It took three months to clear the logjam on the Nooksack and Eustace Honer drowned doing it."

It is in great part by death that these living define themselves; they can't help but be aware that time might run out on them at any moment. Living in the constant presence of peril brings on an exhilarating adrenaline rush. For both the men and the women, this is a great adventure, living on the brink of the new, making it up as they go along, living utterly in the present because so little of their past applies. Every day must be figured out from scratch.

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Why I Hate Self-Help Books

by Mary T. Kelly

What I’m about to say may be considered shocking, blasphemous and puzzling given what I do for a living. But I’m going to say it anyway. Granted, it may be a temporary phase, but I pretty much hate most self-help books. Yeah, despise them.

But I also want to make it clear that I don’t hate ALL self-help books. I’ve been helped by many a self-help book and there’s plenty of times I recommend them to my clients. Many years ago, my journey to waking up and becoming a conscious human being was through the narrow pathway of a self-help book.

My first “self-help” book was, “The Road Less Traveled” by M. Scott Peck. The first line in the book was, “Life is difficult.” It may seem simplistic, but the flood of relief I felt when reading that very first line helped crack open a heart that had long been held captive by dogmatic religious beliefs and the constant self-pressure to be the best Christian/wife/friend/mother I could humanly be. I was in a world where if you didn’t have a continual broad smile on your face, you would be questioned and “admonished”. “Trust in the Lord, Mary” was the simplistic answer as I grappled with my well-loved father’s recent diagnosis of a malignant brain tumor, a mother showing early signs of Alzheimer’s, witnessing the painful agonizing screams of an AIDS patient who had been abandoned by his family in his final days, and the constant activity of four small children who were like eager young puppies making messes and trails of destruction wherever they went.

Reading that “self-help” book nudged me into a much-needed journey of self-excavation. I immersed myself into professional therapy and as a supplement, read many self-help books to serve as guides on an emotional road that took me up, through and over steep and treacherous internal passes. These books were powerful and bold sources of influence and motivation that encouraged me to change, break out of my repression-shrouded cocoon and begin to cure the deadly disease of the highly contagious and deeply ingrained “Good Girl Syndrome”.

Oh how I soaked up those books, the books that contained the Permissions to leave the church, the unhealthy relationships and the expected roles. They were influential in teaching me to do the hardest of all tasks...learning to love myself.

So how I can I say that I hate self-help books? The first reason is that I’m over them. They had a time and a place in my life and I will be forever grateful for much of the wisdom I garnered from them. But I’m tired of self-improvement, the miniscule constant psychoanalysis and inventories of my various faults, patterns, wounds, and ego variations, ad nausea. This “new” me just wants to scream, “WHATEVER! I’m a human being. This automatically means I am not perfect, will never be perfect, and in fact, the thought of perfection makes me feel bored and depressed."

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We'll Be Back

For regular readers of this blog, I apologize for the disruption in new posts.  Blogger went down about 30 hours ago and all posting services were suspended.  Worse yet, posts from the last couple of days were all deleted (Google continues to say this is only a temporary situation, but I have my doubts).  I'll try to reconstruct what I can but can't guarantee everything will be restored.  In the mean time, I hope you'll take this opportunity (?) to browse through some earlier posts.  There are still many cool and relevant things to check out.  Thank you for your patience.

Duck Soup

May 13:  Google Update

What a frustrating day. We’re very sorry that you’ve been unable to publish to Blogger for the past 20.5 hours. We’re nearly back to normal — you can publish again, and in the coming hours posts and comments that were temporarily removed should be restored.  Thank you for your patience while we fix this situation.  We use Blogger for our own blogs, so we’ve also felt your pain.

Here’s what happened: during scheduled maintenance work Wednesday night, we experienced some data corruption that impacted Blogger’s behavior. Since then, bloggers and readers may have experienced a variety of anomalies including intermittent outages, disappearing posts, and arriving at unintended blogs or error pages. A small subset of Blogger users (we estimate 0.16%) may have encountered additional problems specific to their accounts. Yesterday we returned Blogger to a pre-maintenance state and placed the service in read-only mode while we worked on restoring all content: that’s why you haven’t been able to publish.  We rolled back to a version of Blogger as of Wednesday May 11th, so your posts since then were temporarily removed. Those are the posts that we’re in the progress of restoring.

