Ani DiFranco

the sky is grey, the sand is grey, and the ocean is grey. i feel right at

home in this stunning monochrome, alone in my way. i smoke and i drink and

every time i blink i have a tiny dream. but as bad as i am i'm proud of the

fact that i'm worse than i seem. what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've

got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny thing will

wash up on the shore. you walk through my walls like a ghost on tv. you

penetrate me and my little pink heart is on its little brown raft floating out

to sea. and what can i say but i'm wired this way and you're wired to me, and

what can i do but wallow in you unintentionally? what kind of paradise am i

looking for? i've got everything i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny

shiny key will wash up on the shore. regretfully, i guess i've got three

simple things to say. why me? why this now? why this way? overtone's ringing,

undertow's pulling away under a sky that is grey on sand that is grey by an

ocean that's grey. what kind of paradise am i looking for? i've got everything

i want and still i want more. maybe some tiny shiny key will wash up on the

shore.

lyrics via:

Seemingly Surreal Swallows in a Spring Snowstorm by kdee64 on Flickr.
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FDR's Four Freedoms and Global Security

On January 6, 1941, at a time when democracy was literally under siege in much of Europe and Asia, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt called upon his fellow countrymen to help the United States establish a world based on four essential human freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Expression; Freedom of Worship; Freedom from Want; and Freedom from Fear. At the time of the speech, all of Western Europe lay under the heel of the Nazi dictatorship, and with only Great Britain and the Royal Navy standing between Hitler's war machine and the United States, FDR felt it was crucial that the US do all it could to help the British wage war and carry on their resistance to German aggression. In the meantime, things were not much better in the Far East, where the militarist Japanese regime continued its aggressive war in China and had now moved into Indochina in the wake of the French defeat in Europe.

With democracy itself teetering on the brink of collapse, and with Hitler having declared that he had established a ‘"New Order" of tyranny' in Europe, FDR proposed that the United States promote the very antithesis of such an order, "a greater conception" based on a "moral order" that embraced the Four Freedoms as its fundamental guiding principles. It was to establish these principles that he called upon the American people to make the sacrifices needed to help America's allies win the war. America, he said, must become the great "arsenal of democracy," and by the time the United States had formally entered the war in December 1941, establishing the Four Freedoms-"everywhere in the world"-had in essence become the war aims of the United States.

Few Americans -- especially younger Americans -- are familiar with the Four Freedoms, but the vision that FDR articulated in such simple yet eloquent language had an enormous impact not only on the war, but also on the post-war world. For in calling for a world based on these fundamental human freedoms, FDR established a clear link between fundamental human rights and global security. Equally important, the rights that the Four Freedoms called for not only included those that are essentially political in nature, such as speech and worship, but also those that concern one's well being and personal security -- want and fear.

Inspired by these goals the United States went on to direct the effort to establish the postwar multilateral economic and security apparatus -- including the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also the IMF and World Bank -- that would lead to an unprecedented period of economic prosperity; economic prosperity that helped prevent the possible outbreak of a Third World War.

For the generation that fought the war, then, the promotion of human rights and the establishment of global security were inseparable. As we head into the year that will mark the 70th anniversary of FDR's Four Freedoms speech, we will do well to remember this, as well as his admonition that achieving the Four Freedoms "everywhere in the world" is not some "vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation."

by David Woolner, Next New Deal |  Read more:

Hsiau Jung Ching
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Newtown and the Madness of Guns

[ed. As a rule, I don't print entire stories or opinion pieces because of copyright issues. However, in this case, I hope the New Yorker will grant me an exception. Click on the 'Read More' link for other perspectives from the magazine.]

After the mass gun murders at Virginia Tech, I wrote about the unfathomable image of cell phones ringing in the pockets of the dead kids, and of the parents trying desperately to reach them. And I said (as did many others), This will go on, if no one stops it, in this manner and to this degree in this country alone—alone among all the industrialized, wealthy, and so-called civilized countries in the world. There would be another, for certain.

