The Beach Boys

Blocking Enzymes in Hair Follicles Promotes Hair Growth

Inhibiting a family of enzymes inside hair follicles that are suspended in a resting state restores hair growth, a new study from researchers at Columbia University Medical Center has found. The research was published today in the online edition of Science Advances.

In experiments with mouse and human hair follicles, Angela M. Christiano, PhD, and colleagues found that drugs that inhibit the Janus kinase (JAK) family of enzymes promote rapid and robust hair growth when applied to the skin.

The study raises the possibility that JAK inhibitors could be used to restore hair growth in forms of hair loss induced by male pattern baldness, and other types of hair loss that occur when hair follicles are trapped in a resting state. Two JAK inhibitors have been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One is approved for treatment of blood diseases (ruxolitinib) and the other for rheumatoid arthritis (tofacitinib). Both are being tested in clinical trials for the treatment of plaque psoriasis and alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss.

“What we’ve found is promising, though we haven’t yet shown it’s a cure for pattern baldness,” said Dr. Christiano. “More work needs to be done to test if JAK inhibitors can induce hair growth in humans using formulations specially made for the scalp.”

Christiano and her colleagues serendipitously discovered the effect of JAK inhibitors have on hair follicles when they were studying alopecia areata, a form of hair loss that’s caused by an autoimmune attack on the hair follicles. Christiano and colleagues reported last year that JAK inhibitors shut off the signal that provokes the autoimmune attack, and that oral forms of the drug restore hair growth in some people with the disorder.

In the course those experiments, Dr. Christiano noticed that mice grew more hair when the drug was applied to the skin than when the drug was given systemically. This suggested JAK inhibitors might be doing something to the hair follicles in addition to stopping the immune attack.

JAK inhibitors trigger the follicles’ normal reawakening process, the researchers found. Mice treated for five days with one of two JAK inhibitors sprouted new hair within 10 days, greatly accelerating the onset of hair growth. No hair grew on control mice within the same amount of time. (...)

“There aren’t many compounds that can push hair follicles into their growth cycle so quickly,” said Dr. Christiano. “Some topical agents induce tufts of hair here and there after a few weeks, but very few compounds have this potent an effect so quickly.” The drugs also produce longer hair from human hair follicles grown in culture and on skin grafted onto mice.

by Columbia University Medical Center |  Read more:
Image: S. Harel et al., Sci. Adv. 1, e1500973 (2015)

Lykke Li

Trey Gowdy Just Elected Hillary Clinton President

What happened on the Hill Thursday echoed the famous scene from All the President's Men, when super-source Deep Throat scolds reporter Bob Woodward for botching a story about hated Nixon henchman H.R. Haldeman.

"You let Haldeman slip away," says Deep Throat.

"Yes," answers a sheepish Woodward.

"You've done worse than let Haldeman slip away. You've got people feeling sorry for him. I didn't think that was possible."

With Thursday's interminable, pointless, haranguing, disorganized, utterly amateurish attempt at a smear job, the Republicans and their tenth-rate congressional attack schnauzer, South Carolina's Trey Gowdy, got people feeling sorry for Hillary Clinton. Over the course of 11 long hours, they made the most eloquent argument for a Hillary Clinton presidency yet offered by anyone, including Clinton herself.

Hillary's detractors, and I've been one of them, have long complained that she is a politician without firm principles. She, her husband and the other Third Way types who've dominated the modern Democratic Party specialize in a kind of transactional politics, in which issues are endlessly parsed to maintain a balance between fundraising interests and populist concerns. It's a strategy that wins elections, but doesn't get the heart racing much.

But there is one overriding principle that does animate and define the Clinton campaign, and that's keeping Republicans out of office. For years, this has been the Democratic Party's stock answer for every sordid legislative compromise, every shameless capitulation to expediency, every insulting line of two-faced stump rhetoric offered to get over: We have to do this to beat the Republicans.

I never bought that argument, for a lot of reasons, but Trey Gowdy made it look pretty good Thursday. Those idiots represent everything that is wrong not just with the Republican Party, but with modern politics in general. It's hard to imagine a political compromise that wouldn't be justified if its true aim would be to keep people like those jackasses out of power.

