Testing News Paywalls: Which Are Leaky, Which Are Airtight?

It's widely known but rarely acknowledged: Most news paywalls are full of holes.

Publishers aren’t just offering a few free articles per month. They’re building in sweeping exceptions that allow tech-savvy readers—and often simply those entering through search or social media—to access most or all of what subscribers pay for.

It’s easy to understand why subscription outlets want to keep people out. But, even as the so-called “Trump bump” drives up new subscriptions, many also see powerful reasons for letting a lot of people in: from promotion, to data collection, to greater impact on public discourse.

We tested the paywalls at eight prominent subscription news outlets, three daily newspapers and five magazines—The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Nation, Foreign Policy, Harvard Business Review, and The Information—and found that all but one of those were “soft” to one degree or another, and six of eight allowed for some form of unlimited exception, allowing non-subscribers to read widely.

Paywalls have been a part of online news since The Wall Street Journal’s launched in 1996. The Journal’s approach, from that time until last year, largely mimicked its print subscription model: the “hard” paywall, paying customers only.

The New York Times pioneered the alternative “soft,” or “leaky” model in 2011. It allowed non-subscribers to read 20 articles per month (since reduced to 10). And, it created mechanisms for unlimited access.

The exceptions worked like this: When a reader arrived at a story through a search engine or by clicking a link on social media, that story wasn’t counted toward the free allotment. The meter would kick in only if the reader clicked on another article on the site.

Non-subscribers could also subvert the mechanism entirely by manipulating “cookie” files, a common marketing tracker stored on readers’ computers. Deleting cookies restarts the counter tracking how many stories a user has read, and the “private” mode built into most browsers prevents cookies from being saved in the first place.

Since then, paywalls have become much more common, and—with steep, long-term declines in print and digital display ad revenues across the industry— far greater contributors to publishers’ bottom lines.

Times2020, a planning document released by the publisher in January, identified the Times as a “subscription-first business.” Over the past year, digital subscriber numbers have shot up around the industry, a phenomenon referred to as the “Trump bump.” The Times added 755,000 new subscribers in the year ended on March 26, 2017, a 65 percent increase, according to its most recent quarterly report.

The Wall Street Journal signed up around 300,000 in roughly the same time period, representing growth of about 33 percent, Robert Thompson, CEO of the Journal’s corporate parent, said on an earnings call. Digital subscriptions now make up 53 percent of the subscriptions at the company, up from 38 percent just two years ago.

Overall, paywalls and paywall policies are more important for publishers than ever before. And, in general, it’s the Times’s “soft” model, unlimited exceptions and all, that has prevailed.

by Ariel Stulberg, Columbia Journalism Review |  Read more:

Image: NYT

Brand New Congress

The Republican party wasn’t always an organization dominated by the ultra-wealthy. While today most of its federal representatives in Congress are trying to pass a gigantic tax cut for the rich disguised as a health care bill, it was once a party that liberated American slaves, established the Environmental Protection Agency, and broke up enormous business monopolies.

That’s the GOP that 42-year-old Arkansas pastor Robb Ryerse is trying to revive. He is the first Republican to be endorsed by Brand New Congress, a grassroots group started by former Bernie Sanders staffers to encourage Democrats and Republicans who have never served in office before to run for Congress.

Ryerse is running in the primary to unseat incumbent GOP Rep. Steve Womack, who has served in Congress since 2011. The district is heavily Republican; in 2016 Womack won with 77 percent of the vote. That makes the district essentially a one-party state: All of the serious political competition happens within the Republican Party.

In an interview with The Intercept, Ryerse explained why he is trying to unseat Womack and how the Republican Party needs to change to become relevant to the lives of ordinary Americans.

“I grew up as a third-generation pastor and after pastoring in churches up North for about 10 years I went through kind of a spiritual crisis and needed to be part of a church that was welcoming of all people, a church that accepted that people have doubts and questions and that’s not a threat to faith. So my wife and I moved our family to northwest Arkansas where we started a church called Vintage Fellowship,” he explained. “I’m the kind of person who believes in big ideas that are daring enough that they might work and starting a new kind of church was kind of a new kind of idea. The reason I’m running for Congress is because I’ve had this kind of big daring idea that I can’t get out of my head. And that’s that we’ve gotta change the way we do politics in America.”

To Ryerse, the current Republican Party isn’t living up to the legacy of the historic one. “The Republican Party used to be known for who it was for, and now it’s known for who it’s against,” he lamented.

But he believes that Republicans can get back on the right track if they look to their past. “You could look at President Reagan signing immigration reform, you could look at Richard Nixon helping establish needed environmental protections, you could talk about Dwight Eisenhower talking about the military-industrial complex, I think there’s lots of examples if you kind of look back at Republicans who really were on the right side of history in a number of ways.”

He described his opponent Congressman Womack as a “good man” but said he has failed to represent the district adequately. He cited a letter Womack wrote to former Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting Syrian refugees were a threat to the people of Arkansas as one of the things that pushed him to run.

“It was one of those fearmongering kind of ‘We don’t want those people in our town’ kind of letters. And that was one of those things that really kind of planted a seed for me, like, ‘Wow, here’s someone who’s not representing the really just and generous things that are happening in our district,'” Ryerse reflected. “And I think Arkansans deserve someone who will listen to them and represent them better and who will be an independent voice on their behalf.”

Ryerse wants to see a Republican Party that strikes a more accepting tone on immigration. “I think the wall is both a terrible waste of money as well as a symbol that just does not reflect what America’s values are. Ronald Reagan talked about our country being a shining city on a hill. The wall doesn’t communicate that kind of optimism that kind of welcoming. I think in terms of helping Republicans see that, I think Republican leadership who are really passionate on the immigration issue really need to dial back the fearmongering and the dehumanizing of people,” he stated.

On health care, Ryerse thinks that Republicans have faltered by coalescing around a health care bill with approval ratings barely over 20 percent.

“It would’ve taken just three more independent Republicans in Congress to stop the bill that passed the House a couple of weeks ago. And I would’ve voted against it. I would’ve been one of those independent Republicans that would have voted against that bill,” he explained. “In terms of what we need going forward, I think we need a plan that provides health coverage for all people. I think Obamacare was in some ways a step in the right direction but at the same time it kind of offends my Republican sensibilities to have people being forced to buy insurance to be punished in their taxes if they don’t. I think it’s far better to just have a public option that makes affordable health insurance available to all people. We’ve got to make sure that everybody in the country is covered.”

