The Hell of American Day Care

Trusting your child with someone else is one of the hardest things that a parent has to do—and in the United States, it’s harder still, because American day care is a mess. About 8.2 million kids—about 40 percent of children under five—spend at least part of their week in the care of somebody other than a parent. Most of them are in centers, although a sizable minority attend home day cares like the one run by Jessica Tata. In other countries, such services are subsidized and well-regulated. In the United States, despite the fact that work and family life has changed profoundly in recent decades, we lack anything resembling an actual child care system. Excellent day cares are available, of course, if you have the money to pay for them and the luck to secure a spot. But the overall quality is wildly uneven and barely monitored, and at the lower end, it’s Dickensian.

This situation is especially disturbing because, over the past two decades, researchers have developed an entirely new understanding of the first few years of life. This period affects the architecture of a child’s brain in ways that indelibly shape intellectual abilities and behavior. Kids who grow up in nurturing, interactive environments tend to develop the skills they need to thrive as adults—like learning how to calm down after a setback or how to focus on a problem long enough to solve it. Kids who grow up without that kind of attention tend to lack impulse control and have more emotional outbursts. Later on, they are more likely to struggle in school or with the law. They also have more physical health problems. Numerous studies show that all children, especially those from low-income homes, benefit greatly from sound child care. The key ingredients are quite simple—starting with plenty of caregivers, who ideally have some expertise in child development.

By these metrics, American day care performs abysmally. A 2007 survey by the National Institute of Child Health Development deemed the majority of operations to be “fair” or “poor”—only 10 percent provided high-quality care. Experts recommend a ratio of one caregiver for every three infants between six and 18 months, but just one-third of children are in settings that meet that standard. Depending on the state, some providers may need only minimal or no training in safety, health, or child development. And because child care is so poorly paid, it doesn’t attract the highly skilled. In 2011, the median annual salary for a child care worker was $19,430, less than a parking lot attendant or a janitor. Marcy Whitebook, the director of the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, told me, “We’ve got decades of research, and it suggests most child care and early childhood education in this country is mediocre at best.”

At the same time, day care is a bruising financial burden for many families—more expensive than rent in 22 states. In the priciest, Massachusetts, it costs an average family $15,000 a year to place an infant full-time in a licensed center. In California, the cost is equivalent to 40 percent of the median income for a single mother.

Only minimal assistance is available to offset these expenses. The very poorest families receive a tax credit worth up to $1,050 a year per child. Some low-income families can also get subsidies or vouchers, but in most states the waiting lists for them are long. And so many parents put their kids in whatever they can find and whatever they can afford, hoping it will be good enough.

by Jonathan Cohn, TNR |  Read more:

Photo by Darren Braun

Richard MacDonald, "Romeo and Juliet, Third Life"
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Winslow Homer, Eastern Point (1900)
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A Beginner’s Guide to Immortality

I recently reached an odd conclusion. A sense of history isn’t about knowing a lot of history or trying to learn from the past in order to create a better future. It is about living your mortal life as though you were immortal.

To understand why this is an interesting definition to play with, consider the following allegory. Human life is like walking into a movie halfway through, and having to walk out again two minutes later. You’ll have no idea what’s going on when you walk in. And chances are, just as you begin to get a clue, you’ll be kicked out.

So unless you are lucky enough to walk in during a scene that is satisfying without any longer narrative context (think sex or violence), your ability to derive satisfaction from your two-minute glimpse will depend partly on your ability to construct meaning out of it.

One way to do this is to pretend to be immortal. This game of make-believe also reveals a few interesting things about literal immortality seeking, in the sense of seeking longevity therapies or waiting to upload your brain into Skynet, post-Singularity.

To pretend to be immortal is to approach your limited two-minute glimpse of the movie as though you’ve been watching all along, and as though you might stick around to see how it all ends.

You will have to manufacture unverifiable memories and unfalsifiable foreshadowings. You will have to devote some of your limited time whispering to your neighbors, and perhaps surreptitiously looking up reviews with spoilers on your cellphone.

But at least you’ll walk out with a satisfying story, even if not the story. So long as you walk away feeling like you’ve just enjoyed an entire movie, it doesn’t matter.

To do this at the level of an entire life is to spend much of your time having one-way conversations with the dead and the unborn, through books read and written. You inhabit a world of ghosts while walking among the living.

These choices can lead to the sort of detachment and withdrawal from everyday life that we associate with seers, even if you don’t spend your time chasing profundities. You can seek this sort of pretend-immortality through stamp collecting or escapist fantasies.

