Why Do We Work So Hard?

When John Maynard Keynes mused in 1930 that, a century hence, society might be so rich that the hours worked by each person could be cut to ten or 15 a week, he was not hallucinating, just extrapolating. The working week was shrinking fast. Average hours worked dropped from 60 at the turn of the century to 40 by the 1950s. The combination of extra time and money gave rise to an age of mass leisure, to family holidays and meals together in front of the television. There was a vision of the good life in this era. It was one in which work was largely a means to an end – the working class had become a leisured class. Households saved money to buy a house and a car, to take holidays, to finance a retirement at ease. This was the era of the three-Martini lunch: a leisurely, expense-padded midday bout of hard drinking. This was when bankers lived by the 3-6-3 rule: borrow at 3%, lend at 6%, and head off to the golf course by 3pm.

The vision of a leisure-filled future occurred against the backdrop of the competition against communism, but it is a capitalist dream: one in which the productive application of technology rises steadily, until material needs can be met with just a few hours of work. It is a story of the triumph of innovation and markets, and one in which the details of a post-work world are left somewhat hazy. Keynes, in his essay on the future, reckoned that when the end of work arrived:

For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem – how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Karl Marx had a different view: that being occupied by good work was living well. Engagement in productive, purposeful work was the means by which people could realise their full potential. He’s not credited with having got much right about the modern world, but maybe he wasn’t so wrong about our relationship with work.

In those decades after the second world war, Keynes seemed to have the better of the argument. As productivity rose across the rich world, hourly wages for typical workers kept rising and hours worked per week kept falling – to the mid-30s, by the 1970s. But then something went wrong. Less-skilled workers found themselves forced to accept ever-smaller pay rises to stay in work. The bargaining power of the typical blue-collar worker eroded as technology and globalisation handed bosses a whole toolkit of ways to squeeze labour costs. At the same time, the welfare state ceased its expansion and began to retreat, swept back by governments keen to boost growth by cutting taxes and removing labour-market restrictions. The income gains that might have gone to workers, that might have kept living standards rising even as hours fell, that might have kept society on the road to the Keynesian dream, flowed instead to those at the top of the income ladder. Willingly or unwillingly, those lower down the ladder worked fewer and fewer hours. Those at the top, meanwhile, worked longer and longer.

It was not obvious that things would turn out this way. You might have thought that whereas, before, a male professional worked 50 hours a week while his wife stayed at home with the children, a couple of married professionals might instead each opt to work 35 hours a week, sharing more of the housework, and ending up with both more money and more leisure. That didn’t happen. Rather, both are now more likely to work 60 hours a week and pay several people to care for the house and children.

Why? One possibility is that we have all got stuck on a treadmill. Technology and globalisation mean that an increasing number of good jobs are winner-take-most competitions. Banks and law firms amass extraordinary financial returns, directors and partners within those firms make colossal salaries, and the route to those coveted positions lies through years of round-the-clock work. The number of firms with global reach, and of tech start-ups that dominate a market niche, is limited. Securing a place near the top of the income spectrum in such a firm, and remaining in it, is a matter of constant struggle and competition. Meanwhile the technological forces that enable a few elite firms to become dominant also allow work, in the form of those constantly pinging emails, to follow us everywhere.

This relentless competition increases the need to earn high salaries, for as well-paid people cluster together they bid up the price of the resources for which they compete. In the brainpower-heavy cities where most of them live, getting on the property ladder requires the sort of sum that can be built up only through long hours in an important job. Then there is conspicuous consumption: the need to have a great-looking car and a home out of Interiors magazine, the competition to place children in good (that is, private) schools, the need to maintain a coterie of domestic workers – you mean you don’t have a personal shopper? And so on, and on.

The dollars and hours pile up as we aim for a good life that always stays just out of reach. In moments of exhaustion we imagine simpler lives in smaller towns with more hours free for family and hobbies and ourselves. Perhaps we just live in a nightmarish arms race: if we were all to disarm, collectively, then we could all live a calmer, happier, more equal life.

But that is not quite how it is. The problem is not that overworked professionals are all miserable. The problem is that they are not.

Drinking coffee one morning with a friend from my home town, we discuss our fathers’ working habits. Both are just past retirement age. Both worked in an era in which a good job was not all-consuming. When my father began his professional career, the post-war concept of the good life was still going strong. He was a dedicated, even passionate worker. Yet he never supposed that work should be the centre of his life.

Work was a means to an end; it was something you did to earn the money to pay for the important things in life. This was the advice I was given as a university student, struggling to figure out what career to pursue in order to have the best chance at an important, meaningful job. I think my parents were rather baffled by my determination to find satisfaction in my professional life. Life was what happened outside work. Life, in our house, was a week’s holiday at the beach or Pop standing on the sidelines at our baseball games. It was my parents at church, in the pew or volunteering in some way or another. It was having kids who gave you grandkids. Work merely provided more people to whom to show pictures of the grandkids.

This generation of workers, on the early side of the baby boom, is marching off to retirement now. There are things to do in those sunset years. But the hours will surely stretch out and become hard to fill. As I sit with my friend it dawns on us that retirement sounds awful. Why would we stop working?

Here is the alternative to the treadmill thesis. As professional life has evolved over the past generation, it has become much more pleasant. Software and information technology have eliminated much of the drudgery of the workplace. The duller sorts of labour have gone, performed by people in offshore service-centres or by machines. Offices in the rich world’s capitals are packed not with drones filing paperwork or adding up numbers but with clever people working collaboratively.

The pleasure lies partly in flow, in the process of losing oneself in a puzzle with a solution on which other people depend. The sense of purposeful immersion and exertion is the more appealing given the hands-on nature of the work: top professionals are the master craftsmen of the age, shaping high-quality, bespoke products from beginning to end. We design, fashion, smooth and improve, filing the rough edges and polishing the words, the numbers, the code or whatever is our chosen material. At the end of the day we can sit back and admire our work – the completed article, the sealed deal, the functioning app – in the way that artisans once did, and those earning a middling wage in the sprawling service-sector no longer do.

The fact that our jobs now follow us around is not necessarily a bad thing, either. Workers in cognitively demanding fields, thinking their way through tricky challenges, have always done so at odd hours. Academics in the midst of important research, or admen cooking up a new creative campaign, have always turned over the big questions in their heads while showering in the morning or gardening on a weekend afternoon. If more people find their brains constantly and profitably engaged, so much the better.