Again, we are very sorry for the impact to our authors and readers.  We try hard to ensure Blogger is always available for you to share your thoughts and opinions with the world, and we’ll do our best to prevent this from happening again.

Posted by Eddie Kessler, Tech Lead/Manager, Blogger


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News From Everywhere

The Story So Far: What We Know About the Business of Digital Journalism," a new report on digital news economics from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.  [ed.  This is a long read -- book length -- but well worth it.]

In early 2005, a researcher at the Poynter Institute published a column that was instantaneously read and—by many—misunderstood.

Rick Edmonds, who studies the financial side of the news business for Poynter’s website, speculated about how long it would take for online newspaper revenue to match the dollars brought in by the print side. He estimated that digital ads accounted for around 3 percent of the total revenue for an average U.S. paper. Edmonds assumed an optimistic online growth rate, around 33 percent a year, and what seemed then to be a reasonably sober estimate of print growth, around 4 percent.

Given how low online sales were at the time, Edmonds noted it would take fourteen years for digital revenue to catch up to that of print. As he wrote, these calculations provided “little cause for cheer.” He also noted “there isn’t any reason to believe any of these numbers will remain steady state over time.”

His disclaimers were lost on many readers. At several conferences later that year, participants pointed to the study and cheered one of the presumptions in the column—that digital revenue would grow by a third every year, as far as the eye could see.

For a few years, it seemed as if this scenario might be realistic. Newspapers’ online revenue grew by more than 30 percent in both 2005 and 2006. But growth slowed the next year, came to a halt during the recession, and still hasn’t fully returned to what it was in 2007. Meanwhile, print revenue hasn’t grown at 4 percent a year since 2005; indeed, newspapers’ print revenue in 2010 was less than half what it was in 2005.

Fifteen years after most news organizations went online, it is clear that old media business models have been irrevocably disrupted and that the new models are fundamentally different from what they once were. What made traditional media so vulnerable to the web? Or perhaps the better question is this: Why has digital technology, which has been such a powerful force for transmitting news, not yet provided the same energy for companies to maintain and increase profits?

Mainstream news organizations had already started losing audience before the Internet became popular. Broadcast network news programs have been sliding steadily since 1980 and now reach slightly over 20 million viewers a night, down more than half in three decades. Newspapers began to experience significant circulation declines decades ago. Total daily newspaper circulation has fallen by 30 percent in twenty years, from 62.3 million in 1990 to 43.4 million in 2010, as people found other sources, particularly local television news, to be an adequate substitute.

Revenue, however, held steady or increased for mainstream news outlets, even as audiences shrank. This was true in the early days of the web, too, thanks in part to an advertising bubble spawned by the Internet boom.

To begin to understand the disruptions of the digital transformation, it is important to appreciate the circumstances that made the news business—whether in broadcast, cable, magazines, or newspapers—so profitable for so long. The commercial heyday that buoyed the fortunes of American newsrooms in the last half-century had its roots in changes that began much earlier.

by by Bill Grueskin, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

The People vs Goldman Sachs

By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone

They weren't murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.

Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn't leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.

The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — "a million fraud cases a year" is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin's small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street's aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.

To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn't exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What's more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.

But Goldman, as the Levin report makes clear, remains an ascendant company precisely because it used its canny perception of an upcoming disaster (one which it helped create, incidentally) as an opportunity to enrich itself, not only at the expense of clients but ultimately, through the bailouts and the collateral damage of the wrecked economy, at the expense of society. The bank seemed to count on the unwillingness or inability of federal regulators to stop them — and when called to Washington last year to explain their behavior, Goldman executives brazenly misled Congress, apparently confident that their perjury would carry no serious consequences. Thus, while much of the Levin report describes past history, the Goldman section describes an ongoing? crime — a powerful, well-connected firm, with the ear of the president and the Treasury, that appears to have conquered the entire regulatory structure and stands now on the precipice of officially getting away with one of the biggest financial crimes in history.

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The World As We Know It

[ed.  The Michael Stipe (R.E.M.) interview earlier made me think of this.]

