Sociopathic Tendencies

There have always been spectacular stories of lies and deceit in Silicon Valley—tales that span decades, of founders telling half-truths about how their companies were founded, or who founded them; of C.E.O.s exaggerating their latest products to fool the press or induce new funding. In the tech world, these falsehoods are so pedestrian that they have received the moniker “vaporware”: empty vessels that are promoted as complete products despite the knowledge that they will never see the light of day. Over time, the exhalations of these tech C.E.O.s became less about the actual lie, and more about who could deliver it with the utmost persuasion. I remember getting a call from Steve Jobs in the beginning of my career at The New York Times, in which the mythological chief of Apple somehow convinced me not to write a story about a software-related privacy problem. After 45 minutes on the phone with Jobs, I walked over to my editor and convinced him to kill the story. Yet a week later, I realized I’d been duped by Jobs. When I told a seasoned colleague at the Times, he simply laughed and explained, “Welcome to the Steve Jobs Reality-Distortion Field.” Jobs’s chicanery helped birth a whole new strain of tech nerd who believed that, in order to be as successful as King Jobs, you had to be the best used-car salesman in the parking lot. Some C.E.O.s told taradiddles, exaggerating the number of users on their platforms (ahem, Twitter); some in Congress say Mark Zuckerberg lied when he told Congress that people on Facebook have “complete control” over their personal data. (They don’t.) But all of these, all these made-up numbers, concocted valuations, and apocryphal stories of how a company was realized in a garage, are nothing—nothing!—compared to the audacious lies of Elizabeth Holmes, the founder and C.E.O. of Theranos.

Ahh, the story of Holmes, the dedicated Stanford dropout who was set to save the world, one pinprick of blood at a time, by inventing, at 19 years old, a blood-testing start-up which was once valued at almost $10 billion. For years, Holmes was on top of the tech world, gracing the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Forbes, Fortune, and Inc.,always wearing a black turtleneck and often sitting next to the title: “The Next Steve Jobs.” She was written about in Glamour and The New Yorker. She spoke at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2014, and appeared on Vanity Fair’s New Establishment List in 2015. But as The Wall Street Journal’s John Carreyrou details in his new book, Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, almost every word coming out of Holmes’s mouth as she built and ran her company was either grossly embellished or, in most instances, outright deceptive.

As Carreyrou writes, the company she built was just a pile of one deceit atop another. When Holmes courted Walgreens, she created completely false test results from their blood tests. When the company’s chief financial officer found out, Holmes fired him on the spot. Holmes told other investors that Theranos was going to make $100 million in revenue in 2014, but in reality the company was only on track to make $100,000 that year. She told the press that her blood-testing machine was capable of making over 1,000 tests, when in reality, it could only do one single type of test. She lied about a contract Theranos had with the Department of Defense, when she said her technology was being used in the battlefield, even though it was not. She repeatedly made up complete stories to the press about everything from her schooling to profits to the number of people whose lives would be saved from her bogus technology. And she did it all, day in and day out, while ensuring that no one inside or outside her company could publicly challenge the truthfulness of her claims.

While people like Jobs, Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and other titans might stretch the truth and create reality-distortion fields, at the end of the day, they’re doing so to catapult their business—and to protect it. But when it came to Holmes, it seems there was no business to begin with. The entire house of cards was just that, a figment, nothing real. So what was she trying to get out of all these stories? On this week’s Inside the Hive podcast, I sat down with Carreyrou to try to understand how Holmes acted with such deceit, knowing full well that the technology she was selling, technology that was used to perform more than 8 million blood tests, according to Carreyrou, was putting people’s lives in danger. The obvious question to seeing someone act that way, with such utter disregard for how her actions would destroy other people’s lives, is to ask: is she a sociopath?

“At the end of my book, I say that a sociopath is described as someone with no conscience. I think she absolutely has sociopathic tendencies. One of those tendencies is pathological lying. I believe this is a woman who started telling small lies soon after she dropped out of Stanford, when she founded her company, and the lies became bigger and bigger,” Carreyrou said. “I think she’s someone that got used to telling lies so often, and the lies got so much bigger, that eventually the line between the lies and reality blurred for her.”

When I asked if she feels guilty for all the people’s lives who were affected by those lies, including the investors who lost money, the nearly 1,000 employees who lost their jobs, and the patients who were given completely inaccurate blood results, Carreyrou’s response surprised—shocked?—me. “She has shown zero sign of feeling bad, or expressing sorrow, or admitting wrongdoing, or saying sorry to the patients whose lives she endangered,” he said. He explained that in her mind, according to numerous former Theranos employees he has spoken to, Holmes believes that her entourage of employees led her astray and that the bad guy is actually John Carreyrou. “One person in particular, who left the company recently, says that she has a deeply engrained sense of martyrdom. She sees herself as sort of a Joan of Arc who is being persecuted,” he said.

Believe it or not, that’s not the most astonishing thing in the Elizabeth Holmes story. According to Carreyrou, Holmes is currently waltzing around Silicon Valley, meeting with investors, hoping to raise money for an entirely new start-up idea. (My mouth dropped when I heard that, too.) As the dust settles in the Theranos saga, it’s clear that the original investors in Theranos were gullible enough to hand over almost a billion dollars in funding, partially because, when it comes to Silicon Valley, there’s always a sucker hoping to get rich quick. (...)

The Theranos story isn’t over just yet. While she recently settled with the S.E.C. for “massive fraud” as part of the agreement, Holmes is not required to admit wrongdoing, but she has been forced to surrender voting control of Theranos and comply with a 10-year ban from serving as director or officer at any public company (Theranos, ironically, wasn’t public.) Holmes also agreed to return 18.9 million shares of stock, once worth almost $5 billion and now worth nothing, and to pay a small $500,000 penalty. Of course, there is still a major criminal investigation underway by the F.B.I., one that could end with Holmes behind bars. But not to worry: Holmes has lots of prosecutorial quotes she can borrow from Joan of Arc if she stands trial. “I am not afraid . . . I was born to do this.”

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Jeff Chiu/AP

How LinkedIn Turned This “Failmom” Into a Socialist

One warm spring evening, after my teenage daughter and I had spent two hours browsing job boards, the two of us sat at on a bench on the lakefront path on Lake Michigan, watching sweating commuters bike, jog or walk past us. Most of them wore headphones or earbuds.

