Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Vancouver's Supervised Drug Injection Center: How Does It Work?
Vancouver, Canada is the only city in North America that provides a legal facility for drug addicts to push heroin and cocaine and other types of substances into their veins. It's called InSite, and it's both government-sanctioned and government-funded.
Located in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside—often called Canada's poorest postal code—the supervised injection site opened as a 3-year experiment back in 2003 to curb the neighborhood's high levels of disease spread through shared needles and death from overdose. Now, after nearly a decade of academic research, political debate, public scrutiny and a Canadian Supreme Court ruling last September that stated InSite should remain open indefinitely, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa and other cities across the nation are contemplating opening their own injection facilities. According to InSite's own records, between 2004 and 2010 they had 1418 overdoses without a single one resulting in death. No one has ever died there.
I spoke with Tim Gauthier, InSite's current clinical coordinator and registered nurse, about the difficulty of maintaining order in a room where most people are high, the significance of whether addicts live or die, and what hope can look like in such an unusual place.
Paul Hiebert: So, how would you describe InSite to someone who's never heard of it?
Tim Gauthier: It's place where staff members and nurses supervise people's injections. The participants come in with their own drugs. In case a participant overdoses or has a heart attack, someone is there to help. If we can intervene timely and quick, there's no reason anyone should ever die. That's our primary function.
There was a big push to get a facility like this opened in the late '90s when overdose rates in British Columbia were reaching epidemic proportions. I think in 1997 we had something like over 450 overdose deaths in the province. Those are absolutely needless deaths.
Participants at InSite have their own booth, which is clean and sanitary. We offer them new needles, alcohol swabs, a sink to wash their hands and medical care. We can dress their wounds and address chronic health issues. We can also link them up with income assistance and housing.
At our front desk, people can pick up equipment such as condoms, lubrication, needles, cookers, filters and everything you need for injecting safely. We give out as much as people think they need. You could take hundreds of needles if you want. There's no limit. It's not a one-for-one needle exchange.
Also, we ask that participants maintain the confidentiality of others who use the site.
Most of the people using InSite are not casual, weekend users. Is that correct?
Typically, participants are people who have been addicted for two years or longer. They're usually heavily addicted middle-aged men from the neighborhood. We also have an overrepresentation of aboriginal users in comparison to general population rates.
We do have the odd time when a person comes in who's relatively new to their addiction. Maybe they're not even addicted at all. Either way, they're new to using. We used to have a blanket rule that we couldn't accept anybody who was brand new to drugs. But that's been revamped because we were turning away people who were using one needle several times or injecting alone. They were engaging in much higher-risk behavior.
by Paul Hiebert, The Awl | Read more:
Photo courtesy of Vancouver Coastal Health
Cuckoo
An “internal clock” is not a metaphor. Or rather, it is—you don’t have a tiny Timex in your cerebellum—but it’s also a real biological feature, a specialized bundle of cells that regulates our cyclical processes. These clocks are remarkably widespread. Single-cell creatures that lack even nuclei nonetheless have internal clocks; so do human beings with programmable cappuccino-makers. In plants, the clock can be located in leaves, stems, or roots. In slugs, it’s at the base of the eye. In many birds, it’s in the pineal gland, the structure near the center of the brain where Descartes thought future scientists would find the soul.
In mammals, the clock is located near the base of the brain, in a group of nerve cells known as the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or SCN. The SCN consists of only about 20,000 of the brain’s estimated 100 billion neurons; you could fit the entire thing on the tip of the second hand of an analog watch. Yet without it, you are profoundly screwed. If you replace the SCN of one hamster with that of another, the original hamster will begin sleeping, eating, and attending its manic hamster spin class on the schedule previously maintained by the other one. If you remove the SCN, the hamster’s behavior will lose all regularity. Similarly, people with brain lesions in the SCN region cannot maintain consistent sleep-wake patterns.
Assuming that you have a functioning SCN, you also have a chronotype—a genetically determined blueprint for sleepiness, hunger, hormone levels, body temperature, and so forth. Of these, Roenneberg focuses primarily on sleep, “the most conspicuous expression of the body clock in humans.”
