What the Deer Are Telling Us

In 1909, a United States Forest Service officer named Aldo Leopold shot a mother wolf from a perch of rimrock in the Apache National Forest in Arizona. It was a revelatory moment in the life of the young naturalist. “In those days we never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote in an essay called “Thinking Like a Mountain,” later included in his Sand County Almanac, published posthumously after his death in 1948 and which went on to sell several million copies. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.”

Leopold, who today is revered among ecologists, was among the earliest observers of the impact of wolves on deer abundance, and of the impact of too many deer on plant life. In “Thinking Like a Mountain,” he outlined for the first time the basic theory of trophic cascades, which states that top-down predators determine the health of an ecosystem. The theory as presented by Leopold held that the extirpation of wolves and cougars in Arizona, and elsewhere in the West, would result in a booming deer population that would browse unsustainably in the forests of the high country. “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves,” Leopold wrote, “so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”

One of the areas where Leopold studied deer irruptions was the Kaibab Plateau near the Grand Canyon. By 1924, the deer population on the Kaibab had peaked at 100,000. Then it crashed. During 1924-26, 60 percent of the deer perished due to starvation. Leopold believed this pattern of deer exceeding the carrying capacity of the land would repeat across the U.S. wherever predators had been eliminated as a trophic force. By 1920, wolves and cougars were gone from the ecosystems east of the Mississippi—shot, trapped, poisoned, as human settlement fragmented their habitat— and they were headed toward extirpation in most parts of the American West. Within two generations, the hunting of deer had been heavily regulated, the calls from conservationists had been heeded for deer reintroduction throughout the eastern U.S., and swaths of state and federally managed forest had been protected from any kind of hunting.

Freed both of human and animal predation, however, deer did not follow the pattern predicted by Leopold. Instead of eating themselves out of house and home, they survived—they thrived—by altering their home range to their benefit. As recent studies have shown, certain kinds of grasses and sedges preferred by deer react to over-browsing the way the bluegrass on a suburban lawn reacts to a lawnmower. The grasses grow back faster and healthier, and provide more sustenance for more deer. In short, there has been enough food in our forests, mountains, and grasslands for white-tailed deer in the U.S. to reach unprecedented numbers, about 32 million, more than at any time since record-keeping began.

In 1968, Stanford biology professor Paul Ehrlich predicted that another widespread species would die out as a result of overpopulation. But he was spectacularly wrong. Like the deer, the steadily ingenious Homo sapiens altered its home range—most notably the arable land—to maximize its potential for survival. As Homo sapiens continues to thrive across the planet today, the species might take a moment to find its reflection in the rampant deer.

Conservation biologists who have followed the deer tend to make an unhappy assessment of its progress. They mutter dark thoughts about killing deer, and killing a lot of them. In fact, they already are. In 2011, in the name of conservation, the National Park Service and U.S. Department of Agriculture teamed up with hunters to “harvest” 3 million antlerless deer. I asked Thomas Rooney, one of the nation’s top deer irruption researchers, about the losses in forest ecosystems overrun by deer. “I’d say the word is ‘apocalypse,’ ” Rooney said.

On a warm fall day last year, I went to see Rooney, a professor of biology at Wright State University, in Dayton, Ohio. In his office, I noticed a well-thumbed copy of Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and I asked him if he thought a comparison might be drawn between human overpopulation and deer overpopulation. He looked at me as if the point was obvious. “Deer, like humans,” he said, “can come in and eliminate biodiversity, though not to their immediate detriment.” (...)

He told me about a study published last year in Conservation Biology that bemoaned “pandemic deer overabundance,” language suggesting the creature was a disease on the land. Ecosystem damage becomes apparent at roughly 15 deer per square mile, and the damage grows with density. Some areas of the northeast host as many as 100 deer per square mile. (The Wright State University reserve has a density of around 40 deer per square mile.) He noted a 2013 article co-authored by a group of Nature Conservancy scientists who warned that “no other threat to forested habitats is greater at this point in time—not lack of fire, not habitat conversion, not climate change.” (...)

I asked Rooney about the remarkable ability of deer to thrive in their home range—most of the U.S.—while producing ecosystem simplification and a biodiversity crash. In his own studies of deer habitats in Wisconsin, Rooney found that only a few types of grass thrive under a deer-dominant regime. The rest, amounting to around 80 percent of native Wisconsin plant species, had been eradicated. “The 80 percent represent the disappearance of 300 million years of evolutionary history,” he said. He looked deflated.