“Let’s try to guess what they’re listening to,” I suggested.

A shirtless young man ran by.

“Bruno Mars,” my daughter said.

A similar looking guy rode by on a bike.

“Maroon Five,” I said.

A red-faced woman who looked sort of like me, with loose flesh on her upper arms and an expanding menopausal waist, marched past.

“Chapo Trap House,” said my daughter.

I laughed.

A huffing middle-aged woman isn’t the first person one thinks of when they think of Chapo Trap House, a raunchy politics and comedy podcast that lambasts the Trump administration, conservative media, liberal media and most of the rest of American culture.

Early in Chapo Trap House’s existence, the New Yorker profiled the show and the voices behind it. Will Menaker, one of the five hosts, described their typical listener as a “failson.” Co-host Felix Biederman went on to define a failson as the guy that “goes downstairs at Thanksgiving, briefly mumbles, ‘Hi,’ everyone asks him how community college is going, he mumbles something about a 2.0 average, goes back upstairs with a loaf of bread and peanut butter.” His definition went on to mention gaming and masturbating.

The first part of that description could almost be me, an unemployed fiftysomething — or what, in Chapo parlance, might be called a “failmom.”

Of course, I don’t sit in my room eating peanut butter on Thanksgiving, but most other days I can. When my family goes off to work or school in the mornings, I spend a little time sending out résumés that disappear into an ether that has no use for middle-age women. Sometimes I look for gig economy work: walking dogs, when I can get the work, through Rover.com, or the occasional tutoring gig on Wyzant. And then I’m free to mumble and eat peanut butter.

In the same New Yorker profile, Matt Christman, my favorite Chapo host, saw the show and their audience as constituting a population of young people, mostly men, who are “nonessential human beings, who do not fit into the market as consumers or producers or as laborers.”

Yet it’s not just young people who are nonessential.

When I was employed as a copy editor, I thought more about comma placement and modifier placement than I did about economic and political displacement. I had faith in the establishment. Then I got laid off. Twice. There’s nothing like a years-long job search to make a person feel nonessential.

Applying for a job now is different than it used to be, when I could send email directly to the hiring manager or HR person. It’s hard to circumvent online applications, which can take an hour or more to fill out, including addresses of businesses (this requires searching for print publications that have moved as they’ve downsized) and names of supervisors, even though those supervisors moved on, either into retirement or more prestigious positions. The forms demand text in fields, whether there’s an answer or not. For some older job searchers, drop-down menus don’t include the years of employment or graduation. Illinois attorney general Lisa Madigan’s office investigated recruitment sites Monster.com, Indeed.com, CareerBuilder and other aggregators after finding that dates didn’t go back far enough for older applicants. Propublica and the New York Times, while investigating Facebook ads and their effects on the 2016 election, discovered employers like Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target and Facebook targeted recruitment ads to users under a specific age. The age varied by employer, but generally stopped short of 45 or 50. As part of their research they also placed ads on LinkedIn and Google that excluded audiences over 40, and the ads were approved instantly.

What makes this even more insidious is that fact that one in five Americans can’t afford to retire. The Washington Post got a lot of traction last year with a profile of the growing population of formerly middle-class older adults who travel in RVs for seasonal jobs. (...)

The May jobs report showed an unemployment rate at an 18-year low, exciting economists and (employed) news consumers. This looks excellent on paper. But off the page are my failpeople, who have given up on searching for work or are earning what they can by cleaning or running errands via sites like TaskRabbit; delivering food via sites like Postmates; selling stuff on Craigslist or eBay; renting out rooms on Airbnb; or driving strangers around town. The Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households, from May 2018, found that 31 percent of working adults work in the gig economy, and two-fifths of those people are doing said gig-work to supplement income from their paid jobs.

Economist Theresa Ghilarducci tracks unemployment among older adults, particularly women. In an interview with PBS Newshour in 2016 after the publication of her book “How to Retire With Enough Money,” Ghilarducci explained that women’s lives are often punctuated by time outside of the labor market because they care for family members — not just children, but aging parents as well. She describes a typical male hiring manager who sees an older female applicant. “He’s thinking about his partner, who he probably loves very much, but whose work he probably devalues, and he’s thinking about this job applicant that doesn’t have the experience he can recognize. And we all live, including this employer, in a patriarchal society, and the very definition of patriarchy is that women’s lives, women’s skills, what women are offering up, their potential economic value, is all devalued.” (...)

When I listen to Chapo Trap House, I know there’s a mirror image of me — a cranky person over 50 nodding in agreement at a polemic on-air voice — on the opposite side of the political spectrum. This feeling of being devalued or nonessential is what drove those opposites to vote for Trump. I might have done the same, because he talked so much about jobs and the forgotten people, but I couldn’t stomach his repeated statements about Mexicans and Muslims being criminals and terrorists. I couldn’t stomach the way he cheered on violence at his rallies, his disdain for environmental science, women, the mentally ill, and the fact-checking newsrooms where my still-employed friends work.

It’s no longer surprising for my husband to come home from work and find me standing in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, nodding as the Chapo Trap House hosts talk about the failings of capitalism and the government it buys. He told a mutual friend that I’d become radicalized. My views have changed enough that I went on a February afternoon to a Communist Manifesto Class held by the Party for Socialism and Liberation. I sat without about 30 people of all ages at long conference tables in a meeting room in a building that also houses the Mexico–U.S. Solidarity Network.

We took turns reading passages. We didn’t make it through the whole thing because there were so many pauses for discussion. What I learned is that communism is a practice; it’s not static.

To add to my radical bona fides, my son made a collage of my face, added to the famous image of Lenin, Engels, Marx, Mao and Stalin, for Mother’s Day.

Around the same time as this class, Chapo Trap House interviewed the economist Richard Wolff. They started out examining the film “Boss Baby” and its political leanings. This, of course, led to a discussion about America’s economy, and the fact that polls show that millennials prefer socialism to capitalism, perhaps because the market crash of 2008 happened during their formative years. When I hear or read about millennials and their love for socialism, I wonder why more people my age don’t embrace it. We came of age in the Great Recession. We were the ones laid off in 2008.

Wolff predicts a shift to socialism in America, because young people will push for it. A lot of mistakes were made in the name of socialism and communism, he says. We have to learn from history.

