‘‘The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.’’

Once upon a time, polls came and went without much fanfare or even notice. That time is gone. Today, a good portion of Americans plan their lives—or at least their Twitter feeds—around the latest political numbers. As every good political junkie knows, each day at 9:30 a.m. Eastern time, Rasmussen Reports releases its daily national tracking poll; three and a half hours later, Gallup comes out with its own. Wednesdays are typically when Quinnipiac University, the New York Times, and CBS unveil their “swing state” polls; on Thursdays, it’s NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and Marist College’s turn to share their “battleground state” polls. And Sunday nights are for PPP—a three-person public-opinion-research firm in North Carolina that produces upwards of 800 polls a year. “Sunday’s a dead news day,” Jensen says of his poll-release strategy, “so people who are living and breathing this presidential election are just sitting around all day nervously waiting for PPP’s latest poll to come out.”  (...)

The acknowledged master and leader of this analytical effort is Nate Silver. On his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times website, Silver tried to make sense of the PPP poll, and scores of other ones, as he converted their numbers into one of his own: his trademarked FiveThirtyEight forecast that puts a specific numerical value on Obama’s and Romney’s chances of victory in November. On the morning after PPP showed Obama leading by five points in Ohio, and several other state and national polls found similarly positive results for the president, Silver put the president’s chances of reelection at 80.7 percent: “[T]‌he polling movement that we have seen over the past three days represents the most substantial shift that we’ve seen in the race all year, with the polls moving toward Obama since his convention,” he wrote.

And yet, for all the data constantly streaming in from polling firms, and all the data analysis being spit right back out by people like Silver, the polling industry has never been less confident in its ability to reduce a series of interviews to a number that is an accurate reflection of the opinions and future behavior of the populace. Some days, the polls—which are conducted by scores of firms, from established multimillion-dollar corporations to Podunk PR shops with P.O. boxes—present such wildly varied numbers it’s as if they’re examining two different countries. Other days, the results do align, but with clarity come accusations of bias by whoever happens to be shown to be losing. Mostly, this fall, that has been Romney, causing many Republicans to heatedly call into question the entire polling enterprise.

PPP’s number was quickly buried under piles of new numbers, which displayed an alarming inconsistency. Silver’s crystal ball grew cloudier. He started to downgrade Obama’s chances—to 78.6 percent, then to 76.2, then to 72.9. Finally, on a Wednesday afternoon in late September—a day on which more than twenty national and state presidential polls were released—the normally sober Silver seemed to morph into Howard Beale as he tried to reconcile the results of two new polls, one from Marquette University showing Obama beating Romney 54 to 40 in Wisconsin and the other from Rasmussen showing Romney beating Obama 48 to 45 in New Hampshire. “There is no plausible universe in which Mr. Obama wins Wisconsin by fourteen points but loses New Hampshire by three,” Silver later wrote. “Following the polls on Wednesday reminded me of the aphorism: ‘If you don’t like the weather in Chicago, wait five minutes.’ ”

Hence Silver’s mad-as-hell tweet at 1:27 that afternoon: “The. Polls. Have. Stopped. Making. Any. Sense.”

After Obama, Silver may have been the biggest winner of the 2008 elections. A statistician who hadn’t yet turned 30 (and who, for his day job in Chicago, wrote and edited for Baseball Prospectus), Silver began the campaign as one of the hundreds of anonymous, unpaid “diarists” on the Daily Kos website. There, writing under the pseudonym “poblano,” he dissected the political polls in meticulous, downright obsessive detail—sorting the good ones from the bad ones and bringing a level of empirical rigor to his analysis that was heretofore unknown in the world of political punditry. Where most commentators were content to frame the Democratic primary as a contest between Obama’s call for change and Hillary Clinton’s appeal to experience—and made their predictions as to who would prevail based on which message they felt was more potent—Silver was offering up stuff like:

“The basic technique here is multiple regression analysis. I took a look at a whole number of independent variables, and tried to gauge their effect on one dependent variable: Obama’s two-way vote share. By ‘two-way vote share,’ I mean the proportion Obama got of the (Obama + Hillary) votes; essentially we’re throwing the Edwards, Richardson, Biden, etc. votes out. So in New Hampshire, Obama’s two-way vote share is 48.3 percent, and Hillary’s is 51.7 percent—much higher than their multi-way vote share.”