While it would be hard to find a single Republican in Congress who endorses a public option, it’s actually fairly popular among Republican voters, 51 percent of whom told a Kaiser poll last year that they support offering such a plan to Americans. Part of the reason for this gap between public opinion and public policy is the influence of money in the party, which Ryerse wants to tackle.

“I think the influx of so much money has helped to really cause the toxic nature of our system and has really worked to corrupt the party establishment,” he told us. “I am working with Brand New Congress and we’re not taking special interest money, we’re not taking big PAC money, corporate money. We are being supported, my campaign is being supported, by average citizens who believe and who donate. I think that’s the way it needs to be. I think when we’ve got politicians who are beholden to big corporations and big donors, is what happens is the very thing we have, whether Republicans or Democrats they put party ahead of people and we end up with the mess we’ve got now.”

by Zaid Jilani, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Brand New Congress

[ed. I've only voted for one Republican in my life, but I'd vote for this guy.]

In Wreckage of the Fyre Festival, Fury, Lawsuits and an Inquiry

A few days after the spectacular collapse of the Fyre Festival, just as federal investigators began to circle the wreckage, the event’s would-be mastermind, Billy McFarland, was still making promises.

His failed event was sold on social media by the likes of Kendall Jenner as an ultraluxurious musical getaway in the Bahamas. Scheduled for two weekends starting in late April, it was supposed to up the ante in the competitive festival market. Instead, Fyre had become a punch line for its aborted opening, with reports of panicked millennials scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach.

Yet, speaking on May 2 with unnerved employees at his TriBeCa office — with its $30,000 sound system and frequent fashion-model visitors — Mr. McFarland deflected blame and vowed that Fyre would survive to mount another festival next year. The coverage had been “sensationalized,” he insisted, according to a recording obtained by The New York Times. (Fyre has attributed its cancellation to a combination of factors, including the weather.)

Ja Rule, the rapper and Mr. McFarland’s celebrity business partner, looked on the bright side. “The whole world knows Fyre’s name now,” he said. “This will pass, guys.”

Their company, Fyre Media, however, was already facing the first of more than a dozen lawsuits seeking millions and alleging fraud, breach of contract and more.

The endeavor has also become the focus of a criminal investigation, with federal authorities looking into possible mail, wire and securities fraud, according to a source with knowledge of the matter, who was not authorized to discuss it. The investigation is being conducted by the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York and the F.B.I.; it is being overseen by a prosecutor assigned to the complex frauds and cybercrime unit. (A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office and a spokeswoman for the F.B.I. declined to comment.)

There are many potential victims: ticket buyers, investors and businesses small and large, spread across the United States and the Bahamas. Blink-182, a planned headliner, can’t get its equipment out of customs limbo. Fyre’s employees have not been paid. MaryAnn Rolle, a restaurant owner in the Bahamas who catered daily meals and rented villas to the festival crew, says she is owed $134,000.

“I’m struggling” and feeling taken advantage of, Ms. Rolle said. “It’s embarrassing.”

Ja Rule was Fyre’s famous face, but at the center of the controversy is Mr. McFarland, a brash, 25-year-old entrepreneur with a gift for networking and buzzy social media. In his short career, he has persuaded people, over and over, to buy or invest in whatever he was selling, leaving behind a trail of aggrieved customers and business partners. He could be the Wolf of Wall Street for the selfie set, or Gatsby run through an Instagram filter.

Mr. McFarland and his lawyers declined to address specific allegations. But in a statement, he said: “I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal,” adding, “I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend.”

Stacey Richman, a lawyer for Ja Rule, said that he “would never participate in anything fraudulent; it’s simply not in his DNA.”

But interviews with more than two dozen people associated with Mr. McFarland or the festival, many of whom requested anonymity because of pending legal issues, turned up few who were surprised by the ruins in the Bahamas and beyond.

“The lies didn’t start with the Fyre Festival, let’s make that clear,” said Patrick McMullan, the veteran party photographer who came to regret his trust in Mr. McFarland’s business savvy.

by Joe Coscarelli, Melena Ryzik and Ben Sisario, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Scott McIntyre

How to be a Vlogger: A Guide for Wannabe YouTubers

A survey of 1,000 people has revealed that three-quarters would consider a career in vlogging. But is there a viable market for YouTubers, and how do you even get started? Here’s a career guide.

1. Entry requirements

YouTubing has an abnormally low entry threshold. So long as you have a laptop with a webcam, a YouTube account and a flair for endless insincere grinning that barely masks the swirling vortex of abject nothingness that consumes your every waking moment, you’re ready to take your first steps.

2. Skills required

You’ll need:

• An amiable manner.

• A cool haircut.

• Enough time on your hands to believe that filming yourself opening a box isn’t a grotesque waste of the precious life you’ve been given.

• Decent lighting.

3. What you’ll do

• Create a bubbly two-dimensional persona that’s both cheeky and inspiring.

• Document your entire life in a series of well-edited videos.

• Review products that you’re sent, being careful to avoid saying anything critical.

• Back up your brand with endless Instagram and Snapchat posts that show your young followers just how cool your entire life is.

• Be slightly vague about who sponsors you.

• Convince an out-of-work journalist to spend three days listlessly ghostwriting a book for you, then watch their face as it goes on to outsell all the important work they have ever cared about.

• End all of your sentences with the phrase: “Thanks guys, don’t forget to subscribe!”

4. Salary

Starter: Literally nothing.

by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Maskot/Getty Images/Maskot

Even If You Don't Have Student Loans, You Should Want Them to be Forgiven

I graduated in 1996 with a masters’ degree, approximately $27,000 in debt, and a burning desire to do good in the world at a nonprofit. My idealism was quickly replaced with a gnawing, constant worry about making ends meet: An entry-level nonprofit salary and a $300 monthly loan payment made for uneasy budgetary bedfellows in Washington, D.C. I lasted six months as a penny-watching idealist then fled for a higher salary in the private sector.

The world has moved on without my services as a professional idealist, but society as a whole needs people willing to bend their time and talent to public service. Enter the 2007 Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program and its subsequent expansion by the Obama administration in 2010, 2012 and 2015. The fundamentals of the program were simple: Did you have a federal student loan? Were you employed in public service? Then you could cap your payments at a fixed percentage of your monthly income and after ten years of qualified public service, the government would forgive the remaining balance on your federal student loans.

