What's Good For You

If You Haven’t Been On Food Stamps, Stop Trying to Influence Government Policy

by Latoya Peterson

This is a public service announcement intended for journalists, news outlets, bloggers, folks in charge of creating policy, and people who have been lucky enough to have never relied on government assistance for basic necessities like food.

Just stop. Just stop the madness.

The latest in this ridiculousness? Fast Company weighing in on what people should and should not be eating on food stamps.

The writer is pulling all of these assumptions out of the air, based on what can theoretically be purchased on food stamps and an assumption that silly poor people don’t know that they will need to maximize their monthly allotment. They also seem to ignore that some people do eat well on SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) – there isn’t much data about what types of food are most commonly purchased using EBT cards, but national studies don’t really show much of a link between eating well or eating poorly and food stamps. It really depends on the person.

Which is why lines like this are infuriating:

• [I]f you live in cities like New York City and San Francisco, you should revel in your clean tap water, and save your food stamps for other things. [...]

• If [the New York soda ban] passed, the ban would prevent people from using food stamps to buy carbonated and non-carbonated beverages that are sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup or sugar and have more than 10 calories per eight-ounce serving. Is this over the top? Quite likely. But it’s an interesting thought experiment: What would happen to obesity and diabetes rates if soda was taken off the food-stamp approval list? [...]

• One fancy lobster would suck up a good portion of a monthly food stamp allowance–and if you can afford to do that, you should just use cash. Not that poor people shouldn’t get to enjoy lobster. They just shouldn’t use our tax dollars.

13% of Americans are on SNAP. It’s certainly one of the highest rates of SNAP usage since the program has started but let’s be real here – if every single person on SNAP was completely healthy and fit, we wouldn’t make a dent in America’s problem. (And, in general, when people talk about issues with America’s health, it’s really just a veiled way to say “eew, fat people.” Measuring national health is a set of shifting goal posts, and the solutions to a lot of these problems is ending subsidies on certain products. But its easier to pretend that a growing nation is the result of three hundred million individual failures.)

The SNAP program is also considered one of the most successful government programs there is. Families are hungry – people get food. It’s rather simple. The problem comes in when people try to nickel and dime the SNAP program, like the writer above, in service of…well whatever. Small government, personal responsibility, straight up bigotry, political expediency – the SNAP program takes the hit. It’s a popular program, but thanks to the way we demonize people on any sort of government assistance, it seen as something that we need to regulate, lest the undeserving poor get to live the high life on taxpayer dollars.

And what a high life it is. Let’s look at the numbers.

Seeing Is Remembering

Vision is our most dominant sense. It takes up 50% of our brain’s resources. And despite the visual nature of text, pictures are actually a superior and more efficient delivery mechanism for information. In neurology, this is called the ‘pictorial superiority effect’ [...] If I present information to you orally, you’ll probably only remember about 10% 72 hours after exposure, but if I add a picture, recall soars to 65%. So we are hard-wired to find visualization more compelling than a spreadsheet, a speech or a memo.

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You Never Can Tell

Philosophy That’s Not For The Masses

by  James Ladyman

If philosophy is the love of wisdom and concerns itself primarily with how we should live, then one might reasonably infer that true philosophers are wise and good people, able to help others who are struggling with tragedy or just with being. But on the whole that’s not how philosophers are perceived. I have academic philosophers in mind, even though I know that bestowing the title “philosopher” only on people in virtue of their being employed as academics in state-funded universities would be rather ridiculous. There are many great sages and sophiaphiles outside of philosophy departments. The position of academic philosopher is a relatively recent innovation, and one might regard the professionalisation of the subject as inexorably corrupting and distorting, especially in the contemporary academy in which intellectually bogus managerial and administrative ideas are ubiquitous – witness “research themes”, “impact”, and the proliferation of “research strategies”.

However, recent complaints about the specialisation of philosophy seem not to have professionalisation as their target, but rather the inaccessibility of what the professionals are doing from the point of view of outsiders. Professionalisation and inaccessibility may be related. Is it because professional philosophers are so specialised that they are hopeless at helping people live and at engaging with the lay population’s search for meaning and an understanding of philosophy?

The Day I (Nearly) Met Bob Dylan

by John Harris

Imagine this: since you were 11 years old, you have been convinced Bob Dylan is a genius. You own every album he has ever made, and your shelves are full of books whose titles attest to the great cloak of mystery that surrounds him: Behind the Shades, Wanted Man, Invisible Republic. You can quote his lyrics, and play dozens of his songs on the guitar. There are days when you find yourself revering him more than the Beatles, which is saying something.

And then it happens: someone points you in the direction of a set of stairs and says it's time for you to meet him, which produces an attack of nerves so strong that you fear you might pass out.

