A More Moderate Diversity

Diversity has become a sacred word in the contemporary American university. Like equality, fairness, inclusion, academic freedom, and critical thinking, many consider it one of the lodestars of higher education. Yet on campuses across the country, people quietly disagree about what diversity means. Of what, exactly, does it consist, and how should it be measured? Is diversity merely a matter of race and gender, or also sexual orientation? What about political and methodological diversity? Should diversity be pursued primarily in faculty hiring, or in the student body, or in the administrative staff? Do foreign nationals count as diverse hires? How exactly do all these different types of diversity benefit higher education as a whole?

Few within the university community are willing publicly to raise such questions for fear that they will be targeted as bigots or preservers of white and male privilege. This is not an unreasonable fear, and examples of such targeting proliferate. The irony is that the mainstream diversity movement actually tends toward uniformity of the most extreme kind, which happens to look very much like mainstream American progressivism. In the name of diversity — an expansive and liberating notion of engaging with people and ideas markedly different from the ones we know — one particular, narrow understanding of the concept is being used to transform every school into the ostensibly value-neutral, secular state university of today. A cold war rages between those who promote this dominant vision of diversity and those who hold different views about the purpose of a university and about diversity itself.

This war is similar to the kinds of political conflicts that are now ubiquitous in America. One side is ascendant and tries to crush the other side; the other side fights back with ridicule and anger. In the literature about diversity, for example, partisans take the good of diversity (as they understand it) for granted, assuming that the only relevant questions concern implementation and that opponents are motivated solely by bias and bigotry. Critics of diversity tend to highlight the excesses of the movement, often in op-eds that poke fun at the most radical claims of the most radical partisans. It all leads nowhere, and makes enemies of colleagues.

A more constructive approach to this controversy requires the abandonment of polemics. This does not mean that we must also abandon criticism, but inquiry should aim at clarity, and perhaps even compromise, instead of provocation. At the very least, the goal should be a better understanding of the reasons for the present conflict. In a timely new book, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes, political theorist Aurelian Craiutu suggests that the virtue of moderation might help in navigating our polarizing ideological disagreements.

In that spirit, we can attempt to find a moderate position in this particular fight. Our goal must be to see the different "moral worlds" of both partisans and critics of the mainstream social-justice diversity movement, to point out the shortcomings of each view, and ultimately to encourage civility and good humor in the face of difference — instead of the anger and suspicion that come so naturally to many of us. To start, however, the conflict and its origins require some explanation.

Two Diversities

Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt has recently proposed a dichotomy between two ideal types of universities. In a talk titled "How two incompatible sacred values are driving conflict and confusion in American universities," he argues that "Truth University" finds its roots in John Stuart Mill's defense of viewpoint diversity in On Liberty, while "Social Justice University" originates in Marxist ideas about power and oppression. The former requires a vigorous and unfettered exchange of ideas; the latter aims at protecting and eventually liberating victims. Diversity means something quite different in each university.

Truth University assumes that the activity of scholarly inquiry is potentially open to anyone who wants to engage in it, regardless of his or her identity as man or woman, black or white, gay or straight. A black Christian man and a white Jewish lesbian can work together as they examine proto-Corinthian pottery or analyze the latest economic report. The results of such scholarly inquiry are verifiable by others and are subject to criticism, refutation, and revision. Scholarship is understood as "cogent" — clear, logical, convincing, lucid. It is politically and personally disinterested.

In this context, diversity means the cultivation and appreciation of intellectually fresh and often different viewpoints. This occurs as part of scholarly research and in classroom conversation. Such diversity may at times be adversarial in character, but it is warm to the notion of a competitive marketplace of ideas. It is also freewheeling in allowing potentially any idea or method, no matter how controversial or currently out of vogue, into the conversation. This view assumes nothing about social progress or about communal goals like liberation or political reform. It aims at truths that can be widely understood and approved by impartial observers, and then tries to test those truths against competing ones. This type of diversity may also foster a certain kind of intellectually modest character. A person who must remain open to refutation is likely to be aware of his or her own limits.

By contrast, diversity does much more substantial practical and political work in Social Justice University. In this context, diversity is not the expression of different viewpoints concerning issues and methods, but rather the equitable representation of women, blacks, Hispanics, and other designated groups in positions of institutional power. The aim is not necessarily to replicate the proportions of women and minorities in the population at large (though this is considered ideal) but to cultivate a critical mass of people whose race and sex distinguish them from the white, male majority. But the goal is not mere representation. The assumption is that members of these groups will substantively change institutions in a positive way and that the institutions will in turn improve the lives of the group members. Since the goal is reform, certain viewpoints may be deemed off-limits because they appear retrograde, old-fashioned, or simply hurtful.

These contrasting meanings of diversity presuppose different understandings of the essential character of a university and its students. In Truth University, students are invited to identify themselves as apprentices, working with senior scholars to acquire intellectual inheritances of various kinds so that they can begin to know what they might want to say and do. This requires postponement of political activism until one is more certain of what that activism is for. Such a university does not see itself as an institutional advocate for any political cause. Politics, of course, is one legitimate mode of inquiry, but so are art history, classics, history, literature, math, physics, and, in the modern day, business, engineering, and other pre-professional studies. Students are left free to seek their own intellectual and moral fortunes.

In Social Justice University, politics is at the center of a student's experience. The university itself is seen as a vehicle for the intellectual and moral transformation of society. Activism is encouraged early and often, and personal identity is at the center of the curriculum. Women and minorities are brought to see the full scope of their oppression, and white males are made to see their roles as oppressors. To some extent, apprenticeship exists here too, but in another sense it doesn't: Students arrive with identities that are predetermined. The goal is to know more about that identity and its relationship to structures of power.

What are the most important differences between these two ideas of diversity? First, truth diversity is potentially competitive, and it assumes all participants are more or less similarly situated — capable of both deploying and answering arguments. It also requires some separation between person and argument, meaning that if someone questions someone else's position it does not imply a personal attack. Further, it understands certain methods as suitable for certain subjects. Statistical analysis is important in studies of voting behavior, but irrelevant in political philosophy; personal story is important in social work, but not in math. Finally, rational evidence must be adduced to support or refute arguments, and findings are potentially verifiable by anyone.