“I’d like to remind people the transition from feudalism to capitalism didn’t happen in some smooth way,” he says. “Capitalism came into the world after lots of fits and starts and trials and errors. Why do we imagine it will be any different going from capitalism to socialism?”

by Lori Barrett, Salon |  Read more:

Image: Getty/PeopleImages

via: New Yorker

Ala Wai Boat Harbor
photo: markk

Net Neutrality is Officially Dead Today. Now What?

The Obama-era net neutrality rules, passed in 2015, are defunct. This time it's for real.

Though some minor elements of the proposal by the Republican-led FCC to roll back those net neutrality rules went into effect last month, most aspects still required approval from the Office of Management and Budget. That's now been taken care of, with the Federal Communications Commission declaring June 11 as the date the proposal takes effect.

While many people agree with the basic principles of net neutrality, the specific rules enforcing the idea has been a lightning rod for controversy. That's because to get the rules to hold up in court, an earlier, Democrat-led FCC had reclassified broadband networks so that they fell under the same strict regulations that govern telephone networks.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has called the Obama-era rules "heavy-handed" and "a mistake," and he's argued that they deterred innovation and depressed investment in building and expanding broadband networks. (Read his op-ed on CNET here.) To set things right, he says, he's taking the FCC back to a "light touch" approach to regulation, a move that Republicans and internet service providers have applauded.

But supporters of net neutrality -- such as big tech companies like Google and Facebook, as well as consumer groups and pioneers of the internet like World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee -- say the internet as we know it may not exist without these protections.

"We need a referee on the field who can throw a flag," former FCC Chairman and Obama appointee Tom Wheeler said at MIT during a panel discussion in support of rules like those he championed. Wheeler was chairman when the rules passed three years ago.

If you still don't feel like you understand what all the hubbub is about, have no fear. We've assembled this FAQ to put everything in plain English.

What's net neutrality again?

Net neutrality is the principle that all traffic on the internet should be treated equally, regardless of whether you're checking Facebook, posting pictures to Instagram or streaming movies from Netflix or Amazon. It also means companies like AT&T, which is trying to buy Time Warner, or Comcast, which owns NBC Universal, can't favor their own content over a competitor's.

So what's happening?

The FCC, led by Ajit Pai, voted on Dec. 14 to repeal the 2015 net neutrality regulations, which prohibited broadband providers from blocking or slowing down traffic and banned them from offering so-called fast lanes to companies willing to pay extra to reach consumers more quickly than competitors.

Commentary by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai: Our job is to protect a free and open internet

Under the 2015 rules, the FCC reclassified broadband as a utility, which gave it the authority to regulate broadband infrastructure much as it did the old telephone network.

The most significant change resulting from the proposal is the stripping away of the FCC's authority to regulate broadband and the shifting of that responsibility to the Federal Trade Commission. 

Does this mean no one will be policing the internet?

The FTC will be the new cop on the beat. It can take action against companies that violate contracts with consumers or that participate in anticompetitive and fraudulent activity.
So what's the big deal? Is the FTC equipped to make sure broadband companies don't harm consumers?

The FTC already oversees consumer protection and competition for the whole economy. But this also means the agency is swamped. And because the FTC isn't focused exclusively on the telecommunications sector, it's unlikely the agency can deliver the same kind of scrutiny the FCC would.

More importantly, the FTC also lacks the FCC's rule-making authority. This means FTC enforcement extends only to companies' voluntary public commitments or to violations of antitrust law. Unless broadband and wireless carriers commit in writing to basic net neutrality principles, the FTC can only enforce antitrust issues, which must meet a high legal standard.

Also, any action the FTC takes happens after the fact. And investigations of wrongdoing can take years. (...)

What's it all mean for me?

This is a huge change in policy at the FCC and it could affect how you experience the internet. Keep in mind, your experience isn't likely to change right away.

But over time, it could change significantly. Whether you think that change will be for the better or the worse depends on whom you believe.

Pai and many other Republicans say freeing up broadband providers from onerous and outdated regulation will let them invest more in their networks. They're hopeful this will lead to more expansion in rural and hard-to-service areas of the country, as well as higher-speed service throughout the US. The agency's argument for repealing the rules is that investment started to decline in 2015 after the rules were adopted.

But Democrats like Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, consumer advocacy groups, civil rights organizations and technology companies like Google and Mozilla say that repealing the 2015 rules and stripping the FCC of its authority will lead to broadband companies controlling more of your internet experience.

As companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast acquire more online content like video, they could give their own services priority on their networks, squeezing out competitors and limiting what you can access. This might mean fewer startups get a shot at becoming the next Facebook, Netflix or YouTube. Ultimately, it could lead to your internet experience looking more like cable TV, where all the content is curated by your provider.

Some critics also fear this control could lead to higher prices. And groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union say it could affect your First Amendment right to free speech as big companies control more of what you experience online.

"Internet rights are civil rights," said Jay Stanley, an ACLU senior policy analyst. "Gutting net neutrality will have a devastating effect on free speech online. Without it, gateway corporations like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T will have too much power to mess with the free flow of information."

by Marguerite Reardon, CNET |  Read more:

Image: via

Researchers Reverse Cognitive Impairments in Mice with Dementia

Reversing memory deficits and impairments in spatial learning is a major goal in the field of dementia research. A lack of knowledge about cellular pathways critical to the development of dementia, however, has stood in the way of significant clinical advance. But now, researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University (LKSOM) are breaking through that barrier. They show, for the first time in an animal model, that tau pathology—the second-most important lesion in the brain in patients with Alzheimer's disease—can be reversed by a drug.

"We show that we can intervene after disease is established and pharmacologically rescue mice that have tau-induced memory deficits," explained senior investigator Domenico Praticò, MD, Scott Richards North Star Foundation Chair for Alzheimer's Research, Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and Microbiology, and Director of the Alzheimer's Center at Temple at LKSOM. The study, published online in the journal Molecular Neurobiology, raises new hope for human patients affected by dementia.

The researchers landed on their breakthrough after discovering that inflammatory molecules known as leukotrienes are deregulated in Alzheimer's disease and related dementias. In experiments in animals, they found that the leukotriene pathway plays an especially important role in the later stages of disease.

