When Ocean Views Become Too Close for Comfort

Real estate agents looking to sell coastal properties usually focus on one thing: how close the home is to the water’s edge. But buyers are increasingly asking instead how far back it is from the waterline. How many feet above sea level? Is it fortified against storm surges? Does it have emergency power and sump pumps?

Rising sea levels are changing the way people think about waterfront real estate. Though demand remains strong and developers continue to build near the water in many coastal cities, homeowners across the nation are slowly growing wary of buying property in areas most vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

A warming planet has already forced a number of industries — coal, oil, agriculture and utilities among them — to account for potential future costs of a changed climate. The real estate industry, particularly along the vulnerable coastlines, is slowly awakening to the need to factor in the risks of catastrophic damage from climate change, including that wrought by rising seas and storm-driven flooding.

But many economists say that this reckoning needs to happen much faster and that home buyers urgently need to be better informed. Some analysts say the economic impact of a collapse in the waterfront property market could surpass that of the bursting dot-com and real estate bubbles of 2000 and 2008.

The fallout would be felt by property owners, developers, real estate lenders and the financial institutions that bundle and resell mortgages.

Over the past five years, home sales in flood-prone areas grew about 25 percent less quickly than in counties that do not typically flood, according to county-by-county data from Attom Data Solutions, the parent company of RealtyTrac. Many coastal residents are rethinking their investments and heading for safer ground. (...)

In April, Sean Becketti, the chief economist for Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant, issued a dire prediction. It is only a matter of time, he wrote, before sea level rise and storm surges become so unbearable along the coast that people will leave, ditching their mortgages and potentially triggering another housing meltdown — except this time, it would be unlikely that these housing prices would ever recover.

“Some residents will cash out early and suffer minimal losses,” he wrote. “Others will not be so lucky.”

by Ian Urbina, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Logan R. Cyrus

Ross Carron, Indigo No.1

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He was only a cat.
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Politics 101

The Elephants in Lake Charles

I Spent 5 Years With Some of Trump's Biggest Fans. Here's What They Won't Tell You.

The Age of Pain

Workers Don't Need Trump to Give Them a Voice. They Need Unions.

see also:

Robert Reich's 8 Point Plan for a New Democratic Party

Nobody Cooks, and Maybe That's OK

Nobody Cooks, and Maybe That's Ok.
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Morrissey Wants GM to Offer Vegan Leather for Car Interiors

[ed. I know... vegan leather? PETA is all for it. Here's another perspective: Just Say No to Vegan Leather.]

Morrissey has a complaint: the leather that runs smooth on the passenger’s seat isn’t vegan.

The former Smiths frontman has penned a letter to General Motors’ chair and CEO, Mary Barra, asking the automaker to consider adding the option of vegan leather to its interiors. “Given that the Volt and Bolt are being marketed to eco-conscious buyers, entirely vegan options would only broaden their appeal,” the singer-songwriter wrote.

Morrissey cites a recent press release from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) about inhumane conditions in cattle farms, adding that the livestock sector’s greenhouse gas emissions make up a high percentage of the greenhouse gases emitted in the world. (...)

“As I head to Detroit to play the Royal Oak Music Theatre, I’m writing to ask GM to make Chevy’s Volt and Bolt more eco-friendly by giving buyers the option to choose vegan leather interiors – including steering wheels and gear shifts,” Morrissey wrote to Barra.

Elon Musk’s Tesla offers a vegan leather interior, which the CEO himself promoted on Twitter as the best option when it was announced. The company’s Ultra White interior option for Tesla’s Model X SUV veganized the steering wheel and gear shift as well as the seats.

by Sam Thielman, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:: PETA

Why is Turkey Cheaper When Demand is Higher?
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Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist?

Hoss Cartwright, a former editor of the International Journal of Agricultural Innovations and Research, had a good excuse for missing the 5th World Congress on Virology last year: He doesn’t exist. Burkhard Morgenstern, a professor of bioinformatics at the University of Gottingen, dreamt him up, and built a nice little scientific career for him. He wrote Cartwright a Curriculum Vitae, describing his doctorate in Studies of Dunnowhat, his rigorous postdoctoral work at Some Shitty Place in the Middle of Nowhere, and his experience as Senior Cattle Manager at the Ponderosa Institute for Bovine Research. Cartwright never published a single research paper, but he was appointed to the editorial boards of five journals. Apparently, no one involved in the application processes remembered the television show Bonanza, or the giant but amiable cowboy named “Hoss” who was played by actor Dan Blocker. Despite Cartwright’s questionable credentials, he was invited to speak at several meetings such as the 5th World Congress on Virology—typically a mark of recognition as an expert.

