What Your Microbiome Wants for Dinner

Let’s admit it. Few of us like to think, much less talk about our colons. But you might be surprised at the importance of what gets into your colon and what goes on inside it. This little-loved part of our bodies is actually less an onboard garbage can and more like the unlikeliest medicine chest.

There is abundant medical evidence that diet greatly influences health, and new science is showing us why this is so. It is also showing us that advocates of trendy paleo and vegan diets are missing the big picture of how our omnivorous digestive system works.

Your colon is the home for much of your microbiome—the community of microbial life that lives on and in you. In a nutshell, for better and worse, what you eat feeds your microbiome. And what they make from what you eat can help keep you healthy or foster chronic disease.

To gain an appreciation of the human colon and the role of microbes in the digestive tract as a whole, it helps to follow the metabolic fate of a meal. But, first, a word about terms. We’ll refer to the digestive tract as the stomach, small intestine, and colon. While the colon is indeed called the “large intestine,” this is a misnomer of sorts. It is no more a large version of the small intestine than a snake is a large earthworm.

The stomach might better be called a dissolver, the small intestine an absorber, and the colon a transformer. These distinct functions help explain why microbial communities of the stomach, small intestine, and colon are as different from one another as a river and a forest. Just as physical conditions like temperature, moisture, and sun strongly influence the plant and animal communities that one sees on a hike from a mountain peak to the valley below, the same holds true along the length of the digestive tract.

Imagine you are at a Fourth of July barbecue. You saunter over to the grill to take a look at the fare. The pork ribs look great so you spear a few and add a heap of homemade sauerkraut on the side. You grab a handful of corn chips and a few pieces of celery. The vegetable skewers look good too, so you add one to the pile on your plate. And what would the Fourth of July be without macaroni salad and pie?

You lift a rib to your mouth and start gnawing. A forkful of sauerkraut mingles well with the meat and you crunch your way through another mouthful. The macaroni squishes between your teeth, but the celery takes some chewing. It all slips down the hatch and lands in the acid vat of your stomach where gastric acids start dissolving the bits of food. On the pH scale, where 7 is neutral and lower values are more acidic, the stomach is impressive. Its acidity ranges from 1 to 3. Lemon juice and white vinegar are about a 2.

After the stomach acids work over your meal, the resultant slurry drops into the top of the small intestine. Right away bile from the liver shoots in and starts working over the fats, breaking them down. Pancreatic juices also squirt into the small intestine to join the digestive party. Your Fourth of July feast is now on its way to full deconstruction into the basic types of molecules—simple and complex carbohydrates (sugars), fats, and proteins. In general, there is an inverse relationship between the size and complexity of these molecules and their fate in the digestive tract. Smaller molecules, primarily the simple sugars that compose the refined carbohydrates in the macaroni, pie crust, and chips are absorbed relatively quickly. Larger or more complex molecules take longer to break down and are absorbed in the lower reaches of the small intestine.

The sausage-like loops of the small intestine provide an entirely different type of habitat for your microbiota than the stomach. Acidity drops off rapidly and, in combination with all the nutrients, the abundance of bacteria shoots up to 10,000 times more than that in the stomach. But conditions still aren’t ideal for bacteria in the small intestine. It’s too much like a flooding river. And understandably so, considering that about seven quarts of bodily fluids, consisting of saliva, gastric and pancreatic juices, bile, and intestinal mucus flow through it every day. And that’s not including the two additional quarts of whatever other liquids you consume. The rushing swirl of fluids entrains food molecules and bacteria and carries them rapidly downstream. The constant motion means that nothing stays put for long, so bacteria can’t really settle in and contribute much to digestion.

By the middle to lower reaches of your small intestine, the fats, proteins, and some of the carbohydrates in the Fourth of July slurry are sufficiently broken down for absorption and pass into the bloodstream through the intestinal wall. Notice we said some of the carbohydrates. A good amount of them aren’t broken down at all. These complex carbohydrates, what your doctor calls fiber, have a completely different fate than simple carbohydrates.

They drop, undigested, into the slough-like environment of the colon. With a neutral pH of about 7, the colon is a paradise for bacteria compared to the acid vat of the stomach or the churning rapids of the small intestine, where the pH is slightly lower.

Deep within the safety of our inner sanctum, communities of microbial alchemists use our colon as a transformative cauldron in which to ferment the fiber-rich complex carbohydrates we can’t digest. But it takes the right microbes. For example, Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron makes over 260 enzymes that break apart complex carbohydrates. In contrast, the human genome codes for a paltry number. We can only make about 20 enzymes to break down complex carbohydrates.

by David R. Montgomery and Anne Biklé, Nautilus | Read more:
Image: Courtesy of the authors

Golf's Iconoclast Comes Clean

Next year, golf is returning to the Olympics for the first time in more than a century – and a Vandyke-bearded bipolar alcoholic who sometimes covers PGA tournaments while dressed like a pirate will be doing the play-by-play.

"I've never been sure about the whole drug-testing aspect of the Olympics," says David Feherty, 57, a former European Tour player from Northern Ireland whose training regimen once included weed, cocaine and a daily dose of 40 Vicodin and two and a half bottles of whiskey. "If they come up with a drug that helps you play golf better, I am going to be so pissed – I looked for that for years."

In the staid world of pro golf, Feherty is a smart, funny wild card whose cult celebrity is transcending the sport. He covers PGA tournaments while describing a player as having "a face like a warthog stung by a wasp" on live TV, does standup, writes bestselling novels and hosts a Golf Channel show where he gets guests like Bill Clinton and Larry David to open up about their games and lives. Feherty's secret? Sober since 2005, he's now got nothing to hide. "One of the advantages of having a fucked-up life is that other people are more comfortable telling you about theirs," he says. "I see from a different side of the street than most people."