A turkey vulture pounded its wings through the canopy, and in the darkening sky a military cargo plane howled in descent toward nearby Wright-Paterson Air Force Base. Rooney and I emerged from the forest onto a campus parking lot where Homo sapiens held sway. The self-assured mammals crossed fields of exotic bluegrass under pruned hardwoods surrounded by a sea of concrete, tarmac, glass, and metal. There were no flowers except those managed in beds. There were no other animals to be seen except the occasional squirrel, and these were rat-like, worried, scurrying. The Homo sapiens got into cars that looked the same, on streets that looked the same, and they were headed to domiciles that looked more or less the same. This is home for us.

by Christopher Ketcham, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Chris Buzelli

The Wave That Swept the World

In the beginning was the wave. The blue and white tsunami, ascending from the left of the composition like a massive claw, descends pitilessly on Mount Fuji – the most august mountain in Japan, turned in Katsushika Hokusai’s vision into a small and vulnerable hillock. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830–31, yet it forms part of a complex global network of art, commerce, and politics. Its intense blue comes from Hokusai’s pioneering use of Prussian Blue ink – a foreign pigment, imported, probably via China, from England or Germany. The wave, from the beginning, stretched beyond Japan. Soon, it would crash over Europe.

This week the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, home to the greatest collection of Japanese art outside Japan, opens a giant retrospective of the art of Hokusai, showcasing his indispensible woodblock prints of the genre we call ukiyo-e, or ‘images of the floating world’. It’s the second Hokusai retrospective in under a year; last autumn, the wait to see the artist’s two-part mega-show at the Grand Palais in Paris stretched to two hours or more. American and French audiences adore Hokusai – and have for centuries. He is, after all, not only one of the great figures of Japanese art, but a father figure of much of Western modernism. Without Hokusai, there might have been no Impressionism – and the global art world we today take for granted might look very different indeed.

Fine print

Hokusai’s prints didn’t find their way to the West until after the artist’s death in 1849. During his lifetime Japan was still subject to sakoku, the longstanding policy that forbade foreigners from entering and Japanese from leaving, on penalty of death. But in the 1850s, with the arrival of the ‘black ships’ of the American navy under Matthew Perry, Japan gave up its isolationist policies – and officers and diplomats, then artists and collectors, discovered Japanese woodblock printing. In Japan, Hokusai was seen as vulgar, beneath the consideration of the imperial literati. In the West, his delineation of space with color and line, rather than via one-point perspective, would have revolutionary impact.

Both the style and the subject matter of ukiyo-e prints appealed to young artists like Félix Bracquemond, one of the first French artists to be seduced by Japan. Yet the Japanese prints traveling to the West in the first years after Perry were contemporary artworks, rather than the slightly earlier masterpieces of Hokusai, Hiroshige, and Utamaro. Many of the prints that arrived were used as wrapping paper for commercial goods. Everything changed on 1 April, 1867, when the Exposition Universelle opened on the Champ de Mars, the massive Paris marching grounds that now lies in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. It featured, for the first time, a Japanese pavilion – and its showcase of ukiyo-e prints revealed the depth of Japanese printmaking to French artists for the first time.

by Jason Farago, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Katsushika Hokusai 

Just Don't Call It a Panama Hat

There are many types of Panama hats but they all have one thing in common: they’re made in Ecuador. Some say it was the Americans who came up with the misleading name, after they saw photographs of Theodore Roosevelt wearing one as he inspected the construction of the Panama Canal. Legend goes it was actually a loan from Eloy Alfaro, the president of Ecuador and hero of the revolution of 1895. Others say the hats were named after the Isthmus of Panama, the point from which they have historically been exported to the rest of the world.

Yet the misnomer didn’t prevent the famous straw hat, more correctly referred to as Montecristi hat, from being designated by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2012–Ecuador has produced them since the early 17th Century. It takes three months to make a superfino Montecristi hat (the best grade there is), and weavers can only work in the early and late hours of the day because the straw breaks when it’s exposed to high temperature. According to tradition, hats are cleaned, finished and sold in the town of Montecristi, the Panama hat’s spiritual home in the province of Manabi.