That expression takes two forms: sleep timing (when you go to bed) and sleep duration (how much sleep you need). These variables are independent; you can be an early bird who needs ten hours of sleep, a night owl who needs six, or vice versa. You can also be neither. Sleep patterns form a bell curve, and the vast majority of people fall in the middle. What you cannot do—contrary to popular opinion—is change your clock through sheer force of will.
As a chronotypical outlier, I know this firsthand. Work-wise, I function best from around 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., a characteristic I share with roughly one percent of the population. That’s not an easy schedule to live with, so I once tried to train myself into a nine-to-five workday instead. Dismissing my conviction that I wrote better at night as so much Romantic preciousness, I diligently sat down to work each morning, spent eight hours watching the daylight fill and drain outside my window, then finally, well after dark, abruptly found myself able to write. After six months of this insanity—during which I more than doubled my workday without remotely upping my productivity—I gave up and went back to the other, better kind of craziness. The moral applies to every internal clock: Good luck trying to buck it.
Left to their own devices, internal clocks can get much stranger than mine. Roenneberg cites experiments in which subjects were confined to bunkers and deprived of all temporal cues. While most subjects maintained a day-night periodicity of roughly 24 hours (circa one day: hence, “circadian”), some people’s cycle doubled, to about 48 hours. Amazingly, they were oblivious to the change. They continued to eat three meals a “day,” and their sense of smaller time units doubled, too. Asked to estimate an hour, they estimated two instead.
by Kathryn Schulz, New York Magazine | Read more:
Photo: Christian Marclay. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York and White Cube, London
Welcome to the “Friendly Skies!”
[ed. This video has been around a long time but I wasn't aware of Mr. Carroll's opportunity to deliver such a delicious payback over the phone.]
Musician Dave Carroll had difficulty with United Airlines. United’s baggage handlers damaged his $3500 custom guitar, and he spent over 9 months trying to get United to pay for damages.
During his final exchange with the United Customer Relations Manager, Dave stated that he was left with no choice other than to create a music video for YouTube exposing United’s lack of cooperation. The manager responded: “Good luck with that one, pal.”
Dave shot and posted his video on YouTube. The video has since received over 11 million hits. (You’ll soon see why!)
United Airlines contacted Dave and attempted settlement in exchange for pulling the video. Naturally Dave’s response was: “Good luck with that one, pal.”
Taylor Guitars sent Dave two new custom guitars in appreciation for the product recognition from the video that has lead to a marked increase in orders.
via:
Musician Dave Carroll had difficulty with United Airlines. United’s baggage handlers damaged his $3500 custom guitar, and he spent over 9 months trying to get United to pay for damages.
During his final exchange with the United Customer Relations Manager, Dave stated that he was left with no choice other than to create a music video for YouTube exposing United’s lack of cooperation. The manager responded: “Good luck with that one, pal.”
Dave shot and posted his video on YouTube. The video has since received over 11 million hits. (You’ll soon see why!)
United Airlines contacted Dave and attempted settlement in exchange for pulling the video. Naturally Dave’s response was: “Good luck with that one, pal.”
Taylor Guitars sent Dave two new custom guitars in appreciation for the product recognition from the video that has lead to a marked increase in orders.
via:
Taco USA
Admit it, tortilla-chip fans: you are curious about Taco Bell Doritos Locos tacos, introduced in March. These salt bombs take the usual fast-food taco filling and stuff them inside a giant orange-dusted nacho-cheese chip. They have been so successful that the company has just introduced a Cool Ranch flavor.
But to truly grasp the significance of these creations, the taco must be eaten in the company of Gustavo Arellano, a journalist and Orange County, Calif., native who is perhaps the greatest (and only) living scholar of Mexican-American fast food. And preferably, you will eat it here, in the birthplace of American fast food, while he explains to you precisely how the Frito, America’s first corn chip, was copied from the Mexican tostado, then evolved into the Dorito and eventually the Tostito.
He has just published “Taco USA,” an absorbing account of how a few foods (salsa, tacos, chili, tequila) from the complicated and enormous cuisine of Mexico managed to slip into the mainstream of American taste.
“It’s not exactly a feel-good story, except maybe for the shareholders of Frito-Lay,” he said, gesturing out to the empty storefronts and cash-only gas stations that line the streets.