Born on the outskirts of Belfast, Feherty turned pro at 18 and quickly embraced the European Tour's hard-living lifestyle. In 1986, after winning the Scottish Open in Glasgow, he went on a bender and awoke two days later on a putting green 150 miles away – alongside Led Zeppelin's road manager, with no recollection of getting there or what happened to his silver trophy. Once while playing in the Swedish Open, he went out for a drink and arose the next day in Denmark. "After that, I always kept $600 in my wallet," he says, "because that's exactly what it cost me to get back to the golf club just in time to miss my starting time."

After a middling pro career, he became a PGA Tour commentator in 1997, eventually moving to Dallas, raising a family, getting diagnosed with bipolar disorder and sobering up. An insomniac who still struggles with depression – "I get overwhelmed by sadness several times a day and spend a lot of time in tears" – Feherty has managed to achieve success by channeling his restlessness into his work. "I now take 14 pills a day – antidepressants, mood stabilizers and amphetamines," he says. "The Adderall is enough to tear most people off the ceiling, but I can take a nap."

For Feherty, 2016 will be a turning point. After 19 years working as a commentator for CBS, he'll move to NBC – a transition that allows him to take his talent beyond the fairways. In addition to the Olympics, he'll cover the international Ryder Cup and other tournaments while continuing to host his talk show – and is even looking to conquer new sports.

"Remember Fred Willard in Best in Show?" he asks. "If there's a place somewhere for a golf analyst where no technical knowledge is required, I would love to jump in – I just want to be challenged again."

As he prepares for the next chapter in his improbable career, Feherty spoke to Rolling Stone about partying like a rock star, cultivating his rumpled mystique and changing the face of golf.

A lot of musicians are also avid golfers – why do you think that is?

So many musicians play golf, especially people in rock & roll, but most of them use golf as an alternative to drugs and alcohol. I think for addicts, spare time is their worst enemy. And you know, golf takes up time – actually it's one of the problems with the game, but it works in our favor.

by Stayton Bonner, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Chris Condon/PGA/Getty

A Colorblind Constitution: What Abigail Fisher’s Affirmative Action Case Is Really About

[ed. From earlier this year - this case is acutally being heard right now. See also: Supreme Court Justices’ Comments Don’t Bode Well for Affirmative Action]

Court on Monday announced that it would again hear Fisher v. Texas, an affirmative action case in which a white woman claims she was denied admission to the University of Texas because of her race. In 2013, the Court ruled narrowly on the case, requiring the federal appeals court that had ruled against the woman, Abigail Fisher, to re-examine her arguments. Last year, the appeals court again decided against Fisher, affirming that race could be one of the factors considered in trying to diversify the student body at the university.

Months ago, Linda Greenhouse, the Supreme Court expert, asked of the Fisher case: “What will the court do? Let the latest Fifth Circuit opinion, with its endorsement of race-conscious admissions, stand unreviewed? Or plunge back into the culture wars with a case that sorely tested collegial relations among the justices two years ago and that promises to be at least as challenging a second time around?”

The court has now chosen its path. It will re-engage.

In 2013, ProPublica published what became one of the most provocative analyses of the Fisher case. It highlighted an overlooked, deeply ironic fact about the case: when one actually looked at Fisher’s arguments, she actually had not been denied admission because of her race, but rather because of her inadequate academic achievements. Read that analysis, originally published March 18, 2013, below.

Original story:

When the NAACP began challenging Jim Crow laws across the South, it knew that, in the battle for public opinion, the particular plaintiffs mattered as much as the facts of the case. The group meticulously selected the people who would elicit both sympathy and outrage, who were pristine in form and character. And they had to be ready to step forward at the exact moment when both public sentiment and the legal system might be swayed.

That's how Oliver Brown, a hard-working welder and assistant pastor in Topeka, Kan., became the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit that would obliterate the separate but equal doctrine. His daughter, whose third-grade innocence posed a searing rebuff to legal segregation, became its face.

Nearly 60 years after that Supreme Court victory, which changed the nation, conservatives freely admit they have stolen that page from the NAACP's legal playbook as they attempt to roll back many of the civil rights group's landmark triumphs.

In 23-year-old Abigail Noel Fisher they've put forward their version of the perfect plaintiff to challenge the use of race in college admissions decisions.

Publicly, Fisher and her supporters, chief among them the conservative activist who conceived of the case, have worked to make Fisher the symbol of racial victimization in modern America. As their narratives goes, she did everything right. She worked hard, received good grades, and rounded out her high school years with an array of extracurricular activities. But she was cheated, they say, her dream snatched away by a university that closed its doors to her because she had been born the wrong color: White.

The daughter of suburban Sugar Land, Texas, played the cello. Since the second grade, she said, she dreamed of carrying on the family tradition by joining her sister and father among the ranks of University of Texas at Austin alumni.

And the moment for her to lend her name to the lawsuit might never be riper: The Supreme Court has seated its most conservative bench since the 1930s. The Court is expected to issue a decision any week now in what is considered one of the most important civil rights cases in years.

On a YouTube video posted by Edward Blum, a 1973 University of Texas graduate whose nonprofit organization is bankrolling the lawsuit, she is soft-spoken, her strawberry blond hair tucked behind one ear. Not even a swipe of lip gloss adorns her girlish face.

"There were people in my class with lower grades who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were being accepted into UT, and the only other difference between us was the color of our skin," she says. "I was taught from the time I was a little girl that any kind of discrimination was wrong. And for an institution of higher learning to act this way makes no sense to me. What kind of example does it set for others?"

It's a deeply emotional argument delivered by an earnest young woman, one that's been quoted over and over again.

Except there's a problem. The claim that race cost Fisher her spot at the University of Texas isn't really true.

