This Fish Could Save the Caribbean Coral Reefs

The International Union for Conservation of Nature has released a massive report on the health of Caribbean coral reefs. Based on data collected from 35,000 surveys spanning 42 years, it is the most comprehensive study on the reefs ever published.

The bad news is that coral reefs are declining at a breakneck pace. Only a sixth of the structure’s original range has survived the last few decades, and it may take only 20 years to edge out the remaining reefs.

The good news is that there may be a very simple answer: don’t kill parrotfish. The study found that these keystone herbivores disproportionately contribute to the health of their host reefs by feeding on coral-suffocating algae.

The IUCN cited the declining parrotfish population, as well as other algae grazers like sea urchins, as the key driver behind reef collapse. It even trumps the negative effects of climate change on tropical reefs, though that may change over the coming decades.

by Becky Ferreira, Motherboard |  Read more:

Image: Phil's 1stPix

Rude Hooker

From the movie High Road (2011)
[ed. Hilarious. The audio quality is kind of... fagotty. You may need to turn up the sound a bit.]

Candy Chang - Self-evalutation in transit - 2006
Sidewalk Psychiatry
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Fastest-Growing Metro Area in U.S. Has No Crime or Kids

[ed. Sounds like hell on earth to me. Who'd want to isolate themselves from grandchildren, dogs, young people and families? Different ethnic cultures and businesses? New experiences and new perspectives? A lot of people, apparently. But hey, at least there's no crime (and it's clean!)]  

For Jerry Conkle, life in America’s fastest-growing metropolitan area moves as slowly as the golf carts that meander through his palm-lined neighborhood at dusk. Most days, he wakes early, reads the newspaper, and then hops into his four-wheeled buggy for a 20-mile-per-hour ride to one of the 42 golf courses that surround his home.

“It’s like an adult Disney World,” Conkle, 77, said of The Villages, Florida, whose expansion has come with virtually no crime, traffic, pollution -- or children.

The mix has attracted flocks of senior citizens, making The Villages the world’s largest retirement community. Its population of 110,000 has more than quadrupled since 2000, U.S. Census Bureau data show. It rose 5.2 percent last year, on par with megacities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh.

That the most rapidly expanding U.S. metro area is a Manhattan-sized retirement village -- with more golf carts than New York has taxis -- highlights the transformation of the world’s demographic profile. The over-60 set -- which the United Nations projects will almost triple to 2 billion by 2050 -- offers opportunity to marketers and homebuilders even as it confounds governments that must care for an aging populace.

“A lot of communities see seniors as a huge benefit -- they contribute to the tax base and the local economy,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But these people are going to get older, and they’re going to have health needs and service needs.”

Few have benefited from the spending power of retirees more than H. Gary Morse, who developed The Villages. The Holding Company of the Villages Ltd., owned by Morse and his family, has sold more than 50,000 new homes since 1986, generating $9.9 billion in revenue, according to disclosures in municipal-bond filings.

The Villages, which has rules governing everything from how long children can visit to how many pet fish residents can keep, has helped Morse build a family fortune worth $2.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

In addition to selling homes, Morse, 77, and his family own the local newspaper, a radio station and a television channel.

They also hold a controlling interest in Citizens First Bank, which provides mortgages. The holding company is the landlord of more than 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate, including dozens of restaurants and retailers.

“They own everything,” said Andrew D. Blechman, author of “Leisureville,” a book about The Villages and other retirement communities that ranks Morse’s as the biggest. “You basically have a city of 100,000 people, owned by a company.”

by Toluse Olorunnipa, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg

Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber, Personal Message
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The Power of Two

In the fall of 1966, during a stretch of nine weeks away from the Beatles, John Lennon wrote a song. He was in rural Spain at the time, on the set of a movie called How I Won the War, but the lyrics cast back to an icon of his boyhood in Liverpool: the Strawberry Field children’s home, whose sprawling grounds he’d often explored with his gang and visited with his Aunt Mimi. In late November, the Beatles began work on the song at EMI Studios, on Abbey Road in London. After four weeks and scores of session hours, the band had a final cut of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That was December 22.

On December 29, Paul McCartney brought in a song that took listeners back to another icon of Liverpool: Penny Lane, a traffic roundabout and popular meeting spot near his home. This sort of call-and-response was no anomaly. He and John, Paul said later, had a habit of “answering” each other’s songs. “He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields,’ ” Paul explained. “I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane’ … to compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition.”