In social-justice diversity, by contrast, identity plays a far more significant role. Scholarship is often deeply personal, to the point that a challenge to someone's view may be considered an attack on the person, and even on an entire race or gender. If, as in certain varieties of perspectivism, "epistemic privilege" is to be gained only by actually having the experiences that an oppressed person has had, then traditionally privileged persons (like white men) may be barred from entering the conversation at all. Diversity then appears not as a wide range of views, but as a long-awaited amplification of voices that have traditionally not been heard. Moreover, knowledge is not advanced by method, rational evidence, and verifiability, but by attending to an infinite variety of narratives. Personal identity and subjects studied are intricately linked, which is the reason for the proliferation of women's and gender studies, Queer studies, African-American studies, and the like. (...)

Blind Spots

Social Justice University is ascendant in the United States at the moment, but Truth University is the more traditional and longstanding of the two. Jonathan Haidt is right to point out that they are at odds; they presuppose different visions of the character of the scholar and the purpose of scholarship.

In Truth University, diversity does not concern race, gender, or sexuality per se, but is focused on viewpoint or "idea" diversity, which is not therapeutic, practical, or political. Diversity here assumes a general equality of all participants, a willingness to suffer correction, and an inclination to engage in conversation with others in a peer-review process. For Social Justice University, diversity is motivated by a desire for political change, and it aims at transformation. It emerges out of a pedagogy of the oppressed and prioritizes personal identity, focusing on categories like race, gender, and sexuality. Diversity here is not simple representation of formerly oppressed or marginalized groups on university faculties. For this would be to treat the members of these groups as equivalent to the "dominant" group and thus to effect no substantive political change at all. Instead, these groups must reimagine their fields as a whole, and also reimagine and change the university and its structures of power.

Taken as contrasting ideal types, these two ideas of diversity seem to have almost nothing in common. Both make certain assumptions that by definition exclude alternative views and exacerbate disagreement between people who approve one conception of diversity over against the other. Each viewpoint has its own significant deficiencies that should be addressed.

by Elizabeth Corey, National Affairs |  Read more:

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Plastilina Mosh

[ed. Sometimes everyone just needs a little Plastilina Mosh. See also: Let U Know. And, these guys: El Guincho (Bombay), Los Maigos Invisibles (Mentiras) and Odisea (Cabros).]

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How to Save Money at the Hospital

You’re in the hospital to protect your health. But you also need to protect your financial health while there — by asking the right questions. Since more of us now have insurance plans that feature high deductibles and significant copayments, the cash is more likely than ever to be coming out of your wallet. While high deductible plans are featured on the Affordable Care Act’s marketplaces, many employers have also moved in that direction, with 28 percent of firms offering such plans in 2016 compared to only 7 percent in 2007, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Unless you are on Medicare or are a member of an HMO, your stay is most likely being billed intervention by intervention, visit by visit, item by item. Here are five ways you can protect yourself:

Next time you’re in a hospital, make sure to take these precautions:

Avoid a private room. Hospitals have built a huge oversupply of private rooms, though insurers frequently won’t cover their cost. If you are assigned to a private room, make it clear that you did not request it and would be happy to occupy a room with another patient. Otherwise, you might be hit up to pay the “private room supplement” by your insurer.

Avoid out-of-network charges. In the pages of admitting documents you’ll have to sign, there is inevitably one concerning your willingness to accept financial responsibility for charges not covered by your insurer. Before you sign, write in “as long as the providers are in my insurance network.” You don’t mind paying the required co-payments or deductibles but not out-of-network charges. For every medical encounter, Olga Baker, a San Diego lawyer, adds a “limited consent” clause to the chart, indicating that “consent is limited to in-network care only and excludes out-of-network care.” It has worked well for her and, at the very least, this annotation will give you a basis for arguing later.

Be clear on the terms of your stay in the hospital: Are you being admitted or held on “observation status”? Do not be afraid to ask point-blank. The answer will have big implications for your wallet. Hospitals can keep you for up to three days (two midnights) on observation status. Though you will be in a hospital bed, you will be considered an outpatient and be responsible for outpatient co-payments and deductibles, which are generally far higher than those for an inpatient stay. If you are on Medicare, the government insurer will not count days on observation status toward its required three days of hospitalization required for coverage of a stay in a rehabilitation center or nursing home after discharge. Ask why you cannot be fully admitted. If there’s not a good answer, insist on going the inpatient route.

by Elisabeth Rosenthal, Medium |  Read more:

Image: Ryan McGuire
[ed. It's a constant battle. Ever get the feeling that every corporation and industry in the country is out to screw, manipulate or monetize the American consumer?  Insurance, health, airlines, banks, telecommunications, cable, social media, housing, auto, phamaceuticals, energy, etc. It's wearying.] 

Politics 101

A moment of great danger

Seven Lessons From Trump's Syria Strike

The Long, Lucrative Right-wing Grift is Blowing Up in the World's Face

Before This Is Over, Republicans Are Going to Wish Hillary Clinton Won

"But what makes his newfound compassion ring all the more hollow is that while Trump is ready to bomb a runway for those beautiful babies who are dead, he still won’t let America open its doors to those who cling to life. Refugees from Syria remain on Trump’s banned list, including every “child of God” traumatised by Assad and his barrel bombs, raining fire from the sky.

And forgive me if I don’t accept that this volte-face is quite as complete as the White House would have us believe. How convenient that Trump, under fire for being Vladimir Putin’s poodle, now stands up to him in Syria. How neatly this blows away all those allegations of secret links and election hacking. Yes, there have been ample statements of condemnation from Moscow, but those don’t cost either side anything. The US appears to have given Russia sufficient warning to ensure their men weren’t hit, and Russia used none of its ample capacity to hit back. It all worked out very nicely."  Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian

Trump did not target runways in Syria
[ed. This whole operation fails to pass the smell test (for a number of reasons). I'm still betting on collusion with Russia. Why is he so defensive?]