Helicopters and Lawnmowers

Helicopter parent is a colloquial, early 21st-century term for a parent who pays extremely close attention to his or her child's or children's experiences and problems, particularly at educational institutions. The term was originally coined by Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay in their 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility, although Dr. Haim Ginott mentions a teen who complains, "Mother hovers over me like a helicopter..." on page 18 of the bestselling book Between Parent & Teenager published in 1969. Helicopter parents are so named because, like helicopters, they hover closely overhead, rarely out of reach, whether their children need them or not. In Scandinavia, this phenomenon is known as curling parenthood and describes parents who attempt to sweep all obstacles out of the paths of their children. It is also called "overparenting". Parents try to resolve their child's problems, and try to stop them coming to harm by keeping them out of dangerous situations.

Some college professors and administrators are now referring to "Lawnmower parents" to describe mothers and fathers who attempt to smooth out and mow down all obstacles, to the extent that they may even attempt to interfere at their children's workplaces, regarding salaries and promotions, after they have graduated from college and are supposedly living on their own. As the children of "helicopter parents" graduate and move into the job market, personnel and human resources departments are becoming acquainted with the phenomenon as well. Some have reported that parents have even begun intruding on salary negotiations.

The term "helicopter parents" is a pejorative expression for parents that has been widely used in the media; however, there has been little academic research into the phenomenon. Foster W. Cline, M.D. and Jim Fay coined and defined "helicopter parents" very precisely in a section on "ineffective parenting styles" in their 1990 book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility. It gained wide currency when American college administrators began using it in the early 2000s as the Millennial Generation began reaching college age. Their Baby Boomer parents in turn earned notoriety for practices such as calling their children each morning to wake them up for class and complaining to their professors about grades the children had received. Some of these parents had chosen their child's college and hired consultants to help fine-tune the application process.  Summer camp officials have also reported similar behavior from parents.

The rise of the cell phone is often blamed for the explosion of helicopter parenting — it has been called "the world's longest umbilical cord". Parents, for their part, point to rising college tuitions, saying they are just protecting their investment or acting like any other consumer.

The Fifth Dimension

With its time-bending twists and all-pervading paranoia, new box set reveals Rod Serling's classic is in a dimension of its own

by Phelim O'Neill

"There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition and it lies between the pit of man's fears and summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area we call … The Twilight Zone."

Now, that's how you start a television show. Those words were first heard coming out of TV sets across the USA on 2 October 1959. In the decades since, The Twilight Zone has become shorthand for anything offbeat, with that spooky four-note theme ("do-dee-do-do") an instant signal that something unusual is about to happen.

While the short story with a twist ending has always been a staple of storytelling, it was Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone that refined it to an artform. It deservedly casts a long shadow in popular culture: if you stick together "The Time Element", where a man repeatedly "dreams" he's waking up in Pearl Harbor on the morning of the attack, with "Where Is Everybody?", which contains images of a flight-suited army pilot in a capsule, you've pretty much got Source Code. Then there's "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge", based on Ambrose Bierce's classic short story where a man about to be hanged in the American civil war escapes the noose, ventures across country to rejoin his wife and child and realises this has all been a dream condensed into seconds as the noose breaks his neck. Expand on that "dreams with time distortion" routine and you'll eventually hit Inception. The Simpsons still riffs on TZ episodes, particularly in their "Halloween Treehouse Of Horror" specials, and there's not an episode of Futurama that passes without some reference. Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly's bizarre oddity "The Box" was based on "Button, Button", a Twilight Zone episode from its 1980s revamp. Once you get into the Twilight Zone you'll see writers and directors such as M. Night Shyamalan as less remarkable: what is The Sixth Sense if not a half-hour Zone episode stretched out to over an hour and a half?