It’s a famous anecdote. Paul, of course, was stressing the collaborative nature of his partnership with John (he went on to note that their competition made them “better and better all the time”). But in this vignette, as in so many from the Beatles years, it’s easy to get distracted by the idea of John and Paul composing independently. The notion that the two need to be understood as individual creators, in fact, has become the contemporary “smart” take on them. “Although most of the songs on any given Beatles album are usually credited to the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team,” Wikipedia declares, “that description is often misleading.” Entries on the site about individual Beatles songs take care to assert their “true” author. Even the superb rock critic Greg Kot once succumbed to this folly. (...)

For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done. The attempts to pick apart the Lennon-McCartney partnership reveal just how misleading that myth can be, because John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals, even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other. The lone-genius myth prevents us from grappling with a series of paradoxes about creative pairs: that distance doesn’t impede intimacy, and is often a crucial ingredient of it; that competition and collaboration are often entwined. Only when we explore this terrain can we grasp how such pairs as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy all managed to do such creative work. The essence of their achievements, it turns out, was relational. If that seems far-fetched, it’s because our cultural obsession with the individual has obscured the power of the creative pair.

John and Paul epitomize this power. Geoff Emerick—who served as the principal engineer for EMI on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, some of The White Album, and Abbey Road—recognized from the outset that the two formed a single creative being. “Even from the earliest days,” he wrote in his memoir, Here, There and Everywhere, “I always felt that the artist was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not the Beatles.”

One reason it's so tempting to try to cleave John and Paul apart is that the distinctions between them were so stark. Observing the pair through the control-room glass at Abbey Road’s Studio Two, Emerick was fascinated by their odd-couple quality:

Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offense at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say. In fact, unless he felt especially strongly about something, he was usually amenable to change.

The diplomat and the agitator. The neatnik and the whirling dervish. Spending time with Paul and John, one couldn’t help but be struck by these sorts of differences. “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence,” Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, said. “Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”

by Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Robert Whitaker

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Jaya Suberg
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The Stress of Ageing

How do I knock off thirty years from my age?

Faust, the protagonist in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous play, poses this question to Mephistopheles in the chapter Hexenküche (Witches’ kitchen). Mephistopheles provides some pretty good advice – considering that he is the devil and this fictitious exchange takes place in the dark Middle Ages: (...)

Here is the paraphrased essence of the devil’s advice: Seek out a life of moderation, stop being lazy, exercise regularly by ploughing the field and avoid unhealthy foods!

How does the great scholar and scientist Faust respond to these commonsense suggestions?

Thanks, but no thanks. Faust does not like manual labor and is quite happy with his current lifestyle, so he instead opts for plan B – a magic youth potion. (...)

At the 64th Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting, Elizabeth Blackburn reviewed the history of how she and her colleagues identified the role of telomeres and telomerase in the cellular aging process, but also presented newer data of how measuring the length of telomeres in a blood sample can predict one’s propensity for longevity and health. It makes intuitive and theoretical sense that having long telomeres would be a good thing but it is nice to have real-world data collected from thousands of humans confirming that this is indeed the case. A prospective study collected blood samples and measured the mean telomere length of white blood cells in 787 participants and followed them for 10 years to see who would develop cancer. Telomere length was inversely correlated with likelihood of developing cancer and dying from cancer. The individuals in the shortest telomere group were three times more likely to develop cancer than the longest telomere group within the ten year observation period! A similar correlation between long telomeres and less disease also exists for cardiovascular disease.

Dr. Blackburn was quick to point out that these correlations do not necessarily mean that there is a direct cause and effect relationship. In fact, increasing telomerase levels ought to lengthen telomeres but in the case of cancer, too much telomerase can be just as bad as too little telomeres. Too much telomerase can help confer immortality onto cancer cells and actually increase the likelihood of cancer, whereas too little telomerase can also increase cancer by depleting the healthy regenerative potential of the body. To reduce the risk of cancer we need an ideal level of telomerase, with not a whole lot of room for error. This clarifies that “telomerase shots” are not the magical anti-aging potion that Faust and so many other humans have sought throughout history.