Smartphones do not just enable work to follow us around; they also make life easier. Tasks that might otherwise require you to stay late in the office can be taken home. Parents can enjoy dinner and bedtime with the children before turning back to the job at hand. Technology is also lowering the cost of the support staff that make long hours possible. No need to employ a full-time personal assistant to run the errands these days: there are apps to take care of the shopping, the laundry and the dinner, walk the dog, fix the car and mend the hole in the roof. All of these allow us to focus ever more of our time and energy on doing what our jobs require of us.

There are downsides to this life. It does not allow us much time with newborn children or family members who are ill; or to develop hobbies, side-interests or the pleasures of particular, leisurely rituals – or anything, indeed, that is not intimately connected with professional success. But the inadmissible truth is that the eclipsing of life’s other complications is part of the reward.

It is a cognitive and emotional relief to immerse oneself in something all-consuming while other difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.

by Ryan Avent, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Izhar Cohen

The Last Island of the Savages

The lumps of white coral shone round the dark mound like a chaplet of bleached skulls, and everything around was so quiet that when I stood still all sound and all movement in the world seemed to come to an end. It was a great peace, as if the earth had been one grave, and for a time I stood there thinking mostly of the living who, buried in remote places out of the knowledge of mankind, still are fated to share in its tragic or grotesque miseries. In its noble struggles too—who knows? The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world. It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?

                                                                            —Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Shortly before midnight on August 2, 1981, a Panamanian-registered freighter called the Primrose, which was traveling in heavy seas between Bangladesh and Australia with a cargo of poultry feed, ran aground on a coral reef in the Bay of Bengal. As dawn broke the next morning, the captain was probably relieved to see dry land just a few hundred yards from the Primrose’s resting place: a low-lying island, several miles across, with a narrow beach of clean white sand giving way to dense jungle. If he consulted his charts, he realized that this was North Sentinel Island, a western outlier in the Andaman archipelago, which belongs to India and stretches in a ragged line between Burma and Sumatra. But the sea was too rough to lower the lifeboats, and so—since the ship seemed to be in no danger of sinking—the captain decided to keep his crew on board and wait for help to arrive.

A few days later, a young sailor on lookout duty in the Primrose’s Watchtower spotted several people coming down from the forest toward the beach and peering out at the stranded vessel. They must be a rescue party sent by the shipping company, he thought. Then he took a closer look at them. They were small men, well-built, frizzy-haired, and black. They were naked except for narrow belts that circled their waists. And they were holding spears, bows, and arrows, which they had begun waving in a manner that seemed not altogether friendly.

Not long after this, a wireless operator at the Regent Shipping Company’s offices in Hong Kong received an urgent distress call from the Primrose’s captain, asking for an immediate airdrop of firearms so that his Island crew could defend itself. “Wild men, estimate more than 50, carrying various homemade weapons are making two or three wooden boats,” the message read. “Worrying they will board us at sunset. All crew members’ lives not guaranteed.”

If the Primrose’s predicament seemed a thing less of the twentieth century than of the eighteenth—an episode, perhaps, from Captain Cook’s voyages in the Pacific—it is because the island where the ship lay grounded had somehow managed to slip through the net of history. Although its existence had been known for centuries, its inhabitants had had virtually no contact with the rest of humanity. Anthropologists referred to them as “Sentinelese,” but no one knew what they called themselves—indeed, no one even knew what language they spoke. And in any case, no one within living memory had gotten close enough to ask. Whether the natives’ prelapsarian state was one of savagery or innocence, no one knew either.

The same monsoon-whipped waves that had driven the Primrose onto the reef kept the tribesmen’s canoes at bay, and high winds blew their arrows off the mark. The crew kept up a twenty-four-hour guard with makeshift weapons—a flare gun, axes, some lengths of pipe—as news of the emergency slowly filtered to the outside world. (An Indian government spokesman denied reports in the Hong Kong press that the Sentinelese were “cannibals.” A Hong Kong government spokesman suggested that perhaps the Primrose’s radio officer had “gone bananas.”) After nearly a week, the Indian Navy dispatched a tugboat and a helicopter to rescue the besieged sailors.

The natives of North Sentinel must have watched the whirring aircraft as it hovered three times above the great steel hulk, lowering a rope ladder to pluck the men safely back into modernity. Then the strange machines departed, the sea calmed, and the island remained, lush and impenetrable, still waiting for its Cook or its Columbus.

Epochs of history rarely come to a sudden end, seldom announce their passing with anything so dramatic as the death of a king or the dismantling of a wall. More often, they withdraw slowly and imperceptibly (or at least unperceived), like the ebbing tide on a deserted beach.

That is how the Age of Discovery ended. For more than five hundred years, the envoys of civilization sailed through storms and hacked through jungles, startling in turn one tribe after another of long-lost human cousins. For an instant, before the inevitable breaking of faith, the two groups would face each other, staring—as innocent, both of them, as children, and blameless as if the world had been born afresh. To live such a moment seems, when we think of it now, to have been one of the most profound experiences that our planet in its vanished immensity once offered. But each time the moment repeated itself on each fresh beach, there was one less island to be found, one less chance to start everything anew. It began to repeat itself less and less often, until there came a time, maybe a century ago, when there were only a few such places left, only a few doors still unopened.

Sometime quite recently, the last door opened. I believe it happened not long before the end of the millennium, on an island already all but known, a place encircled by the buzzing, thrumming web of a world still unknown to it, and by the mesh of a history that had forever been drawing closer. (...)

This is how you get to the most isolated human settlement on earth: You board an evening flight at JFK for Heathrow, Air India 112, a plane full of elegant sari-clad women, London-bound businessmen, hippie backpackers. You settle in to watch a movie (a romantic comedy in which Harrison Ford and Anne Heche get stranded on a desert island) and after a quick nap you are in London.

Then you catch another plane. You read yesterday’s Times while flying above the corrugated gullies of eastern Turkey, watch a Hindi musical somewhere over Iran. That night, and for the week that follows, you are in New Delhi, where the smog lies on the ground like mustard gas, and where one day you see an elephant—an elephant!—in the midst of downtown traffic.

From New Delhi you go by train to Calcutta, where you must wait for a ship. And you must wait for a ticket. There are endless lines at the shipping company office, and jostling, and passing back and forth of black-and-white photographs in triplicate and hundred-rupee notes and stacks of documents interleaved with Sapphire brand carbon paper. Next you are on the ship, a big Polish-built steamer crawling with cockroaches. The steamer passes all manner of scenery: slim and fragile riverboats like craft from a pharaoh’s tomb; broad-beamed, lateen-rigged Homeric merchantmen. You watch the sun set into the Bay of Bengal, play cards with some Swedish backpackers, and take in the shipboard video programming, which consists of the complete works of Macaulay Culkin, subtitled in Arabic. On the morning of the sixth day your ship sails into a wide, sheltered bay—steaming jungles off the port bow, a taxi-crowded jetty to starboard—and you have arrived in the Andamans, at Port Blair.