Watching The Twilight Zone today, it's striking how complex, satirical and thought-provoking it all is. While the tales include such fantastical imagery as a stopwatch that can stop time, department store mannequins coming to life, or a child whose dreams take corporeal form, you can clearly see that they're really about the early-60s: an era of race riots, assassinations, crooked politicians and the Vietnam war, when communism and nuclear bombs were palpable fears. People were confused, scared and paranoid, yet so little of the television of the time reflected this mood. Sponsors, executives, salesmen and producers were in charge of the networks and they didn't want viewers distracted by big issues when they should have been thinking about what products to buy. It was in this climate that 34-year-old writer-producer Rod Serling devised The Twilight Zone. After having almost all the contemporary political references excised from an early drama about a crooked senator, he hit upon the idea of using science fiction and fantasy to smuggle in more controversial elements, in plain sight of the moneymen.

Interview - Michael Stipe R.E.M

[ed.  For those of you who missed our Saturday Night Mix, here is R.E.M. Wolves, Lower.]

by  Christopher Bollen

Earlier this year, Michael Stipe turned 51, and his band, R.E.M., released its 15th full-length album, Collapse Into Now (Warner Bros.). I highly doubt that there was ever a time in American culture when youth wasn't worshiped and the new preferred. But Stipe might be the American independent culture's only certifiable rock legend-so original and imitable that no similar career comparison can be found in the arts-who is actually still in the process of defining what that legend is. Of course, Stipe has always been about eliding genres and confounding expectations. Along with his band members Peter Buck, Mike Mills, and Bill Berry (who retired from the group in 1997), Stipe has built an American band with an American sound that has arguably been one of the most successful among American audiences in the past 30 years, seemingly by inventing a new type of music from scratch: It's poetic; it ranges from manic melancholy to post-apocalyptic hope; the lyrics and choruses (when there are any) resist glib, sentimental, or cloyingly defiant clichés and yet remain in the head for decades.

Ever since R.E.M. was founded in Athens, Georgia, in 1980 and ushered in a radical, grassroots-youth alternative choice to mainstream pop, the group has been the real thing. Today, the most successful pop acts instantly sign promotional deals and include product placement in their music videos while singing about rebellion. There is hardly a mention now of "selling-out" because the music industry is more desperate than ever to be sold. But early on, Stipe and his bandmates made a commitment never to let their music be used to sell merchandise. Instead they've lent their talents to a number of causes throughout the decades-from local politics to global environmental initiatives. But the real surprise about the unlikely super-career of Stipe is that he isn't being asked to perform the hits from the heyday of his first albums. Collapse Into Now, with its propulsive yet restrained momentum, its lyrical gift of making the listener want to dance and cry at the same time, and its experiments with new sounds, is being described as one of the most powerful albums that R.E.M. has made in years. Yes, that means 31 years into existence, R.E.M. is making new music, their best music, going-forward-and-exploring music. R.E.M. has also teamed up with a collection of artists and filmmakers to create "art films" that accompany each song, providing a richer idea of the album for the YouTube generation. Stipe, of course, has always been involved in the art world (and is an artist in his own right), and R.E.M.'s collaborators on the films include Sophie Calle and Sam Taylor-Wood (who shot her own fiancé, the actor Aaron Johnson, dancing through the streets of London for the song "üBerlin"), as well as James Franco and Jem Cohen. But what is perhaps most amazing about Stipe is that though he has been famous for 30 years, he has still managed to remain something of a mystery. That fact might be the most triumphant. He has stayed human.

In early March, we sat down at his kitchen counter in downtown New York City over sushi to talk about his career.

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On The Floor, Laughing

by  James Somers

It's just past noon on a Friday and I'm on the fourth floor of a skyscraper in lower Manhattan watching numbers rise and fall. The place is teeming with them--numbers by the screenful, screens everywhere you look -- but I've been told to pay attention to just one in particular, and what's really important is that I'm supposed to say something if it goes above 1,238. I'm not yet sure why.

I'm here to watch my roommate work. I realize that might sound insipid, but my passive curiosity about his job -- he trades complex equity derivatives for a "bulge bracket" bank -- has metastasized over this past year into something closer to devastating envy as I've seen him come home, day after day, buoyant and satisfied. I need to know what the hell goes on down here. I need to find out why, of all the fledgling professionals I know, he seems to be the only one genuinely delighted to go into the office every day.

