Deconstructing: LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” And Trying To Define The Best Song Of The Millennium

[ed Personally, I've always liked "Home"]

As an artist, LCD Soundsystem seemed to perfectly contain enough seeming contradictions as to be a sonic distillation of the times, a representation of what occurs when all the different strands crash together, and they seem to create something new, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it yet. “All My Friends” is their greatest achievement: arguably their most recognizable song, containing all of the various complexities that could be attributed to the band at one point or another, while also being an even further distilled version of the times. It’s hard to say whether it’s supposed to be happy or sad, naïve or disillusioned. Whether it’s supposed to make you feel twenty again or forty before your time. Maybe both, and maybe it carries all the corresponding years in between with it. So once you’ve weighed it down with everything it might be, or is supposed to be, does it still move? Can it?

If “Losing My Edge” was a rush and a push of an opening salvo, “All My Friends” completes the mission statement, refines and clarifies the manifesto. It’s one 7-minute summation of the experience of the millennium, the sense of wanting everything all at once, having access to everything all at once, and ultimately not feeling so much freed as paralyzed at the inescapable weight that comes with carrying all that with you. On one hand all our immediate access is great, but it also denies us a collective experience in the same way as older generations. So it produces nostalgia: for simpler times, or ’80s music, or vague notions of a past that seems easy to wrap your arms around. And it produces a detachment, a sense that there’s this big messy culture out there that you can try to touch but ultimately feels impossible to understand in its entirety. That’s why a band like LCD Soundsystem, and a song like “All My Friends,” capture that zeitgeist-y feeling: they sound singular, but contain the sorts of multitudes required to define an era during which we live with the pop of every era at the same time.

“All My Friends” is about aging, feeling disconnected, simultaneously reckoning with and missing your past. James Murphy turned 37 the year it was released, and it should appeal to people in their 30s. And yet Murphy’s impressionistic verses evoke more widespread experiences than chronologically approaching middle age. This millennium was kicked off with 9/11, and as it progressed we became able to carry entire decades of pop culture and history in our pockets. All of this ages us before our time, whether these were the years in which we grew up, or whether these were the years where we ourselves had children.”You spent the first five years trying to get with the plan/ And the next five years trying to be with your friends again,” Murphy sings. That could be about the struggles of aging and figuring yourself out, but it could also be about the seeming impossibility of navigating the people and culture around you when 2010 suggests 2001, 1987, 1964, and 1999 as much as it suggests itself.

It’s too overwhelming to face that all at once. Is it then any wonder that perhaps the two defining behaviors of our era have become nostalgia and ironic detachment, that we prefer our world through the perfectly faded haze of Instagram or the performative quips of Twitter? Even if you’d argue that the last thirteen years have been primarily characterized by a push and pull between irony and earnestness, it all stems from a sense of disassociation from our time and place — we intentionally say things we don’t mean so we don’t have to bare ourselves to all the noise that comes with infinite digital voices, or we overcompensate and overshare as a proposed salve to the supposedly corrosive effects of ironic living. Murphy buried some of the most earnest pop songs of the last ten years under a veneer of ironic wit. “All My Friends” taps into that same disassociation. It’s like, to paraphrase an old Don Draper quote, watching your life, knowing it’s right there, and futilely trying to break into it. That’s the engine behind “All My Friends,” behind its oscillation between sentimentality and one-liners. Thanks to the speed and abstractions through which we live our lives in the new millennium, you no longer need to be 37 to feel that way.

by Ryan Leas, Stereogum |  Read more:

NSA Shares Unfiltered Intelligence with Israel

[ed. It's like giving free drugs to your friends with the only caveat being "don't do anything stupid (or anything that would embarrass me)". See also: NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans' data with Israel.]

The National Security Agency (NSA) routinely shares “raw” intelligence data with Israel that can include sensitive information about Americans, according to the latest top-secret document leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The 2009 document, a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, says the U.S. government regularly hands over intercepted communications that have not first been reviewed by U.S. analysts and are likely to contain phone calls and emails of U.S. citizens.