In Port Blair you board a bus, finding a seat beneath a wall-mounted loudspeaker blaring a Hindi cover of “The Macarena Song.” The bus rumbles through the bustling market town, past barefoot men peddling betel nut, past a billboard for the local computer-training school (“I want to become the 21st century’s computer professional”). On the western outskirts you see a sawmill that is turning the Andaman forests into pencils on behalf of a company in Madras, and you see the airport, where workmen are busy extending the runway—out into a field where water buffalo graze—so that in a few years, big jetliners will be able to land here, bringing tour groups direct from Bangkok and Singapore. A little farther on, you pass rice paddies, and patches of jungle, and the Water Sports Training Centre, and thatched huts, and family-planning posters, and satellite dishes craning skyward. And then, within an hour’s time, you are at the ocean again, and on a very clear day you will see the island in the distance, a slight disturbance of the horizon.

by Adam Goodheart, American Scholar |  Read more:

Image: Ana Raquel S. Hernandes/Flickr

The World's Top Fighter Pilots Fear This Woman's Voice

All F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jets come with a female voice that issues greetings and warnings, in tones ranging from stern and sharp to extremely urgent. It doesn't matter if the pilot is wearing a Malaysian, Kuwaiti, or Australian flag on his flight suit, the airplane speaks in a Tennessee twang that sounds a lot like Loretta Lynn in the middle of a very bad day. Embark on a miscue, and the jet issues an audible correction: “Roll right! Roll right!” or “Pull up! Pull up!”

U.S. Air Force pilots refer to voice of the Super Hornet as “Bitchin' Betty,” while among Britain's Royal Air Force she is known as “Nagging Nora.” But a real woman personifies the aircraft, 60-year-old Leslie Shook, and she recently retired after 35 years as an employee of Boeing Co. “I knew I had an accent which I did not think was desirable in the plane,” Shook said in an interview, the voice familiar to generations of fighter pilots coming in clear over a telephone. “No one ever said anything about it. I was my own worst critic as far as that goes.”

After powering up the F/A-18 and hearing Shook's greeting, a pilot won't typically hear much from her again unless the situation gets serious. You might be in danger of flying into a mountain, triggering a warning recorded by Shook. Or perhaps you have just drained half the fuel supply for the mission, in which case you will hear her repeat: “Bingo. Bingo.”

Nearly every aircraft has its own voice. The first digital voice in a U.S. combat jet was that of Kim Crow, a professional actor who still does voice-over work. For whatever reason, women’s voices have been common in fighter jets and numerous civilian aircraft.

Shook worked in St. Louis for McDonnell Douglas, which Boeing acquired in 1997. McDonnell was among the first to use voice commands on the flight deck, for both civilian and military jets, and the company favored women for the job.

Shook’s involvement with the Hornet came about by happenstance, as one more job to record following a long day in her work as a video-services coordinator for the defense contractor. That meant she helped arrange such things as video shoots, photography, audio recordings, television commercials, and speaking events.

In the mid-1990s, when an F/A-18 customer requested a voice command for the jet’s ground-avoidance system, Boeing arranged a recording session. Several people were involved, including a Navy lieutenant colonel, and the woman recording the command wasn’t suitable.

“They did not like her voice; it was too sweet for the airplane,” Shook recalled. She was feeling tired and hungry that evening, ready to get home, and she stepped in with some voice advice. “I explained to them that Betty has a cadence, a sharpness to get your attention.”

The Navy officer suggested Shook do the recording, and the fighter jet quickly had its digital scold.

by Justin Bachman, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Boeing Co. and U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Ben Fulton

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In a Hail of Bullets and Fire

In late 2013, Jang Song-thaek, an uncle of Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, was taken to the Gang Gun Military Academy in a Pyongyang suburb.

Hundreds of officials were gathered there to witness the execution of Mr. Jang’s two trusted deputies in the administrative department of the ruling Workers’ Party.

The two men, Ri Ryong-ha and Jang Su-gil, were torn apart by antiaircraft machine guns, according to South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. The executioners then incinerated their bodies with flamethrowers.

Jang Song-thaek, widely considered the second-most powerful figure in the North, fainted during the ordeal, according to a new book published in South Korea that offers a rare glimpse into the secretive Pyongyang regime.

“Son-in-Law of a Theocracy,” by Ra Jong-yil, a former deputy director of the National Intelligence Service, is a rich biography of Mr. Jang, the most prominent victim of the purges his young nephew has conducted since assuming power in 2011.

Mr. Jang was convicted of treason in 2013. He was executed at the same place and in the same way as his deputies, the South Korean intelligence agency said.

The book asserts that although he was a fixture of the North Korean political elite for decades, he dreamed of reforming his country. “With his execution, North Korea lost virtually the only person there who could have helped the country introduce reform and openness,” Mr. Ra said during a recent interview.

Mr. Ra, who is also a professor of political science and a former South Korean ambassador to Japan and Britain, mined existing publications but also interviewed sources in South Korea, Japan and China, including high-ranking defectors from the North who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Jang met one of the daughters of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, while both attended Kim Il-sung University in the mid-1960s. The daughter, Kim Kyong-hee, developed a crush on Mr. Jang, who was tall and humorous — and sang and played the accordion.

Her father transferred the young man to a provincial college to keep the two apart. But Ms. Kim hopped in her Soviet Volga sedan to see Mr. Jang each weekend.

Once they married in 1972, Mr. Jang’s career took off under the patronage of Kim Jong-il, his brother-in-law and the designated successor of the regime.

In his memoir, a Japanese sushi chef for Kim Jong-il from 1988 to 2001 who goes by the alias Kenji Fujimoto remembered Mr. Jang as a fun-loving prankster who was a regular at banquets that could last until morning or even stretch a few days. A key feature of the events was a “pleasure squad” of young, attractive women who would dance the cancan, sing American country songs or perform a striptease, according to the book and accounts by defectors.

Mr. Jang also mobilized North Korean diplomats abroad to import Danish dairy products, Black Sea caviar, French cognac and Japanese electronics — gifts Mr. Kim handed out during his parties to keep his elites loyal.

But North Korean diplomats who have defected to South Korea also said that during his frequent trips overseas to shop for Mr. Kim, Mr. Jang would drink heavily and speak dejectedly about people dying of hunger back home.

Few benefited more than Mr. Jang from the regime he loyally served. But he was never fully embraced by the Kim family because he was not blood kin. This “liminal existence” enabled him to see the absurdities of the regime more clearly than any other figure within it, Mr. Ra wrote.