Morgenstern was tired of the constant barrage of solicitations from suspect science journals asking him to join their editorial boards—the academic equivalent of the flood of credit card applications that anyone with a mailbox receives. “At some point I was just so fed up with all those spam emails from these junk publishers that I just did this little experiment,” he says. “I contacted them under the fake name Peter Uhnemann and asked to be accepted on the editorial board.” Uhnemann was a name borrowed from a German satirical magazine and Morgenstern’s first alter ego.

Uhnemann immediately joined the masthead of the journal Molecular Biology, which belongs to the publishing house OMICS International—which in August was sued by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for deceptive practices—and is produced “in association” with the Nigerian Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Unfortunately, Morgenstern admits, he was a bit too subtle: “Hardly anybody knows the name ‘Peter Uhnemann,’ so I then tried it with a more popular name, and this happened to be Hoss Cartwright.”

He has also found work for Borat Sagdiyev, the character created by comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Borat is better known by his first name and less well known as a senior investigator at the University of Kazakhstan, who is still on the editorial board of at least one journal, Immunology and Vaccines. That journal belongs to Academician’s Research Center, a publisher based in India that’s suspected of “predatory” behavior against scientists desperate to see their work in a journal no matter how obscure or unread. (We emailed ARC about its quality control efforts, or lack thereof, but haven’t heard back from them.)

Cartwright, Uhnemann, Borat, and others are, in some sense, sting operations built to expose the growing practice of gaming the metrics by which scientific publications are judged. The number of publications a scholar has, how many times they have been cited, who the co-authors are—metrics like these should all be secondary to the quality of the work itself, but often they are actually more important.

“Scientists no longer publish to share results with their colleagues, but rather to improve their ‘metrics,’ ” laments Morgenstern. These metrics can have real impact on scientists’ careers.

Edward Calabrese, a toxicologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has sat on committees tasked with hiring and promoting faculty, and he sees signs of vulnerability in the process. “Committees are somewhat to very self serving and tend to lower the bar based on personal relationships with colleagues,” Calabrese says. “For the most part I doubt that they are very alert to being manipulated and can therefore be easy targets. … In most departments I think it is likely that the faculty may not even evaluate the quality of the papers, giving up their judgment to journals, peer review processes, and the letters of external reviewers,” he adds. “It is easier to use these means for decision making.”

And that’s in the United States. The Medical Council of India recently updated its guidelines to require publication of four papers to become associate professor, and eight to become a full professor. The policy has triggered fears among some scientists that the quality of Indian research will fall as people try to pad their resumes with bogus or crummy papers.

The fact is that professional advancement for scientists around the world is becoming more and more challenging in an era of ever-scarcer funding for research and tightening competition for faculty spots. To succeed in the publish-or-perish environment of academia, most scientists hit the lab and play within the rules. Others, though, hatch schemes.

The nuclear option is faking data. But the complexity of the modern scientific publishing environment has opened a host of new, more sophisticated approaches: fluffing up resumes with scam appointments to editorial boards, adding nonexistent authors to studies (or real, high-powered co-authors who didn’t participate in the research), and even publishing junk journal articles for the sake of publication count.

But, one of today’s most direct new frauds is incredibly simple: Make up new people.

by Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: nkbimages & Caiaimage/Martin Barraud / Getty

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The F*cking P.C. Culture Problem

A year and a half after I graduated from the infamously progressive Oberlin College, The Washington Post published an article about students protesting the dining hall's own (quite literally tasteless) interpretations of Banh mi and sushi. Students weren't upset about the quality of the food, but rather, its political implications. As one junior from Japan explained, "If people not from that heritage take food, modify it, and serve it as 'authentic,' it is appropriative." An average person might consider this line of reasoning to be far-fetched, but this sounds like your typical Oberlin student to me. I identify as a leftist, but let's be real, this is fucking absurd. Not only is it a stretch to assert bad dining hall sushi is racist, but on a fundamental level, is this really what anyone wants to invest their energy in fighting? It's the perfect example of so-called "political correctness" run amuck.

