Life of Solitude: A Loneliness Crisis is Looming

[ed. See also: Ask Polly: Help, I'm the lonliest person in the world!]

Chronic loneliness has roots that are both internal and external, a combination of genes and social circumstance, but something is making it worse. Blame the garage-door opener, which keeps neighbours from seeing each other at the end of the day, or our fetish for roads over parks, or the bright forest of condo towers that bloom on our city’s skylines.

Or blame an increasingly self-absorbed society, as John Cacioppo does. Prof. Cacioppo, the leading authority on the health effects of loneliness, is director of the University of Chicago’s Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. “One of the things we’ve seen is a movement away from a concern for others,” he says in a phone interview. “Economics basically says you should be concerned about your own short-term interests. There’s more division in society, more segmentation; there’s less identity with a national or global persona, but rather on the family or the individual. People aren’t as loyal to their employers, and employers are certainly not as loyal to their workers.”

Loneliness, it turns out, is as bad for your health as smoking, or being obese. The research that Prof. Cacioppo has done with colleagues also adds to the growing body of work that shows how bad loneliness can be for your health. It shows that loneliness suppresses the immune system and cardiovascular function, and increases the amount of stress hormone the body produces. It causes wear and tear on a cellular level, and impairs sleep. As he writes in his book Loneliness, “these changes in physiology are compounded in ways that may be hastening millions of people to an early grave.”

His theory, simply, is that we are social animals who function most successfully in a collective; the physical pain and degradation caused by loneliness are a kind of early-warning signal of a failure to connect, the way the pain of a cut finger tells you to fetch a Band-Aid.

A study last year from the University of California at San Francisco showed a clear link between loneliness and serious heart problems and early death in the elderly. Seniors in the study who identified themselves as lonely had a 59-per-cent greater chance of health problems, and a 45-per-cent greater chance of early death. (...)

Ask Vancouverites what bothers them, and you’d think they might say house prices. Drugs on the street. Not being able to get into the hot new sushi joint. But when the Vancouver Foundation asked that question, it received a gobsmacking response.

“The biggest issue people had is that they felt lonely, isolated, and unconnected to their communities,” says Kevin McCort, president of the community-outreach charity. Last year, the foundation conducted a survey of almost 4,000 Vancouverites and found that one-third of those between 25 and 34 felt “alone more than they would like.” Another one-third said they have trouble making friends. Forty per cent of high-rise dwellers felt lonely, almost twice the number (22 per cent) living in detached homes. Crucially, the study found that the loneliest also reported being in poorer health and lacking trust in others.

“Social isolation just may be the greatest environmental hazard of city living,” writes Vancouver-based author Charles Montgomery in his new book, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design. “Worse than noise, pollution, or even crowding.” And the way we’ve built cities – suburbs with no central meeting place, prioritizing the car and the condo tower, passing restrictive zoning bylaws – has made the problem worse, he says in an interview. “If we’re concerned about happiness, then social disconnection in Canadian cities is an acute problem.”

by Elizabeth Renzetti, Globe and Mail |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

How to Save Football

Is there an activity that Americans give more of their attention to and know less about than professional football? The essence of N.F.L. life is the intense weeklong process of preparation for Sunday, which takes place at the thirty-two N.F.L. team “facilities.” The New York Jets allowed me to spend more than a year with them at their team facility in Florham Park, New Jersey, while I wrote a book, but that was unusual. Most visitors to N.F.L. facilities receive only supervised tours on the order of state visits to Pyongyang. In an era of exposure, the national passion operates in almost total seclusion, apart from the televised games. Perhaps the distance gives it an allure that increases the pleasure. Or, possibly, those who watch wouldn’t like what they’d see if they got too close.