Publicity Stunts Aren’t Policy

The Spoils of War: Trump Lavished With Media and Bipartisan Praise For Bombing Syria

Policyholders in Limbo After Rare Failure of Insurer

Something unusual happened last month: A good-size American insurer, Penn Treaty of Allentown, Pa., was ordered to liquidate and wind down its affairs. Its demise will orphan tens of thousands of policyholders — people who bought its long-term-care insurance to shield their families from crushing nursing home costs.

Big insurance companies rarely fail in the United States. Most of the time, an ailing insurer will quietly find a buyer, and vanish under its rescuer’s wing. Policyholders may not know what happened, or care, as long as their claims are paid.

The dearth of visible insurance failures makes it seem the industry’s squadrons of actuaries and regulators will always get things right, measuring complex risks accurately and charging premiums that will cover all future claims.

But the failure of Penn Treaty shows that was not really true. It’s quite possible for a regulated insurer to miscalculate its book of business, operate for years without correcting the mistake, and ultimately take policyholders into the very realm of loss and uncertainty that insurance is specifically designed to avoid.

Now, some fear Penn Treaty’s failure is a signal of more trouble to come in the long-term-care sector. (...)

Michelle Leonard, a Penn Treaty policyholder in Venus, Fla., said she was shocked to learn of the liquidation.

“It’s time for me to go to a facility to live out my days,” she said, explaining that she had already selected a group home, submitted an application and been accepted (but had not yet sold her house). “They may not take me now. I may not have enough assets to go in.”

Each state has a so-called guarantee fund to rescue policyholders in insurance failures. The funds pay people’s claims, up to a predetermined limit that varies by state. The limit is $300,000 in Florida.

“But how long does that take?” Ms. Leonard wondered. She said that she had not yet heard from the guarantee fund, but added that she had received mailings instructing her to keep on paying her monthly premium in full, even if it rises, or else her coverage would be canceled.

“Oh, hey! We’re going down the toilet but keep paying your premium,” she said, mocking the letters. “It’s very upsetting.”

Other Penn Treaty customers agreed. “That’s why we have C.P.A.s and actuaries and insurance professionals — to run the business properly,” said Charley Sproule, a policyholder in Harrisburg, Pa. “In my opinion, the actuaries and executives and the board should be held legally liable for this, but they won’t. They’ll get off scot-free.”

In Pennsylvania, the guarantee limit is also $300,000. Mr. Spoule said the cash value of his policy was close to double that — $573,000. So is the cash value of a separate policy held by his wife, Mary Lou.

Mr. Sproule said that his mother lived to be 100 and spent her final years in a nursing home. The care was expensive enough to wipe out all of her assets in just three years, including the value of her house. After that, she had to turn to Medicaid, the government health program for the poor.

“That’s why we bought insurance, so that all of our assets wouldn’t be gobbled up by nursing-home costs,” Mr. Sproule said.

In liquidation, the policies will be canceled, and the guarantee fund will take care of $300,000 worth of claims. “We end up suffering about a 48 percent loss,” Mr. Sproule said. It took the couple 18 years to build up their policies’ value to $573,000 apiece. Mr. Sproule said he was sure it was too late to go out and buy coverage to replace what they had lost.Photo

“We’re probably uninsurable,” he said. “You buy long-term-care insurance when you’re young and healthy, because that’s how you pay the lower premium.”

They were also encouraged by a federally financed program in which states urged their residents to buy long-term-care insurance. The goal was to keep Medicaid from being overwhelmed by tens of millions of aging baby boomers.

The Sproules, Ms. Leonard and all the rest of Penn Treaty’s policyholders have spent the last nine years in a strange legal limbo. State insurance regulators in Pennsylvania first petitioned the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania to order liquidation in 2009, which is standard procedure.

But then the standard playbook went out the window. Droves of insurance agents challenged the petition in court. That’s because as long as Penn Treaty stayed out of liquidation, they would keep receiving their sales commissions, which they said they were constitutionally entitled to.

Health insurers fought the liquidation, too. State guarantee funds, it turns out, are not funded at all. When an insurance company goes under, all the surviving companies in that line of business are required to chip into the guarantor, with assessments based on their market share.

Long-term-care insurance is classified as health insurance, so health insurers would get the assessment — even the ones that steered clear of long-term-care insurance and never sold a single policy. They were aghast at having to pay for other people’s mistakes.

by Mary Williams Walsh, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Zack Wittman

[ed. What a mess.]

Masters Press Room, Augusta National Golf Course
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[ed. Pray for good weather. See also: Pro Golfers Find Winning Rounds From Numbers Crunching.]

Your Name

Early in “Your Name,” the anime blockbuster that’s conquered Japan, China, and the rest of Asia, a high-school girl named Mitsuha performs a ritual dance at her family’s Shinto shrine. Dressed in the red and white costume of a miko shrine maiden, she and a partner pose and twirl, punctuating the leisurely rhythms of drums with precisely timed, jangly handbells. Mitsuha’s rural village is perched on the edge of a gleaming lake, surrounded by verdant forests and soaring mountains. It looks like a modern-day Eden. To Mitsuha, though, it’s an inescapable cage of tradition. After the rite is over, she rushes down the shrine’s ancient staircase to the empty street below and cries out, in frustration, “Make me a handsome Tokyo boy in my next life!” As fate would have it, her wish is granted. Soon afterward, Mitsuha begins switching bodies with Taki, a teen-age boy at a Tokyo high school.

Such a film seems like an unlikely candidate for “Titanic”-level success. But since “Your Name” premièred, last August, young adults in Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and China have flocked to watch and rewatch it. It has become a national and regional phenomenon. Even its director, Makoto Shinkai, seems to have been taken aback: “It’s not healthy,” he said, during a December interview in Paris. “I don’t think any more people should see it.” The film has now grossed more than three hundred and twenty-six million dollars worldwide, making it the most successful anime film of all time—surpassing even Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” from 2001.