The Obama years ushered in a series of ridiculous protests on college campuses, restarting the national conversation on political correctness. Since the rise of Donald Trump, people of all political leanings have been trying to figure out the best way to understand how political correctness influences our country's discourse. On last week's Saturday Night Live, Colin Jost joked about a new feature on Tinder that allows users to choose from 37 gender identity options, attributing Clinton's loss to this type of social progress. Jost directed critics of his joke to a recent New York Times opinion piece, where liberal historian Mark Lilla argues that the left's embrace of identity politics "has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of themselves as a disadvantaged group whose identity is being threatened or ignored."

Identity politics alone didn't cost Clinton the election. "It indirectly had an impact," New York columnist Jonathan Chait—who's written extensively about the risks of P.C. culture—told me last week. Trump campaigned on an explicitly anti-P.C. platform, saying in one Republican primary debate, "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct. I've been challenged by so many people and I don't, frankly, have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time, either."

Chait said he doesn't think political correctness was why Clinton lost. Rather, "There is this phenomenon of categorizing too many things as racist or sexist, and that makes us unable to analyze and engage with Trump. I think one of the problems with that phenomenon is that on the flipside it allows people like Trump to disguise themselves—disguise their racist and sexist beliefs among a lot of other beliefs that aren't racist and sexist."

That sentiment applies to Oberlin: Dining hall cultural appropriation protests turn us into a society where serving someone low quality sushi makes you a racist. This type of discourse, then, trivializes actual racism—like Trump wanting to put Muslims on a registry—by elevating something like a petty complaint about food to the same level as other serious racist behaviors. (...)

The very concept of leftist political correctness practiced at a place like Oberlin hinges on the idea that experiences of identity-related oppression should play a major role in political discourse. It is about language, about who gets to say what, and how we communicate. It doesn't necessarily aim to limit free speech, like some critics claim, but rather impose consequences for asserting hateful ideas. The heart of the issue isn't about making sure what you say doesn't offend, but how people with radically different beliefs should best talk to each other.

Political correctness is difficult to pin down because its definition changes depending on the political orientation of the person you ask. Instead of defining what political correctness is, pundits prefer to speak in examples of the ideology gone wrong. This exposes a major hole in the way our culture thinks about political correctness: It's not quite an ideology, but instead a way to categorize an argument about social equity you disagree with. Most people don't self-identify as "politically correct."

by Eve Peyser, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Smart Garbage Can Places Amazon Orders Based On Your Trash

[ed. Hallelujah, I've been waiting for this all my life. Are we living in an age of wonder, or what?]

Amazon has continually tried to make ordering easier, especially when it comes to household items that people generally replace after using.

The company lets people order via its Echo voice assistant and it has hundreds of companies in its Dash replenishment program. The first iteration of that effort has been single-brand buttons that people put in the locations where they use the item. One push and the item is reordered through Amazon. For example, a person may have a Tide Dash button near his or her washing machine and one tied to a favorite cereal in the pantry.

Dash, however, is not solely linked to devices programmed by Amazon. The company has a number of APIs (essentially a piece of software allowing third parties access to the technology) that will bring Dash to a whole new range of products. At the core of all of them is the idea that it will make ordering from Amazon easier or even automated.

Now, a number of new companies have joined Amazon's automated replenishment program. One of those new partners makes a device to attach to your trash can that, with your help, looks at what you throw away in order to reorder those items for you.

What is a smart trash can?

GeniCan, which starts at $124.99, is an add-on sensor for trash cans. The device, which ships in January, is programmable. People simply scan the bar code of any product they want added to their replenishment list. As the smart-trash-can owner throws an item away, he or she simply needs to run the bar code past the in-can scanner to have it reordered. Or, if there is no bar code, you can add an item to your list by speaking to the machine. If you merely throw the item in the trash, it won't be added to the shopping list.

by Daniel B. Kline, Motley Fool |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

Utamaro, “Okita in the Mirror”
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[ed. Something else your kids will never understand. (So, like...  you had to send the cartridge away in the mail and couldn't see your pictures for a week?!) Well, yes... and sometimes even longer, but eventually you could take them to the photomart and get them processed in a couple hours. (But, but... then anyone could see them!) Umm...]
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Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays

[ed. Listening to some Pat clips this morning. You'll probabaly recognize this one from Fandango (one of my all time favorite movies). Here's the wedding scene at the end.]

Utopia Is Creepy

At the moment Carr started his blog, the agent of millenarian change was the internet — in particular, what enthusiasts were touting as “Web 2.0,” with its promise of universal collaboration, connectedness, and participation. User-created content like Wikis and blogs would displace the old media, and participants would ultimately congeal into a collective intelligence capable of acting on a global scale.