In the small and remote village of Pile nearby, the craft is passed on through family. Manuel Lopez, 41, learned to weave with his father at the age of eight. He says he teaches his own children now, though making a Montecristi hat is becoming a lost art. A weaver only makes between $700 to $1,200 to produce a superfino hat, which can fetch for $25,000 abroad. And now that China has become the world’s top producer of straw hats (which they actually make from paper), Ecuador’s hat makers are unable to keep up with decline in price and demand. With most young people looking for more lucrative opportunities elsewhere, experts say the last-ever traditionally made Montecristi hat will be woven in the next 15 years.

by Eduardo Leal, Roads & Kingdoms |  Read more:

Image: Eduardo Leal

photo: markk

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Paul Klee, The White Form, 1939.
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Our Land, Up for Grabs

A battle is looming over America’s public lands.

It’s difficult to understand why, given decades of consistent, strong support from voters of both parties for protecting land, water and the thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in economic benefits these resources make possible.

Last week, the United States Senate voted 51 to 49 to support an amendment to a nonbinding budget resolution to sell or give away all federal lands other than the national parks and monuments.

If the measure is ever implemented, hundreds of millions of acres of national forests, rangelands, wildlife refuges, wilderness areas and historic sites will revert to the states or local governments or be auctioned off. These lands constitute much of what’s left of the nation’s natural and historical heritage.

This was bad enough. But it followed a 228-to-119 vote in the House of Representatives approving another nonbinding resolution that said “the federal estate is far too large” and voiced support for reducing it and “giving states and localities more control over the resources within their boundaries.” Doing so, the resolution added, “will lead to increased resource production and allow states and localities to take advantage of the benefits of increased economic activity.”

The measures, supported only by the Republicans who control both houses, were symbolic. But they laid down a marker that America’s public lands, long held in trust by the government for its people, may soon be up for grabs.

We’ll get a better sense of Congress’s commitment to conservation this year when it decides whether to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, created in 1965 and financed by fees paid by oil companies foroffshore drilling. The program underwrites state and local park and recreation projects, conservation easements for ranches and farms, plus national parks, forests and wildlife refuges.

Nearly $17 billion has gone to those purposes over the years, including 41,000 state and local park and recreation projects, some of which my organization has helped put together. (Another $19 billion was diverted by Congress to other purposes.) The program expires Sept. 30 unless Congress keeps it alive.

Land protection has long been an issue for which voters of both parties have found common cause. Since 1988, some $71.7 billion has been authorized to conserve land in more than 1,800 state and local elections in 43 states. Last year, $13.2 billion was approved by voters in 35 initiatives around the country — the most in a single year in the 27 years my organization has tracked these initiatives and, in some cases, led them.

But this consensus is being ignored, and not just in the nation’s capital.

by Will Rogers, NY Times |  Read more:

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The Common Man’s Crown

The 1903 World Series was the first of baseball’s modern era. Boston and Pittsburgh were adhering to newly codified rules of play — and also initiating a new code of dress, as no one could have known, least of all the men in the stands, uniformly obedient to the laws of Edwardian haberdashery. The spectators wore “derbies, boaters, checkered caps and porkpie hats,” wrote Beverly Chico in her book, “Hats and Headwear Around the World.” Each style signaled a distinct social identity. All are now regarded largely as museum pieces, having fallen away in favor of a hat that offers casual comfort and a comforting image of classlessness. Given our cult of youth, our populist preference for informality and our native inclination toward sportiness, its emergence as the common man’s crown was inevitable.

Frank Sinatra supposedly implored the fedora-wearers of his era to cock their brims: Angles are attitudes. Ballplayers have accepted this as truth since at least that first World Series, when Fred Clarke, Pittsburgh’s left fielder and manager, wore his visor insouciantly askew, and the general public has come to know the ground rules as well. Here’s a test of fluency in the sartorial vernacular of Americans: You can read the tilt of a bill like the cut of a jib. The way you wear your hat is essential to others’ memories of you, and the look of a ball cap’s brim communicates tribal identity more meaningfully than the symbols stitched across its front. Is the bill flatter than an AstroTurf outfield? Curved like the trajectory of a fly ball? Straightforwardly centered? Reversed like that of a catcher in his crouch or a loiterer on his corner? The cap conforms to most any cast of mind.