Why is that telomere lengths are such good predictors of longevity, but too much telomerase can be bad for you? The answer is probably that telomere lengths measured in the white blood cells reflect a broad range of factors, such as our genetic makeup but also the history of a cell. Some of us may be lucky because we are genetically endowed with a slightly higher telomerase activity or longer telomeres, but the environment also plays a major role in regulating telomeres. If our cells are exposed to a lot of stress and injury – even at a young age – then they are forced to divide more often and shorten their telomeres. The telomere length measurements which predict health and longevity are snapshots taken at a certain point in time and cannot distinguish between inherited traits which confer the gift of longer telomeres to some and the lack environmental stressors which may have allowed cells to maintain long telomeres.

by Jalees Rehman, Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings | Read more:
Image: Tiziano Vecellio: Three Ages of Man

Stoop Stories

My black friends call it Baldamore, Harm City or Bodymore Murderland. My white friends call it Balti-mo, Charm City or Smalltimore while falling in love with the quaint pubs, trendy cafés and distinctive little shops. I just call it home.

We all love Baltimore, Maryland. It’s one of those places that people never leave – literally. I know people, blacks and whites, who have been residents for 30-plus years and haven’t even been as north as Philly or as south as DC.

Baltimore is one of the few major metropolitan cities with a small-town feel. (...)

I went to all-black schools, lived in an all-black neighbourhood, and had almost no interactions with whites other than teachers and housing police until college, where I got my first introduction to the other Baltimore.

My SAT scores and grades were exceptional for an east Baltimore kid. This gained me acceptance into schools I probably wouldn’t have been admitted to if I weren’t a ghetto kid. Thirsty for a new experience, I wanted to go to an out-of-state college. But my plans were derailed when, months before my high-school graduation in 2000, my brother Bip and my close friend DI were murdered. I became severely depressed and rejected the idea of school.

Most of my family and friends came around in effort to get me back on track. My best friend Dre hit my crib everyday.

I met Dre way back in the nineties. His mom sucked dick for crack until she became too hideous to touch. Then she caught AIDS and died.

Dre’s my age. He had so many holes in his shoes that his feet were bruised. I started giving him clothes that I didn’t want, and he stayed with us most nights. We became brothers.

At 13, Dre started hustling drugs for Bip and never looked back. He loved his job. Dre was organised, he recruited, and he outworked everyone else on the corner. Like a little Bip, Dre beat the sun to work every morning: 4am every day in the blistering cold, with fist full of loose vials. His workload tripled after Bip passed, but he called everyday.

‘D, how you holdin’ up, shorty?’ said Dre.

‘I don’t even know. Man, I been in this house for weeks,’ I replied.

‘Naw, nigga, get out. Get a cut, nigga, go do some shit! Least you still alive!’

‘You right,’ I said as I sat on the edge of my bed. ‘Wet floor’ signs were needed for my tears.

‘What the fuck, Yo, you cry everyday?’ Dre said.

‘Naw, well no, shit. I dunno.’

‘Yo anyway, I’m gonna murder dat nigga that popped Bip. Ricky Black, bitch ass. So go live, nigga, get some new clothes, pussy or sumthin’.’

I picked my head up for the first time in days. I didn’t know my brother even had static with Ricky Black. They played ball together a week before Bip died. But it didn’t matter if Dre killed Ricky, or I did, because someone would eventually.

Murder made Dre smile theatrically; he leapt from his seat. ‘Nigga, I keep the ratchet on me,’ he said, lifting his sweatshirt to show me the gun gleaming on his waist.

I told him he was crazy, but I didn’t care. I wouldn’t commit that murder – I’m not a killer. Or am I? I am capable of hate, and I am a direct product of this culture of retaliation – a culture that won’t let me sleep, eat or rest until I know that Bip’s killer is dead.

‘Be careful,’ I said.

‘You should think about school, D,’ said Dre on his way out the door. ‘Bip would like that.’

He was right. My brother always wanted me to attend college: I owed Bip that.

I decided to stay in state to be close to family, so I attended Loyola University, a local school on the edge of the city.

I always thought college would be like that TV show, A Different World. Dimed-out Whitney Gilberts and Denise Huxtables hanging by my dorm – young, pure and making a difference. I’d be in Jordans and Jordan jerseys or Cosby sweaters like Ron Johnson and Dwayne Wayne, getting As and living that black intellectual life on a beautiful campus. No row homes, hood-rats, housing police or gunshots: just pizza, good girls and opportunity. I could even graduate and be ‘The Dude Who Saves the Hood!’ (...)