What was that whole thing about? What was Gowdy trying to prove? That Sidney Blumenthal had Hillary's private email address, and an ambassador didn't?

The overriding implication of the Benghazi hearing seemed to be that Hillary Clinton was so crass, unfeeling and politically self-involved as to not care if members of her State Department were massacred. Again, Hillary has a lot of flaws, but we're supposed to believe that she doesn't have a problem with dead Americans? Seriously?

This is the same kind of abject stupidity we saw in the 9/11 Truth movement, which believed unquestioningly that a whole bund of Bush administration officials was willing to see Americans murdered en masse in order to further some convoluted world domination scheme. (...)

If you follow partisanship to the extreme, this is where you end up: Israel-Palestine, Serbia-Albania, Ajax-Feyenoord, Sox-Yankees, Republicans-Democrats. You get to a place where you don't merely disagree with your opponents, you actively disbelieve in their basic humanity.

The Republicans at the Benghazi hearing made Hillary a proxy for an aspect of this phenomenon that virtually every blue-state American has seethed at in the last decade or so: being accused of treason.

We've been told that we hate veterans, that we sympathize with terrorists, that we long for a UN takeover or Soviet rule. It's said all the time that it makes us happy to see cops shot or soldiers killed in battle. Not only do we hear this on right-wing TV, we see the amazing spectacle of millions of conservatives believing it. To believe this stuff, you'd have to believe we aren't even people.

Hillary was forced into that same narrative Thursday. In this hearing she wasn't really being accused of mismanaging just the latest of thousands of logistical screw-ups by the U.S. government over the years.

On a deeper level the Republican committee members were accusing her of not caring about martyred American lives, because, well, "liberals" only care about the victims of torture or police brutality or other special interest groups they can exploit for political gain. In conservative legend, they don't care about "regular" Americans.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

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Clark Little
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My Mum Was a Keanu Reeves Superfan

[ed. Me too. I'll watch anything with Keanu in it.]

For as long as I can remember, my mom has been a Keanu Reeves super fan. She’s had a non-stop obsession with the actor and musician since 1994, and it’s one she’s been unable to shake. “It has nothing to do with the fame,” she told me. “I like him because he is a beautiful person who has endured the same struggles and challenges in life as me. But, if I was to say it has nothing to do with his looks, I would be lying.”

Meredith Nirui, my mom, moved to Japan in 1989 to escape the Islamic leadership transition in Iran, and became more aware of western culture after witnessing the legions of Hollywood-obsessed Japanese girls in Kobe. After my father forced her to watch the movie Speed, starring Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, my mom took an immediate interest in the Canadian actor. “I remember absolutely hating action movies and I was really mad your dad forced me to watch this film with tons of explosions and violence,” she said, “but the moment I started watching Speed, I was so mesmerized by Keanu. I loved absolutely everything about him, and he had such a great energy. I can't quite explain it.”

From this moment on, she religiously kept tabs on the actor in the media, while forming an impressive VHS collection of Keanu's films — Point Break, Feeling Minnesota, My Own Private Idaho—you name it. “I joined a Keanu fan club online and would visit the forums every night and stay on for hours. I would put you and your brother to bed and rush to the computer,” she said. “From the web, I learned he was the bass player in the post-grunge band Dogstar. They became my new favourite band.”

By 1996, my mom had built a detailed Keanu shrine on the interior of our linen closet, featuring a bunch of posters and cut-outs from TV Weekly and other tabloid mags, along with a life-size framed Keanu poster stapled to our living room wall. When she discovered through a forum that Dogstar was touring in the U.S, she saw this as an opportunity not only to see him in the flesh, but to potentially profess her love for him face-to-face. “A completely random girl asked me if I wanted to meet her in Chicago and drive around to all the shows. I was really scared of meeting a stranger off the Internet, but I had Keanu in mind and would do whatever it took to get to him.” She met with the stranger in Chicago, and they drove for days over the span of two weeks to see Keanu play each and every show.