As he winds down after playing in front of 10,000 people, what exactly are you going to say? "Hello Bob, you're the reason I made a harmonica holder out of one of my mum's coathangers in 1983 and tortured the neighbours with repeated renditions of Like a Rolling Stone, and I just wanted to say thanks"? No. "Hello Bob, I've always had trouble making narrative sense of your 1978 song Changing of the Guards, and wondered whether you could help?" Absolutely not. "Hello Bob, great show"? Please.

Sadly, to kill this shaggy dog story before it runs away with us, when the dressing room door eventually swung open, Dylan wasn't there: he'd been spirited away by Eric Clapton, someone reckoned. Which makes 11 May 2002 – the day I nearly met Bob Dylan – nothing to tell the grandchildren about, really.

Thanks to favours pulled by a musician friend, I did, though, watch Dylan perform from the wings of the London Arena that night, and studied him as he left the stage. I noted that he was smaller than I imagined (5ft 7in, apparently), and that he walked with a strange gait, shuffling on his toes, almost like a boxer. He passed a foot or so in front of me: I nodded at him, and I think he nodded back. To me that was quite something, but that's an indication of what hero-worship can do to you.

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The Hangover

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Frontiers of Cooking

[ed.  Beyond what you could ever imagine.  Trust me.]

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Let’s Not Get to Know Each Other Better

by Joel Walkowski

A few months ago I liked a girl — a fairly common occurrence. But being slightly ambitious and drunk, I decided to ask her out on a date.

This was a weird choice, as I’m not sure I know anyone who has ever had a real date. Most elect to hang out, hook up, or Skype long-distance relations. The idea of a date (asking in advance, spending rent money on dinner and dealing with the initial awkwardness) is far too concrete and unnecessary. As the adage goes: Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? Why pay for dinner if you can sit around watching TV? If you stay at home, you hardly even need to stand up, let alone put on a nice shirt.

Despite misgivings, this particular foray felt legitimate, a coming-of-age moment straight out of a John Hughes movie. I had always wanted to go on a real date: flowers, dinner and all that. I thought that maybe in doing so I would feel more like an adult and less like a dumb little boy.

So I called this girl, feeling a little sleazy as I searched for the right words: “Hey, um, this is Joel. Do you want to, like, go out? On a date?”

“O.K.,” she said uncertainly, no doubt suspicious the whole thing was a joke.

Her positive response did nothing to calm my jitters. Give me a party, a front porch gathering, or a random encounter, and I’m comfortable talking to anyone. But this kind of formal planning unnerved me. Riding my bike home, I realized I didn’t even know what a real date was, beyond some vague Hollywood notion.

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Frisbee Fun

[Nothing like college to help one realize their true calling in life.]

Saturday Night Mix

[ed.  Happy Birthday, David Byrne.]

Makes Sense

 

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Neti Pots: Better Than They Sound

by Cassie Murdoch

Chances are someone you know has raved about using a neti pot or at least you've got an idea of what they are. But maybe you think washing out your nose sounds gross or scary, or perhaps you’ve been intrigued but are too nervous to try it? I was once like you. I’d been told how great they were for years but resisted because I thought it would make me feel like I was drowning. Then one day I went to a new doctor who ordered me to start using one, and I caved, and now I am a full-blown neti pothead. I guarantee that using one is not nearly as hard or nasty as you think it’ll be. Plus, flushing out all the slime from your nose can be satisfying in the same way that cleaning your house can be. You’ll walk around feeling light and accomplished because your sinuses are so sparkling and fresh!

So what exactly is a neti pot? It is a cute little pitcher that’s usually shaped like what I imagine a genie’s lamp looks like. You fill it with salt water, and then pour the water into one nostril, which is easier and less terrifying than it sounds. Gravity then pulls the water through your sinuses and it comes pouring out of your other nostril, along with a bunch of goop it’s collected along the way. Yes, it may sound a little unpleasant, but I promise it doesn’t hurt, and once you get the hang of it, it actually feels good! It’s a practice that has been used for centuries in India and has become ever more popular in the United States. (Dr. Oz even talked about it on Oprah, so you know it’s legit.)

Why would you want to flush your sinuses out with salt water? Lots of reasons: it helps clear congestion during a cold (and can make them go away faster), it can prevent and treat sinus infections, reduce allergies, help you breathe more easily, and just generally keep your respiratory system in better health. Neti pots work because they remove the dirt and bacteria and the dried mucousy clumps which like to hang out in your precious nasal caves and cause problems. The water can reach places you can't get clear simply by blowing your nose or reaching in with your finger (which you would never do, of course). So even if the idea of pouring water into your sinuses sounds icky, just remind yourself that tiny bacteria making a nice home in your face is even ickier. Hey, you clean your mouth and your ears out, why not treat your sinuses with the same respect?