They have reason to worry. For all its present popularity, trouble has been lurking for football. Recent glimpses into the insular culture of the game have revealed bounties promised in New Orleans for injuring opponents, a tight end charged with murder in New England (he’s pleaded not guilty), and particularly abusive hazing in Miami. Most significant, a growing body of scientific evidence and investigative journalism, such as the recent PBS documentary “League of Denial,” and the book of the same title, has found that players are at risk for chronic traumatic encephalopathy—the degenerative brain disease previously more associated with boxers. For decades, the N.F.L. seemed indifferent to the consequences of head injuries, and may even have concealed evidence of the dire long-term cognitive costs of concussions while disseminating more anodyne information to players and their families. This has led to a perception that professional football is the Big Tobacco of sports, a profit-obsessed corporate entity with a callous lack of concern for the human beings who take the big hits.

As a result, many fans are torn. They love football, in part because of the human car wrecks, but they are repelled by the thought of enjoying a blood sport that brutalizes the minds and bodies of players. It used to be easy to say that the players knew what they were getting themselves into. Now that this has proven untrue, at least for the veterans, it’s more challenging for Americans to take uncomplicated pleasure in watching young men, many of whom grew up in poverty, play a sport they’re not sure they want their own sons to pursue. It has been the American way to tolerate our moral misgivings about the public institutions that define us, from Southern segregation to drunk driving. Then, sometimes abruptly, the queasy reservations veer into disgust and rejection. What can the N.F.L. do, going forward, to make fans feel better about the sport?

by Nicholas Dawidoff, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Mike Ehrmann/Getty

Jessica Bell
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N.S.A. Report Outlined Goals for More Power

[ed. This is a watershed moment for American democracy (and democracy everywhere). Do you want a surveillance/police state to feel safe? If so, you've got one. So do you feel safer? (and if the answer is no, what more would it take?)]

Officials at the National Security Agency, intent on maintaining its dominance in intelligence collection, pledged last year to push to expand its surveillance powers, according to a top-secret strategy document.

In a February 2012 paper laying out the four-year strategy for the N.S.A.’s signals intelligence operations, which include the agency’s eavesdropping and communications data collection around the world, agency officials set an objective to “aggressively pursue legal authorities and a policy framework mapped more fully to the information age.”

Written as an agency mission statement with broad goals, the five-page document said that existing American laws were not adequate to meet the needs of the N.S.A. to conduct broad surveillance in what it cited as “the golden age of Sigint,” or signals intelligence. “The interpretation and guidelines for applying our authorities, and in some cases the authorities themselves, have not kept pace with the complexity of the technology and target environments, or the operational expectations levied on N.S.A.’s mission,” the document concluded.

Using sweeping language, the paper also outlined some of the agency’s other ambitions. They included defeating the cybersecurity practices of adversaries in order to acquire the data the agency needs from “anyone, anytime, anywhere.” The agency also said it would try to decrypt or bypass codes that keep communications secret by influencing “the global commercial encryption market through commercial relationships,” human spies and intelligence partners in other countries. It also talked of the need to “revolutionize” analysis of its vast collections of data to “radically increase operational impact.”

The strategy document, provided by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, was written at a time when the agency was at the peak of its powers and the scope of its surveillance operations was still secret. Since then, Mr. Snowden’s revelations have changed the political landscape.

Prompted by a public outcry over the N.S.A.’s domestic operations, the agency’s critics in Congress have been pushing to limit, rather than expand, its ability to routinely collect the phone and email records of millions of Americans, while foreign leaders have protested reports of virtually unlimited N.S.A. surveillance overseas, even in allied nations. Several inquiries are underway in Washington; Gen. Keith B. Alexander, the N.S.A.’s longest-serving director, has announced plans to retire; and the White House has offered proposals to disclose more information about the agency’s domestic surveillance activities.

The N.S.A. document, titled “Sigint Strategy 2012-2016,” does not make clear what legal or policy changes the agency might seek. The N.S.A.’s powers are determined variously by Congress, executive orders and the nation’s secret intelligence court, and its operations are governed by layers of regulations. While asserting that the agency’s “culture of compliance” would not be compromised, N.S.A. officials argued that they needed more flexibility, according to the paper.