San Bernardino, an hour east of Los Angeles, is the fertile crescent for American fast food, but its west side has clearly seen better days. In 1940, the first McDonald’s drive-up hamburger stand opened a few blocks from this Taco Bell; throughout the ’40s and ’50s, entrepreneurs came through town to check out the McDonald brothers’ revolutionary technology hacks — like single-serving ketchup dispensers, burger-size spatulas and disposable milkshake cups. (In 1954, Ray Kroc, a salesman of milkshake mixing machines, came through town and was so impressed that he bought in, started his own franchise, and later bought the brothers out.)
The evolution of Mexican food in the United States is the current obsession of Mr. Arellano, the editor of The OC Weekly, a lively journal where he has also been the food critic for the last 10 years. He has spent much of that time exploring precisely how Mexican food became so popular and profitable in this country — where, until very recently, most things Mexican were generally both unpopular and unprofitable.
For the purposes of Mr. Arellano’s tale, the story of the fast-food taco begins here, on the corner of North Sixth and Mount Vernon Streets, where Route 66 used to run through town.
by Julia Moskin, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Axel Koester for The New York Times
It’s Time to Say Goodbye to All That Stuff
It often takes a crisis, major or minor, to prompt people to change bad habits, especially when the change is time-consuming and anxiety-provoking.
The other day, the drawer in which I store my swimming stuff jammed. When I finally got it open and dumped out its contents, I counted more than a dozen bathing suits (several with their store tags intact), 12 bathing caps, 10 pairs of goggles and countless nose clips and earplugs.
Then I recalled the same thing had happened a week earlier with my drawer of pens and pencils, literally hundreds of them, half of which were dried out or otherwise useless.
And I shouldn’t even mention my full-size freezer or humongous medicine cabinet, where things fall out every time I open them. Or my floor-to-ceiling plastic bins of yarn, mountain-high pile of Bubble Wrap, bags of plastic bags and shopping bags, and shelves of items I thought might be gifts for someone someday.
Having just read “Homer & Langley,” E. L. Doctorow’s novel about the Collyer brothers, who were found dead in a Harlem brownstone under more than 100 tons of stuff they had accumulated, I finally vowed to tackle my lifelong tendency to accumulate too much of nearly everything and my seeming inability to throw out anything that I considered potentially useful to me or someone else sometime in the future.
Living in a three-story house with full basement made it far too easy to pursue this habit. I had plenty of storage space (and had filled every nook and cranny of it), but often couldn’t find things when I needed them, including clothes, books, articles, even frozen food I knew I had stored somewhere. Last year I found eight unopened jars of cocktail sauce in the back of my fridge; I had forgotten I had any and kept buying more.
When a product I liked at the moment was on sale (graham crackers, lipstick, shampoo, detergent, cereal, supplements), I often bought as many as I could and added them to already overflowing stashes. I’m often afraid I won’t be able to get more when I need it, a concern occasionally validated when a manufacturer discontinues something I like. But more often, I tire of these items and move on to others long before I’ve used up the old purchases.
Steps to Declutter
Recently, as if by fate, an advance copy of a book arrived in the mail that is without doubt the most helpful tome for anyone with a cluttering tendency. It’s called “The Hoarder in You: How to Live a Happier, Healthier, Uncluttered Life” (published Tuesday by Rodale Books). It was written by Robin Zasio, a clinical psychologist, a star of the show “Hoarders” and director of the Anxiety Treatment Center in Sacramento.
I would say that Dr. Zasio’s book is about the best self-help work I’ve read in my 46 years as a health and science writer. She seems to know all the excuses and impediments to coping effectively with a cluttering problem, and she offers practical, clinically proven antidotes to them.
Unless you are an extreme hoarder (the kind portrayed on the show) who requires a year or more of professional therapy, the explanations and steps described in the book can help any garden-variety clutterer better understand the source of the problem and its negative consequences, as well as overcome it and keep it from recurring.
Though it is not possible here to include all of Dr. Zasio’s lessons, here are a few I think are especially helpful.
by Jane E. Brody, NY Times | Read more:
Illustration: Yvetta Fedorova
Tuesday, May 1, 2012
On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning
One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo’s fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl.