And using it to make uncannily accurate forecasts—projecting, for instance, that Obama would win 833 Super Tuesday delegates, which was just fourteen delegates off Obama’s actual haul that day. It was an approach that resonated with a new group of young, web-savvy political junkies who favored charts and graphs over platitudes and clichés (and many of whom, like Silver himself, favored Obama over Hillary). “Poblano” gained enough of a following that, in March 2008, he abandoned Daily Kos, and eventually his pseudonym, to start his own website, FiveThirtyEight.com (538 being the total number of votes in the Electoral College). He also came to the attention of the Obama campaign, which, as Sasha Issenberg reveals in his new book, The Victory Lab, shared its internal polling with Silver, who signed a confidentiality agreement with the campaign so that he could analyze the data. Before long, there was a Silver-worshipping Facebook group—There’s a 97.3 Percent Chance That Nate Silver Is Totally My Boyfriend—and TEAM NATE SILVER T-shirts. If Shepard Fairey’s HOPE posters spoke to the Obamanauts’ ids, Silver’s regression analyses tickled their superegos. His legend only grew when, on Election Night, he accurately predicted the results in 49 states and Obama’s popular vote within 1.1 percent.

by Jason Zengerle, New York Magazine |  Read more:
Photo: Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

Peoria (4)

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lambsquarter, cutgrass, saw brier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butterprint, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads nodding in a soft morning breeze like a mother's hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.

[ed. First paragraph of The Pale King, by David Foster Wallace.]

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Terri Lyne Carrington -- the Mosaic Project

Posh Plans for Exciting Urban Living

Playboy: The Playboy Townhouse (1961)
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walkinginspace pt2....taking it easy, Cheridan Chard

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BB King at 87: The Last of the Great Bluesmen

The fat red sun settles itself against the horizon, throwing a last, honey-sweet light through humid evening and over a small crowd on the lawn beside a railroad track that cuts through the cotton fields beyond. A quarter-moon rises and a chorus of cicadas serenades imminent twilight, now conjoined by the sound of the band; the drummer catches the backbeat and the compere announces: "How about an Indianola hometown welcome for the one-and-only King of the Blues: BB KING!"

And on he comes, to applause from people who know him well and claim him as their own – the last of the blues masters a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. "Nice evening, isn't it?" he says, and introduces his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren are in the audience, though one of his daughters died recently of diabetes, as had BB's mother – a poignant riptide beneath the occasion. "I guess you can look at me," he says from the stage, "and tell I'm the old man. My name is BB King."

Backed now by a lilac glow in the western sky – and looking east towards the village of Itta Bena, where he was born – BB sits down and starts up the show. He reaches "Key to the Highway", and there it is: that one long and trembling note, hanging there in the wafts of barbecue smoke, like only BB King can play it. He rolls his eyes, raises his eyebrows, then stares out into the crowd – and there's a collective gasp, a ripple of applause, and a mutual bond of affection.

This is a huddle, not a crowd, really. The town has come to hear its famous son: mostly black people – in families, many with a picnic – plus a few whites with ponytails, ZZ Top beards or other gestures of nonconformity. There are people here like Alfred Knox – one of 11 children with eight of his own (and 21 grandchildren) – who left Mississippi for Milwaukee when he was 19, the sound of Honeyboy Edwards playing juke joints ringing in his ears, and has now come back with his nephew Gervis to hear BB, to hear and talk blues, talk politics. The usual jocks and suits who wave bottles of Bud and shout at tourist clubs like BB King's own franchise in Memphis are not here for this annual homecoming concert – oddly, but thank God.