Mr. Ra said Hwang Jang-yop, a North Korean party secretary who defected to Seoul in 1997 and lived here until his death in 2010, shared a conversation he once had with Mr. Jang. When told that the North’s economy was cratering, Mr. Jang responded sarcastically: “How can an economy already at the bottom go further down?”

Mr. Jang’s frequent partying with the “pleasure squad” strained his marriage. Senior defectors from the North said it was an open secret among the Pyongyang elite that the couple both had extramarital affairs.

Their only child, Jang Kum-song, killed herself in Paris in 2006. She overdosed on sleeping pills after the Pyongyang government caught wind of her dating a Frenchman and summoned her home.

Still, the marriage endured. When Kim Jong-il banished Mr. Jang three times for overstepping his authority, his wife intervened on his behalf.

After Mr. Kim suffered a stroke in 2008 and died in 2011, Mr. Jang helped his young nephew, Kim Jong-un, establish himself as successor. At the same time, he vastly expanded his own influence — and ambition.

by Choe Sang-Hun, NY Times | Read more:
Image: CreditKyodo, via Reuters

What Would It Mean To Have A 'Hapa' Bachelorette?

On a recent episode of The Bachelor, the ABC dating reality show that ends its 20th season Monday night, contestant Caila Quinn brings Ben Higgins home to meet her interracial family.

"Have you ever met Filipinos before?" Quinn's mother asks, leading Higgins into a dining room where the table is filled with traditional Filipino food.

"I don't know," he replies. "No. I don't think so."

As they sit around the adobo and pancit, Quinn's father talks to Higgins, white man to white man. What comes with dating Quinn, the father says, "is a very special Philippine community." Quinn grimaces.

"I had no idea what I was getting into when I married Caila's mother," the father says. But being married to a Filipina, he assures Higgins, has been "the most fun" and "magical."

This scene can be read as an attempt by The Bachelor franchise to dispel criticisms (and the memory of a 2012 lawsuit) concerning its whitewashed casts. It shows how these attempts can be clunky at best, offensive and creepy at worst.

Quinn's run also demonstrates how, as this rose-strewn, fantasy-fueled romance machine tries to include more people of color, diversification looks like biracial Asian-American — often known as "hapa" — women.

Among the 19 women who have won the "final rose" since The Bachelor premiered in 2002, two — Tessa Horst and Catherine Giudici — have been biracial Asian-white. All other winners, aside from Mary Delgado in 2004 who was Cuban-American, appear to have been white. As these handy graphics by writer and video artist Karen X. Cheng show, in the previous seven years, the only women of color who lasted into the final few weeks were of mixed-race Asian-white background. (...)

To understand why only a narrow group of women of color — biracial Asian-white women — survive in this world is to delve into romantic tropes, the stuff The Bachelor is made of.

"As objects of beauty, these women are benefiting from two helpful stereotypes about female desirability," said Ann Morning, associate professor of sociology at New York University. One is whiteness as the persisting standard of beauty. The other is Asian women as sexualized, exotic and submissive.

Taken alone, the first stereotype can be detrimental. "Today, being white is often perceived as a kind of boring, colorless identity," Morning said. But that stereotype about whiteness can work to balance negative stereotypes about Asian women.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai, curator of history at the Japanese American National Museum (and a friend of mine), explained where these stereotypes about Asian women come from. The trope of Puccini's 1904 Madama Butterfly paved the way for American incarnations of a tragic love story between an American soldier and Asian woman in the mid-20th century, when American soldiers brought home war stories — and sometimes brides — from Asia, where women were often part of the conquest. Popular narratives included the 1957 film Sayonara and the 1989 musical Miss Saigon. ("I guess they just never got around to making the Korea version," Tamai said.)

These stories cemented in the American consciousness the idea of the Asian woman as the foreign sex toy: the geisha, the china doll, the "me love you long time" sex worker.

by Akemi Johnson, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Kelsey McNeal/ABC via Getty Images

Mr. Spock at the “Sh*t Show”

Barack Obama, the rise of Trump and a world gone crazy

Barack Obama does not much appreciate being blamed for the rise of Donald Trump. But after reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s immense article on “The Obama Doctrine” in the Atlantic, which was based on several lengthy interviews with the president and his inner circle of advisors, I suspect Obama also knows that the charge contains a germ of truth, on a deep karmic or psychological level most of his critics are unlikely to grasp.

Goldberg’s Obama magnum opus is well written, highly intelligent and impressively researched. It’s also massively narcissistic and sycophantic, in vintage Beltway-insider style, marinating in details and locations and celebrating its author’s access to power. We’re in the White House dining room, or John Kerry’s private office at the State Department, or aboard Air Force One on the runway in Kuala Lumpur. We are discussing serious things: the perceived personality defects of Vladimir Putin, the contemporary relevance of Thomas Hobbes’ “Leviathan,” and the importance of America’s relationship to Asia — a question Obama hoped would be central to his presidency that got trumped, or Trumped, by other concerns.

Even as Goldberg sinks, little by little, into the swamp of Washington groupthink — honestly, he should know better than to refer to Hugo Chávez, the late Venezuelan president, as a “dictator” — he teases out an intriguing portrait of the blend of caution, calculation and hopefulness that have characterized Obama’s foreign policy. Through it all, we can also discern a depiction of the president’s central flaw. It may not be a flaw at all, depending on your view of such things; it is certainly preferable to other flaws we could name. (Obama is presumed to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, but Clinton is portrayed throughout the Goldberg article as an incautious military interventionist who drove the administration’s disastrous Libya policy and wanted to compound the error in Syria. It’s a lot more like an indictment than an endorsement.)

Obama is frequently described as cool or sardonic or detached or analytical or deliberative; he is without doubt the most intellectually gifted American president in many decades. (Woodrow Wilson would be the most recent candidate, and before him probably Lincoln.) But what underlies Obama’s impressive book-learning and nuanced strategic thinking is a well-known failing of the intellectual class: He doesn’t seem to know much about human nature, and appears continually surprised by how stupid, fearful and irrational his fellow citizens and fellow planetary inhabitants are. He has read more than enough of Hobbes and John Locke, more than enough foreign-policy papers by officials of the George H.W. Bush administration. (His avatar in that field is, no kidding, Brent Scowcroft, which explains a lot.) He’s a little short, so to speak, on Freud and Nietzsche, on “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Apocalypse Now” and “Blue Velvet.”