This was not a “get out of all student loans” ticket—thanks to federal student loan limits, the amount of money a student can borrow from the government may not cover tuition, room and board, so a lot of students have to fill in the rest with private loans. But the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) could and did help people manage their federal student loan debt.

The current administration is proposing to eliminate this program. As the Washington Post reports:

The loan forgiveness program, enacted in 2007, was designed to encourage college graduates to pursue careers as social workers, teachers, public defenders or doctors in rural areas. There are at least 552,931 people on track to receive the benefit, with the first wave of forgiveness set for October. It’s unclear how the proposed elimination would affect those borrowers… There were no estimates on how much the government would save by eliminating public-service loan forgiveness.

So what? Yanking away programs that help young adults with student loans build a future is remarkably short-sighted. Several key components of a functioning society—law, medicine, education, social services—do better when there is a wide, deep pool of qualified aspirants. And if dedicating a decade or more to a public service job doesn’t ruin an adult financially, then the fields of law, education, etc. benefit from having passionate, committed veterans. Never underestimate the bargain that a long-time employee represents, in terms of both institutional knowledge and reduced employee overhead.

If “professional competence” and “higher quality applicants” and “better employees, therefore better public service” aren’t sufficiently compelling reasons, consider this one: Student loans are throttling some sectors of the U.S. economy.

Approximately 44 million people in the U.S. have borrowed for student loans, with outstanding student loan debt standing at approximately $1.3 trillion today. Around seven in 10 newly-minted college graduates leave school with debt. They are carrying, on average, around $37,000 in student loans. In 2014, Pew Research estimated that college graduates aged 25-32 were earning $45,500 annually. That’s not too shabby—the median annual income for that age group as a whole is estimated at $25,000 or so—but throw in those $300-a-month loan payments on top of other fixed expenses like rent and it’s no wonder young people aren’t buying anything.

In addition to eliminating any public-service loan forgiveness programs, the current administration also wants to hike loan repayment for income-based repayment plans, end subsidized federal student loans, eliminate more than $700 million in Perkins loans for disadvantaged students, and cut $490 million from undergraduate work-study programs. The upshot is the current administration just said it’s not the government’s job to broaden access to education to people below the middle class.

by Lisa Schmeiser, Business Insider | Read more:
Image: democracynow.org

Ancestry.com Takes Ownership of Your DNA Forever

Don’t use the AncestryDNA testing service without actually reading the Ancestry.com Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. According to these legal contracts, you still own your DNA, but so does Ancestry.com.

The family history website Ancestry.com is selling a new DNA testing service called AncestryDNA. But the DNA and genetic data that Ancestry.com collects may be used against “you or a genetic relative.” According to its privacy policies, Ancestry.com takes ownership of your DNA forever. Your ownership of your DNA, on the other hand, is limited in years.

It seems obvious that customers agree to this arrangement, since all of them must “click here to agree” to these terms. But, how many people really read those contacts before clicking to agree? And how many relatives of Ancestry.com customers are also reading?

There are three significant provisions in the AncestryDNA Privacy Policy and Terms of Service to consider on behalf of yourself and your genetic relatives: (1) the perpetual, royalty-free, world-wide license to use your DNA; (2) the warning that DNA information may be used against “you or a genetic relative”; (3) your waiver of legal rights. (...)

Buried in the “Informed Consent” section, which is incorporated into the Terms of Service, Ancestry.com warns customers, “it is possible that information about you or a genetic relative could be revealed, such as that you or a relative are carriers of a particular disease. That information could be used by insurers to deny you insurance coverage, by law enforcement agencies to identify you or your relatives, and in some places, the data could be used by employers to deny employment.”

This is a massive red flag. The data “you or a genetic relative” give to AncestryDNA could be used against “you or a genetic relative” by employers, insurers, and law enforcement.

For example, a young woman named Theresa Morelli applied for individual disability insurance, consented to release of her medical records through the Medical Information Bureau (a credit reporting agency for medical history), and was approved for coverage. One month later, Ms. Morelli’s coverage was cancelled and premiums refunded when the insurer learned her father had Huntington’s disease, a genetic illness.

Startlingly, the Medical Information Bureau (MIB) used Morelli’s broad consent to query her father’s physician, a doctor with whom she had no prior patient relationship. More importantly, the applicant herself wasn’t diagnosed with Huntington’s carrier status, but she suffered exclusion on the basis of a genetic predisposition in her family.

by Joel Winston, Medium |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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How Facebook Is Making Membership a Prerequisite to Everyday Existence

In mid-February, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published his “Building Global Community” manifesto, in which he called for “supportive,” “safe,” “informed,” “civically engaged” and “inclusive” communities.

Which sounds lofty and benevolent, yet if you read between the lines, the message is: we want to own all the data of all the interpersonal/community interactions in the world and profit off of them through advertising and other as-yet-unveiled value-added propositions. (Facebook Bucks, anyone?)

Facebook launched a few years after I graduated from college, so I guess this makes me an old fuddy-duddy—an old fuddy-duddy who doesn’t want a corporation like Facebook owning my most sensitive personal info. Somehow, this sentiment not only puts me in the minority of the connected world, but also it increasingly marginalizes me in my everyday interactions.

I was OK with missing the occasional baby announcement. I was fine with missing the occasional warehouse party. But last month the Zuckerberg Mafia finally hit me where it hurts: I got kicked off of car sharing because I don’t have (and won’t have) a Facebook account.
If you haven’t and/or won’t join Facebook, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.

Paradise Lost

One of the most glorious things about living in the Bay Area is that I don’t have to own a car. For nearly 10 years, I’ve been a member of City CarShare, a local nonprofit car-sharing service with vehicle stations all around the Bay Area. I built my life around the service. I love biking to a Prius parked in some random garage, tossing my bike into the hatch and launching off to my next adventure. I’m a believer in the vision of the Internet and smartphones helping us share stuff and get the most value out of our assets. City CarShare was an early real-world example of how technology might help facilitate/streamline people living together better and more efficiently.

However, City CarShare was recently bought by a corporation, Getaround. And Getaround built its platform on top of Facebook. So when I went to migrate my account over to them, I found that there’s literally no way to do it as a non-Facebook user. If I want to share cars with my fellow city dwellers, I’m compelled to strike a Faustian bargain.

To access the services of Getaround, one must authenticate their identity through Facebook.

