Leaving Wall Street

When some people think about Wall Street, they conjure up images of traders shouting on the stock exchange, of bankers dining at five star restaurants, of CEOs whispering in the ears of captured Congress members.

When I think about Wall Street, I think about its stunted rainbow of pale pastel shirts. I think about the vaulting, highly secured, and very cold lobbies. And I think about the art passed daily by the harried workers, virtually unseen.

Before I occupied Wall Street, Wall Street occupied me. What started as a summer internship led to a seven-year career. During my time on Wall Street, I changed from a curious college student full of hope for my future, into a cynical, bitter, depressed, and exhausted “knowledge worker” who felt that everyone was out to screw me over.

The culture of Wall Street is pervasive and contagious. While there are Wall Street employees who are able to ignore it, or block it out, I was not one of them. I drank the Kool Aid. I’m out of it now. But I’d like to tell you what it was like.

When you are wealthy and successful, you have a choice. You can believe your success stems from luck and privilege, or you can believe it stems from hard work. Very few people like to view their success as a matter of luck. And so, perhaps understandably, most people on Wall Street believe they have earned their jobs, and the money that follows.

While there are many on Wall Street who come from wealthy backgrounds, there are also many people from very humble backgrounds. In my experience, it is often those who do not come from privilege who are the system’s fiercest defenders.

When I was a summer intern, we met with various executives who’d tell us about their careers and pitch us on the firm. The aim was to sell the firm to everyone, even though only a few of us would ultimately be offered full-time positions at the firm. It had an element of redundancy to it, since we were clearly already interested in the firm, or we wouldn’t be there at all. The effect of these talks, then, was to make a competitive situation even more competitive. Welcome to Wall Street. One executive described the firm as a “Golden Springboard.” If we began our careers there, his reasoning went, there wasn’t anywhere we couldn’t go. The executive was right. Background becomes irrelevant once you have “made it” to Wall Street. Once you’ve gotten in the door, you’re one of “us.”

by Alexis Goldstein, N+1 Magazine |  Read more:
Image: Wall Street, 1915. Paul Strand.

Bear Meat

Evenings spent in a mountain hut are among the most sublime and intense that life holds. I mean a real hut, the kind where you seek shelter after a four-, five-, or six-hour climb and where you find few so-called comforts.

Not that chairlifts and cable cars and such comforts are to be looked down on: they are, on the contrary, logical achievements of our society, which is what it is, and must be either accepted or rejected in its totality—and those who are able to reject it are few. But the advent of the chairlift puts an end to a valuable process of natural selection, by which those who reach the hut are sure to find, in its pure state, a small sample of a little-known human subspecies.

Its members are people who don’t speak much and of whom others don’t speak at all, so there is no mention of them in the literature of most countries, and they should not be confused with other, vaguely similar types, who do speak, and of whom others speak: hot shots, extreme climbers, members of famous international expeditions, professionals, etc. All worthy people, but this story is not about them.

I arrived at the hut at sunset, and I was very tired. I stayed outside, on the wooden porch, to consider the frozen mystery of the seracs at my feet until everything had vanished behind silent ghosts of fog, and then I went in.

Inside it was almost dark. By the glow of a small carbide lamp one could distinguish a dozen human figures gathered around three or four tables. I sat down at a table and opened my backpack. Across from me was a tall, large man, middle-aged, with whom I exchanged a few words about the weather and our plans for the following day. This is a standard conversation, like the classic opening moves of a chess game, where what matters, much more than what one says (which is brief and obvious), is the tone in which one says it.

We found ourselves in agreement on the fact that the weather was uncertain (it always is in the mountains; when it isn’t, it is nonetheless declared to be so, for obvious magical reasons), and on the forecast for the following day. A little later, two lanky men in their twenties entered, with long beards and ravenous eyes. They had arrived from another valley and were attempting an intricate series of crossings. They sat down at our table.

After we had eaten, we started to drink. Wine is a more complex substance than one might think, and, above two thousand metres, and at close to zero degrees centigrade, it displays interesting behavioral anomalies. It changes flavor, loses the bite of alcohol, and regains the mildness of the grape from which it comes. One can take it in heavy doses without any undesired effects. In fact, it eliminates fatigue, loosens and warms the limbs, and leads to a fanciful mood. It is no longer a luxury or a vice but a metabolic necessity, like water on the plains. It is a well-known fact that vines grow better on a slope: could there be a connection?