Watch people fiddling with their baseball caps as they sit at a stoplight or on a bar stool, primping and preening in what must be the most socially acceptable form of self-grooming. No one begrudges their fussiness, because everyone appreciates the attempt to express a point of view. The cap presents studies of plasticity in action and of the individual effort to stake out a singular place on the roster, and the meaning of the logo is as mutable as any other aspect. To wear a New York Yankees cap in the United States is to show support for the team, maybe, or to invest in the hegemony of an imperial city. To wear one abroad — the Yankees model is by far the best-selling Major League Baseball cap in Europe and Asia — is to invest in an idealized America, a phenomenon not unlike pulling on contraband bluejeans in the old Soviet Union. (...)

“Until the late 1970s, wearing a ball cap anywhere but on the baseball field carried with it a cultural stigma,” James Lilliefors writes in his book “Ball Cap Nation,” citing the Mets cap of the “Odd Couple” slob Oscar Madison as one example of its signaling mundane degeneracy. In Lilliefors’s reckoning, eight factors contributed to the cap’s increased legitimacy, including the explosion of television sports, the maturation of the first generation of Little League retirees and the relative suavity of the Detroit Tigers cap worn by Tom Selleck as the title character of “Magnum P.I.”: “It made sporting a ball cap seem cool rather than quirky; and it created an interest in authentic M.L.B. caps.” What had been merely juvenile came to seem attractively boyish, and New Era was poised to reap the rewards, having begun selling its wares to the general public, by way of a mail-order ad in the Sporting News, in 1979. (...)

Where the basic structure of a derby or a boater spoke of the wearer’s rank and region, the baseball cap is comparatively subtle. Angles are indeed accents, and a millimetric bend in the bill will inflect the article’s voice. The hip-hop habit is to wear the cap perfectly fresh and clean, as if it arrived on the head directly from the cash register, spotless except, perhaps, for the circle of the manufacturer’s label still stuck to it, alerting admirers that this is no counterfeit and that the cap is as new as the money that bought it. In tribute to this practice, New Era not long ago issued a limited-edition series of caps in the colors of its sticker, black and gold, as if the company were at once flattering its customers and further transforming them into advertisements for itself.

Peel the sticker away and bow the brim a bit: This is the simple start of asserting a further level of ownership. Taken to an extreme, the process can resemble a burlesque of the ancient ritual of breaking in the baseball mitts with which the cap’s contours rhyme. To speak to an undergraduate about a “dirty white baseball cap” is to evoke a fratboy lifestyle devoted to jam bands and domestic lager and possibly lacrosse. To spend time among the frat boys themselves is to learn the baroque techniques for accelerating wear and tear. Some wear them in the shower; others yet undertake artificial rituals involving the hair dryer and the dishwasher and the kitchen sink, recalling the collegians of midcentury who, expressing the prep fetish for the shabby genteel, took sandpaper to the collars of their Oxford shirts to gain a frayed edge.

by Troy Patterson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mauricio Alejo

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The Most Popular Antidepressants Are Based On An Outdated Theory

One in ten Americans takes an anti-depressant drug like Zoloft or Prozac. These drugs have been shown to work in some patients, but their design is based on a so-called "chemical imbalance" theory of depression that is incomplete, at best.

The number of people taking antidepressants has increased by over 400% since the early '90s. In a certain light, this could be perceived as a success for public health; it is clear, for example, that tens of millions of people have found antidepressants to be effective. What's less clear iswhy these medications work, but decades of research on the subject suggest that an explanation parroted in ad campaigns and physicians' offices alike – that depression can be chalked up to low levels of serotonin in the brain – is insufficient.

"Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. It's much more complicated than that,"Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, told NPR in 2012. "It's really an outmoded way of thinking."

This is the story of how pharmaceutical companies and psychiatrists convinced the public that depression was the result of a simple chemical imbalance – and how scientists, patients, and psychiatrists are working to piece together the more complicated truth.

by Levi Gadye, i09 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Bambi, Yummy Gaga
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Against Chill

The Great Chill Massacre of 2014 was not premeditated. When I woke up that morning, I had no idea that I’d end the day going from casually dating six men to formally and intentionally dating zero. But then two of the six men coincidentally sent texts admiring my “chill,” and it became clear that drastic and draconian measures would be required to set the record straight. It seems that my poker face is too perfect when men report a desire to “see what happens.” My willingness to call dates “hanging out” in perpetuity sometimes gives the impression that I am in possession of the amorphous and increasingly desirable characteristic of Chill. And so in a fit of shamelessness and glory, I sent some variation of the text, “I’m actually looking for something serious so I’m not planning to see you anymore” to all six of them. Incredulity and attempts to lure me back into my Chill with more empty promises that we could “see where it goes” were ignored or actively mocked. I killed what little Chill I actually had and I shed no tears for it.