The agreement allows for the possibility that intercepts given to Israel might include the communications of U.S. government officials, in which case Israel is supposed to destroy them immediately. Data on U.S. citizens who aren’t in the government, however, can be kept by Israel for up to a year, according to the document, first published Wednesday by Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The agreement requires Israel to consult an NSA liaison officer when it finds data on Americans and to adhere to U.S. rules designed to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens, a process known as “minimization.” But it’s unclear how that requirement is monitored or enforced, because the agreement expressly says it is not legally binding.

It’s no secret that the United States and Israel cooperate closely against intelligence targets of mutual interest, such as Syria and Iran. But the sharing of unprocessed electronic intercepts raises the specter that Israel could have used U.S. intelligence to carry out operations of which the United States disapproves. The Obama administration has condemned, for example, the assassinations of several Iranian nuclear scientists in which many analysts believe Israel had a hand.

“One of the biggest concerns in all intelligence-sharing relationships is that the partner would use the data to take action that would result in killing somebody or doing something outside the scope of what our government might consider appropriate,” said a former senior NSA official who refused to be identified. “The worry is they might go off and bomb somebody and assassinate somebody.”

The U.S. decision to provide Israel unfiltered electronic intelligence feeds raises questions about why American officials would trust Israel to respect the privacy of U.S. citizens.

by Ken Dilanian, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: James Emery, The Guardian

Richmond, California and Eminent Domain

Very early this morning, the city council in Richmond, California, narrowly voted to move forward with a plan to aid underwater homeowners. It's a plan so controversial that everyone from Wall Street investment banks, to the National Association of Realtors, to U.S. congressmen, to state politicians, to the Federal Housing Finance Agency has weighed in.

Five years into the housing crisis, the city of about 105,000 and its Green Party mayor figure they've run out of better options – and out of patience with federal solutions that never came – to ease the local foreclosure glut. The median price of homes in town has dropped to less than half of what it was at the height of the housing boom. And the city has estimated that about 51 percent of its homeowners are underwater. Richmond is in worse shape than most towns sacked by the housing bubble: Its home values are low, its unemployment and poverty rates are high, and its residents in danger of foreclosure are unlikely to have the principal on their mortgages reduced any time soon.

In this position, Richmond has now become the only municipality in the country to seriously consider using eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages from the investors who currently hold them. The city would not seize the properties themselves – as more typically happens in eminent domain cases – but would use the power to essentially purchase the mortgages at their current market value (against the wishes of the banks that hold them).

A company called Mortgage Resolution Partners would help the city fund and manage the purchases, ultimately selling the restructured mortgages to new investors at rates that would keep the current residents in their homes.

So far, every other local government that's been tempted by this idea has ultimately abandoned it.

The scheme, Mother Jones wrote earlier this year, "is almost as complicated as the derivatives and collateralized debt obligations that caused this mess to begin with."

But the idea at its core is relatively simple: Richmond sent letters to the banks and investors currently holding 624 mortgage notes on homes in the city, asking to buy them at current market value. The banks said no. Now the city hopes to purchase them anyway, citing a government power more commonly wielded to take private property for constructing public infrastructure like highways.

Mortgage Resolution Partners has been pitching the proposal to distressed cities for more than a year. But, so far, every other local government that's been tempted by the idea has ultimately abandoned it in the face of growing pressure from the banking industry, realtor groups and even the federal government.

by Emily Badger, Atlantic Cities |  Read more:

Image: Flickr user BasicGov

Robert Doisneau, Baiser Passage Versailles, Paris, 1950.
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Recalling Buzzwinkle

Every autumn in recent years our boreal neighbors in Sweden and Norway have regaled the rest of the world with tales of drunken moose. In most of the stories, the moose have gotten smashed eating fermented apples, the active ingredient in applejack.

