Thursday, December 3, 2015
The Third Son
Back in the house, the father sat at the dinner table, before his wife’s cold feet. He smoked; whispered to himself; watched the lonely life of a little gray bird in its cage; cried from time to time, then grew calm again; wound up his pocket watch; observed the weather in the window that changed from wet, tired snow to rain, to chilly autumnal sun; and waited for his sons.
The next day, the eldest arrived by airplane; the five others took two more days to reach home.
The third son brought with him a daughter, a girl of six, who had never seen her grandfather before.
The old woman had been dead for three days, yet her neat body, emaciated by a long illness, didn’t smell of death. After giving her sons a bountiful, healthy life, she had retained for herself only a tiny frugal frame, which she had sustained—even in its most pitiful form—for as long as she could, in order to love her sons and be proud of them, until she died.
Six tall men, aged between twenty and forty, gathered silently around the coffin. The father, the seventh, and smaller and weaker than even his youngest son, held the girl, who kept her eyes shut from fear of the strange dead woman whose white eyes seemed to watch her from beneath closed lids.
The sons shed infrequent tears, and strained their faces to keep their grief quiet. The father didn’t cry; he’d had his cry earlier, and now watched his progeny with inappropriate joy. Two of the sons had joined the navy and now commanded their own ships. Another worked in a Moscow theater. His third son, who had brought the daughter, was a physicist and a Communist. The youngest was studying to be an agriculturist, and the eldest headed a division at an airplane plant and wore a medal for excellent work. All seven men stood around the dead mother mourning her silently; the sons were hiding their despair, their memories of childhood, of the extinguished happiness of love that had constantly and generously renewed itself in their mother’s heart and that had always, across a thousand miles, found them and made them stronger and bolder. And now she had turned into a corpse. She couldn’t love anyone anymore, but just lay there like an indifferent old stranger.
Each son felt at that moment scared and alone, as though somewhere in a dark meadow, in the window of an old house, a light used to burn, and it illuminated the surrounding night, the flying bugs, the dark blue grass, the clouds of gnats in the air—the entire universe of their childhood—and the doors of that house always remained open for those who had left it, even if none of them chose to return. And now that light was extinguished, and the world it illuminated turned instantly from reality into a memory.
by Andrei Platonov, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Marcellus Hall
Library as Infrastructure
[ed. Fascinating (and sometimes frustrating) essay on the function and future of libraries.]
Melvil Dewey was a one-man Silicon Valley born a century before Steve Jobs. He was the quintessential Industrial Age entrepreneur, but unlike the Carnegies and Rockefellers, with their industries of heavy materiality and heavy labor, Dewey sold ideas. His ambition revealed itself early: in 1876, shortly after graduating from Amherst College, he copyrighted his library classification scheme. That same year, he helped found the American Library Association, served as founding editor of Library Journal, and launched the American Metric Bureau, which campaigned for adoption of the metric system. He was 24 years old. He had already established the Library Bureau, a company that sold (and helped standardize) library supplies, furniture, media display and storage devices, and equipment for managing the circulation of collection materials. Its catalog (which would later include another Dewey invention, the hanging vertical file) represented the library as a “machine” of uplift and enlightenment that enabled proto-Taylorist approaches to public education and the provision of social services. As chief librarian at Columbia College, Dewey established the first library school — called, notably, the School of Library Economy — whose first class was 85% female; then he brought the school to Albany, where he directed the New York State Library. In his spare time, he founded the Lake Placid Club and helped win the bid for the 1932 Winter Olympics.
Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the “knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its significant controversies) embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end — in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?
As Zadie Smith argued beautifully in the New York Review of Books, we risk losing the library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, offered an equally eloquent plea for the library as a space of exception:
by Shannon Mattern, Places | Read more:
Images: Forgemind Archimedia; Pedro Szekely; Thomas Guignard
Dewey was thus simultaneously in the furniture business, the office-supply business, the consulting business, the publishing business, the education business, the human resources business, and what we might today call the “knowledge solutions” business. Not only did he recognize the potential for monetizing and cross-promoting his work across these fields; he also saw that each field would be the better for it. His career (which was not without its significant controversies) embodied a belief that classification systems and labeling standards and furniture designs and people work best when they work towards the same end — in other words, that intellectual and material systems and labor practices are mutually constructed and mutually reinforcing.
Today’s libraries, Apple-era versions of the Dewey/Carnegie institution, continue to materialize, at multiple scales, their underlying bureaucratic and epistemic structures — from the design of their web interfaces to the architecture of their buildings to the networking of their technical infrastructures. This has been true of knowledge institutions throughout history, and it will be true of our future institutions, too. I propose that thinking about the library as a network of integrated, mutually reinforcing, evolving infrastructures — in particular, architectural, technological, social, epistemological and ethical infrastructures — can help us better identify what roles we want our libraries to serve, and what we can reasonably expect of them. What ideas, values and social responsibilities can we scaffold within the library’s material systems — its walls and wires, shelves and servers?
Library as Platform
For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the forms of those resources have changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books, electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of wires, protocols and regulations. At every stage, the contexts — spatial, political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so they are continuously reinventing themselves and the means by which they provide those vital information services.
Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, and the early Carnegie buildings of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500 libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his 1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.
In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally) supports that program.
Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new applications, technologies and processes. In an influential 2012 article in Library Journal, David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the development of knowledge and community. Weinberger argued that libraries should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy, rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens, laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a platform not only for the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.
Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable” “knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even non-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.
Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to do stuff with. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a “cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine what happens on the stage, and that allow it to function as a stage. Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu would call “structuring structures” that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”
It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand how our libraries function as, and as part of, infrastructural ecologies — as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and cultural values that we want to define our communities. (...)
For millennia libraries have acquired resources, organized them, preserved them and made them accessible (or not) to patrons. But the forms of those resources have changed — from scrolls and codices; to LPs and LaserDiscs; to e-books, electronic databases and open data sets. Libraries have had at least to comprehend, if not become a key node within, evolving systems of media production and distribution. Consider the medieval scriptoria where manuscripts were produced; the evolution of the publishing industry and book trade after Gutenberg; the rise of information technology and its webs of wires, protocols and regulations. At every stage, the contexts — spatial, political, economic, cultural — in which libraries function have shifted; so they are continuously reinventing themselves and the means by which they provide those vital information services.
Libraries have also assumed a host of ever-changing social and symbolic functions. They have been expected to symbolize the eminence of a ruler or state, to integrally link “knowledge” and “power” — and, more recently, to serve as “community centers,” “public squares” or “think tanks.” Even those seemingly modern metaphors have deep histories. The ancient Library of Alexandria was a prototypical think tank, and the early Carnegie buildings of the 1880s were community centers with swimming pools and public baths, bowling alleys, billiard rooms, even rifle ranges, as well as book stacks. As the Carnegie funding program expanded internationally — to more than 2,500 libraries worldwide — secretary James Bertram standardized the design in his 1911 pamphlet “Notes on the Erection of Library Buildings,” which offered grantees a choice of six models, believed to be the work of architect Edward Tilton. Notably, they all included a lecture room.In short, the library has always been a place where informational and social infrastructures intersect within a physical infrastructure that (ideally) supports that program.