"At the onset of dementia, leukotrienes attempt to protect nerve cells, but over the long term, they cause damage," Dr. Praticò said. "Having discovered this, we wanted to know whether blocking leukotrienes could reverse the damage, whether we could do something to fix memory and learning impairments in mice having already abundant tau pathology."

To recapitulate the clinical situation of dementia in humans, in which patients are already symptomatic by the time they are diagnosed, Dr. Praticò and colleagues used specially engineered tau transgenic mice, which develop tau pathology—characterized by neurofibrillary tangles, disrupted synapses (the junctions between neurons that allow them to communicate with one another), and declines in memory and learning ability—as they age. When the animals were 12 months old, the equivalent of age 60 in humans, they were treated with zileuton, a drug that inhibits leukotriene formation by blocking the 5-lipoxygenase enzyme.

After 16 weeks of treatment, animals were administered maze tests to assess their working memory and their spatial learning memory. Compared with untreated animals, tau mice that had received zileuton performed significantly better on the tests. Their superior performance suggested a successful reversal of memory deficiency.

To determine why this happened, the researchers first analyzed leukotriene levels. They found that treated tau mice experienced a 90-percent reduction in leukotrienes compared with untreated mice. In addition, levels of phosphorylated and insoluble tau, the form of the protein that is known to directly damage synapses, were 50 percent lower in treated animals. Microscopic examination revealed vast differences in synaptic integrity between the groups of mice. Whereas untreated animals had severe synaptic deterioration, the synapses of treated tau animals were indistinguishable from those of ordinary mice without the disease.

"Inflammation was completely gone from tau mice treated with the drug," Dr. Praticò said. "The therapy shut down inflammatory processes in the brain, allowing the tau damage to be reversed."

The study is especially exciting because zileuton is already approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of asthma. "Leukotrienes are in the lungs and the brain, but we now know that in addition to their functional role in asthma, they also have a functional role in dementia," Dr. Praticò explained.

"This is an old drug for a new disease," he added. "The research could soon be translated to the clinic, to human patients with Alzheimer's disease."

by Temple University |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Frida Kahlo and the Birth of Fridolatry

Frida, the unapologetic bitch. Frida, the disabled artist. Frida, symbol of radical feminism. Frida, the victim of Diego. Frida, the chic, gender-fluid, beautiful and monstrous icon. Frida tote bags, Frida keychains, Frida T-shirts, And also, this year’s new Frida Barbie doll (no unibrow). Frida Kahlo has been subject to global scrutiny and commercial exploitation. She has been appropriated by curators, historians, artists, actors, activists, Mexican consulates, museums and Madonna.

Over the years, this avalanche has trivialised Kahlo’s work to fit a shallow “Fridolatry”. And, while some criticism has been able to counter the views that cast her as a naive, infantile, almost involuntary artist, most narratives have continued to position her as a geographically marginal painter: one more developing-world artist waiting to be “discovered”, one more voiceless subject waiting to be “translated”.

In 1938, Frida Kahlo painted Lo que el agua me dio (What the Water Gave Me), the painting perhaps responsible for launching her international career, but also her international mistranslation. In this self-portrait of sorts, we see Kahlo’s feet and calves inside a bathtub and above them, as if emanating from the steam, a collaged landscape: an erupting volcano out of which a skyscraper emerges; a dead bird resting on a tree; a strangled woman; a Tehuana dress dramatically spread out; a female couple resting on a floating cork. Kahlo was working on Lo que el agua me dio when the French surrealist André Breton arrived in Mexico for a visit. He was transfixed by it. He called Kahlo a “natural surrealist”, and in a brochure endorsing her New York debut at Julien Levy’s gallery in 1938, he wrote: “My surprise and joy were unbounded when I discovered, on my arrival in Mexico, that her work has blossomed forth, in her latest paintings, into pure surreality, despite the fact that it had been conceived without any prior knowledge whatsoever of the ideas motivating the activities of my friends and myself.”

Though “natural surrealist” was a label that helped translate Kahlo’s paintings for European and American audiences, it was one that she always rejected. To be projected as a “surrealist” in Europe helped audiences to understand her work more immediately – more palatably. She was branded as authentically Mexican, with international flair. But to be seen as a “naturalsurrealist” also transformed her into a kind of sauvage: unconscious of her talent, unsuspecting of her mastery. After her debut, a Time magazine critic described her work as having “the daintiness of miniatures, the vivid reds and yellows of Mexican tradition and the playfully bloody fancy of an unsentimental child.”

Kahlo was hardly unsuspecting, hardly unconscious of what she was doing and who she was. She knew how to capitalise on the elements of her private life and cultural heritage, curate them carefully, and use them to build her public persona. She was a mestizo, born in Mexico City, who had adopted a traditional Zapotec-Tehuana “look”. Her father, the German-born Carl Wilhelm “Guillermo” Kahlo, was a well-known photographer, and the family lived in a neocolonial mansion in Coyoacán, the famous Casa Azul. Kahlo was very much aware of the complex politics of selfhood she was creating and manipulating. In a 1939 photograph taken during the opening of Kahlo’s first exhibition in Paris, she is posing in front of Lo que el agua me dio. She is wearing a Tehuana dress and her unibrow is underscored with black eyeliner: Frida representing Frida. (It is unclear which one is the artwork.)

The way Kahlo’s work and persona were read in Mexico was of course very different from the way they were translated into other cultural milieux. Just as Breton had attached the category “natural surrealist” to her art and framed her work in a discourse that she herself did not embrace, many others did the same with various aspects of her public and private life.

by Valeria Luiselli, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Frida Kahlo/Alarmy
[ed. See also: Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up]

Sir Sly

Repost

The Biggest Scandal in American History

The other evening I was on a cable news show to cover the latest Russia news of the day—and I had an epiphany.

We were talking about a recent scoop from Michael Isikoff, the co-author of my latest book, Russian Roulette. He had reported that a Spanish prosecutor had handed the FBI wiretapped transcripts of a Russian official who was suspected of money laundering and for years had been trying to gain influence within the American conservative movement and the National Rifle Association. We then discussed a New York Times article revealing that Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s longtime fixer, had met with a Russian oligarch in January 2017, around the time a US company affiliated with this tycoon began making $500,000 in payments to Cohen. Next we turned to the latest in the so-called Spygate nonscandal—the false claim, championed by Trump and his defenders, that the FBI infiltrated a spy into his presidential campaign for political purposes.