In the hundreds of pages of legal filings, Fisher's lawyers spend almost no time arguing that Fisher would have gotten into the university but for her race.

If you're confused, it is no doubt in part because of how Blum, Fisher and others have shaped the dialogue as the case worked its way to the country's top court.

Journalists and bloggers have written dozens of articles on the case, including profiles of Fisher and Blum. News networks have aired panel after panel about the future of affirmative action. Yet for all the front-page attention, angry debate and exchanges before the justices, some of the more fundamental elements of the case have been little reported.

Race probably had nothing to do with the University of Texas's decision to deny admission to Abigail Fisher.

by Nikole Hannah-Jones, ProPublica | Read more:
Image Susan Walsh/AP

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In Texting, Punctuation Conveys Different Emotions. Period.

[ed. See also: What’s Really Hot on Dating Sites? Proper Grammar.]

Technology is changing language, period

The use of a period in text messages conveys insincerity, annoyance and abruptness, according to a new study from the State University of New York Binghamton. Omitting better communicates the conversational tone of a text message, the study says.

As with any study by university researchers, though, it’s not that simple. The study found that some punctuation expresses sincerity. An exclamation point is viewed as the most sincere. (I overuse exclamation points!)

“It’s not simply that including punctuation implies a lack of sincerity,” said the study’s lead author, Celia Klin, an associate professor of psychology at Binghamton. “There’s something specific about the use of the period.”

by Christina Passariello, WSJ |  Read more:

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The Man Who Would Make the World a Prettier Place

Matthew Moneypenny (his real name) is Hollywood handsome, with a dressed-down wardrobe of Saint Laurent and an easy patter somewhere between pitchman and showman.

He laughs loudly and has a favorite table at Sant Ambroeus in the West Village, as well as a preferred room at the Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood, Calif. He looks like what industry types call “talent,” but Mr. Moneypenny, 46, isn’t talent (though talented). In the congested little world of fashion image-making, he is talent’s agent, the bargaining power behind the throne.

Mr. Moneypenny’s job is to secure high-revenue deals for top-tier images and image-makers. In effect, he said with a practiced twinkle over cookies at a Sant Ambroeus corner table, “to make the world a prettier place.”

Mr. Moneypenny is the president and chief executive of Trunk Archive, a photography licensing agency, whose back catalog of images run in magazines and product packaging, are loaded as smartphone backdrops and hang on hotel walls. In Trunk’s trunk are images by hundreds of photographers, including many of fashion’s marquee names: Annie Leibovitz, Bruce Weber, Arthur Elgort and Patrick Demarchelier.

Mr. Moneypenny has built Trunk into a digital, long-tail boutique of stylish imagery, making the photographers (and the company) significant amounts of money in the process. They are high-end images for high-end prices.

“If Corbis and Getty are Kmart and Walmart,” Mr. Moneypenny said, ticking off two of the larger stock-photo agencies, “we’re Bergdorf Goodman.”

Having made a success of reselling existing images, Mr. Moneypenny is now getting into the business of creating new ones.

Fueled by investment capital from Waddell & Reed, which has taken positions in companies like Richemont and LVMH, Mr. Moneypenny has spent the last two years quietly buying creative agencies. The result is Great Bowery, a group that will include Trunk Archive and 11 other assignment and licensing agencies under its umbrella.

Great Bowery is a mega-agency, one whose ambition is to rebalance the scales, empowering those who make fashion’s imagery — photographers, fashion stylists, hair and makeup artists and set designers — and checking, implicitly, the powerful and increasingly integrated luxury companies and media conglomerates that have traditionally commissioned their work.

He sees it as nothing less than the fashion analogue of the rise of the agency system in Hollywood, which unseated the film studios as the sole kingmakers and deal-brokers.

“If one can say three pillars were originally music, television and film, I would argue that fashion is now the fourth pillar,” Mr. Moneypenny said. “Twenty years ago, it was the socialite on the Upper East Side or the resident of Mayfair or Beverly Hills that was aware of what was coming down the Chanel or Dior runway. There’s so much more interest about the creativity that comes out of this world.” (...)

Most of the agencies now under the aegis of Great Bowery, like CLM, M.A.P, Management & Artists and Streeters, are unfamiliar to the public. So, too, are many of the artists they represent.

Their work is not. You have seen it in the glossy spreads of fashion magazines, the ad campaigns that precede them, the billboards and bus shelters luxury companies commandeer and the videos that run on their Instagram accounts and websites.

If they are not, on the whole, household names the way CAA clients like Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Madonna are, Mr. Moneypenny is betting that they can be. Their rates can already run Hollywood stratospheric (“It’s not unusual for a highly talented artist in our world to generate a seven-figure annual income,” he said), and their visibility is rising to match. Is Pat McGrath, the most in-demand of the runway makeup artists, say, primed to become a name-brand megastar?

“Some designers are big famous stars,” Mr. Baron said. “Also photographers are, and stylists are, and models are. Everybody’s kind of important. It’s become popular culture.”

by Matthew Schneier, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

How The Big Short Hollywood-ized the Financial Collapse

The Big Short—based on Michael Lewis’s account of the 2008 financial crisis and directed by Will Ferrell’s writing partner, Adam McKay—is a ruthless takedown of Wall Street disguised as a snarky Hollywood romp. In the movie, a group of renegade brokers and traders bet against the housing market and make a killing while the rest of the finance world weeps. Fun! The way those renegades did it, however, presents a very big filmmaking problem: How do you dramatize a series of financial trades so convoluted, so abstruse, that even the people in on the deals didn’t always understand what was going on?

by Claire Suddath, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: The Big Short

Sniff 'n' The Tears

Forget Sexy: Cutting-Edge Design Gives Taiwan's Giant Bicycles the Edge

Among professional riders and cycling magazine reviewers, the Propel, which retails in the U.S. for $2,200-$9,000 depending on the model, is more than a high-performance racing bicycle. It’s an engineering marvel.