Now we are seeing the rise of a new metaphor: the library as “platform” — a buzzy word that refers to a base upon which developers create new applications, technologies and processes. In an influential 2012 article in Library Journal, David Weinberger proposed that we think of libraries as “open platforms” — not only for the creation of software, but also for the development of knowledge and community. Weinberger argued that libraries should open up their entire collections, all their metadata, and any technologies they’ve created, and allow anyone to build new products and services on top of that foundation. The platform model, he wrote, “focuses our attention away from the provisioning of resources to the foment” — the “messy, rich networks of people and ideas” — that “those resources engender.” Thus the ancient Library of Alexandria, part of a larger museum with botanical gardens, laboratories, living quarters and dining halls, was a platform not only for the translation and copying of myriad texts and the compilation of a magnificent collection, but also for the launch of works by Euclid, Archimedes, Eratosthenes and their peers.
Yet the platform metaphor has limitations. For one thing, it smacks of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial epistemology, which prioritizes “monetizable” “knowledge solutions.” Further, its association with new media tends to bracket out the similarly generative capacities of low-tech, and even non-technical, library resources. One key misperception of those who proclaim the library’s obsolescence is that its function as a knowledge institution can be reduced to its technical services and information offerings. Knowledge is never solely a product of technology and the information it delivers.
Another problem with the platform model is the image it evokes: a flat, two-dimensional stage on which resources are laid out for users to do stuff with. The platform doesn’t have any implied depth, so we’re not inclined to look underneath or behind it, or to question its structure. Weinberger encourages us to “think of the library not as a portal we go through on occasion but as infrastructure that is as ubiquitous and persistent as the streets and sidewalks of a town.” It’s like a “canopy,” he says — or like a “cloud.” But these metaphors are more poetic than critical; they obfuscate all the wires, pulleys, lights and scaffolding that you inevitably find underneath and above that stage — and the casting, staging and direction that determine what happens on the stage, and that allow it to function as a stage. Libraries are infrastructures not only because they are ubiquitous and persistent, but also, and primarily, because they are made of interconnected networks that undergird all that foment, that create what Pierre Bourdieu would call “structuring structures” that support Weinberger’s “messy, rich networks of people and ideas.”It can be instructive for our libraries’ publics — and critical for our libraries’ leaders — to assess those structuring structures. In this age of e-books, smartphones, firewalls, proprietary media platforms and digital rights management; of atrophying mega-bookstores and resurgent independent bookshops and a metastasizing Amazon; of Google Books and Google Search and Google Glass; of economic disparity and the continuing privatization of public space and services — which is simultaneously an age of democratized media production and vibrant DIY and activist cultures — libraries play a critical role as mediators, at the hub of all the hubbub. Thus we need to understand how our libraries function as, and as part of, infrastructural ecologies — as sites where spatial, technological, intellectual and social infrastructures shape and inform one another. And we must consider how those infrastructures can embody the epistemological, political, economic and cultural values that we want to define our communities. (...)
As Zadie Smith argued beautifully in the New York Review of Books, we risk losing the library’s role as a “different kind of social reality (of the three dimensional kind), which by its very existence teaches a system of values beyond the fiscal.” Barbara Fister, a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, offered an equally eloquent plea for the library as a space of exception:
Libraries are not, or at least should not be, engines of productivity. If anything, they should slow people down and seduce them with the unexpected, the irrelevant, the odd and the unexplainable. Productivity is a destructive way to justify the individual’s value in a system that is naturally communal, not an individualistic or entrepreneurial zero-sum game to be won by the most industrious.Libraries, she argued, “will always be at a disadvantage” to Google and Amazon because they value privacy; they refuse to exploit users’ private data to improve the search experience. Yet libraries’ failure to compete in efficiency is what affords them the opportunity to offer a “different kind of social reality.” I’d venture that there is room for entrepreneurial learning in the library, but there also has to be room for that alternate reality where knowledge needn’t have monetary value, where learning isn’t driven by a profit motive. We can accommodate both spaces for entrepreneurship and spaces of exception, provided the institution has a strong epistemic framing that encompasses both. This means that the library needs to know how to read itself as a social-technical-intellectual infrastructure.
by Shannon Mattern, Places | Read more:
Images: Forgemind Archimedia; Pedro Szekely; Thomas Guignard
Wednesday, December 2, 2015
Dark Clouds Over the Internet
The Internet is routinely described as borderless, and that is often how it feels. Tweet a photo or post a comment, and it is instantly viewable in nearly every country in the world. But a global Internet unbounded by territorial limits is pure fantasy.
Down where the cables lie and the servers spin, territory still matters.
Take user data. While 90 percent of the Internet’s users are outside the United States, the web is dominated by American firms. As a result, a great deal of non-American data is held on American servers. This was tolerable when trust in the United States was high. But after Edward J. Snowden peeled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance efforts, that trust withered.
In response, other nations are increasingly exercising their territorial control over the Internet, often in ways that mimic America’s worst practices.
Earlier this month, the British Home Secretary introduced a bill known as the Snoopers’ Charter that would broadly expand the government’s ability to collect user data — from authorizing the police to hack into phones and computers, to mandating that Internet companies decrypt encrypted communications. The bill goes too far and privacy advocates are right to oppose it.
But governments do have legitimate reasons to seek user data beyond their territorial reach, and privacy advocates ignore that need at their peril.
Ask a police officer anywhere outside of the United States and he’ll tell you that evidence for routine crimes — murder, theft, burglary — is very often stored in the cloud, typically in another jurisdiction. Last year alone, British law enforcement agents made nearly 54,000 requests for data from just five American firms: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.
These requests often go nowhere because America’s 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act only allows technology firms to release American-held data in response to orders from an American judge. So if a British cop is investigating a murder in London, and he has good reason to believe that Google or Facebook has evidence about the crime, he must satisfy an American judge using an American constitutional standard to obtain the evidence. This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.
Exasperation with this process was a key motivation behind the Snoopers’ Charter, and Britain is hardly alone.
Because American law has made it nearly impossible to obtain digital evidence through legitimate channels, foreign police are turning to illegitimate ones. I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.
Down where the cables lie and the servers spin, territory still matters.
Take user data. While 90 percent of the Internet’s users are outside the United States, the web is dominated by American firms. As a result, a great deal of non-American data is held on American servers. This was tolerable when trust in the United States was high. But after Edward J. Snowden peeled back the curtain on the National Security Agency’s Internet surveillance efforts, that trust withered.
In response, other nations are increasingly exercising their territorial control over the Internet, often in ways that mimic America’s worst practices.Earlier this month, the British Home Secretary introduced a bill known as the Snoopers’ Charter that would broadly expand the government’s ability to collect user data — from authorizing the police to hack into phones and computers, to mandating that Internet companies decrypt encrypted communications. The bill goes too far and privacy advocates are right to oppose it.
But governments do have legitimate reasons to seek user data beyond their territorial reach, and privacy advocates ignore that need at their peril.
Ask a police officer anywhere outside of the United States and he’ll tell you that evidence for routine crimes — murder, theft, burglary — is very often stored in the cloud, typically in another jurisdiction. Last year alone, British law enforcement agents made nearly 54,000 requests for data from just five American firms: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo.
These requests often go nowhere because America’s 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act only allows technology firms to release American-held data in response to orders from an American judge. So if a British cop is investigating a murder in London, and he has good reason to believe that Google or Facebook has evidence about the crime, he must satisfy an American judge using an American constitutional standard to obtain the evidence. This cross-border process is notoriously slow. Requests take an average of 10 months — an eon in a criminal investigation — and many languish for years.
Exasperation with this process was a key motivation behind the Snoopers’ Charter, and Britain is hardly alone.