Quickly you get the sense that something strange happens in this room. There must be three hundred people within eyeshot, all but a handful of them healthy, handsome, well-dressed men in their mid-twenties or early thirties. (My friend points at various colleagues around the room: "Triathlete; runs marathons; hardcore cyclist; marathons; marathons..."). They look less like they're working -- reading e-mails, say, or putting together a slide deck -- than calmly responding to a crisis. Maybe it's because they're wearing headsets and their heads are darting from screen to screen the way lizards' do and their keyboards are unusually colorful and they're talking fast like Aaron Sorkin characters in an incomprehensible argot as streaming real-time line charts flicker loudly in their faces. It's like a mission control center.

They're packed in pretty tight. Workstations are aligned in blocks of twenty, two facing columns of ten each, guarded by the dancing backs of ergonomic swivel chairs. It's a bit of a shambles to navigate, but no matter, hardly anyone stands up. The market is a fickle leviathan, after all, and its keepers don't like to leave it unsupervised. Hence all the takeout. And hence the way my roommate falls asleep (early, instantaneously). These guys are at it -- glued to their desks, mentally engaged--for six and a half hours straight.

The upshot is that there is a lot of energy on a trading floor. Go to a law firm, Silicon Valley startup, magazine, or corporate headquarters. Even if what they do there shakes the world, even if the staff practically sneezes vibrant creativity, still you can't escape that Office-y undercurrent, the unmistakable intimation of malaise you find wherever adults are stuck inside doing their homework. This place, on the other hand, feels like something closer to an active battleship.

I'm starting to think it has something to do with the computers. From far away each station looks like one of those extravagantly immersive arcade games -- like something you get into rather than sit down at. That's probably why I keep calling them "stations."

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Let Kid's Play With Fire

by Veronique Greenwood 

Nobody wants to be called a helicopter parent—but who is totally innocent of micromanaging their children's lives? Parents want to protect their kids. No playing with sticks means no risk of lost eyes.

Yet as Gever Tulley and Julie Spiegler point out in Fifty Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), children who grow up as safe as humanly possible become adults who aren't adventurous, resilient, or confident. Sometimes you have to fall out of a tree to figure out how to climb one the right way, and learning that you can accomplish such a thing on your own teaches you that you can be self-sufficient.

With Fifty Dangerous Things, Tulley and Spiegler, founders of the Tinkering School summer camp, have written a handbook of activities that are, yes, dangerous at some level—like playing with fire, breaking glass, licking batteries, pounding nails, learning to tightrope walk, and squashing pennies on railroad tracks. The book is a blueprint to help parents and children explore the world, and ensure the children grow up, with a little common sense and a lot of curiosity.

Both the advice and the warnings are down to earth. Yes, there are risks—ranging from frustration to impalement—but the authors provide good ways to learn to avoid them through your own skill. And scientific or historical tidbits are appended: Did you know that the first batteries were made over 2,000 years ago in Baghdad? It takes work to raise a child who can use a table saw, build a campfire, and chart a course for herself after growing up. But with this book in hand, it'll be a satisfying adventure.

I spoke to Tulley about the impetus for the book, a new school he's opening in San Francisco, and his favorite (dangerous) things.

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Brain Gain

by  Margaret Talbot

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing “any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours.” In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” capsule to his daily regimen.

Alex recalled one week during his junior year when he had four term papers due. Minutes after waking on Monday morning, around seven-thirty, he swallowed some “immediate release” Adderall. The drug, along with a steady stream of caffeine, helped him to concentrate during classes and meetings, but he noticed some odd effects; at a morning tutorial, he explained to me in an e-mail, “I alternated between speaking too quickly and thoroughly on some subjects and feeling awkwardly quiet during other points of the discussion.” Lunch was a blur: “It’s always hard to eat much when on Adderall.” That afternoon, he went to the library, where he spent “too much time researching a paper rather than actually writing it—a problem, I can assure you, that is common to all intellectually curious students on stimulants.” At eight, he attended a two-hour meeting “with a group focussed on student mental-health issues.” Alex then “took an extended-release Adderall” and worked productively on the paper all night. At eight the next morning, he attended a meeting of his organization; he felt like “a zombie,” but “was there to insure that the semester’s work didn’t go to waste.” After that, Alex explained, “I went back to my room to take advantage of my tired body.” He fell asleep until noon, waking “in time to polish my first paper and hand it in.”