These choices can also lead to odd patterns of identification with, and attachment to, dead or unborn cultures and people. It can lead to a sense of connection to larger human realities that is not purely genealogical. They can lead to social identities that make no sense to anyone, but are not exactly individualist either. They can make the contemporary living around you resentful and angry about your withdrawn, ghostly lifestyle.

The small difference between this kind of ghostly, vicarious immortality seeking and the literal kind is that in this kind, pretending is often enough.

The big difference is that sense-of-history seekers not only want to live forever, they want to have lived forever.

The sense of loss they feel about missing the invention of the wheel in 3000 BC is as poignant as the sense of loss they feel about missing the first interstellar human space mission in 2532 AD.

But this is only a symptom, the real difference lies deeper.

by Venkat, Ribbonfarm |  Read more:
Images via: here and here

Man's Search for Meaning

[ed. I was browsing for other things today when I came across Viktor Frankl's obituary. I remember reading "Man's Search for Meaning" in college and not really getting the full context of the message he was trying to get across (or too immature to absorb it). This provides a better understanding.]

Viktor Frankl's mother, father, brother and pregnant wife were all killed in the camps. He lost everything, he said, that could be taken from a prisoner, except one thing: ''the last of the human freedoms, to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.''

Every day in the camps, he said, prisoners had moral choices to make about whether to submit internally to those in power who threatened to rob them of their inner self and their freedom. It was the way a prisoner resolved those choices, he said, that made the difference.

In ''Man's Search for Meaning,'' Dr. Frankl related that even at Auschwitz some prisoners were able to discover meaning in their lives -- if only in helping one another through the day -- and that those discoveries were what gave them the will and strength to endure.

Dr. Herbert E. Sacks, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said Dr. Frankl's contributions shifted the direction of the field, especially in existential psychiatry, adding: ''His interest in theory galvanized a generation of young psychiarists.''  (...)

Dr. Frankl's writings, lectures and teaching, along with the work of Rollo May, Carl Rogers and others, were an important force in forming the modern concept that many factors may be implicated in mental illness and in opening the door to the wide variety of psychotherapies that now exist.

This was a major change from the strictures of Freud and Adler, who attributed what they called neurosis to single causes: sexual repression and conflicts in the subconscious in Freud's case, or unfilled desires for power and feelings of inferiority in Adler's. To Dr. Frankl, behavior was driven more by a subconscious and a conscious need to find meaning and purpose.  (...)

Viktor Emil Frankl was born in Vienna on March 26, 1905. His father held a government job administering children's aid. As a teen-ager he did brilliantly in his studies, which included a course in Freudian theory that prompted him to write the master himself.

A correspondence ensued, and in one letter he included a two-page paper he had written. Freud loved it, sent it promptly to the editor of his International Journal of Psychoanalysis and wrote the boy, ''I hope you don't object.''

''Can you imagine?'' Dr. Frankl recalled in an interview before his death. ''Would a 16-year-old mind if Sigmund Freud asked to have a paper he wrote published?''

The paper appeared in the journal three years later. But shortly before its publication, Dr. Frankl said, he was walking in a Viennese park when he saw a man with an old hat, a torn coat, a silver-handled walking stick and a face he recognized from photographs.

''Have I the honor of meeting Sigmund Freud?'' he asked and began to introduce himself, whereupon the man interrupted: ''You mean the Victor Frankl at Czernin Gasse, No. 6, Door Number 25, Second District of Vienna?'' The founder of psychoanalysis had remembered the name and address from their correspondence.

At the University of Vienna Medical School, the young Frankl began attending seminars with Alfred Adler, who had broken with Freud earlier. Together with two other students, he began to feel that Adler erred in denying that people had the freedom of choice and willpower to overcome their problems.

Adler demanded to know whether he had the courage to stand and defend his position.

Dr. Frankl recalled that he rose and spoke for 20 minutes, after which Adler sat slouched in his chair ''terrifyingly still'' and then exploded. ''What sort of heroes are you?'' he shouted at the three dissenters and never invited them back to his meetings.

After receiving his medical degree in 1930, Dr. Frankl headed a neurology and psychiatry clinic in Vienna. But anti-Semitism continued to rise in Austria.

In December 1941 he and Tilly Grosser were among the last couples allowed to be wed at the National Office for Jewish Marriages, a bureau set up for a time by the Nazis. The next month his entire family, except for a sister who had left the country, was arrested in a general roundup of Jews.

The family had expected the roundup, and Dr. Frankl's wife sewed the manuscript of the book he was writing on his developing theories of psychotherapy into the lining of his coat.

After their arrival at Auschwitz, they and 1,500 others were put into a shed built for 200 and made to squat on bare ground, each given one four-ounce piece of bread to last them four days. On his first day, Dr. Frankl was separated from his family; later he and a friend marched in line, and he was directed to the right and his friend was directed to he left -- to a crematory.

