[ed. Another short break while we try to stay ahead of the authorities. Enjoy the archives.]
Friday, February 6, 2015
Why Doctors Die Differently
Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. It was diagnosed as pancreatic cancer by one of the best surgeons in the country, who had developed a procedure that could triple a patient's five-year-survival odds—from 5% to 15%—albeit with a poor quality of life.
Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with his family. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation or surgical treatment. Medicare didn't spend much on him.
It's not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently.
Doctors don't want to die any more than anyone else does. But they usually have talked about the limits of modern medicine with their families. They want to make sure that, when the time comes, no heroic measures are taken. During their last moments, they know, for instance, that they don't want someone breaking their ribs by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (which is what happens when CPR is done right).
In a 2003 article, Joseph J. Gallo and others looked at what physicians want when it comes to end-of-life decisions. In a survey of 765 doctors, they found that 64% had created an advanced directive—specifying what steps should and should not be taken to save their lives should they become incapacitated. That compares to only about 20% for the general public. (As one might expect, older doctors are more likely than younger doctors to have made "arrangements," as shown in a study by Paula Lester and others.)
Why such a large gap between the decisions of doctors and patients? The case of CPR is instructive. A study by Susan Diem and others of how CPR is portrayed on TV found that it was successful in 75% of the cases and that 67% of the TV patients went home. In reality, a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR found that only 8% of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3% could lead a mostly normal life.
Charlie, 68 years old, was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with his family. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation or surgical treatment. Medicare didn't spend much on him.It's not something that we like to talk about, but doctors die, too. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared with most Americans, but how little. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care that they could want. But they tend to go serenely and gently.
Doctors don't want to die any more than anyone else does. But they usually have talked about the limits of modern medicine with their families. They want to make sure that, when the time comes, no heroic measures are taken. During their last moments, they know, for instance, that they don't want someone breaking their ribs by performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (which is what happens when CPR is done right).
In a 2003 article, Joseph J. Gallo and others looked at what physicians want when it comes to end-of-life decisions. In a survey of 765 doctors, they found that 64% had created an advanced directive—specifying what steps should and should not be taken to save their lives should they become incapacitated. That compares to only about 20% for the general public. (As one might expect, older doctors are more likely than younger doctors to have made "arrangements," as shown in a study by Paula Lester and others.)
Why such a large gap between the decisions of doctors and patients? The case of CPR is instructive. A study by Susan Diem and others of how CPR is portrayed on TV found that it was successful in 75% of the cases and that 67% of the TV patients went home. In reality, a 2010 study of more than 95,000 cases of CPR found that only 8% of patients survived for more than one month. Of these, only about 3% could lead a mostly normal life.
by Ken Murray, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Arthur Giron
Creator or Buyer: Who Really Owns Art?
When we purchase an item, whether it’s a blender, a car, or a really cool toboggan for snowmageddon races, the purchaser owns what they bought and can modify it to their heart’s content. Buying an artistic work, on the other hand and the ownership is joint, with some right going to the buyer while others are retained by the work’s creator. Whether the purchase is an original oil painting or a corporate logo, ownership rights are not the same as owning a toboggan, even if it is handmade from ancient oak found in the forests of Valhalla.
As you can imagine, many lawsuits are fought over ownership right for artistic works and other intellectual property, many of which would not have happened had the parties known the basic rules surrounding IP ownership. Although every case is unique and requires a thorough analysis (that why we have lawyers after all), looking at a few hypothetical scenarios, should help us map but some of the boundaries of ownership rights when purchasing visual art. Imagine the following situation:
by Steve Schlackman, Art Law Journal | Read more:
Image:uncredited
- A wealthy executive purchases an oil painting from a living artist to be the centerpiece of his private library. After hanging the work, he feels he may have made a mistake in purchasing the painting, but thinks that if he cuts it into three smaller pieces, it might look better in the room.
- After some negative reaction to his idea, the executive instead decides it would be better just to sell it and consigns it to a reputable gallery for the sale.
- Before the gallery takes possession of the oil painting, a major fashion magazine rents the executive’s home for a photo shoot. The photographer uses the private library as the main setting and the oil painting is shown in the background of several photos, which the magazine publishes in its next issue.
- Impressed with the photographer’s work, the executive commissions her to shoot his home. A couple of years later, the executive puts the home on the market and gives the photos to his real estate agent to use in the listing. The agent’s brokerage posts the photos on its site and also u0loads them to a Multiple Listing Service.
- The brokerage is in the midst of a branding redesign including a new website. The company hires several freelancers to create the new designs, including some amazing drawings of streets in the area, which the company uses, along with photos of the executive’s home on its homepage.
- The Brokerage also makes large posters of the drawings that it sells on its website.
by Steve Schlackman, Art Law Journal | Read more:
Image:uncredited
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
What's Another Word For "Misremembering"?
[ed. Conflating? Hmm no... I don't think that's the one.]
Williams repeated the claim Friday during NBC’s coverage of a public tribute at a New York Rangers hockey game for a retired soldier that had provided ground security for the grounded helicopters, a game to which Williams accompanied him. In an interview with Stars and Stripes, he said he had misremembered the events and was sorry.
The admission came after crew members on the 159th Aviation Regiment’s Chinook that was hit by two rockets and small arms fire told Stars and Stripes that the NBC anchor was nowhere near that aircraft or two other Chinooks flying in the formation that took fire. Williams arrived in the area about an hour later on another helicopter after the other three had made an emergency landing, the crew members said.“I would not have chosen to make this mistake,” Williams said. “I don’t know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.”
Williams told his Nightly News audience that the erroneous claim was part of a "bungled attempt" to thank soldiers who helped protect him in Iraq in 2003. “I made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” Williams said. “I want to apologize.”
Late Wednesday, Williams’ Twitter account, with 212,000 followers, appeared to have been wiped clean.
Williams made the claim about the incident while presenting NBC coverage of the tribute to the retired command sergeant major at the Rangers game Friday. Fans gave the soldier a standing ovation.
“The story actually started with a terrible moment a dozen years back during the invasion of Iraq when the helicopter we were traveling in was forced down after being hit by an RPG,” Williams said on the broadcast. “Our traveling NBC News team was rescued, surrounded and kept alive by an armor mechanized platoon from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry.”