Then the show moved on. We had spent 15 or so minutes on these important developments, delving into the details—but without referring to the essence of the story. And it hit me: Though it’s clear Trump’s presidency has been hobbled by the Russia scandal, the manner in which this matter plays out in the media has helped Trump.

Almost every day, Trump pushes out a simple (and dishonest) narrative via tweets and public remarks: The Russia investigation is a…well, you know, a witch hunt. Or a hoax. Or fake news. He blasts out the same exclamations daily: Witch hunt, hoax! Hoax, witch hunt! That’s his mantra.

His synopsis is easy to follow. It encompasses (even if by ignoring) every new fact and revelation. It connects all the inaccurate and false dots Trump and his partisans toss out: Unmasking! Obama wiretapped Trump! The FBI improperly obtained warrants to conduct surveillance on his campaign advisers! And so on. He’s the victim. The bad guys are the Dems, libs, prosecutors, and deep staters pursuing this huge nothing-burger for nothing but political gain. The Russia story, in Trump’s telling, is a black-and-white tale of evildoers persecuting a great man—him. Sad. And this bully uses his pulpit (and smartphone) to transmit this simple message nonstop.

The other side—the accurate perspective—isn’t that complicated. In 2016, Vladimir Putin’s regime mounted information warfare against the United States, in part to help Trump become president. While this attack was underway, the Trump crew tried to collude covertly with Moscow, sought to set up a secret communications channel with Putin’s office, and repeatedly denied in public that this assault was happening, providing cover to the Russian operation. Trump and his lieutenants aligned themselves with and assisted a foreign adversary, as it was attacking the United States. The evidence is rock-solid: They committed a profound act of betrayal. That is the scandal.

But how often do you hear or see this fundamental point being made? The media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal—which has merged with Cohen’s pay-to-play scandal, the Stormy Daniels scandal, and a wider foreign-intervention-in-the-2016-campaign scandal—has yielded a flood of revelations. Yet the news reporting tends to focus on specific components of an unwieldy and ever-expanding story: a Trump Tower meeting between Trump aides and a Kremlin emissary; what special counsel Robert Mueller may or may not be doing; the alleged money-laundering and tax-evasion skullduggery of Paul Manafort; a secret get-together in the Seychelles between former Blackwater owner Erik Prince and a Russian financier; the Kremlin’s clandestine exploitation of social media; Russian hackers penetrating state election systems; Michael Flynn’s shady lobbying activities; Trump’s attempted interference in the investigation; and so much more. It is hard to hold on to all these pieces and place them into one big picture.

These revelations do not emerge in chronological or thematic order. They arrive as part of the fusillade known as the daily news cycle. One day, we learn that Trump last year leaned on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to un-recuse himself from the Russia investigation. Another day, we see headlines that Mueller has indicted Russian trolls. We learn that—yikes!—a former Trump campaign adviser has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his efforts to put the campaign in secret contact with Putin’s regime. We’re told that Donald Trump Jr. during the campaign met with a shady character representing the princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who were secretly offering to help Trump. Or the big story is that Trump has acknowledged he dictated a false statement issued in his eldest son’s name about the Trump Tower meeting. What’s the connection? Is there a connection? And how is each new headline related to Putin’s war on America? Attempting to track this whole damn thing—while the nation experiences a larger hurricane of crazy—can make one feel like Carrie Mathison on Homeland. Do you even have enough string or enough space on the bulletin board?

And that’s just it. Trump has no bulletin board—and no need for one. He only requires 280 characters. Or less. Sometimes just those two words—witch hunt—accompanied by other tweets designed to fog and distract by raising peripheral and non-evidence-based matters, such as the phony Uranium One scandal and other supposed examples of Democratic malfeasance. The problem is there is no organized force with as loud a bullhorn countering his disinformation in fundamental terms.

In the face of Trump’s fact-free denials, who is reminding the public of the basics—that Russia attacked, and that Trump aided and abetted the operation?

by David Corn, Mother Jones |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Bumbling con men and amatuers with authoritarian impulses. Which is fine if you're China or Russia. Hey, does anyone even remember the Paradise Papers? It seems so long ago, so 2017.]

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[ed. Sorry for the sporadic posts lately. I just moved into my new house yesterday. Feels weird and fun.]

Seiichi Hayashi
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Gail Boucher
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Anthony Bourdain and the Power of Telling the Truth

I have long maintained a theory that Anthony Bourdain—who died on Friday, at the age of sixty-one, of an apparent suicide—was the best-known celebrity in America. There are, I realize, actual ways to measure this sort of thing, but the intimacy that Bourdain cultivated with his fans was of a sort that transcended Q scores and approval polls. His show brought in millions of viewers, his books found millions of readers, and—especially for people outside of the food world, and to his own great irritation—he seemed to be everyone’s first idea of the “celebrity chef,” even though he hadn’t worked in a restaurant kitchen in years. (At best, he said, he could be described as a “cook.”)

Bourdain’s fame wasn’t the distant, lacquered type of an actor or a musician, bundled and sold with a life-style newsletter. Bourdain felt like your brother, your rad uncle, your impossibly cool dad—your realest, smartest friend, who wandered outside after beers at the local one night and ended up in front of some TV cameras and decided to stay there. As a writer himself, he was always looking out for other writers, always saying yes, always available for interviews and comments. You had to fight through a wall of skeptical P.R. to get to someone like Guy Fieri, but Bourdain was right there, for everyone, in equal measure. He remembered names. He took every question seriously. He was twenty minutes early to every appointment, to the minute. Every newspaper, every magazine, every Web site that asked got its Bourdain quotes—and good ones, too! Not pre-scripted pablum but potent missiles of cultural commentary—bombastic wisdom, grand pronouncements, eviscerations of celebrities, flagrantly named names.