It’s so light you can lift it with one hand. It’s so fast, promising to shave 12 to 36 seconds off race time over 40 kilometers (25 miles), that it was picked by German rider John Degenkolb for a final sprint in this year’s Tour de France.

The Propel, named Cycling Plus Magazine’s "Bike of the Year" both this year and last, isn’t the handiwork of prestige Italian or North American brands such as Cannodale, Colnago, Pinarello or Cervélo. It’s made by Taiwan’s Giant Manufacturing Co., the biggest bike manufacturer in the world better known until recently as a contract manufacturer for Trek, Scott and other bikes—not for its high-end, carbon-fiber racing bicycles.

"I think Giant’s technical prowess and abilities are amongst the very best in the whole industry," said Warren Rossiter, senior technical editor for road for the London-based magazine group that publishes Cycling Plus and Bikeradar, and whose team tests more than 200 bikes a year. "Giant may lack the cachet of historic Italian or American innovators like Cannondale, but for those in the know, the Giant brand represents truly cutting-edge design and technology."

But while serious enthusiasts now recognize Giant’s engineering and design chops, casual riders haven’t always—some even spray paint away Giant’s logo on the frame. So to improve its image overseas, Giant is planning an expansion in the U.S., from the 125 bike shops now offering Giant bikes as at least half of their inventory to 155 by the end of next near, adding to the almost 1,000 stores that carry Giant bikes in lesser proportions with other models.

Still, Giant wants consumers to know that its selling strategy is based on quality, not flash. "Tony" Lo Hsiang-an, the chief executive officer of three decades, said he realizes Giant is "not as sexy as some of the brands." He said in a 90-minute interview in a bike workroom at headquarters in Taiwan’s west coast city of Taichung that the brand’s image is improving, because innovation speaks for itself.

"Strategy wise, we have no intention to become just a very fancy brand," he said. "Our root is still technology and quality. Everything we do, we must have very good reasons why we do that. I think some brands, they are more marketing, more talk, but I believe ours should be real."

by Sheridan Prasso and Cindy Wang, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Maurice Tsui

Nizo Yamamoto, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
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Ayano Imai, "The Town Mouse & The Country Mouse"
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What If?

What if Adolf Hitler’s paintings had been acclaimed, rather than met with faint praise, and he had gone into art instead of politics? Have you ever wondered whether John F Kennedy would have such a shining reputation if he had survived his assassination and been elected to a second term? Or how the United States might have fared under Japanese occupation? Or what the world would be like if nobody had invented the airplane?

If you enjoy speculating about history in these counterfactual terms, there are many books and movies to satisfy you. The counterfactual is a friend to science-fiction writers and chatting partygoers alike. Yet ‘What if?’ is not a mode of discussion you’ll commonly hear in a university history seminar. At some point in my own graduate-school career, I became well-acculturated to the idea that counterfactualism was (as the British historian E P Thompson wrote in 1978) ‘Geschichtwissenschlopff, unhistorical shit.’

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’ It’s hard enough to do the reading and research required to understand the complexity of actual events, Evans argues. Let’s stay away from alternative universes.

But hold on a minute. In October 2015, when asked if, given the chance, he would kill the infant Hitler, the US presidential candidate Jeb Bush retorted with an enthusiastic: ‘Hell yeah, I would!’ Laughter was a first response: what a ridiculous question! And didn’t Bush sound a lot like his brash ‘Mission Accomplished’ brother George W just then? When The New York Times Magazine had asked its readers to make the same choice, only 42 per cent responded with an equally unequivocal ‘Yes’. And as The Atlantic’s thoughtful piece on the question by Matt Ford illustrated, in order to truly answer this apparently silly hypothetical, you have to define your own beliefs about the nature of progress, the inherent contingency of events, and the influence of individuals – even very charismatic ones – on the flow of historical change. These are big, important questions. If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?

One reason professional historians disdain counterfactuals is that they swing so free from the evidence. The work of academic historical writing depends on the marshalling of primary and secondary sources, and the historian is judged on her interpretations of the evidence that’s available. Did she try hard enough to find the kind of evidence that would answer her questions? Does she extrapolate too much meaning from a scanty partial archive? Does she misunderstand the meaning of the evidence, in historical context? Or should she have taken another related group of sources into account? For the professional historian, these sources are not incidental to interpreting history; they are the lifeblood of doing so. In a counterfactual speculation, the usual standards for the use of evidence are upended, and the writer can find herself far afield from the record – a distance that leaves too much room for fancy and interpretation, making a supposedly historical argument sound more and more like fiction.

What is worse, counterfactual speculations spring naturally from deeply conservative assumptions about what makes history tick. Like bestselling popular histories, counterfactuals usually take as their subjects war, biography or an old-school history of technology that emphasises the importance of the inventor. (This is part of why Evans termed counterfactualism ‘a form of intellectual atavism’.) Popular counterfactuals dwell on the outcomes of military conflicts (the Civil War and the Second World War are disproportionately popular), or ponder what would have happened if a leader with the fame of Hitler had (or, in some cases, hadn’t) been assassinated. These kinds of counterfactual speculations assign an overwhelming importance to political and military leaders – a focus that seems regressive to many historians who consider historical events as the result of complicated social and cultural processes, not the choices of a small group of ‘important’ people.