Senior intelligence officials, responding to questions about the document, said that the N.S.A. believed that legal impediments limited its ability to conduct surveillance of terrorism suspects inside the United States. (...)

Intent on unlocking the secrets of adversaries, the paper underscores the agency’s long-term goal of being able to collect virtually everything available in the digital world. To achieve that objective, the paper suggests that the N.S.A. plans to gain greater access, in a variety of ways, to the infrastructure of the world’s telecommunications networks.

Reports based on other documents previously leaked by Mr. Snowden showed that the N.S.A. has infiltrated the cable links to Google and Yahoo data centers around the world, leading to protests from company executives and a growing backlash against the N.S.A. in Silicon Valley.

Yet the paper also shows how the agency believes it can influence and shape trends in high-tech industries in other ways to suit its needs. One of the agency’s goals is to “continue to invest in the industrial base and drive the state of the art for high performance computing to maintain pre-eminent cryptanalytic capability for the nation.” The paper added that the N.S.A. must seek to “identify new access, collection and exploitation methods by leveraging global business trends in data and communications services.”

And it wants to find ways to combine all of its technical tools to enhance its surveillance powers. The N.S.A. will seek to integrate its “capabilities to reach previously inaccessible targets in support of exploitation, cyberdefense and cyberoperations,” the paper stated.

by James Risen and Laura Poitras, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited via:

Liu Wen By Mario Testino For Vogue China
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Buzzkill

[ed. I wrote a short piece about this not too long after I-502 passed. See: Holding Our Breath.] 

One morning in August, Mark Kleiman, a professor of public policy at U.C.L.A., addressed the Seattle city council on the subject of marijuana. Kleiman is one of the country’s most prominent and outspoken analysts of drug policy, and for three decades he has argued that America’s cannabis laws must be liberalized. Kleiman’s campaign used to seem quixotic, but in November, 2012, voters in Washington and Colorado passed initiatives legalizing the use and commercial sale of marijuana. Immediately afterward, the State of Washington decided that it needed help setting up a pot economy. State bureaucrats don’t generally sit around pondering the improbable, so they had made no contingency plans. A call for proposals was issued. Kleiman assembled a team that beat out more than a hundred other contenders for the job. He calls himself a “policy entrepreneur,” and offers advice through a consultancy that he runs, botec Analysis Corp. In a nod to the ambiguity inherent in studying illicit economies, botec stands for Back of the Envelope Calculation.

Washington and Colorado have launched a singular experiment. The Netherlands tolerates personal use of marijuana, but growing or selling the drug is still illegal. Portugal has eliminated criminal sanctions on all forms of drug use, but selling narcotics remains a crime. Washington and Colorado are not merely decriminalizing adult possession and use of cannabis; they are creating a legal market for the drug that will be overseen by the state. In a further complication, the marijuana that is legal in these states will remain illegal in the eyes of the federal government, because the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 forbids the growing and selling of cannabis. “What the state is doing, in actuality, is issuing licenses to commit a felony,” Kleiman says. In late August, after months of silence, the Department of Justice announced that it will not intervene to halt the initiatives in Washington and Colorado. Instead, it will adopt a “trust but verify” approach, permitting the states to police the new market for the drug. Many other states appear poised to introduce legalization measures, and the Obama Administration’s apparent acquiescence surely will hasten this development.

Washington’s initiative, called I-502, received fifty-six per cent of the vote, with especially strong support in western Washington, around Seattle. Voters saw a lot to like: the end of prohibition of a drug that many people enjoy and consider harmless; a fresh source of tax revenue; an end to the punitive, and racially discriminatory, enforcement of marijuana laws. Each year, U.S. authorities make more than three-quarters of a million arrests for marijuana offenses. Blacks are more than three times as likely to be arrested for such offenses as whites are, though they are no more likely to use the drug. Pete Holmes, the city attorney of Seattle, told me that state prosecutors had stopped indicting people for marijuana possession, because local jurors found the prohibition so objectionable that they tended to acquit on principle. A few years ago, Holmes stopped prosecuting misdemeanor marijuana-possession cases. He then publicly endorsed I-502.