Sweden and Norway have lots of moose and loads of apple trees. Alaska has fewer moose and a paucity of fruit trees, but where the two entities overlap -- in Anchorage, for example -- reports of drunken moose also abound. Alaska’s best-known public inebriate may have been Buzzwinkle.

Buzzwinkle’s name was coined by Anchorage Daily News columnist Julia O’Malley in November 2007 after a moose downed a few too many fermented crabapple cocktails in the courtyard of Bernie’s Bungalow Lounge, across the street from the Nordstrom store in downtown Anchorage. When O’Malley and I arrived, the massive bull was standing rigid, knees locked, with his wide-set eyes fixed in an inscrutable expression. A long strand of small white lights tangled in his antlers attested to some careless twig noshing in Town Square earlier in the day. The most obvious sign of life was the cloud of vapor venting from his nostrils with every deep exhalation. He was blotto, and he knew it. Too large to fit in a taxi, we left him to sleep it off in the fenced courtyard. After he revived, Anchorage Daily News photographer Erik Hill captured Buzzwinkle’s unapologetic, nonchalant departure -- party lights still firmly affixed.

Although nameless before that incident, Buzzwinkle had been a well-known character in downtown Anchorage for years. He was often seen strolling slowly along urban sidewalks or crossing streets surrounded by what in Alaska passes for skyscrapers. Buzzwinkle was street smart. When I worked as an Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist, I once watched him wait patiently for a red light to stop traffic on West Ninth Avenue before confidently stepping onto the crosswalk and ambling into the Delaney Park Strip. He specialized in foraging on ornamental shrubs and the vestiges of birch and other native trees that remain in the city’s center. Undisturbed moose are notoriously phlegmatic. Buzzwinkle was unperturbed by people and traffic. He was large enough to command respect from awestruck commuters and shoppers. It was seldom necessary for him to throw his weight around.

by Rick Sinnott, AK Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Rick Sinnott

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The Dangers of Going Gluten-Free

The first time Margaret Dron organized the Gluten Free Expo early last year, it was inside the gymnasium of a small community centre in east Vancouver. She had recruited one volunteer, two speakers, 38 vendors and expected 500 attendees. There was no entrance fee—instead, people were to bring gluten-free goods for the local food bank; three boxes were set aside for the collection. Six hours later, more than 3,000 people had turned out, and the volunteer had to call a one-tonne truck to pick up the donations. In one Sunday afternoon, Dron realized, “there is some serious potential here. So I quit everything I had, got an extension on my mortgage, and just dove in.” Since then, “it has blown up.”

That is to say, the Gluten Free Expo is now an annual affair in Toronto and Calgary, besides Vancouver. Next year, Edmonton and Ottawa will join the roster. About 10,000 people attend each weekend-long event, which is usually held inside a 60,000-sq.-foot convention centre. “And that’s getting tight,” says Dron. More than 200 vendors sell their offerings, mostly food items but also skin-care products and nutritional supplements—all made without gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye, and blamed for many digestive problems. Food donations are still accepted, but a $12 to $15 entrance fee has been implemented. “It’s gone from me begging [for] volunteer speakers to chefs and authors from all over North America requesting to come out,” says Dron. “It’s amazing.”

“Amazing” meaning lucrative, of course. Gluten-free products are a $90-million enterprise in Canada alone, and the sector is expected to grow at least 10 per cent each year through to 2018—an astounding feat for what is primarily a food-based category. In the United States, the market is valued at $4.2 billion and climbing. A landmark study by researchers at Dalhousie University in Halifax, published in the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research in 2008, revealed that gluten-free foods were, on average, 242 per cent more expensive than their “regular” counterparts, and up to 455 per cent pricier in some cases. “If I was to manufacture a product,” says Dron, “there is no way that I would not have a gluten-free option in today’s day and age.”

