Eardrum Suck

Thanks to recent research, we now understand a lot about headphones. But there’s one part of the headphone puzzle that I haven’t understood at all, and until a few weeks ago, neither did anyone else I’d talked with. It’s a phenomenon I call “eardrum suck,” and it occurs with some noise-canceling headphones. When you put the headphones on and activate the noise-canceling function, it can cause a feeling like riding a high-speed elevator, where you’re whisked abruptly into a region of lower atmospheric pressure, and the higher-pressure air inside your ear pushes your eardrums out slightly. For many, including me, it’s an effect so uncomfortable it can cause us to leave our expensive noise-canceling headphones in a drawer, unused.

Until recently, the models most notorious for eardrum suck have been Bose over-ear noise-canceling headphones, such as the QC25s and QC35 IIs. Yet as anyone who’s taken a commercial airline flight in the last decade can attest, these models are immensely popular. Clearly, some people either don’t experience eardrum suck, or do experience it but aren’t bothered by it.

Also, I and others noticed that the problem doesn’t seem to occur with Bose’s QC20 and QC30 noise-canceling earphones, even though those models deliver noise-canceling performance comparable to the over-ear models.

The question arose again when Sony came out late last year with the WH-1000XM3s, the first headphones I’ve found that deliver measurably better noise canceling than the Bose equivalents. Against my hopes but confirming my fears, I and some of my colleagues noticed that the WH-1000XM3s’ eardrum suck seemed about as bad as the Bose QC35 IIs’.

I’d asked some of the best minds in the headphone business to explain what’s going on, but no one was able to give me a plausible answer; “We’ve been wondering about that, too,” was the most common response. I searched around on the Internet, but none of the purported explanations (such as the idea that the noise canceling allows you to hear the blood pumping through your ears) survived more than a few moments of scrutiny.

Last fall, I even built a test rig to measure the pressure inside a headphone. But while it was sensitive enough to pick up the minuscule pressure difference caused by lightly tapping a finger on the earcup, it didn’t detect any pressure difference when I switched the noise canceling on and off. The more I thought about it, the more I realized this shouldn’t have surprised me. If there were added pressure in the headphones, the pressure would be relieved merely by shifting the earpads slightly to let the pressure leak out.

Then I remembered I’d once met an audio engineer whose previous work in headphone noise canceling has resulted in several patents. I thought that because he doesn’t work directly for a headphone manufacturer, he might be willing to shed some light. Through a mutual acquaintance, I was able to connect with him over Skype. At his request, I won’t share his name, but his comments gave me the first plausible answer I’ve found on this topic.

Before we continue, it’s important to understand how noise-canceling headphones work. In all noise-canceling headphones, there’s a microphone inside the earcup, near your ear, that picks up the sound inside the earcup, which is a mixture of the music coming from the driver plus environmental noise leaking in through the headphones. The headphones route the sound from the microphone back into the headphones’ internal circuitry, out of phase with the music signal. This cancels out most of the music signal and leaves the noise. The resulting noise signal -- which is out of phase with the environmental noise coming in through the headphones -- is then routed back into the amplifier’s input. Because the driver then reproduces this noise that’s out of phase with the environmental noise, it cancels the environmental noise.

This is called feedback noise canceling. More advanced noise-canceling headphones, such as the Bose QC35 IIs and Sony WH-1000XM3s, add feed-forward noise-canceling, which uses a microphone (or two) on the outer shell of the headphones to pick up the environmental noise. The noise signal from the microphones is inverted in phase and sent into the driver, so the noise is canceled. Combining the feedback and feed-forward systems results in the maximum possible noise canceling available with today’s technology.

At last, the answer

According to the engineer, eardrum suck, while it feels like a quick change in pressure, is psychosomatic. “There’s no actual pressure change. It’s caused by a disruption in the balance of sound you’re used to hearing,” he explained. “People sometimes report the same effect when they go into anechoic chambers, which absorb high frequencies but allow low frequencies to come through. With noise-canceling headphones, it’s the opposite -- you’re canceling the bass but not the high frequencies -- but it can have the same effect.”

by Brent Butterworth, Soundstage! Solo |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: The Best Noise-Cancelling Headphones (Wirecutter).]

Dan Clarke / Arkotype / DTL–H300/0/½ / Graphics / 2018
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‘Knitting is Coding’ and Yarn is Programmable

On the eve of the American Physical Society’s annual March meeting, a Sunday “stitch ‘n bitch” session convened during happy hour at a lobby bar of the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel.