For comparison: Airbnb allows multiple verification options — including, but not limited to, Facebook. If I’m going to share my car or house with someone, I sure as heck want to know if that person is who they say they are. But saying that Facebook is the sole conduit toward this goal is treading into scary, Black Mirror–esque territory.

I know that for you Facebook-having people, this is no big deal. You have resigned yourself to the idea of Facebook owning your data. But if you don’t, haven’t and/or won’t resign to this fate, you might end up left, like me, in a peculiar situation: the price of “sharing” a car equals money plus forking over a huge trove of personal data. Personal information is supplanting money as a form of currency.

Customer Disservice

I wrote to the nice folks at Getaround to let them know that I’ve been a loyal customer for over 10+ years and said I’d happily verify myself in any manner they see fit besides Facebook. But since the very architecture of their site is integrated unto Facebook, technically, they have no way to do this (short of redesigning the entire service). And there doesn’t seem to be any awareness of why this might even be an issue. It would take me just a minute to open an account, so why shouldn’t I do it?

A careful reading of Getaround’s privacy statement makes it clear that the data they are compiling will be shared with other companies. In the case of car sharing, that includes GPS tracking of where and when I’m driving (OMG, Facebook would love to get their tentacles on those juicy profile nodes). (...)

Social Credit

You have a credit score if you want to get a mortgage—soon you’ll have a social-credit score that people can check to see if you fit the bill for their service/community/etc.

Potential landlords, employers, car-share companies and dates will scan your social-credit score to see if you fit the bill. We’re facing a world in which you’ll be a social outcast if you don’t regularly grant access to your Facebook profile. Facebook is becoming our de facto social-credit system.

by Jason Ditzian, The Bold Italic | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. I've run into the same problem (with other apps). It's an irritant. But if businesses want to alienate a segment of their potential customer base, that's up to them. See also: Facebook wants to use your brain activity as an input device.]

Patagonia Made a Bikini That Won't Ever Fall Off

Image: Patagonia

The Good Daughter

In Tate Britain is a painting by the Victorian artist George Elgar Hicks of a woman ministering tenderly to her invalid father. It is called Comfort of Old Age. The work is the final panel of Hicks’s triptych Woman’s Mission. The first part, Guide of Childhood, in which the same figure teaches her little boy to walk, has been lost. But the second panel also hangs at the Tate in London: Companion of Manhood shows our heroine consoling her husband after ghastly news.

Hicks depicted “woman” in her three guises – mother, wife, daughter – and in her ideal state, the selfless provider of guidance, solace and care. Her life has meaning only in so far as it nourishes and facilitates the lives of others, principally men.

Domestic and emotional labour, we call it now. Feminists have long campaigned both for this to be acknowledged as real work and for men to do their share. Women cannot reach their potential at the office, notes Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in her book Lean In, until men pull their weight at home. But this has always been the toughest, messiest fight, because it is about domestic harmony, varying standards of personal hygiene, nagging, sulking and love. Besides, there is an enduring sense, little changed since Hicks’s day, that not only are women better at caring duties, but it is their natural lot.

I have spent a long time in the first two panels of the triptych: a partner/wife for 30 years, a mother for 21. (My two sons are grown and pretty much gone.) And I have seen, in the course of my adult life, enormous progress in those two domains. Men no longer assume that wives will dump their careers to follow them on foreign postings, for instance, or that mothers cannot work. According to research by the Office for National Statistics, women still do 40 per cent more household chores than men but, growing up, I never saw a man make dinner, let alone push a pram. Marriages are increasingly equal partnerships and each generation of fathers is more engaged.

Now I have reached the third panel, the trickiest bit of the triptych. My 93-year-old mother is 200 miles away in Doncaster, and since my father died, five years ago, she has been living alone. She is – I must stress – admirable, independent, uncomplaining and tough. A stoic. Someone who doesn’t mourn her every lost faculty but relishes what she can still do. Yet almost everyone she ever knew is dead, and I am her only child: her principal Comfort of Old Age.

For a long time, the landscape was a series of plateaus and small dips. Her little house acquired rails, walking frames, adaptations; she wears an emergency pendant. But until she broke her hip four years ago, she wouldn’t even have a cleaner. (“I don’t want strangers in my house.”) She managed. Just. But since Christmas the terrain has shifted. A persistent infection, two collapses, three ambulance rides, tachycardia (in which your heart beats to the point of explosion), but then, after three weeks, back home. Finally I persuaded her to have carers – nice, kindly, expensive – for an hour five times a week. (She demanded days off.) A slightly lower plateau.

Then, a few weeks ago, a neighbour called to say that my ma’s curtains were still closed at 4pm. She was found dehydrated, hallucinating. (She hadn’t pressed her emergency button; it was a non-carer day.) I hurriedly packed my bag for God knows how long, then scrambled north to sit by her bedside believing, for the third time this year, that I was watching her die.

For three weeks, on and off, I slept alone in my teenage single bed, in the house where I grew up, weeping every time I opened a cupboard to see her cake tins or Easter eggs for her grandsons. That week, I read a news report about how having children makes people live two years longer. Of course! As her daughter, I was her advocate, hassling doctors for information, visiting, reassuring, making sure she was fed, washing her soiled clothes (even long-stay units won’t do laundry), trying to figure out what to do next. God help the childless! Really, who will speak for them?

Finally, having wrestled her into (almost) daily care – she is very stubborn – I returned to London to find a letter. I am a Times columnist and write a weekly notebook slot, occasionally featuring my mother. I am used to harsh reader critiques of my life. But this, I must say, stung. It was from a man who lives in Cheshire (he had supplied his name and address), and he wanted me to know what a terrible person I am. “I have been puzzled when reading your column over the past months how you have been able to leave your mother – whose serious health issues you have used as copy . . . to holiday in Mexico, East Anglia and Norway.” I was “selfish and self-regarding”, and I should be ashamed.

He was not the first. Online posters often chide me for maternal neglect, and otherwise kind letters sometimes conclude: “But I do think your mother should move in with you.” Anyway, my egregious Mexican holiday had been long delayed by her illness and although she was well when I left, I was braced to fly back at any moment. The Norway trip was to visit my son on his 21st birthday. No matter. How dare I have a life.

I was reminded of when my children were young and I was a magazine editor. The guilt-tripping, the moral judgement: the looks from full-time mothers, the pursed lips from older relatives. Why bother having kids if you work full-time? Back then, I was “selfish and self-regarding”, too. My husband, who worked vastly longer hours, was blameless.