Then there were—many more, in fact—and when the latest and worst one happened, in Aurora, I (and many others) said, this time in a tone of despair, that nothing had changed. And I (and many others) predicted that it would happen again, soon. And that once again, the same twisted voices would say, Oh, this had nothing to do with gun laws or the misuse of the Second Amendment or anything except some singular madman, of whom America for some reason seems to have a particularly dense sample.

And now it has happened again, bang, like clockwork, one might say: Twenty dead children—babies, really—in a kindergarten in a prosperous town in Connecticut. And a mother screaming. And twenty families told that their grade-schooler had died. After the Aurora killings, I did a few debates with advocates for the child-killing lobby—sorry, the gun lobby—and, without exception and with a mad vehemence, they told the same old lies: it doesn’t happen here more often than elsewhere (yes, it does); more people are protected by guns than killed by them (no, they aren’t—that’s a flat-out fabrication); guns don’t kill people, people do; and all the other perverted lies that people who can only be called knowing accessories to murder continue to repeat, people who are in their own way every bit as twisted and crazy as the killers whom they defend. (That they are often the same people who pretend outrage at the loss of a single embryo only makes the craziness still crazier.)

So let’s state the plain facts one more time, so that they can’t be mistaken: Gun massacres have happened many times in many countries, and in every other country, gun laws have been tightened to reflect the tragedy and the tragic knowledge of its citizens afterward. In every other country, gun massacres have subsequently become rare. In America alone, gun massacres, most often of children, happen with hideous regularity, and they happen with hideous regularity because guns are hideously and regularly available.

The people who fight and lobby and legislate to make guns regularly available are complicit in the murder of those children. They have made a clear moral choice: that the comfort and emotional reassurance they take from the possession of guns, placed in the balance even against the routine murder of innocent children, is of supreme value. Whatever satisfaction gun owners take from their guns—we know for certain that there is no prudential value in them—is more important than children’s lives. Give them credit: life is making moral choices, and that’s a moral choice, clearly made.

All of that is a truth, plain and simple, and recognized throughout the world. At some point, this truth may become so bloody obvious that we will know it, too. Meanwhile, congratulate yourself on living in the child-gun-massacre capital of the known universe.

by Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker |  Read more:

Photograph by Douglas Healey/Getty

The Ironman: Triathlete Executives' Ultimate Status Feat

On the Thursday before the 2012 Ironman World Championship in Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii, Troy Ford stood in the lobby of the King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel. Around him were several gaunt men with shaved legs, hands steadying their composite bicycles costing upwards of $10,000 each. Ford is the director of the Ironman Executive Challenge program, or XC, as everyone calls it. For $9,000, or about 10 times the regular registration price, XC provides a way to VIP the Ironman, which, for the uninitiated, is a 2.4-mile open-water swim followed by a scorching 112-mile bike ride and a full 26.2-mile marathon run. It’s the hardest major endurance race in the world and the ultimate status bauble for a certain set of high-earning, high-achieving, high-VO2-max CEOs.

Ford, a sinewy 43-year-old with a shaved head, was waiting for two of his client-athletes: Jim Callerame, regional general manager of International Paper (IP), and Luis Alvarez, chief executive officer of Mexican fuel tank manufacturer SAG-Mecasa. Both needed their bikes tuned. For non-XC athletes, a bike tune-up requires a sweaty, anxious wait at an overburdened cycling shop and lost sleep over whether a year of training will be lost to some stoner bike mechanic who fails to true a wheel. Not so for Ford’s guys. Expected wait time: zero. “We’re going to walk right in,” Ford said, smiling.

XC provides its 25 athletes with what it refers to as “high-touch” service: breakfast with the pros, a seat up front at the welcome banquet, Ford at your disposal. He books your travel. He’ll find out your favorite snack is Oreos and have a pack waiting in your suite. When your kids get bored in the hotel restaurant, he’ll improvise with an entire box of Coffeemate creamers that they can use as building blocks.  (...)