Because American law has made it nearly impossible to obtain digital evidence through legitimate channels, foreign police are turning to illegitimate ones. I recently attended a conference for purveyors of surveillance software — an event unofficially known as the “Wiretappers’ Ball.” I asked one vendor if he was aware of law enforcement’s frustrations with American tech firms. The salesman grinned and told me that police departments now buy his malware precisely because they’re tired of waiting for evidence through established diplomatic channels. This is alarming: Making it harder for the police to get criminal evidence lawfully may actually incentivize them to seek that data by snooping.
by Andrew Keane Woods, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Christopher DeLorenzo
The Invitation
When I was young, and just beginning to travel with them, I imagined that indigenous people saw more and heard more, that they were overall simply more aware than I was. They were more aware, and did see and hear more than I did. The absence of spoken conversation whenever I was traveling with them, however, should have provided me with a clue about why this might be true; but it didn’t, not for a while. It’s this: when an observer doesn’t immediately turn what his senses convey to him into language, into the vocabulary and syntactical framework we all employ when trying to define our experiences, there’s a much greater opportunity for minor details, which might at first seem unimportant, to remain alive in the foreground of an impression, where, later, they might deepen the meaning of an experience.
If my companions and I, for example, encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate the smaller thing within the larger thing, back and forth. As they noticed trace odors in the air, or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten just to ‘meeting the bear’, was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter itself, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund ‘bearing’.
Over the years traveling cross-country with indigenous people I absorbed two lessons about how to be more fully present in an encounter with a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed. Second, the event itself – let’s say we didn’t disturb the grizzly bear as he fed but only took in what he or she was doing and then slipped away – could not be completely defined by referring solely to the physical geography around us in those moments. For example, I might not recall something we’d all seen a half-hour before, a caribou hoof print in soft ground at the edge of a creek, say; but my companions would remember that. And a while after our encounter with the bear, say a half-mile farther on, they would notice something else – a few grizzly bear guard hairs snagged in scales of tree bark – and they would relate it to some detail they’d observed during those moments when we were watching the bear. The event I was cataloging in my mind as ‘encounter with a tundra grizzly’ they were experiencing as a sudden immersion in the current of a river. They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene – the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.
The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects. When they saw the bear they right away began searching for a pattern that was resolving itself before them as ‘a bear feeding on a carcass’. They began gathering various pieces together that might later self-assemble into an event larger than ‘a bear feeding’. These unintegrated pieces they took in as we traveled – the nature of the sonic landscape that permeated this particular physical landscape; the presence or absence of wind, and the direction from which it was coming or had shifted; a piece of speckled eggshell under a tree; leaves missing from the stems of a species of brush; a hole freshly dug in the ground – might individually convey very little. Allowed to slowly resolve into a pattern, however, they might become revelatory. They might illuminate the land further.
If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind.
As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.
If my companions and I, for example, encountered a grizzly bear feeding on a caribou carcass, I would tend to focus almost exclusively on the bear. My companions would focus on the part of the world of which, at that moment, the bear was only a fragment. The bear here might be compared with a bonfire, a kind of incandescence that throws light on everything around it. My companions would glance off into the outer reaches of that light, then look back to the fire, back and forth. They would repeatedly situate the smaller thing within the larger thing, back and forth. As they noticed trace odors in the air, or listened for birdsong or the sound of brittle brush rattling, they in effect extended the moment of encounter with the bear backward and forward in time. Their framework for the phenomenon, one that I might later shorten just to ‘meeting the bear’, was more voluminous than mine; and where my temporal boundaries for the event would normally consist of little more than the moments of the encounter itself, theirs included the time before we arrived, as well as the time after we left. For me, the bear was a noun, the subject of a sentence; for them, it was a verb, the gerund ‘bearing’.Over the years traveling cross-country with indigenous people I absorbed two lessons about how to be more fully present in an encounter with a wild animal. First, I needed to understand that I was entering the event as it was unfolding. It started before I arrived and would continue unfolding after I departed. Second, the event itself – let’s say we didn’t disturb the grizzly bear as he fed but only took in what he or she was doing and then slipped away – could not be completely defined by referring solely to the physical geography around us in those moments. For example, I might not recall something we’d all seen a half-hour before, a caribou hoof print in soft ground at the edge of a creek, say; but my companions would remember that. And a while after our encounter with the bear, say a half-mile farther on, they would notice something else – a few grizzly bear guard hairs snagged in scales of tree bark – and they would relate it to some detail they’d observed during those moments when we were watching the bear. The event I was cataloging in my mind as ‘encounter with a tundra grizzly’ they were experiencing as a sudden immersion in the current of a river. They were swimming in it, feeling its pull, noting the temperature of the water, the back eddies and where the side streams entered. My approach, in contrast, was mostly to take note of objects in the scene – the bear, the caribou, the tundra vegetation. A series of dots, which I would try to make sense of by connecting them all with a single line. My friends had situated themselves within a dynamic event. Also, unlike me, they felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning. Their approach was to let it continue to unfold. To notice everything and to let whatever significance was there emerge in its own time.
The lesson to be learned here was not just for me to pay closer attention to what was going on around me, if I hoped to have a deeper understanding of the event, but to remain in a state of suspended mental analysis while observing all that was happening – resisting the urge to define or summarize. To step away from the familiar compulsion to understand. Further, I had to incorporate a quintessential characteristic of the way indigenous people observe: they pay more attention to patterns in what they encounter than to isolated objects. When they saw the bear they right away began searching for a pattern that was resolving itself before them as ‘a bear feeding on a carcass’. They began gathering various pieces together that might later self-assemble into an event larger than ‘a bear feeding’. These unintegrated pieces they took in as we traveled – the nature of the sonic landscape that permeated this particular physical landscape; the presence or absence of wind, and the direction from which it was coming or had shifted; a piece of speckled eggshell under a tree; leaves missing from the stems of a species of brush; a hole freshly dug in the ground – might individually convey very little. Allowed to slowly resolve into a pattern, however, they might become revelatory. They might illuminate the land further.
If the first lesson in learning how to see more deeply into a landscape was to be continuously attentive, and to stifle the urge to stand outside the event, to instead stay within the event, leaving its significance to be resolved later; the second lesson, for me, was to notice how often I asked my body to defer to the dictates of my mind, how my body’s extraordinary ability to discern textures and perfumes, to discriminate among tones and colors in the world outside itself, was dismissed by the rational mind.
As much as I believed I was fully present in the physical worlds I was traveling through, I understood over time that I was not. More often I was only thinking about the place I was in. Initially awed by an event, the screech of a gray fox in the night woods, say, or the surfacing of a large whale, I too often moved straight to analysis. On occasion I would become so wedded to my thoughts, to some cascade of ideas, that I actually lost touch with the details that my body was still gathering from a place. The ear heard the song of a vesper sparrow, and then heard the song again, and knew that the second time it was a different vesper sparrow singing. The mind, pleased with itself for identifying those notes as the song of a vesper sparrow, was too preoccupied with its summary to notice what the ear was still offering. The mind was making no use of the body’s ability to be discerning about sounds. And so the mind’s knowledge of the place remained superficial.
by Barry Lopez, Granta | Read more:
Image: Angies
Creating Hipsturbia
[ed. Ack... gag me with an organic, free-range muffin. A bit dated but still relevant.]
A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.
Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”
You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.
As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.
But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.
To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.
“I don’t think we need to be in Brooklyn,” said Marie Labropoulos, who recently moved to Westchester County and opened a shop, Kalliste, selling artisanal vegan soap in Dobbs Ferry. “We’re bringing Brooklyn with us.”
Welcome to hipsturbia.
A yoga studio opened on Main Street that offers lunch-hour vinyasa classes. Nearby is a bicycle store that sells Dutch-style bikes, and a farm-to-table restaurant that sources its edible nasturtiums from its backyard garden.