To the uninitiated, having Chill and being cool are synonyms. They describe a person with a laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis, and reasonably interesting tastes and passions. But the person with Chill is crucially missing these last ingredients because they are too far removed from anything that looks like intensity to have passions. They have discernible tastes and beliefs but they are unlikely to materialize as passionate. Passion is polarizing; being enthusiastic or worked up is downright obsessive. Excessive Chill is “You do you” taken to its most extreme conclusion, giving everyone’s opinions and interests equal value so long as they’re authentically ours.

In an infamous passage in Gone Girl, the elusive “Cool Girl” is described as a woman who declares, “I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2.” The “Cool Girl” is, of course, remarkably dull in her interests because they center almost exclusively on the man with whom she is so inexplicably enraptured. But the “Cool Girl” has no Chill. She likes him far too much and lets it show. Chill is different — it is agreeable because it is emotionally vacant. Chill is what Cool would look like with a lobotomy and no hobbies. And for a large subset of the population, Chill is one of the most desirable qualities in a romantic prospect.

I am originally from San Diego where Chill was as much a part of our culture as burritos and surfing and lifted Toyota Tacoma trucks. It was an insistence on going with the flow, rolling with the punches. It would have been about saying “C’est la vie!” to all the shitty shit that happened if more people there had taken French. The ever-reliable Urban Dictionary has 111 definitions of “chill,” the first of which appeared in June 2002. Most of these descriptions describe the act of chilling, which is either hanging out or smoking weed, and sometimes both. The others describe being chill, an adjective to describe being calm, laid back, or relaxed. The first instance of Chill as a noun appears in 2013 under the term “No Chill” and describes a range of people who are reckless or lacking rationality. These definitions are deceptively simple ways of asking people to have fewer strong emotions.

by Alana Massey, Matter | Read more:
Image: Ana Benaroya

Stuck in Seattle

The Aggravating Adventures of a Gigantic Tunnel Drill

About 20 workers wearing hard hats and reflective vests clump together on the edge of a chasm near Seattle’s waterfront, peering down a hole 120 feet deep and 83 feet wide. The last men have been craned out of the pit in a yellow metal cage. Gulls squawk. A TV news helicopter hovers overhead.

A dozen journalists stand nearby on the bed of a truck. We’re here to see Bertha, one of the world’s biggest tunneling machines. Or at least a piece of her. A 240-foot crane is about to haul a 540,000-pound steel shield out of the ground, 20 months after Bertha started digging a highway. Almost imperceptibly, the crane starts rising.

The event, on a Thursday in mid-March, is part of a massive rescue mission to fix the $80 million machine. She broke abruptly in December 2013 after boring through just 1,000 feet, one-ninth of her job. Her seals busted, and her teeth clogged with grit and pieces of an 8-inch steel pipe left over from old groundwater tests. She stopped entirely.

The tunnel, with a budget of $1.4 billion and originally scheduled to be finished in November 2015, is two years behind schedule. The state’s contractor, a joint venture called Seattle Tunnel Partners (STP), has spent months digging to reach Bertha and crane her to the surface, where a weary Seattle awaits.

Bertha’s job is to bury a highway that runs on a structurally unsound elevated road smack in the middle of an earthquake zone. The viaduct, as it’s called, follows the shoreline, effectively barricading downtown Seattle from what could be a beautiful waterfront. The tunnel will let most of the traffic travel deep underground; at street level an old freeway will be demolished, and in its place the city will build a boulevard and shoreline park created by the designers behind New York’s acclaimed High Line park. The $4.2 billion plan calls for the long-neglected waterfront to come to life; Seattleites can celebrate the glory of Puget Sound, where ferries dash across the bay and the jagged peaks of the Olympic Peninsula jut in the distance.

Everything about the project is gargantuan, starting with Bertha, who is as tall as a five-story building. She runs on a 25,000-horsepower motor and has a head weighing 1.7 million pounds, with 260 steel teeth designed specifically to chew through Seattle’s silty soil. She’s named after the city’s first and only female mayor, Bertha Knight Landes, who served in the 1920s. According to the machine’s official state biography, her role models include “whoever invented the shovel.” Bertha’s got 15,700 Twitter followers, has inspired Halloween costumes, and was once feted by thousands.