Nor, indeed, are some of Indianola's good citizens. Latunya and her friend were in the post office earlier, and said how "We're real excited BB's coming back. Gee, I'd lo-o-ove to go see him play. But I go out Fridays. I don't go out Wednesdays, I only go out Fridays". This is also the town in which the White Citizens Council was formed, political wing of the Ku Klux Klan; and the founders' heirs are probably elsewhere tonight.

The maestro's sonority on guitar is as inimitably perfect as ever. After one long, searing note during "The Thrill is Gone", BB King darts the stare of a clown right into the front rows, as though to say: "How about that!?" But it is BB's voice on the warm breeze that stops a heartbeat – that feeling behind and between the words that is the quintessence of the blues.

This is the 35th Homecoming concert, an event initially staged in memory of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist and friend of BB's assassinated by a member of the White Citizens' Council. There is something important about BB King's appearance, for the simple reason that even if he is still touring as a 90-something, there will not be that many more of these; nor will there be occasions upon which this great man will reflect on his extraordinary life, which began when he was working out there on the cotton plantations, living alone in a shack, having outlived his mother and then his grandmother.

All the more reason for that remarkable life to be recounted on film. Jon Brewer's The Life of Riley, released next month, was made after hours talking with BB King, with those who grew up around him, and those – including many British musicians – who followed his example. This is the definitive filmed testimony of the last great bluesman.

Even more important than the tributes from stars – Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Bono et al – are the recollections of people like John Fair and Clemmie Trevellaine, who sit on the porch of their home remembering the day that nine-year-old Riley B King cycled home to live among the cotton fields, working behind a plough, holding the reins of a mule. "I knew none of this," says Brewer. "I had no idea this had been BB King's life. That he lived alone, in a shack out there, at nine years of age, working for four years to pay off his dead mother's and grandmother's debts. I never knew he was so alone, talking to rabbits, his only friends. And by the time he's telling me this, I'm in tears."

by Ed Vulliamy. The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: Wikipedia

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess

The Internet's great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?

Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?

But if you really want to see a mess, go visit the nation's greatest apartment-hunting site, the first likely choice of anybody searching for a rental or a roommate. On this site, contrary to every principle of usability and common sense, you can't easily browse pictures of the apartments for rent. Customer support? Visit the help desk if you enjoy being insulted. How much market share does this housing site have? In many cities, a huge percentage. It isn't worth trying to compare its traffic to competitors', because at this scale there are no competitors.

Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.

Craigslist is not only gigantic in scale and totally resistant to business cooperation, it is also mostly free. The only things that cost money to post on the site are job ads in some cities ($25 to $75), apartment listings by brokers in New York ($10), and—in a special case born of recent legal trouble—advertisements in categories commonly used by prostitutes, because authorities encourage vendors to maintain a record that would aid investigators. There is no banner advertising. They won't let you join them, and at this price you can't beat them either.

At times it has occurred to people that the problems with craigslist could be solved by appealing to its eponym, Craig Newmark. Newmark is under lots of pressure these days. His company is being sued by eBay, a competitor and minority shareholder angry at being excluded from the company's deliberations. The attorney general of South Carolina has blustered about prosecuting his CEO for facilitating prostitution, and there have been strong challenges from law enforcement agencies in other states, too. The tabloids have relentlessly played up stories about two so-called craigslist killers, one who allegedly used the site's erotic-services section to lure victims and another who used the help-wanted ads. Newmark responds to such criticism with extreme serenity. Inquire about his finances and he talks about his hummingbird feeder. When his Twitter page asks him, "What are you doing?" he retweets in the voice of a squirrel.

"Run, run, run," he says. "Dig, dig."  (...)

Newmark's claim of almost total disinterest in wealth dovetails with the way craigslist does business. Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview.

The axioms of this worldview are easy to state. "People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day," Newmark says. If most people are good and their needs are simple, all you have to do to serve them well is build a minimal infrastructure allowing them to get together and work things out for themselves. Any additional features are almost certainly superfluous and could even be damaging.