Williams and his camera crew were actually aboard a Chinook in a formation that was about an hour behind the three helicopters that came under fire, according to crew member interviews.
That Chinook took no fire and landed later beside the damaged helicopter due to an impending sandstorm from the Iraqi desert, according to Sgt. 1st Class Joseph Miller, who was the flight engineer on the aircraft that carried the journalists.
“No, we never came under direct enemy fire to the aircraft,” he said Wednesday.
The helicopters, along with the NBC crew, remained on the ground at a forward operating base west of Baghdad for two or three days, where they were surrounded by an Army unit with Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams M-1 tanks. (...)
“It was something personal for us that was kind of life-changing for me. I know how lucky I was to survive it,” said Lance Reynolds, who was the flight engineer. “It felt like a personal experience that someone else wanted to participate in and didn’t deserve to participate in.”
by Travis J. Tritten, Stars and Stripes | Read more:
Image: Stars and Stripes
Don’t Be Like That
Does black culture need to be reformed?
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.
After the Times described Brown as “no angel,” the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry accused the newspaper of “victim-blaming,” arguing that African-Americans, no matter how “angelic,” will never be safe from “those who see their very skin as a sin.” But, on the National Review Web site, Heather MacDonald quoted an anonymous black corporate executive who told her, “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” And so the Michael Brown debate became a proxy for our ongoing argument about race: where some seek to expose what America is doing to black communities, others insist that the real problem is what black communities are doing to themselves.
Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known as structuralists, while those who emphasize the importance of self-perpetuating norms and behaviors are known as culturalists. Mainstream politicians are culturalists by nature, because in America you seldom lose an election by talking up the virtues of hard work and good conduct. But in many sociology departments structuralism holds sway—no one who studies African-American communities wants to be accused, as the Times was, of “victim-blaming.” Orlando Patterson, a Jamaica-born sociologist at Harvard with an appetite for intellectual combat, wants to redeem the culturalist tradition, thereby redeeming sociology itself. In a manifesto published in December, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he argued that “fearful” sociologists had abandoned “studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty,” and that the discipline had become “largely irrelevant.” Now Patterson and Ethan Fosse, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology, are publishing an ambitious new anthology called “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth” (Harvard), which is meant to show that the culturalist tradition still has something to teach us.
The book arrives on the fiftieth anniversary of its most important predecessor: a slim government report written by an Assistant Secretary of Labor and first printed in an edition of a hundred. The author was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the title was “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At first, the historian James T. Patterson has written, only one copy was allowed to circulate; the other ninety-nine were locked in a vault. Moynihan’s report cited sociologists and government surveys to underscore a message meant to startle: the Negro community was doing badly, and its condition was probably “getting worse, not better.” Moynihan, who was trained in sociology, judged that “most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.” He returned again and again to his main theme, “the deterioration of the Negro family,” which he considered “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community”; he included a chart showing the rising proportion of nonwhite births in America that were “illegitimate.” (The report used the terms “Negro” and “nonwhite” interchangeably.) And, at the end, Moynihan called—briefly, and vaguely—for a national program to “strengthen the Negro family.”
The 1965 report was leaked to the press, inspiring a series of lurid articles, and later that year the Johnson Administration released the entire document, making it available for forty-five cents. Moynihan found some allies, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech in October, King referred to an unnamed “recent study” showing that “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling and disintegrating.” But King also worried that some people might attribute this “social catastrophe” to “innate Negro weaknesses,” and that discussions of it could be “used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Many sociologists were harsher. Andrew Billingsley argued that in assessing the problems caused by dysfunctional black families Moynihan had mistaken the symptom for the sickness. “The family is a creature of society,” he wrote. “And the greatest problems facing black families are problems which emanate from the white racist, militarist, materialistic society which places higher priority on putting white men on the moon than putting black men on their feet on this earth.” This debate had influence far beyond sociological journals: when Harris-Perry accused the Times of “victim-blaming,” she was using a term coined by the psychologist William Ryan, in a book-length rebuttal to the Moynihan report, “Blaming the Victim.”
Orlando Patterson thinks that, half a century later, it’s easier to appreciate all that Moynihan got right. “History has been kind to Moynihan,” he and Fosse write, which might be another way of saying that history has not been particularly kind to the people Moynihan wrote about—some of his dire predictions no longer seem so outlandish. Moynihan despaired that the illegitimacy rate for Negro babies was approaching twenty-five per cent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the equivalent rate in 2013 was 71.5 per cent. (The rate for non-Hispanic white babies was 29.3 per cent.) Even so, Patterson and the other contributors avoid pronouncing upon “ghetto culture” or “the culture of poverty,” or even “black culture.” Instead, the authors see shifting patterns of belief and behavior that may nevertheless combine to make certain families less stable, or certain young people less employable. The hope is that, by paying close attention to culture, sociologists will be better equipped to identify these patterns, and help change them.
It was just after eight o’clock on a November night when Robert McCulloch, the prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County, announced that a grand jury would not be returning an indictment in the police killing of Michael Brown, who was eighteen, unarmed, and African-American. About an hour later and eight hundred miles away, President Obama delivered a short and sober speech designed to function as an anti-inflammatory. He praised police officers while urging them to “show care and restraint” when confronting protesters. He said that “communities of color” had “real issues” with law enforcement, but reminded disappointed Missourians that Brown’s mother and father had asked for peace. “Michael Brown’s parents have lost more than anyone,” he said. “We should be honoring their wishes.”
Even as he mentioned Brown’s parents, Obama was careful not to invoke Brown himself, who had become a polarizing figure. To the protesters who chanted, “Hands up! Don’t shoot!,” Brown was a symbol of the young African-American man as victim—the chant referred to the claim that Brown was surrendering, with his hands up, when he was killed. Critics of the protest movement were more likely to bring up the video, taken in the fifteen minutes before Brown’s death, that appeared to show him stealing cigarillos from a convenience store and then shoving and intimidating the worker who tried to stop him—the victim was also, it seemed, a perpetrator.After the Times described Brown as “no angel,” the MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry accused the newspaper of “victim-blaming,” arguing that African-Americans, no matter how “angelic,” will never be safe from “those who see their very skin as a sin.” But, on the National Review Web site, Heather MacDonald quoted an anonymous black corporate executive who told her, “Michael Brown may have been shot by the cop, but he was killed by parents and a community that produced such a thug.” And so the Michael Brown debate became a proxy for our ongoing argument about race: where some seek to expose what America is doing to black communities, others insist that the real problem is what black communities are doing to themselves.
Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known as structuralists, while those who emphasize the importance of self-perpetuating norms and behaviors are known as culturalists. Mainstream politicians are culturalists by nature, because in America you seldom lose an election by talking up the virtues of hard work and good conduct. But in many sociology departments structuralism holds sway—no one who studies African-American communities wants to be accused, as the Times was, of “victim-blaming.” Orlando Patterson, a Jamaica-born sociologist at Harvard with an appetite for intellectual combat, wants to redeem the culturalist tradition, thereby redeeming sociology itself. In a manifesto published in December, in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he argued that “fearful” sociologists had abandoned “studies of the cultural dimensions of poverty, particularly black poverty,” and that the discipline had become “largely irrelevant.” Now Patterson and Ethan Fosse, a Harvard doctoral student in sociology, are publishing an ambitious new anthology called “The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth” (Harvard), which is meant to show that the culturalist tradition still has something to teach us.
The book arrives on the fiftieth anniversary of its most important predecessor: a slim government report written by an Assistant Secretary of Labor and first printed in an edition of a hundred. The author was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and the title was “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” At first, the historian James T. Patterson has written, only one copy was allowed to circulate; the other ninety-nine were locked in a vault. Moynihan’s report cited sociologists and government surveys to underscore a message meant to startle: the Negro community was doing badly, and its condition was probably “getting worse, not better.” Moynihan, who was trained in sociology, judged that “most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped.” He returned again and again to his main theme, “the deterioration of the Negro family,” which he considered “the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community”; he included a chart showing the rising proportion of nonwhite births in America that were “illegitimate.” (The report used the terms “Negro” and “nonwhite” interchangeably.) And, at the end, Moynihan called—briefly, and vaguely—for a national program to “strengthen the Negro family.”
The 1965 report was leaked to the press, inspiring a series of lurid articles, and later that year the Johnson Administration released the entire document, making it available for forty-five cents. Moynihan found some allies, including Martin Luther King, Jr. In a speech in October, King referred to an unnamed “recent study” showing that “the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling and disintegrating.” But King also worried that some people might attribute this “social catastrophe” to “innate Negro weaknesses,” and that discussions of it could be “used to justify neglect and rationalize oppression.” Many sociologists were harsher. Andrew Billingsley argued that in assessing the problems caused by dysfunctional black families Moynihan had mistaken the symptom for the sickness. “The family is a creature of society,” he wrote. “And the greatest problems facing black families are problems which emanate from the white racist, militarist, materialistic society which places higher priority on putting white men on the moon than putting black men on their feet on this earth.” This debate had influence far beyond sociological journals: when Harris-Perry accused the Times of “victim-blaming,” she was using a term coined by the psychologist William Ryan, in a book-length rebuttal to the Moynihan report, “Blaming the Victim.”
Orlando Patterson thinks that, half a century later, it’s easier to appreciate all that Moynihan got right. “History has been kind to Moynihan,” he and Fosse write, which might be another way of saying that history has not been particularly kind to the people Moynihan wrote about—some of his dire predictions no longer seem so outlandish. Moynihan despaired that the illegitimacy rate for Negro babies was approaching twenty-five per cent. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the equivalent rate in 2013 was 71.5 per cent. (The rate for non-Hispanic white babies was 29.3 per cent.) Even so, Patterson and the other contributors avoid pronouncing upon “ghetto culture” or “the culture of poverty,” or even “black culture.” Instead, the authors see shifting patterns of belief and behavior that may nevertheless combine to make certain families less stable, or certain young people less employable. The hope is that, by paying close attention to culture, sociologists will be better equipped to identify these patterns, and help change them.
by Kelefa Sanneh, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Tony Rodriguez
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
Why Beef Jerky Is So Popular
Beef jerky is big business, and Hershey wants in.
The international chocolate giant announced on Thursday that it has agreed to purchase upscale meat snack maker Krave for as much as $300 million. The deal is unprecedented for Hershey, because it marks the first time Hershey has purchased a company that doesn't sell candy, chocolate, or other sweets.
On the surface, it's fairly easy to see why Hershey, let alone any company interested in a half decent investment, would want to acquire Krave. The high-end snack company, which prides itself on its lineup of beef jerky offerings with no artificial ingredients, closed 2014 with $36 million in sales after only five years in business. The jerky's colorful packaging, which encloses a variety of flavors, will soon be found at Starbucks restaurants across the country. And it is anticipated to continue growing—and fast. Jon Sebastiani, the company's founder, said he expects Krave to more than double its business next year.
"Krave jerky is a great fit to our portfolio," Michele Buck, president of Hershey's North America, said in a press release.
But acquiring Krave offers Hershey more than merely the opportunity to share in the company's success. It also, and perhaps more importantly, ushers the chocolate giant into one of the savory snack world's most promising foodstuffs: jerky.
The market for jerky has ballooned into a nearly $1.5 billion industry in the United States. Sales are up by 13 percent since 2013, and by 46 percent since 2009, according to data from market research firm IRI. Jack Link's, the largest jerky maker in America, now sells more than $1 billion in meat snacks each year.
The demand for dried meat has risen to such heights that it now dwarfs that of other once comparable snacks. A recent report by market research firm Euromonitor found that jerky outsells seeds, party mixes, and pita chips—combined.
The rise of dried meat is in part the result of a general uptick in snacking among Americans. The U.S. snacks business, which includes not only jerky, but also chips, bars, nuts, and other fare, is now a $120 billion behemoth. Pepsi now relies on snacks—not soda—for growth. And it's easy to see why. A recent survey by Nielsen found that one in ten people in this country say they eat snacks instead of meals, a number which the research company expects will increase.
But jerky's popularity also owes a great deal to this country's obsession with protein. More than half of Americans say they want more of it in their diet, and they have proven that the talk isn't cheap. The protein shake business has become a behemoth. So too has the protein bar market, which was already worth more than $500 million in 2013. Sales of health and wellness bars, which often dangle high protein content, are growing more than twice as fast as the overall food industry.