The law, which was sixty-four pages long and contained hundreds of specific provisions, assigned the liquor-control board the role of regulating the pot market. Yet many difficult questions remained: Who would be allowed to grow legal marijuana? Who would be allowed to sell it? How much would an ounce of legal pot cost? The legislation gave Washington officials only a year to come up with answers. Randy Simmons, the state’s project manager for I-502, says, “From the week after the initiative passed, it’s been about a hundred and fifty miles an hour.”

The liquor-control board instructed Kleiman and his associates at botec to submit research papers outlining the advantages and disadvantages of rival approaches to legalization. They were to be paid two hundred and ninety-two dollars an hour. In the spring and summer, Kleiman’s team engaged in the often surreal enterprise of conducting market research on a black market: producing reports on the number of active marijuana users in each county; estimating how many retail cannabis outlets would be needed to serve that population; assessing how various tax schemes might affect the price of the drug. They also investigated protocols for “product quality standards and testing.” Kleiman’s mandate was to offer officials options, rather than prescriptions. But he has a lot of opinions, and does not excel at hiding them.

If Seattle has welcomed the legalization of marijuana with utopian optimism—a conviction that Washington’s experiment will eventually sweep the nation—then Kleiman can seem like a total downer. Allergic to cant, he speaks with the bracing candor of a scientist in a disaster movie, and appears to derive grim pleasure from informing politicians that they have underestimated the complexity of a problem.

by Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Maureen Drennan

David Hockney, A Lawn Being Sprinkled, 1967
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R. Crumb
Image source: misplaced

Bill Gate's Super-Condom

It's been hailed as the new wonder-material, set to revolutionise everything from circuit boards to food packaging, a magic super-strength membrane that is barely there at all. Now, thanks to the unlikely sex champion Bill Gates, graphene could be used to make the thinnest, lightest, most impenetrable condom ever conceived.

“The common analogy is that wearing a condom is like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” says Dr Papa Salif Sow, senior program officer on the HIV team at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has awarded $100,000 (£60,000) to scientists at the University of Manchester's National Graphene Institute to aid their pursuit of the ultimate super-sheath. “A redesigned condom that overcomes inconvenience, fumbling or perceived loss of pleasure would be a powerful weapon in the fight against poverty.”

At only one atom thick, an all-graphene condom would put the Durex Ultra Thin to shame – although the fact that the material is barely visible to the naked eye could lead to some awkward moments between the sheets. A slight ruffle of the duvet and could it just float away?

Dr Aravind Vijayaraghavan, who will lead the research team, explains the focus is on developing a composite material, with latex, “tailored to enhance the natural sensation during intercourse while using a condom, which should encourage and promote condom use.”

It will be achieved, he says, “by combining the strength of graphene with the elasticity of latex to produce a new material which can be thinner, stronger, more stretchy, safer and, perhaps most importantly, more pleasurable.”

by Oliver Wainwright, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Niall Carson/PA

[ed. Upon encountering Duck Soup for the first time.]
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No, You Shut Up!

If you're a parent, you are probably familiar with being provoked into a blood vessel-popping rage that instantly overwhelms any resolution you might have made to stay calm. That's because kids are amazingly good at refining behaviors that they can turn to when they're upset or angry, especially in public, to make their parents even angrier—in fact, insanely angry. Let's just stand back for a moment and appreciate the virtuosity of the 6-year-old who trails along behind you every morning on the way to school wailing that you're mean because you make him wear an uncomfortable backpack or wrinkly socks, or the 9-year-old who demonstrates her budding independence and wit by being rude to you in front of others, or the 12-year-old who during an argument over chores shouts, "You don't care about anybody but yourself! You just want me to do all this stupid stuff around your stupid house because you're so selfish and lazy!" It's as if they had commissioned a study of the most effective ways to set you off and then implemented the findings with great care and foresight.