Manufacturers are getting the message—and not just small fringe businesses, but behemoth multinational corporations, too. Kellogg’s revamped its Rice Krispies recipe, first concocted in 1927, by removing barley malt (the source of gluten in the original) from its gluten-free version so it could advertise as a cereal “that’s easy for kids to digest.” Campbell Company of Canada claims to be the “first mainstream brand” to feature a gluten-free symbol on its soups and chilies. Tim Hortons hailed the introduction of a gluten-free menu item in mid-July—a chewy coconut macaroon drizzled with milk chocolate—as nothing short of a “defining moment in our Canadian dining history.” Wal-Mart Canada started selling gluten-free goods online this summer and offers free shipping no matter the order size. “They want to be the Amazon.com of gluten-free,” says communications specialist Tricia Ryan, who founded the Gluten-Free Agency in Toronto last August to help companies market their new products.

Business is booming for her, too, as the variety of products expands far beyond the oxymoronic “gluten-free pasta” and “gluten-free bread” lines. Items that consumers might never even think of as containing gluten are being tweaked, or at least rebranded, to meet the demand: soy sauce, salad dressings, potato chips, hot dogs, veggie burgers, licorice, pickles, spices, beer, vodka, toothpaste, makeup, protein powders, medicine, even playdough. Indeed, nothing is so sacred it can’t be reworked. Canadian churches can now purchase gluten-free or low-gluten Eucharistic wafers: $22.95 for 100 pieces. (...)

In the midst of this frenzy, it’s easy to forget the fact that only a tiny segment of the Canadian population is strictly prohibited from eating wheat by medical professionals—the roughly 35,000 people diagnosed with celiac disease. Another 300,000 are believed to be afflicted but undiagnosed. Their plight is severe: Just one bite of a glutenous food damages their small intestine and can cause a range of symptoms including abdominal pain, gas, bloating, diarrhea and constipation. The disease can lead to problems including “osteoporosis, anemia, sterility, even carcinoma,” says Peter Taylor, executive director of the Canadian Celiac Association. For them, “every day, every meal, every mouthful” is a matter of sickness or health.

But they are a small lot, certainly “not enough to make a business,” says Ryan. Rather, it appears that the gluten-free craze is being fuelled by the dietary choices of a much larger group of individuals known as “gluten avoiders”—seven million strong in Canada alone, the majority of whom do not have celiac disease or any other medically prescribed reason for eliminating gluten from their diet. Many say they experience gut problems, but their doctors can’t explain why or what to do about it. Some of these individuals turn to blogs and books for guidance on how to go gluten-free. In the process, they may learn of other rumoured benefits: weight loss, chief among them. They share their story with family, friends and co-workers, who in turn try going gluten-free, too. It’s for this crowd that the market grows. The gluten avoider group “is the driver for the gluten-free category,” says Ryan. “It’s the one that substantiates businesses making [these products].”

It’s also the segment of the population that has an increasing number of doctors across Canada confused and worried about the possible dangers of patients going gluten-free without talking to a health professional first. Gluten avoiders may spend money on foods that they don’t really need to eat, that may actually be lacking nutrition and causing them other problems. They may also miss out on important diagnoses, especially if they do have celiac disease and aren’t tested. All this has led doctors to debate in the pages of scientific journals and even out loud: Is Canada facing a new medical emergency about which little is yet understood or is this just the latest health fad gone wild? And most importantly, are gluten avoiders doing themselves more harm than good?

by Cathy Gulli, MacLeans | Read more:

Image: Liam Mogan

Swearing - the Language of Life and Death

Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly once said, ‘Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.’ The same could be said for swearing and taboo language, as this article explains. Swearing is a relatively new focus for psychology research but an apt one. From swearing in pain to swearing in foreign tongues, and several points in between, a number of investigators have begun to rise to the challenge of striving to understand the emotional power undoubtedly contained within some of the shortest of utterances in the lexicon. Here, then, is a brief introduction.