Beef jerky, which is high in protein, low in calories, highly portable, and can last for a long time, has benefited greatly from its ability to double as both a practical and healthy snack.
by Roberto A. Ferdman, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Mike Blake/Reuters
The international chocolate giant announced on Thursday that it has agreed to purchase upscale meat snack maker Krave for as much as $300 million. The deal is unprecedented for Hershey, because it marks the first time Hershey has purchased a company that doesn't sell candy, chocolate, or other sweets.
On the surface, it's fairly easy to see why Hershey, let alone any company interested in a half decent investment, would want to acquire Krave. The high-end snack company, which prides itself on its lineup of beef jerky offerings with no artificial ingredients, closed 2014 with $36 million in sales after only five years in business. The jerky's colorful packaging, which encloses a variety of flavors, will soon be found at Starbucks restaurants across the country. And it is anticipated to continue growing—and fast. Jon Sebastiani, the company's founder, said he expects Krave to more than double its business next year."Krave jerky is a great fit to our portfolio," Michele Buck, president of Hershey's North America, said in a press release.
But acquiring Krave offers Hershey more than merely the opportunity to share in the company's success. It also, and perhaps more importantly, ushers the chocolate giant into one of the savory snack world's most promising foodstuffs: jerky.
The market for jerky has ballooned into a nearly $1.5 billion industry in the United States. Sales are up by 13 percent since 2013, and by 46 percent since 2009, according to data from market research firm IRI. Jack Link's, the largest jerky maker in America, now sells more than $1 billion in meat snacks each year.
The demand for dried meat has risen to such heights that it now dwarfs that of other once comparable snacks. A recent report by market research firm Euromonitor found that jerky outsells seeds, party mixes, and pita chips—combined.
The rise of dried meat is in part the result of a general uptick in snacking among Americans. The U.S. snacks business, which includes not only jerky, but also chips, bars, nuts, and other fare, is now a $120 billion behemoth. Pepsi now relies on snacks—not soda—for growth. And it's easy to see why. A recent survey by Nielsen found that one in ten people in this country say they eat snacks instead of meals, a number which the research company expects will increase.
But jerky's popularity also owes a great deal to this country's obsession with protein. More than half of Americans say they want more of it in their diet, and they have proven that the talk isn't cheap. The protein shake business has become a behemoth. So too has the protein bar market, which was already worth more than $500 million in 2013. Sales of health and wellness bars, which often dangle high protein content, are growing more than twice as fast as the overall food industry.
Beef jerky, which is high in protein, low in calories, highly portable, and can last for a long time, has benefited greatly from its ability to double as both a practical and healthy snack.
by Roberto A. Ferdman, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Mike Blake/Reuters
Love and Death
In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, a reporter who, confronted with living the same day over and over again, matures from an arrogant, self-serving professional climber to someone capable of loving and appreciating others and his world. Murray convincingly portrays the transformation from someone whose self-importance is difficult to abide into a person imbued with kindness. It seems that the Nietzschean test of eternal return, insofar as it is played out in Punxsutawney, yields not an overman but a man of decency.
But there is another story line at work in the film, one we can see if we examine Murray’s character not in the early arrogant stage, nor in the post-epiphany stage, where the calendar is once again set in motion, but in the film’s middle, where he is knowingly stuck in the repetition of days. In this part of the narrative, Murray’s character has come to terms with his situation. He alone knows what is going to happen, over and over again. He has no expectations for anything different. In this period, his period of reconciliation, he becomes a model citizen of Punxsutawney. He radiates warmth and kindness, but also a certain distance.The early and final moments of “Groundhog Day” offer something that is missing during this period of peace: passion. Granted, Phil Connors’s early ambitious passion for advancement is a far less attractive thing than the later passion of his love for Rita (played by Andie MacDowell). But there is passion in both cases. It seems that the eternal return of the same may bring peace and reconciliation, but at least in this case not intensity.
And here is where a lesson about love may lie. One would not want to deny that Connors comes to love Rita during the period of the eternal Groundhog Day. But his love lacks the passion, the abandon, of the love he feels when he is released into a real future with her. There is something different in those final moments of the film. A future has opened for their relationship, and with it new avenues for the intensity of his feelings for her. Without a future for growth and development, romantic love can extend only so far. Its distinction from, say, a friendship with benefits begins to become effaced.
There is, of course, in all romantic love the initial infatuation, which rarely lasts. But if the love is to remain romantic, that infatuation must evolve into a longer-term intensity, even if a quiet one, that nourishes and is nourished by the common engagements and projects undertaken over time.
This might be taken to mean that a limitless future would allow for even more intensity to love than a limited one. Romantic love among immortals would open itself to an intensity that eludes our mortal race. After all, immortality opens an infinite future. And this would seem to be to the benefit of love’s passion. I think, however, that matters are quite the opposite, and that “Groundhog Day” gives us the clue as to why this is. What the film displays, if we follow this interpretive thread past the film’s plot, is not merely the necessity of time itself for love’s intensity but the necessity of a specific kind of time: time for development. The eternal return of “Groundhog Day” offered plenty of time. It promised an eternity of it. But it was the wrong kind of time. There was no time to develop a coexistence. There was instead just more of the same.
The intensity we associate with romantic love requires a future that can allow its elaboration. That intensity is of the moment, to be sure, but is also bound to the unfolding of a trajectory that it sees as its fate. If we were stuck in the same moment, the same day, day after day, the love might still remain, but its animating passion would begin to diminish.
This is why romantic love requires death.
If our time were endless, then sooner or later the future would resemble an endless Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney. It is not simply the fact of a future that ensures the intensity of romantic love; it is the future of meaningful coexistence. It is the future of common projects and the passion that unfolds within them. One might indeed remain in love with another for all eternity. But that love would not burn as brightly if the years were to stammer on without number.
Why not, one might ask? The future is open. Unlike the future in “Groundhog Day,” it is not already decided. We do not have our next days framed for us by the day just passed. We can make something different of our relationships. There is always more to do and more to create of ourselves with the ones with whom we are in love.