I wore six braids straight back like the basketball player Allen Iverson, real Gucci sweat suits, and a $15,000 mixture of mine and Bip’s old jewellery. The other students looked at me like I was an alien. I’d walk up on a student and clearly say: ‘Excuse me, where is the book store?’ And they’d look back with a twisted face, like: ‘I don’t understand you. What are you saying?’ And I had this dance with multiple students every day until I mastered my ‘Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’ voice.

by D Watkins, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Stacey Watkins

Rickie Lee Jones

Hippie Roots & The Perennial Subculture

In 1906 Bill Pester first set foot on American soil having left Saxony, Germany that same year at age 19 to avoid military service. With his long hair, beard and lebensreform background he wasted no time in heading to California to begin his new life.

He settled in majestic Palm Canyon in the San Jacinto Mountains near Palm Springs California and built himself a palm hut by the flowing stream and palm grove.

Bill spent his time exploring the desert canyons, caves and waterfalls, but was also an avid reader and writer. He earned some of his living making walking sticks from palm blossom stalks, selling postcards with lebensreform health tips, and charging people 10 cents to look through his telescope while he gave lectures on astronomy.

He made his own sandals, had a wonderful collection of Indian pottery and artifacts, played slide guitar, lived on raw fruits and vegetables and managed to spend most of his time naked under the California sunshine.

During the time when Bill lived near Palm Springs he was on Cahuilla Indian land, with permission from the local tribe who had great admiration for him. His name even appeared on the 1920 census with the Indians, and in 1995 An American Indian woman Millie Fischer published a small booklet about Palm Canyon that included a chapter on Pester.

The many photos of Pester clearly reveal the strong link between the 19th century German reformers and the flower children of the 1960’s…long hair and beards, bare feet or sandals, guitars, love of nature, draft dodger, living simple and an aversion to rigid political structure. Undoubtedly Bill Pester introduced a new human type to California and was a mentor for many of the American Nature Boys.

In 1914 another German immigrant, Professor Arnold Ehret arrived in California. The philosophy he preached had a powerful influence on various aspects of American culture. Ehret advocated fasting, raw foods, nude sun bathing and letting your hair and beard grow un-trimmed. His "Rational Fasting" (1914) and "Mucus-less Diet"(1922) were literary standbys within hippie circles in San Francisco and Los Angeles in the 1960’s.

The husband and wife team of John and Vera Richter first opened their Raw-Foods cafeteria the "Eutropheon" in 1917, and during it’s lifetime it hosted thousands of customers and taught many people how to prepare such raw treats as sun-dried bread, salads, dressings, soups, beverages and many other healthy alternatives to the typical Los Angeles cuisine of the 1920’s-1940’s.

John’s powerful lectures were attended by many young health enthusiasts, who later went on to become well known health teachers and authors, and Vera’s recipe book was the precursor to many of the modern Live-Food recipe books.

Some of the young employees of the Eutropheon were Americans who had adopted the German Naturmensch and Lebensreform image and philosophy, wearing their hair and beards long and feeding exclusively on raw fruits and vegetables. The "Nature Boys" came from all over America but usually ended up in southern California. Some of the familiar ones were Gypsy Jean, eden ahbez, Maximilian Sikinger, Bob Wallace, Emile Zimmerman, Gypsy Boots, Buddy Rose, Fred Bushnoff and Conrad. This was decades before the Beats or Hippies and their influence was very substantial. In "On The Road" Kerouac noted that while passing through Los Angeles in the summer of 1947 he saw"an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals".

But in the spring of 1948 eden ahbez became an internationally recognized personality when his song "Nature Boy" was recorded by Nat King Cole. Photos and story of eden and his wife Anna appeared in Life, Time and Newsweek magazines that year.

Born in Brooklyn New York, April 15, 1908 "ahbez" had walked across America 4 times, hopped freight trains and lived in a cave in Tahquitz Canyon before he penned his #1 hit tune, which was on the hit parade for 15 weeks.

The song itself was part autobiographical but was also a nod to his German mentor Bill Pester who was 23 years his senior and had been a Nature Boy for decades when eden encountered him in the Coachella Valley of southern California.