In 2004 my second daughter was born and, aspiring to be a modern dad, I stayed with and supported my wife through the labour. After a while it became clear that things were not going according to plan. This was mainly because our daughter was trying, unsuccessfully, to come out feet first. What followed was a very long and difficult labour for my wife, and towards the end her pain was such that she swore out loud. Indeed, she produced a rather impressive selection of expletives during each wave of agonising contractions. But as the contractions passed and the pain subsided, she became embarrassed and apologetic over having let fly in front of the nurses, midwives and doctors, only to redouble her efforts when the next wave of contractions struck. The staff, however, had clearly seen all of this before.

A midwife explained to us that swearing, four-letter words, cursing, profanity, bad language – whatever you care to call it – is a completely normal and routine part of the process of giving birth. Amid the joy at the arrival of our healthy daughter and the mental disorientation of a very difficult and emotional day, I found this fascinating.

When I eventually returned to my desk at Keele University School of Psychology I wondered why it was that people swear in response to pain. Was it a coping mechanism, an outlet for frustration, or what? I did some literature searching to find out what psychologists thought of the link between swearing and pain. To my surprise I could not find anything written on this topic, although there were some papers on the psychology of swearing more generally. Professor Timothy Jay of Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in the States, whom I have since had the pleasure of meeting, has forged a career investigating why people swear and has written several books on the topic. His main thesis is that swearing is not, as is often argued, a sign of low intelligence and inarticulateness, but rather that swearing is emotional language. In his words: ‘Curse words do things to sentences that noncurse words cannot do’ (Jay, 1999, p.137). Indeed, Professor Jay is rather scathing at psycholinguists’ tendency to have largely ignored swearing. He says: ‘Linguistic definitions of language [that omit cursing] are ultimately invalid, although polite’ (Jay, 1999, p.11).

I spoke with colleagues. Two psychological explanations of why people might swear when in pain were put forward. The ‘disinhibition’ explanation was the idea that in the momentary stress of acute pain we enter a state of social disinhibition (a diminished concern for social propriety) and reduced self-control so that words and ideas that we would usually suppress are expressed. The other explanation was that swearing in response to pain represents ‘pain catastrophising’ behaviour. Pain catastrophising is an exaggerated negative ‘mental-set’ brought to bear during pain experience (Sullivan et al., 2001). Catastrophic thinking exaggerates the level of threat posed by a painful event and heightens the pain intensity experienced. While there was some plausibility to the idea of swearing being an expression of pain catastrophising, it also seemed illogical. Swearing as catastrophising would serve to increase feelings of hurt and discomfort, whereas most people seek to reduce the pain they are feeling.

by Richard Stephens, The Psychologist |  Read more:

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David Byrne

[ed. See also: Men I Might Regret Sleeping With Were It Not for the Music They Introduced Me To (Parts 1-3) and ( Part 4).

Mark Lague, San Francisco White
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[ed. Julie Andrews can no longer sing. A sad fact I didn't know about until today.]
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Google's Covert Role In Foaming Uprisings

[ed. Dang, missed this a couple weeks ago. Pretty interesting.] 

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. (...)

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

Two months after my meeting with Eric Schmidt, WikiLeaks had a legal reason to call Hilary Clinton and to document that we were calling her. It’s interesting that if you call the front desk of the State Department and ask for Hillary Clinton, you can actually get pretty close, and we’ve become quite good at this. Anyone who has seen Doctor Strangelove may remember the fantastic scene when Peter Sellers calls the White House from a payphone on the army base and is put on hold as his call gradually moves through the levels. Well WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison, pretending to be my PA, put through our call to the State Department, and like Peter Sellers we started moving through the levels, and eventually we got up to Hillary Clinton’s senior legal advisor, who said that we would be called back.

Shortly afterwards another one of our people, WikiLeaks’ ambassador Joseph Farrell, received a call back, not from the State Department, but from Lisa Shields, the then girlfriend of Eric Schmidt, who does not formally work for the US State Department. So let’s reprise this situation: The Chairman of Google’s girlfriend was being used as a back channel for Hillary Clinton. This is illustrative. It shows that at this level of US society, as in other corporate states, it is all musical chairs. (...)