Across the street is the home-décor shop that purveys monofloral honey produced by nomadic beekeepers in Sicily. And down the street is a retro-chic bakery, where the red-velvet cupcakes are gluten-free and the windows are decorated with bird silhouettes — the universal symbol for “hipsters welcome.”You no longer have to take the L train to experience this slice of cosmopolitan bohemia. Instead, you’ll find it along the Metro-North Railroad, roughly 25 miles north of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the suburb of Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y.
Here, beside the gray-suited salarymen and four-door minivans, it is no longer unusual to see a heritage-clad novelist type with ironic mutton chops sipping shade-grown coffee at the patisserie, or hear 30-somethings in statement sneakers discuss their latest film project as they wait for the 9:06 to Grand Central.
As formerly boho environs of Brooklyn become unattainable due to creeping Manhattanization and seven-figure real estate prices, creative professionals of child-rearing age — the type of alt-culture-allegiant urbanites who once considered themselves too cool to ever leave the city — are starting to ponder the unthinkable: a move to the suburbs.
But only if they can bring a piece of the borough with them.
To ward off the nagging sense that a move to the suburbs is tantamount to becoming like one’s parents, this urban-zen generation is seeking out palatable alternatives — culturally attuned, sprawl-free New York river towns like Hastings, Dobbs Ferry, Irvington and Tarrytown — and importing the trappings of a twee lifestyle like bearded mixologists, locavore restaurants and antler-laden boutiques.
“I don’t think we need to be in Brooklyn,” said Marie Labropoulos, who recently moved to Westchester County and opened a shop, Kalliste, selling artisanal vegan soap in Dobbs Ferry. “We’re bringing Brooklyn with us.”
Welcome to hipsturbia.
by Alex Williams, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ryan Inzana
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
How an $84,000 Drug Got Its Price
Gilead Sciences executives were acutely aware in 2013 that their plan to charge an exorbitantly high price for a powerful new hepatitis C drug would spark public outrage, but they pursued the profit-driven strategy anyway, according to a Senate Finance Committee investigation report released Tuesday.
"Let's not fold to advocacy pressure in 2014," Kevin Young, Gilead's executive vice president for commercial operations, wrote in an internal email. ‘‘Let’s hold our position whatever competitors do or whatever the headlines."
Gilead gained federal approval for its drug Sovaldi in late 2013 and ultimately settled on the price of $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment. To the company, that price seemed to deliver the right balance: value to shareholders while also not so high that insurers would "hinder patient access to uncomfortable levels," according to internal documents. But they also got more than they bargained for: an outpouring of outrage from the public, a backlash from government and private payers, and political scrutiny.
The 18-month Senate committee investigation reviewed more than 20,000 pages of company documents.
“The documents show it was always Gilead’s plan to max out revenue, and that accessibility and affordability were pretty much an afterthought," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-led the investigation with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), in a news conference.
In a statement released Tuesday, Gilead disagreed with the conclusions of the report, saying that the price was "in line with previous standards of care.” The company noted that it has programs in place to help uninsured patients and those who need financial assistance access the treatments. More than 600,000 patients around the world have been treated with Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs since 2013, according to the company.
Here are four key takeaways from the investigation:
1. It could have been priced at $115,000 for a course of treatment.
Gilead considered a range of prices for Sovaldi and weighed the value to its shareholders against the "reputational risks," meaning the potential outrage from patients, physicians and payers. The potential prices ranged from $50,000 to $115,000.
Executives believed a $50,000 price would build good will and ensure easy access to the drug because it would be covered by most plans. But it would cause "significant foregone revenue," and activists would still critique the price, even at this relatively low level.
At $115,000, executives were concerned about "external considerations" and predicted: "High levels of advocacy group criticism and negative PR/competitive messaging could be expected at $115K and it would be increasingly difficult to manage at these levels."
2. Gilead priced Sovaldi partly based on the expectation it would set a benchmark for the next drugs in the pipeline.
A company presentation noted that Gilead has "considerable pricing potential" for Sovaldi, but that future pricing for next-generation drug launches would be limited by competition -- what it referred to as a second wave of treatments.
"Wave 1 will set a price benchmark against which Wave 2 will ultimately be evaluated," the presentation stated.
"By elevating the price for the new standard of care set by Sovaldi, Gilead intended to raise the price floor for all future hepatitis C treatments, including its follow-on drugs and those of its competitors," the report states.
Its next hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, was priced at $94,500.
by Carolyn Y. Johnson and Brady Dennis, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Gilead Sciences
"Let's not fold to advocacy pressure in 2014," Kevin Young, Gilead's executive vice president for commercial operations, wrote in an internal email. ‘‘Let’s hold our position whatever competitors do or whatever the headlines."
Gilead gained federal approval for its drug Sovaldi in late 2013 and ultimately settled on the price of $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment. To the company, that price seemed to deliver the right balance: value to shareholders while also not so high that insurers would "hinder patient access to uncomfortable levels," according to internal documents. But they also got more than they bargained for: an outpouring of outrage from the public, a backlash from government and private payers, and political scrutiny.The 18-month Senate committee investigation reviewed more than 20,000 pages of company documents.
“The documents show it was always Gilead’s plan to max out revenue, and that accessibility and affordability were pretty much an afterthought," said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who co-led the investigation with Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), in a news conference.
In a statement released Tuesday, Gilead disagreed with the conclusions of the report, saying that the price was "in line with previous standards of care.” The company noted that it has programs in place to help uninsured patients and those who need financial assistance access the treatments. More than 600,000 patients around the world have been treated with Gilead’s hepatitis C drugs since 2013, according to the company.
Here are four key takeaways from the investigation:
1. It could have been priced at $115,000 for a course of treatment.
Gilead considered a range of prices for Sovaldi and weighed the value to its shareholders against the "reputational risks," meaning the potential outrage from patients, physicians and payers. The potential prices ranged from $50,000 to $115,000.
Executives believed a $50,000 price would build good will and ensure easy access to the drug because it would be covered by most plans. But it would cause "significant foregone revenue," and activists would still critique the price, even at this relatively low level.
At $115,000, executives were concerned about "external considerations" and predicted: "High levels of advocacy group criticism and negative PR/competitive messaging could be expected at $115K and it would be increasingly difficult to manage at these levels."
2. Gilead priced Sovaldi partly based on the expectation it would set a benchmark for the next drugs in the pipeline.
A company presentation noted that Gilead has "considerable pricing potential" for Sovaldi, but that future pricing for next-generation drug launches would be limited by competition -- what it referred to as a second wave of treatments.
"Wave 1 will set a price benchmark against which Wave 2 will ultimately be evaluated," the presentation stated.
"By elevating the price for the new standard of care set by Sovaldi, Gilead intended to raise the price floor for all future hepatitis C treatments, including its follow-on drugs and those of its competitors," the report states.
Its next hepatitis C drug, Harvoni, was priced at $94,500.
by Carolyn Y. Johnson and Brady Dennis, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Gilead Sciences
A Baby Boomer's 9-Step Guide to Millennial Golfers
1) What are millennials, exactly?
The most important group of human beings in history, age 20 to 35, and thin. They're the new guys at your club who say the course is too short and your dress code is prehistoric, meaning pre-Windows 10. Every golf company in America loves millennials, who are so totally high-tech they can understand most driver ads.
2) Are they pretty much all alike?
No. There are two types: Entrepreneurial Millennials (EMs) are rich. They start and sell companies like Cub Scouts sell donuts. Broke Millennials (BMs) flock to work for them at "start-ups," which are basically Junior Achievement projects with serfs. In the time it took to read this, an EM joined your club, added an assessment and lengthened the fifth hole by 50 yards.