Another one of the Nature Boys, Maximillian Sikinger was born in Augsberg Germany in 1913 and spent most of his childhood and youth living wild in the environs of various European cities. Through his wanderings, personal contacts and outdoor living he developed a keen interest in various aspects of natural healing; nutrition, water cure, fasting, sitz baths, deep breathing and sunshine.

Max left Europe in 1935 at age 22, arrived in America then eventually made his way west to California where he traveled with the Nature Boys who valued his introspective and philosophical ideas very highly. Maximillian’s world travels and rugged background had given him deep insight into many of life’s puzzles.

But the one Nature Boy to pass the torch from the old era (circa 1930’s-40’s)…into the 1960’s hippie generation was Gypsy Boots.

Born in San Francisco in 1916 to Russian Jewish parents "Boots" grew up in the San Francisco area where he quit school at an early age to travel and live a life close to nature. He met Maximillian on the beach at Kelley’s Cove in 1935 and it was then that his life began to change. Boots noted in his autobiography: "It was with Max that I first experimented with fasting and special diets, and also learned much about yoga".

In the 1940’s Boots lived wild in Tahquitz Canyon with all of the Nature Boys, bathing in the cool mountain water, eating fruits and vegetables, sleeping on rocks or in caves, hiking and selling produce in Palm Springs.

In 1953 he married Lois Bloemker, settled near Griffith Park in Los Angeles and had 3 sons. In 1958 he opened his "Health Hut" in Hollywood, which was a big hit, and shortly thereafter began his career as a serious health teacher and example of optimum living.

In the early 1960’s he appeared on the Steve Allen show over 25 times to an audience of some 25 million households. Steve Allen had originally started the "Tonight" show, then began his own show featuring guests like Elvis Presley, Jack Kerouac, Frank Zappa and the psychedelic band Blue Cheer.

When the Beatles and Rolling Stones arrived in Los Angeles in the mid 1960’s their "pudding basin" hairstyles seemed tame when compared to a local rock band "The Seeds" who wore shoulder length hair, thanks to the influence of Gypsy Boots and his ilk. "Seeds" singer Sky Saxon, a vegetarian, had invented a new type of music…."Flower Punk". Even Jimi Hendrix had a front row seat to a Seeds concert, and the Doors played second bill on a Seeds tour.

When the Love-In’s began in Griffith Park in 1966 some of the Flower Children who were stoned on Owsley acid looked up in the big trees to see Gypsy Boots swinging and climbing from branch to limb, then exclaiming "what’s that guy on…. I’d sure like to have a hit of that!" But Boots "high" was always induced from his sun-charged foods like figs and grapes, as well as his fitness regime.

by Gordon Kennedy & Kody Ryan, Hippie.com | Read more:
Images: Palm Springs Art Museum and Gypsy Boots

Misty Copeland

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Go Team!
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MGMT

[ed. Check out Josie Charlwood's killer alternative version.]

Ernest Hemingway’s Summer Camping Recipes

With regard to writing, Ernest Hemingway was a man of simple tastes. Were I to employ a metaphor, I’d describe Hem as the kind of guy who’d prefer an unadorned plum from William Carlos Williams’ icebox to Makini Howell’s Pesto Plum Pizza with Balsamic Arugula.

Don’t mistake that metaphor for real life, however. Judging by his 1920Toronto Star how-to on maximizing comfort on camping vacations, he would not have stood for charred weenies and marshmallows on a stick. Rather, a little cookery know-how was something for a man to be proud of:

“…a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.”

Clearly, the man did not trust readers to independently seek out such sources as The Perry Ladies’ Cookbook of 1920 for instructions. Instead, he painstakingly details his method for successful preparation of Trout Wrapped in Bacon, including his preferred brands of vegetable shortening.

Would your mouth water less if I tell you that literary food blog Paper and Salt has updated Hem’s trout recipe à la Emeril Lagasse, omitting the Crisco and tossing in a few fresh herbs? No campfire required. You can get ‘er done in the broiler:

Bacon-Wrapped Trout: (adapted from Emeril Lagasse)
2 (10-ounce) whole trout, cleaned and gutted
1/2 cup cornmeal
Salt and ground pepper, to taste
8 sprigs fresh thyme
1 lemon, sliced
6 slices bacon
Fresh parsley, for garnish 

1. Preheat broiler and set oven rack 4 to 6 inches from heat. With a paper towel, pat trout dry inside and out. Dredge outside of each fish in cornmeal, then season cavity with salt and pepper. Place 4 sprigs of thyme and 2 lemon slices inside each fish. 