So let me warn you that just when you’re free from being judged as a mother, you’ll be judged as a daughter. It is the last chance for reactionary types who resent women’s career success, or just their freedom to live how they choose, to have a dig. Look at this selfish bitch, weekending in East Anglia when she should be a Comfort of Old Age.

When we say someone is a Good Dad, it means he turns up to football matches and parents’ evenings, gives sensible advice, isn’t a derelict alcoholic or a deserter. I know many fathers do much, much more. But that is the bar to Good Dadhood. It is pretty low. To qualify as a Good Mother, however, a woman must basically subsume her entire existence into her children and household and may only work part-time, if at all.

So, what is a Good Daughter? A US report showed in 2014 that daughters were twice as likely as sons to care for their elderly parents. In a survey of 26,000 older Americans, Angelina Grigoryeva, a sociologist at Princeton University, discovered that daughters provide as much care as they can manage, while sons do as little as they can get away with. If they have sisters or even wives, men are likely to leave it to them. I can find no equivalent UK study, but I’d bet the same is true here.

I know many sons who help out with ageing parents: Sunday care-home visits or a spot of DIY. Some do the truly grim stuff, such as washing and toileting a frail, dementia-patient father. And all sons – unless they are estranged, or cruel, or in prison – are Good Sons. Being a Good Daughter is a much tougher gig. However often I go north, sort out bills, buy new ironing boards, listen to my mother’s worries, take her shopping, organise her Christmas presents and stay awake worrying, it won’t be enough. A friend visits her disabled mother every day, despite her family and career, sorts out wheelchairs and carers, runs errands. Her three brothers drop by for ten minutes once a fortnight: so busy, so important! Yet my friend’s care is a given, and her brothers are “marvellous”. A truly Good Daughter would quit her job, have her old mother move in and tend to her alone.

The truth is I don’t want to be a full-time carer, any more than I wanted to be a full-time mother. And I don’t want to live with my ma any more than she wants to live with me. Now that I’ve served out my motherhood years, I want to do other things with my life besides looking after people. Is that a shocking admission? Men wouldn’t give it a second thought.

by Janice Turner, New Statesman |  Read more:
Image: George Elgar Hicks

Duck Ramps Appear at U.S. Capitol, but Not Everyone Is Pleased

Image: Architect of the Capitol

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Slop Machines

In The Waste Makers, his 1960 history of American consumerism for consumerism’s sake, author Vance Packard describes a satirical city of the future. It’s a place of planned obsolescence, where papier-mache houses are torn down and rebuilt every other year, plastic automobiles melt if they’re driven more than 4,000 miles, and factories are constructed on the edges of cliffs, so that conveyor belts can simply dump excess consumer goods into the abyss without slowing down the economic engine of production itself. Packard calls his mock-utopia “Cornucopia City.” If America possesses a non-imagined model for Cornucopia City, it’s Las Vegas. A horn of plenty that’s half-metropolis, half-amusement park, where excess is an edict, from bottomless booze bongs to endless buffets, it is our crapulent capital of abundance.

At a proper Vegas buffet, like the 25,000-square-foot Bacchanal at Caesars Palace, or The Buffet at the Wynn, the steam tables and hot lamps and carving stations stretch out toward infinity and you can eat prime rib, oak-grilled lamb chops, South Carolina shrimp and grits, roasted bone marrow, angry mac ‘n’ cheese, lobster tails, baked-to-order souffles, made-to-order cognac-and-Boursin omelets, breakfast tacos, fish sliders, barbecue chicken pizza, filet mignon, Peking duck rolls, mashed potatoes, waffle cone chicken and fries, cookies, cakes, pies, crème brulees, assorted fudges and barks, and, sure, even some fresh fruit, until your guts explode, all for one flat fee.

When you get up to reload your plate or duckwalk to the toilet, your sullied china, littered with rib bones and crustacean carcasses, will disappear as if by magic, plate after plate after plate. The handling of the leftovers is so efficient and elegant that you don’t even get to think about where they go. That’s by design. It’s like the old joke: In the fevered throes of a swinging sexual reverie, a man turns to someone and whispers in their ear, “What are you doing after the orgy?” Squirming in the sticky spasms of rhapsodic pleasure, we’re not meant to think about what comes after. In the case of your leftovers, the “after,” it turns out, is inside the belly of a hog.

Sin City bleeds away about a dozen miles north of the Strip, past the factory outlet malls and “locals-only” casinos and quarries and high school gymnasiums boasting “RATTLER PRIDE,” where everything starts looking more and more like a parched parcel of the American heartland. The snowcapped mountains on the northern horizon insist upon this being a real place, like pretty much any other, emerging out of and folding back into nature. The cling and clang of casino gambling floors and the howls of rowdy bachelorette parties are replaced by the chirpy songs of native Nevada birds. Then there’s the smell: the piquant pong of hot garbage and porcine excrement that wafts downwind. Yes, that’s the aroma of the real Las Vegas.

In September 2009, the funk was so aggressive that it became the subject of a lawsuit. Local homeowners, recently moved into a then-new housing development, complained that the builders hadn’t fully disclosed that the area was suffused with the reek. The suit charged that the smell was so bad that new owners couldn't even be in their homes “without gagging.” Neighbors would hang up those strips of gluey flypaper, only to find them completely full just a few days later, mottled with flies drawn to garbage perfume. The source of this great odor was R.C. Farms, a North Vegas hog farm, overseen by veteran agriculturalist Bob Combs since the 1960s — and the final destination for the literal tons of wasted food that is produced every day at casinos up and down the Strip. (...)

Since it opened in April 1963, R.C. Farms has had a very particular relationship with the overflowing decadence of nearby Las Vegas. At the time, the Combs family operated a modest hog farm in Chula Vista, near San Diego. They established relationships with a local army base, collecting food scraps to be reused as pig feed. Every year the base would contract out the privilege of collecting their wasted food to the highest bidder, with a few local farmers vying for the deal. But in Vegas, tens of thousands of pounds of food were going to waste. “My dad came here to Vegas for his 70th birthday, to have little gambling vacation,” Combs said as we sat at the round kitchen table of his modest bungalow farmhouse. On that auspicious trip, Combs’s father wandered through a backdoor of the now-long-gone Navajo-themed Thunderbird Hotel, and he came upon a huge container full of food being thrown away — the same sort of stuff he was bidding on back in La Mesa.