To my mind, the most illuminating of Goldberg’s numerous Obama-up-close anecdotes is the one about the presidential press conference at a G20 summit in Turkey last November, a few days after the ISIS attacks in Paris that killed 130 people. Obama seemed increasingly exasperated and puzzled that the press corps never asked him about climate change or the conflict in Ukraine or the Iranian nuclear negotiations or any other possible summit topics. Every question was about ISIS and terrorism, culminating in a CNN reporter’s infamous outburst: “Why can’t we take out these bastards?”

That was the week when Trump first proposed barring all Muslims from entering the United States, a suggestion that all normal and reasonable people immediately rejected as outrageous — and that propelled him to a huge lead in the Republican campaign he has yet to surrender. Every Republican elected official everywhere in the country seized on the Syrian refugee crisis as a potential wedge issue, demanding that no more migrants be admitted under any circumstances (except maybe the Christians, in Ted Cruz’s iteration). Obama barely appeared to have noticed any of this. An unnamed official told Goldberg that it wasn’t until the next day, after a flight to Manila, that the president’s advisors figured out that “everyone back home had lost their minds.”

Whoever said that — it may have been Obama himself — was entirely correct. America’s reaction to the Paris attacks came pretty close to mass hysteria, and had nothing to do with the actual danger represented by ISIS, which was and is insignificant. There are many valid criticisms to raise about Obama’s approach to foreign policy and national security, including the dubious effects of the drone war and his administration’s obsessive crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers. But we have been very fortunate, in my judgment, to have had a president for seven-plus years who has valued logic over panic when it comes to the issue of Islamic terrorism, and who has consistently sought to frame that problem in global and historical terms and not to exaggerate its importance.

I’m delighted to learn, via Goldberg, that Obama often reminds his staff that far more Americans die every year from falls in the bathtub than die at the hands of Muslim terrorists. (John Kerry, on the other hand, comes off like a raving lunatic, envisioning a future in which ISIS destroys European society and leads to the return of 1930s-style fascism. Thank Christ he didn’t get elected.) I can understand why he doesn’t say this stuff in public, but Obama is justified in describing Syria — and, by extension, the larger quagmire of the Middle East — as a “shit show” that won’t be solved during his presidency or the next one or the one after that. On any logical basis, it’s difficult to challenge his argument that the least bad choice in Middle East policy is to disentangle and disconnect to the greatest extent possible and pivot toward America’s relationship with the developing nations of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where constructive change is far more achievable.

But Americans, as you may have noticed, don’t do logic all that well. We do fear and passion and soaring guitar chords and “freedom isn’t free.” We love tough talk and paranoid fantasies and bizarre, apocalyptic delusions. Obama is a master of political oratory, which is what got him elected in the first place. But given his apparent puzzlement that the stupid, primitive and seductive passions that run throughout human history — and the deranged current of jingoistic nationalism that runs throughout American history — have not been conclusively vanquished by the light of reason, he still adds up to the strangest and unlikeliest president ever. So I think it’s about halfway true that Obama’s persistent mode of cool drove us crazy and paved the way for the empty hotness of Trump, although it’s a lot more true to say that we were already crazy and Trump was ready and waiting.

Trump is the anti-Obama, the distorted reflection, the choleric abreaction to Obama’s phlegmatic calm. If Obama is the most Apollonian political figure ever, Trump is the Dionysian comeback. If Obama is the only president ever to be compared with Mr. Spock — Goldberg does it at least twice — then Trump is the sadistic, bearded Spock from that alternate-universe “Star Trek” episode. (As Obama probably knows, that would be season 2, episode 4: “Mirror, Mirror.”) Obama did not create Trump, because the Trumpian force has always been with us and within us. But in relying too much on his misguided assumption that humans are governed by reason more than emotion, and that the atavism, tribalism and nihilism Trump so perfectly embodies were in retreat, Obama may unwittingly have released Trump from his dungeon in the American unconscious.

As is customary when he feels that his fundamental worldview is under attack, Obama managed to sound bemused rather than outraged when Margaret Brennan of CBS News brought up what a Wall Street Journal editorial has called the “Obama-Trump dialectic” at a White House press conference this week. “I have been blamed by Republicans for a lot of things,” the president said, “but being blamed for their primaries and who they’re selecting is novel.” He went on to say, reasonably enough, that “Republican political elites” and the right-wing media have been pouring poison into the lagoon for years, and should hardly be surprised that a mutant monster has come crawling out of it. He’s neither Republican nor Democrat! Neither man nor crustacean!

by Andrew O'Hehir, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Pete Souza

10 Awkward Friendships You Probably Have

10 awkward friendships you probably have

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The Residents

The Theory of Obscurity
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[ed. See also: Third Reich and Gingerbread Man]

William Adolphe Bouguereau, Fishing For Frogs, 1882

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Pax, the 'iPhone of Vaporizers'

Josh, a banker at a hedge fund in Manhattan, loves his Pax vaporizer.

He uses the small, sleek gadget to heat up his stash of weed just to the right temperature in under a minute — hot enough so he can inhale it and feel the effects, but not so hot that it burns — a few times each week.

He presses a button to turn it on while it’s in his pocket, and about a minute later, pulls it out, puts it to his lips, and inhales.

“You breathe in, you breath out, and you’re done,” he recently told Tech Insider.

Josh (we're not using his real name for obvious reasons) said he’s used his Pax to get high outside of a movie theater, on the subway, at concerts, and even on his way into the office.

He likes it because it’s not only convenient, but also inconspicuous. Because you’re not actually smoking, there isn’t as much of an odor, and it doesn’t create a huge cloud of smoke that draws attention.

Pax, he said, “has truly pushed the envelope and brought [smoking weed] into the 21st century.”

The Pax vaporizer is made by Pax Labs, one of the leading — and certainly one of the buzziest — companies cashing in on the growing demand for small, handheld battery-powered vaporizers that have revolutionized how people smoke weed in public.

The second generation Pax, the Pax 2, came out last year and is packed with technology: It has multiple sensors to measure temperature and an accelerometer that detects movement. The mouthpiece recognizes when your lips touch it, telling the heater to turn on and start heating up whatever you've packed inside of it. Insulation keeps the smooth exterior cool while the oven heats up to temperatures as high as 455 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's been referred to as "the iPhone of vaporizers," and, like the iPhone, it comes with a premium price tag — the Pax 2 will set you back $289.99.

by Tim Stenovec, Tech Insider | Read more:
Image: Pax

The Facebook Breakup

For Kate Sokoloff, a brand strategist in Portland, Ore., the Facebook mirror of her breakup with her boyfriend of three years was like “an emotional sucker punch,” she said. “Not 15 minutes after we broke up four years ago, and probably while he was still parked outside of my house, he changed his status to ‘single.’”