by Ava Nirui, Dazed | Read more:
Image: Meredith Nirui

Some Thoughts About Constant Connectivity

I don’t have a smartphone. I am aware that this puts me in an ever-shrinking demographic (when I got my most recent phone, a model so simple that its most advanced feature is a slide-out keyboard, the person helping me called over two of her co-workers because none of them had seen it before), and there are certainly annoyances I put up with to maintain that status: When I’m heading somewhere unfamiliar I have to plan my journey out in advance. I always need to remind people that if they’re going to be late or they need to cancel plans they have to text me because I can’t get email. I spend a lot of time standing on line thinking about things instead of calming myself with crushable candy or whatever. (This is perhaps the hardest part of refusing to enter our mobile world; there is almost no one who needs protection from being alone with his thoughts more than I do.) And yet I persist, because I refuse to become a hostage to the web. I refuse to be always available. I refuse to forget that most of life is boredom and discomfort with no easy recourse to distraction.

I have no illusion that my refusals are in any way reflective of a growing movement against constant connection. If anything, it’s only going further the other way. For example: Do people in Silicon Valley ever turn off their phones? The answer seems to be an occasional, semi-braggy “yes, but only when I’m running marathons,” which is overshadowed by an overwhelming “no, not really, not by choice,” or, as one person actually put it, “We’re building a company for the long term and being offline is not an option.” “I do sleep with my phone under my pillow, though!” says a woman who prides herself on carving out two-to-four hours “away from device-enabled connectivity.”

I get it. I understand that once you have the technology it is almost impossible not to use it, even if you know it is ultimately bad for you. I am aware that making yourself constantly available—creating a world, in fact, where being unavailable is not an option—is a way to signal how busy and vital and valuable you are. If your self-esteem is completely wrapped up in the idea that “online” equals “working” and “working” is how you demonstrate your level of importance, the idea that you might miss an email is horrifying, because it robs you of your carefully-constructed concept of yourself as a dynamic, important part of the digital age.

And then there’s this: “I can come up with a long list of reasons why you should be a lot more worried about people who are on their phones than people who are off them. But culture is a weird thing. Sometimes we want to be pure and above it all, to be observational. Other times we want to fit in. At that moment, in that bar, anyone not looking at their phone was presumed to be a serial killer. So I took mine out of my pocket and looked at it, and everyone else chilled out.”

by Alex Balk, The Awl |  Read more:

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Crusty Broiled Cod with Littlenecks and Chouriço

Setting the Oven to ‘Broil’

INGREDIENTS
½ cup panko, lightly toasted
¼ cup chopped parsley
3 tablespoons minced garlic
1 tablespoon lemon zest
¼ cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
4 5-ounce pieces cod fillet, about 1 to 1 1/2 inches thick
1 lemon, quartered
2 tablespoons medium or hotsmoked paprika
Salt
Cracked black pepper
½ pound chouriço, diced medium
12 littleneck clams, well washed
½ cup dry white wine

PREPARATION
Heat broiler (to high if you have the option).

Combine panko, parsley, garlic, lemon zest and 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a small bowl, mix well and set aside.

Rub cod and lemon quarters all over with remaining oil, sprinkle with paprika, salt and pepper, then place in 9-by-12-inch shallow baking dish or disposable foil pan. Arrange chouriço and clams around cod and pour in wine. Place under broiler on top rack (about 3 to 4 inches from flame) and broil, turning dish back to front after about 5 minutes, until fish is almost opaque and littlenecks are open, 10 to 12 minutes.

Sprinkle panko mixture over the cod and return to broiler until crumbs are crispy golden brown, another 2 to 3 minutes.

Split cod, clams, chouriço, and lemon among 4 shallow bowls, pour pan juices around and serve.

by John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Rikki Snyder

Animal Collective

[ed. Probably as close as anyone's gotten to the old Beach Boys sound. Too bad they couldn't keep it going.]

Nobuyoshi Araki
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Should You Be Allowed to Invest in a Lawsuit?

The Miller quick coupler comes in a few different sizes. The one I tried out has the proportions of a laundry bin and weighs nearly 700 pounds. It allows the operators of hydraulic digging machines to switch buckets without ever leaving the cab. Two flanges rise from its sides, supplying it with the Volks­wagen-like curves that inspired its nickname, the Bug. The flanges are drilled clean through with four holes set inside four bosses; beneath the front pair of holes are two upturned latches, like the open ends of two wrenches. Other than its poppy-red color, the device appears to be an ordinary specimen from the menagerie of heavy-duty construction equipment.