Karen Daniels, a physicist at North Carolina State University, had tweeted notice of the meet-up earlier that day: “Are you a physicist into knitting, crocheting, or other fiber arts?” she asked. “I’ll be the one knitting a torus.” (A torus is a mathematized doughnut; hers was inspired by a figure in a friend’s scientific paper.)

At the bar, amid tables cluttered with balls of yarn, Dr. Daniels absorbed design advice from a group of specialized knitters, among them Elisabetta Matsumoto, an applied mathematician and physicist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a co-host of the gathering.

For Dr. Matsumoto, knitting is more than a handicraft hobby with health benefits. She is embarking on a five-year project, “What a Tangled Web We Weave,” funded by the National Science Foundation, to investigate the mathematics and mechanics of “the ancient technology known as knitting.”

Some of the oldest examples date to the 11th century B.C.E. in Egypt. But despite generations of practical and experiential knowledge, the physical and mathematical properties of knitted fabric rarely are studied in a way that produces predictive models about how such fabrics behave.

Dr. Matsumoto argues that “knitting is coding” and that yarn is a programmable material. The potential dividends of her research range from wearable electronics to tissue scaffolding.

During the happy-hour meetup, she knitted a swatch illustrating a plastic surgery technique called Z-plasty. The swatch was for a talk she would deliver at 8 a.m. on Wednesday morning called “Twisted Topological Tangles.” Scores of physicists turned up, despite a competing parallel session on “The Extreme Mechanics of Balloons.”

“I’ve been knitting since I was a kid,” Dr. Matsumoto told her (mostly male) audience. “That was the thing I did to get along with my mom when I was a teenager. It’s just been a dream to take all of this stuff that I learned and played with as a child and turn it into something scientifically rigorous.”

As a first step, her team is enumerating all possible knittable stitches: “We know there’s going to be uncountably many, there’s going to be a countably infinite number. How to classify them is what we are working on now.”

The investigation is informed by the mathematical tradition of knot theory. A knot is a tangled circle — a circle embedded with crossings that cannot be untangled. (A circle with no crossings is an “unknot.”)

“The knitted stitch is a whole series of slipknots, one after the other,” said Dr. Matsumoto. Rows and columns of slipknots form a lattice pattern so regular that it is analogous to crystal structure and crystalline materials.

By way of knot theory, Dr. Matsumoto essentially is developing a knit theory: an alphabet of unit-cell stitches, a glossary of stitch combinations, and a grammar governing the knitted geometry and topology — the fabric’s stretchiness, or its “emergent elasticity.” (...)

Dr. Matsumoto’s presentation opened a three-hour session entitled “Fabrics, Knits and Knots” — the first time that the subject had been addressed at the American Physical Society’s annual meeting. (...)

Derek Moulton, of the University of Oxford, mentioned variants of sailor’s knots, DNA and protein knots, and worms that tie themselves into knots in order to minimize dehydration. He went on discuss “whether a knotted filament with zero points of self-contact may be realized physically.” That is, can a knot exist wherein none of its crossings touch? (It can; try it at home with a strip of paper, or a cord.)

And Thomas Plumb-Reyes, an applied physicist at Harvard, presented his research on “Detangling Hair” to a standing-room-only audience.

“What is going on in tangled hair?” he asked. “What is the optimal combing strategy?”

Shashank Markande, a Ph.D. student working with Dr. Matsumoto, reported on their stitch classification work so far. Together, they had derived a conjecture: All knittable stitches must be ribbon knots. (A ribbon knot is a very technical tangle.) And they pondered the corollary: Are all ribbon knots knittable?

Back in February, Mr. Markande (who started knitting only recently for the sake of science) thought he’d found an example of an unknittable ribbon knot, using a knots-and-links software program called SnapPy. He sent Dr. Matsumoto a text message with a sketch: “Tell me if this can be knitted?”

Dr. Matsumoto was just heading out for a run, and by the time she returned, having manipulated the yarn every which way in her head, she had worked out an answer. “I think that can be knitted,” she texted back. When Mr. Markande pressed her on how, she added: “It’s knittable by our rules, but it isn’t trivial to do with needles.”

Mr. Markande said later, “I was pretty surprised. With my limited knowledge, I thought it could not be knitted. But Sabetta managed to knit it.”

by Siobhan Roberts, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Johnathon Kelso for The New York Times

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Dinosaur Jr.

Can CBD Really Do All That?