2. Wrap 3 bacon slices around the middle of each fish, so that the edges overlap slightly. Line a roasting pan with aluminum foil, and place fish on pan. Broil until bacon is crisp, about 5 minutes. With a spatula, carefully flip fish over and cook another 5 minutes, until flesh is firm.

by Ayun Halliday, Open Culture | Read more:
Image:Chowstalker

The Bait-And-Switch Behind Today’s Hobby Lobby Decision

For many years, the Supreme Court struck a careful balance between protecting religious liberty and maintaining the rule of law in a pluralistic society. Religious people enjoy a robust right to practice their own faith and to act according to the dictates of their own conscience, but they could not wield religious liberty claims as a sword to cut away the legal rights of others. This was especially true in the business context. As the Supreme Court held in United States v. Lee, “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

With Monday’s decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, however, this careful balance has been upended. Employers who object to birth control on religious grounds may now refuse to comply with federal rules requiring them to include contraceptive care in their health plans. The rights of the employer now trump the rights of the employee.

To achieve this outcome, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion on behalf of a bare majority of the Court engages in a kind of legalistic bait-and-switch. It takes a law Congress enacted to serve one limited purpose, and expands that law to suit Hobby Lobby’s much more expansive purpose.

In its 1963 decision in Sherbert v. Verner, the Court announced that laws that impose an “incidental burden on the free exercise of [a person of faith's] religion” may only be applied to them if the law is “justified by a ‘compelling state interest in the regulation of a subject within the State’s constitutional power to regulate.’” As anyone who has studied constitutional law will immediately recognize, this “compelling state interest” framework is the language judges use when the wish to invoke a test known as “strict scrutiny” — the highest test that exists under American constitutional law. Typically, laws that are subjected to strict scrutiny fare very badly. Strict scrutiny is the constitutional standard used to evaluate laws that discriminate on the basis of race, for example, and it only permits laws to be enforced when they further a compelling government interest and when they use the least restrictive means of doing so.

It soon became clear, however, that when the Court considered religious liberty claims it was actually engaged in something much less rigorous than strict scrutiny. As Professor Adam Winkler documented, courts uphold less than one-third of all laws they subject to strict scrutiny — yet they rejected 59 percent of the claims brought by plaintiffs claiming religious liberty. A different study reached even starker results — determining that nearly 88 percent of religious liberty plaintiffs lost under the standard announced in Sherbert.

The most likely explanation for this fact is that Sherbert and its progeny were careful to maintain the balance between religious liberty and third parties’ rights. InSherbert itself, the justices emphasized that they were siding with a plaintiff who claimed a religious liberty right not to work on Saturday because “the recognition of the appellant’s right” did not “serve to abridge any other person’s religious liberties.” Less than a decade later, in a case called Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Court once again emphasized that it was exempting an Amish family from a law making school attendance mandatory because it did not perceive any harms to third parties. “This case,” the Court explained, “is not one in which any harm to the physical or mental health of the child or to the public safety, peace, order, or welfare has been demonstrated or may be properly inferred.”

Ten years after that, the Court decided the Lee case, with its proclamation that a business owner’s own religious views “are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others” engaged in a similar business. Allowing an employer to ignore a law protecting its employees, the Court explained “operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.”

In 1990, however, the Court briefly narrowed the protections offered to people who object to laws on religious grounds in an opinion authored by Justice Antonin Scalia. This unpopular decision inspired the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which formed the basis of Hobby Lobby’s legal claim. Yet, the purpose of RFRA was not to change the longstanding balance between religious liberty and the rights of third parties. Rather, it was to restore the many decades of religious liberty law that began with the Sherbert opinion. Indeed, RFRA explicitly states that its purpose is to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth in Sherbert v. Verner [] and Wisconsin v. Yoder [].”