3) Why are millennials so important compared to, say,... me?
Companies want their brands to be youthful and vibrant, like millennials. You are a Boomer—old, and old hat. If advertisers were honest, they would tell you: "Your money's no good, old man. Your replacement has arrived." From now on, your survival in the world of commerce—much less golf—depends on your ability to relate to the common millennial.
4) How do I identify one?
The first place to look is your basement. The millennial is typically moody and communicates in clever, ironic bursts. I had one who disappeared after years in my home but left the television set on its video-game function. I have no idea how to get it back to Golf Channel. Millennials start companies like PicPKT, which tells you how many ball markers you have at any time in any of your pockets, and which hand to use to get them. Clever. But keep an eye on the remote.
by Bob Carney, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Appalachia Grasps for Hope as Coal Loses Its Grip
The seams of coal in some of Eddie Asbury's mines in McDowell County are so thin workers can barely squeeze down them. They enter on carts nearly flat on their backs, the roof of the mine coursing by just a few inches in front of their faces. They don't stand up all day.
To keep his business operating with such a paltry amount of coal, Asbury has to do everything himself. He has no use for the shiny, multimillion-dollar mining machines on display this fall at the biannual coal show nearby. His equipment is secondhand stuff that he repairs and refurbishes. The coal he and his workers scrape out of the mountain is washed and prepared for sale in a plant Asbury and a colleague built themselves.
"It's how we survive," says Asbury, 66, a miner since 1971.
Even coal is barely surviving in coal country - and coal is about the only thing that Central Appalachia has.
West Virginia is the only state in the country where more than half of adults are not working, according to the Census Bureau. It is tied with Kentucky for the highest percentage of residents collecting disability payments from Social Security, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the death rate among working-age adults is highest in the nation, 55 percent higher the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And now the one main source for decent-paying work, the brutal life of coal, seems to be drying up for good. The thick, easy, cheap coal is gone, global competition is fierce, and clean air and water regulations are increasing costs and cutting into demand.
Central Appalachia's struggle is familiar to many rural regions across the U.S., where middle-class jobs are disappearing or gone and young people have no other choice than to leave to find opportunity. But the problems are amplified in coal country, where these difficult economic and social conditions have gripped the region for decades and where there is hardly any flat land to build anything.
Every year since 1979, West Virginia has led the country in the percentage of people who are either not working or looking for work. But businesses are reluctant to come set up shop in Central Appalachia and take advantage of the available labor in part because education levels are so low. Forty-two percent of prime-age West Virginians have no more than a high-school degree, nearly double the national average.
"We have a mismatch between the job skills that employers want and the job skills West Virginians have," says John Deskins, director of the Bureau for Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University. "It's a little bit grim. You can cut the data in multiple ways, and West Virginia still lags the nation."
But this crisis - and the realization that there won't be another coal boom in these parts - is leading to a growing understanding that new approaches are needed to help Central Appalachia emerge from decades of deep poverty, under-education and poor health.
To keep his business operating with such a paltry amount of coal, Asbury has to do everything himself. He has no use for the shiny, multimillion-dollar mining machines on display this fall at the biannual coal show nearby. His equipment is secondhand stuff that he repairs and refurbishes. The coal he and his workers scrape out of the mountain is washed and prepared for sale in a plant Asbury and a colleague built themselves.
"It's how we survive," says Asbury, 66, a miner since 1971.Even coal is barely surviving in coal country - and coal is about the only thing that Central Appalachia has.
West Virginia is the only state in the country where more than half of adults are not working, according to the Census Bureau. It is tied with Kentucky for the highest percentage of residents collecting disability payments from Social Security, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. And the death rate among working-age adults is highest in the nation, 55 percent higher the national average, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And now the one main source for decent-paying work, the brutal life of coal, seems to be drying up for good. The thick, easy, cheap coal is gone, global competition is fierce, and clean air and water regulations are increasing costs and cutting into demand.
Central Appalachia's struggle is familiar to many rural regions across the U.S., where middle-class jobs are disappearing or gone and young people have no other choice than to leave to find opportunity. But the problems are amplified in coal country, where these difficult economic and social conditions have gripped the region for decades and where there is hardly any flat land to build anything.
Every year since 1979, West Virginia has led the country in the percentage of people who are either not working or looking for work. But businesses are reluctant to come set up shop in Central Appalachia and take advantage of the available labor in part because education levels are so low. Forty-two percent of prime-age West Virginians have no more than a high-school degree, nearly double the national average.
"We have a mismatch between the job skills that employers want and the job skills West Virginians have," says John Deskins, director of the Bureau for Business and Economic Research at West Virginia University. "It's a little bit grim. You can cut the data in multiple ways, and West Virginia still lags the nation."
But this crisis - and the realization that there won't be another coal boom in these parts - is leading to a growing understanding that new approaches are needed to help Central Appalachia emerge from decades of deep poverty, under-education and poor health.
by Jonathan Fahey, AP | Read more:
Image: David Goldman
The Peculiar Ascent of Bill Murray to Secular Saint
Over the last few years, Mitch Glazer, the screenwriter and producer, has watched with awe and bewilderment what has happened to Bill Murray.
Mr. Glazer has been friends with the actor for decades, and they have worked together on several projects, including “A Very Murray Christmas,” his Netflix holiday special having its premiere on Dec. 4. Mr. Murray first gained notice during his “Saturday Night Live” days in the late ’70s before shooting to stardom with the 1984 comedy “Ghostbusters.” But in the recent past, his fame transcended mere Hollywood celebrity.
“It’s the feeling of how they make crystals,” Mr. Glazer said. “It’s water, it’s water, it’s water, and then it reaches this density, and all of a sudden, it’s this other thing.”
What Mr. Glazer means by “this other thing” is the transformation of Bill Murray the actor into a pop icon.
The kind of figure for whom there is a coloring book, frameable art prints and T-shirts bearing his face in its many moods, from the smirking mug of “Stripes” (1981) to the pensive gray-bearded visage of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004)
The bro-centric website theCHIVE.com holds him up as a hero and wise elder, and sells a popular T-shirt printed with the words “Bill [Expletive] Murray” across the front, with matching stickers available.
Indeed, he now rivals James Dean, Elvis Presley and Albert Einstein in image appropriated bric-a-brac. On Etsy, you can buy: a “Saint Bill Murray” prayer candle; a galvanized metal planter pot showing the actor as the demented, but possibly enlightened, Carl Spackler in the 1980 comedy “Caddyshack”; a set of Bill Murray coasters; coffee mugs in varying graphics; a baby mobile with dangling felt dolls representing his movie characters; and much, much more.
The actor has little or nothing to do with these products and seems not to have brought legal action. People are strangely moved to make this stuff and others to purchase it.
As Mr. Glazer wrote in his recent Vanity Fair cover article on his old friend, there is no equivalent for the Murray worship, even among A-listers. One aspires to the suaveness of George Clooney or the intensity of Daniel Day-Lewis, and perhaps enjoys their movies, but no one buys the T-shirt.
There are murals of Bill Murray that decorate the interiors of bars from Toronto to Sydney, and tattoos of the actor’s face inked onto the arms and calves of 20- and 30-somethings. Tumblr blogs celebrate his awesomeness.
It’s clear that he has come to symbolize something. But what, exactly?
Mr. Glazer has been friends with the actor for decades, and they have worked together on several projects, including “A Very Murray Christmas,” his Netflix holiday special having its premiere on Dec. 4. Mr. Murray first gained notice during his “Saturday Night Live” days in the late ’70s before shooting to stardom with the 1984 comedy “Ghostbusters.” But in the recent past, his fame transcended mere Hollywood celebrity.