Another way of putting it is that Anthony Bourdain built his career on the telling of truth. The son of a French father and an American mother (Gladys Bourdain, writing as G. S. Bourdain, was a writer and a copy editor at the Times), he was a novelist before he became an essayist, but, even in the realm of fiction—as in his series of sardonic crime thrillers, including the novels “Bone in the Throat” and “Gone Bamboo”—he evinced a fascination with how people lived within and around their ill behaviors. “Guys who wake up every morning, brush their teeth, shower, shave, then go to work at the serious business of committing felonies,” he wrote in “A Life of Crime,” an essay in his collection “Medium Raw.” “These are the characters who continue to dominate my reverie.” In crime there’s not just transgression, there’s clarity: being in the conspiracy, knowing the inner workings of the machine, seeing what’s really going on. This was the engine that powered “Don’t Eat Before Reading This,” Bourdain’s 1999 New Yorker story that stripped the elegant window dressing from the world of high-end restaurants—the article that, in short order, evolved into his blockbuster 2000 memoir, “Kitchen Confidential.”

This attraction to the secrets behind the façade—the frantic, shadowed stage-managing happening in the wings—is perhaps the singular theme threading through all of Bourdain’s work. He was a relentless reader, looking not only for knowledge and diversion but for tools of the craft. He was less a television star than a television creator: an obsessive film buff, he crafted each episode of “Parts Unknown” like a feature film, plotting every shot, every music cue, every visual flourish. When I interviewed him for a podcast, in 2016, we talked about how he used those tools of storytelling as a way to bring his audience to him, to get them to a place where they could receive what he was giving. “You want them to feel how you felt at the time, if you’re telling something that you experienced,” he said. “Or you want to drive them to a certain opinion or way of looking at things.”

As Bourdain’s career grew, the truths he was positioned to tell grew, as well. He was never able to shake off his association with the now-pedestrian revelations of “Kitchen Confidential”—the cook’s antipathy toward brunch, the daily special as a dumping ground for leftover ingredients, the questionable integrity of Monday’s fish. But his Food Network show, “A Cook’s Tour,” his Travel Channel show, “No Reservations,” and his CNN show, “Parts Unknown” (which remains in production; at the time of his death, Bourdain was filming in France for the show’s twelfth season), allowed him to acknowledge that the point of his journeys—and of sharing them with his massive, ever-growing audience—was not a gastronomic fluency but a broader cultural one. In what is likely the most famous episode of “Parts Unknown,” Bourdain sat on low plastic stools at an unadorned noodle shop in Hanoi, Vietnam, eating bún chả with Barack Obama—at the time a sitting President. The meeting, which Patrick Radden Keefe chronicled in a Profile for the magazine, was momentous for both men—both had grown up in the shadow of the Vietnam War, and that conflict, its long shadow, and its human costs suffused the hour-long episode. Bourdain ended the episode on a brutal note, with an infamous quote from William Westmoreland, the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, a reminder of America’s racist dehumanization of the culture we at home had just spent an hour celebrating.

Bourdain effectively created the “bad-boy chef” persona, but over time he began to see its ill effects on the restaurant industry. With “Medium Raw,” his 2010 follow-up to “Kitchen Confidential,” he tried to retell his story from a place of greater wisdom: the drugs, the sex, the cocky asshole posturing—they were not a blueprint but a cautionary tale. Ever resistant to take on the label of chef, he published a book of home recipes, in 2016, inspired by the cooking he did for his daughter. Despite its chaotic cover illustration by Ralph Steadman—and its prurient title, “Appetites”—the book, which was co-written with his longtime collaborator, the writer Laurie Woolever, is a tender memoir of fatherhood, an ode to food as a vehicle for care.

Beneath the vivaciousness and the swagger, Bourdain was still a man whose life was marked by darkness. His memoirs, in “Kitchen Confidential” and elsewhere, tell of an early life spent struggling with anger, hard-drug use, and other self-destructive behaviors. His parents’ marriage ended when he was young, leaving a lasting scar; Bourdain’s own first marriage, to his high-school girlfriend, Nancy Putkoski, lasted for twenty years, ending in 2005, shortly after his ascent to fame. When the dissolution of his second marriage, to Ottavia Busia, the mother of his daughter, was announced in the tabloids, Bourdain seemed profoundly disturbed by the evidence of public interest in his private life. In a 2016 episode of “Parts Unknown,” set in Buenos Aires, he held an on-camera therapy session. “I will find myself in an airport, for instance, and I’ll order an airport hamburger,” he says, lying on a leather couch. “It’s an insignificant thing, it’s a small thing, it’s a hamburger, but it’s not a good one. Suddenly, I look at the hamburger and I find myself in a spiral of depression that can last for days.”

In other moments, particularly when he wasn’t the one controlling the narrative, Bourdain could be slippery about personal matters—the critic Maria Bustillos, in a 2017 piece analyzing his literary œuvre, observed his tendency toward “a gentle drawing of the curtain over private moments.” A year and a half ago, just after the Presidential election, I interviewed Bourdain for a profile in Eater, where I was an editor at the time. We sat for a few hours at a yakitori restaurant in midtown, eating chicken hearts and drinking beer. The Rome episode of “Parts Unknown” had just aired, and, as we settled into our conversation, I jokingly mentioned his obvious crush on the Italian actor and filmmaker Asia Argento, who had been featured in the episode. At the mention of her name, Bourdain’s large, tanned hand swept over the microphone of the recorder. “What do you mean, my crush on Asia?” he said, and I laughed, telling him his puppy-dog eyes were in every frame—not to mention his Twitter posts about the episode, which fairly breathed with infatuation. He took his phone out and scrolled through his recent tweets, asking me to point out specific evidence. “We’re trying to keep it under wraps,” he said.

by Helen Rosner, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Twitter
[ed. See also: Anthony Bourdain Was a Teller of Often Unappetizing Truths]

How the Monstera Leaf Took Over Design

Rachel Berger, a 29-year-old Philadelphia native and bride-to-be, recently told her wedding florist that for the event’s table arrangements, she’d like leaves of the Monstera deliciosa: a plant with big, waxy, hole-riddled leaves that’s also known as the Swiss cheese plant.

Initially, her florist balked at the request. Why would an East Coast wedding feature a leaf that hails from Central American rainforests and is typically associated with a tropical vibe? But Berger had seen the leaf on social media and was a fan, and so she asked him to research ways to incorporate it into arrangements.

By their next meeting, the florist’s attitude toward the leaf had changed. He’d learned that the Monstera wasn’t just a now-popular leaf for floral arrangements: It was everywhere.

The current Monstera leaf craze might have started off niche, but it’s now been watered, pruned, and fed lots and lots of Miracle-Gro: The Monstera has become ubiquitous across fashion, retail, and branding.