But in a Chicago courtroom on Oct. 26, the Bug will star in a multimillion-dollar dispute that represents a new frontier in the march of global capitalism. The nominal occasion is a paternity feud between two of the Bug’s corporate parents, Miller UK, the equipment manufacturer based in Cramlington, England, and Caterpillar, the American construction-equipment giant that was once Miller’s biggest customer. The themes of Miller UK v. Caterpillar are classics of the intellectual-property genre: greed, betrayal, bloodlines. But Miller’s method of funding its side of the production is something new. Rather than paying its lawyers out of pocket, Miller has turned to a private firm to front the money for its legal costs: the Illinois-based Arena Consulting, which is headed by two brothers, Herbert and Douglas Lichtman. If Miller loses, Arena gets nothing. If it wins, Arena will get a share of the proceeds, which could run well into the tens of millions of dollars.

This new form of lawsuit funding is called litigation finance. It lies at the crossroads of two Anglo-American tendencies. The first is our litigious side, in which we celebrate our equality before the law by dragging those who have wronged us before a judge. The second is our ingenious mercantilism, as demonstrated by our penchant for turning everything from church raffles to mortgages into marketable securities to be chopped up, bundled and resold. Like the celebrity bonds backed by royalties and popularized by David Bowie during the 1990s, litigation finance represents the expansion of securitization into hitherto virgin territory. Those involved in the practice argue that it allows smaller companies like Miller to afford a day in court. Detractors worry that it could give rise to a litigation arms race, with speculative money aggravating the already high costs of the American legal system.

While the amount of litigation funded by outside financiers is still relatively small, the industry — which barely existed outside personal-injury cases until the mid-2000s — is growing rapidly, driven by increasingly permissive laws, the promise of high returns and hourly billing rates that run $500 or more for the largest and most sophisticated law firms. Between 2013 and 2014, Burford Capital, a public company traded in Britain, increased its lawsuit investments from $150 million to $500 million. During the same period, its profits rose by 89 percent, with a 61 percent net profit margin. The two-year-old Gerchen Keller, one of the industry’s youngest funds, has now raised $475 million in private capital. With investor-backed war chests, plaintiffs are crossing borders to find the most favorable jurisdictions, and sometimes enlisting the help of foreign governments. Like equities and mortgages, lawsuits are making a transition from a private arrangement to a fully monetized asset class. The ‘‘portfolio’’ held by IMF Bentham, an Australia-based funder, consists of 39 cases, which the firm values at just over $2 billion. United States lawmakers are beginning to ask questions. In August, two senators from the Judiciary Committee sent letters to major funders asking them for the names of the cases they had invested in and many details of their business dealings. The letter called litigation finance a ‘‘burgeoning industry’’ that was ‘‘largely unregulated and operates with no licensing or oversight.’’

Larger companies, even those with their own in-house counsel, are selling off pieces of lawsuits to smooth out cash flow and offload risk. Juridica Investments, a Miami-based fund with $650 million under management, specializes in working with Fortune 500 companies, which make up 80 to 85 percent of its investments, according to Richard Fields, its chief executive, who says that outside funding helps align the interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers with those of their clients. ‘‘You want the largest recovery, in the shortest time, with the least uncertainty,’’ he says. Smaller companies can use litigation financing to finance growth, by using their future award as a credit line.

Over the last century, many have come to see lawsuits as a means of expression, a political weapon and a powerful deterrent against those who might do wrong. And yet creating lawsuits is not the same as creating something like the Bug. Litigation is a zero-sum industry — every dollar in damages taken home by the winner, minus fees, must be wrung out of the loser. Litigation also helps shape legal precedent, defining the terms under which civil justice may be sought. It’s hard to imagine how billions in outside capital won’t wind up changing the justice system. The only question is how.

by Mattathias Schwartz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sam Island

Romantic Regimes

In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend a school year in the United States. It was a prestigious scholarship; I was 16 and my parents were very excited about the possibility of my somehow slipping into Yale or Harvard afterwards. I, however, could think of only one thing: getting an American boyfriend.