Combs told me the story with a well-practiced, raconteur’s confidence. It’s a tale he’s likely told a hundred times before, slowly metastasizing with each telling into a bona fide legend: Imagine Jed Clampett happening across oil in his fetid swamp, except that the treasure is something that was being chucked away. Where the casinos saw only untouched shrimp cocktails and half-nibbled slabs of heat-lamp-warmed prime rib, the older Combs saw profit. He leased 150 acres north of the Strip, at the dead end of a dirt road, and installed his son to run the place. The young Bob (affectionately known as “Goof” to his family) arranged deals with several of the old-school casinos — the Desert Inn, the Stardust, the Sands, the Flamingo, the Sahara, the Tropicana, Caesars, the Riviera, and other locals-only joints. The business model was simple: collect buffet food scraps, reprocess them as feed, fatten hogs, send them off to slaughter. (...)

Hank estimates that the family company currently handles about 15 percent of buffet food waste in Las Vegas. The actual amount is tricky to tabulate, as the total tonnage of food that isn’t diverted to the farms isn’t calculated. “We really don’t know the true number,” Hank said. “Some of these hotels are throwing out eight tons of food a day!”

by John Semley, Eater | Read more:
Image:Natalie Nelson; photos by PictureNet / Corbis, Getty Images, and Shutterstock

*BD* 11 1 86

The strangeness began shortly after his eighteenth birthday. A time when, he'd wanted to think, his life might have begun to be more fully his own.

The new, veiled way in which people were looking at him. Or looking away from him.

Got to be imagining it. Weird!

Nothing about him had outwardly changed, he was sure. He'd been growing steadily since the age of twelve, and he was now five feet ten, weighed approximately 135, had to be normal, average for his age. Sometimes he cut himself shaving out of carelessness, but that didn't seem to be what anyone was looking at, or not looking at. He wore his usual clothes: baggy khakis, longsleeved black T-shirt, size 11 running shoes. In cold weather he wore his purple school jacket, emblazoned with the bronze letters MT. OLIVE VARSITY TRACK, and Army-surplus combat boots. Much of the time he wore his Walkman, and his mind was totally elsewhere. When he removed the headphones and the heavy, throbbing music faded, the world, which was a world of adults, a world designed and controlled by adults, rolled in over him like an avalanche.

It wasn't Danny's friends and classmates who behaved strangely with him, just adults. And not all adults, only a few. His foster parents, the Stampfels—Ed and Em, they wanted to be called. Two or three of his teachers at Mt. Olive High. The track-team coach, Hal Diedrich. The principal, Mr. Bernard, and the faculty adviser to the student newspaper, Mr. Fackler. And Mrs. Jameson, the guidance counselor.

He'd thought he knew Mrs. Jameson. Thought she knew him.

Two years before, when Danny Neuworth was a sophomore, a new transfer to Mt. Olive High, he'd had a difficult time adjusting; he'd been lonely yet not very sociable, poorly motivated in his studies yet anxious about grades, and so he'd been referred to Mrs. Jameson. She had let him talk without interrupting him, had asked him questions that showed she was sympathetic, genuinely interested in him, and so he'd come to trust her. She'd given him good advice he'd tried to follow. But now, so strangely, in November of his senior year, when Danny was considering where to apply to college, eager for advice and encouragement, Mrs. Jameson answered his questions in a distracted manner, smiling faintly in his direction without seeming to see him. Open before her on her desk was a manila file inscribed, in stark black ink, NEUWORTH, DANIEL S. '05. "CONFIDENTIAL."

When he first entered Mrs. Jameson's office, she was frowning at a document in the file. She glanced up at him then with a look—veiled, startled. "Oh, Daniel. Come in." Their conversation was stiff, awkward. If he didn't know better, Danny would have thought the guidance counselor didn't know him at all. Finally he asked if there was something in his file: "I guess you couldn't tell me, huh?"

Mrs. Jameson said quickly, "There's nothing wrong, Daniel. Of course. What could be wrong?" A deep flush rose into her face. Her voice was oddly flat, toneless.

Danny had friends who'd conferred with the guidance counselor, students whose grades were no better than his, and they'd come away with lists of colleges to apply to, even catalogues and brochures. But Mrs. Jameson didn't seem to have any ideas for him. He said he'd like to study mechanical engineering, maybe. His foster father, Ed Stampfel, had thought that might work for him. Yes, that might work for him, Mrs. Jameson said vaguely. "If you have the math. Engineering requires math, you know." Repeatedly Mrs. Jameson blew her nose in a tissue, apologizing for "sinus allergies." Out of a crammed bookshelf she pulled dogeared catalogues for regional New Jersey colleges—Warren County, Cape May, Hunterdon Community, Rutgers-Camden. "Maybe one of these. Let's see."

Strange—Mrs. Jameson wasn't meeting his eye. Wasn't calling him Danny, as she had in the past.

Adults! You couldn't figure them.

Since kindergarten, Danny's teachers had encouraged him, presumably knowing of his foster-home background. Pursue your goals, follow your dream, everyone in America is special, you have only to be you. Now, when he needed encouragement and advice, Mrs. Jameson couldn't seem to think of anything to tell him. Her sleek, slender laptop was open on her desk, and in the lenses of her glasses he saw a faint reflection of mysterious darting movements on the screen, like secret thoughts.

Something in my file. That must be it.

Yet what could it be? He'd never gotten into trouble at school, or anywhere else. He'd been a sulky kid for a while in high school, but came out of it gradually and became an earnest, diligent, if not very imaginative, student. In easy subjects like communication arts, social studies, health and fitness, he'd earned A-minuses, but mostly his grades hovered at B-/C+ no matter how hard he worked. He had a small circle of friends, mostly guys like himself. This year he'd finally made the varsity track team, by driving himself mercilessly and earning the respect of Coach Diedrich for his effort if not for his actual accomplishments ("Not every guy can be a star, Danny. You're a team player"). His only distinction was that since the second semester of his sophomore year Neuworth, Daniel had been listed on the Mt. Olive Good Citizenship Roster, initiated by the school district to boost morale by "honoring" those students who attended classes regularly, did their schoolwork, and caused no trouble. But the honor had become a joke, because so many names were listed.