Tell you the truth, she’s not that good-looking. She doesn’t stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn’t young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a “girl,” properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She’s the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there’s a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert.
Maybe you have your own particular favorite type of girl - one with slim ankles, say, or big eyes, or graceful fingers, or you’re drawn for no good reason to girls who take their time with every meal. I have my own preferences, of course. Sometimes in a restaurant I’ll catch myself staring at the girl at the next table to mine because I like the shape of her nose.
But no one can insist that his 100% perfect girl correspond to some preconceived type. Much as I like noses, I can’t recall the shape of hers - or even if she had one. All I can remember for sure is that she was no great beauty. It’s weird.
“Yesterday on the street I passed the 100% girl,” I tell someone.
“Yeah?” he says. “Good-looking?”
“Not really.”
“Your favorite type, then?”
“I don’t know. I can’t seem to remember anything about her - the shape of her eyes or the size of her breasts.”
“Strange.”
“Yeah. Strange.”
“So anyhow,” he says, already bored, “what did you do? Talk to her? Follow her?”
“Nah. Just passed her on the street.”
She’s walking east to west, and I west to east. It’s a really nice April morning.
Wish I could talk to her. Half an hour would be plenty: just ask her about herself, tell her about myself, and - what I’d really like to do - explain to her the complexities of fate that have led to our passing each other on a side street in Harajuku on a beautiful April morning in 1981. This was something sure to be crammed full of warm secrets, like an antique clock built when peace filled the world.
by Haruki Murakami, YMFY | Read more:
Image via:: City Block, Geoffrey Johnson. Represented at the Hubert Gallery here
Snacks for a Fat Planet
PepsiCo is the largest food-and-beverage company in the United States, and the second-largest in the world, after Nestlé. If PepsiCo were a country, the size of its economy—sixty billion dollars in revenues in 2010—would put it sixty-sixth in gross national product, between Ecuador and Croatia. Although the flagship brand, Pepsi-Cola, has always been second to Coca-Cola, the Frito-Lay division is ten times larger than its largest competitor, Diamond Foods, Inc., of San Francisco. Its products take up whole aisles at Walmart. They are the first thing you see when you enter a deli or a convenience store, and they’re in pharmacies, office-supply stores, schools, libraries, and the vending machines at work. PepsiCo’s snacks are also deeply embedded in our social rituals and national institutions. (At the climactic moment of the national college-football championship game, in January, when Auburn was about to kick the winning field goal, the sportscaster Brent Musberger yelped, “This is for all the Tostitos!”) If grazing on snacks throughout the day eventually comes to replace eating regular meals—a situation that already exists in some households—we’ll have PepsiCo to thank.
PepsiCo is also an empire of mind share. Pepsi is the second-most-recognized beverage brand in the world, after Coke, and eighteen of PepsiCo’s other brands, which include Tropicana, Gatorade, and Quaker Oats, are billion-dollar businesses in their own right. In 2010, the company spent $3.4 billion marketing and advertising its brands. They represent a kind of promise to its customers—a guarantee that the drinks and snacks are safe, and that the taste of them, that irresistible combination of flavors, will be the same every time. But in another sense the brands are abstractions. The taste is the rootstock onto which PepsiCo grafts desires (“aspirations,” as they say in the branding business) that have nothing to do with the products themselves. This duality in PepsiCo’s products—part sensory, part aspirational—extends throughout the company’s culture and its mission, as defined by Indra Nooyi, who has been its C.E.O. since October, 2006. It is not enough to make things that taste good, she says. PepsiCo must also be “the good company.” It must aspire to higher values than the day-to-day business of making and selling soft drinks and snacks. Nooyi calls this “performance with purpose.” The phrase is on the screen savers that pop up on idle computers around headquarters.
And yet, for all its riches, its vast reach, and its sense of high purpose, the PepsiCo empire is built on shifting sands. Over the course of the past half century, during which PepsiCo’s revenues have increased more than a hundredfold, a public-health crisis has been steadily growing along with it. People are getting fatter. In the nineteen-eighties, rates of obesity started to rise sharply in the U.S. and around the world. By the nineteen-nineties, obesity reached epidemic proportions. One study cited by federal health officials estimates that, in 2008, obesity cost the U.S. a hundred and forty-seven billion dollars in health-care charges and resulted in about three hundred thousand deaths.