Jared Cohen was the co-writer of Eric Schmidt’s book, and his role as the bridge between Google and the State Department speaks volumes about how the US securitocracy works. Cohen used to work directly for the State Department and was a close advisor to both Condolezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. But since 2010 he has been Director of Google Ideas, its in-house ‘think/do’ tank.

Documents published last year by WikiLeaks obtained from the US intelligence contractor Stratfor, show that in 2011 Jared Cohen, then (as he is now) Director of Google Ideas, was off running secret missions to the edge of Iran in Azerbaijan. In these internal emails, Fred Burton, Stratfor’s Vice President for Intelligence and a former senior State Department official, describes Google as follows:

“Google is getting WH [White House] and State Dept support and air cover. In reality they are doing things the CIA cannot do…[Cohen] is going to get himself kidnapped or killed. Might be the best thing to happen to expose Google’s covert role in foaming up-risings, to be blunt. The US Gov’t can then disavow knowledge and Google is left holding the shit-bag”

In further internal communication, Burton subsequently clarifies his sources on Cohen’s activities as Marty Lev, Google’s director of security and safety and.. Eric Schmidt.

WikiLeaks cables also reveal that previously Cohen, when working for the State Department, was in Afghanistan trying to convince the four major Afghan mobile phone companies to move their antennas onto US military bases. In Lebanon he covertly worked to establish, on behalf of the State Department, an anti-Hezbollah Shia think tank. And in London? He was offering Bollywood film executives funds to insert anti-extremist content into Bollywood films and promising to connect them to related networks in Hollywood. That is the Director of Google Ideas. Cohen is effectively Google’s director of regime change. He is the State Department channeling Silicon Valley.

by Julian Assange, Zero Hedge |  Read more:

Image: Eric Schmidt via:

National Parks Try to Appeal to Minorities

[ed. See also: White People Love Hiking. Minorities Don't. Here's Why.]

Thrusting out into the Pacific Ocean, Olympic National Park can feel like a lost world, with its ferny rain forests, violent surf and cloud-shrouded peaks.

But to the four women who hiked down to the sand one recent afternoon, there was an added element of strangeness: race.

“We’ve been here for two days, walking around, and I can’t think of any brown person that I’ve seen,” said Carol Cain, 42, a New Jersey resident of Dominican and Puerto Rican roots, who was zipped up tight in her hooded, dripping rain jacket.

The National Park Service knows all too well what Ms. Cain is talking about. In a soul-searching, head-scratching journey of its own, the agency that manages some of the most awe-inspiring public places is scrambling to rethink and redefine itself to the growing number of Americans who do not use the parks in the way that previous — mostly white — generations did.

Only about one in five visitors to a national park site is nonwhite, according to a 2011 University of Wyoming report commissioned by the Park Service, and only about 1 in 10 is Hispanic — a particularly lackluster embrace by the nation’s fastest-growing demographic group.

One way the service has been fighting to break through is with a program called American Latino Expeditions, which invited Ms. Cain and her three colleagues. Groups like theirs went to three parks and recreation areas this summer — participants competed for the spots, with expenses paid for mostly through corporate donations — part of a multipronged effort to turn the Park Service’s demographic battleship around.

“We know that if we get them there, it can be transformative,” Jonathan B. Jarvis, the Park Service’s director, said in a telephone interview. A single positive park visit, he said, can create a lifelong pattern.

Easy to say, harder to achieve, Mr. Jarvis admitted. But the agency, in looking for a path forward, has also stumbled onto an unlikely team of allies — from outdoor outfitters to health and fitness advocates — all focused on the same thing: encouraging, supplying or simply understanding the young minority market. (...)

“The future is diverse,” said Scott Welch, a spokesman for Columbia Sportswear, which provided clothing to expedition groups this summer and has been working with GirlTrek. “If you want to be a brand for the future, you’ve got to embrace that.”