In my desk, I kept a precious document of American life, sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York a year earlier: an article about the Pill, ripped from the US girls’ magazine Seventeen. I read it lying in bed, feeling my throat getting dry. Staring into its glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in a different country, I would turn into someone beautiful, someone boys turned their heads for. I dreamed that I would need this kind of pill, too.

Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and borrowed a stack of Seventeens that stood taller than me. I was determined to find out precisely what happened between American boys and girls when they started liking each other, and what I was supposed to say and do in order to reach the stage when ‘the Pill’ would prove necessary. Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I looked for words and expressions that had to do with American conduct in courtship and wrote them out on separate cards, just like my English teacher in St Petersburg had taught me.

I soon gathered that the lifecycle of a Seventeen-approved relationship went through several clear stages. First, you developed a ‘crush’, normally on a boy a year or two older than yourself. Then, you asked around a bit to establish whether he was a ‘cutie’ or a ‘moron’. If he was the former, Seventeen gave you thumbs up to ‘hook up’ with him once or twice after ‘asking him out’. Throughout the process, several boxes needed to be ticked: did you feel like the young man ‘respected your needs’? Were you comfortable ‘asserting your rights’ – in particular, refusing or initiating ‘body contact’? How was the ‘communication’? If any of the boxes remained unticked, you would ‘dump’ him and start looking for a replacement, until someone who was ‘good boyfriend material’ came along. Then you would start ‘making out on the couch’ and graduate into a Pill‑user.

Sitting in the American school library, I stared at my dozens of handwritten notes and saw an abyss opening up: a gulf between the ideals of love that I had grown up with and the exotic stuff I was now encountering. Where I came from, boys and girls were ‘falling in love’ and ‘seeing each other’; the rest was a mystery. The teen film drama that my generation of Russians grew up with – a socialist replica of Romeo and Juliet set in a Moscow commuter neighbourhood – was deliciously unspecific when it came to declarations of love. To express his feelings for the heroine, the protagonist recited the multiplication tables: ‘Two times two is four. It is as certain as my love. Three times three is nine. That means you are mine. And two times nine is 18, and that’s my favourite number because at 18 we will get married.’

What else was there to say? Not even our 1,000-page Russian novels could match the complexity of Seventeen’s romantic system. When engaging in love affairs, the countesses and officers were not exactly eloquent; they acted before they spoke, and afterwards, if they weren’t dead as a result of their hasty undertakings, they gazed around speechless and scratched their heads in search of explanations.

Although I did not yet have a PhD in sociology, it turned out that what I had been doing with the copies of Seventeen was exactly the kind of work that sociologists of emotion perform in order to understand how we conceptualise love. By analysing the language of popular magazines, TV shows and self-help books and by conducting interviews with men and women in different countries, scholars including Eva Illouz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have demonstrated clearly that our ideas about love are dominated by powerful political, economic and social forces. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we can call romantic regimes: systems of emotional conduct that affect how we speak about how we feel, determine ‘normal’ behaviours, and establish who is eligible for love – and who is not.

The clash of romantic regimes was precisely what I was experiencing on that day in the school library. The Seventeen girl was trained for making decisions about whom to get intimate with. She rationalised her emotions in terms of ‘needs’ and ‘rights’, and rejected commitments that did not seem compatible with them. She was raised in the Regime of Choice. By contrast, classic Russian literature (which, when I was coming of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described succumbing to love as if it were a supernatural power, even when it was detrimental to comfort, sanity or life itself. In other words, I grew up in the Regime of Fate.

by Polina Aronson, Aeon | Read more:
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Laurel Canyon Daze

The epic tales of Laurel Canyon’s heyday continues to linger like the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air… It’s here that the SoCal sound was born out of an era of relaxed morals (sex), folks expanding their mental horizons (drugs), and a wave of eclectic misfits coming from all over to launch, reinvent, or escape their musical careers (rock ‘n’ roll) in this sleepy, smoky, winding hippy enclave. And the women, Mama Cass & Joni Mitchell, were the (wise and worldly beyond their years) matriarchs watching over over this peaceful, easy-feeling, community headquartered on Lookout Mountain. Henry Diltz was a friend and photographer to many in the scene those days, and his visual record and memories of these times is priceless.