Callerame was in Kona to clear an item from his bucket list. Just getting to the start line had been a feat. World Triathlon Corp. (WTC), which controls the Ironman brand, metes out slots for its events on a scarcity model. The 2,500 spots for the 2013 Ironman in Arizona sold out in less than a minute. The 2,500 slots for the 2013 Ironman Asia-Pacific Championship Melbourne sold out in five. There are 30 such events each year. Most Ironman customers hate to be denied. Andrew Messick, the CEO of WTC, describes them this way: “When you tell them about the hardest one-day endurance event in the world, they think, ‘I could do that!’ ” What makes getting a bib number for Kona even sweeter is that no berths are openly for sale. This year 84 of the nearly 2,000 spots went to pros, 1,668 to people who qualified by placing at the top of their age groups at earlier Ironman events, 205 were doled out through a lottery, and six were auctioned on EBay (EBAY). The top bidder paid $45,605.  (...)

Ford guided Callerame and Alvarez through the deafening beat of the Ironman expo—a carnival of metal-tube and tarpaulin tents hawking everything a triathlete could want—to a backroom with a mechanic, who immediately put Callerame’s bike on a stand. Given that nobody at the expo or on Ali’i Drive wears much clothing, one of the few ways to decipher status between Ironman aspirants is by the color-coded security bracelets on everybody’s wrists. These look like little hospital bands, and they’re in the registration packets. Orange means racer, yellow means family member, purple volunteer, and blue VIP. None of the athletes swarming around the mechanic seemed to notice Ford’s high-touch service, which is just how he likes it. Lots of big egos; best not to ruffle feathers.

Later, back at the King Kamehameha, Ford confessed that there was one perk he couldn’t guarantee: a VIP port-a-potty at the race start. “It would start a riot,” he said. “We’d need a full-time security person.” Not that all XC Ironmen wait in line for the loo. “We did have one XC guy a few years ago who was staying down the road at the Four Seasons. He rented a room at the King Kam, too, for the full three-day minimum, just in case he needed to poop.”

by Elizabeth Weil,  Bloomberg Businessweek |  Read more:
Photograph by Kramon

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Thomas Saliot Winter Funfair
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High and Dry

The Mississippi as seen from Ed Drager's tug boat is a river in retreat: a giant beached barge is stranded where the water dropped, with sand bars springing into view. The floating barge office where the tug boat captain reports for duty is tilted like a funhouse. One side now rests on the exposed shore. "I've never seen the river this low," Drager said. "It's weird."

The worst drought in half a century has brought water levels in the Mississippi close to historic lows and could shut down all shipping in a matter of weeks – unless Barack Obama takes extraordinary measures.

It's the second extreme event on the river in 18 months, after flooding in the spring of 2011 forced thousands to flee their homes.

Without rain, water levels on the Mississippi are projected to reach historic lows this month, the national weather service said in its latest four-week forecast.

"All the ingredients for us getting to an all-time record low are certainly in place," said Mark Fuchs, a hydrologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) in St Louis. "I would be very surprised if we didn't set a record this winter."

The drought has already created a low-water choke point south of St Louis, near the town of Thebes, where pinnacles of rock extend upwards from the river bottom making passage treacherous. (...)

Shipping companies say the economic consequences of a shut-down on the Mississippi would be devastating. About $7bn in vital commodities typically moves on the river at this time of year – including grain, coal, heating oil, and cement.Cutting off the transport route would be a disaster that would resonate across the mid-west and beyond.

"There are so many issues at stake here," said George Foster, owner of JB Marine Services. "There is so much that moves on the river, not just coal and grain products, but you've got cement, steel for construction, chemicals for manufacturing plants, petroleum plants, heating oil. All those things move on the waterways, so if it shuts down you've got a huge stop of commerce."

by Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: Jeff Roberson/AP

Out of Its Shell and Onto Your Plate

Call the creatures scungilli, and you have an ingredient that Italian-Americans have long used in a seafood salad for the Feast of the Seven Fishes on Christmas Eve. But call them by their English name — whelks — and you have an item that is suddenly making news on cutting-edge menus.

Whelks are a type of sea snail, or gastropod, inhabiting the Atlantic Ocean and some of its bays and sounds in North America and Europe. Farther south, the family includes conch. In Europe, especially in England, where people eat lots of shelled creatures that might make Americans shudder, whelks are extremely popular.