The success of “Your Name” is due, in part, to its remarkable beauty. It contains some of the most vivid imagery ever seen in an animated film. Although it was produced entirely on computers, like nearly all modern anime, Shinkai and his team seem to have synthesized the best parts of both worlds: the characters emote with a warmth reminiscent of traditional hand-drawn animation. The backdrops are digitally rendered in detail so exquisite that they resemble high-definition video. Tokyo’s streets surge with life, down to the anti-slip striations on the pavement; the countryside erupts with a lushness worthy of “Planet Earth.” Even mundane images—the tangle of recharging cables atop a high-school student’s desk; old cans cluttering a countryside bus stop; a wood-and-paper shoji screen sliding in its well-worn track—glow with a rich, romantic intensity. (...)

But “Your Name” has not been Disneyfied. It remains defiantly strange. The film’s oddest moment comes early on, when Mitsuha, as part of her Shinto ritual, chews and spits rice into a jar to make a primitive form of sake, fermented using human saliva. Later, Taki drinks the sake. Shinkai has said that he intended the scene to represent an idea common in teen anime, the “indirect kiss,” in which one drinks from the same container as one’s crush. But the image of a teen-age girl dribbling milky liquid from her lips has raised eyebrows. Pressed during a December TV appearance, he admitted that “saliva is a fetish element for a lot of teen-age boys.”

Midway through, moreover, “Your Name” takes a surprising turn. Its frivolity is interrupted by a great Something that cleaves the protagonists’ lives into “before” and “after,” in a way that anyone who has lived through a 9/11 or a Fukushima will understand. Eventually, the movie becomes a metaphysical love story steeped in Shinto cosmology—“Interstellar,” if that film had been written by Haruki Murakami, perhaps, instead of Christopher Nolan.

The easy gender fluidity of Mitsuha and Taki has led some Western commentators to describe the film as a “queer” movie, but gender bending is a classic trope in anime; the real subject of “Your Name” is the contrast between the country and the city. In this respect, it reflects an unprecedented change in Japanese society. Over the past few decades, more than ninety per cent of the Japanese population has migrated to dense urban areas, leading to depopulation and a so-called “hollowing out” of youth and industry in the countryside. Take, for example, Hida, the town in Gifu prefecture that inspired the one in which Mitsuha lives. A recent Nikkei newspaper study calculates that, by 2040, the town will lose more than sixty per cent of its female population between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine. In this demographic erosion, Hida is hardly alone. A handful of rural municipalities, desperate to expand their tax bases, have even experimented with giving land away to lure city-dwellers back.

By contrast, in the Japan of “Your Name,” the city and the country exist in symmetry, not competition. Mitsuha is a country girl and Taki a city boy, but they are equally educated and comfortable. Tokyo’s skyline beckons like a twenty-first-century Emerald City, but the countryside, too, brims with vitality, both natural and human—its forests unspoiled, its schools filled with students, its festivals thronged with visitors. The movie is an elegiac meditation on a Japan that no longer exists—if it ever truly did. From “Madame Butterfly” to “Lost in Translation,” portrayals of Japan that have been exoticized and idealized by Western eyes abound. But “Your Name” is Japan as the Japanese wish it was.

by Matt Alt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Your-Name

Hungary. Budapest. September 5, 2015. A Syrian father, centre, sleeps with his son and other family members on the floor of a bus driving from Budapest to Vienna.
   ~ Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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Mars Maiers
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Demand Booming on College Campuses for Creative Writing

Some credit the rise of social media. Others attribute it to a flourishing culture of self-expression. Whatever the reason, colleges across the United States are seeing a boom in demand for courses on creative writing.

Colleges are adding writing programs to accommodate interest in what has become the rarest of fields in the humanities - a sector that is growing, rather than losing students to science and technology.

The number of schools offering bachelor's degrees in creative writing has risen from three in 1975 to 733 today, according to the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, an industry group based at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

So what will these students do after graduating?

"Most of them are aware that this probably is not going to be their career. At least, I hope they're aware," said David Galef, director of the creative writing program at Montclair State University in New Jersey. "They're interested in doing something they feel is creative."

While some will become professional writers, others will find work in fields such as public relations, advertising or something completely unrelated. Instructors say some students see their focus on writing as a way to understand themselves, make use of a liberal education and enrich their lives.

One Montclair State undergraduate, Gil Moreno, 46, enrolled years after completing another bachelor's degree, in business management, and dreams of becoming a writer. Even if he can't do it professionally, he'll keep it up on the side.

"I'm looking to get away from the business world," he said. "I'm kind of looking to live in my own separate world."

The number of creative writing bachelor's programs has grown steadily, but spiked from 161 in 2008 to 592 in 2013, according to the AWP . English departments elsewhere have offered new concentrations or minors in writing, and still more major programs are planned, including one beginning next fall at the University of Chicago.

In some English departments, the boom has created tension between creative writing and those who emphasize instruction of literature.

At Yale University's English department, which is reviewing admissions procedures for the writing concentration amid a surge in applications, professors say their writing program is unusual in requiring that all courses include reading in contemporary work of the chosen genre.

"All over the country students are more interested in writing about themselves than they are in reading other people," said English professor Leslie Brisman, who has taught at Yale since 1969. "We are in favor of creativity. We are not in favor of ignorance."

The number of course offerings in creative writing has roughly doubled over the last five years at Yale, where the creative writing director, Richard Deming, suspects the interest can be credited, at least partly, to social media.

"This act of expressing one's voice in a public way - some people feel that they want to add craft, they want to hone those skills and take it to a place of more intensity," he said. "It just builds from there."

by Michael Melia, AP |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Biggest Threat Facing Middle-Age Men Isn’t Smoking or Obesity. It’s Loneliness.

Let's start with the moment I realized I was already a loser, which was just after I was more or less told that I was destined to become one.

I’d been summoned to an editor’s office at the Globe Magazine with the old “We have a story we think you’d be perfect for.” This is how editors talk when they’re about to con you into doing something you don’t want to do.

Here was the pitch: We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends.

Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

The editor told me there was all sorts of evidence out there about how men, as they age, let their close friendships lapse, and that that fact can cause all sorts of problems and have a terrible impact on their health.

I told the editor I’d think about it. This is how reporters talk when they’re trying to get out of something they don’t want to do. As I walked back to my desk in the newsroom — a distance of maybe 100 yards — I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.