I met Alex one evening last summer, at an appealingly scruffy bar in the New England city where he lives. Skinny and bearded, and wearing faded hipster jeans, he looked like the lead singer in an indie band. He was ingratiating and articulate, and smoked cigarettes with an ironic air of defiance. Alex was happy enough to talk about his frequent use of Adderall at Harvard, but he didn’t want to see his name in print; he’s involved with an Internet start-up, and worried that potential investors might disapprove of his habit.

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The Tragedy of Sarah Palin

[ed.  This is the most meaningful analysis of Alaska politics and Sarah Palin that I have read anywhere.]

by Joshua Green 

It’s hard to escape Sarah Palin. On Facebook and Twitter, cable news and reality television, she is a constant object of dispute, the target or instigator of some distressingly large proportion of the political discourse. If she runs for president—well, brace yourself! But there is one place where a kind of collective resolve has been able to push her aside, make her a less suffocating presence than almost everywhere else: Alaska.

During a week spent traveling there recently, I learned that Palin occupies a place in the minds of most Alaskans roughly like that of an ex-spouse from a stormy marriage: she’s a distant bad memory, and questions about her seem vaguely unwelcome. Visitors to Juneau, the capital and a haven for cruise-ship tourism, are hard-pressed to find signs of the state’s most famous citizen—no “Mama Grizzly” memorabilia or T-shirts bearing her spunky slogans. Although the town was buzzing with politics because the legislature was in session, talk of Palin mainly revolved around a rumored Democratic poll showing her to be less popular in Alaska right now than Barack Obama. The only tangible evidence I saw was her official portrait in the capitol and a small sign in the window of a seedy-looking gift shop advertising “Sarah Palin toilet paper.” Alaska has moved on.

So has Palin. Two years after abruptly resigning the governorship, she is a national figure, touring the country to promote her books; speaking out whenever moved to on important issues of the day; and serving, mainly through Fox News, as the guardian-enforcer of a particularly martial brand of conservatism. Though she still lives in Alaska, she has all but withdrawn from its public life, appearing only seldom and then usually to film her reality-television show, Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

But if she decides to run for the White House—and she’ll have to make up her mind soon—all of that will change. As much as Alaska might like to forget Sarah Palin, and she it, her record there, especially as governor, will take on new salience.

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Happy Hookers

by Anne Eisenberg

MOST angling gear is designed to hold onto fish. But some new equipment is fine-tuned to be more selective — holding tight to some fish and letting go of others, especially if they are Atlantic bluefin tuna — a fish whose numbers have fallen sharply.

Starting this month, commercial fishing vessels that drop long lines in the Gulf of Mexico in search of tuna are mandated to use lightweight circular hooks that retain approved fish like yellowfin tuna, but flatten under the weight of the far heavier bluefin and allow them to swim free.

Bluefin populations have declined precipitously, and bluefin fishing is prohibited in the gulf. But the bluefin, which spawn there, are sometimes snared accidentally by long-line fishermen. Tuna fishing vessels are allowed to retain some bluefin caught accidentally, depending on the pounds of the intended catch on board. The new “weak” hook, as it is known, is aimed at reducing this unintended catch, said John Mitchell, who helped develop it. He is a unit leader in Pascagoula, Miss., at the Southeast Fisheries Science Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hook design alone won’t save the world’s endangered sea creatures, said John E. Graves, a professor of marine science at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, Va., but he added that the new product is a good idea. Dr. Graves’s work at the institute, which is part of the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Va., includes research on ways to reduce incidental catching of fish by long lines.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” he said of the new hook, but he observed that “it turns out that the hook type you use can have a huge impact on survival.”

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The End

by  Ben Ehrenreich

You've made some bargains. We all have. Maybe you allow yourself a single Tommy’s burger every six months. Maybe you’ve given up meat altogether, or red meat anyway, most of the time. Maybe you’re serious about this and you’ve given up all refined grains and any processed anything; the extra buck a pound to buy organic seems a reasonable sacrifice. You’ve given up booze, cigarettes, pills, cocaine, sex with strangers. You tell yourself you don’t miss them. You wear sunscreen and eat flaxseeds. You go to the gym on breezy Sundays when you’d rather lie around. You go to yoga classes even though the chanting makes you want the world to end. You sold your motorcycle years ago. You cross at the light and look both ways.