And yet there you go, rising to the bait. What's your standard move? The hard come-along arm yank? The livid pinch-and-shake combo? The point-by-point counterargument? "What? I'm selfish? I'm lazy? I changed your diapers and picked your nose and sat up with you all night long when you were sick! I work hard all day to support this family, and then I get home and I clean and I cook. ..."

There's really no satisfying response, is there? Decreeing an extravagantly harsh punishment may immediately address your sense of justice, but it's unlikely to make the annoying behavior go away, and once you calm down, you're unlikely to stick with the punishment, anyway. Grabbing, shaking, hitting, or screaming at your kid may stop the behavior and be cathartic for you, but only for a moment (after which you may well begin to feel bad for losing control of yourself and overreacting), and over time such responses will likely lead to further behavioral problems. Ignoring the unwanted behavior and finding ways to encourage its positive opposite will be most effective in getting rid of the unwanted behavior in the long run, but this approach won't satisfy your overwhelming short-term urge to do something right now that addresses and fits the crime.

It's difficult to work out a satisfying response to flagrant disrespect because you're typically in the grip of at least four distinct, only partially overlapping, and often conflicting motives: an emotional urge to do something with the anger surging up inside you, a moralistic impulse to dispense justice in proportion to the offense, a social obligation to show yourself and your child and any others who might be watching that you don't tolerate such behavior, and a practical intent to get rid of the problem so you don't have to put up with such hassles in the future.

When your child stages a scene in front of witnesses, the mixed motives—and the anger, now supercharged by humiliation—grow all the more complex and difficult to handle. Yes, sure, a vast body of psychological research tells you that any attention you give to a bad behavior, even if it's in the form of screaming and hitting and grounding your child for the rest of her life, will only reinforce that behavior, so it's best not to react, but your kid just called you an a--hole in front of the neighbors—unless you're B.F. Skinner or the Buddha, ignoring it is not an option. And, anyway, ignoring it won't make it go away. You need to do something.

So, what do you do?

Let's consider the immediate, long-term, and side effects of some common and not-so-common responses to a disrespectful provocation by your child.

by Alan Kazdin and Carlo Rotella, Slate | Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Yuko Murata
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A Tune With A View

No matter where you are on the planet, a song is probably being written nearby. Ever since the Beatles accidentally persuaded anyone who could play an instrument that they must be able to compose songs on it, songwriting has become the most widely practised creative art. PRS for Music, the official song-licensing body, estimates that it registers 700,000 new musical works every year. That's just in Britain.

There are more songwriters—pro, semi-pro, would-be or simply deluded—than novelists, composers, screenwriters or painters. That must be because songwriting looks easy. Where novels and paintings require stamina, don't great songs simply materialise? Paul McCartney says the tune for "Yesterday" came to him in a dream. Keith Richards woke in the middle of the night and played the riff for "Satisfaction" into a tape recorder by his motel bed. Songwriters know the unease when their subconscious comes up with something good. Where did I pinch that from?

Even if the process clearly involves sweat, there is usually a moment when chords and words magically mesh. "Somewhere in a burst of glory/Sound becomes a song", Paul Simon sang, in one of the intricate compositions which he spends months polishing. Biographers and critics like to think the best songs are inspired by events, which is why they treasure so-called break-up albums. In fact they're usually inspired by nothing more than a chord change that seems worth repeating, a snatch of conversation that might make a title, and a studio booked for Monday.

All songwriters agree that the best ideas seem to alight upon them rather than coming from within. Waiting for the song fairy is the hardest part. Modern songwriters long for the structure of the music publisher's cell, the spur of a deadline. Chris Difford of Squeeze would rather do it for someone else: "I like to write to order. Like a tailor making a suit." Owen Parker, who has worked with Pet Shop Boys, talks yearningly of how the veteran Ervin Drake was told to come up with a song for an artist who was arriving the next day. In his notebook he found "song about ageing as if stages of your life were like wine"; 20 minutes later he had written "It Was a Very Good Year". "The best songs", says Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, "take exactly as long to write as the song lasts."