Newmark has been working hard to extend the influence of his worldview. His public pronouncements have the delighted yet apologetic tone of a man who has stumbled on a secret hiding in plain sight and who finds it embarrassingly necessary to point out something that should long have been obvious. He seems to have discovered a new way to run a business. He suspects that it may be the right way to run the world.

by Gary Wolf, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: Platon

Pot Dispensaries Clouding Medical Marijuana's Image

Three weeks ago, an event space in Fremont hosted an unusual trade show.

A legal panel debated public policy and a doctor discussed the state of health care as girls in bikinis posed near tables of bongs and a guy in a green bear suit offered free hits off a 5-foot pipe.

And the smell of marijuana wafted over the Ship Canal.

Seattle's first-ever Medical Cannabis Cup — part gourmet weed contest, part trade show, part smoke-in — showcased the entrepreneurial drive and explosive growth of the local medical-marijuana industry.

From dispensaries offering dozens of marijuana varieties to new potency-testing labs to makers of cannabis-infused capsules and candy corn, storefronts displaying the trademark green cross dot nearly every Seattle neighborhood. The city estimates there are at least 150 marijuana-related businesses here, more ubiquitous than Starbucks. Elsewhere in Washington, business may not be as out in the open, but it's still chugging along.

"We're at the infancy of a new industry," said Dan Skye, editorial director at High Times magazine, which put on the Cannabis Cup. "Everybody's trying to get their foundations.

But just as quickly as this quasi-legal industry has grown, it is at a crossroads.

With virtually no state regulation, hustlers threaten to stain what began as a grass-roots patient-care movement. Federal authorities continue to enforce the prohibition against marijuana, with recent warnings to dispensaries and a handful of prosecutions.

And, as voters consider a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana use, it's clear that, under the guise of medicine, the party has already started, particularly in Seattle.

Leaders in the medical-marijuana industry are pushing for more regulation from Olympia. In the interim, they're working to police themselves, including writing their own ethics guidelines. Some even pay taxes.

"I would like our industry to appear more grown up," said John Davis, owner of a West Seattle dispensary. "But I understand that's not the way it is right now."

Now, some say it's more like the Wild West.

by Maureen O'Hagan and Jonathan Martin

Photo: Steve Ringman

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Who Destroyed the Economy? The Case Against the Baby Boomers

Crescent Lake, Ore.--My father taught me how to throw a baseball and divide big numbers in my head and build a life where I'd be home in time to eat dinner with my kid most nights. He and my mother put me through college and urged me to follow my dreams. He never complained when I entered a field even less respected than his. He lives across the country and still calls just to check in and say he loves me.

His name is Tom. He is 63, tall and lean, a contracts lawyer in a small Oregon town. A few wisps of hair still reach across his scalp. The moustache I have never seen him without has faded from deep brown to silver. The puns he tormented my younger brother and me with throughout our childhood have evolved, improbably, into the funniest jokes my 6-year-old son has ever heard. I love my dad fiercely, even though he's beaten me in every argument we've ever had except two, and even though he is, statistically and generationally speaking, a parasite.

This is the charge I've leveled against him on a summer day in our Pacific Northwest vision of paradise. I have asked my favorite attorney to represent a very troublesome client, the entire baby-boom generation, in what should be a slam-dunk trial--for me. On behalf of future generations, I am accusing him and all the other parasites his age of breaking the sacred bargain that every American generation will pass a better country on to its children than the one it inherited.

We are sitting on a beach in late afternoon on a sun-drizzled lake in the Cascade Mountains, two college-educated, upper-middle-class white men settling in for a week of generational warfare. My son, Max, splashes in the waves with his grandmother; sunbathers lounge in inner tubes around us; snow-capped peaks loom above the tree line. The breeze smells of Coppertone and wet dog. My father thinks back on the country that awaited him when he finished law school. "There seemed to be a lot of potential," he says, setting up the first of many evasions, "but there weren't a lot of jobs."