He took an older prisoner into his confidence and told him about the hidden manuscript: ''Look, this is a scientific book. I must keep it at all costs.''

by Holcomb B. Noble, NY Times |  Read more:

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Great Scott

Congratulations, Adam! A great performance, and great golf  by the entire field all the way around (especially Angel Cabrera and Jason Day). Go Aussies! (and thanks to Greg Norman for leading the way).
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Kristina Yakimova - Asleep, 2012
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Life on Earth… But Not As We Know It

Across the world's great deserts, a mysterious sheen has been found on boulders and rock faces. These layers of manganese, arsenic and silica are known as desert varnish and they are found in the Atacama desert in Chile, the Mojave desert in California, and in many other arid places. They can make the desert glitter with surprising colour and, by scraping off pieces of varnish, native people have created intriguing symbols and images on rock walls and surfaces.

How desert varnish forms has yet to be resolved, despite intense research by geologists. Most theories suggest it is produced by chemical reactions that act over thousands of years or by ecological processes yet to be determined.

Professor Carol Cleland, of Colorado University, has a very different suggestion. She believes desert varnish could be the manifestation of an alternative, invisible biological world. Cleland, a philosopher based at the university's astrobiology centre, calls this ethereal dimension the shadow biosphere. "The idea is straightforward," she says. "On Earth we may be co-inhabiting with microbial lifeforms that have a completely different biochemistry from the one shared by life as we currently know it." (...)

The concept of a shadow biosphere was first outlined by Cleland and her Colorado colleague Shelley Copley in a paper in 2006 in the International Journal of Astrobiology, and is now supported by many other scientists, including astrobiologists Chris McKay, who is based at Nasa's Ames Research Centre, California, and Paul Davies.

These researchers believe life may exist in more than one form on Earth: standard life – like ours – and "weird life", as they term the conjectured inhabitants of the shadow biosphere. "All the micro-organisms we have detected on Earth to date have had a biology like our own: proteins made up of a maximum of 20 amino acids and a DNA genetic code made out of only four chemical bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine," says Cleland. "Yet there are up to 100 amino acids in nature and at least a dozen bases. These could easily have combined in the remote past to create lifeforms with a very different biochemistry to our own. More to the point, some may still exist in corners of the planet."

Science's failure to date to spot this weird life may seem puzzling. The natural history of our planet has been scrupulously studied and analysed by scientists, so how could a whole new type of life, albeit a microbial one, have been missed? Cleland has an answer. The methods we use to detect micro-organisms today are based entirely on our own biochemistry and are therefore incapable of spotting shadow microbes, she argues. A sample of weird microbial life would simply not trigger responses to biochemists' probes and would end up being thrown out with the rubbish. (...)

"Billions of years ago, life based on different types of carbon biochemistry could have arisen in several places on Earth," says Cleland. "These varieties would have been based on different combinations of bases and amino acids. Eventually, one – based on DNA and on proteins made from 20 amino acids – formed multicellular entities and became the dominant form of life on Earth. That is why we find that life as we know it, from insects to humans and from plants to birds, has DNA as its genetic code. However, other lifeforms based on different bases and proteins could still have survived – in the shadow biosphere."

A different prospect is highlighted by Sasselov, who points out that a complex organic chemical can come in two different shapes even though they have the same chemical formula. Each is a mirror-image of the other and are said to have a different chirality. "Amino acids are an example," says Sasselov. "Each comes in a right-handed version and a left-handed version. Our bodies – in common with all other lifeforms – only use left-handed versions to create proteins. Right-handed amino acids are simply ignored by our bodies. However, there may be some organisms, somewhere on the planet, that use only right-handed amino acids. They could make up the weird life of the shadow biosphere."

But how can scientists pinpoint this weird life? Microbes are usually detected in laboratories by feeding nutrients to suspected samples so they grow and expend. Then the resulting cultures can be analysed. A weird lifeform – such as one made only of proteins formed out of right-handed amino acids – will not respond to left-handed nutrients, however. It will fail to form cultures and register its existence.

by Robin McKie, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photo: BWAC Images/Alamy

Amen Corner

"I been to London once, didn't reckon it much," said David, in a voice like treacle running over rocks. "Rained pretty much the whole time we …" He broke off. "Oh, oh, Bubba, that's going in the drink." The fans around him turned their heads just in time to see Bubba Watson's shot coming skipping down the fairway, run along the fringe of the pond and drop down into the water at the 11th. "Ouch."