First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year?

And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I genuinely could not remember the last time I’d seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.

There were all those other good friends who feel as if they’re still in my lives because we keep tabs on one another via social media, but as I ran down the list of those I’d consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I’d seen many of them, even decades for a few.

By the time I got back to my desk, I realized that I was indeed perfect for this story, not because I was unusual in any way, but because my story is very, very typical. And as I looked into what that means, I realized that in the long term, I was heading down a path that was very, very dangerous.

Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general of the United States, has said many times in recent years that the most prevalent health issue in the country is not cancer or heart disease or obesity. It is isolation.

I turned 40 in May. I have a wife and two young boys. I moved to the suburbs a few years ago, where I own a fairly ugly home with white vinyl siding and two aging station wagons with crushed Goldfish crackers serving as floor mats. When I step on a Lego in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom, I try to tell myself that it’s cute that I’ve turned into a sitcom dad.

During the week, much of my waking life revolves around work. Or getting ready for work. Or driving to work. Or driving home from work. Or texting my wife to tell her I’m going to be late getting home from work.

Much of everything else revolves around my kids. I spend a lot of time asking them where their shoes are, and they spend a lot of time asking me when they can have some “dada time.” It is the world’s cutest phrase, and it makes me feel guilty every time I hear it, because they are asking it in moments when they know I cannot give it to them — when I am distracted by an e-mail on my phone or I’m dealing with the constant, boring logistics of running a home.

We can usually squeeze in an hour of “dada time” before bed — mostly wrestling or reading books — and so the real “dada time” happens on weekends. That’s my promise. “I have to go to work, but this weekend,” I tell them, “we can have ‘dada time.’ ”

I love “dada time.” And I’m pretty good about squeezing in an hour of “me time” each day for exercise, which usually means getting up before dawn to go to the gym or for a run. But when everything adds up, there is no real “friend time” left. Yes, I have friends at work and at the gym, but those are accidents of proximity. I rarely see those people anywhere outside those environments, because when everything adds up, I have left almost no time for friends. I have structured myself into being a loser.

“You should use this story suggestion as a call to do something about it.”

That’s Dr. Richard S. Schwartz, a Cambridge psychiatrist, and I had reached out to him because he and his wife, Dr. Jacqueline Olds, literally wrote the book on this topic, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century.

He agreed that my story was very typical. When people with children become overscheduled, they don’t shortchange their children, they shortchange their friendships. “And the public health dangers of that are incredibly clear,” he says.

Beginning in the 1980s, Schwartz says, study after study started showing that those who were more socially isolated were much more likely to die during a given period than their socially connected neighbors, even after you corrected for age, gender, and lifestyle choices like exercising and eating right. Loneliness has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke and the progression of Alzheimer’s. One study found that it can be as much of a long-term risk factor as smoking.

The research doesn’t get any rosier from there. In 2015, a huge study out of Brigham Young University, using data from 3.5 million people collected over 35 years, found that those who fall into the categories of loneliness, isolation, or even simply living on their own see their risk of premature death rise 26 to 32 percent.

Now consider that in the United States, nearly a third of people older than 65 live alone; by age 85, that has jumped to about half. Add all of this up, and you can see why the surgeon general is declaring loneliness to be a public health epidemic.

“Since my wife and I have written about loneliness and social isolation, we see a fair number of people for whom this is a big problem,” Schwartz continues. But there’s a catch. “Often they don’t come saying they’re lonely. Most people have the experience you had in your editor’s office: Admitting you’re lonely feels very much like admitting you’re a loser. Psychiatry has worked hard to de-stigmatize things like depression, and to a large part it has been successful. People are comfortable saying they’re depressed. But they’re not comfortable saying they’re lonely, because you’re the kid sitting alone in the cafeteria.”

I’m not that kid. I’m gregarious. I have family around me all the time, or I’m around “friends” at work or elsewhere. I comment on their Facebook posts. They comment on mine. My wife and I also have other couples we like and see often. It’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that’s good enough — and for many men it is, at least until their spouse gets the friends in the divorce.

I’m hesitant to say I’m lonely, though I’m clearly a textbook case of the silent majority of middle-aged men who won’t admit they’re starved for friendship, even if all signs point to the contrary. Now that I’ve been forced to recognize it, the question is what to do about it. Like really do about it. Because the tricks I’ve been using clearly do not work. I’ve been on “guy dates” with people I like — maybe I met them through my kids or on an assignment or whatever — but all too often those are one and done. It’s not that we don’t hit it off. We’ll go have that beer, and we’ll spend that beer talking about how we’re overscheduled and never get to hang with our friends, vaguely making plans to do something again, though we both know it’s probably not going to happen — certainly not the grand “Let’s hike the Appalachian Trail” ideas that start getting thrown out after the third beer. It’s a polite way of kicking the ball down the road, but never into the goal. I like you. You like me. Is that enough? Does that make us friends?

In February at a conference in Boston, a researcher from Britain’s University of Oxford presented study results that most guys understand intuitively: Men need an activity together to make and keep a bond. Women can maintain friendships over the phone. My wife is capable of having long phone talks with her sister in Virginia or her friend Casey (whom she sees in person almost every day), and I kind of look at it with amazement. I hate the phone. My guy friends seem to share my feelings, because our phone conversations seem to naturally last about five minutes before someone says, “All right, I’ll catch up with you later.” Dudes aren’t going to maintain a bromance that way, or even over a once-in-a-blue-moon beer. We need to go through something together. That’s why, studies have shown, men tend to make their deepest friends through periods of intense engagement, like school or military service or sports. That’s how many of us are comfortable.

When I was talking to Richard Schwartz, the psychiatrist told me something that had me staring off into the distance and nodding my head. Researchers have noticed a trend in photographs taken of people interacting. When female friends are talking to each other, they do it face to face. But guys stand side by side, looking out at the world together.