“When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said, ‘Ask anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live and they’ll say Lookout Mountain.’ So I bought a house on Lookout Mountain.” —Joni Mitchell

by Jon Patrick, The Selvedge Yard |  Read more: 

Image: Henry Diltz

A Stay-At-Home Dad Documents His Sex Life on a Fitbit

For dinner, make Lisa’s favorites: Southwestern kale with black bean salad and organic chicken soup. Thoughtfully leave out the black beans since Lisa complained that they made her gassy during her early-morning hot yoga class.

Heartrate: 81 bpm
- -

Set the table with the wine glasses we use only for Thanksgiving and the silver candelabra with hanging crystal hearts I bought on sale last week at Bed, Bath & Beyond.

Heartrate: 86 bpm
- -

Give Lisa smoldering, seductive looks from across the table during dinner, while Piper smears chewed kale on the wall and Caleb burps loudly while picking craisins from the salad with his fingers.

Heartrate: 74 bpm
- -

Wash dishes, scour the countertops and stove. Spend an extra five minutes scrubbing the spinach and chia seed residue from Lisa’s Vitamix Turboblend 4500.

Heartrate: 91 bpm
- -

Bathe the children, get them in jammies, read a bedtime story about an ambitious rooster that dreams of becoming a trapeze artist. Tuck them them into bed and sing “Itsy Bitsy Spider” five times until they fall into a peaceful slumber.

Heartrate: 94 bpm
- -

Stand in our bedroom doorway as Lisa changes into satin boxers and a tight tank top. Casually mention the healthy dinner, spotless kitchen, bathed children, and extra-clean Vitamix Turboblend 4500. Wait for Lisa to offer a sexual reward for the many well-done domestic tasks. When Lisa offers nothing, take a more direct route and ask Lisa if tonight is convenient for sexual relations. Remind Lisa it’s been two weeks since our last coupling.

Heartrate: 96 bpm
- -

Do a vigorous fist pump in the hallway after Lisa checks her phone for any morning meetings, glances at her watch, and then consents to sexual relations.

Heartrate: 98 bpm
- -

Prepare for our amorous encounter: brush and floss teeth, apply Acqua di Gio to neck and earlobes, scrub my private parts vigorously with a hot washrag in case Lisa feels wild tonight, like last February when she drank too many margaritas at her book club and actually suggested that we make love that night on our bedroom floor.

Heartrate: 87 bpm
- -

Lie on the bed and wait as Lisa finishes the final chapter of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Give more smoldering, seductive looks and hope that Lisa sees the enormous bulge protruding from my flannel pjs.

Heartrate: 66 bpm
- -

Listen patiently as Lisa recounts the entire plot of Vampire Chronicles: Volume 1. Nod eagerly and hope my energetic headshaking disperses the cologne and puts Lisa in a sexy mood.

Heartrate: 83 bpm

by Ryan Shoemaker, McSweeny's |  Read more:

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Thorsten Hasenkamm
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US States Move Quickly in VW Case

[ed. Caution: feeding frenzy. Having been involved in similar litigation, I can only imagine the legal manuevering going on behind the scenes. Greed is pretty ugly. But VW also comprises a major component of Germany's economy, so it'll be interesting to see what political influence is brought to bear on the situation going forward. The criminal case will be bad enough, the civil case could last for decades.]

With billions of dollars at stake in restitution and penalties, U.S. states are moving quickly to try to hold Volkswagen accountable for its emissions-cheating scandal.

Forty-five states and D.C. have joined a multistate investigation led by attorneys general, which is determining how VW was able to game emissions tests to hide that its "Clean Diesel" cars emitted smog-causing exhaust up to 40 times dirtier than the law allows. California and Texas are conducting their own investigations for now. At least one county, Harris County in Texas, also is going after Volkswagen with a lawsuit seeking more than $100 million.

The attorneys general are expected to seek compensation for consumers and redress for environmental harm, building their investigations under state laws that protect consumers from deceptive trade practices and set clean air standards.

"This is a really important case and it has big economic and health consequences. It's nowhere near the scale of tobacco but you are kind of in that realm," said former Wisconsin governor and attorney general Jim Doyle, who participated in the multistate investigation that ended with a landmark $200 billion, 25-year settlement with tobacco companies in 1998. "This is the kind of case that you elect an AG for, to stand up for the safety and health of the people of the state."