This is not true, however, and romantic love itself shows us why. Love is between two particular people in their particularity. We cannot love just anyone, even others with much the same qualities. If we did, then when we met someone like the beloved but who possessed a little more of a quality to which we were drawn, we would, in the phrase philosophers of love use, “trade up.” But we don’t trade up, or at least most of us don’t. This is because we love that particular person in his or her specificity. And what we create together, our common projects and shared emotions, are grounded in those specificities. Romantic love is not capable of everything. It is capable only of what the unfolding of a future between two specific people can meaningfully allow.
Sooner or later the paths that can be opened by the specificities of a relationship come to an end. Not every couple can, with a sense of common meaningfulness, take up skiing or karaoke, political discussion or gardening. Eventually we must tread the same roads again, wearing them with our days. This need not kill love, although it might. But it cannot, over the course of eternity, sustain the intensity that makes romantic love, well, romantic.
by Todd May, NY Times | Read more:
Image via: DailyBrisk
[ed. Many of the comments in response to this article are also well worth reading. Like this:]
The screenplay traps the obnoxious, self-absorbed Phil Connors in an endless repetition of the same day to make the point that he can only find true love by learning to be selfless. His initial panic eventually gives way to selfishly exploiting the situation, toying with the citizenry for his bitter amusement. When in his desperation he finally recognizes Andie MacDowell's simple charms, he at first tries to reach her by learning what she likes, little by little, trying to be her artificially constructed soul mate. Ultimately this strategy fails, because it does not ring true to her. Only when Connors becomes weary of the game and starts to use his endless time to improve himself, learn to play the piano, fix an elderly woman's tire, perform a timely Heimlich maneuver, and truly help others, does MacDowell's character see him in a new light. When he becomes a loveable person, MacDowell gives her love to him, and the trap is ended.
The message is that love is not based on the efforts you make to "get" someone. Love is given willingly when someone recognizes the qualities that you possess.
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Does Living Alone Drive You Mad?
These are, statistically, boom times for middle-aged people who are living alone. Their numbers have nearly doubled since 1999, rising from 13 percent to 21 percent of the 55-to-64-year-old population. Singletons in general tend to dwell in large cities: Manhattan and Washington households are half-solo-occupant (by contrast, Idaho and Utah households are less than one-fifth so).
And there are, in fact, those who’d say this is healthy. In his 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, sociologist Eric Klinenberg led the rallying cry. In Klinenberg’s formulation, the freedom to live alone is one of the triumphs of wealthier societies, and loneliness is but a memory thanks to, among other things, social media. The studies of UCLA genomics researcher Steven Cole, however, yielded somewhat-conflicting results. Cole did an analysis of gene activity in people with varying loneliness levels as measured by a survey. He controlled for factors like age, weight, and the use of prescription drugs. The result? Chronic loneliness (social isolation, that is, as opposed to mere stress or depression) correlates to actual changes in gene expression. Genes for bad things like inflammation get overexpressed, while genes for good things like antibodies are stifled. This could make a person more prone to infection, heart disease, and even cancer. The study also found the size of one’s social network matters less than the strength of one’s ties. Never mind all that liking on Facebook; medically speaking, a few close friends is better than many casual acquaintances.
In the end, is stability limiting — does it quash our vibrating uniqueness — or is it, in fact, stabilizing? In our youths, many of us suspected that being tied down to a partner and family might constrain us. But after 40, even that landscape starts to shift. Many singletons turn inward and start longing for the things so many of us longed to be free of in our 20s. One bachelor friend of mine decided at 46 that, after too many Trader Joe’s single-serve Indian meals (plus those all-too-handy microwaveable burritos, Kettle Chips, and chocolate-covered espresso beans), he had suddenly become too fat to appear in public — not even for a home-cooked dinner with three single (very friendly, and not too anorexic themselves) women. Another bachelor, another ex of mine in fact, became obsessed, as many do in L.A., with traffic patterns. When I invited him to a play — by James Joyce, his favorite author — he declared proudly and obstinately: “I won’t cross the 405 after 4 p.m.!,” practically waving a cane. Speaking of traffic, I admit that I couldn’t get out in the evenings at all by this point without my partner. He loves to drive — so that’s my personal Uber; he’ll flag the toothpaste spots on my collar (why so many? It’s because I vigorously brush my teeth without putting on my glasses); and if there is the sort of obligatory vaguely work-related L.A. party where you are “greeted” in the lobby by a wide-eyed intern crossing you off on a clipboard and the only real “mixing” offered is snatching both veggie bruschetta and Thai meat skewers off passing trays, at least we have each other to talk to before driving home and roundly complaining.
But what does that mean for all those people who don’t have that person to complain to? Or who, after nights spent apart, don’t have someone to come home to, to reassure them that, no, that wasn’t rude to say, and no, they didn’t really mean that, and no, you weren’t so drunk (or perhaps were, more than you realized)? All those people who spent all those years coming home only to their own thoughts. The more time I spend thinking about living alone, the more I kept coming back to that endless vacuum of mental space.
For writers who are mothers, like me, our customary complaint has always been that we never had time to ourselves. More recently, I’ve started suspecting that the belief that if we are alone with our thoughts, brilliant things will occur (a novel! An opera! A screenplay!) may be a myth. In fact, the opposite may be true — that, left solely to its own devices, one’s mind tends to go into endless fretting circles. There are the emails sent that drew no answer — do they not like you? Did you offend them? Did you ask too much? (And now we have social-media anxiety — if enough people don’t like our Instagrams right away, we might quickly take them down.) Let alone the stress over one’s impossible-to-fulfill ambition. And then there is the mole that you watch anxiously, day after day. (I am currently in a slightly alarmed relationship with a back molar that has me flossing four times a day.) One does retirement-account and property-tax sums in one’s head over and over again. To a certain extent, these are the worry beads of life, and a calming partner (if you have that sort of partner) can simply say, “There, there.” Or, “That’s enough for today — let’s shake up a cocktail, light up a bowl, and watch TV.”
And if you don’t, never mind socializing, even keeping our lonely caves relatively civilized can start to become challenging, though few will be quite as bizarre as legendary outsider artist Henry Darger. A solitary custodian who lived alone in a small apartment, in Chicago, Darger left behind not just a 15,145-page tome detailing wars between massive armies of girls (with penises) but also, less dramatically if no less tellingly, a ten-year daily weather journal. Think about that: a ten-year daily weather journal.