But in the middle years of life, those side-by-side opportunities to get together are exactly the sort of things that fall off. When you have a gap in your schedule, you feel bad running off with the fellas and leaving your partner alone to look for the shoes. And the guys I’d like to spend time with are all locked in the exact same bind as me. Planning anything takes great initiative, and if you have to take initiative every time you see someone, it’s easy to just let it disappear.

by Billy Baker, Boston Globe |  Read more:

Image: Mario Zucca

On the Yamanaka-goe Road
via:

Pepsi's New Ad Is a Total Success

[ed. See also: How Pepsi's ad backfired for Kendall Jenner.]

Before it’s an ad for shampoo or cat food or cola, every advertisement is first an ad for capitalism.

Without a privately-controlled industry jockeying to compete with one another for consumer dollars, there’s no need for advertising. People would wash their hair with Shampoo, and feed their cats with Cat Food, and quench their thirst with Cola. Without competition, there would be no need to advertise in the first place. Especially when it comes to commodities. There are some differences between colas—the taste and the ingredients, for example. But the main difference is on the can rather than in it. The branding, and the sensibilities that branding conveys.

Yesterday, Pepsi released an ad that takes a strong, if bizarre, brand position on contemporary politics. In the spot, dubbed “Jump In,” Kendall Jenner abandons a photo shoot to join a passing march. To do so, she sheds a blonde wig and slips in among a diverse throng of variously-toned participants in a seemingly-innocuous protest. Eventually, Jenner meets an equally innocuous policeman keeping order. She hands him a cold Pepsi, and the crowd of protesters rejoices. “Live for Now,” the spot concludes, topped by the Pepsi brand mark.

The ad has been almost universally panned online. A tone-deaf take on “protest as brunch.” An absurdist parody of the long, unfinished project of civil-rights activism in America. A trivialization of today’s street unrest.

All these criticisms are dead-on. But they don’t matter, because the ad is an undeniable success. Yes, true, it coopts the politics of protest, particularly as they surround race relations in America today. But that’s not the ad’s goal, so the public’s objection is ultimately irrelevant to Pepsi’s mission. The ad’s point is to put the consumer in a more important role than the citizen anyway. And to position Pepsi as a facilitator in the utopian dream of pure, color-blind consumerism that might someday replace politics entirely. (...)

Critics aren’t wrong to see the protest as a milquetoast mockery of the real agitation for social justice in the streets in America. In particular, the ad neuters one of the most memorable images of protest in recent memory, that of a woman facing-off with riot police in a mid-2016 Baton Rouge demonstration.

But the ad’s interpretive possibilities don’t end with this explanation. It’s equally possible to understand the Pepsi protest as a march for the power of Pepsi branding instead of social justice. It may seem preposterous or even revolting to advance this interpretation, but that doesn’t make it any less viable. After all, the ad ends with a clear admission of the march’s purpose: to deliver ice-cold Pepsi cola to the (prominently unmilitarized) police who quirkily mistook an innocent, branded march for a political protest.

At a time when so much is worthy of protest, it might seem insane to imagine a big company like Pepsi greenlighting such a tone-deaf take. But it’s equally likely that Pepsi is banking on this exact social anxiety as an invitation for branded levity. Today’s political climate is distressing for many people in America. For some of them, the answer to such distress is protest and agitation. But for others, salve comes in dreaming of a near future in which all that anxiety melts away, like a cool soda quenching a big thirst. (...)

The genius of this decision is that it satisfies everyone. The Kardashian fanatics got their Kendall Jenner fix. The agitators get to feel that they have successfully redressed a big brand company; a minor victory in a time of so many defeats. The earnest, probably-white folk who enjoyed Pepsi’s alternative to constant politicization got their saccharine status-quo—and now they also get a branded excuse to issue a counter-offensive against the progressives who insisted on bringing politics into innocuous soft drinks (surely it’s coming). The media get their scoops, and their thinkpieces (like this one). And these outcomes, incompatible though they are, all return attention to Pepsi—which is all it really wanted in the first place.

by Ian Bogost, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: PepsiCo

Trump's Terrible Moment of Truth in Syria

Last November, a few days before the U.S. Presidential election, I was among a group of American reporters and researchers who visited Damascus, Syria, to interview President Bashar al-Assad and his foreign minister, Walid Muallem. At a meeting with the group, Muallem was asked which candidate he favored, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

“I hope they will not elect anybody,” he said.

Muallem laughed at his own joke. He wasn’t serious. Both Muallem and his boss very much wanted Trump to win, hoping that, if he did, some of the pressure on their regime, which has been ostracized around the globe for committing war crimes, would ease up. Assad and Muallem had every reason to think that Trump would give them a more sympathetic hearing than they’d receive from a Clinton Administration. During the campaign, while Clinton was promising to get tough on Assad, Trump had praised him, if for no other reason than that he was battling the Islamic State. Trump had also made numerous positive references to Vladimir Putin, Russia’s leader and Assad’s most important international ally. There was talk, after Trump’s election, of a possible rapprochement with Syria, perhaps facilitated by Putin. And, indeed, the Washington Post reported on Monday that, earlier this year, the Blackwater founder Erik Prince met secretly in the Seychelles with a confidant of Putin to discuss, among other things, a possible deal on Syria.

“I don’t like Assad at all,’’ Trump said in a Presidential debate in October. “But Assad is killing isis. Russia is killing isis and Iran is killing isis.”

The trouble, of course, was that while Assad may indeed have been killing isis, he was also killing Syrian civilians—and so prolifically that most Western governments, including the United States, long ago severed diplomatic relations with Assad’s government and called on Assad to step down. Most notoriously, in 2013, the Assad regime was accused by Western governments of using poison gas in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta, an attack that killed at least fourteen hundred people and wounded more than three thousand, most of them civilians. And though President Barack Obama had previously publicly drawn a “red line” over the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and threatened to respond militarily if it were crossed, he decided, at the last moment, to refrain from any military action, securing instead a promise from Assad to turn over the country’s chemical weapons. It was one of the most significant moments of Obama’s Presidency, and one that Trump and other Republicans ridiculed.

Now comes the moment of truth for President Trump. Sources inside Syria are reporting that a sarin-gas attack in Idlib Province killed dozens of civilians and injured hundreds more on Tuesday. In a statement, Trump blamed Assad’s regime, called the attack “reprehensible,” and said that it “cannot be ignored by the civilized world.” He also described the attack as a “consequence of the past Administration’s weakness and irresolution.”