Carr’s blog first came to wide attention on the strength of his critique of an influential article called “We Are the Web,” by Wired’s “Senior Maverick” Kevin Kelly. Kelly wrote that the accumulation of content on the web — from music, videos, and news, to sports scores, guides, and maps — was providing a view of the world that was “spookily godlike.” By 2015, he predicted, the web would have evolved into “a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet […] and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network.” With chiliastic zeal, he announced, “There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine […] You and I are alive at this moment.” Future generations, he said, will “look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then.” Or, as Wordsworth might have put it, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be online.”

In a post called “The Amorality of Web 2.0,” Carr taxed Kelly with using a “language of rapture” that made objectivity impossible: “All the things that Web 2.0 represents — participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism — become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state.” On the contrary, he countered, those features are invariably mixed blessings. As a manifestation of the age of participation, Wikipedia is certainly useful, but it’s also slipshod, factually unreliable, and appallingly written. “It seems fair to ask,” he said, “when the intelligence in ‘collective intelligence’ will begin to manifest itself.”

Similarly with blogs: Kelly described them as part of “a vast and growing gift economy, a visible underground of valuable creations” that turns consumers into producers. Carr, himself a blogger, pointed to the limits of the blogosphere: “its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological polarization and extremism.” In short, “Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It’s a set of technologies — a machine, not a Machine — that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption.” (...)

Looking back over the history of technological enthusiasms in his American Technological Sublime, the historian David Nye notes that, in each generation, “the radically new disappears into ordinary experience.” By now, the internet is ubiquitous, and for just that reason no longer a Thing. There are between 50 and 100 processors in a modern luxury car, about as many as there are electric motors (think power steering, seats, wipers, windows, mirrors, CD players, fans, etc.). But you wouldn’t describe the automobile as an application of either technology.

So the futurists have to keep moving the horizon. One feature that makes this era truly different is the number of labels that we’ve assigned to it. Carr himself lists “the digital age, the information age, the internet age, the computer age, the connected age, the Google age, the emoji age, the cloud age, the smartphone age, the data age, the Facebook age, the robot age”; he could have added the gamification age, the social age, the wearable age, and plenty of others. Whatever you call it, he notes, this age is tailored to the talents of the brand manager.

In his more recent posts, Carr is reacting to these varying visions of a new millennium, where the internet is taken for granted and the transformative forces are innovations like wearables, biosensors, and data analytics. The 2011 post from which he draws his title, “Utopia is creepy,” was inspired by a Microsoft “envisionment scenario.” Direct digital descendants of the World’s Fair pavilions, these are the videos that companies produce to depict a future in which their products have become ubiquitous and essential, similar to the worlds pervaded by self-driving cars or synthetics described above. The Microsoft video portrays “a not-too-distant future populated by exceedingly well-groomed people who spend their hyperproductive days going from one computer display to another.” A black-clad businesswoman walks through an airport, touches her computerized eyeglasses, and a digitized voice lights up to define a personal “pick up” zone:

As soon as she settles into the backseat the car’s windows turn into computer monitors, displaying her upcoming schedule […] [h]er phone, meanwhile, transmits her estimated time of arrival to a hotel bellhop, who tracks her approach through a screen the size of a business card.

One thing that makes these scenarios disquieting, Carr suggests, is the robotic affectlessness of the humans — who bring to mind the “uncanny valley” that unsettles us when we watch their digital replicas. These figures are the direct descendants of those audio-animatronic families that Disney designed for the 1964 World’s Fair. As technologies become the protagonists of the drama, people become props. The machines do the work — observing us, anticipating our needs or desires, and acting on what they take to be our behalf.

It’s that sense of ubiquitous presence that has made “creepy” our reflexive aesthetic reaction to the intrusiveness of new technologies — there is already a whole body of scholarly literature on the subject, with journal articles titled “On the Nature of Creepiness” and “Leakiness and Creepiness in App Space,” etc. Creepy is a more elusive notion than scary. Scary things set our imaginations racing with dire thoughts of cyberstalkers, identity thieves, or government surveillance. With creepy things, our imagination doesn’t really know where to start — there is only the unease that comes from sensing that we are the object of someone or something’s unbidden gaze.(...)