No matter how many sacrifices you make to Lady Death, no matter how rich the offerings you lay before her altar, she will know where to find you. When she comes, she will hold you tight, and she will never let you go. Don’t be frightened. She takes us all.

Even here in Los Angeles, in the glow of so much newness, she takes 60,000 of us each year.1 That’s 164 each day. Imagine them all lying side by side, napping forever without a snore. The sun goes down and rises again, and 164 more are sleeping beside them, resting cheeks on shoulders, ears on arms. One day you will join their still parade. Chances are good—about one in four in L.A. County—that death will grab you by the heart. Coronary disease is by far our leading cause of mortality, as it is in the rest of the country. L.A.’s specific inequities, though, travel as deeply through death as they do through life. In this and other ways, death maps life. If you’re an African American or a Latino male and you die before 75, you’re more likely to die of homicide than any other cause. The same goes if you’re of any race or either gender and you live in South L.A. If you’re white or live west of La Cienega and it’s not your ticker that gets you, it will most likely be an overdose, or a car crash, or lung cancer,2 or your own hand—murder is not even in the running.

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you will go. You will not be you anymore. Not exactly. You will be a corpse, a cadaver, a decedent, a “loved one.” You will be remains. The death industry employs more euphemisms than politicians do.3 Someone will find what’s left of you. A child, spouse, or parent. A nurse or passerby. Whoever it is will call for help. At home, at work, or in the street, he or she will dial 911. In a hospital, hospice, or nursing home, someone will call your doctor, who will check one last time for vital signs, declare you dead, and fill out the proper forms. A nurse will remove your clothes and close your eyes. (Not just for modesty’s sake: Rigor mortis hits the eyelids fast.) He or she will tie a tag bearing your name, which you can no longer speak, onto one of your toes, cover you with a plastic shroud, and wheel you to an elevator and thence to the morgue. In most hospitals it is in the basement. You will be rolled from the gurney into a refrigerated drawer. The door will close behind you. It will be dark and cold, but you won’t care.

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A Crooked Straight Ball

by Bill Pennington

Ducks quack, dogs bark, cab drivers honk and golfers slice. Among the basic truths of the planet: 80 percent of golfers cannot hit their tee shots where they aim.

But what if there were a golf ball that went only straight?

“That would be a miracle,” Dion Cooper, 26, of Brooklyn, said as he swatted balls last week at the Edgewater Golf Range in northern New Jersey.

Mr. Cooper was hitting his driver toward the Manhattan skyline, the balls tailing off in the familiar arc of the classic golf slice. Then he was handed the new Polara golf ball and took a healthy swat.

“Straight as an arrow,” he yelped with a mix of awe and surprise. For the next five minutes, he rarely hit a ball crooked.

A golf ball that won’t slice? It sounds like an old joke: guy invents a ball that won’t sink in water hazards, then loses it in the woods. It sounds too good to be true, sacrilege to the golf ethos of eternal struggle.

Or, as Mr. Cooper asked, “Is this magic?”

It is physics, not magic, but there is, of course, a catch. The Polara ball has an irregular dimple pattern that means it does not conform to golf’s official rules. The ball, which is designed to reduce slices and hooks by 75 percent or more, would be illegal to use in the Masters, for example, or any other competition, local or otherwise, sanctioned by the United States Golf Association.

But as golf works to appeal to a younger generation that hits the links in cargo shorts and sandals and without a rulebook, does a nonconforming label still matter?

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Talent to Burn

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New Life

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Rules of Misbehavior

Dan Savage, the brilliant and foul-mouthed sex columnist, has become one of the most important ethicists in America. Are we screwed?

by  Benjamin J. Dueholm

Five months after the death of Esther “Eppie” Lederer in 2002, the bulk of her estate—a sprawling Chicago apartment’s worth of furniture, photographs, papers, and memorabilia—went up for public auction with some fanfare in Elgin, Illinois.