“It’s the feeling of how they make crystals,” Mr. Glazer said. “It’s water, it’s water, it’s water, and then it reaches this density, and all of a sudden, it’s this other thing.”What Mr. Glazer means by “this other thing” is the transformation of Bill Murray the actor into a pop icon.
The kind of figure for whom there is a coloring book, frameable art prints and T-shirts bearing his face in its many moods, from the smirking mug of “Stripes” (1981) to the pensive gray-bearded visage of “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou” (2004)
The bro-centric website theCHIVE.com holds him up as a hero and wise elder, and sells a popular T-shirt printed with the words “Bill [Expletive] Murray” across the front, with matching stickers available.
Indeed, he now rivals James Dean, Elvis Presley and Albert Einstein in image appropriated bric-a-brac. On Etsy, you can buy: a “Saint Bill Murray” prayer candle; a galvanized metal planter pot showing the actor as the demented, but possibly enlightened, Carl Spackler in the 1980 comedy “Caddyshack”; a set of Bill Murray coasters; coffee mugs in varying graphics; a baby mobile with dangling felt dolls representing his movie characters; and much, much more.
The actor has little or nothing to do with these products and seems not to have brought legal action. People are strangely moved to make this stuff and others to purchase it.
As Mr. Glazer wrote in his recent Vanity Fair cover article on his old friend, there is no equivalent for the Murray worship, even among A-listers. One aspires to the suaveness of George Clooney or the intensity of Daniel Day-Lewis, and perhaps enjoys their movies, but no one buys the T-shirt.
There are murals of Bill Murray that decorate the interiors of bars from Toronto to Sydney, and tattoos of the actor’s face inked onto the arms and calves of 20- and 30-somethings. Tumblr blogs celebrate his awesomeness.
It’s clear that he has come to symbolize something. But what, exactly?
by Steven Kurutz, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Justin Cozens
Monday, November 30, 2015
Hit Charade
The biggest pop star in America today is a man named Karl Martin Sandberg. The lead singer of an obscure ’80s glam-metal band, Sandberg grew up in a remote suburb of Stockholm and is now 44. Sandberg is the George Lucas, the LeBron James, the Serena Williams of American pop. He is responsible for more hits than Phil Spector, Michael Jackson, or the Beatles.
After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.
Most Americans will recognize their songs, however. As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean. And so on. If you flip on the radio, odds are that you will hear one of their songs. If you are reading this in an airport, a mall, a doctor’s office, or a hotel lobby, you are likely listening to one of their songs right now. This is not an aberration. The same would have been true at any time in the past decade. Before writing most of Taylor Swift’s newest album, Max Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, and Katy Perry.
Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed as their songs and dances. The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.
Impressionable young fans would therefore do well to avoid John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.
The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”
Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.
After Sandberg come the bald Norwegians, Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Hermansen, 43 and 44; Lukasz Gottwald, 42, a Sandberg protégé and collaborator who spent a decade languishing in Saturday Night Live’s house band; and another Sandberg collaborator named Esther Dean, 33, a former nurse’s aide from Oklahoma who was discovered in the audience of a Gap Band concert, singing along to “Oops Upside Your Head.” They use pseudonyms professionally, but most Americans wouldn’t recognize those, either: Max Martin, Stargate, Dr. Luke, and Ester Dean.Most Americans will recognize their songs, however. As I write this, at the height of summer, the No. 1 position on the Billboard pop chart is occupied by a Max Martin creation, “Bad Blood” (performed by Taylor Swift featuring Kendrick Lamar). No. 3, “Hey Mama” (David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj), is an Ester Dean production; No. 5, “Worth It” (Fifth Harmony featuring Kid Ink), was written by Stargate; No. 7, “Can’t Feel My Face” (The Weeknd), is Martin again; No. 16, “The Night Is Still Young” (Minaj), is Dr. Luke and Ester Dean. And so on. If you flip on the radio, odds are that you will hear one of their songs. If you are reading this in an airport, a mall, a doctor’s office, or a hotel lobby, you are likely listening to one of their songs right now. This is not an aberration. The same would have been true at any time in the past decade. Before writing most of Taylor Swift’s newest album, Max Martin wrote No. 1 hits for Britney Spears, ’NSync, Pink, Kelly Clarkson, Maroon 5, and Katy Perry.
Millions of Swifties and KatyCats—as well as Beliebers, Barbz, and Selenators, and the Rihanna Navy—would be stunned by the revelation that a handful of people, a crazily high percentage of them middle-aged Scandinavian men, write most of America’s pop hits. It is an open yet closely guarded secret, protected jealously by the labels and the performers themselves, whose identities are as carefully constructed as their songs and dances. The illusion of creative control is maintained by the fig leaf of a songwriting credit. The performer’s name will often appear in the list of songwriters, even if his or her contribution is negligible. (There’s a saying for this in the music industry: “Change a word, get a third.”) But almost no pop celebrities write their own hits. Too much is on the line for that, and being a global celebrity is a full-time job. It would be like Will Smith writing the next Independence Day.
Impressionable young fans would therefore do well to avoid John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, an immersive, reflective, and utterly satisfying examination of the business of popular music. It is a business as old as Stephen Foster, but never before has it been run so efficiently or dominated by so few. We have come to expect this type of consolidation from our banking, oil-and-gas, and health-care industries. But the same practices they rely on—ruthless digitization, outsourcing, focus-group brand testing, brute-force marketing—have been applied with tremendous success in pop, creating such profitable multinationals as Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Taylor Swift.
The music has evolved in step with these changes. A short-attention-span culture demands short-attention-span songs. The writers of Tin Pan Alley and Motown had to write only one killer hook to get a hit. Now you need a new high every seven seconds—the average length of time a listener will give a radio station before changing the channel. “It’s not enough to have one hook anymore,” Jay Brown, a co-founder of Jay Z’s Roc Nation label, tells Seabrook. “You’ve got to have a hook in the intro, a hook in the pre, a hook in the chorus, and a hook in the bridge, too.”
Sonically, the template has remained remarkably consistent since the Backstreet Boys, whose sound was created by Max Martin and his mentor, Denniz PoP, at PoP’s Cheiron Studios, in Stockholm. It was at Cheiron in the late ’90s that they developed the modern hit formula, a formula nearly as valuable as Coca-Cola’s. But it’s not a secret formula. Seabrook describes the pop sound this way: “ABBA’s pop chords and textures, Denniz PoP’s song structure and dynamics, ’80s arena rock’s big choruses, and early ’90s American R&B grooves.” The production quality is crucial, too. The music is manufactured to fill not headphones and home stereo systems but malls and football stadiums. It is a synthetic, mechanical sound “more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians.” This is a metaphor, of course—there are no musicians anymore, at least not human ones. Every instrument is automated. Session musicians have gone extinct, and studio mixing boards remain only as retro, semi-ironic furniture.
by Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Nicolas Dehghani
Naomi Klein: Climate Change Makes for a Hotter and Meaner World
Naomi Klein is a journalist and author who has written for a number of publications about environmentalism, globalization, the wars in Iraq, and the impact of unrestrained neoliberal economics. She has also written several books on the anti-corporate movement (and in addition to print, has made documentary films on the subject with her husband, Avi Lewis). Her critiques of free market fundamentalism earned her the £50,000 (about $76,000) Warwick Prize for Writing and a place on the New York Times bestseller list.
In this interview, Klein tells the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette about her latest non-fiction book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. The book takes no prisoners, pointing at weak government efforts to address climate change; environmental groups that have compromised with industry on too many issues; what she considers to be pie-in-the-sky “techno-fixes” such as carbon sequestering; conservatives who consistently deny climate change is even happening; and corporations that Klein thinks are seeking to earn a profit by scuttling efforts to deal with the crisis. (...)