After Bertha got stuck, she couldn’t back up because she builds the concrete walls of the tunnel as she drills forward. That means the hole she leaves behind is narrower than she is. The contractor has devised a method—itself unprecedented—­to repair Bertha by craning her in sections to the surface. After almost a decade of debating the tunnel’s merits and three more years of construction, more than a few Seattleites argue that Bertha should be buried where she is, her last rites read, and another plan pursued.

by Karen Weise, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Ted S. Warren / AP Photo

Miki Hasegawa
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Slow Love

An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next?

You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids.

While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a one-night stand turn into a long-term, committed partnership.1

We humans are a romantic tribe. Over 54 percent of American singles (which make up over half of the adult population) believe in love at first sight; 56 percent believe laws should make it easier to wed; 89 percent believe you can stay married to the same person forever. And, remarkably, 33 percent of American singles believe it’s ok to leave a “satisfactory marriage” if you are no longer passionately in love. In America, as in much of the post-industrial world, romantic love is in full bloom.

Yet between 43 and 50 percent of American marriages will fail, and some 67 percent of American cohabiting couples report that they are terrified of the social, legal, emotional, and economic consequences of divorce.2 Divorce, men and women wanly joke, is in the drinking water.

So I have come to believe that—motivated by romance and afraid of what sociologist Andrew Cherlin calls the marriage-go-round—today’s singles are ushering a long pre-commitment stage into the courtship process. Fast sex is part of the package. Couples want to get to know everything about a potential life partner before they tie the knot. Welcome to the age of slow love.

Singles in America is not a poll of the Match.com population. Instead, it probes an annual representative sample of over 5,000 Americans, based on the U.S. census. To date we have queried over 25,000 men and women—to my knowledge, the largest national representative study of singles. And what we have found is an abundance of caution.

Take hooking-up—an uncommitted sexual encounter between two people who are not currently in a romantic relationship with one another. Hooking up appears reckless. Certainly those who engage in one-night stands are risking sexually transmitted infections, unwanted pregnancy, and emotional trauma. Nevertheless, in the 2014 Singles in America study, 66 percent of single men and 50 percent of single women reported that they had engaged in a one-night stand—and these numbers have varied little over the past five years. Why do we hop into the sack with someone we hardly know?

Perhaps because you learn a lot about a person between the sheets. You might even kick-start a real relationship: Any stimulation of the genitals promotes dopamine activity, which can potentially push you over the threshold into falling in love. At orgasm, oxytocin and vasopressin—neurochemicals linked with feelings of attachment—spike. With just one night of casual sex, risky as it is, you may win life’s greatest prize: a devoted mating partner.

Nevertheless, few race to the altar after a night in bed together. Instead, many take the next cautious step, a friends with benefits relationship—commitment-lite. In this sexual arrangement, a pair has coitus when convenient, but they don’t appear in public as a couple. In 2013, 58 percent of men and 50 percent of women in our Singles in America study reported that they’d had a friends with benefits relationship, including one in three people in their 70s. And 28 percent of our 2014 participants had had a friends with benefits relationship turn into a long-term partnership.

Next, many couples move in together—another cautious step toward permanent pairing, which first entered the public discourse with a famous 1966 article by anthropologist Margaret Mead. Mead suggested that a young couple with no immediate plans to reproduce should first make an “individual marriage,” a legal tie that excluded bearing children, did not imply a life-long commitment, and had no economic consequences should the couple part. A “parental marriage” could come later if they so decided.

“Living together,” a version of the first step of this two-step marriage, emerged in the 1970s; and today what had been scandalous has become routine. In 2012, 58 percent of those in our Singles in America study reported that they have lived with one to five partners outside of wedlock. And as the Pew Research Center notes, some 64 percent of Americans believe this living arrangement is a step toward wedding.3

But discretion still reigns after partners have agreed to marry. In 2014, 36 percent of singles in our Singles in America study said they wanted a pre-nuptial agreement.

Even marriage is becoming provisional. Civil partnerships in England, civil unions in the U.S., and de facto partnerships in Australia enable a couple to start and end a partnership relatively easily. France’s pacte civil de solidarite, or PACS, is particularly intriguing. Enacted in 1999 primarily to enable gays and lesbians to obtain a legal means of attachment without conventional matrimony, it immediately became popular among heterosexuals. All you do is go to a federal office with your partner and sign some papers to initiate a legal relationship. If you want to end it? Send in a form.