What happens now? Trump’s comment put forward no clear policy or planned response. During a press briefing on Tuesday, Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, strongly suggested that the Administration is preparing a military response in order to punish the Syrian government and deter it from carrying out any more chemical-weapons attacks.

The Obama Administration took plenty of actions against the Assad government, including sending arms to rebel groups. But Obama’s other aim, in addition to destroying isis, was to avoid a collapse of the Syrian state—the kind that might happen if the United States were to directly attack the Assad regime. Obama feared that the ensuing vacuum in Damascus would be filled by the likes of isis and the Al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra. When Obama looked at Damascus in 2013, he saw Baghdad in 2003.

by Dexter Filkins, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Getty
[ed. Well, he's already blamed Obama, so that's out of the way. Next item on the day's agenda: this.]

Tiger Woods and the Amazing 1997 Masters

It’s Masters week, the annual ritual of thrilling golf, whispered commentary, blooming magnolias, white-suited caddies, and “patrons” in Bermuda shorts. (For the sensitive souls who run Augusta National Golf Club, which has hosted the tournament since 1934, the “fans” is too redolent of beer-swilling frat boys.)

Twenty years ago this month, a young man named Tiger Woods blitzed his way around Augusta, taking down the other players, the racial prejudice that has long attended golf, and the very expectations of what was possible in the sport. The shock of his performance wasn’t merely in seeing a twenty-one-year-old phenom defeat the rest of the field by twelve shots, beating the previous record of nine shots that Jack Nicklaus had set in 1965. It was the preternaturally calm demeanor that Woods displayed, and the manner in which he dismantled a course that had long been regarded as one of the world’s most difficult.

Colin Montgomerie, who was then one of the leading golfers in the world, was paired with Woods on Saturday, the third day of the four-day tournament. Woods shot seven under par—“the easiest sixty-five I’ve ever seen,’’ Montgomerie called it recently. “From the second hole onwards, I thought, ‘Hang on a minute. This is something extraordinary,’ ” he said. “This is a game that I had not seen before, and none of us had.” On Sunday, Woods shot three under par, and on the back nine his round turned into a victory procession. “From the 13th to the 18th, the people supported him like crazy,” his playing partner Costantino Rocca recalled. “I don’t know if anyone remembered I was on the golf course. It was good for him, not for me.’’

For those who would like to see Woods’s victory again, or who were too young to see it the first time around, the Masters is streaming the original CBS Sports broadcast of Sunday’s final round on its Web site. To watch the three-hour tape is to be reminded of how green Augusta National is, how white the crowds were (and are to this day), and how young, talented, and self-assured Woods was.

On the video, you can see Woods standing on the tee at the famous par-five thirteenth hole. At that point, he had a ten-shot lead over his closest competitor that weekend, Tom Watson. Standing tall, a steel-shafted three wood in hands, Woods lashed the ball straight down the middle of the fairway and bent over to pick up his tee. “You couldn’t walk that out there any better than that,” the late Ken Venturi commented.

Before going after his ball, Woods flashed his caddie, Mike (Fluff) Cowan, a quick, close-mouthed smile—a smile of youth and limitless confidence. Although he was barely old enough to drink legally, Woods had already won three professional tournaments, and going into Augusta he believed he could triumph there. In fact, he expected to win. “There are a few tournaments throughout my career where I felt, ‘Just don’t screw it up,’ ” he told USA Today a couple of weeks ago. “That was one of them.”

With the advantage of a young, limber body and a free-flowing swing that generated tremendous club-head speed, Woods drove the ball thirty or forty yards farther than most other players. He was also a great iron player and a fabulous putter. When the three elements of his game came together, as they did that week at Augusta, he was unbeatable. On the fifteenth hole, after driving his tee shot three hundred and one yards, he arrowed a mid-iron over the creek in front of the green. The shot landed about twenty feet behind the hole, setting up a two-putt birdie that extended his lead to eleven shots. “How good does it get?” Venturi asked. “You don’t want to play him on holes like this, he’ll own you. And he’s owning everybody today.”

During the twelve and a half years that followed his Masters coming-out party, Woods won another sixty-six tournaments on the P.G.A. Tour, including thirteen more major championships. The members at Augusta, seeing what he had done to their beloved course, lengthened it considerably, laid down new rough, and planted trees in areas where previously there had been none. This effort to “Tiger-proof” Augusta didn’t prevent Woods from winning the Masters three more times. But, as other venues copied Augusta’s example, Woods’s 1997 victory changed the very game, creating the conditions for the rise of a generation of “bombers” who also hit the ball a mile—players like Dustin Johnson, Rory McIlroy, and Jason Day.

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Gary Hershorn/Reuters/Alamy
[ed. Watching the video again, it's startling how much people age in 20 years.]

How Seattle Is Dismantling a NIMBY Power Structure

For decades, activist homeowners have held virtual veto power over nearly every decision on Seattle’s growth and development.

In large and small ways, these homeowners, who tend to be white, more affluent and older than the average resident, have shaped neighborhoods in their reflection — building a city that is consistently rated as one of the nation’s most livable, as well as one of its most expensive.

Now — in the face of an unprecedented housing crisis and a dramatic spike in homelessness — that may be starting to change.

Last July, Mayor Ed Murray and the director of the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, Kathy Nyland, announced that Seattle was cutting formal ties with, and funding for, the 13 volunteer Neighborhood District Councils that had been the city’s chief sounding boards on neighborhood planning since the 1990s. Through this bureaucratic sleight of hand, Murray and Nyland signaled their intent to seek more input and feedback from lower-income folks, people of color and renters — who now make up 54 percent of the city — and away from the white baby boomers who have long dominated discussions about Seattle’s future. The message: We appreciate your input, but we’re going to get a second opinion.