Many studies point to the ubiquity of high-calorie, low-cost processed foods and drinks as one of the major drivers of this condition. Snacks, in particular, play a role in childhood obesity, which is growing even faster than obesity in adults. Americans consume about fifty gallons of soda a year, more than four times the average per-capita consumption sixty years ago. Americans also ingest about thirty-four hundred milligrams of sodium per day, twice the recommended amount; sodium has long been linked to high blood pressure. And the oils and fats used in some fried potato and corn chips elevate cholesterol and can cause heart disease. In other words, that great taste promised by PepsiCo’s brands, which relies heavily on sugar, salt, and fat, appears to be making some people sick, and its most devoted fans, the “heavy users,” as they’re known in the food industry, could be among the worst afflicted. Cutting short the lives of your best customers isn’t much of a strategy for long-term success.
by John Seabrook, The New Yorker (May, 2011) | Read more:
Illustration by Robert Risko
FiveBooks Interviews > Stephen Cave on Immortality
Why do we have this compelling, addictive interest in the idea of living forever?
It’s a human universal. Among all of the animals, we probably uniquely are aware that we’re going to die. We try to avoid the worst, to keep going one way or another, yet we must live in the knowledge that it is futile – that ultimately, the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen. That all our projects and all our dreams, everything we’re striving for, one day it will all be over. And this is terrifying. So we are very keen to hear any story that can allay this fear and say death isn’t what it seems, and we can just keep on going indefinitely.
In your book Immortality, just out, you identify four paths to that goal. Will you take us through them?
These four paths are, I think, the only ways in which we can imagine living forever. They have a logical relationship that takes us from one to the next. The first one is simply living on, in this body and on this earth. That might seem a rather implausible idea initially, given the success rate of it during history, but almost every culture dreams of this in one way or another – whether through an elixir of life or biotech.
If we think that isn’t likely to work, and we need a plan B, the next step is to think maybe this body that has to die can nonetheless rise again and live for a second time. This is the hope that we can be resurrected, and it has played an important role in various religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and ancient Egypt. We have modern conceptions of this too, such as cryonics – the idea that we can freeze our corpses and revive them at some later point.
But if you think this physical body is too unreliable, that ultimately we will crumble from disease and ageing, then you want instead an immaterial thing that is immune to all this. This is the third path, the belief in the soul. Something pure, some spark of the divine that won’t age or succumb to disease, that we can live on through. Belief in the soul is probably the most widespread of all the immortality narratives, but it too has problems from the philosophical perspective.
And for those who don’t believe in anything as definite as an immaterial soul that can preserve our personality, then there is the more indirect route to immortality of legacy, which is the fourth route. There are different forms of legacy – biological legacy, in our genes and children, or cultural legacy, living on through our works and fame. Every culture has some kind of story about why death is not the end. And this story will draw on one or more of these four fundamental forms of how we might live forever.
by Stephen Cave, The Browser | Read more:
Illustration: Florian Prischl. The Ladder of Divine Ascent
Monday, April 30, 2012
How Online Black Markets Work
The internet is no stranger to crime. From counterfeit and stolen products, to illegal drugs, stolen identities and weapons, nearly anything can be purchased online with a few clicks of the mouse. The online black market not only can be accessed by anyone with an Internet connection, but the whole process of ordering illicit goods and services is alarmingly easy and anonymous, with multiple marketplaces to buy or sell anything you want.
Understanding how the market thrives—unregulated and untraceable—can give you a better sense of the threats (or resources) that affect you and your business.
In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets anyone purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some "on stage" fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they've had their eyes on.
A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.
Moving Money
Bitcoin (www.bitcoin.org) is system tool that will act as a personal bank for storing and investing digital currency on your computer. Once it's installed on your system, it sits empty like a piggy bank, waiting to be filled with untraceable digital cash.
Getting it filled is the tricky part.
The digital monetary system online is predominately operated by the likes of Paypal, Western Union, and banking companies that try to follow government regulations to prevent fraud and money laundering. There are two steps to legally take money and have it converted at the current Bitcoin rate into BTCs in our digital and anonymous bank.