One-night stands; hooking-up; friends with benefits; living together; pre-nups; civil unions. These all spell caution. But they also spell logic—because our brain is soft-wired to attach slowly to a partner.

by Helen Fisher, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Hulton Archive

[ed. When Love Takes Over (feat. Kelly Rowland).]

It’s Raining Sideways in Juneau, Yo

Rainy Sunday, wake up at the ass crack o’ dawn
Call up a dozen moms cuz I can’t be alone
Hello?
What up, moms?
Sistah wife! What’s crackin’?
You thinkin' what I’m thinkin?
TWIN LAKES
Yeah, it’s happenin'!

But first we gotta make our kids put on their gear
We rock the Hellys and the Xtra-Tuffs all DAY up in here!
They got the triple insulation with the steel toe built in
The slip-resistant outsole that flex like Paris Hilton
No doubt those boots got all da bomb rubbah
I needsta have those kicks like an orca needs blubbah!
One, no two, no three WARM LAYAHS
I ain’t tryin’ to hear my kids bitchin,’ playahs!

Yo, who’s got the snacks?
Oh shit, not me!
Better hit Freds or better yet the I.G.
I got some Annie’s bunnies and maybe some M&Ms
Rainbow Foods shook me down for like all of my Benjamins.

Egan Drive let’s go
Step on it, sucka.
What you wanna do, moms?
COFFEE MOTHER FUCKER.

It’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
I said it’s raining sideways in Juneau, yo
Yeah you heard me, this shit is BLEAK.

by Libby Bakalar, One Hot Mess | Read more:
Image: Geoff Kirsch, Story via:AK Dispatch

Land-based Food Won't Sustain Polar Bears in a Low-Ice Arctic

As summer and autumn sea ice diminishes in the Arctic Sea, polar bears spending more time on shore have been spotted eating eggs, hunting down the nesting birds that lay them, hunting other land animals and even chewing on edible plants growing onshore.

But is that enough to sustain them in an ice-scarce Arctic?

No, says a new study by scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey, Washington State University and Polar Bears International.

The study analyzes food needs of polar bears, including their genetic metabolic characteristics, and the characteristics of the onshore ecosystems and the foods in them.

The verdict? Terrestrial foods are, for the most part, the wrong kind for fat-dependent polar bears, and there is too little of it. What bear food does exist on land is already being used by Arctic grizzly bears, which -- appropriately -- are the smallest and most spread out of all the world’s brown bears, said the study’s lead author, USGS research biologist Karyn Rode.

The study, published Wednesday in the journal Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment, find that even though polar bears are spending more time ashore and are affecting terrestrial ecosystems, “evidence suggests that the nutritional contribution of terrestrial foods to polar bear diets will probably remain negligible.”

As the world’s biggest bears, and as denizens of the cold Arctic climate, polar bears need large amounts of fat in their diet to survive, said co-author Steve Amstrup, a former Alaska-based USGS biologist who is now chief scientist at Polar Bears International.

“All bears are not created equal, and if you’re a really big bear, like a polar bear, you need to have a rich food source to sustain you,” Amstrup said.

Ringed seals, the primary prey for polar bears, are precisely that rich food source, with fat accounting for up to half their body weight, Amstrup said. The food sources on land cannot compare in quality or quantity, he said.

Consumption of bird eggs, birds, shore plants and even seaweed is not necessarily widespread, Rode and Amstrup said. Only a small portion of any of the world’s polar bear populations have been observed doing such foraging, Rode said. And an important indicator that it is not doing much to help overall polar bear survival is that in the places where such behavior has been most frequently documented, polar bears have declined in population and in body condition, she said.

In some cases, polar bears have gone to extraordinary lengths to get at their alternate food sources. The study includes a photograph from Svalbard showing a bear perched precariously on a ledge in Svalbard and trying to get at murre nests lodged in the steep rocky cliff there.

That might be a sign of desperation, Amstrup said. “Foraging on the high cliff is very, very high-risk and the bears have to be really hungry before they take on that risk,” he said.

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

Image: Loren Holmes

Sting and Elton John (Piano)

[ed. Sorry, been away for a couple days. I'll be gone this weekend and a few days after. Enjoy the archives.]