David, 60, has been coming to Augusta National for 21 years, and he sits in the same place every time, down at Amen Corner. He reckons it's the best, and busiest, spot in Augusta. "Other than Hooters, that is."

He has a point there. Hooters, down on the Washington Road that runs up to the gates of the golf course, are running a Ms Green Jacket Bikini contest in one room, and a professional chicken wing‑eating competition in the other. On top of which, John Daly's tour bus is parked up in the lot outside. The former Open and PGA champion has been camped out there all week, flogging merchandise from a trestle table out front, from golf clubs ("Grip it and rip it") to beer mugs ("Grip it and sip it") to baby bibs ("Slurp it and burp it") to his own country and western CDs (featuring his hit, All My Exes Wear Rolexes).

When David and all the other patrons pass that way in the morning, Daly is still asleep inside. You have to start earlier than sunrise if you want to get a prime seat on the Corner. The gates open at 8am, and as soon they're through the "patrons" (as Augusta National insists on calling the punters) break into a rapid waddle across the course, doing their utmost not to break the rule that forbids them from running. By 9am thousands of green folding seats ($30 each from one of the club's many shops) are arrayed around the best watching spots all over the course.

Everybody has their own favourite. The glory hunters make for the 18th green, for obvious reasons. The diligent and dutiful make for the mound at the back of the 7th, because that is where Bobby Jones (sorry, "Robert Tyre Jones Jr") tells them to go in his "spectator suggestions", written in 1949 but still used today. And the connoisseurs may make for the vicious par-three 4th, which, this week at least, is the toughest on the course, with 70 bogeys or worse in the first two rounds alone.

But the thrill-seekers make for Amen Corner, where they can watch the action on the 11th, 12th and the start of the 13th. It's a long way from the clubhouse down there, and the atmosphere is just a little looser, and the grass is carpeted with cigar stubs and ice, tipped out of freshly drained cups. The 11th, where Bubba's Saturday run of birdies came to an end with a double bogey, is a mean hole. But it's the 12th, called Golden Bell, that the patrons come for. They love it so much that the grandstand there fills up three hours before the first players arrive on the tee.

Jack Nicklaus said the 12th was "the hardest tournament hole in golf".

by Andy Bull, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image via: Golf.com

Samantha French, Dive in; float
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Gerald Schlosser
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How Wireless Carriers Are Monetizing Your Movements

Wireless operators have access to an unprecedented volume of information about users’ real-world activities, but for years these massive data troves were put to little use other than for internal planning and marketing.

This data is under lock and key no more. Under pressure to seek new revenue streams (see “AT&T Looks to Outside Developers for Innovation”), a growing number of mobile carriers are now carefully mining, packaging, and repurposing their subscriber data to create powerful statistics about how people are moving about in the real world.

More comprehensive than the data collected by any app, this is the kind of information that, experts believe, could help cities plan smarter road networks, businesses reach more potential customers, and health officials track diseases. But even if shared with the utmost of care to protect anonymity, it could also present new privacy risks for customers.

Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S. carrier with more than 98 million retail customers, shows how such a program could come together. In late 2011, the company changed its privacy policy so that it could share anonymous and aggregated subscriber data with outside parties. That made possible the launch of its Precision Market Insights division last October.

The program, still in its early days, is creating a natural extension of what already happens online, with websites tracking clicks and getting a detailed breakdown of where visitors come from and what they are interested in.

Similarly, Verizon is working to sell demographics about the people who, for example, attend an event, how they got there or the kinds of apps they use once they arrive. In a recent case study, says program spokeswoman Debra Lewis, Verizon showed that fans from Baltimore outnumbered fans from San Francisco by three to one inside the Super Bowl stadium. That information might have been expensive or difficult to obtain in other ways, such as through surveys, because not all the people in the stadium purchased their own tickets and had credit card information on file, nor had they all downloaded the Super Bowl’s app.

Other telecommunications companies are exploring similar ideas. In Europe, for example, Telefonica launched a similar program last October, and the head of this new business unit gave the keynote address at new industry conference on “big data monetization in telecoms” in January.

“It doesn’t look to me like it’s a big part of their [telcos’] business yet, though at the same time it could be,” says Vincent Blondel, an applied mathematician who is now working on a research challenge from the operator Orange to analyze two billion anonymous records of communications between five million customers in Africa.

The concerns about making such data available, Blondel says, are not that individual data points will leak out or contain compromising information but that they might be cross-referenced with other data sources to reveal unintended details about individuals or specific groups (see “How Access to Location Data Could Trample Your Privacy”).