Credit April Bloomfield, herself an English import, for placing three whole, lightly boiled whelks still in their shells on a plate with a small tub of warm, garlicky green sauce at the John Dory in Midtown Manhattan. Armed with a small fork, you pull the pale meat from the whorled shell, dip and enjoy.

“Some people have questions about them,” said Tim Carosi, the restaurant’s manager. “Most don’t know what they are. But those who do, order them, sometimes 6 or 10 at a time.”

At Oceana, in Rockefeller Center, the executive chef, Ben Pollinger, included a scungilli salad with celery, olives, chiles, cranberry beans and herbs in a lemon-and-olive-oil dressing on his menu last year for the Feast of the Seven Fishes. This year, he has been serving a whelk-and-potato chowder. He said he first encountered the shellfish a few years ago while visiting Maine. “They’re very popular up there,” he said.

Whelks range in size from a couple of inches — a dozen or so in a pound — to eight or nine inches long. So-called common whelks are the smallest and the ones to seek at the fish market for their briny-sweet taste and only slight chewiness. Often from Maine, these are the whelks Ms. Bloomfield serves and Mr. Pollinger puts on his raw bar.

Larger varieties, like the channeled whelk or the knobbed whelk, are usually sold as scungilli. In the New York region, they often come from Long Island Sound, Cape Cod and Peconic Bay.

by Florence Fabricant, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Marilynn K. Yee

There and Back Again

Last year, Midas, the muffler company, in honor of its fiftieth anniversary, gave an award for America’s longest commute to an engineer at Cisco Systems, in California, who travels three hundred and seventy-two miles—seven hours—a day, from the Sierra foothills to San Jose and back. “It’s actually exhilarating,” the man said of his morning drive. “When I get in, I’m pumped up, ready to go.” People like to compare commutes, to complain or boast about their own and, depending on whether their pride derives from misery or efficiency, to exaggerate the length or the brevity of their trip. People who feel they have smooth, manageable commutes tend to evangelize. Those who hate the commute think of it as a core affliction, like a chronic illness. Once you raise the subject, the testimonies pour out, and, if your ears are tuned to it, you begin overhearing commute talk everywhere: mode of transport, time spent on train/interstate/treadmill/homework help, crossword-puzzle aptitude—limitless variations on a stock tale. People who are normally circumspect may, when describing their commutes, be unexpectedly candid in divulging the intimate details of their lives. They have it all worked out, down to the number of minutes it takes them to shave or get stuck at a particular light. But commuting is like sex or sleep: everyone lies. It is said that doctors, when they ask you how much you drink, will take the answer and double it. When a commuter says, “It’s an hour, door-to-door,” tack on twenty minutes.

Seven hours is extraordinary, but four hours, increasingly, is not. Roughly one out of every six American workers commutes more than forty-five minutes, each way. People travel between counties the way they used to travel between neighborhoods. The number of commuters who travel ninety minutes or more each way—known to the Census Bureau as “extreme commuters”—has reached 3.5 million, almost double the number in 1990. They’re the fastest-growing category, the vanguard in a land of stagnant wages, low interest rates, and ever-radiating sprawl. They’re the talk-radio listeners, billboard glimpsers, gas guzzlers, and swing voters, and they don’t—can’t—watch the evening news. Some take on long commutes by choice, and some out of necessity, although the difference between one and the other can be hard to discern. A commute is a distillation of a life’s main ingredients, a product of fundamental values and choices. And time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend—and how you spend it—reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth. (...)

Americans, for all their bellyaching, are not the world’s most afflicted commuters. They average fifty-one minutes a day, to and from work. Pity the Romanians, who average fifty-four. Or the citizens of Bangkok, who average—average!—two hours. A business trip to Bangkok will buck up the glummest Van Wyck Expressway rubbernecker; the traffic there, as in so many automobile-plagued Asian mega-capitals, is apocalyptic. In Japan, land of the bullet train, workers spend almost ninety minutes a day.