Sandra Tsing Loh, The Cut | Read more:
Image: The Big Lebowski’
And there are, in fact, those who’d say this is healthy. In his 2012 book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone, sociologist Eric Klinenberg led the rallying cry. In Klinenberg’s formulation, the freedom to live alone is one of the triumphs of wealthier societies, and loneliness is but a memory thanks to, among other things, social media. The studies of UCLA genomics researcher Steven Cole, however, yielded somewhat-conflicting results. Cole did an analysis of gene activity in people with varying loneliness levels as measured by a survey. He controlled for factors like age, weight, and the use of prescription drugs. The result? Chronic loneliness (social isolation, that is, as opposed to mere stress or depression) correlates to actual changes in gene expression. Genes for bad things like inflammation get overexpressed, while genes for good things like antibodies are stifled. This could make a person more prone to infection, heart disease, and even cancer. The study also found the size of one’s social network matters less than the strength of one’s ties. Never mind all that liking on Facebook; medically speaking, a few close friends is better than many casual acquaintances.In the end, is stability limiting — does it quash our vibrating uniqueness — or is it, in fact, stabilizing? In our youths, many of us suspected that being tied down to a partner and family might constrain us. But after 40, even that landscape starts to shift. Many singletons turn inward and start longing for the things so many of us longed to be free of in our 20s. One bachelor friend of mine decided at 46 that, after too many Trader Joe’s single-serve Indian meals (plus those all-too-handy microwaveable burritos, Kettle Chips, and chocolate-covered espresso beans), he had suddenly become too fat to appear in public — not even for a home-cooked dinner with three single (very friendly, and not too anorexic themselves) women. Another bachelor, another ex of mine in fact, became obsessed, as many do in L.A., with traffic patterns. When I invited him to a play — by James Joyce, his favorite author — he declared proudly and obstinately: “I won’t cross the 405 after 4 p.m.!,” practically waving a cane. Speaking of traffic, I admit that I couldn’t get out in the evenings at all by this point without my partner. He loves to drive — so that’s my personal Uber; he’ll flag the toothpaste spots on my collar (why so many? It’s because I vigorously brush my teeth without putting on my glasses); and if there is the sort of obligatory vaguely work-related L.A. party where you are “greeted” in the lobby by a wide-eyed intern crossing you off on a clipboard and the only real “mixing” offered is snatching both veggie bruschetta and Thai meat skewers off passing trays, at least we have each other to talk to before driving home and roundly complaining.
But what does that mean for all those people who don’t have that person to complain to? Or who, after nights spent apart, don’t have someone to come home to, to reassure them that, no, that wasn’t rude to say, and no, they didn’t really mean that, and no, you weren’t so drunk (or perhaps were, more than you realized)? All those people who spent all those years coming home only to their own thoughts. The more time I spend thinking about living alone, the more I kept coming back to that endless vacuum of mental space.
For writers who are mothers, like me, our customary complaint has always been that we never had time to ourselves. More recently, I’ve started suspecting that the belief that if we are alone with our thoughts, brilliant things will occur (a novel! An opera! A screenplay!) may be a myth. In fact, the opposite may be true — that, left solely to its own devices, one’s mind tends to go into endless fretting circles. There are the emails sent that drew no answer — do they not like you? Did you offend them? Did you ask too much? (And now we have social-media anxiety — if enough people don’t like our Instagrams right away, we might quickly take them down.) Let alone the stress over one’s impossible-to-fulfill ambition. And then there is the mole that you watch anxiously, day after day. (I am currently in a slightly alarmed relationship with a back molar that has me flossing four times a day.) One does retirement-account and property-tax sums in one’s head over and over again. To a certain extent, these are the worry beads of life, and a calming partner (if you have that sort of partner) can simply say, “There, there.” Or, “That’s enough for today — let’s shake up a cocktail, light up a bowl, and watch TV.”
And if you don’t, never mind socializing, even keeping our lonely caves relatively civilized can start to become challenging, though few will be quite as bizarre as legendary outsider artist Henry Darger. A solitary custodian who lived alone in a small apartment, in Chicago, Darger left behind not just a 15,145-page tome detailing wars between massive armies of girls (with penises) but also, less dramatically if no less tellingly, a ten-year daily weather journal. Think about that: a ten-year daily weather journal.
Sandra Tsing Loh, The Cut | Read more:
Image: The Big Lebowski’
Monday, February 2, 2015
The Two Chords You Need to Join the Ukulele Boom
[ed. My personal favorite (super easy) uke song: Eddie Vedder's Longing to Belong.]
Someone inform Zooey Deschanel on an olde tyme phone: the ukulele has gone mainstream. Yes, the instrument that was once a hipster essential alongside thick-rimmed glasses and craft beer is currently enjoying a massive sales boost. Amazon reports that, between 2013 and 2014, sales of the ukulele have increased by 1,200%.But is the rise down to the so-called “Mumford effect” – or should we blame recent four-string abuser Meghan Trainor instead? “It’s replacing the recorder in schools now,” says Will Grove-White, member of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and author of Get Plucky with the Ukulele. “It’s an easy way for kids to get into music. Unlike the recorder, you don’t need a lot of technique to get a tune out of it quickly. And ukuleles are also cheap: a good one costs less than £30.”
OK, we’ve got our diminutive friend in our hands, we have banished all memory of Tiny Tim tiptoeing through his tulips and we’re trying hard to channel Joaquin Phoenix in Her instead. So where do we begin?
“The easiest place to start is with some one-chord songs such as Bob Marley’s Get Up Stand Up,” says Grove-White. That’s just a C minor chord for the whole thing. Or you could try Chain of Fools by Aretha Franklin. It’s just a C 7th chord.”
Great. But now we’re getting pins and needles in our fingers and we have to admit that our Aretha impression isn’t quite what it used to be. Is there anything we can try that makes us look more like, say, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine?
by Priya Elan, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Sam Jones
For Pete's Sake
[ed. I'm still in shock. On the upside, Duck Soup readers won't have to wade through crazy sports posts for a while.]