This meant that all of the couple’s Facebook friends, including her teenage sons, were instantly notified. “There was no hiding or time to cry on my own,” said Ms. Sokoloff, now 55.

She did message friends, asking them to remove any photos of herself and her former partner from their own Facebook albums, but she remembers wishing “there was a Facebook vacuum cleaner that could suck every trace of our relationship off the Internet. Photos, in particular. In fact, some just popped up yesterday.”

Since last November, there has been such a tool, part of a kit the social network has designed to manage and curate the digital archive that is growing with each relationship. It’s like cleaning your closet, said Kelly Winters, a product manager on Facebook’s designated “Compassion Team,” a changing squad of product managers and designers, engineers, researchers, social scientists and psychologists. “You don’t want to keep anything around that doesn’t spark joy,” she said, echoing the mantra of Marie Kondo, the Japanese decluttering guru.

Three million users have already deployed some aspect of the breakup flow, as it’s called, by choosing to minimize what they see of an ex going forward, and similarly hide their own postings, settings that can easily be reversed if the future brings a change of heart or a dulling of the ache.

Undoing the vacuum tool (to use Ms. Sokoloff’s words for the engineering feat that harnesses what is known as distributed computing to untag hundreds or even thousands of images that no longer spark joy) is more laborious. (...)

Finding the right tone was a big part of the design process, Ms. Albert said, language being crucial in creating a tool kit that would be flexible enough to address a 14-year-old breaking up with her boyfriend of four weeks as well as longtime married couples with children.

It also had to be neutral, not familiar, and not in any way hortatory. “If designers are in charge of surprise and delight,” she said, “what does it mean to design for aspects of life that are painful?”

Facebook language isn’t lyric poetry, by any means, but it does the trick. If you’re able to stumble onto the breakup flow (not an easy task, at this point; it’s only available on mobile and only in the United States), you should discover, as Ms. Winters described, a bento box of options.

“Take a Break. Here are some changes that might be helpful. We won’t notify Taylor of any changes you make. See less of Taylor. See Taylor on Facebook only if you visit his profile.” And so on. Mostly the language is like that of an instruction manual — “Turn on tag approvals for posts and photos you’re tagged in” — though at the end, it veers into self-care: “Reach out to people you trust for support. Stay Active. …”

There were some ideas that were, as Ms. Albert said, “out of scope to build, the idea of locking yourself out, temporarily, from one person’s account, trying to prevent that stalking behavior.” Technologically, she said, it was a bridge too far, and it led to a bigger conversation about what role Facebook wants to play in people’s lives. “It would be like Starbucks not accepting your credit card,” she said.

And just maybe such stalking is productive for some, a step toward resilience that would never accrue from watching baby sloth videos or mash-ups of Donald Trump tweets.

Ms. Sokoloff, the brand strategist who yearned for a digital vacuum cleaner, wondered if there wasn’t some emotional cost in making all traces of a relationship disappear. “Is there something important in the healing process that would be lost if we can essentially have the Facebook equivalent of the dream removers from ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’?”

by Penelope Green, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: NY Times screenshots

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A Century of Fakers

In Chatuchak, Bangkok’s largest outdoor market, smells compete. A bleachy chemical tang replaces a foul suggestion of powdered prawn. This is where you’ll find luxury of spurious origin—Mulberry bags, Lacoste polos, and Tom Ford perfume. There are also pets (lordly tortoises and exhausted rats) and snacks (garlicky sour sausage and thick guava juice). And there are chickens, which, I guess, straddle the pet-snack conceptual divide.

Chatuchak is a great mass of torsos swivelling in response to an abundance of stimuli. All the bodies create a constant cascade of spatial problems, which are solved immediately and inelegantly by seemingly involuntary amoeba-like movements of the general throng. It never feels like you’ve chosen to be where you are.

On this day at Chatuchak, Jennifer, a felicitous middle-aged Welsh woman on vacation, was going through a scary ordeal. She was buying gifts for her nephews in London, who had humiliated her last Christmas, when she gave them fake Paul Smith socks that they immediately threw in the garbage. They instantly knew the socks weren’t genuine. She didn’t really understand any of this. She grew up pretty poor—when she was a kid, anything that wasn’t black with coal was a nice outfit. She had no idea what made a sock anything other than a foot containment device. She was sweating gallons, trying to think like a pubescent aristocrat.

Taylor was from Utah. He had one of those meaty faces that you immediately trust—I suppose because mass is inherently trustworthy. He was wearing a fanny pack below his sleeveless black tee so I assumed he wouldn’t care about the authenticity of the Louis Vuitton bag he was buying his sister. I was wrong. He wanted to give her “the fucking stupid thing she really wants”—luxury, he said, was all about stupidity. But what really confused Taylor was that the rich kids back in Utah cared less about being rich than he did. They ate 7-Eleven hot dogs leaning on their beautiful cars. Having real money meant money meaning less. “They were just okay with that stuff,” he said, with a zoological tone in his voice. “It’s almost like they had an inherent sense of self-worth, or something.”

Counterfeit clothing is illegal in Thailand theory, but in Thailand practice, all legality feels dangerously fluid. A drug possession charge will get you years of jail time, complete with leg irons, while tourists scream enthusiasm about bars in Pai where hallucinogens are available over the counter. Porn is largely censored, but the blowjob bars are many. If you’re an unscrupulous criminal resembling this writer not one bit, you can ride a motorbike without a license, ripping through humorously dangerous traffic along a snaky mountain road. So, regardless of the law, everyone wears counterfeit everything—like a trio of panhandling children I saw wearing beautiful matching New Balance shoes.

In downtown Bangkok, MBK mall is where the real action is. It’s a place where it’s actually difficult to buy something legitimate. If you’re tired of Starbucks coffee, you can go to Star Back Coffee, right next door. You can buy Dior shades that are totally believable except for the words “so real” stenciled on the insides of their arms. Y’know, in case you were wondering.

Some of the fakes at MBK are eerily accurate. There are imitation Burberry briefcases costing about as much as decent moisturizer that nevertheless exude British expensiveness. Others are as convincing as the paper version of a plane.

The really hallucinatory thing about MBK is that prices bear no relation to quality whatsoever. I saw, for example, maybe a dozen different fake pairs of a certain Prada shoe, which were all—despite being wildly various in quality—the exact same price. A silk fake Armani tie is no more expensive than a rayon fake Armani tie. This seemed absolutely insane at first—but it actually makes perfect sense.