The term “commute” derives from its original meaning of “to change to another less severe.” In the eighteen-forties, the men who rode the railways each day from newly established suburbs to work in the cities did so at a reduced rate. The railroad, in other words, commuted their fares, in exchange for reliable ridership (as it still does, if you consider the monthly pass). In time, the commuted became commuters. In New York, and in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, railways begat reachable and desirable suburbs, so that, by the time the automobile came along, patterns of development, and a calculus of class and status, had already been established. It was this kind of commute—the forty-minute train trip, bookended by a short drive or walk or subway ride—that people grew accustomed to, and even fond of. Here was a measure of inconvenience that could be integrated into daily life, albeit with certain bleak side effects, as chronicled by John Cheever and Richard Yates. Commuting by rail became a kind of gateway drug. (...)

Nationwide, the automobile took over from the train long ago. Nine out of ten people travel to work by car, and, of those, eighty-eight per cent drive alone. The car, and the sprawl that comes with it (each—familiar story—having helped to engender and entrench the other), ushers in another kind of experience. The gray-suited armies of Cheever’s 5:48 have given way to the business-casual soloists, whose loneliness is no longer merely existential. They hardly even have the opportunity to feel estranged at home, their time there is so brief.

“Drive until you qualify” is a phrase that real-estate agents use to describe a central tenet of the commuting life: you travel away from the workplace until you reach an exit where you can afford to buy a house that meets your standards. The size of the wallet determines that of the mortgage, and therefore the length of the commute. Although there are other variables (schools, spouse, status, climate, race, religion, taxes, taste) and occasional exceptions (inner cities, Princeton), in this equation you’re trading time for space, miles for square feet. Sometimes contentment figures in, and sometimes it does not.

Commuting makes people unhappy, or so many studies have shown. Recently, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and the economist Alan Krueger asked nine hundred working women in Texas to rate their daily activities, according to how much they enjoyed them. Commuting came in last. (Sex came in first.) The source of the unhappiness is not so much the commute itself as what it deprives you of. When you are commuting by car, you are not hanging out with the kids, sleeping with your spouse (or anyone else), playing soccer, watching soccer, coaching soccer, arguing about politics, praying in a church, or drinking in a bar. In short, you are not spending time with other people. The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude. You have cup holders for company.

“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is,” Robert Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, told me. (Putnam wrote the best-seller “Bowling Alone,” about the disintegration of American civic life.) “There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”

by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker (2007) |  Read more:

Illustration: Kevin H.

Kurt Hutton Merry-go-round at Southend Fair, England, 1939
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John James Audubon, Tundra Swan
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Pedro Aznar

Cancer has a “Game-Changing” Moment

On Monday morning, I sat in a waiting room at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, drinking a bottle of dye disguised as a room temperature, fruit-flavored drink. I was there, as I am on a regular basis, for my scans. As I waited for my name to be called, to be ushered into a room where I’d change into a seersucker robe, where I’d have a drip attached to my arm, and where I would hold very still while technicians took pictures of my insides, I read the paper. And there on the front page were two words that leapt out at me. Two words that changed my life: Immune cells.

It was a compelling, dramatic story, about a Pennsylvania girl named Emma Whitehead who’d had aggressive, treatment-resistant leukemia. Last spring, Whitehead’s doctors performed an experimental treatment on her, removing millions of her T-cells and inserting new genes, using a “disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells.” From there, the altered cells were returned to her body, with the hope that “if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.”

The experiment was not an immediate success. Whitehead had an intense reaction, including severe drops in blood pressure and fevers that pitched up to 105 degrees. But her doctor, Carl June, hit upon the idea of using an existing drug to lower her cytokines level, and she quickly stabilized. Better than that, she’s now been in full remission for several months. It’s a breakthrough of unprecedented proportions, one with unlimited potential.

I had recognized the narrative as soon as I’d started the story. Back in October, I’d seen two of the doctors mentioned in the Times feature, Dr. June and Sloan-Kettering’s Dr. Michel Sadelain, at the Cancer Research Institute’s awards dinner. I’d heard them tell their story, as they were given a prize for Distinguished Research in Tumor Immunology. The person handing it to them was my doctor.