Despite the hype, the CBD molecule is actually pretty amazeballs

CBD is definitely screaming up toward the peak of inflated expectations, but it's not pure grift: the actual molecule and the way it interacts with our bodies is pretty amazing.

Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Moises Velasquez-Manoff dives deep into the history of therapeutic uses of CBD (which are necessarily small-scale and inconclusive, thanks to both legal prohibition and centuries of intense selective breeding to increase the THC content of marijuana, which downregulates production of CBD).

Small-scale studies and personal experimentation produced a wealth of anecdata, but not much by way of solid conclusion. That may change soon, thanks to both the breathless commercial hype and the true believers whose lives have been altered by taking CBD (maybe). In the wake of state-level legalizations (and Canada's national legalization), there is a renaissance in the science of CBD, and in more rigorous manufacturing standards (many "high-CBD" marijuana products have little or no CBD in them, and the people who claim health benefits from these are experiencing some combination of a placebo effect and just getting really high).

Preliminary data shows that CBD has 65 cellular target ("CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level") which may account for the very wide range of symptoms and pathologies it has been used to treat, from opioid addiction to "autism spectrum disorders... [an] aggressive brain cancer called glioblastoma... [lessening the] incidence of graft-versus-host disease in bone-marrow transplant patients" and more. In the meantime, actual CBD vendors no longer make actual health claims because the FDA has (quite rightly) told them to cut it out with that shit.

And yet, for millenniums people have used cannabis itself with relatively few side effects. (These can include dry mouth, lethargy and paranoia.) THC hits CB1 and CB2 receptors, but how CBD works is less clear. It seems to interact with multiple systems: increasing the quantity of native cannabinoids in the human body; binding with serotonin receptors, part of the “feel good” molecular machinery targeted by conventional S.S.R.I.s; and stimulating GABA receptors, responsible for calming the nervous system. With more than 65 cellular targets, CBD may provide a kind of full-body massage at the molecular level.

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: Gartner Hype Cycle

[ed. Full article here: Can CBD Really Do All That? (NY Times Magazine).]

How the Hell Has Danielle Steel Managed to Write 179 Books?

There's a sign in Danielle Steel's office that reads, "There are no miracles. There is only discipline." It's a dutiful message, and yet the sheer amount that Steel has accomplished in her five-decade career does seem like the stuff of dreams.

Let's look at the numbers, shall we? The author has written 179 books, which have been translated into 43 languages. Twenty-two of them have been adapted for television, and two of those adaptations have received Golden Globe nominations. Steel releases seven new novels a year—her latest, Blessing in Disguise, is out this week—and she's at work on five to six new titles at all times. In 1989 Steel was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having a book on the New York Times best-seller list for the most consecutive weeks of any author—381, to be exact. To pull it off, she works 20 to 22 hours a day. (A couple times a month, when she feels the crunch, she spends a full 24 hours at her desk.)

Steel writes in her home office. Most of the time, that's in Paris, but sometimes she's at her home in San Francisco, where she writes on her 1946 Olympia standard typewriter, which she's nicknamed Olly. "Olly's a big, heavy machine and it's older than I am," Steel tells Glamour. "It has a very smooth flow to it . I have anywhere between 12 to 15 of them that I've bought over the years, but they're not good enough to work on. I keep them for parts in case there's ever a problem, because this is a very endangered species!"

Steel is a creature of habit. She gets to her office—by 8:30 A.M., where she can often be found in her cashmere nightgown. In the morning she'll have one piece of toast and an iced decaf coffee (she gave up full-throated caffeine 25 years ago). After lunch and as the day wears on, she'll nibble on miniature bittersweet chocolate bars. "Dead or alive, rain or shine, I get to my desk and I do my work. Sometimes I'll finish a book in the morning, and by the end of the day, I've started another project," Steel says.

She credits her boundless energy for her productivity and also her drive to push through moments when she's stuck. "I keep working. The more you shy away from the material, the worse it gets. You're better off pushing through and ending up with 30 dead pages you can correct later than just sitting there with nothing," she advises. Her output is also the result of a near superhuman ability to run on little sleep. "I don't get to bed until I'm so tired I could sleep on the floor. If I have four hours, it's really a good night for me," Steel says.

She's always been like this, even as a kid growing up in France. Before playing with friends after school, she'd come home and immediately complete her homework. By 19, Steel had written her first book—she’d promised herself that if she got it to sell, she'd be content, prepared to give up writing and focus on her family. The novel sold in a week. One hundred and seventy-nine books later, she still hasn't been able to quit.