I don’t think passing the ball was the right decision, but let me try to put together a case in which it might be a justifiable choice. After the game, Pete Carroll suggested that the Seahawks didn’t want to leave the Patriots any time for a last-ditch drive after Seattle’s seemingly inevitable touchdown. Granted, Carroll suggested his team was “… playing for third and fourth down,” which seems a little bizarre given that the Super Bowl was on the line, but I’m willing to give his ability to formulate coherent words 30 minutes after that play happened the benefit of the doubt, given that I was watching the game at home and could barely form meaningful sentences at what I had seen.
by Bill Barnwell, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Mike Ehrmann/Getty
Sunday, February 1, 2015
Beginners
Drinking gin and talking about love
(This is a draft of Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” without Gordon Lish’s edits.)
My friend Herb McGinnis, a cardiologist, was talking. The four of us were sitting around his kitchen table drinking gin. It was Saturday afternoon. Sunlight filled the kitchen from the big window behind the sink. There were Herb and I and his second wife, Teresa—Terri, we called her—and my wife, Laura. We lived in Albuquerque, but we were all from somewhere else. There was an ice bucket on the table. The gin and the tonic water kept going around, and we somehow got on the subject of love. Herb thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. When he was young he’d spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He’d left the Church at the same time, but he said he still looked back to those years in the seminary as the most important in his life.
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Herb loved her so much he tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him. Then she said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles, all the while saying, ‘I love you, don’t you see? I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room, my head knocking on things.” She looked around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. “What do you do with love like that?” she said. She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person,” as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his hippie.
“My God, don’t be silly. That’s not love, and you know it,” Herb said. “I don’t know what you’d call it—madness is what I’d call it—but it’s sure as hell not love.”
“Say what you want to, but I know he loved me,” Terri said. “I know he did. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s true just the same. People are different, Herb. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. O.K. But he loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Herb. Don’t deny me that.”
Herb let out breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. “He threatened to kill me, too.” He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the ‘Kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me’ school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” He reached across the table and touched her cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.
“Now he wants to make up,” Terri said. “After he tries to dump on me.” She wasn’t smiling.
“Make up what?” Herb said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know, and that’s all.”
“What would you call it then?” Terri said. “How’d we get started on this subject anyway?” She raised her glass and drank. “Herb always has love on his mind,” she said. “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled now, and I thought that was the last of it.
“I just wouldn’t call Carl’s behavior love, that’s all I’m saying, honey,” Herb said. “What about you guys?” he said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”
(This is a draft of Carver’s story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” without Gordon Lish’s edits.)
Terri said the man she lived with before she lived with Herb loved her so much he tried to kill her. Herb laughed after she said this. He made a face. Terri looked at him. Then she said, “He beat me up one night, the last night we lived together. He dragged me around the living room by my ankles, all the while saying, ‘I love you, don’t you see? I love you, you bitch.’ He went on dragging me around the living room, my head knocking on things.” She looked around the table at us and then looked at her hands on her glass. “What do you do with love like that?” she said. She was a bone-thin woman with a pretty face, dark eyes, and brown hair that hung down her back. She liked necklaces made of turquoise, and long pendant earrings. She was fifteen years younger than Herb, had suffered periods of anorexia, and during the late sixties, before she’d gone to nursing school, had been a dropout, a “street person,” as she put it. Herb sometimes called her, affectionately, his hippie.“My God, don’t be silly. That’s not love, and you know it,” Herb said. “I don’t know what you’d call it—madness is what I’d call it—but it’s sure as hell not love.”
“Say what you want to, but I know he loved me,” Terri said. “I know he did. It may sound crazy to you, but it’s true just the same. People are different, Herb. Sure, sometimes he may have acted crazy. O.K. But he loved me. In his own way, maybe, but he loved me. There was love there, Herb. Don’t deny me that.”
Herb let out breath. He held his glass and turned to Laura and me. “He threatened to kill me, too.” He finished his drink and reached for the gin bottle. “Terri’s a romantic. Terri’s of the ‘Kick-me-so-I’ll-know-you-love-me’ school. Terri, hon, don’t look that way.” He reached across the table and touched her cheek with his fingers. He grinned at her.
“Now he wants to make up,” Terri said. “After he tries to dump on me.” She wasn’t smiling.
“Make up what?” Herb said. “What is there to make up? I know what I know, and that’s all.”
“What would you call it then?” Terri said. “How’d we get started on this subject anyway?” She raised her glass and drank. “Herb always has love on his mind,” she said. “Don’t you, honey?” She smiled now, and I thought that was the last of it.
“I just wouldn’t call Carl’s behavior love, that’s all I’m saying, honey,” Herb said. “What about you guys?” he said to Laura and me. “Does that sound like love to you?”
by Raymond Carver, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Jessica Hines
What’s the Dam Problem
Why it's so hard to design a fish ladder that works
The salmon look stressed. Behind the algae-streaked windows at Seattle’s Hiram Chittenden fish ladder they’re bumping heads, flipping in the current, and pointing their narrow jaws upstream.
To get to this point, they’ve already swum through the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound, and jumped through the first 17 steps of the ladder, which looks like a skinny set of concrete bleachers. Most fish passes aren’t as visible at the Seattle one, which has an observation deck where you can peer into the steps, but the way the fish have to work around a manmade barrier in the river is common. From here, the fish will keep following the current upstream to spawn in the stream where they were born. Anadramous fish are imprinted, Twilight style, in the rivers where they hatched, so depending on where they came from, they’ll still have several more dams to navigate.
There are more than 80,000 dams in the U.S. and nearly all of them have some kind of fish pass. They range from multi-step ladders like the Seattle one to elevators that suck the fish upstream to nature-like diversion canals. Some of them have been in place since the colonists started farming, and in 1890 the state of Washington passed a law that all dams, “wherever food fish are wont to ascend,” needed to include a fishway. The rest of the country eventually followed suit. Now, any new hydropower dam needs to get its fish ladder design cleared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But there aren’t a ton of new dams going in, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that just because a ladder exists it doesn’t mean that fish are going to figure out how to use it, or want to. (...)
All fish migrate to a degree, but dams have the biggest disrupting force on anadramous fish, like salmon or shad, which spawn in rivers but spend most of their lives in the ocean, and catadramous ones, like eel, which live in freshwater, but swim out into the ocean to do it.