Immunology has traditionally been the redheaded stepchild of cancer research. Using the body’s own defenses to fight off tumors has long been considered a dubious proposition – too difficult to execute, too controversial because of the resources required to search for answers. The past few years, however, have brought real results that have translated into a variety of new approaches. The Gardasil vaccine is now routinely used on young men and women to prevent the HPV virus, which in turn can help prevent cervical cancer. Doctors at Roswell Park Cancer Center are now working on a cancer vaccine. And in 2011, the FDA approved Ipilimumab, a drug therapy for melanoma unlike any other that’s come before, one that works with the body’s immune system.

Five months after Ipilimumab went on the market, I was one of those patients who needed it. The malignant cancer that I had undergone surgery for a year before had returned with a vengeance, metastasized into my lungs and under my flesh. At Stage 4, I was facing a diagnosis that generally offers patients only a few months to live. I could do the math. I was looking at my birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas but maybe not Easter. Summer was definitely a long shot. That’s when my oncologist recommended a clinical trial that was combining Ipilimumab with a new investigational drug. I jumped in as soon as possible, entering the first cohort of the first phase, a place in research where, as a doctor later admitted to me, “We usually expect a lot of losses.” Instead, three months later, I was cancer-free. Just like Emma Whitehead.

by Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon |  Read more:

Photo: NY Times

Ben Aronson  Low Sun, Rising Shadow, 1977
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8 Great Philosophical Questions That We’ll Never Solve

Philosophy goes where hard science can't, or won't. Philosophers have a license to speculate about everything from metaphysics to morality, and this means they can shed light on some of the basic questions of existence. The bad news? These are questions that may always lay just beyond the limits of our comprehension.

Here are eight mysteries of philosophy that we'll probably never resolve.

1. Why is there something rather than nothing?

Our presence in the universe is something too bizarre for words. The mundaneness of our daily lives cause us take our existence for granted — but every once in awhile we're cajoled out of that complacency and enter into a profound state of existential awareness, and we ask: Why is there all thisstuff in the universe, and why is it governed by such exquisitely precise laws? And why should anything exist at all? We inhabit a universe with such things as spiral galaxies, the aurora borealis, and SpongeBob Squarepants. And as Sean Carroll notes, "Nothing about modern physics explains why we have these laws rather than some totally different laws, although physicists sometimes talk that way — a mistake they might be able to avoid if they took philosophers more seriously." And as for the philosophers, the best that they can come up with is the anthropic principle — the notion that our particular universe appears the way it does by virtue of our presence as observers within it — a suggestion that has an uncomfortably tautological ring to it.

2. Is our universe real?

This the classic Cartesian question. It essentially asks, how do we know that what we see around us is the real deal, and not some grand illusion perpetuated by an unseen force (who René Descartes referred to as the hypothesized ‘evil demon')? More recently, the question has been reframed as the "brain in a vat" problem, or the Simulation Argument. And it could very well be that we're the products of an elaborate simulation. A deeper question to ask, therefore, is whether the civilization running the simulation is also in a simulation — a kind of supercomputer regression (or simulationception). Moreover, we may not be who we think we are. Assuming that the people running the simulation are also taking part in it, our true identities may be temporarily suppressed, to heighten the realness of the experience. This philosophical conundrum also forces us to re-evaluate what we mean by "real." Modal realists argue that if the universe around us seems rational (as opposed to it being dreamy, incoherent, or lawless), then we have no choice but to declare it as being real and genuine. Or maybe, as Cipher said after eating a piece of "simulated" steak in The Matrix, "Ignorance is bliss."

3. Do we have free will?

Also called the dilemma of determinism, we do not know if our actions are controlled by a causal chain of preceding events (or by some other external influence), or if we're truly free agents making decisions of our own volition. Philosophers (and now some scientists) have been debating this for millennia, and with no apparent end in sight. If our decision making is influenced by an endless chain of causality, then determinism is true and we don't have free will. But if the opposite is true, what's called indeterminism, then our actions must be random — what some argue is still not free will. Conversely, libertarians (no, not political libertarians, those are other people), make the case for compatibilism — the idea that free will is logically compatible with deterministic views of the universe. Compounding the problem are advances in neuroscience showing that our brains make decisions before we're even conscious of them. But if we don't have free will, then why did we evolve consciousness instead of zombie-minds? Quantum mechanics makes this problem even more complicated by suggesting that we live in a universe of probability, and that determinism of any sort is impossible. And as Linas Vepstas has said, "Consciousness seems to be intimately and inescapably tied to the perception of the passage of time, and indeed, the idea that the past is fixed and perfectly deterministic, and that the future is unknowable. This fits well, because if the future were predetermined, then there'd be no free will, and no point in the participation of the passage of time."