A few months later, the Department of Neighborhoods doubled down on its commitment to community engagement, putting out a call for volunteers to serve on a new 16-member Community Involvement Commission, which will be charged with helping city departments develop “authentic and thorough” ways to reach “all” city residents, including underrepresented communities such as low-income people, homeless residents and renters. Finally, DON will also oversee and staff a second new commission, the Seattle Renters’ Commission, which will advise all city departments on policies that affect renters and monitor the enforcement and effectiveness of the city’s renter protection laws.

The shakeup has rattled traditional neighborhood groups, which have grown accustomed to outsized influence at City Hall, and invigorated some groups that have long felt ignored and marginalized by the city.

The shift toward a more inclusive neighborhoods department, and neighborhood planning process, is more than just symbolic; it’s political. The homeowner-dominated neighborhood councils have typically argued against land use changes that would allow more density (in the form of townhouses and apartment buildings) in and near Seattle’s traditional single-family neighborhoods, which make up nearly two-thirds of the city. Including more renters and low-income people in the mix could dilute, or even upend, those groups’ agendas.

“Our city has changed dramatically since our district councils system was created three decades ago, and we have seen them over time become less and less representative not only of their neighborhoods but of Seattle itself,” Murray said last year.

His statement echoed a point Nyland made in a memo to the City Council back in May: “We have heard from residents active in the system that ‘District Councils work for us.’ … However, they don’t work for everyone.” (...)

Nyland’s reform can be traced back to a 2009 audit of the district councils that found an obsolete system that did not reflect the city’s true demographics. “The system is dominated by the presence of longtime members whose point of view is overly dominant at both the district council and city neighborhood council levels and potentially not representative of their communities,” the city audit found. “The district councils in general are not sufficiently representative of the communities they nominally represent,” it concluded.

The disconnect was even deeper in 2016, when a report by the neighborhoods department found that while the population of Seattle was becoming younger, more diverse and more evenly split between homeowners and renters, “residents attending district council meetings tend to be 40 years of age or older, Caucasian and homeowners.”

“If you’ve ever gone to some of these community meetings, they’re just deadly dull, and the same 25 people have been there for 100 years,” City Council Member Sally Bagshaw says.

At a meeting of the Ballard District Council in northwest Seattle immediately after the announcement, district council members seemed shell-shocked by the city’s decision to cut them off. Sitting around a horseshoe of tables at the area’s branch library in northwest Seattle, they took turns grousing about the change. One member argued that the mostly white, mostly middle-aged council should be considered diverse, because “this group represents homeowners, environmental groups, businesses and other organizations.” “We have people here from every state,” he added. Another suggested that the city had made the move in haste, without a plan to replace the councils. “If you’re going to get rid of the current plan, you need to have a new plan in place before you get rid of the old one,” he said.

At another recent meeting of the group formerly known as the Magnolia/Queen Anne District Council, which represents a wealthy enclave just south of Ballard, one member asked plaintively, “Why do we have to encourage certain groups to come? Why can’t it just be an open forum?”

In a sense, traditional neighborhood groups are right to feel threatened. Nyland’s announcement, coupled with her department’s new emphasis on outreach to communities that have rarely had a say in city decisions, represents a fundamental shift in the very definition of the “neighborhoods” department. By emphasizing outreach to underserved groups such as renters, immigrants and refugees, Nyland is shaking up traditional notions of community engagement and redefining community as something based not on geographic proximity, but on personal and cultural affinity.

by Erica C. Barnett, Next City | Read more:
Image:Alex Garland

Costco Members Get Deeper Discounts on $100 Google Play Codes

If you are a member of the Costco wholesale warehouse retailer, you already know you can get deep discounts on lots of bulk items. That also includes purchasing Google Play e-codes. At the moment, Costco is running a promotion where its members can get a $100 Google Play code for an even bigger discount.

Normally, the discount for a $100 Google Play code from Costco would be down to $92.99, or a price cut of $7.01. However, from now until April 16, there will be an additional $10 discount taken for the Google Play e-codes, bringing the price down to just $82.99. The code is delivered via email and is limited to five codes per customer. You can use it to purchase items on the Google Play Store, including apps, movies, TV shows, books, and music. You can also use it to purchase subscriptions to some of Google’s services, including YouTube Red and adding more storage to Google Drive.

by John Callaham, Android Authority |  Read more:

Image: Costco

Why You Feel the Urge to Jump

Have you ever stood in a high place and felt the urge to jump? Judith Dancoff did one beautiful, clear day on Deception Pass Bridge, a narrow two-lane causeway that ribbons between two islands north of Seattle. If she followed her compulsion to leap, death at the bottom of the steep ocean gorge 180 feet below would be almost certain.

A novelist known for literary flights of fancy, she did not feel suicidal—and never had. Though normally fearful of heights, she strangely was not afraid then, though Deception Pass Bridge is ranked among the scariest in the world. Its slender concrete span cantilevers over jagged cliff-tops and reportedly wobbles in high winds, with only a minimalist 1935 railing separating you from distant roiling waters.

None of that registered with Dancoff, who was also unaware of the bridge’s history of attracting jumping. Instead, she saw herself as if in a dream, climbing onto the pedestrian railing then diving off. She was so unnerved that she sat down cross-legged on the pavement to stop herself. “It was terrifying because of the possibility of doing it,” she later recalled. “I felt a bit foolish. I thought, ‘where did that come from?’ ”

The seemingly irrational, but common urge to leap—half of respondents felt it in one survey—can be so disturbing that ruminators from Jean-Paul Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) to anonymous contributors in lengthy Reddit sub-threads have agonized about it. While the French philosopher saw a moment of Existentialist truth about the human freedom to choose to live or die, ramp_tram called it “F***king stupid” when he had to plaster himself to the far wall of a 14th-floor hotel atrium away from the balcony railing because “I was deathly afraid of somehow jumping off by accident.”

The French explain it as L’Appel du Vide, or call of the void. Are they just French, or can the void really beckon you to kill yourself? New science on balance, fear, and cognition shows that the voice of the abyss is both real and powerful. Heights, it turns out, are not exactly what they seem.

by Jessica Seigel, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Amit Chattopadhyay / Wikipedia

[ed. I live a few miles from this bridge and you could not pay me enough to walk over it... the vertigo and urge to jump are just too great (even driving on it gives me the creeps).]