Start by opening a Dwolla (www.dwolla.com) banking account with no fees. You can use your real information—you aren't doing anything illegal. In about three days you will be given a fraud test and have to identify small transfers in your Dwolla and personal bank account. Once your account is confirmed, wire any amount from your personal bank to Dwolla from a lump sum or the estimated price of your purchase you have in mind. After you confirm the transfers, your legit money will now be stored in a new global bank with less restriction than US banks.
Next you need to set up an account with the largest bitcoin exchanger, MtGox. Due to fraud concerns, MtGox will only allow transfers from banks like Dwolla.
After your Dwolla transfer moves to MtGox, you can use the money to purchase Bitcoins on the open market for a small percentage-based fee. Once this sale is complete, your bitcoins are best stored in your own bank account that is residing digitally on your computer.
The whole process can be completed in less than a week, and the $1,000 USD is now exchanged to $191 BTC. Now you are ready to go shopping on the black market.
by Brandon Gregg, CSO Online, Read more:
Photo via:
In our scenario we are going to legally transfer $1,000 USD out of a regular bank account and into a mathematical system of binary codes, and then enter a neighborhood of the Internet largely used by criminals. This hidden world anyone lets anyone purchase bulk downloads of stolen credit cards, as well as a credit card writer, blank cards, some "on stage" fake identities—and maybe even a grenade launcher they've had their eyes on.
A journey into the darker side of the Internet starts with two open-source programs: Bitcoin and the Tor Bundle.
Moving Money
Bitcoin (www.bitcoin.org) is system tool that will act as a personal bank for storing and investing digital currency on your computer. Once it's installed on your system, it sits empty like a piggy bank, waiting to be filled with untraceable digital cash.
Getting it filled is the tricky part.
The digital monetary system online is predominately operated by the likes of Paypal, Western Union, and banking companies that try to follow government regulations to prevent fraud and money laundering. There are two steps to legally take money and have it converted at the current Bitcoin rate into BTCs in our digital and anonymous bank.
Start by opening a Dwolla (www.dwolla.com) banking account with no fees. You can use your real information—you aren't doing anything illegal. In about three days you will be given a fraud test and have to identify small transfers in your Dwolla and personal bank account. Once your account is confirmed, wire any amount from your personal bank to Dwolla from a lump sum or the estimated price of your purchase you have in mind. After you confirm the transfers, your legit money will now be stored in a new global bank with less restriction than US banks.
Next you need to set up an account with the largest bitcoin exchanger, MtGox. Due to fraud concerns, MtGox will only allow transfers from banks like Dwolla.
After your Dwolla transfer moves to MtGox, you can use the money to purchase Bitcoins on the open market for a small percentage-based fee. Once this sale is complete, your bitcoins are best stored in your own bank account that is residing digitally on your computer.
The whole process can be completed in less than a week, and the $1,000 USD is now exchanged to $191 BTC. Now you are ready to go shopping on the black market.
by Brandon Gregg, CSO Online, Read more:
Photo via:
Take The Skyway
There wasn't a damn thing I could do or say
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements
Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well.
The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.
How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,
This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.
by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Up in the skyway
~The Replacements
Walking has been much in the news lately, or rather, how little Americans seem to be doing it. It’s obvious that walking is good for individual health, but what should perhaps be even more emphasized is the importance of walking for the overall health of the urban fabric. So, in addition to asking ourselves the question of how we can get people to walk more, we also ought to consider equally beneficial ways for designing the built environment, such that all this walking will bring about a result for society. Walking may be an end in itself, but if it is only considered as such, we forego the opportunity that it is a means as well. The history of walking in American cities is one of the steady erosion of an activity that was so natural that its importance was almost entirely tacit. It is always amazing to realize how malleable our norms are: during the automobile’s first few decades, pedestrian fatalities were commonly greeted with criminal charges such as ‘technical manslaughter’. Drivers were viewed with mistrust, considered reckless and even represented class division. However, pedestrians became increasingly regarded as impediments to the velocity of modern life, and economic progress became increasingly associated with the automobile and the infrastructure that made its hegemony possible.