The ‘wars and great men’ approach to history not only appears intellectually bankrupt to many historians, it also excludes all those whose voices from the past historians have laboured to recover in recent decades. Women – as individuals, or as a group – almost never appear, and social, cultural, and environmental history are likewise absent. Evans, for his part, thinks this is because complex cultural topics are not easy to understand through the simplifying lens of the ‘what if’. He uses that resistance as evidence against the validity of the practice itself: ‘You seldom find counterfactuals about topics such as the transition from the classical sensibility to the Romantic at the end of the 18th century, or the emergence of modern industry, or the French revolution, because they’re just too obviously complicated to be susceptible of simplistic “what-if” speculation.’

Despite all these criticisms, a few historians have recently been making persuasive arguments that counterfactualism can be good – for readers, for students, and for writers. Historical speculation, they say, can be a healthy exercise for historians looking to think hard about their own motives and methods. Counterfactuals, if done well, can force a super-meticulous look at the way historians use evidence. And counterfactuals can encourage readers to think about the contingent nature of history – an exercise that can help build empathy and diminish feelings of national, cultural, and racial exceptionalism. Was the US always destined (as its 19th-century ideologues believed) to occupy the middle swath of the North American continent, from sea to shining sea? Or is its national geography the result of a series of decisions and compromises – some of which, if reversed, could have led to a different outcome? The latter view leaves more space for analysis, more chance to examine how power worked during expansion; it’s also the realm of counterfactuals.

One of the fundamental premises of the new pro-counterfactualists is this: just as there are good and bad ways to write standard histories, so too there are good and bad ways to put together a counterfactual. The historian Gavriel Rosenfeld at Fairfield University in Connecticut is working on an edited collection of Jewish alternative histories, and maintains a blog called the Counterfactual History Review, where he aggregates and analyses examples of counterfactualism in public discourse, many of which relate to the Nazi period: Amazon’s recent adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962); the US presidential candidate Ben Carson’s argument that the Holocaust could have been prevented if Jewish people were better armed; and, yes, the ‘Killing Baby Hitler’ kerfuffle. Rosenfeld argues that a counterfactual’s point of departure from the actual timeline has to be plausible; in other words, it’s much more productive, analytically speaking, to speculate about a situation that was likely to come about, than one that is completely improbable. He also cites a ‘minimal rewrite rule’ that asks the speculator to think about only one major point of divergence, and not to assume two or more big changes in an alternative timeline.

The historian Timothy Burke at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania teaches a seminar on the topic, and wrote on his blog about a class project in which he gave groups of students counterfactual scenarios (‘Mary Wollstonecraft does not die after the birth of her daughter but in fact lives into old age’; ‘Native American societies have robust resistance to Old War diseases at the time of contact with Europeans in the 15th century’) and asked them to game out the scenario in stages. The experience shows students how to use both direct and contextual evidence from our own timeline to support counterfactual assertions. A good counterfactual scenario must be generated with attention to what’s actually known – about the setting, the time, or the people involved. The closer the counterfactual can hew to actual historical possibility, the more plausible it can be judged to be. The end result should be a counterfactual that is relatively close to the given historical record, and offers a new way to think about the period under discussion. Looked at this way, the exercise of constructing a counterfactual has real pedagogical value. In order to do it well, students must figure out what factors matter in writing history, argue for the importance of the factors they’ve chosen to discuss, and deploy the most helpful existing evidence. It’s a tall order, and pretty far from idle speculation.

by Rebecca Onion, Aeon |  Read more:

Image: Crowds cheer Hitler's Austrian election campaign, April 1938. Photo by LIFE/Getty

Stanley Clarke Band Feat. Hiromi

Yoko, Neko and Mom
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Every Dog Will Have His Day

Fashion is such a far-reaching thing. It isn’t content with all that goes on a woman; it extends to all that goes around, under, and over her. It is responsible for her figure, her complexion, and her state of mind. It won’t even stop at inanimate things—it extends to her very dog. Fancy carrying a short full dog when Paris insists on long straight lines, or trying to combine a Louis XVI–style dog with a Moyen Âge gown—well, it simply isn’t done, that’s all.

But one need not despair. So many dogs are smart this season that a woman could really have a different dog for every gown in her wardrobe. There are chows, for instance. They are becoming to almost every woman. One may have a Titian-haired chow or a decided brunette, according to which is the better foil, and he is just the thing to put in the front seat of one’s motor, to fill in that awkward space left by any chance departure of the footman. Chows are most decorative, and they wear a puzzled expression that keeps one interested. One wonders what on earth they are trying to find out. Then, too, they are a shining example to the woman of flirtatious tendencies—the chow is a one-man dog.

If it’s the little things that count in one’s life, one might acquire a Brussels griffon. They are scarcely visible to the naked eye, but they are exceedingly smart this season. A griffon bears a startling resemblance to a small mop that has seen hard service; it is difficult to ascertain, at a cursory glance, which end is going to bark and which to wag.

But fashion isn’t content with a mere chow or two and a handful of griffons. All sorts and conditions of terriers are being done, this season—they are so smart, worn with tailored costumes. Airedales are so popular that they are almost overdone. One can not stroll down Fifth Avenue without encountering an affable Airedale every six feet or so. In color and texture, an Airedale is very like a shredded wheat biscuit. There is such a wistfully angelic expression in his amber-colored eyes that, at first, one fears that he will be snatched up to heaven at any minute; after one has known him for a while, one ceases to worry. He is far from graceful, his manner is absolutely unpolished, he has no savoir faire, and he just can’t make his paws behave. But he has a way with him—and scepters have been tossed aside for that.

Fifth Avenue is also densely populated with assorted Scottish terriers—all sorts and conditions of these uncanny Scots. They plod busily along on their utterly inadequate paws, with their overgenerous allowances of tail streaming proudly in the breeze. Their general air is that of those who are burdened with affairs of international importance, and who cannot be annoyed with merely local matters. On those rare occasions when they can be persuaded to sit, they do it with extreme care, neatly arranging their forepaws in the first dancing position. There is something about them that irresistibly reminds one of a fussy little old gentleman—the sort of old gentleman who writes to the newspapers about those disgraceful skirts the women are wearing.

by Dorothy Parker, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

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A House Divided

[ed. Lemmings with suicide vests!]