What’s most striking about these pictures of the sensor-saturated world isn’t just their creepiness, but how trivial and pedestrian they can be. The chief of Google Android touts interconnected technology that can “assist people in a meaningful way,” and then offers as an example automatically changing the music in your car to an age-appropriate selection when you pick up your kids. Microsoft’s prototype “Nudge Bra” monitors heart rate, respiration, and body movements to detect stress and, via a smart phone app, triggers “just-in-time interventions to support behavior modification for emotional eating.” (A similar application for men was judged unfeasible since their underwear was too far from the heart — “That has always been the problem,” Carr deadpans.) They’re symptomatic of Silicon Valley’s reigning assumption, writes Carr, that anything that can be automated should be automated. But automatic music programming and diet encouragement — really, is that all?

by Geoff Nunberg, LARB | Read more:
Images: Utopia is Creepy

How the Time of Day Affects Productivity: Evidence from School Schedules

Abstract—Increasing the efficiency of the school system is a primary focus of policymakers. I analyze how the time of day affects students’ productivity and if efficiency gains can be obtained by rearranging the order of tasks they perform throughout the school day. Using a panel data set of nearly 2 million sixth- through eleventh-grade students in Los Angeles County, I perform within-teacher, class type, and student estimation of the time-of-day effect on students’ learning as measured by GPA and state test scores. I find that given a school start time, students learn more in the morning than later in the school day. Having a morning instead of afternoon math or English class increases a student’s GPA by 0.072 (0.006) and 0.032 (0.006), respectively. A morning math class increases state test scores by an amount equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap. Rearranging school schedules can lead to increased academic performance. 

I. Introduction 

Companies, schools, hospitals, and other organizations are always looking for innovations that increase productivity with little to no increase in inputs. History has proven that simple innovations such as assembly lines, crop rotation, washing hands, changes in incentive structures, and other simple managerial practices have been successful at increasing efficiency. By using such methods, companies increase their profits, hospitals improve patient outcomes, and schools produce more academically prepared students. 

In this paper, I propose a simple innovation that schools can use to improve student performance: rearranging schedules to take advantage of time-of-day effects. I use detailed, studentlevel panel data from the Los Angeles Unified School District for 1.8 million student-year observations. The data include the complete class schedule, grades, and California Standards Test (CST) scores for all sixth- through eleventh-grade students from 2003 to 2009. 

The fundamental challenge in estimating time-of-day effects is that class assignments are not random. Certain teachers or subjects might selectively be placed at certain times of day. The panel nature of the data allows me to control for individual characteristics, and the main results are estimated within teacher, class type, and student. The data allow previous years’ GPA and test scores to be used as clear falsification tests. These falsification tests, with the notable exception of English GPA, also support a causal interpretation of the results. I find that having math in the first two periods of the school day instead of the last two periods increases the math GPA of students by 0.072 (0.006) and increases math CST scores by 0.021 (0.003) standard deviations. These effect sizes are equivalent to increasing teacher quality by one-fourth standard deviation or half of the gender gap (Rockoff, 2004; Hyde et al., 2008). Similarly, having English in the morning increases the English GPA of students by 0.032 (0.006); however, there is no increase in their English CST score. There are no clear systematic differences in the time-of-day effect between boys and girls, older and younger students, students with high- and low-educated parents, or low- and high-performing students. The time-of-day effect may be caused by changes in teachers’ teaching quality, changes in students’ learning ability, or differential student attendance. The time-of-day effect may be interpreted as differential productivity during different parts of the day due to the circadian rhythm; stamina effects, with decreasing productivity the longer a student is at school; or school structure effects such as lower productivity after a lunch break. 

by Nolan G. Pope, The Revew of Economics and Statistics |  Read more (pdf):

 

No Evidence of Aloe Vera Found in the Aloe Vera at Wal-Mart, Target, CVS
Image:Wikipedia
[ed. Surprise, surprise]

René Magritte, Les Moyens d’Existence, 1969.
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Affluenza Anonymous

Tall, lean, and lantern-jawed, Jamison Monroe Jr. could pass for a third Winklevoss brother. His childhood in Texas, as he recalls it, was a series of misadventures with addiction: pretending to have ADHD in ninth grade to get Adderall; getting booted from his Houston prep school; being arrested five times and cycling through four rehabs, all with no real effect. He was a spoiled rich kid, the namesake of a prominent Houston financier. “I had such low self-esteem and such severe depression that drugs and alcohol worked,” Monroe says. Until, of course, they didn’t. “I did self-harm, cutting myself, burning myself, contemplating suicide. Plus a lot more cocaine, a lot more drinking, blacking out a lot more. Everything just got progressively worse and worse.”