Already, some startups are building businesses by aggregating this kind of data in useful ways, beyond what individual companies may offer. For example, AirSage, an Atlanta, Georgia, a company founded in 2000, has spent much of the last decade negotiating what it says are exclusive rights to put its hardware inside the firewalls of two of the top three U.S. wireless carriers and collect, anonymize, encrypt, and analyze cellular tower signaling data in real time. Since AirSage solidified the second of these major partnerships about a year ago (it won’t specify which specific carriers it works with), it has been processing 15 billion locations a day and can account for movement of about a third of the U.S. population in some places to within less than 100 meters, says marketing vice president Andrea Moe.

by Jessica Leber, MIT Technolgy Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Sergio and the Golf Guy

Sergio Garcia Doesn't Trust Success

People, you're going at life all wrong. Do not try, try again. Try a few times and then go back to your room and mope. Set the bar low and then slink under it. The key to success is being positive ... that it will never happen to you.

Take, for instance Sergio Garcia, the Sulking Spaniard. He is a man who does not see a glass half full. He sees a glass that someone will soon pick up and crack over his skull.

Take last year at the Masters, for instance. Garcia shot himself out of it with a Saturday 75 and then announced to the world he was done trying.

"I'm not good enough," he said that day. "I don't have the thing I need to have. In 13 years [as a pro], I've come to the conclusion that I need to play for second or third place. I have no more options. I wasted my options. ... Tell me something I can do."

And yet?

If you check your favorite sports website this morning, you'll see that this same Sergio Garcia, the Eeyore of golf, has a share of the lead at this 2013 Masters after a brilliant 6-under 66 Thursday.

It won't be easy playing for third place from first, but if anybody can do it, it's Garcia.

"This is obviously not my favorite place -- my most favorite place, that is," he said afterward. "We try to enjoy it as much as we can. Sometimes it comes out better than others. Today it was one of those good days. Let's enjoy it while it lasts."

Hey, Sergio, can you come speak at my Pessimists' Club meeting?

Look at him, would you? The man just shot 66 and he looks like he just shot 86. He has all the joy of a mortician whose hearse just ran over his own dog. His next smile is scheduled for Aug. 13.

I don't know where the happy, jumping-off-the-golf-cart, 19-year-old Sergio went, but what we're left with now is the waiting-for-a-Steinway-to-fall-on-his-head Sergio.

"That's the beautiful [thing] about being 19," he reminisced recently, at 33. "When you are 19 or 15 or 12, you don't think. You just go out there and you don't think and you let it fly and there isn't a worry in the world. ... And then, as the years go by and you've been hit with disappointments and they start to wear down on you, you start thinking too much. Back then, the world was right in front of me."

Wow. Anybody got a Xanax?

by Rick Reilly, ESPN | Read more:
Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

***

Get to Know the Essence of the Golf Guy

Everyone loves the Masters Tournament.

Even non-golfers like the Masters. It’s a sign of spring and a good excuse to take a weekend afternoon nap.

Those of us who play golf like it even more. It means golf season is here and that it’s time to get the clubs out of the garage again.

But there is a third category of person who watches the Masters. He is Golf Guy. Anyone who has played golf knows Golf Guy.

Golf Guy loves golf like nothing else. It is all he has. It is very sad.

Let’s get to know Golf Guy better.

Attire

Like any weirdo you might choose to dress up as for Halloween, getting the right costume for Golf Guy is of utmost importance.

To pull off the look of Golf Guy, you will want to start with a pair of pants that exists somewhere in the realm between khaki cargo pants and tan dress pants. Look for some tan, cotton-blend pants with a bit of a sheen to them. Think high-end Dockers.

Next, buy several dozen short-sleeve polo shirts. These will be the only shirts you own for the rest of your life. The more boring the better, but mixing in a few extremely ugly ones that don’t go with anything -- even tan pants somehow -- is fine, too. Wear them tucked in with a belt and seriously consider buttoning the shirt all the way up to the top button.

Now, look in the mirror. Do you look like a perfect mix between accountant on a casual Friday and 5-year-old boy dressed by his mother for school picture day? Do you look like Davis Love III? Would people look at you and think: “I bet that guy drives a Buick and loves Hootie and the Blowfish.” The answer to all three questions should be "yes" or you don’t have the look right.

Golf Guy always dresses as though he just stepped off the golf course, or could step on the golf course at any moment, or is on the golf course right now, as Golf Guy must always be ready for the possibility of some golf.

by DJ Gallo, ESPN |  Read more:

Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Kawase Hasui
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Woods Penalized but Can Still Play

[ed. This seems to be a terrible decision, any way you look at it. Why didn't one of the numerous rules officials around the course advise him at the time that it was going to be an illegal drop? Why wait until after the news conference in which he discussed his thought process? And, what if he hadn't said anything, would he still be penalized? Finally, if he was officially determined to have violated the rules, why allow him to keep playing after signing an invalid scorecard (and why didn't he DQ himself)? The rules officials seem to be promoting exactly what Rule 33-7 was designed to prevent - armchair officiating. See also: Mistakes Compounded in Tiger Ruling.] 