by George Dvorsky, io9 |  Read more:

Image: Lightspring/shutterstock

One is the Loneliest Number

In the latest issue of the New Republic, Judith Shulevitz offers a fascinating and fairly personal meditation on the consequences of delayed childbearing and older parenting for American society. At heart, the essay is about public health, and the ways in which older parenting — especially older male parenting, the latest research on sperm quality suggests — and fertility treatments seem to be associated with increasing risks of birth defects, genetic disorders, schizophrenia, and possibly autism as well. But there’s a long section on the social consequences of postponing parenting, which intertwines in interesting ways with some of the birthrate-related issues I’ve been writing about lately. Here’s an extended quote from Shulevitz on the world that delayed childbearing is making:

… As soon as we procrastinators manage to have kids, we also become members of the “sandwich generation.” That is, we’re caught between our toddlers tugging on one hand and our parents talking on the phone in the other, giving us the latest updates on their ailments. Grandparents well into their senescence provide less of the support younger grandparents offer—the babysitting, the spoiling, the special bonds between children and their elders through which family traditions are passed.

Another downside of bearing children late is that parents may not have all the children they dreamed of having, which can cause considerable pain. Long-term studies have shown that, when people put off having children till their mid-thirties and later, they fail to reach “intended family size”—that is, they produce fewer children than they’d said they’d meant to when interviewed a decade or so earlier. 

… What haunts me about my children, though, is … the actuarial risk I run of dying before they’re ready to face the world.

At an American Society for Reproductive Medicine meeting last year, two psychologists and a gynecologist antagonized a room full of fertility experts by making the unpopular but fairly obvious point that older parents die earlier in their children’s lives. (“We got a lot of blowback in terms of reproductive rights and all that,” the gynecologist told me.) A mother who is 35 when her child is born is more likely than not to have died by the time that child is 46. The one who is 45 may have bowed out of her child’s life when he’s 37. The odds are slightly worse for fathers: The 35-year-old new father can hope to live to see his child turn 42. The 45-year-old one has until the child is 33. 

These numbers may sound humdrum, but even under the best scenarios, the death of a parent who had children late, not to mention the long period of decline that precedes it, will befall those daughters and sons when they still need their parents’ help—because, let’s face it, even grown-up children rely on their parents more than they used to. They need them for guidance at the start of their careers, and they could probably also use some extra cash for the rent or the cable bill, if their parents can swing it … They may not go off the parental payroll until their mid- to late-twenties. Children also need their parents not to need themjust when they’ve had children of their own. 

There’s an entire body of sociological literature on how parents’ deaths affect children, and it suggests that losing a parent distresses young adults more than older adults, low-income young adults more than high-income ones, and daughters more than sons. Curiously, the early death of a mother correlates to a decline in physical health in both sexes, and the early death of a father correlates to increased drinking among young men …

It’s obvious, in a way, and yet the obvious bears emphasis: In a world where children are born later and less frequently, and where the two trends intertwine, the life cycle inevitably gets lonelier. Your grandparents are less likely to be involved with your upbringing when you’re young, you’re less likely to have multiple siblings (or even a single brother or sister) to be your companions in childhood and your constants in adulthood, your own children are less likely to have aunts and uncles and cousins and your parents are more likely to pass away (or decline into senescence) before you’re fully established as a grown-up in your own right.

There are economic costs to this atomization, just as Shulevitz suggests: Weaker support networks when people are young and struggling, fewer kids to share the burden of an aging relative, and so on. But the emotional costs seem larger — not just the impact of a parent’s early passing, but the non-impact of the relationships you never get to form, because your grandparents are too old and your siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles don’t exist at all.

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

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