On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant.

Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in a series of clashes over taxes and spending. Two years ago, House Republicans brought about a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act and nearly caused the United States to default on its debt. This week, as Congress raced to meet a December 11th deadline to pass the annual legislation that funds the government, the members of the Freedom Caucus had new demands: they wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and restrict Syrian refugees from entering the United States, policies that, if attached to the spending bills, could face a veto from Obama and, potentially, lead to another government shutdown.

To the general public, these fights have played out as a battle between President Obama and Republicans in Congress. But the more critical divide is within the Republican Party, as House Speaker John Boehner discovered. Boehner, who is from Ohio, was elected to Congress in 1990 and rose to the Speakership in 2010. His tenure was marked by an increasingly futile effort to control a group of conservatives that Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and an ally of Boehner’s, once described as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2013, to the bafflement of some colleagues, Boehner supported the shutdown, in the hope that the public backlash would expose the group as hopelessly radical. It didn’t work. The group continued to defy Boehner. He tried to regain control as Speaker by marginalizing its members, and they decided that he must be forced out.

Meadows, who was elected in 2012, spent months weighing whether to launch the attack. “It was probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” he told me recently. “It was a lonely period of time here on Capitol Hill. Even my closest friends didn’t necessarily think it was the right move.”

The decisive moment came on June 4th, when Meadows and his wife were being given a private tour of the Library of Congress. In the South Exhibition Gallery of the Thomas Jefferson Building, below stained-glass ceilings etched with the names of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, the guide showed them one of the first printed copies of the Declaration. Meadows was surprised to see, at the bottom of the document, only the name of John Hancock, in large block type. The guide explained that about two hundred copies of that version, known as the Dunlap Broadside, were printed on July 4, 1776, and one of them was sent off to King George. It was only several weeks later, in early August, that Hancock’s fellow-revolutionaries convened to sign the document.

“He was committing treason,” Meadows said. “When I heard that, it hit me profoundly that this motion to vacate could have only one signature. I wrestled with it for weeks.”

Meadows was feeling pressure from his constituents, who were angry that the G.O.P. leadership kept losing to Obama. “I got an e-mail from a gentleman back home,” Meadows told me. “He said, ‘I’ve worked hard and I’ve given money and yet nothing is happening.’ And this was from a country-club Republican, not a Tea Party activist. That had a real impact.”

On the morning of July 28th, Meadows’s fifty-sixth birthday, he got a voice mail from his son, Blake, encouraging him to go forward with the anti-Boehner plot. Blake read some lines from a famous Teddy Roosevelt speech. “It is not the critic who counts,” Roosevelt said. “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,” and who, “at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” Listening to the message brought tears to Meadows’s eyes. “I still keep it on my phone,” he told me.

Because there had been only one previous motion to vacate the chair, Meadows had to consult with a parliamentarian. His motion echoed the style and language of the Declaration’s “long train of abuses.” At about 5 P.M., during a series of votes on unrelated legislation, he waded through the crowded House floor, handed a copy of the resolution to the House clerk, and signed his name.

The resolution declared that Boehner “endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decision-making, bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent.” Boehner had “caused the power of Congress to atrophy, thereby making Congress subservient to the Executive and Judicial branches,” and he “uses the power of the office to punish Members.” It provided details about several rules and parliamentary maneuvers that Boehner had allegedly used to control the chamber, and it ended, “Now, therefore, be it Resolved, That the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives is hereby declared to be vacant.”

by Ryan Lizza, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Matt Chase

Ad Blockers Will Change How Ads Are Sold

[ed. See also: X Marks the Spot That Makes Online Ads So Maddening]

Last week, I was in Berlin for a presentation of the Digital News Initiative created by Google and a group of publishers (see a previous story on the Accelerated Mobile Pages program). Needless to say, ad blockers was the talk of the town.

In a detailed lecture, Dr. Thomas Schreiber, who works with European publishers, exposed the first step of Google’s approach. Unsurprisingly, the search giant will first collect facts. In a wide study to be conducted globally in the coming months, Google will try to ascertain what exactly motivates a web user to install an ad blocker. A (large) unspecified number of people will go through what is called a Cognitive Load Test in which users are compensated for reading as many articles as possible. Different series of stories will carry various ads formats, ranging from the most invasive to the lightest. Applied on a large sample, the study will provide valuable information on ad intolerance. The Google survey will also yield reliable numbers for people using ad blockers, especially in Asia where mobile web browsing runs high.

As often, averages don’t provide the whole picture. Stating that 25% or 30% of users have installed an ad blocker is close to meaningless. We know the oldest segment of the internet doesn’t block ads very much. By contrast, the rate will skyrocket for a younger, more tech-savvy crowd. I recently took a quick show of hands while giving a couple of lectures to young audiences: more than eight out of ten admitted using an ad blocker. A few months ago, the operator of a large gaming site told me that 90% of its users were blocking ads.

Clearly, entire categories of digital properties are being wrecked.

The study should also confirm that people who are ideologically opposed to advertising are a minority compared to the ones who have installed an ad blocker simply because digital promotions and tracking have become unbearable. Richard Gingras, who oversees news products at Google, said on stage that the invasion of ad blockers “…is the reaction to a user experience gone bad”.

All conversations I had with conference attendees confirmed a growing resentment from publishers who denounce the ad community’s “let’s milk the cow until it dies” approach. The whole food chain is seen as way too tolerant of invasive ads. More important, some publishers begin to question the ability of their own sales force to adapt quickly enough. The future of advertising revenue rests on adopting a “less is more” attitude: less annoying formats will eventually generate more revenue.