Say we’ve got two counterfeiters: Larry and Curly. Larry sells excellent fake Chanel bags. He has them made by skilled people in Vietnam. He charges $50 for them, making a decent profit off each bag. They sell well. Meanwhile, at the next stall over, Curly sells positively abortive fake Chanel bags. They are essentially branded plastic boxes. Curly makes them in his garage with his nephew. However, he matches Larry’s price of $50, because price is a mark of legitimacy. If Curly’s bags were on sale for $5, nobody would buy them, for the same reason that you wouldn’t buy a jam roll for a penny: it would feel suspicious, like it was made by someone intent on poisoning children. Curly sells fewer bags than Larry, but Curly still manages to sell a few to people who aren’t paying much attention. Each shitty bag Curly sells nets him an outrageous profit. He’s a highly successful fraudulent fraud.

Quality also varies in Pantip Plaza, the place where the computer stuff goes: shiny new machines all over a squat dirty sprawl. It’s three malls over fromMBK—central Bangkok is basically a forest of vertical shopping opportunities. The smell of cat pee flows around its malfunctioning escalators. The day I was there, they were filming a commercial in which an American GI shoots at a bosomy Santa in booty shorts while a robot sulks sadly in the background. I was with Courtney, a clever woman with a sly smile who ran away with me to Thailand for no discernible reason. She wanted a fake iPhone after we met someone who bought a perfectly-operational-you’d-never-guess-it-wasn’t-real model for $20. We wondered what kind of subtle insinuation she’d have to mumble to obtain such a thing. “Do you have iPhones?” she said to a guy at the stall. “Real or copy?” he replied.

The product Courtney received seemed genuine at first. It looked as pretty as an iPhone should. But it soon refused to do much of anything. When she tried to open crucial applications, the phone responded with the koan-like error message “Resources are not shelves.” Bikini’d women appeared in unbidden windows. She had to hit the screen hard to make it acknowledge her. The phone invited her to play a game of Look After Your Stone, where you take care of a pebble, by, for example, buying a piece of meat for it to cuddle.

It was about this time, while Courtney was loudly considering maiming the unit, when I started wondering why I gave a shit about all of this.

by Sasha Chapin, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Image: via Flickr user Tim Lucas

For the Best

The Clavells weren’t the sort to play pranks, so the printed invitation to their annual Christmas party arrived after what Gerald and Charlotte’s son, Timothy, would call a “heads-up,” sent by e-mail, letting them know that both were invited to the event, at the Clavells’ apartment, on West Fifty-sixth Street. Gerald hadn’t seen Charlotte since their divorce, thirty-one years before, and this was the first time he’d seen her e-mail address. Whether she was on any social media he wouldn’t know, as he was not.

It was a rather jaunty message from the Clavells, who were not jaunty people. Intellectually, they were clear thinkers, and, as for jauntiness, Rorra Clavell had never totally recovered from a hip replacement years earlier, and her husband constantly fretted about why anyone would read a book on a Kindle. The brief e-mail message featured not one but two exclamation points, and offered no explanation as to why the Clavells had decided to invite them both. It seemed odd, but although Gerald did have some curiosity about how Charlotte looked and what she was doing, it did not keep him awake at night.

Gerald lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the East Side, next door to his oldest friend and former college roommate, Willers Caton, and his dog, Alexander the Great. A few days before the party, he happened to mention to Willers that he’d accepted an invitation to an event that Charlotte might also be attending. Without a second’s hesitation, Willers said, “She won’t show up. Watch.” Since Willers wasn’t usually a skeptic, Gerald asked how he could be so sure. To his great surprise, he found out that Charlotte and Willers had a psychiatrist in common, a Dr. Frederick Owls, known as the Owl, on Central Park West.

The day before the party, Gerald got a good jump on the season. He took a cab down to Kiehl’s, then worked his way back uptown, stopping at various stores, including the newly relocated Rizzoli. At each place, he picked out presents to be wrapped and mailed directly to his list of nineteen friends. (He counted his four cousins as friends, as he was not close enough to any of them to consider them family.) Outside the bookstore, he saw a man walking with a cane, his head bent in the wind. Was it Ned Farnsworth, his former accountant? He doubled back and managed to get a look at the man’s long, sharp nose as he was waiting for the light. He said Ned’s name, and the two warmly embraced. If such an embrace had happened with his son, Gerald would have had to suffer a series of violent thumps on the back, since young men who were affectionate in this way tended to act as if the other person were a baby in need of burping.

Gerald and Ned had coffee and caught up. (Ned had retired years before.) Ned said that he’d sold his beautiful Victorian upstate but was enjoying life on the twentieth floor of a new building in midtown that came complete with a dry cleaner’s, a lap pool, a gym he never used, and a concierge so eager for tips that he wrote thank-you notes for the simplest kindnesses—such as a resident remembering what team he wanted to win the World Series—then leaned them, in parchment envelopes, against the door to your apartment at night. Ned laughed heartily while telling him this. Years before, it had been Ned who’d recruited Gerald to pose in another client’s ad—almost to be mischievous, initially, but the ad had been so successful that Gerald had made a late career of modelling for others. As Ned gossiped, Gerald’s attention floated away. Might Ned also have been invited to the Clavells’? If memory served, he had been the Clavells’ accountant, too. But how to find out without risking making Ned feel excluded?

“Tell me the holiday party you’re most looking forward to!” Gerald exclaimed, thinking himself rather clever to have asked in such an open-ended way. “I don’t think I’m invited to any,” Ned replied, crestfallen. How rude of me, really unforgivable, Gerald thought, so he said, “Well, I’d like to invite you to dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant, on Fifty-fifth Street. Perhaps early January, when all the craziness has ended?” Oh, Ned said, he couldn’t eat much anymore; such an evening would be wasted on him, though he’d be happy to meet for coffee again. It would be something to look forward to. He produced his card, which Gerald pocketed with thanks. He found, to his surprise, that he had no card of his own in his wallet, so he jotted down his phone number on the back of a receipt. They parted with a firm handshake and a promise to meet again.

Late that same afternoon, Gerald had another thought. Or not so much a thought as a dream. He and Ned were swimming in the ocean, and he knew, though Ned did not, that a shark was lurking nearby. He tried to warn Ned, but some woman in the dream, an idiotic tourist, kept blocking his view, telling him that “Jaws” had scared an entire generation, and he really should shut up. However much he tried to look around her, or move to the side, no one seemed to notice him; nor was his shouting audible anymore. The dream ended abruptly when the heating turned on, with a series of little clicks, as it had been programmed to do, at 5 P.M. Gerald sat on the edge of the bed, sweating, distressed to have had such a vivid, disturbing dream, which he hoped was not a premonition.