Jimmy Webb wrote "Wichita Lineman" when Glen Campbell, who had had a hit with his "By the Time I Get to Phoenix", demanded "another song about a city". Webb dashed off a song about the working man with the soul of a poet and found that Campbell had recorded it before he'd had time to fit it with the standard middle eight. It's widely regarded as the best record either man has been associated with.

For all the money lavished on videos, the words uttered in interviews, the dark arts of marketing and the occasional whisper of corruption, the music business remains at root a songs business. The destinies of large companies hinge on that one person staring into space in their attic, killing time on Twitter, contemplating another cup of coffee or a walk in the park, trying to banish all conscious thought apart from a silent prayer to the songwriting god that the next five minutes will bring the wisp of the idea that earns them immortality.

I spoke to a number of songwriters working in different fields to find out what's going through their heads when they write and what they're looking at as they wait for that inspiration to strike.

by David Hepworth, Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Richard Wilkinson

November 22, 1963

[ed. 3rd Grade, studying in the library, a teacher burst in sobbing, 'They've shot and killed the President'. Until then I never knew someone could kill a President - he was like Superman - or that teachers could cry.]
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[ed. See also: The day that will live in infamy.]

Evolution's Other Narrative

During a recent meal with a friend who happens to be a successful engineer, I found myself drawn, as usual, into debate. Although our theological and political views diverge, he and I customarily find common ground in scientific epistemology. However, this time the topic was whether intelligent design should be taught in high schools. When I expressed incredulity at his support for teaching intelligent design, he said, “Brad, just look around us—survival of the fittest can’t be all that’s going on here, and I think it is important to respect people’s sensitivity to that.”

I reminded my friend that, because intelligent design argues for supernatural causes of natural phenomena, teaching it would undermine rational inquiry, together with students’ ability to eventually make the kind of scientific breakthroughs we are enjoying today. I pointed out the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s Human Microbiome Project as an example, which is revealing how human health suffers when the health of the millions of microorganisms with which we’ve coevolved suffers. My friend’s simplistic interpretation of evolution as “survival of the fittest” left him ignorant even of the possibility of projects like this, which are based on evolutionary considerations of symbiosis. Evidently, educators—and certainly evolutionary specialists themselves—must broadcast a more nuanced story of evolutionary theory. Otherwise, future scientists and projects that inform better approaches to human health and global ecology will be sabotaged before they even emerge.

Science education has failed to overcome entrenched cultural ideals rooted not only in religion, but also in political philosophy. For those like my engineer friend trying to comprehend how magnificent structures of life emerge by means of “survival of the fittest,” skepticism is understandable. Popular appreciation for life’s complexity has far outpaced the popular interpretation of the evolutionary source of that complexity, which has remained stuck in 1864, when Herbert Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.”

When it comes to the story of evolutionary science, people know the name Charles Darwin, but most do not know the names Ivan Wallin or Lynn Margulis—two more recent, groundbreaking evolutionary theorists. Over the past several decades, these and other researchers have revealed that organisms’ cooperation and interdependence contribute more to evolution than competition. Symbiogenesis—the emergence of a new species through the evolutionary interdependence of two or more species—is at least as important in the history of life as survival of the fittest. Such insight has failed to gain traction in American minds—including those of American scientists—because of cultural history traceable back through the popularization of Adam Smith’s individualist philosophy. (...)

According to Margulis, the evolving relationships between microscopic organisms and other micro- and macroscopic organisms are the essence of the history of life. Despite scientists’ mid-century focus on eukaryotic life (organisms with larger cells featuring a bounded nucleus and organelles), the most prolific type of organism on Earth, bacteria, is prokaryotic (an organism without a bounded nucleus). Virtually all eukaryotic forms of life have adapted symbiotic associations with prokaryotic bacteria. Margulis was among the first Western scientists to attempt to popularize this fact. She spent virtually her entire career laboring to bring this mostly microscopic form of evolution to the macroscopic focus of her readers.