This implies two major shifts.

by Frédéric Filloux, Monday Note |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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Can’t Put Down Your Device? That’s by Design

Greg Hochmuth was one of the first software engineers hired at Instagram.He worked on a team in 2012 that developed the first Android app for the slick photo-sharing service. In its first 24 hours, the app was downloaded more than one million times.

But Mr. Hochmuth eventually came to realize that the platform’s pleasing features — the interface that made it easy for people to upload and share beautiful images, the personalized suggestions of accounts to follow — also had potential downsides.

The same design qualities that make an app enthralling, he said, may also make it difficult for people to put down. And the more popular such services become, the more appeal they hold for users — a phenomenon known as the network effect.

“Once people come in, then the network effect kicks in and there’s an overload of content. People click around. There’s always another hashtag to click on,” Mr. Hochmuth, who left Instagram last year and started his own data consulting firm in Manhattan, told me recently. “Then it takes on its own life, like an organism, and people can become obsessive.”

Now Mr. Hochmuth and Jonathan Harris, an artist and computer scientist, have collaborated on a project that explores the implications of such compelling digital platforms for the human psyche. Titled “Network Effect,”the site invites users to click through a video and audio smorgasbord of human behavior. It includes 10,000 clips of people primping, eating, kissing, blinking and so on.

Unlike delectable cooking apps or engrossing music streaming apps that may elicit pleasure responses in the brain, however, the voyeuristic site is deliberately disjointed and discomfiting. To challenge the idea that people entirely exercise free will during their online sessions, the site also automatically turns itself off after a few minutes, shutting out users for 24 hours.

“The endpoint makes you reflect,” Mr. Hochmuth said. “Do I want to keep browsing and clicking and being obsessed? Or do I want to do something else?”

As the site underscores, digital life keeps us hooked with an infinite entertainment stream as its default setting. Tech companies often set it up that way.

There’s Facebook beckoning with its bottomless news feed. There’s Netflix autoplaying the next episode in a TV series 10 seconds after the previous one ends. There’s Tinder encouraging us to keep swiping in search of the next potential paramour.

And then there are the constant notices and reminders — a friend liked your photo or tweet; a colleague wants to connect with you on LinkedIn; an Evite awaits your response — which automatically induce feelings of social obligation. You damn yourself to distraction if you respond, and to fear of missing out if you don’t.

Tech companies tend to present these feedback loops as consumer conveniences. A new Intel TV ad, for instance, shows a young girl in the back of a car growing sad because the laptop on which she was watching a singalong video suddenly runs out of power. The company’s new battery-preserving processor, though, ultimately saves the day, “so you never have to stop watching.” T-Mobile has just introduced BingeOn, a feature that offers subscribers on certain plans unlimited high-speed access to popular streaming video channels.

There’s even an industry term for the experts who continually test and tweak apps and sites to better hook consumers, keep them coming back and persuade them to stay longer: growth hackers.

“How do you drive habitual use of a product?” said Sean Ellis, the chief executive of GrowthHackers.com, a software company specializing in online growth techniques. “It’s not just about getting new people. It’s about retaining the people you already have and, ultimately, getting them to bring in more people.”

by Natasha Singer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: The Network Effect

The Myth Of The Perfect 36

[ed. I've never thought much to how the "cocktail generation" might have been a precursor to the drug-drenched, free-love hippie ethic of the 60s, but it makes sense. The comments on this essay also brought up an old memory: The Glades in Honolulu. The women there (transvestites, or mahu's as they're called in Hawaii) were so beautiful, at least the ones we'd banter with and whistle to outside at 2 am (always the last thing to do before heading home after a fun night of partying). Life was grittier and more dangerous back then, but also more interesting.]

Carol Doda’s death came to me via the same mechanism as so much news comes to me these days – Social Media. It was Veteran’s Day when I saw the article on SF Gate. I had enjoyed a much-needed day off work though I spent much of it working on things for myself and my kid – artwork, writing, laundry, dishes.

In the evening, I logged onto Facebook and found myself glutted with streams of posts about the passing of Doda at age 78. I read the SF Gate story on Doda’s death which opens with the preposterous statement that “Carol Doda . . . helped take stripping out of the shadowy margins of American society.” My first response was fury and outrage. Really? That is a rather grand and sweeping statement. On what facts are writers Kevin Faggan and Sam Whiting making this assumption? Clearly they haven’t spent a lot of time (or any time) working in strip clubs in America, or more specifically, North Beach. I can’t really blame them. They are writing about their perceptions, what has been fed to them from media and what they have experienced as onlookers.

The SF Gate article was just the tip of the iceberg (or of the nipples in Doda’s case). These writers represent a very small fraction of the hundreds of people who I read voicing their opinion on Doda. It seems like everyone, especially those living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s and 70s, had a story or opinion to share. Her tits were mythic! She revolutionized stripping! She was an icon for female sexual freedom! She changed the landscape of San Francisco’s North Beach from sleaze-ball sex alley to neon lit tourist destination! She put the S in Silicone and pioneered bending sexuality as an act of sexual liberation! She was hilarious! She was a riot! She was iconic! Bigger than her big neon tits glowing over Broadway and Columbus!

People recounted their encounters with Doda, which in the end mostly weren’t encounters at all, but restatements of myths of Doda which were perpetuated by the image of her plastered in the media as a representation of San Francisco’s ribald history and its reputation as a leader in sexual freedom. But these stories weren’t “real.” They were recreations of urban myths that took a real person – Carol Doda – and turned her into a phantom legend. People writing about Doda mostly experienced her from the point of view of spectator and tourist. Few of them had ever really met her, and none that I read had actually worked for her.