“The Monstera is everywhere you turn, and everyone wants one in their space,” says Charlotte Parker, the social manager of Apartment Therapy’s Instagram, who estimates that Monstera leaves are featured in more than 25 percent of interior design content she sees on Instagram. Recently, the interior design site launched an Instagram account just for plant content, IPlantEven, and its logo features, of course, the Monstera leaf.

So why is this leaf everywhere? (...)

Like most modern trends — luxury pool floats, scammy teatoxes, color-coded bookshelves — the Monstera has social media to thank for its current A-list status.

Justina Blakeney, the designer and author behind the interior design lifestyle blog the Jungalow, doesn’t exactly claim the current Monstera trend as her own, but she recalls a blog post from February 2015 about the Monstera leaf that went viral. When Blakeney wrote the post, she had 1 million followers on Pinterest. (She now has 6.6 million.) Within a few days of publishing, photos from the post spread all across Pinterest, Instagram, and were “reposted by a gajillion blogs.”

Ever since, she says, the Monstera leaf has “slowly taken over.” Now on Instagram, the Monstera is generally potted in handmade ceramics or woven baskets and placed next to velvet sofas and rustic woven rugs. On Pinterest, the leaves are commonly spotted as placemats and on wallpaper.

It helps that the leaf lends itself to a minimalist brand aesthetic. Eliza Blank, the founder of the online and IRL plant shop The Sill, points out that stores like COS, Reformation, and Away — all of which use the leaf in stores — have an extremely similar retail aesthetic: white walls, bright lighting, neat and carefully curated product (what New York magazine recently called retail’s “Minimalist Art Gallery”). And while the Monstera leaf is associated with bohemian Jungalow branding, it can also steer a minimalist aesthetic away from feeling cold and sterile.

“The Monstera is a safe, modern add for a store like Away or Reformation,” Blank says. “A bouquet of flowers probably couldn’t work inside there because it might feel feminine or romantic, and isn’t the muted minimalist look they want. But the Monstera is cool and chic. It has a unique graphic and architectural element to it, with that whimsical wabi-sabi type of Japanese imperfection, where its design is tied to nature and the earth. I think this really resonates in fashion.”

by Chavie Lieber , Racked | Read more:
Image: The Sill

Aaron Marcus, Symbolic Constructions series, 1971-1972
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WhatsApp and Facebook's Broken Promises

The Wall Street Journal published a bombshell story on Tuesday about what reporters Kirsten Grind and Deepa Seetharaman call “the messy, expensive split between Facebook and WhatsApp’s founders.” The dishy piece makes for great reading. (Do the multibillionaire founders of global communications platforms make time to grouse at each other about who gets to pick out office chairs? Yes. Yes, they do.) Behind the dishiness, however, is a very important story that pretty much clears up any doubt as to whether Mark Zuckerberg is a trustworthy man who keeps his promises—or a profit-obsessed machine who’s much stronger on greed than he is on morals.

By the time you’ve finished the WSJ piece, only two options seem possible: Either Zuckerberg is a liar, or he’s a liar with absolutely no concept of the sunk-cost fallacy. When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, the companies rolled out a very clear messaging campaign, based around WhatsApp’s motto of “no ads, no games, no gimmicks.” The messaging service would be owned by Facebook, and Facebook could continue to make as much money as it wanted from ads on its own platform, but WhatsApp would retain its purity of product and even roll out end-to-end encryption. As co-founder Jan Koum wrote in a blog post after the deal was announced:

Respect for your privacy is coded into our DNA, and we built WhatsApp around the goal of knowing as little about you as possible: You don’t have to give us your name and we don’t ask for your email address. We don’t know your birthday. We don’t know your home address. We don’t know where you work. We don’t know your likes, what you search for on the internet or collect your GPS location. None of that data has ever been collected and stored by WhatsApp, and we really have no plans to change that. 

If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it. Instead, we are forming a partnership that would allow us to continue operating independently and autonomously. Our fundamental values and beliefs will not change. Our principles will not change… 

Make no mistake: our future partnership with Facebook will not compromise the vision that brought us to this point.

WhatsApp wasn’t an easy acquisition for Zuckerberg, because the two apps have very different founding principles. Koum, who grew up in Ukraine, believes deeply in privacy; Zuckerberg thinks that the more open and connected we are, the happier we all become. And so in order to acquire WhatsApp, Zuckerberg not only had to pay a lot of money and give up a board seat to Koum; he also had to make a lot of promises. Some of those promises were even enshrined in the acquisition agreement: If Facebook imposed “monetization initiatives” like advertising onto WhatsApp, its founders’ shares would vest immediately, and they could leave without suffering any kind of financial penalty.

Thus did WhatsApp retain exactly the independence that it had been promised—until it didn’t.

Today, it seems inevitable not only that advertising will make it onto WhatsApp, but also that the advertising in question will be targeted—which is to say that when you use the app, Facebook will know exactly who you are, where you live, and what kind of products you might be interested in buying. It’s a complete repudiation of WhatsApp’s founding principles, and makes a mockery of its end-to-end encryption.

What’s more, WhatsApp’s two founders both left hundreds of millions of dollars on the table, so keen were they to leave Facebook’s ad-friendly walls. (It turns out that their contractual right to being paid out in full would require them to sue for the money, and, according to the Journal, neither of them had the appetite for that.) Brian Acton resigned in September; Koum stayed on until the end of April. In leaving before November of this year, Acton gave up some $900 million; Koum gave up about $400 million. You need to be really unhappy at work if you’re willing to quit a job that’s effectively paying you some $60 million per month, and from which you basically can’t be fired.

The cause of that unhappiness seems as clear as Koum’s 2012 blog post titled “Why We Don’t Sell Ads”—a post that starts off by saying that “advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need,” and gets more vehement from there. Koum and Acton really didn’t want ads, but, as the WSJ puts it, Zuckerberg and his number two, Sheryl Sandberg, “grew impatient for a greater return on the company’s 2014 blockbuster $22 billion purchase.” After the two founders left, Zuckerberg installed in their place “a longtime Facebook executive who is tasked with finding a business model that brings in revenue at a level to justify the app’s purchase price.”

by Felix Salmon, Slate |  Read more:
Image: Lluis Gene/Getty Images

Sleep Radio

John Watson is the first to admit that his DJ skills put people to sleep. Lucky for him, that is the point.