Volkswagen is "looking at an enormous settlement, just enormous, when you think about how many cars are out there," he said.

The case, in some respects, presents a slam dunk: Volkswagen has already admitted wrongdoing, affecting roughly a half million cars in the United States.

"This case makes me miss my AG days because there's such an opportunity to send a message, and the states can be at the forefront of sending a message," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., former attorney general of his state.

Blumenthal said he was stunned by news that the world's largest carmaker had rigged its software to dupe emissions tests. "Astonishment bordering on disbelief that a company could be so absurdly arrogant and lawless that it would knowingly engage in this type of conduct," he said.

The multistate group formed unusually quickly given the company's admissions, but the investigation could last years. For comparison, a multi-state attorneys general investigation of ignition switch defects involving GM cars - a review that started shortly after GM announced a recall 20 months ago - remains active today. (...)

Volkswagen may want to deal first with any criminal charges before discussing any civil settlement, as the Justice Department investigates potential illegality by the company and its executives. The Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Trade Commission are also investigating.

"Until the criminal case clears, nobody is going to talk about civil. Volkswagen will not settle until the criminal investigations are resolved," said James E. Tierney, program director of the national state attorneys general program at Columbia Law School, and a former Maine attorney general.

by Ronnie Greene and Ryan J. Foley, AP |  Read more:

Image: Luca Bruno

A Canadian Votes From New York

[ed. Congratulations to Justin Trudeau. And good luck.]

The inevitability of moving to America, if you grow up in Canada, is a benevolent ultimatum: will you or won’t you? Will you stay in Canada, your home and native land, a country with the kind of social infrastructure that (in theory) respects the life and health of its citizen, that gives communities and their individual inhabitants (in theory) the rights and support necessary to live their lives as they please? In doing so, will you resign yourself to swirl in a drain of repetitive platitudes and ineffective yet unimpeachable traditions that never stops moving but seems, somehow, to never move forward?

Or will you move to America—a default term so often compromising only New York—to take advantage of the wide spaces and vast resources (in theory), the promise of unfettered financial opportunity and limitless professional acclaim (in theory)? In doing so, will you admit to callously abandoning your neighbours, your family, the very lifeline that provided the privileges necessary to even reach out and touch such a Northern Hemisphere-specific dream, without so much as a culturally obligatory apology?

Canada is a country constantly defined by opposition. Often (almost always) this opposing contrast comes from America, a neighbour close enough to cast a country-wide shadow. Canada, as seen from America, is an eerily similar counterpart, close enough for scrutiny but not far enough for perspective: either a nearby nirvana or a malevolent microcosm. The promise of our cheerfully praised globally recognized political characteristics, such as socialized healthcare or Drake, suggests a welcome respite from what are America’s less-favourable globally recognized characteristics—the cynicism, the capitalism, the crushing pursuit of no less than complete control.

One of the truest clichés about young, career-driven Canadians living in Toronto is that the “upwards” in “upwardly mobile” refers to the ascending ninety-minute flight to New York. There is, my peers and I tell ourselves, simply more in America: there are more schools, more people, more jobs, more money. There is, our friends back home remind us, simply nothing better in America: nothing secure, nothing guaranteed, nothing given. To leave one for the other is to address the unanswerable question at the root of choosing Canada or America: why leave? The response—why stay?—is maddeningly unsatisfying for both the asker and answerer. In any case, I left Toronto for New York six months ago.

Today is a federal election and my first time voting as an ex-pat. Canadians vote for candidates in their electoral district (called a “riding”), as per the regulations of Canada’s electoral system; there are currently twenty-three registered political parties candidates can be affiliated with, but the predominant parties to watch are the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the New Democratic Party (known as the NDP), as well as, to a slightly lesser extent, the Green Party and the Bloc Quebecois. Candidates who win a riding represent that district as a Member of Parliament (known as MPs), and the party with the most winning candidates becomes the ruling government and their leader the Prime Minister. The risk of splitting the vote is high, and real, particularly between the two left-leaning parties, the Liberals and the NDP. As voters, we can vote for the candidate we think would be best for our neighbourhoods, or we can vote for the candidate who belongs to the party we want to become the ruling government, or we can hope for a candidate who fulfills both those requirements. It is…confusing!