I'm mildly impressed that he's even bothering to mount a defense. The facts as I see them are clear and damning: Baby boomers took the economic equivalent of a king salmon from their parents and, before they passed it on, gobbled up everything but the bones.

by Jim Tankersley, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Photo: Rob Finch Visuals

War Between the Sexes

Darwinian sexual selection has not, in general, selected for particularly cosy relations between the sexes. The praying mantis female often cannibalizes her mate; she bites his head just as he is delivering his sperm and then completes her meal when he’s done. Aside from a hard-to-interpret wiggle, he seems not to protest the terms of the sexual bargain because he is solitary and unlikely to score again. By contrast, the male bedbug is a brutal bully; he has evolved a dagger-like projection with which to slash the female’s abdomen. The more graceful water strider has two precision antennae that serve no other purpose than to hold females down. As for the toxin-loaded scorpion, he has evolved a special toxin-lite to subdue the female of his species.

And so it goes. Sex on six legs, or eight, can be a decidedly sordid affair. As Darwin himself observed, one should not look for moral uplift in nature. For the economist and Darwinist Paul Seabright, insect sex nonetheless neatly illustrates the dialectical nature of sexual evolution. Male strategies for “scoring” escalate over time. In dialectic tandem, so do female counterstrategies for evading undesirables and exerting some choice – overt or covert – in their affairs. This is the “war” of his title.

Game theory enables evolutionary biologists and economists such as Seabright to think of the so-called war of the sexes as a strategic game. In general, the male evolves to “want” to score at all costs – whether that means being a bully, a martyr or something else entirely. The female, however, “knows” the real stakes are viable offspring. Of course, neither sex “knows” or “wants”, which would imply sentience or introspection; rather, they are unconscious vehicles for such behaviours. Insects and humans alike, we are the descendants of those who happened to play the game exceptionally well.

Cars, sports, human plumage and a great deal else, according to Seabright, all exploit the same basic principle. The wastefulness of the billion-dollar cosmetics industry clearly dismays him even while it enables him to point out the connection between vanity, fertility cues and marketability. Much of the first half of his book cleverly relates the essence of life to cocktail party dynamics. Seabright puts it this way: “Like a conversation at a party with someone who cannot restrain himself from looking over your shoulder to see who else there might be to talk to, sexual relations in almost all species are clouded by the possibility that either partner might be better off with someone else now or in the future”.  (...)

Regarding romance, Seabright argues that we have evolved to be “a socially monogamous species but surreptitiously promiscuous”. Sexual conflicts of interest need not compromise our long-term unions. “We are the species for whom life is about partnerships” – even if every partnership harbours sublimated conflicts of interest. For Seabright as for Freud, the sexual partnership is the template for all others. We can’t create, any more than we can procreate, without others. We exist only in the cocktail party-distracted gaze of the other. Charm is about monopolizing that gaze. Adolescent schoolgirls know this better than anyone. (Seabright reminds his reader that female “cunning” can be charming, even glamorous.) So do business tycoons. Being in the dumpster where no one wants to partner up or collaborate with us makes us physically ill. Fearing the dumpster makes us neurotic. Winning the Oscar or its equivalent gives us extra years of life (compared to also-rans), according to a now-famous study, because everyone wants to partner or cooperate with us. In other words, our emotions and health are intimately tied up with where we stand in the cooperative or partnering hierarchy – with our bargaining power in effect.

by Michele Pridmore-Brown, The Times Literary Supplement |  Read more:

Unfriending Someone, Before Facebook

I realized the other day that I had been quietly unfriended on Facebook and I could not help but think how much better things were 50 years ago, when a relationship went south and you knew why.

Let me give you an example of how the people in my family unfriended someone when I was growing up in the Catskills: It is summer and my favorite city cousin, whom we shall call Ravishing Rachel because of the delicacy of the situation, is in the mountains with a boyfriend. My mother gets a call that one of her brothers, Rachel’s father, has had a fatal heart attack. She is naturally distraught and, after calling a few motels, finally tracks down her niece and breaks it to her.