How did this change come about? As Sarah Goodyear writes in the Atlantic Cities blog,
One key turning point…came in 1923 in Cincinnati. Citizens’ anger over pedestrian deaths gave rise to a referendum drive. It gathered some 7,000 signatures in support of a rule that would have required all vehicles in the city to be fitted with speed governors limiting them to 25 miles per hour.Local auto clubs and dealers recognized that cars would be a lot harder to sell if there was a cap on their speed. So they went into overdrive in their campaign against the initiative. They sent letters to every individual with a car in the city, saying that the rule would condemn the U.S. to the fate of China, which they painted as the world’s most backward nation. They even hired pretty women to invite men to head to the polls and vote against the rule. And the measure failed…The industry lobbied [for] the adoption of traffic statutes to supplant common law. The statutes were designed to restrict pedestrian use of the street and give primacy to cars. The idea of "jaywalking” – a concept that had not really existed prior to 1920 – was enshrined in law.
This was the beginning of a long and effective campaign that saw walking legislated and planned almost out of existence. Even now, designers and planners are often hobbled by a perspective which continues to favour the automobile over pedestrian – most ironically, in the name of safety.
by Misha Lepetic, 3 Quarks Daily | Read more:
Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem
Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates.
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post | Read more:
It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.
“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.
It is clear that the center of gravity in the Republican Party has shifted sharply to the right. Its once-legendary moderate and center-right legislators in the House and the Senate — think Bob Michel, Mickey Edwards, John Danforth, Chuck Hagel — are virtually extinct.
The post-McGovern Democratic Party, by contrast, while losing the bulk of its conservative Dixiecrat contingent in the decades after the civil rights revolution, has retained a more diverse base. Since the Clinton presidency, it has hewed to the center-left on issues from welfare reform to fiscal policy. While the Democrats may have moved from their 40-yard line to their 25, the Republicans have gone from their 40 to somewhere behind their goal post.
What happened? Of course, there were larger forces at work beyond the realignment of the South. They included the mobilization of social conservatives after the 1973Roe v. Wade decision, the anti-tax movement launched in 1978 by California’s Proposition 13, the rise of conservative talk radio after a congressional pay raise in 1989, and the emergence of Fox News and right-wing blogs. But the real move to the bedrock right starts with two names: Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist.
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, Washington Post | Read more:
They Dressed Like Groucho
You could say, with partial plagiarism: It was the best of nights. It was the worst of nights.
I remember thinking that it might be a long time before I saw so many happy people in one place. The place was Carnegie Hall and the people were fans — worshipers might be the more appropriate word — of Groucho Marx.
At least half the eager throng was a young, college-type crowd; it was at the peak of the time when the Marx Brothers — and I, to some extent — were campus heroes. The controversial (mildly put) Erin Fleming (see previous column), the young woman who was running Groucho’s life and household for both good and ill — had hauled the frail fellow out into public once more.
To the dismay of friends and relatives, who feared that in these sadly waning years, Groucho, with formidable powers decreasing noticeably, lacked the stamina, let alone the desire to perform again, Erin had lined up a series of “concerts,” the true purpose of which many felt was less to get Groucho back in the limelight than to get Fleming into it with him.
There were two fears. Would he be physically able to get through a full-length concert, enfeebled as he was most days then, and what would it do to him if only a handful of people showed up? Could he survive that? That last fear proved unfounded.
When the big night came, I had the cabdriver let me off out front, instead of at the stage door, to assess the crowd.
There was a touching aspect to the milling, chatting, laughing throng. Some carried pictures of Groucho and his siblings, some had painted on Groucho mustaches. Hurrying back to the stage door I must have seen at least a dozen fully-got-up Grouchos complete with swallow-tail coat. There were even a few Harpos and Chicos. (I saw no Zeppos.) Nice kids in a troubled time.
It was 1972 — not a nice time in the country — and there was something so sweet about these kids that I couldn’t manage to ditch the thought that some equally nice kids might have loved to be there but for their having been, just two years earlier, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.
Pushing dark thoughts aside, I went inside and up to the dressing room. I recall now that the words and melody of Groucho’s friend Harry Ruby’s “Everyone Says I Love You” began to play in my head in Groucho’s voice, sung by him on my show a few years earlier. This was going to be a great evening.