Belatedly, in the way of a coach giving a pep talk to a paraplegic athlete, Mrs. Jameson had begun to extol the virtues of small colleges, technical schools, to say how much more suitable they were for some students than universities, let alone the "prestigious" Ivy League universities, which in her opinion were "undemocratic and overrated." Mrs. Jameson was speaking now with a strange vehemence, as if someone had dared to argue with her, an invisible presence in her office toward whom she felt animosity. Danny listened uneasily. He saw a thin blade of sunshine ease onto the framed diplomas on the wall behind Mrs. Jameson's desk. Her master's degree was in education and psychology from Rutgers-Newark.

Rutgers-Newark! No wonder Mrs. Jameson was so contemptuous of "prestigious" schools.

When Mrs. Jameson fell silent, blowing her nose, Danny reverted to the subject of his file. "I guess there must be something bad in it, right?" Mrs. Jameson said quickly, with a frown, "No, not at all, Danny. Everything is fine."

"Not so great, not outstanding, but 'fine.'" Danny smiled to show that he understood. Dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, Mrs. Jameson said, like a mother gently rebuking a child, "Not everyone can be outstanding, Danny. In our American republic everyone is created 'equal,' but only politically—as citizens. Not in other respects. At your age, you must know that."

Danny nodded yes, he knew. How could he not know!

"Not many of us at Mt. Olive are 'outstanding,' I can assure you. Or we wouldn't be here, you see." This was meant to be lightly playful, provocative. But something in Mrs. Jameson's face seemed to crack. Clumsily she rose from behind her desk, a fleshy middleaged woman with a flushed face, saying, "I think I have, in the outer office, a brochure for—I'm not sure. Excuse me."

The guidance counselor left her office, pointedly shutting the door behind her. Danny was baffled. Was she leaving him alone with his file, giving him the opportunity to look into it? Or was he misinterpreting the gesture? Was he being videotaped? Was he making a terrible mistake?

He listened for her footsteps returning. His heart began to pound with excitement as, leaning over Mrs. Jameson's desk, he tried to read upside down the document lying on top of the manila file. Not hearing footsteps, he dared to go behind the desk to peer at it; it had the letterhead *BIOTECHINC* at the top and "NEUWORTH, DANIEL S. *BD* 11 1 86" heading a pagelong column of densely printed information that appeared to be a mixture of scientific terms and mathematical symbols, incomprehensible to him. Danny had to suppose that this was coded data having to do with his grades at Mt. Olive High and the results of the numerous tests—IQ, "cognitive," "psychological"—he'd taken over the years. His ranking in his class, possibly statewide, even nationwide, was probably indicated too. At the very bottom of the page was a mysterious numeral of a dozen digits followed by a blank space and "*BD* 11 1 86-6 21 05."

What "BD" meant, Danny didn't know. But 11/1/86 was his birthday and, he recalled after a moment, 6/21/05 was the date of his high school graduation.

They expected him to graduate, then. This was good news!

by Joyce Carol Oates, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Damian Garcia/Getty via:

[ed. See also: Never Let Me Go]

Linda Ronstadt

Mark Klett, Border fence separating the United States and Mexico, 2015.

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Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

In his famous 1968 essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," biologist Garrett Hardin singled out ocean fishing as a prime example of self-interested individuals short-sightedly depleting shared resources:

Professing to believe in the "inexhaustible resources of the oceans," they bring species after species of fish and whales closer to extinction.

The whales have actually been doing a lot better lately. Fish in general, not so much.

Then there's the Maine lobster. As University of Maine anthropologist James M. Acheson put it in his 2003 book "Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry":

Since the late 1980s, catches have been at record-high levels despite decades of intense exploitation. We have never produced so many lobsters. Even more interesting to managers is the fact that catch levels remained relatively stable from 1947 to the late 1980s. While scientists do not agree on the reason for these high catches, there is a growing consensus that they are due, in some measure, to the long history of effective regulations that the lobster industry has played a key role in developing.

Two of the most prominent and straightforward regulations are that lobsters must be thrown back in the water not only if they are too small but also if they are too big (because mature lobsters produce the most offspring), and that egg-bearing females must not only be thrown back but also marked (by notches cut in their tails) as off-limits for life. Acheson calls this "parametric management" -- the rules "control 'how' fishing is done," not how many lobsters are caught -- and concludes that "Although this approach is not supported by fisheries scientists in general, it appears to work well in the lobster fishery."

It's a seafood sustainability success story! But there's been an interesting twist since Acheson wrote those words in 2003. That already-record-setting Maine lobster harvest has more than doubled:

Sustainable fisheries practices alone can't really explain why today's lobster take is more than seven times the pre-2000 average. What can? The most universally accepted answer seems to be that depletion of the fish that used to eat young lobsters (mainly cod, landings of which peaked in Maine in 1991 and have fallen 99.2 percent since) has allowed a lot more lobsters to grow big enough for people to catch and eat them. The tragedy of one commons has brought unprecedented bounty to another.

Warming ocean temperatures have also improved lobster survival rates. Canada's Atlantic provinces have experienced a lobster boom similar to Maine's. Not so in the New England states to the south and west of Maine, where the water is now apparently a little too warm and lobster harvests peaked in the 1990s. Within Maine, which now accounts for more than 80 percent of U.S. lobsters, the sweet spot for lobstering has moved from the state's southern coast to the cooler northeast. (...)

This leaves the Maine (and Canadian) lobster industry with another interesting challenge: how to find enough buyers for all those lobsters so that prices don't collapse. As you can see from the chart below, they've mostly succeeded:

Affluent Chinese diners have been one reason. This January, five chartered 747s full of live lobsters flew from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to China to supply Chinese New Year feasts. Maine's lobsters tend to make the voyage less dramatically, in regularly scheduled flights from Boston, but $27 million worth of them were shipped to China in 2016.

The national and even global spread of the lobster roll has also helped a lot. I came to Maine on a trip organized by Luke's Lobster, a fast-casual restaurant chain that now has 21 "shacks" in the U.S. and eight more scheduled to open this year, along with six licensed locations in Japan. Founder Luke Holden was an investment banker in New York when he and former food writer Ben Conniff opened the first restaurant in the East Village in 2009, but he's also the son of a Maine lobsterman who owned the state's first lobster-processing plant.

Luke's Lobster now has its own plant in Saco, Maine, that processes between 4 and 5 percent of the state's lobster harvest. Processing, in this case, means cooking and picking the meat out of the claws and knuckles for Luke's lobster rolls 4 while cleaning and freezing the raw tails and clawless "bullet" lobsters for sale to restaurants, groceries and such.