Lederer, who was better known by the pen name Ann Landers, had for almost fifty years written America’s foremost newspaper advice column. With an estimated 90 million readers, the self-described “nice Jewish girl from Sioux City, Iowa,” was often counted among the most influential women in the United States. What was most remarkable about that influence was its breadth: she advised teenagers about pimples and presidents about missile defense—and the presidents often wrote her back.

Before her death, Lederer made clear that the Ann Landers pseudonym, which she had inherited in 1955, would die with her. But that did not prevent would-be successors from seeking to assume her mantle in more symbolic ways. On the auction block that November were Lederer’s writing desk and typewriter, on which she had composed her responses to correspondents like Desperate in Denver and Nervous in Nevada. When the bidding was over, an advice columnist named Dan Savage happily walked away with them. Today, the desk sits in Savage’s office in Seattle, where he serves as editorial director of the city’s alternative weekly The Stranger and writes his own hugely successful weekly sex advice column, “Savage Love.” His correspondents have included a woman signing off as “Fucking Asshole Idiot Losers” (FAIL), who faced a very modern problem. “My husband and I have a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy when we’re apart,” she began.

“A few months ago, I hooked up with a guy on a business trip who said he and his wife have the same arrangement. He was lying. His wife found out and started harassing me on Facebook. I truly feel horrible. How can I know if someone is really in an open relationship when they say they are? I am so done.”

Savage pointed out, “The only way to verify that someone is in an open relationship is to speak to that person’s partner—and as that would constitute ‘telling,’ FAIL, it would be a violation of a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

“But even a couple with a ‘please ask, do tell’ policy probably has a rule against 2:00 a.m. calls from drunken hotel-bar pickups. So you’ll have to trust your gut, FAIL, which failed you here. Just remember this on your next business trip: The further a married person is from home and the drunker that married person is, the likelier it is that that married person is lying to you.”

Suffice it to say, Savage is not the most obvious heir to Landers’s ultra-mainstream legacy. His columns answer a Chaucerian panorama of correspondents: gay Mormons, incestuous siblings, weight-gain fetishists, men yearning to be cuckolded, and otherwise ordinary Americans grappling with an extraordinary range of problems and proclivities. By the standards of a family newspaper, his advice is not only explicit but broad-minded to the point of being radical, encouraging people to embrace or at least tolerate previously unmentionable sexual inclinations in their partners, praising open relationships, and celebrating behaviors that might cause even the most intrepid reader to balk.

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Sleeping With The Fishes

by Dave Gilson

Last Monday, at around 11 in the morning local time, Osama Bin Laden's body dropped from the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson into the Arabian Sea. According to the Pentagon, the hours-old corpse had been washed and placed in a simple white sheet in accordance with Islamic practice. It was then sealed inside a weighted bag and laid on top of a board, which was tilted until "the body slid off into the sea."

Back on land, the controversy surrounding Bin Laden's last splash was just beginning. But beneath the waves, nature was taking its course, quietly and methodically turning the world's most-wanted terrorist into fish food. You could say Osama bin Laden had received the ultimate green burial, courtesy of the United States Navy.

Obviously, the decision to consign Bin Laden to the deep was motivated by expedience rather than eco-friendliness. Seafarers from Odysseus to Ahab have long known that there's no better way to quickly be rid of a corpse than to toss it overboard. But only recently has this salty custom been rediscovered as a relatively efficient way to be laid to rest with minimal environmental impact.

"I have noticed a great increase in interest in burial at sea," says Ann Rodney, an environmental protection specialist in the New England office of the Environmental Protection Agency's ocean and coastal unit, which oversees burials in American waters. The agency doesn't have hard data on how many Americans choose sea burial, but Rodney suspects the numbers, though small, are growing. "Ten years ago, I might get one or two calls a year about it. Now I get at least one call a week."

If you're intent on going into a watery grave, you'll need to enlist someone like Brad White, a 52-year-old licensed ship captain who has been depositing bodies in the Atlantic since 2005. His company, New England Burials at Sea, based in Scituate Harbor, Massachusetts, does an average of six full-body burials a year and has 25 "pre-need" requests on the books. People who choose to be buried at sea, he says, "typically have a love for the ocean, do not want to be cremated, and prefer 'ashes to ashes, dust to dust.' They want to become part of the Earth again via our oceans."

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