The night of the party, Gerald nicked his cheek—with an electric razor, no less—and had to find the styptic pencil to stop the bleeding. He was perhaps more nervous than he’d thought. He showered, dried off, and dressed, making it a point not to care which of his white shirts he selected, except that regular cuffs seemed fine; hardly anyone still wore cufflinks.

Alonzo got him a cab with the first blow of his whistle. He might have walked to the party had he set out a little earlier, but it had rained all day, and more was predicted. Also, he didn’t want to arrive sweaty. It was early in the month for a Christmas party, though many people were sure to be out of town, or harder to get, closer to the holidays. His son had asked him to visit, but Seattle was too much for him in the winter—both the travel and the climate.

The Clavells’ lobby already had its Christmas tree up, resplendent in green and white lights, though it dangled no Christmas balls. At the top was an angel with sparkling white wings. She’d fallen forward a bit, so that it looked as if she were about to jump. “Darling!” Brenda Hampton called to Gerald, rushing in with a young woman she introduced as her goddaughter. They’d had their hair styled the same way, with a curly tendril hanging below one ear, and the rest neatly wound in a French twist. Each wore bright-red lipstick. “Brenda!” he exclaimed. The goddaughter extended her hand as if it were a gift. Indeed it was, with its slim fingers, absent of jewelry, its smooth skin, and glossy fingernails. He raised her hand and kissed it, which made her blush. “I’ll have to stick out my hand next time we meet, instead of hurling myself into your arms,” Brenda said, laughing.

by Ann Beattie, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: John Gall

Diarrhea Planet

[ed. Reminds me of Citizen Dick (in a good way)]

Obama the Divider

[ed. Thoughtful, articulate (and really kind of sad) response to this inane question/premise. See also: The Obama Doctrine.]

One of the most annoying habits of the right is their propensity for "I know you are but what am I" rhetoric. Among the stupidest is their obstructing every proposal and bringing the government to a crashing halt and then blaming President Obama for failing to achieve bipartisan nirvana after promising that he "would bring people together." It's a cute trick.

They've gone one step beyond that in recent times by proclaiming that Obama is a divider because he somehow "made" them act like barbarians. He was asked about this at his press conference today:

QUESTION: Some of your critics have pointed to the incredible polarized political climate as under your administration as contributing to the rise of someone as provocative as Donald Trump. Do you feel any responsibility for that, or for the protectionist rhetoric from some Democratic candidates. Do you have a timeline for when you may make a presidential endorsement?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: I have been blamed by the Republicans for a lot of things, but to be blamed for their primaries and who they are selecting, that is taking place in their primary is... novel. 

Look, I've said -- I said at the State of the Union that one of my regrets is the degree to which polarization and the nasty tone of our politics has accelerated, rather than waned over the course of the last seven and a half years, and I do all kinds of soul searching in terms of --- Are there things I can do better to make sure we're unifying the country, but I also have to say, Margaret, that objectively it's fair to say that the Republican political elites, and many of the information outlets, social media, television stations, talk radio, have been feeding the Republican base for the last seven years, a notion that everything I do is to be opposed, that cooperation or compromise somehow is a betrayal, that maximalist absolutist positions on issues are politically advantageous. 

That there's a them and us, and it's the them that are causing the problems we're experiencing, and the tone of that politics -- which I certainly have not contributed to -- I have not -- you know, I don't think that I was the one to prompt questions about my birth certificate, for example. I don't remember saying, hey, why don't you ask me about that. 

Why don't you question whether I'm American or whether I'm loyal or whether I have America's best interests at heart. 

Those aren't things that were prompted by any actions of mine, and so what you're seeing within the Republican party is to some degree all those efforts over a course of time creating an environment where somebody like a Donald Trump can thrive. (...)

I'm glad to hear the president answer that stupid question and answer it with the proper disdain. It's ridiculous.

by Digby |  Read more:

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‘Rented White Coats’ Who Defend Toxic Chemicals

How corporate-funded research is corrupting America’s courts and regulatory agencies

At 2:15 in the morning, an insomniac corporate defense lawyer in San Francisco finished crafting a “revolutionary” scientific theory.

Now Evan Nelson of the law firm Tucker Ellis & West needed a scientist willing to publish it in a medical journal. If his theory were given scientific validity, Nelson could use it to win lawsuits.

Nelson defended companies that had exposed people to asbestos, a heat-resistant, fibrous mineral. Asbestos causes several deadly diseases, including mesothelioma, a rare cancer that often drowns the lungs in fluid.

Nelson had expressed frustration with the argument that asbestos is the only known cause of mesothelioma. After scouring the scientific literature and applying his own logic, Nelson came up with a new culprit: tobacco.

Nelson sent a typo-ridden email to Peter Valberg of Cambridge, Massachusetts. A former professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, Valberg was by then a principal at the environmental consulting firm Gradient Corporation, with offices in Harvard Square.

“We can collaborate to publish several key, revolutionary articles that you will see unfold as I present this stuff to you,” the lawyer wrote in the 2008 email.

Citing a few scientific articles, Nelson drew a hypothetical link between the fact that cigarette smoke contains radioactive particles and limited evidence that people exposed to radiation had higher rates of mesothelioma.

“It is amazing that no one has pout [sic] this together before me, but I am confident that you will agree it is solid science that proves tobacco smoke causes mesothelioma — you just have to look at the tissue [sic] through the proper lense [sic].”

There was an obvious problem with Nelson’s “science.” Researchers for decades have exhaustively analyzed data on the health of hundreds of thousands of smokers. Since 1964, the U.S. Surgeon General has summarized the findings of study after study, none of which shows evidence that tobacco causes mesothelioma.

Valberg wrote back within hours, calling Nelson’s scientific theory “very intriguing.” He was game to try to disseminate it in peer-reviewed journals. He later sent Nelson a contract agreeing to write the first of three articles and even offered him a 10-percent discount. In the meantime, Valberg would adopt Nelson’s theory as an expert witness in lawsuits, using it against mesothelioma victims such as Pam Collins of Bellevue, Ohio.

The emails offer a rare glimpse into a world where corporate interests can dictate their own science and scientists for hire willingly oblige. It’s a phenomenon that’s grown in recent decades as government-funded science dwindles. Its effects are felt not only in courtrooms but also in regulatory agencies that issue rules to try to prevent disease.

The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.

Gradient belongs to a breed of scientific consulting firms that defends the products of its corporate clients beyond credulity, even exhaustively studied substances whose dangers are not in doubt, such as asbestos, lead and arsenic.

by David Heath, Center for Public Integrity |  Read more:

Image: Emilie Udell

Rene Burri  Mexique. Etat du Chiapas. 1982.
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