Atchafalaya - The Control of Nature

By John McPhee

Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river. In evident defiance of nature, they descend as much as thirty-three feet, then go off to the west or south. This, to say the least, bespeaks a rare relationship between a river and adjacent terrain—any river, anywhere, let alone the third-ranking river on earth. The adjacent terrain is Cajun country, in a geographical sense the apex of the French Acadian world, which forms a triangle in southern Louisiana, with its base the Gulf Coast from the mouth of the Mississippi almost to Texas, its two sides converging up here near the lock—and including neither New Orleans nor Baton Rouge. The people of the local parishes (Pointe Coupee Parish, Avoyelles Parish) would call this the apex of Cajun country in every possible sense—no one more emphatically than the lockmaster, on whose face one day I noticed a spreading astonishment as he watched me remove from my pocket a red bandanna.

“You are a coonass with that red handkerchief,” he said.

A coonass being a Cajun, I threw him an appreciative smile. I told him that I always have a bandanna in my pocket, wherever I happen to be—in New York as in Maine or Louisiana, not to mention New Jersey (my home)—and sometimes the color is blue. He said, “Blue is the sign of a Yankee. But that red handkerchief—with that, you are pure coonass.” The lockmaster wore a white hard hat above his creased and deeply tanned face, his full but not overloaded frame. The nameplate on his desk said rabalais.

The navigation lock is not a formal place. When I first met Rabalais, six months before, he was sitting with his staff at 10 a.m. eating homemade bread, macaroni and cheese, and a mound of rice that was concealed beneath what he called “smoked old-chicken gravy.” He said, “Get yourself a plate of that.” As I went somewhat heavily for the old chicken, Rabalais said to the others, “He’s pure coonass. I knew it.”

If I was pure coonass, I would like to know what that made Rabalais—Norris F. Rabalais, born and raised on a farm near Simmesport, in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. When Rabalais was a child, there was no navigation lock to lower ships from the Mississippi. The water just poured out—boats with it—and flowed on into a distributary waterscape known as Atchafalaya. In each decade since about 1860, the Atchafalaya River had drawn off more water from the Mississippi than it had in the decade before. By the late nineteen-forties, when Rabalais was in his teens, the volume approached one-third. As the Atchafalaya widened and deepened, eroding headward, offering the Mississippi an increasingly attractive alternative, it was preparing for nothing less than an absolute capture: before long, it would take all of the Mississippi, and itself become the master stream. Rabalais said, “They used to teach us in high school that one day there was going to be structures up here to control the flow of that water, but I never dreamed I was going to be on one. Somebody way back yonder—which is dead and gone now—visualized it. We had some pretty sharp teachers.”

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Michael Marsicano

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Rich Returns

Imagine if you could invest $100,000 to control a $200 million asset for three months and sell it back to the owners for $10 million—tax-free. That's the Somali pirate way.

by Robert Young Pelton

Tucked behind the shouting dockworkers and fishermen cleaning their nets at the wharf in Bosaso, on the Gulf of Aden, there's a row of decrepit gray skiffs and patrol boats. Strewn with rusted antiaircraft shells and old mattresses, these dead ships look more like floating homeless shelters than vehicles of terror. Out on the water, though, they played a starring role in a booming criminal enterprise. These are the impounded attack vessels used by Somali pirates to hijack passing cargo ships, private yachts, and even massive oil tankers.

Drive a few hundred yards west along the beach, and there, just past the presidential compound, is a well-worn and crowded jail, with 248 pirates among its 400 prisoners. Abdirahman Mohamed Farole, the president of Puntland, insisted that I visit the prison to prove that his tough stand on maritime kidnappers was not just talk. (Somalia has not had an effective central government since 1991; Puntland is one of the country's seven autonomous regions.) Minutes after entering the prison, I was face to face with 51-year-old Farah Hirsi Kulan, or "Boyah," the unrepentant John Dillinger of the Indian Ocean.

Halfway into an eight-year sentence for piracy, Kulan—an arrogant, flash-tempered stick-insect of a man—lounged outside a packed cell block with another famous bandit, Omar Bagaley. A newly arrested 13-year-old, Saynab, sat wedged between Bagaley's knees on a concrete slab. Back in November 2008, Kulan was the first public face of Somali piracy. Not only was he the region's chief scoundrel—he had coordinated the seizure of 25 ships, as he boasted to the BBC in 2009—Kulan began a second career as a "reformed" pirate, advocating for pirates to quit, stop the violence, and go to the mosque. Some believed him, until Kulan was apprehended while fleeing a major pirate planning meeting in Garowe, Puntland's central city, and thrown in jail.