But the effort to diversify also touches some deep cultural grooves in American life that may not be as quick to change as a moisture-wicking outdoor shirt.

by Kirk Johnson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Matthew Ryan Williams

The Psychiatric Drug Crisis

It’s been just over twenty-five years since Prozac came to market, and more than twenty per cent of Americans now regularly take mind-altering drugs prescribed by their doctors. Almost as familiar as brands like Zoloft and Lexapro is the worry about what it means that the daily routine in many households, for parents and children alike, includes a dose of medications that are poorly understood and whose long-term effects on the body are unknown. Despite our ambivalence, sales of psychiatric drugs amounted to more than seventy billion dollars in 2010. They have become yet another commodity that consumers have learned to live with or even enjoy, like S.U.V.s or Cheetos.

Yet the psychiatric-drug industry is in trouble. “We are facing a crisis,” the Cornell psychiatrist and New York Times contributor Richard Friedman warned last week. In the past few years, one pharmaceutical giant after another—GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis, Pfizer, Merck, Sanofi—has shrunk or shuttered its neuroscience research facilities. Clinical trials have been halted, lines of research abandoned, and the new drug pipeline has been allowed to run dry.

Why would an industry beat a hasty retreat from a market that continues to boom? (Recent surveys indicate that mental illness is the leading cause of impairment and disability worldwide.) The answer lies in the history of psychopharmacology, which is more deeply indebted to serendipity than most branches of medicine—in particular, to a remarkable series of accidental discoveries made in the fifteen or so years following the end of the Second World War.

by Gary Greenberg, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Paul Skelcher/Science Faction/Corbis

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The Bechdel Test

In her 1929 essay A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf observed about the literature of her time what the Bechdel test would later highlight in more recent fiction:

All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. [...] And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. [...] They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men. It was strange to think that all the great women of fiction were, until Jane Austen's day, not only seen by the other sex, but seen only in relation to the other sex. And how small a part of a woman’s life is that [...]

What is now known as the Bechdel test was introduced in Alison Bechdel's comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. In a 1985 strip titled "The Rule", an unnamed female character says that she only watches a movie if it satisfies the following requirements:

1. It has to have at least two women in it,
2. who talk to each other,
3. about something besides a man.

Bechdel credited the idea for the test to a friend and karate training partner, Liz Wallace.

The test has been described as "the standard by which feminist critics judge television, movies, books and other media", and moved into mainstream criticism in the 2010s. According to Neda Ulaby, the test still resonates because "it articulates something often missing in popular culture: not the number of women we see on screen, but the depth of their stories, and the range of their concerns." (...)

Application

Only a small proportion of films pass the Bechdel test, according to writer Charlie Stross and film director Jason Reitman. According to Mark Harris of Entertainment Weekly, if passing the test were mandatory, it would have jeopardized half of 2009's Academy Award for Best Picture nominees and would cut the length of the annual Comic-Con from five days to 45 minutes. Stross also noted that about half of the films that do pass the test only do so because the women talk about marriage or babies. Works that fail the test include some that are mainly about or aimed at women, or which do feature prominent female characters. The television series Sex and the City highlights its own failure to pass the test by having one of the four female main characters ask: "How does it happen that four such smart women have nothing to talk about but boyfriends? It's like seventh grade with bank accounts!"

Explanations that have been offered to explain why relatively few films pass the Bechdel test include the relative lack of diversity among scriptwriters, or their assumptions about the audience's preferences: A scriptwriting student at UCLA wrote in 2008 that she was told by professors that the audience "only wanted white, straight, male leads" and not, as she quoted a male industry professional as saying, "a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about".

The website bechdeltest.com is a user-edited database of some 3,300 films classified by whether or not they pass the test, with the added requirement that the women must be named characters. As of July 2012, it listed 53% of these films as passing all three of the test's requirements, 11% as failing one (the women's conversations are about men), 25% as failing two (the women don't talk to each other) and 11% as failing all three (there are not two named female characters).

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

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