Once we started drinking, the conversation at our table became much less impersonal. Each of us spoke of our initiation, and we established with some surprise that we had all begun our mountaineering careers with an extremely foolish act.

As it turned out, the best of these foolish acts, and the best told, was the one recounted by the tall, large man.

by Primo Levi, New Yorker |  Read more: 
Photo: The Alaska List

Michelle Shocked

Lyrics

Jean-François Martin, Illustrateur - Noir de Mars: American Lawyer, avril 2012
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Laura Rathe 
La Mer: 72” x 96” ink, oil, oil crayon, & charcoal on Belgian linen, 2011
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One Drug to Shrink All Tumors

A single drug can shrink or cure human breast, ovary, colon, bladder, brain, liver, and prostate tumors that have been transplanted into mice, researchers have found. The treatment, an antibody that blocks a "do not eat" signal normally displayed on tumor cells, coaxes the immune system to destroy the cancer cells.

A decade ago, biologist Irving Weissman of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, discovered that leukemia cells produce higher levels of a protein called CD47 than do healthy cells. CD47, he and other scientists found, is also displayed on healthy blood cells; it's a marker that blocks the immune system from destroying them as they circulate. Cancers take advantage of this flag to trick the immune system into ignoring them. In the past few years, Weissman's lab showed that blocking CD47 with an antibody cured some cases of lymphomas and leukemias in mice by stimulating the immune system to recognize the cancer cells as invaders. Now, he and colleagues have shown that the CD47-blocking antibody may have a far wider impact than just blood cancers.

"What we've shown is that CD47 isn't just important on leukemias and lymphomas," says Weissman. "It's on every single human primary tumor that we tested." Moreover, Weissman's lab found that cancer cells always had higher levels of CD47 than did healthy cells. How much CD47 a tumor made could predict the survival odds of a patient.

To determine whether blocking CD47 was beneficial, the scientists exposed tumor cells to macrophages, a type of immune cell, and anti-CD47 molecules in petri dishes. Without the drug, the macrophages ignored the cancerous cells. But when the CD47 was present, the macrophages engulfed and destroyed cancer cells from all tumor types.

Next, the team transplanted human tumors into the feet of mice, where tumors can be easily monitored. When they treated the rodents with anti-CD47, the tumors shrank and did not spread to the rest of the body. In mice given human bladder cancer tumors, for example, 10 of 10 untreated mice had cancer that spread to their lymph nodes. Only one of 10 mice treated with anti-CD47 had a lymph node with signs of cancer. Moreover, the implanted tumor often got smaller after treatment -- colon cancers transplanted into the mice shrank to less than one-third of their original size, on average. And in five mice with breast cancer tumors, anti-CD47 eliminated all signs of the cancer cells, and the animals remained cancer-free 4 months after the treatment stopped.

"We showed that even after the tumor has taken hold, the antibody can either cure the tumor or slow its growth and prevent metastasis," says Weissman.

by Sarah C.P. Williams, Science |  Read more: 
Photo: Fotosearch

Norah Jones

You'd Like Norah Jones When She's Angry (via: the Atlantic)

© Chris Ware/The New Yorker - Mother's Day issue.

www.newyorker.com

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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.

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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

[ed. This article was written in May, 2011. You can read about Ms. Brody's progress here:]

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

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

 

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Snacks for a Fat Planet

PepsiCo’s headquarters sit on a broad, grassy hilltop in Purchase, New York, the site of a former polo club, in rolling Westchester horse country. The office complex—seven identical white cubes joined at the corners, designed in 1970 by Edward Durell Stone—looks more like a European government ministry than the home of a business founded on sugary drinks like Pepsi-Cola and Mountain Dew and salty snacks like Lay’s potato chips and Fritos corn chips. The entire hundred-and-sixty-eight-acre campus is brand free, except for the PepsiCo flag, which floats next to the Stars and Stripes over the main entrance and displays a globe encircled with colored stripes that loosely correspond to PepsiCo’s rainbow of brand images. Scattered around the grounds, like giant boulders left behind by a retreating glacier, is PepsiCo’s collection of monumental sculptures, such as Richard Erdman’s “Passage,” hewn from a four-hundred-and-fifty-ton block of travertine, and Claes Oldenburg’s thirty-seven-foot-high steel trowel, which is embedded in the earth. Nearer the entrance, stands of exotic trees and sunken Japanese gardens and stone walkways impart a monastic feel.

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

 

Fon Klement Dutch, 1930-2000
A Manet
Une belle journee
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