Tiger Woods was three strokes off the lead in the Masters when he completed the second round at Augusta National Golf Club on Friday. But he began his third round five strokes behind the leader Jason Day after being assessed a two-stroke penalty on Saturday for an illegal drop on the 15th hole of the second round.

Woods, 37, was summoned to Augusta National hours before his tee time Saturday with his participation uncertain for the third round of a tournament he has won four times.

He could have been disqualified for signing an incorrect scorecard. But after reviewing the episode with Woods, the rules committee at Augusta National chose to add two strokes to Woods’s score and allow him to play the weekend. The committee invoked Rule 33-7, which allows a penalty of disqualification to be waived or modified in exceptional cases. The rule addresses the issue of armchair rules officials’ calling in or posting to Twitter violations that are clearly inadvertent.

On the hole in question, a 530-yard par 5, Woods laid up. His approach shot clanked off the flagstick and caromed into the water. After taking a one-stroke penalty, Woods dropped his ball in the fairway, a few feet behind his original divot, and hit a wedge shot to within three feet and made the putt for a bogey 6. After the ruling, his score was changed to an 8.

When choosing to drop near one’s divot, a golfer should play his ball “as nearly as possible” at the spot from which the original ball was last played. After his round, Woods said he purposely dropped the ball two yards from his first divot.

He said: “Well, I went down to the drop area, that wasn’t going to be a good spot, because obviously it’s into the grain, it’s really grainy there. And it was a little bit wet. So it was muddy and not a good spot to drop. So I went back to where I played it from, but two yards further back, and I took, tried to take two yards off the shot of what I felt I hit.”

The committee’s decision not to disqualify Woods, a 77-time winner on the PGA Tour, reinforced how the rules of golf, once clear, have grown blurry. From the definition of a legal putting stroke to the enforcement of slow play, there has been confusion about the way to interpret and apply the rules. On Friday, Guan Tianlang, a 14-year-old amateur from China, became the only known player in Masters history to be assessed a one-stroke penalty for slow play, which is endemic on the tour. Many players in the field wondered why Guan was singled out when some professionals routinely play with great deliberation and are never penalized with strokes.

by Karen Crouse, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Max Ernst, Pleiades (1920)
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Dogshit Orgasm

Golden Goat is a strain of marijuana distinguished by a citrus scent and a potent but mellow buzz. “The person who originally created that strain, I knew him personally,” explains Garrett Pearson of Natural Remedies Medical Marijuana Dispensary in Colorado. “There was a recycling plant out in Kansas where the strain is originally from. When the sun hit those empty bottles and the scent of soda and beer mingled, it smelled a certain way, and that’s just what the strain smells like. So he named it Golden Goat after the Golden Goat recycling factory.”

Greg Williams, better known as Marijuana Man, told me the story behind another strain. Williams used to sell seeds by mail order, “There was a strain in our catalogue called A-Frame. We always wondered why it was called A-Frame,” he said, in exactly the sort of leisurely drawl you might expect from someone known as Marijuana Man. “We thought maybe it was because the shape of the plant was like an A-shape but it turns out, the seeds originally came from a guy who lived in an A-frame.”

OG Kush, Big Afghan Skunk, AK47, Alien God, Fraggle Rock, Smelly Guy, Blueberry Yum Yum. There’s one named Snoop Dogg too. It’s potent and cerebral. According to online reviews, your brain will feel like it’s hovering over your body.

Linnaean biological classifications divide the genus Cannabis into three species: indica, sativa, and ruderalis. The strain named for DO-double-G is one of many indicas, distinguished from the sativas by its drowsy, fullbody effects. Sativas provide a more energetic high. To speak in reductive binaries, indica is nighttime while sativa is daytime. No one really cares about ruderalis because it has a negligible THC count.

Many of the strains come from crossbreading indicas and sativas to get that perfect high, the best of both worlds, the stoner’s holy grail. (Ruderalis are often cross-bred as well, but only for the plant’s auto-flowering and therefore fast-finishing trait.) S.A.G.E. stands for Sativa Afghani Genetic Equilibrium and was designed to be 50-50 sativa and indica.

At Natural Remedies in Colarado, they cross-bred S.A.G.E. with another strain called Hanis. For no good reason, they call that one Bob Saget. That’s the non-story behind a lot of these strain names. Others are descriptive. Girl Scout Cookies supposedly smells and tastes not like the cookies themselves but the box they come in, a mix of mint and cardboard.