Justice Alito’s opinion, however, tosses this explicit statement of congressional purpose aside, although he offers little explanation for why he is justified in doing so. His best effort is a reference to a 2000 law that amended one of RFRA’s definition of an “exercise of religion” to take out an explicit reference to the First Amendment. According to Alito, the purpose of this amendment was “an obvious effort to effect a complete separation from First Amendment case law” as laid out by cases like Sherbert and Yoder. Yet, it is difficult to square this interpretation with the fact that the RFRA statute still provides that its purpose is to “restore the compelling interest test as set forth” in Sherbert and Yoder.

The upshot of Alito’s opinion is that, for the first time in American history, people with religious objections to the law will be able to ignore many laws with impunity unless the government’s decision to enforce the law overcomes a very high legal bar that few laws survive. The full implications of Hobby Lobby, however, may not be known for years. When cases like Sherbert, Yoder and Lee were still good law at the federal level, plaintiffs alleging religious liberty alleged that they could engage in race discrimination and discrimination against women, and they also claimed immunity to paying Social Security taxes and the minimum wage. Though the Supreme Court probably isn’t ready to revisit these cases, religious business owners are likely to find many other regulations they can now object to on religious grounds. And all of these objections will come to court with vigorous tailwind.

by Jan Millhiser, Think Progress |  Read more:

Image: Sy Mukuherjee

The 'Internet's Own Boy' Free on Internet Archive

The Creative Commons-licensed version of The Internet's Own Boy, Brian Knappenberger's documentary about Aaron Swartz, is now available on the Internet Archive, which is especially useful for people outside of the US, who aren't able to pay to see it online. It's a remarkable movie and I hope you make some time to watch it. The Internet Archive makes the movie available to download or stream, in MPEG 4 and Ogg. There's also a torrentable version.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Video: Internet Archive

I Would Reunite 4 U: Prince’s Private Paisley Park Concert for Apollonia

[ed. Prince shreds.]

Eye want 2 tell U a story. Once upon a time in the land of Sinaplenty, there lived a Prince named Prince, who was always looking 4 his princess. Then he met a beautiful girl named Patricia Apollonia Kotero and cast her as the lead in his 1984 movie, Purple Rain. He dubbed her simply “Apollonia,” and after the departure of Denise “Vanity” Matthews, he assigned the remaining members of Vanity 6 (Susan Moonsie and Brenda Bennett) to be Apollonia’s backup singers in a new group called Apollonia 6.

Despite their intense connection on the silver screen in Purple Rain, Prince and Apollonia never had a romantic relationship in real life. Kotero was married, but her relationship status was kept a secret in order to better sell her image as a vixen. In addition to rumors about her relationship with Prince, the tabloids also linked Apollonia to Lorenzo Lamas and David Lee Roth. Prince had intended to give Apollonia 6 songs including “Manic Monday,” “Take Me With U,” and “The Glamorous Life” but soon realized that Apollonia was not a very good technical singer. She also hadn’t planned on being a Prince girl for all that long, and she did not intend to stay with Apollonia 6 after her contractual obligations to make an album and do Purple Rain were completed. Prince wrote all the songs on the group’s lone album but credited them to the group’s members, attributing the lead single, “Sex Shooter,” to Kotero herself.

But this was all long ago. Many years (30) have passed since Prince convinced Apollonia to purify herself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka. But some of us have held a torch for Prince and Apollonia all of these years. The hot, purple chemistry they had in Purple Rain was just 2 iconic. And for those some of us, on Saturday night, our dreams came true. Prince took Apollonia home 2 his kingdom of Paisley Park in Minnesota for the first time.

Paisley Park Studios, named after a song on 1985’s Around the World in a Day and Prince’s (now defunct) Paisley Park Records label, is a mysterious, magical $10 million complex that only a select few get to enter, and only by invitation from Prince. Essentially it is the Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory of funk. What is known about Paisley Park is that it has a Granite Room and a Wood Room that provide different acoustics for recording, and a complete soundstage that Prince used to shoot much of Purple Rain follow-up Graffiti Bridge. Prince still rehearses all of his tours on the Paisley Park soundstage, and its also been used as a practice space by the Beastie Boys, the Bee Gees, Neil Young, Kool & The Gang, and the Muppets. Paisley Park also contains “The Vault,” where Prince stores everything he has ever made, including B-sides, outtakes, and jam sessions he deemed 2 b 2 funky 4 human ears.

by Molly Lambert, Grantland |  Read more:

Image: YouTube