I entered the dressing room and was horrified. Groucho was slumped on a couch looking more frail and papery than I had ever seen him. The famous voice was a hoarse whisper. I thought of those milling kids outside in a near frenzy to see their hero and here he (all but) lay before me, looking like moribundity warmed over. Clearly it would be a miracle if we could get him downstairs and to the stage, let alone through a two-hour concert.
“How do you feel, Grouch?” I asked with forced brightness.
“Tired.”
by Dick Cavett, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
I remember thinking that it might be a long time before I saw so many happy people in one place. The place was Carnegie Hall and the people were fans — worshipers might be the more appropriate word — of Groucho Marx.
At least half the eager throng was a young, college-type crowd; it was at the peak of the time when the Marx Brothers — and I, to some extent — were campus heroes. The controversial (mildly put) Erin Fleming (see previous column), the young woman who was running Groucho’s life and household for both good and ill — had hauled the frail fellow out into public once more.To the dismay of friends and relatives, who feared that in these sadly waning years, Groucho, with formidable powers decreasing noticeably, lacked the stamina, let alone the desire to perform again, Erin had lined up a series of “concerts,” the true purpose of which many felt was less to get Groucho back in the limelight than to get Fleming into it with him.
There were two fears. Would he be physically able to get through a full-length concert, enfeebled as he was most days then, and what would it do to him if only a handful of people showed up? Could he survive that? That last fear proved unfounded.
When the big night came, I had the cabdriver let me off out front, instead of at the stage door, to assess the crowd.
There was a touching aspect to the milling, chatting, laughing throng. Some carried pictures of Groucho and his siblings, some had painted on Groucho mustaches. Hurrying back to the stage door I must have seen at least a dozen fully-got-up Grouchos complete with swallow-tail coat. There were even a few Harpos and Chicos. (I saw no Zeppos.) Nice kids in a troubled time.
It was 1972 — not a nice time in the country — and there was something so sweet about these kids that I couldn’t manage to ditch the thought that some equally nice kids might have loved to be there but for their having been, just two years earlier, shot dead by the National Guard at Kent State.
Pushing dark thoughts aside, I went inside and up to the dressing room. I recall now that the words and melody of Groucho’s friend Harry Ruby’s “Everyone Says I Love You” began to play in my head in Groucho’s voice, sung by him on my show a few years earlier. This was going to be a great evening.
I entered the dressing room and was horrified. Groucho was slumped on a couch looking more frail and papery than I had ever seen him. The famous voice was a hoarse whisper. I thought of those milling kids outside in a near frenzy to see their hero and here he (all but) lay before me, looking like moribundity warmed over. Clearly it would be a miracle if we could get him downstairs and to the stage, let alone through a two-hour concert.
“How do you feel, Grouch?” I asked with forced brightness.
“Tired.”
by Dick Cavett, NY Times | Read more:
Photo: Wikipedia
Aspirin Really Is Kind of a Wonder Drug
The evidence that over-the-counter (OTC) medications can benefit our long-term health in meaningful ways keeps accruing. Aspirin, ibuprofen, and acetaminophen all have various health benefits, but aspirin is emerging as a key player in the fight against cancer. Three new studies by the same research team have shown that aspirin over the long term can reduce the risk of cancer - and its spread through the body.
One type of cancer called metastatic adenocarcinoma, which can affect the prostate, lungs, and colon, was reduced by 46 percent in people who took aspirin.
The team's earlier work had shown that daily aspirin could reduce cancer risk over the next 20 years. Now, Peter M. Rothwell and his team have expanded on their original findings. In one large scale review of 51 earlier studies, people who took less than 300 mg of aspirin every day had a 25 percent reduced risk of developing any type of cancer after three years. It reduced the risk of death from cancer by about 15 percent. The longer people took aspirin, the better: after five years, the risk of death was reduced by 37 percent in aspirin-takers.
Another study determined how aspirin affected the spread of cancer once it had developed. People who took at least 75 mg of aspirin a day had a 36 percent reduced risk of metastatic cancer than non-aspirin takers. One type of cancer called metastatic adenocarcinoma, which can affect the prostate, lungs, and colon, was reduced by 46 percent in people who took aspirin.
by Alice G. Walton, The Atlantic | Read more:
Photo: Melinda Fawver/Shutterstock
Sunday, April 29, 2012
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