Recently my friend, Nicolae Rusan, told me he was helping to organize the #NoHarper event for Canadians living in New York: together with some of his friends from McGill University—often referred to as “Canada’s Harvard”—they were fundraising for an independent advocacy group called Leadnow currently running a campaign to ultimately defeat the sitting Conservative government and Stephen Harper—often referred to as “Canada’s Richard Nixon”—by educating people to vote strategically in the ridings with the most contentious campaigns for MPs.

His former classmate, Marie-Marguerite Sabongui, sits on the board of Leadnow. She had the idea for the event while drinking beers at Ontario Bar in Williamsburg (it is an Ontario-themed bar). They were, according to Sabongui, “disenfranchised and angry” about the recent Ontario Court of Appeals decision to uphold a rule that prevents Canadians from living abroad for more than five years to vote. Originally put into place in 1993, most Canadians retained their right to vote simply by visiting the country every five years—even a connecting flight through a Canadian airport counted as a visit—until 2007, when the ruling began to be strictly enforced in the most literal terms: if you didn’t have an address on Canadian soil, you could not vote. A 2014 lawsuit restored the original interpretation, but this was overturned in June 2015.

As a direct result, approximately 1.4 million Canadian citizens are not eligible to vote in the current federal election. As an indirect result, the comparison between Harper and Nixon has become particularly apt. Harper’s party has been directly implicated in the push to disenfranchise as many voters as possible, alongside a multitude of other sins. In The Guardian, Nick Davies recently outlined some of the most recent and egregious offences:

In the 11 years since he became the leader of the country’s Conservatives, the party has been fined for breaking electoral rules and various members of Team Harper have been caught misleading parliament, gagging civil servants, subverting parliamentary committees, gagging scientists, harassing the Supreme Court, gagging diplomats, lying to the public, concealing evidence of potential crime, spying on opponents, bullying and smearing. (...)

Last year, in an essay published on n+1, Marianne Lenabat quoted Harper in 2006: “You won’t recognize Canada when I’m through with it.” His point, punctuated for dramatic flourish, is often cited to underscore the one-sided mirror of a relationship between Harper and his constituents. There is an “I” in Harper and a “you” in us. But this statement suggests that Harper was taking for granted Canada already had an identity that is both easily recognizable and internally accepted, a firm identity with leftist leanings that he was reorienting towards a more austere path, a face only a fellow Canadian could love. I am not sure that that identity ever completely existed or if it is, like other forms of nostalgic reference, a past fantasy used to foster present frustrations: yes, we’re supposed to think in the simplest terms possible, clean up this place, which is so messy I don’t even recognize it anymore! (...)

In that same Guardian article, Davies mentioned one of my favorite anecdotes about Harper: while his brothers became accountants, he pursued a pre-political career as an economist, claiming he did not have the personality to become an accountant. This aligns with the Stephen Harper public persona I know best: the man I’ve seen represent my country for the last nine years is known for his dullness, his dryness, his perceived disdain for other people. It is hard to reconcile the idea of a man who felt himself antisocial enough to choose the kind of career that would allow him to work in solitude, yet wants to represent millions of Canadians to the world; the kind of man who self-identifies as most comfortable when unobserved, yet also decorates his office with self-portraits. And yet this is an equation that continues to add up in Harper’s favour, as befits an economist who knows his calculations. Harper has won three elections. Despite the best efforts of multiple parties, activists, and lobbyists to convince Canadians to vote otherwise, multiple polls leading up to the election were consistently too close to accurately predict which party will pull ahead and with what percentage of votes, suggesting that, at the very least, Canadians were not ready to declare their firm opposition to Harper, but had not settled on their other, singular option. This is, I think, a symptom of the confusing messages dispersed across our wide and disparate land mass: vote, but vote with caution. As a result, Harper’s version of divide-and-conquer becomes not so ominous as it is elementary: for him, Canada will be a long division equation to solve, and he will keep breaking down the numbers until there are simply no remainders left.

by Haley Mlotek, The Hairpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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