Margulis’s research in microbiology equipped her to verify and expand on Wallin’s symbiosis-centered theory. In 1966 she attempted to publish a summary of her perspectives on the evolution of complex life forms in “The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells,” only to be rejected by more than a dozen scientific journals. When her article was finally published by the Journal of Theoretical Biology, criticism ensued. Nonetheless, the further Margulis pushed her symbiotic evolutionary theory, the more convinced she became that the emergence of eukaryotic cells a billion and a half years ago—a major evolutionary transition in the history of life—was the result of symbiogenesis.

In Margulis’s view, out of prokaryotic–prokaryotic symbiosis emerged eukaryotes. Out of prokaryotic–eukaryotic symbiosis emerged more competitive eukaryotes. And out of eukaryotic–eukaryotic symbiosis emerged multicellular life. The classic image of evolution, the tree of life, almost always exclusively shows diverging branches; however, a banyan tree, with diverging and converging branches is best. To this day, many scientists and most laypeople remain ignorant of this way of imagining evolution, which profoundly constricts how they imagine themselves.

by Bradford Harris, American Scientist |  Read more:

Image: Endosymbiosis: Homage to Lynn Margulis, by Shoshanah Dubineer

Senate Limits Use of the Filibuster

[ed. There'll be lots of commentary on this (for example: here and here). The Republicans have been abusing the filibuster for a long time. Nice to see some sanity finally restored. And for those who say wait until the shoe's on the other foot, just look at the record.]

The Senate approved the most fundamental alteration of its rules in more than a generation on Thursday, ending the minority party’s ability to filibuster most presidential nominees in response to the partisan gridlock that has plagued Congress for much of the Obama administration.

Furious Republicans accused Democrats of a power grab, warning them that they would deeply regret their action if they lose control of the Senate next year and the White House in years to come. Invoking the Founding Fathers and the meaning of the Constitution, Republicans said Democrats were trampling the minority rights the framers intended to protect. But when the vote was called, Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader who was initially reluctant to force the issue, prevailed 52 to 48.

Under the change, the Senate will be able to cut off debate on executive and judicial branch nominees with a simple majority rather than rounding up a supermajority of 60 votes. The new precedent established by the Senate on Thursday does not apply to Supreme Court nominations or legislation itself.

It represented the culmination of years of frustration over what Democrats denounced as a Republican campaign to stall the machinery of Congress, stymie President Obama’s agenda, and block his picks to cabinet posts and federal judgeships by insisting that virtually everything the Senate approves must be done by a supermajority.

After repeatedly threatening to change the filibuster, Mr. Reid decided to follow through when Republicans refused this week to back down from their effort to keep Mr. Obama from filling any of three vacancies on the most powerful appeals court in the country.

This was the final straw for some Democratic holdouts against limiting the filibuster, providing Mr. Reid with the votes he needed to impose a new standard certain to reverberate through the Senate for years.

“There has been unbelievable, unprecedented obstruction,” Mr. Reid said as he set in motion the steps for the vote on Thursday. “The Senate is a living thing, and to survive it must change as it has over the history of this great country. To the average American, adapting the rules to make the Senate work again is just common sense.”

Republicans accused Democrats of irreparably damaging the character of an institution that in many ways still operates as it did in the 19th century, and of disregarding the constitutional prerogative of the Senate as a body of “advice and consent” on presidential nominations.

“You think this is in the best interest of the United States Senate and the American people?” asked the Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, sounding incredulous.

“I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think,” he added.

Mr. Obama applauded the Senate’s move. “Today’s pattern of obstruction, it just isn’t normal,” he told reporters at the White House. “It’s not what our founders envisioned. A deliberate and determined effort to obstruct everything, no matter what the merits, just to refight the results of an election is not normal, and for the sake of future generations we can’t let it become normal.”

by Jeremy W. Peters, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Stephen Crowley/The New York Times