Holden's father, Jeff, says that tails used to sell for much more than claw meat. Now lobster rolls, for which tail meat is generally too chewy, have flipped the price equation.

All in all, it's a fascinating tale of adaptation, marketing and lobster logistics. There is one big catch, though, beyond the vague fears that the lobsters can't be this abundant forever. It's that the bait used to lure the lobsters into traps -- herring -- isn't as abundant as they are. Herring stocks along the Maine coast haven't collapsed as some other fisheries have, but the catch has fallen in recent years, to 77 million pounds in 2016 from 103 million in 2014 and more than 150 million some years in the 1950s and 1960s.

On average, it takes about a pound of herring to catch a pound of lobster.

by Justin Fox, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Roger Ailes Was One of the Worst Americans Ever

On the Internet today you will find thousands, perhaps even millions, of people gloating about the death of elephantine Fox News founder Roger Ailes. The happy face emojis are getting a workout on Twitter, which is also bursting with biting one-liners.

When I mentioned to one of my relatives that I was writing about the death of Ailes, the response was, "Say that you hope he's reborn as a woman in Saudi Arabia."

Ailes has no one but his fast-stiffening self to blame for this treatment. He is on the short list of people most responsible for modern America's vicious and bloodthirsty character.

We are a hate-filled, paranoid, untrusting, book-dumb and bilious people whose chief source of recreation is slinging insults and threats at each other online, and we're that way in large part because of the hyper-divisive media environment he discovered.

Ailes was the Christopher Columbus of hate. When the former daytime TV executive and political strategist looked across the American continent, he saw money laying around in giant piles. He knew all that was needed to pick it up was a) the total abandonment of any sense of decency or civic duty in the news business, and b) the factory-like production of news stories that spoke to Americans' worst fantasies about each other.

Like many con artists, he reflexively targeted the elderly – "I created a TV network for people from 55 to dead," he told Joan Walsh – where he saw billions could be made mining terrifying storylines about the collapse of the simpler America such viewers remembered, correctly or (more often) incorrectly, from their childhoods.

In this sense, his Fox Newsbroadcasts were just extended versions of the old "ring around the collar" ad – scare stories about contagion. Wisk was pitched as the cure for sweat stains creeping onto your crisp white collar; Fox was sold as the cure for atheists, feminists, terrorists and minorities crawling over your white picket fence. (...)

Ailes grew out of the entertainment world – his first experience was in daytime variety TV via The Mike Douglas Show – but he later advised a series of Republican campaigns, from Ronald Reagan to George H.W. Bush to Trump.

So when he created Fox, he merged his expertise from those two worlds, mixing entertainment and political stagecraft.

The effect was to politicize the media, a characteristic of banana republics everywhere. When Ailes decided to cordon off Republican audiences and craft news programming targeted specifically to them, he began the process of atomizing the entire media landscape into political fiefdoms – Fox for the right, MSNBC for the left, etc.

Ailes trained Americans to shop for the news as a commodity. Not just on the right but across the political spectrum now, Americans have learned to view the news as a consumer product.

What most of us are buying when we tune in to this or that channel or read this or that newspaper is a reassuring take on the changes in the world that most frighten us. We buy the version of the world that pleases us and live in little bubbles where we get to nurse resentments all day long and no one ever tells us we're wrong about anything. Ailes invented those bubbles.

by Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone |  Read more:
Image: Jim Cooper/AP

We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment

We are misnamed. We call ourselves Homo sapiens, the “wise man,” but that’s more of a boast than a description. What makes us wise? What sets us apart from other animals? Various answers have been proposed — language, tools, cooperation, culture, tasting bad to predators — but none is unique to humans.

What best distinguishes our species is an ability that scientists are just beginning to appreciate: We contemplate the future. Our singular foresight created civilization and sustains society. It usually lifts our spirits, but it’s also the source of most depression and anxiety, whether we’re evaluating our own lives or worrying about the nation. Other animals have springtime rituals for educating the young, but only we subject them to “commencement” speeches grandly informing them that today is the first day of the rest of their lives.

A more apt name for our species would be Homo prospectus, because we thrive by considering our prospects. The power of prospection is what makes us wise. Looking into the future, consciously and unconsciously, is a central function of our large brain, as psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered — rather belatedly, because for the past century most researchers have assumed that we’re prisoners of the past and the present.

Behaviorists thought of animal learning as the ingraining of habit by repetition. Psychoanalysts believed that treating patients was a matter of unearthing and confronting the past. Even when cognitive psychology emerged, it focused on the past and present — on memory and perception.

But it is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

Our emotions are less reactions to the present than guides to future behavior. Therapists are exploring new ways to treat depression now that they see it as primarily not because of past traumas and present stresses but because of skewed visions of what lies ahead.

Prospection enables us to become wise not just from our own experiences but also by learning from others. We are social animals like no others, living and working in very large groups of strangers, because we have jointly constructed the future. Human culture — our language, our division of labor, our knowledge, our laws and technology — is possible only because we can anticipate what fellow humans will do in the distant future. We make sacrifices today to earn rewards tomorrow, whether in this life or in the afterlife promised by so many religions. (...)

The central role of prospection has emerged in recent studies of both conscious and unconscious mental processes, like one in Chicago that pinged nearly 500 adults during the day to record their immediate thoughts and moods. If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past, and even those few thoughts about a past event typically involved consideration of its future implications.

When making plans, they reported higher levels of happiness and lower levels of stress than at other times, presumably because planning turns a chaotic mass of concerns into an organized sequence. Although they sometimes feared what might go wrong, on average there were twice as many thoughts of what they hoped would happen.

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection. Studies have shown depressed people are distinguished from the norm by their tendency to imagine fewer positive scenarios while overestimating future risks. (...)

The brain’s long-term memory has often been compared to an archive, but that’s not its primary purpose. Instead of faithfully recording the past, it keeps rewriting history. Recalling an event in a new context can lead to new information being inserted in the memory. Coaching of eyewitnesses can cause people to reconstruct their memory so that no trace of the original is left.

The fluidity of memory may seem like a defect, especially to a jury, but it serves a larger purpose. It’s a feature, not a bug, because the point of memory is to improve our ability to face the present and the future. To exploit the past, we metabolize it by extracting and recombining relevant information to fit novel situations.

by Martin E.P. Seligman and John Tierney, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Maxwell Holyoke-Hirsch