Our conversation was brief and loud. Bagaley stabbed the air with his finger, warning me and my interpreter to back off, while Kulan declaimed, insisting that he had ceased to be a pirate before his arrest and, anyway, he was merely a fisherman, enlisted to repel poachers. What money he earned, he shared with friends. This is a common refrain among Somali pirates: that they're just poor fishermen taking up arms to defend the seas from the predatory practices of foreign poachers—the real piracy, in their view. Some will tell you they go to sea to prevent toxic dumping, too, à la Greenpeace.

It's a romantic angle—and it's wrong. The U.N. Monitoring Group on Somalia estimates that only 6.5 percent of the attacks by gangs of Somali men have been against fishing vessels. According to the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a London-based nonprofit specializing in global commerce, the estimated $150 million to $300 million in ransom money paid out last year was provided to free the crews of bulk carriers, container ships, and other vessels carrying unglamorous (and lightly protected) cargo. Some of that was paid to recover private yachtsmen. And while a pirate's take may trickle down to friends, President Farole said most burn through cash conspicuously on Land Cruisers, lavish parties, and a steady supply of qat (a mild stimulant chewed like tobacco and imported from Kenya).

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Profiting In Misery

"God Help You. You're on Dialysis."

by Robin Fields

In October 1972, after a month of deliberation, Congress launched the nation’s most ambitious experiment in universal health care: a change to the Social Security Act that granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income.

It was a supremely hopeful moment. Although the technology to keep kidney patients alive through dialysis had arrived, it was still unattainable for all but a lucky few. At one hospital, a death panel—or “God committee” in the parlance of the time—was deciding who got it and who didn’t. The new program would help about 11,000 Americans for starters, and for a modest initial price tag of $135 million, would cover not only their dialysis and transplants, but all of their medical needs. Some consider it the closest that the United States has come to socialized medicine.

Now, almost four decades later, a program once envisioned as a model for a national health-care system has evolved into a hulking monster. Taxpayers spend more than $20 billion a year to care for those on dialysis—about $77,000 per patient, more, by some accounts, than any other nation. Yet the United States continues to have one of the industrialized world’s highest mortality rates for dialysis care. Even taking into account differences in patient characteristics, studies suggest that if our system performed as well as Italy’s, or France’s, or Japan’s, thousands fewer kidney patients would die each year.

In a country that regularly boasts about its superior medical system, such results might be cause for outrage. But although dialysis is a lifeline for almost 400,000 Americans, few outside this insular world have probed why a program with such compassionate aims produces such troubling outcomes. Even during a fervid national debate over health care, the state of dialysis garnered little public attention.

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Bearly Room

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Gonna Get Louder

[ed.  ok, don't say I didn't warn you]
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A Perfect Vacuum

 

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Three From Cannes

Midnight In Paris

Woody Allen's love affair with France, which goes back at least 30 years, finds its consummation with "Midnight in Paris," the latest of Allen's tourist-board brochures from foreign ports of call, which opened the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday. (His next movie will be made in Rome. Yes, really.) It's no surprise that premiere audiences here ate up this lightweight, rather silly fantasy about the eternal allure of the City of Light. But the good news is that Allen seems to be paying attention in a way he hasn't always done in recent films, and has found a way to channel his often-caustic misanthropy, half-comic fear of death and anti-American bitterness into agreeable comic whimsy.

Of all the leading men Allen has hired to stand in for him as the awkward, lovelorn, fatally talky writer-type hero since he stopped appearing in his own movies (a list that includes Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, Josh Brolin and, unhappily, Larry David), none has seemed less suited to the role than Owen Wilson. As Allen explained to the press corps here, he cast Wilson as frustrated Hollywood screenwriter Gil Pender -- who sees a Paris vacation as a chance to start over -- precisely because Wilson was a "California beach boy" who didn't remind the director of himself. However it works, it works pretty well; Wilson may not possess immense range or dramatic technique, but I've always enjoyed him. He's masterful with subtle, slow-burn comedy and can be a gentle screen presence in a way Allen never is. Gil is a naive, almost feral creature, wonderfully unfazed by the farcical and magical adventures that befall him.

Gil is in Paris with his insufferable fiancée, Inez (a truly thankless role for Rachel McAdams, who can do nothing with it), and her even worse parents (Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy), rich conservatives from who-knows-where who talk dismissively about French politics, wine and culture but don't blink at dropping 20 grand for some antique furniture to decorate their daughter's Malibu beach house. Fortunately these people only appear in a few scenes, because they're more like a New Yorker cartoonist's line drawing of what Republicans might be like than the real thing. Allen has never had even the vaguest idea of what sort of life may be found west of the Hudson; if he really wants to go exotic he could get off the Grand Tour and try making "Vicky Cristina Tuscaloosa."

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