The demand for all these different strains is relatively recent. Once upon a time, pot was pot and you bought what your dealer down the street was selling. But a new breed of cannabis connoisseur has emerged alongside increasingly nuanced legal restrictions. In the Netherlands in the 1970s, coffee shops dispensing marijuana tolerated by the government started cropping up. For the first time, there were dozens of different strains on the menu. Today medical marijuana dispensaries in North America offer a similar range of choices.

Even before growers started crossbreeding there were regional varieties. The term “landrace” refers to a strain of cannabis that was geographically isolated and pollinated itself — it’s the same phenomenon that we refer to as “heirloom” in the world of vegetables. Marijuana Man’s favourite strain is one of these landraces, a rare pure African sativa called Congolese. The landrace indigenous to Jamaica is known as Lambsbread (or sometimes Lamb’s Breath, a mondegreen suggesting the oral history of these names). Whatever you call it, its effects include energy and positive introspection. (...)

At the medical dispensary where Pearson works in Colorado, they have 60 to 80 varieties in their garden and offer about 20 different strains at a time. They always have a mix of sativas and indicas to provide different types of relief to their patients. Pearson sees clients refining their tastes. “There’s lots of nerds out there,” he explains.” It’s like wine.” He adds that a lot of this comes from an increased level of comfort talking about marijuana on the Internet and on the phone. “People don’t use secret code words anymore,” Pearson said.

by Whitney Mallett, TNI |  Read more:

Image: Imp Kerr

Paul Sample (1896-1974) Vermont Farm, c. 1937 24 x 30 inches oil on canvas
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Awakening

Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

This experience is called “intraoperative recall” or “anesthesia awareness,” and it’s more common than you might think. Although studies diverge, most experts estimate that for every 1,000 patients who undergo general anesthesia each year in the United States, one to two will experience awareness. Patients who awake hear surgeons’ small talk, the swish and stretch of organs, the suctioning of blood; they feel the probing of fingers, the yanks and tugs on innards; they smell cauterized flesh and singed hair. But because one of the first steps of surgery is to tape patients’ eyes shut, they can’t see. And because another common step is to paralyze patients to prevent muscle twitching, they have no way to alert doctors that they are awake. (...)

An anesthesiologist’s job is surprisingly subjective. The same patient could be put under general anesthesia a number of different ways, all to accomplish the same fundamental goal: to render him unconscious and immune to pain. Many methods also induce paralysis and prevent the formation of memory. Getting the patient under, and quickly, is almost always accomplished with propofol, a drug now famous for killing Michael Jackson. It is milky and viscous, almost like yogurt in a fat syringe. When injected, it has a nearly instant hypnotic effect: blood pressure falls, heart rate increases, and breathing stops. (Anesthesiologists use additional drugs, as well as ventilation, to immediately correct for these effects.)

Other drugs in the anesthetic arsenal include fentanyl, which kills pain, and midazolam, which does little for pain but induces sleepiness, relieves anxiety, and interrupts memory formation. Rocuronium disconnects the brain from the muscles, creating a neuromuscular blockade, also known as paralysis. Sevoflurane is a multipurpose gaseous wonder, making it one of the most commonly used general anesthetics in the United States today—even though anesthesiologists are still relatively clueless as to how it produces unconsciousness. It crosses from the lungs into the blood, and from the blood to the brain, but … then what?

Other mysteries have been untangled. Redheads are known to feel pain especially acutely. This confused researchers, until someone realized that the same genetic mutation that causes red hair also increases sensitivity to pain. One study found that redheaded patients require about 20 percent more general anesthesia than brunettes. Like redheads, children also require stronger anesthesia; their youthful livers clear drugs from the system much more quickly than adults’ livers do. Patients with drug or alcohol problems, on the other hand, may be desensitized to anesthesia and require more—unless the patient is intoxicated at that moment, in which case less drug is needed.

After delivering the appropriate cocktail, anesthesiologists carefully monitor a patient’s reactions. One way they do this is by tracking vital signs: blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature; fluid intake and urine output; oxygen saturation in arteries. They also observe muscles, pupils, breathing, and pallor, among many other indicators.

One organ, however, has remained stubbornly beyond their watch. Even though anesthesiologists are not entirely sure how their drugs work, they do know where they go: the brain. All changes in your vital signs are only the peripheral reverberations of anesthetic drugs’ hammering on the soft mass inside your skull. Determining consciousness by measuring anything besides brain activity is like trying to decide whether a friend is angry by studying his or her facial expressions instead of asking directly, “Are you mad?”