“Ravishing, you tramp!” I hear her holler. “Your father is dead and you killed him.”

See how much better that was than Facebook? No confusion, no wondering why or when it happened. Yes, yes, I know what you are thinking: My mother was obviously the Emily Post of the Catskills, how many of us could hope to attain her command of language, her diplomacy and tact? It is amazing, you are thinking, that Jackie Kennedy didn’t ditch Letitia Baldrige and hire my mother to be her social secretary at the White House. And I would have to give you that. In my mother, one found a moral clarity that I think can only be compared to John Wayne, who unfriended people by shooting them dead.

Consider the grace with which my mother unfriended Cousin Marvin when he appeared on a summer day at our house:

“Marvin, I plain can’t stand you and nobody in the family can stand you. Stay at a motel.”

But why stop with my mother’s generation?

My grandmother Gussie, who conversed primarily in Yiddish and was so hazy about American customs that she understood Halloween to be a national holiday in which you give the children money, was a genius at terminating relationships. When someone, say Cousin Marvin, who just seemed to have one problem after another, got a divorce, a scandalous event at the time, my grandmother took out a pair of nail scissors and removed the face of Marvin’s ex-wife from the family photos, leaving for some reason the hair – well, Marvin’s wife did have very nice hair. She did the same thing with someone’s prom photos, after he had broken up with the girl. I kept expecting to see it in The National Enquirer: “Upstate Boy Takes Faceless Girl to Prom.”

by Joyce Wadler, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: NY Times

Grateful Dead

Drinking is bad, feelings are worse.
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Maureen Herndon

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Beyonce'

The Things They Carried: At The National Wife-Carrying Championships

It's happened before—for Dave and for his wife Lacey, perennial contenders at the North American Wife-Carrying Championships, a raucous gathering attended by both fitness fiends and softies like me who think, wrongly, that Wife-Carrying is an easy kind of carnival game. It's not.

The basics on the most difficult nuptial sport around: fifty couples run in the Championships, two in each heat, and the two best times overall make the finals. The husband dangles his wife upside-down over his head and tries to traverse a hilly, sloppy, divot-filled, 278-yard obstacle course as fast as he can while gradually coming to realize, once and for all, that his hamstrings are useless. He thinks, Oh God, I'm about to tumble in the most emasculating fashion possible. That was my experience, at least.

But Dave Castro did much better than that. He came up only three feet short, and he hasn't stopped thinking about it since.

***

Well before these Wife-Carrying Championships came to Newry, Maine's Sunday River Ski Resort a decade ago, and well before Dave and Lacey Castro were a world-class pair, Wife-Carrying already had a long, half-nefarious history. While Wife-Carrying sounds like something an enterprising Jack might have invented in 1956 to amuse the local Rotarians, it's actually a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition.

Story goes that a Finnish robber named Herkko Rosvo-Ronkainen used women as training weights to prepare his marauding bands for their raids on nearby villages. That's the sanitized tale, at least; it's also possible that modern-day Wife-Carrying has its origins in Rosvo-Ronkainen's knack for women-napping. This is part of why I'd been a bit reluctant to haul my progressive wife on my back like she was some sort of nifty plunder.

“Some people say, 'Oh, Wife-Carrying is such a sexist sport,'" Lacey Castro says. "But I feel like I've been training just as long as my husband has. The women are forcing the husbands to do it just as much as the other way.”

The Castros have forced themselves into phenomenal shape for the one-minute a year when they have a chance to be the absolute best at something. Silly as that something may seem to an outsider, they take the Championships seriously, and they're made for them. Lacey, a body-builder with about a thimble's-worth of body fat, weighs in at around 108 pounds, which is the minimum for wives; Dave, compact and slim, has the bulging calves of a UPS driver. Which is because he is a UPS driver.