People fondly remembered seeing Doda descend to the stage of the Condor while standing on a pristine white grand piano. Doda donned in slinky glitter and high heels belted out songs and jokes to a riotous audience while she made her tits pump up and down and sideways. Or they remembered driving past the large red neon sign outside the Condor and gaping in awe at Doda’s neon-lit larger-than-life-size-tits and blinking incandescent nipples pointed to the San Francisco skyline. Others recounted stories of the barkers standing outside the Condor inciting tourists to step inside and checkout Carol’s show. Real live Carol Doda tits! Woo hoo!

As I read through these stories, my insides churned. I flashed back to a time nearly 40 years ago when I was a fifteen-year-old runaway girl living on the streets of San Francisco, and I happened to land a job in the Condor Club working for Carol Doda. My story is a different story then the ones I have read in the news this past week. Sure, when I walked through the doors of the Condor, I was as aware of the legend of Doda as anyone else growing up in San Francisco at that time. She was, after all, a television icon. Her slinky voice – “This is Carol Doda, and you are watching the Perfect 36”—was the soundtrack to late night TV, her voice accompanied by the ever present snap of the tab on my dad’s beer cans as we watched movies together and he drank down six packs of Budweiser or Olympia.

So yeah, I thought I knew damn well who Carol Doda was when I walked into the Condor in April 1977 looking for a job, but actually, I didn’t know her at all.

I grew up in San Francisco in the 1960s and 70s, and Carol Doda was a regular household name. My parents and uncles and aunts were part of the Cocktail Generation, the generation that thought getting drunk and wagging your tits was revolutionary. Sure Doda’s face was a staple on the TV in my house, but she and her tits were also emblems of a whole culture that centered on getting wasted and humping each other as some sign of being sexually revolutionary. My parents played Herb Albert albums, the covers featuring naked women covered in whipped cream. Playboy magazine arrived in the mail regularly, and my mom used Mod Podge to decoupage all variety of household items with the images of naked women and their large Hugh Hefner-endorsed tits. My parents, uncles, aunts and their friends frequently headed to North Beach to play the scene.

During the day, my mom was a bookkeeper and my dad was an ironworker. On the weekends, they were transformed into out-of-control hyper sexual drunks, and Carol Doda incited them to push boundaries while North Beach gave them a place to push them. My parents came home with black eyes, hangovers and tales of public displays of debauchery. They came home saying they saw Carol Doda’s tits.

On my 12th birthday, my Uncle Jerry gave me a dog-eared copy of Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker (1971) as a present. It was the copy that he already read, and I really don’t want to think about what that meant. I think Uncle Jerry thought he was passing along some kind of baton of liberation, but really it was just another way in which the Cocktail Generation fucked up their kids. I was supposed to look to a hooker as a hero? I read the book front to back cover, mesmerized by the story. That book, along with every other piece of sex and booze propaganda thrust on my young self, probably helped pave the way for me to walk into the Condor and ask for a job when I was a fifteen year old girl who barely had lost her virginity.

In my mind, Doda was wrapped into the entire stinking cocktail that soaked through my parents’ generation. They were part of the Rat Pack generation and its taste for excess – booze, sex, and cigarettes – for no other reason than they could do it without any perceivable repercussions and that they felt momentary escape from the confines of their ordinary lives. To them, it was like flipping the finger to the Establishment they worked for but were also part of. Regardless of the myth of San Francisco as some kind of sex-crazed free for all, during the time of Doda’s reign, much of the city was still populated by working class families, like my own, who would head to North Beach as if they were going to Disneyland for the weekend.

This was well and fine for the adults who were exercising their new sense of liberty, especially for the cocktail generation who coopted the ideals of the hippy free love movement into a nightmarish bastardization that included believing it was okay to have orgies in front of their kids, engage in wife-swapping, and feed their children booze because “it was safer in the home than outside.” In this skewed world, these drunken sex-addled adults thought they were doing their kids a favor by removing taboos, when really for a lot of kids like me, growing up at that time was like living inside a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

That was my San Francisco. The era when kids were oversexed before they could crawl. The era that sent a lot of young girls, including myself, fleeing home and landing on the streets with nowhere to go and no way of knowing how to get there. And in the background, Carol Doda reminded us all that we were not only watching but living the world of the Perfect 36.

Of course the first myth to bust (pun intended ) is that Carol Doda’s tits were 36s. They were 44DDs the last time I checked. And I saw Carol Doda’s tits, many nights, as she pumped them up and down and sideways on the stage of the Condor. Those taut globes were the size of bowling balls. Ludicrous orbs ready to burst from their overinflated seams. As a kid looking at those things, I felt like I was watching what happened to Barbie when she took a wrong turn. Holy shit! So much for Disneyland. I was in the seventh circle of Plasticine Hell.

Perhaps my uncle knew something about my future that I didn’t when he handed me The Happy Hooker on my 12th birthday, or perhaps he was writing my future. In any case, my future led me to Carol Doda, and my memories of The Condor and the North Beach strip club scene (where I spent much of my fifteenth year on the planet ) are nothing like the mythic nostalgic recollections I read about Doda when she died last week.

The road that took me to The Condor Club is a long and winding one, to quote a song from the background of my childhood. But through many events in my early life – from alcohol-drenched parents to a strung out brother and a lot of Very Bad Shit – I ended up alone in San Francisco, a fifteen year old girl without a home and nowhere to go. Perhaps it was the fallout of the Cocktail Generation that shook my foundation so hard it threw me onto the streets when I was just a kid. I landed hard, and it was a tough fall, but somehow I learned how to survive, which is certainly obvious by the fact that I am sitting here writing my Carol Doda memories at age 53.

by Kim Nicolini, Anderson Valley Advertiser |  Read more:

Image: uncredited