In lamenting how little we know about the anesthetized brain, Gregory Crosby, a professor of anesthesiology at Harvard, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2011, “The astonishing thing is not that awareness occurs, but that it occurs so infrequently.”

by Joshua Lang, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Max Aguilera-Hellweg

The Cure for Loneliness

No sooner had the fighting of World War II ended than the Cold War began, and the United States seemed plunged once more into the anxiety that had prevailed while the guns were firing. A manipulated terror of godless Communism, coupled with an even greater one of nuclear war, made the 1950s a decade in which ordinary women and men feared to speak freely or act independently. Injected into this unhealthy atmosphere was a straitjacket demand for conformity to what was rapidly becoming corporate America. In a world that had just fought one of the bloodiest wars in history for the sake of the individual, millions were rushing into the kind of lockstep existence that by definition meant a forfeiture of inner life.

Books written by sociologists, novelists, and psychologists describing this cultural turn of events were suddenly thick on the ground: David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950), Harry Stack Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (1953), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1953), and in some ways the most penetrating of all, Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, a novel published in 1961 but set in 1955. It was a time, Yates claimed, that embodied “a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price.”

The book, however, that accounted most fully for the ’50s’ near-morbid desire for security at any price, had been written a decade earlier by the émigré psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom (1941), rooted in a European intellectual thought that had been heavily influenced by the work of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, brought social psychology to the United States where, in the years ahead, it flourished wildly. The book launched its author on one of the most celebrated careers that any public intellectual, anywhere, has ever achieved. (...)

Overnight, it seemed, millions of people, indifferent to the loss of democracy, were happy to capitulate to the rule of the strongman, relieved to feel order restored when they were being told what they could and could not do, no matter the human cost. This was a crisis that, in Fromm’s view, threatened “the greatest achievement of modern culture—individuality and uniqueness of personality.”

Why was this happening? What was it in the human psyche that welcomed what Fromm could only think of as a return to tribalism? The more he thought about it, the more clearly he saw that in all human beings a tug of war persisted between the desire to have freedom and the desire to shun its responsibilities. Friedman calls the latter “conformist escapism.”

In Fromm’s view, humanity was always trading freedom for the comfort of external authority. (...)

And it is just here that Fromm and Freud part company in a way that accounts for the vital difference between social psychology and hard-worked analysis. For Freud, the all-important loneliness of mankind was inborn; for Fromm it was culturally created. Freud said the conflict of instinctual drives means that human beings are born into a sense of loss and abandonment that can be ameliorated only through psychoanalysis. Fromm said it was enough to understand that the race is born with a sense of connectedness that is destroyed by the social climate.

Ironically, though, for each of these thinkers, it was the exercise of the very powers that had brought about our downfall that alone could release human beings from the imprisonment of such separateness. If men and women learned to occupy their own conscious selves, fully and freely, they would find that they were no longer alone: they would have themselves for company. Once one had company one could feel benign toward others.

This, Fromm said, was the only solution to the problem of the alienated individual in relation to the modern world. The only thing that could save humanity from its own soul-destroying loneliness was the individual’s ability to inhabit what came to be known as the “authentic” self. If you achieved authenticity, you would be rewarded with the inner peace necessary to become a free agent who is happy to do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

The fly in the ointment, as Fromm the Marxist saw it, was that we were living in a world where “economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality.” That meant that the struggle to achieve authenticity was continually being so undercut that it became “an unbearable burden.” If a burden is unbearable one will do almost anything to be relieved of it, even if relief demands submission to a set of social conventions that suffocates the spirit. This, however, is a Faustian bargain that creates anxiety. Now, something was needed to dull the anxiety. Capitalism, as Fromm and many other Frankfurt intellectuals said, had just the thing: consumerism. The pursuit of worldly goods—escapist conformism—would etherize the unrealized hunger for a genuine self.  (...)

In the Art of Loving Fromm argued that the phrase “falling in love” was a dangerous misnomer. We did not fall into anything; what we did, once attraction had allowed a relationship to form, was recognize ourselves in the other and then—through affection, respect, and responsibility—work hard to teach ourselves how to honor that recognition. “Once one had discovered how to listen to, appreciate, and indeed love oneself,” Friedman paraphrases The Art of Loving, “it would be possible to love somebody else . . . to fathom the loved one’s inner core as one listened to one’s own core.” In short, the dynamic would induce an emotional generosity that allowed each of us to be ourselves in honor of the other. Once one had achieved this admittedly ideal state, Fromm declared, as he did in every single book he wrote, one could extend that love to all mankind.

by Vivian Gornick, Boston Review |  Read more:

Photo courtesy of Anita Hagan