Even at his life’s darkest moments, young Jamison had something available to him that thousands of other people don’t: seemingly limitless access to wealth. Despite going through a divorce, his parents could afford to help him through his DUIs and expulsions and send him anywhere in the world to get better. In 2006, after a host of false starts and detours, including a therapeutic wilderness program, he found the right place for him—a 30-day, $2,200-a-day program in Malibu with a full team of specialists drilling down into the root causes of his addictions. “I had a primary therapist, I had a family therapist, I had a recovery counselor, I had a spiritual therapist,” Monroe says. Slipping easily into the patois of recovery, he explains that the real culprit behind his drug use was a lack of self-worth that all the money in the world couldn’t help him overcome; all that overflowing privilege, he suggests, may have been part of the problem. “The focus was on my negative self-beliefs, which stem from early childhood—this feeling of not being good enough.”

When he emerged from the program he was 25, with no college degree, no career, and no obvious prospects. Six months later, Monroe came up with a startup idea. He went to his father and asked for the money to open a drug rehab facility of his own. It would have been comical if it weren’t also poignant: What do you do if you’re a young, rich screw-up who wants to help other young, rich screw-ups? Ask Dad to buy you a rehab.

Jamison Monroe Sr. let his son down gently. “It’s not happening at this point,” he said. But what both understood, after so much exposure to so many addiction treatment services, was that opening a rehab center in America is practically as easy as opening a fast-food franchise. From the research he’d done since getting out of rehab, Monroe knew that of the 10,000 or so behavioral health-care providers in this country, more than 90 percent are single operators, mom and pops. A large number of those are started by people in recovery themselves. You don’t need to be a doctor to start one; you just have to hire a qualified staff.

One more thing made the rehab business appealing: The demand for treatment constantly overwhelms supply. So many providers are springing up so quickly that quality varies wildly, and regulation and oversight are spotty. Many rehabs avoid regulation entirely by being what the industry calls “sober houses,” where the license sits not with the residence but with the professionals doing the clinical work. Monroe spent a year starting a sober house for an investor friend, in part to prove to his father that he was serious. “When I showed him that I had basically broke even the first two months of operations with a shoestring budget, that gave him enough confidence to say, ‘OK, yes.’ ”

In the spring of 2009, a few months after Monroe’s 28th birthday, Newport Academy opened the doors of a six-bed rehab facility for adolescent girls in a spacious house on a residential street in the hills of Orange County, a horsy suburban neighborhood miles away from the more glitzy, Real Housewives-ready Laguna Beach. This house came to be known as the Ranch—a one-floor Spanish modern on 3 acres of arid California hillside. A few months later, Monroe opened a second location in another house not too far away, for six boys. These rehabs were more regulated than sober houses, licensed as group homes by the California Department of Social Services. Anxious to establish a serious pedigree, Monroe appointed David Smith, founder of the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics of San Francisco, as his medical director. Smith, who stayed four years before leaving Newport Academy in 2013, says he was glad to help start a facility that “demonstrates that you can successfully treat adolescents. For adolescents, just talking about how bad drugs are, that isn’t going to do it. They have to find positive alternatives.”

Monroe was alone in the Orange County marketplace, without any serious competition. “There were teen treatment centers in L.A.,” he says, “but you had 6 million people between Orange and San Diego counties and nothing for them.” He also stood out for the sheer opulence and pampering he provided his young patients. The Ranch’s nickname may make it seem rustic, approachable, back-to-the-land, but its parlor has four ornate chandeliers. Its grounds have a rose garden and stables. There’s an on-site gym for mixed martial arts, yoga, meditation, and dance and movement therapy. There’s art therapy, cinema therapy (watching and discussing movies), and an on-site chef offering organic nutritional counseling and cooking classes. Newport Academy’s staff-to-client ratio is 4 to 1—not counting the horses that each resident is given regular time with for equine-assisted psychotherapy. At $40,000 a month, there may be no other teenage rehab in America that, at first glance, seems more like Canyon Ranch. “What’s the price on a kid’s life?” Monroe said in an interview a few years ago about the cost of Newport Academy. “If you’re a parent of a child, there’s no price tag you can put on that.”

by Robert Kolker, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Simone Lueck

Mississippi Fred McDowell

[ed. This is not actually "Jesus on the Mainline", but "Mercy" instead. If you'd like to hear Mainline here's an excellent version by Ry Cooder.]