There are other factors, like overfishing and climate change, which also hurt declining fish populations, but dams are the most obvious, and because of that, environmental engineers, dam operators, and fish biologists have been trying, with limited success, to design ways for fish to get past them.
In the middle of last century, dams were seen as the answer to a wide range of issues, from water supply to energy security. JFK boosted dam building in his campaign speeches. From the 1920s to the ‘70s, the Army Corps of Engineers built tens of thousands of dams, ones like the Columbia River’s Grand Coulee, which has cut off more access to fish habitat than any other structure in the world. That boom in dam building took a toll. “Many fishways were originally designed for adult salmon over 50 years ago, but we’ve recently found that they don’t work well for other species,” says USGS fish biologist Alexander Haro.
He’s trying to find ways to make them more appealing. At the Conte Anadramous Fish Branch, in Massachusetts, Haro sends fish through a respirometer to see how much energy they exert when they’re stressed, and through what he calls a “sprint swimming flume,” to see how fast they can swim and for how long. “It’s kind of like a high-speed treadmill for fish,” he says. He’ll use that data to try to design fishways that actually work.
The biggest issue, according to Jim Taurek, a NOAA restoration ecologist, is that different fish swim very differently. Some, like salmon, can jump high and sprint, while others — sturgeon for instance — mosey upstream. Alewife freak out in confined spaces and shad don’t like air bubbles.
Because of that, there are almost as many ways to design a passage as there are fish trying to swim through it. “In general, the lower the slope of a fishway, the easier fish can ascend, but that also means the fishway needs to be longer, and many fish will not stay in a fishway structure for very long,” Haro says. It’s possible to have a theoretically perfectly designed ladder that keeps fish stranded on the bottom, because they don’t like its style.
In addition to figuring out the size and shape of the structure you also need to design an appealing entrance, and to make sure the river flow points the fish in the right direction. Salmon can’t use an elevator if they can’t find the door. “Building fish ladders, even thought it’s engineering, it’s also art,” Waldman says.
Then you have to engineer the other side, for downstream fish migration. That’s simpler from a design perspective — the hardest part is teasing the fish out of the main current and into the fish pass — but it can be complicated from the financial side. Running water around the dam is the simplest solution, but utilities make their money on river flows, so they’re hesitant to spill a single drop.
by Heather Hansman, Medium | Read more:
Image: French Lake Dam fish ladder, Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma. Flickr/lsmith2010
The salmon look stressed. Behind the algae-streaked windows at Seattle’s Hiram Chittenden fish ladder they’re bumping heads, flipping in the current, and pointing their narrow jaws upstream.
To get to this point, they’ve already swum through the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the Puget Sound, and jumped through the first 17 steps of the ladder, which looks like a skinny set of concrete bleachers. Most fish passes aren’t as visible at the Seattle one, which has an observation deck where you can peer into the steps, but the way the fish have to work around a manmade barrier in the river is common. From here, the fish will keep following the current upstream to spawn in the stream where they were born. Anadramous fish are imprinted, Twilight style, in the rivers where they hatched, so depending on where they came from, they’ll still have several more dams to navigate.There are more than 80,000 dams in the U.S. and nearly all of them have some kind of fish pass. They range from multi-step ladders like the Seattle one to elevators that suck the fish upstream to nature-like diversion canals. Some of them have been in place since the colonists started farming, and in 1890 the state of Washington passed a law that all dams, “wherever food fish are wont to ascend,” needed to include a fishway. The rest of the country eventually followed suit. Now, any new hydropower dam needs to get its fish ladder design cleared by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But there aren’t a ton of new dams going in, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that just because a ladder exists it doesn’t mean that fish are going to figure out how to use it, or want to. (...)
All fish migrate to a degree, but dams have the biggest disrupting force on anadramous fish, like salmon or shad, which spawn in rivers but spend most of their lives in the ocean, and catadramous ones, like eel, which live in freshwater, but swim out into the ocean to do it.
There are other factors, like overfishing and climate change, which also hurt declining fish populations, but dams are the most obvious, and because of that, environmental engineers, dam operators, and fish biologists have been trying, with limited success, to design ways for fish to get past them.
In the middle of last century, dams were seen as the answer to a wide range of issues, from water supply to energy security. JFK boosted dam building in his campaign speeches. From the 1920s to the ‘70s, the Army Corps of Engineers built tens of thousands of dams, ones like the Columbia River’s Grand Coulee, which has cut off more access to fish habitat than any other structure in the world. That boom in dam building took a toll. “Many fishways were originally designed for adult salmon over 50 years ago, but we’ve recently found that they don’t work well for other species,” says USGS fish biologist Alexander Haro.
He’s trying to find ways to make them more appealing. At the Conte Anadramous Fish Branch, in Massachusetts, Haro sends fish through a respirometer to see how much energy they exert when they’re stressed, and through what he calls a “sprint swimming flume,” to see how fast they can swim and for how long. “It’s kind of like a high-speed treadmill for fish,” he says. He’ll use that data to try to design fishways that actually work.
The biggest issue, according to Jim Taurek, a NOAA restoration ecologist, is that different fish swim very differently. Some, like salmon, can jump high and sprint, while others — sturgeon for instance — mosey upstream. Alewife freak out in confined spaces and shad don’t like air bubbles.
Because of that, there are almost as many ways to design a passage as there are fish trying to swim through it. “In general, the lower the slope of a fishway, the easier fish can ascend, but that also means the fishway needs to be longer, and many fish will not stay in a fishway structure for very long,” Haro says. It’s possible to have a theoretically perfectly designed ladder that keeps fish stranded on the bottom, because they don’t like its style.
In addition to figuring out the size and shape of the structure you also need to design an appealing entrance, and to make sure the river flow points the fish in the right direction. Salmon can’t use an elevator if they can’t find the door. “Building fish ladders, even thought it’s engineering, it’s also art,” Waldman says.
Then you have to engineer the other side, for downstream fish migration. That’s simpler from a design perspective — the hardest part is teasing the fish out of the main current and into the fish pass — but it can be complicated from the financial side. Running water around the dam is the simplest solution, but utilities make their money on river flows, so they’re hesitant to spill a single drop.
by Heather Hansman, Medium | Read more:
Image: French Lake Dam fish ladder, Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, Oklahoma. Flickr/lsmith2010
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