BAS: One of the shocking things to read in your book was that all these trade agreements essentially say that free trade trumps everything else, including environmental concerns. Economic growth always comes first; climate second.
Klein: And we’re seeing a flurry of these new trade deals, with the United States and China, and with Europe and the United States, to name just a few of the larger partnerships. There is this fundamental contradiction between what governments are negotiating in trade summits and what they’re negotiating at climate summits. There’s seemingly very little desire to reconcile the two.
It’s like they’re on these two parallel tracks and don’t communicate with each other.
Twenty years ago the trade lawyers could plead ignorance and say that they weren’t really up on climate change. But that’s not true anymore. It’s really a willful compartmentalization, because it’s hard to reconcile that kind of trade with a radical carbon reduction agenda.
BAS: The book laid out a case for the large environmental groups—“Big Green”—being in bed with Big Oil. The Environmental Defense Fund came off particularly badly.
Klein: Even the Sierra Club had a really ugly chapter, in which they were taking many millions from a natural gas company which had a very clear financial interest in shutting down coal plants because it was creating a market for them.
And frankly I think the same is true for Michael Bloomberg—who continues to be a major funder for the Sierra Club—because Bloomberg as a businessman is massively invested in natural gas. He has a dedicated fund for his $33 billion worth of wealth that specializes in oil and gas. And he continues to be a vocal advocate in favor of fracking in New York State.
What do I take away from this? I love the Sierra Club, I have friends who work there, they do fantastic work. But I frankly don’t see a huge difference between the conflict of interest with Michael Bloomberg and some of the other conflicts of interest I mentioned in the book.
That said, I think the Sierra Club has definitely gotten on the right side of the fracking fight. Unlike the Environmental Defense Fund, which continues to try to broker these so-called “best practices” for fracking at a time when the people affected by fracking are being very clear that they want outright bans.
What’s interesting is what has been happening in places like New York State, where local green organizations have been challenging the relevancy of some of these Big Green groups that started that whole “split the difference” middle ground approach—and Big Green is to the right of Cuomo, which is not a place where you want to be. There’s been the emergence of a harder-core, grass-roots movement that I call ‘Blockadia’—and because it is growing, and so strong, and resonating with so many people, these new movements are winning huge victories, like the ban on fracking in New York State. And the grassroots is making these Big Green groups irrelevant. (...)
BAS: In the book, you rebutted the claim by some environmentalists that the fight against climate change would bring us all together. You cited examples in which some people found a way to profiteer off of this—such as a private security firm to patrol your expensively engineered, stormproof home and protect your possessions when the next flood arrive—with the net result that wedges were driven between everyone.
Klein: This is where I come to climate from. My previous book, The Shock Doctrine, was all about this. It was about the rise of “disaster capitalism” after wars. When I started writing it, the book was about military and economic crises and how they are used to push further privatization—and how these situations offer moments for intense profiteering. Because that’s what was happening in Iraq after invasion.
And as I was writing it, I was starting to see how the same sort of thing was cropping up in the aftermath of natural disasters like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina: privatized aid, privatized security infrastructure, privatized military, and so on. I felt like I was catching a glimpse of the future when I was doing the field reporting.
And I think that’s why I feel so passionately about the fact that climate change is not just about things getting hotter, it’s about things getting meaner and much more divided. We saw this during Hurricane Katrina—and to a lesser extent, during Hurricane Sandy—where there was such a huge gap between how that storm was experienced by people of means and people who were in public housing. It’s very cruel the way this plays out.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is when the developers come in and say, “Well, let’s just bulldoze the public housing and have condos instead.” Or, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to privatize the school system,” which is what happened in New Orleans.
This is what our current economic system is built to do, and it does it. And I’ve spent a lot of time documenting that.
We can count on that pattern continuing, unless there is a plan for a progressive response to the climate crisis.
by Dan Drollette Jr, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: Anya Chibis For The Guardian
In this interview, Klein tells the Bulletin’s Dan Drollette about her latest non-fiction book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, published by Simon & Schuster in 2014. The book takes no prisoners, pointing at weak government efforts to address climate change; environmental groups that have compromised with industry on too many issues; what she considers to be pie-in-the-sky “techno-fixes” such as carbon sequestering; conservatives who consistently deny climate change is even happening; and corporations that Klein thinks are seeking to earn a profit by scuttling efforts to deal with the crisis. (...)BAS: One of the shocking things to read in your book was that all these trade agreements essentially say that free trade trumps everything else, including environmental concerns. Economic growth always comes first; climate second.
Klein: And we’re seeing a flurry of these new trade deals, with the United States and China, and with Europe and the United States, to name just a few of the larger partnerships. There is this fundamental contradiction between what governments are negotiating in trade summits and what they’re negotiating at climate summits. There’s seemingly very little desire to reconcile the two.
It’s like they’re on these two parallel tracks and don’t communicate with each other.
Twenty years ago the trade lawyers could plead ignorance and say that they weren’t really up on climate change. But that’s not true anymore. It’s really a willful compartmentalization, because it’s hard to reconcile that kind of trade with a radical carbon reduction agenda.
BAS: The book laid out a case for the large environmental groups—“Big Green”—being in bed with Big Oil. The Environmental Defense Fund came off particularly badly.
Klein: Even the Sierra Club had a really ugly chapter, in which they were taking many millions from a natural gas company which had a very clear financial interest in shutting down coal plants because it was creating a market for them.
And frankly I think the same is true for Michael Bloomberg—who continues to be a major funder for the Sierra Club—because Bloomberg as a businessman is massively invested in natural gas. He has a dedicated fund for his $33 billion worth of wealth that specializes in oil and gas. And he continues to be a vocal advocate in favor of fracking in New York State.
What do I take away from this? I love the Sierra Club, I have friends who work there, they do fantastic work. But I frankly don’t see a huge difference between the conflict of interest with Michael Bloomberg and some of the other conflicts of interest I mentioned in the book.
That said, I think the Sierra Club has definitely gotten on the right side of the fracking fight. Unlike the Environmental Defense Fund, which continues to try to broker these so-called “best practices” for fracking at a time when the people affected by fracking are being very clear that they want outright bans.
What’s interesting is what has been happening in places like New York State, where local green organizations have been challenging the relevancy of some of these Big Green groups that started that whole “split the difference” middle ground approach—and Big Green is to the right of Cuomo, which is not a place where you want to be. There’s been the emergence of a harder-core, grass-roots movement that I call ‘Blockadia’—and because it is growing, and so strong, and resonating with so many people, these new movements are winning huge victories, like the ban on fracking in New York State. And the grassroots is making these Big Green groups irrelevant. (...)
BAS: In the book, you rebutted the claim by some environmentalists that the fight against climate change would bring us all together. You cited examples in which some people found a way to profiteer off of this—such as a private security firm to patrol your expensively engineered, stormproof home and protect your possessions when the next flood arrive—with the net result that wedges were driven between everyone.
Klein: This is where I come to climate from. My previous book, The Shock Doctrine, was all about this. It was about the rise of “disaster capitalism” after wars. When I started writing it, the book was about military and economic crises and how they are used to push further privatization—and how these situations offer moments for intense profiteering. Because that’s what was happening in Iraq after invasion.
And as I was writing it, I was starting to see how the same sort of thing was cropping up in the aftermath of natural disasters like the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina: privatized aid, privatized security infrastructure, privatized military, and so on. I felt like I was catching a glimpse of the future when I was doing the field reporting.