“He's basically training all the time,” Lacey told me. “Five days a week he's running around with 50-pound boxes from door to door.” (...)

Wife-Carrying is, honestly, mostly Estonian. If only because The Estonian Carry is the sport's answer to the Fosbury Flop: both stylistic signature and agreed-upon best practice. There is no official technique in wife-carrying—Piggybacks, Fireman's Carries, and Honeymoon Threshold Lifts are all legal. But every champion has used the Estonian Carry, most notably the Estonian Uusorg brothers, the most decorated spouse-hauling athletes, and rivals of Miettenen's for international supremacy. At the farthest opposite end of the prestige spectrum, I also would need to master this Baltic carry for my own turn on the Wife-Carrying Championship course.

Since the North American Championship was my first attempt at extreme sports with my wife—they'd given us a wild card entry—I wasn't sure I could convince her to dangle near my rear as I traversed a slippery ski hill. She'd agreed to participate because I'd made some claim about Immersion Journalism, but we'd yet to get to the touchy subject of head-ass-ground proximity. I turned to the Castros for advice.

“Tell her, 'Look, you might be a little dizzy, but just hold on',” Lacey said. “Go right into the Estonian.”

Dave added: “You'll put her on your back. She might not like it at first. But it'll be good.”

I was convinced, but I was not really the one who needed convincing. Megan and I needed to practice, so before the competition, we took to the field between our apartment and the public library. It was dark. I popped her up on my shoulders and chugged up a hill. Right then, the local book club let out and we were bathed in the accusing glare of a dozen pairs of headlights. Undaunted, I took 17 laps around an oak tree and put her down. She was flushed beneath her helmet, either from embarrassment or because half her blood supply had rushed straight to her cheeks, or both.

by David Wancyzk, The Classical |  Read more:

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What Will Ice-Free Arctic Summers Bring?

On Sunday, September 16, the sun did not rise above the horizon in the Arctic. Nevertheless enough of the sun's heat had poured over the North Pole during the summer months to cause the largest loss of Arctic sea ice cover since satellite records began in the 1970s. The record low 3.41 million square kilometers of ice shattered the previous low—4.17 million square kilometers—set in 2007. All told, since 1979, the Arctic sea ice minimum extent has shrunk by more than 50 percent—and even greater amounts of ice have been lost in the corresponding thinning of the ice, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).

"There is much more open ocean than there used to be," says NSIDC research scientist Walt Meier. "The volume is decreasing even faster than the extent [of surface area] as best as we can tell," based on new satellite measurements and thickness estimates provided by submarines. Once sea ice becomes thin enough, most or all of it may melt in a single summer.

Some ice scientists have begun to think that the Arctic might be ice-free in summer as soon as the end of this decade—leaving darker, heat-absorbing ocean waters to replace the bright white heat-reflecting sea ice. The question is: Then what happens? Although the nature and extent of these rapid changes are not yet fully understood by researchers, the impacts could range from regional weather-pattern changes to global climate feedbacks that exacerbate overall warming. As Meier says: "We expect there will be some effect…but we can't say exactly what the impacts have been or will be in future."

On thin ice

Arctic ice influences atmospheric circulation and, hence, weather and climate. Take away the ice and impacts seem sure to follow. There's more warming to come, as well, particularly in the Arctic, which is warming faster than the rest of the globe. Given cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, there's likely at least as much warming to come as has occurred to date—a rise of 0.8 degree Celsius in global average temperatures, most of that in the past 30 years.

The warmer Arctic waters and land have also begun to release methane, a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas that is also the primary hydrocarbon in natural gas fuel. The Arctic Ocean alone contains more methane than the rest of the world's oceans combined—though when and even if such a thawing would contribute a massive methane release remains a "known unknown" in the words of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and oceanographer Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "If we release that methane, we will amplify global warming by an unknown amount," Maslowski says. "We have no idea."

by David Biello, Scientific American |  Read more:

Image: Courtesy of NASA

09-30-12 (by Lee Kaloidis)
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