For the past four years Watson, who lives in the tiny New Zealand township of Te Aroha, has been broadcasting to the world. But instead of seeking an engaged listenership, Watson wants those who tune into his station to literally fall asleep. And they do.

People from as far away as Afghanistan, Israel, Russia, Hungary, Taiwan and Puerto Rico log on to Watson’s station Sleep Radio. Someone in Prague has been listening for three days straight.

The idea of a radio station that sends listeners to sleep came to Watson after he had a heart attack 10 years ago. Following five coronary artery bypasses he began to suffer from chronic depression and insomnia.

“I never used to have trouble going to sleep but now I was lying awake watching the sun rise and feeling like a zombie,” he said.

Watson, 62, was treated with medication and started seeing a counsellor who suggested he try relaxing, ambient music to help him sleep. Soon he found there was not a lot out there for sleep music aficionados.

“Even on the radio you would be listening to relaxing music, trying to get to sleep and, all of a sudden, an advert would come on, yelling at you to buy something.”

Watson thought he could do better. He did his research, looking into royalty-free ambient music and taught himself how to set up a digital radio station. Sleep Radio was born.

He said the project is a “hobby and a passion”. He often gets grateful listeners emailing him with their success stories, including a mother whose newborn baby is also seemingly a fan.

However, Watson is quick to say that ambient music does not work for everyone. His wife, for example, finds it too boring. Sleep Radio has now expanded into an app that allows people to set a timer for their listening.

Meanwhile Watson has not had to source new music for over a year. There are ambient music producers lining up to have people fall asleep to their material. However there are rules – no vocals, no piano, guitar or harp solos, and absolutely no ocean sounds or birdsong.

by Charles Andersen, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Supplied

[ed. Sleep Radio here.]

Redux: Fasting – The New Fad Diet?

A couple of weeks ago I found myself in a beautiful rural home that belongs to my parents’ friends, a slim and sophisticated couple who enjoys bird watching and international travel. I was meeting this pair—let’s call them George and Marsha—for the first time. I’m inherently nosy, so while the rest of the group chatted, my eyes scanned the room. On the fridge, I noticed a slip of paper that looked to be George and Marsha’s weekly dinner menu. That night they’d be having polenta and pork roast. The other days had meals written next to them too, all except for Monday and Wednesday. Next to those two days, Marsha (or George) had scrawled “Fast.”

Fast as in not eat? Marsha and George didn’t seem like the type to fall for juice cleanses or fad diets. My parents said the couple had probably seen the same documentary they had. The show follows Michael Mosley, a BBC journalist and former physician, on his quest to become slimmer and healthier through fasting.

I’ve never heard of Michael Mosley, but I’m not sure how I missed him. Lately Mosley is everywhere — on the BBC, on PBS, in the news. In January he launched a bestselling diet book co-authored by journalist Mimi Spencer. Here’s the approach they’re advocating: To lose weight and improve health, dieters should fast two days each week. On fasting days, women should consume no more than 500 calories. Men are allowed 600. The other five days dieters have no restrictions.

In the BBC documentary my parents referenced, a chubby, unhealthy, middle-aged Mosley seeks the secret to weight loss and health. He starts his journey by visiting Joseph Cordell, a lawyer who practices calorie restriction. Individuals who follow this diet, known as CRONies, generally cut their caloric intake by 25%. So a woman who typically eats 2,000 calories a day would consume just 1,500. There’s lot of science to support the benefits of calorie restriction. I wrote about a few studies here. But there’s no doubt it has drawbacks, hunger being among them. Emily Yoffe, who tried caloric restriction back in 2007, had this to say: “Each meal I ate now had the poignancy of a Shakespeare sonnet: how much I longed for each bite, how aware I was of how few there would be.”

Mosley wasn’t convinced he could adopt calorie restriction as a lifestyle. “What I really want to do is try to understand the ways in which calorie restriction works,” Mosley said in the documentary. “Then hopefully I can get all the delicious benefits without actually having to do it.”

In other words, Mosley wanted what the entire human race has always wanted — a shortcut.

Mosley’s search for a shortcut leads him to fasting. Not all fasts are created equal, and Mosley flirts with various forms. He first tries a painful three-day fast. But he wants something a little less intense, so he visits Krista Varady at the University of Illinois. She’s studying alternate day fasting. Participants in her studies fast every other day and on those days Varady’s subjects eat a single meal that’s about 400-600 calories. The other days they can eat whatever they want. Varady has found that alternate day fasting can help participants shed pounds and lower their cholesterol and blood pressure.

“I am now starting to be won over by the idea that a simple pattern of feast and fast can be powerful,” Mosley says after his visit with Varady. “It seems to have an impact which goes beyond simply eating less. And I think it could work for someone like me.”

But Mosley doesn’t adopt alternate day fasting. In the book, he writes that fasting every other day “can be socially inconvenient as well as emotionally demanding.” Instead he chooses to fast two days a week, eating 600 calories those days and a normal diet the other days. And it seems to work. In three months, Mosley loses 19 pounds. His body mass index falls from 26.4 to 24, and his body fat drops from 28% to 21%.

“The results have been absolutely fantastic for me. But that doesn’t mean that intermittent fasting will work for everyone. It’s really important that they do more trials on humans to find out if, in the long term, it is safe and effective,” Mosley says in the documentary.

Yet, early this year, Mosley launched a diet book that advocates the exact diet that he once said needs more research. The book description includes this line: “Is it possible to eat normally, five days a week, and become slimmer and healthier as a result? Simple answer: yes.”

by Cassandra Willyard, The Last Word on Nothing |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I gained 60 lbs. my first year in college (keggers and dorm food and... you know) so I went on a diet very similar to this, except 1000 calories a day - generally a tiny lunch (or light snacks), moderate dinner and one or two beers (I don't think I could fast completely). On weekends I'd eat and drink as much as I wanted, pizzas and beers galore. My appetite shrunk. Even with the opportunity to binge, I just didn't want that much after a while (but it was still important to have that weekend safety valve). Long story short - I lost all the weight I had gained in less than 7 months (I still have the stretch marks to prove it), and have kept it off, 40 years later. (Tip: get a calorie counter so you know what you're eating. After a while, a reduced appetite just feels normal).]