And I think that’s why I feel so passionately about the fact that climate change is not just about things getting hotter, it’s about things getting meaner and much more divided. We saw this during Hurricane Katrina—and to a lesser extent, during Hurricane Sandy—where there was such a huge gap between how that storm was experienced by people of means and people who were in public housing. It’s very cruel the way this plays out.
But that’s not the worst of it. The worst is when the developers come in and say, “Well, let’s just bulldoze the public housing and have condos instead.” Or, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to privatize the school system,” which is what happened in New Orleans.
This is what our current economic system is built to do, and it does it. And I’ve spent a lot of time documenting that.
We can count on that pattern continuing, unless there is a plan for a progressive response to the climate crisis.
by Dan Drollette Jr, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | Read more:
Image: Anya Chibis For The Guardian
Sunday, November 29, 2015
The Neurofix: Chicken Soup for the Ageing Brain
Stem cell therapies for the scourges of old age are on the near horizon. Will they come in time for the Baby Boomers?
No amount of Botox or Pilates can stave off the loss of brain cells, a steady erosion that began, ironically, in the days when we were part of the Woodstock nation. The brain reaches its maximum weight by age 20 and then slowly starts shrinking, losing 10 per cent or more of its volume over a lifetime. By our 50s, we’re experiencing mild mental glitches, those unsettling ‘senior moments’ when we’ve misplaced the keys for the umpteenth time or can’t remember the name of an acquaintance, all of it symptomatic of the steady erosion of neurons in our brains.
We make feeble jokes about our failing memories, but quietly worry that they are harbingers of something worse – such as scourges from dementia to Parkinson’s, which increase in frequency as we age. No matter how it manifests, the progressive shrinkage of our brain and the faulty wiring in our neural circuitry slowly rob us of our memories, identity and personality, the abilities that give our lives meaning and purpose, and the physical and emotional capacity to fully embrace the world.
All this is magnified by the demographic time bomb that threatens to exhaust society’s resources: by 2050, more than 400 million people worldwide will be aged over 80, many caring for the explosion of friends and family suffering from brain afflictions of varying kinds. The burden could bankrupt our health system – or, new technology based on neural stem cells, the progenitor cells of the nervous system, could intervene, reversing neurodegeneration, healing damaged brains and averting catastrophe in the nick of time. (...)
A team researching Alzheimer’s at the University of California, Irvine has shored up memory by transferring stem cells to the brains of mice. To do their work, they compared the performance on a simple memory test of a group of healthy mice with ones who were genetically altered to develop brain lesions that mimic Alzheimer’s. The fit mice remembered their surroundings about 70 per cent of the time, while the recall rate for the impaired animals was a scant 50 per cent. Scientists then injected the hippocampus – the brain region responsible for memory storage – of the injured mice with 200,000 neural stem cells that were engineered to glow green under an ultraviolet light so their progress could be tracked. Three months later, when both groups of mice were given the same test, they scored the same – about 70 per cent recall – while a control group of damaged mice that didn’t receive the stem cells still had significant mental deficits.
Significantly, only a handful – about 6 per cent – of the implanted cells were transformed into neurons, so the beneficial effects didn’t occur because they simply replaced dead cells. Yet there was a 75 per cent increase in the number of synapses – the connections between neurons that relay nerve impulses. Subsequent experiments suggest the stem cells release a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) that seems to nurse the injured neurons back to health by keeping them alive and functional, and prompt the surrounding tissue to produce new neurites (long, thin structures called axons and dendrites that transmit electrical messages).
In replications of these studies at labs around the world, treated lab animals showed improvements even after months – roughly the equivalent of about a decade in human years. ‘The stem cells were acting as a fertiliser of sorts for the surviving cells,’ says Mathew Blurton-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine involved in the research. When scientists artificially reduced the amount of BDNF the stem cells produced, the benefit disappeared too. (...)
A dose of stem cells delivered to just the right sweet spot could mend the fractured neural circuits that ferry signals throughout the brain, holding promise for relief of psychiatric diseases from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. The technology might one day ease learning disabilities, including deficits in information processing and attention. But the application closest at hand is the one that could rescue the boomer generation, my friends, and me, from the looming loss of our memories, our social skills, and our very selves. One day soon, neural stem cells will be used like brick and mortar to shore up the crumbling walls in our brains and restore lost functions so we’re almost good as new. ‘We can change the face of therapeutics with neural stem cells,’ says Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan who is a leading stem cell researcher. ‘They’re like chicken soup for the brain.’
We make feeble jokes about our failing memories, but quietly worry that they are harbingers of something worse – such as scourges from dementia to Parkinson’s, which increase in frequency as we age. No matter how it manifests, the progressive shrinkage of our brain and the faulty wiring in our neural circuitry slowly rob us of our memories, identity and personality, the abilities that give our lives meaning and purpose, and the physical and emotional capacity to fully embrace the world.All this is magnified by the demographic time bomb that threatens to exhaust society’s resources: by 2050, more than 400 million people worldwide will be aged over 80, many caring for the explosion of friends and family suffering from brain afflictions of varying kinds. The burden could bankrupt our health system – or, new technology based on neural stem cells, the progenitor cells of the nervous system, could intervene, reversing neurodegeneration, healing damaged brains and averting catastrophe in the nick of time. (...)
A team researching Alzheimer’s at the University of California, Irvine has shored up memory by transferring stem cells to the brains of mice. To do their work, they compared the performance on a simple memory test of a group of healthy mice with ones who were genetically altered to develop brain lesions that mimic Alzheimer’s. The fit mice remembered their surroundings about 70 per cent of the time, while the recall rate for the impaired animals was a scant 50 per cent. Scientists then injected the hippocampus – the brain region responsible for memory storage – of the injured mice with 200,000 neural stem cells that were engineered to glow green under an ultraviolet light so their progress could be tracked. Three months later, when both groups of mice were given the same test, they scored the same – about 70 per cent recall – while a control group of damaged mice that didn’t receive the stem cells still had significant mental deficits.
Significantly, only a handful – about 6 per cent – of the implanted cells were transformed into neurons, so the beneficial effects didn’t occur because they simply replaced dead cells. Yet there was a 75 per cent increase in the number of synapses – the connections between neurons that relay nerve impulses. Subsequent experiments suggest the stem cells release a protein called brain-derived neurotropic factor (BDNF) that seems to nurse the injured neurons back to health by keeping them alive and functional, and prompt the surrounding tissue to produce new neurites (long, thin structures called axons and dendrites that transmit electrical messages).
In replications of these studies at labs around the world, treated lab animals showed improvements even after months – roughly the equivalent of about a decade in human years. ‘The stem cells were acting as a fertiliser of sorts for the surviving cells,’ says Mathew Blurton-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine involved in the research. When scientists artificially reduced the amount of BDNF the stem cells produced, the benefit disappeared too. (...)
A dose of stem cells delivered to just the right sweet spot could mend the fractured neural circuits that ferry signals throughout the brain, holding promise for relief of psychiatric diseases from bipolar disorder to schizophrenia. The technology might one day ease learning disabilities, including deficits in information processing and attention. But the application closest at hand is the one that could rescue the boomer generation, my friends, and me, from the looming loss of our memories, our social skills, and our very selves. One day soon, neural stem cells will be used like brick and mortar to shore up the crumbling walls in our brains and restore lost functions so we’re almost good as new. ‘We can change the face of therapeutics with neural stem cells,’ says Eva Feldman, a neurologist at the University of Michigan who is a leading stem cell researcher. ‘They’re like chicken soup for the brain.’
by Linda Marsa, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Centre Jean Perrin/SPL
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