Steel never set out to be a best-seller. In fact, she was made to feel embarrassed of her success. "I grew up in Europe, where it was not considered polite for a woman to be working, and I was married to two different men who did not like that I worked," she says. "But I was lucky because I could work at home when my kids were asleep." (Steel has nine children.) "It was kind of this invisible thing that I did," she adds. "I never had success as a goal. I had this drive to to write the stories that came to me—and to conquer them. It came from the gut, not from the cash register." Even now Steel still encounters people who are put off by her illustrious career. "About 10 years ago someone asked me, 'Oh, do you have an agent?' I mean, do they think I stand on the street corner and try to sell this stuff?" she says. Or another time at a party, "Someone said to me, 'Are you still writing?' And I wanted to say, 'I guess you don't read The New York Times.'"

by Samantha Leach, Glamour |  Read more:

Image: Danielle Steel

Transcript: Don Felder

This week we speak to Don “fingers” Felder, lead guitarist for the Eagles. The classic band has sold over 150 million albums worldwide. Their album, the Eagle’s Greatest Hits, was the best selling album of the 20th century. The band accumulated five number-one singles, six Grammy Awards, five American Music Awards, and six number-one albums.

Felder is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and writer of the Eagle’s biggest hit, Hotel California — #3 on the all time best-selling albums. The Eagles are the only band that have 2 albums in the top 10 best sellers (The Beatles have two in top 20).

He is proud of his ongoing charity work for the likes of the Starkey Hearing Foundation.

His latest album is “American Rock ’N’ Roll.” The album was an opportunity to jam with some of his closest musical pals, including Sammy Hagar, Slash, Richie Sambora, Peter Frampton, Joe Satriani, Mick Fleetwood, Bob Weir, and more.

He tells the story of how he wrote the music to Hotel California — about a year before the band recorded it. The album Hotel California was an attempt to move the band away from the Soft Country genre and more towards a harder Rock sound. He created a guitar duel for the song so he could play with his pal and new band member, Joe Walsh. Felder also tells about crafting a new intro for the song for their live MTV acoustic show.

His favorite books are here; A transcript of our conversation is available here. [ed. Ignore the typos, it's a transcript.]

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VOICE-OVER: This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.

RITHOLTZ: This week on the podcast I have an extra special guest and I know everybody bust my chops when I say that, but my guest is extra special. His name is Don Felder. He was the lead guitarist for the Eagles. He wrote Hotel California. He is a legend in the music industry and really a very nice guy and an informative raconteur who tells wonderful stories.

If you are at all interested in music or 70’s, or the Eagles, or the 80’s or guitar history, or the 90’s, you will find this to be an absolutely fascinating conversation. So with no further ado, my interview with Don Felder.

FELDER: Thank you. It’s fabulous to be back here again.

RITHOLTZ: So you have really a fascinating background, and I was really, you know, stunned when I was reading you — you grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which somehow became a hot bed of music. Is that a fair statement?

FELDER: Yeah, for some reason and I don’t know if it was something that was in the water or in something that we were all smoking at the time that so many people came out of Gainesville that went on to become rock and roll legends, rock and roll hall of fame inductees, platinum-selling artist. We were all just kids in different garage bands down there. One of my guitar students was a kid named Tommy Petty who I taught how to play guitar. He was playing …

RITHOLTZ: Little Tommy Petty.

FELDER: Little Tommy Petty. He was playing base in this band called the Epics, and he thought it was kind of awkward and keekee to be fronting a band playing bass and singing. So he wanted to learn to play guitar so he could write songs instead of playing base, so I gave him guitar lessons. I helped with a little bit of the arrangement on a couple of their songs and their shows. I went to just hang out. We were friends. We were in Battles of the Bands together.

Stephen Stills and I had a band together in Gainesville. I think we were 14 and 15 years old. My mom would drive us around in these little events because we didn’t have a car or a driver’s license or anything.

Duane Allman and Gregg Allman were in different bands in that time called, like the Allman Joys or The Spotlights. Duane taught me how to play slide guitar one night on the floor of his mom’s house in Daytona Beach about 2:30 in the morning. Who else was around there?

Lynyrd Skynyrd was right over in Jacksonville, Florida. Bernie Leadon actually moved to Gainesville because his dad was given the appointment of heading up the Nuclear Research Department at the University of Florida, so he moved his family, all eight kids over to Gainesville. And Stephen stills had just left to move to California. Bernie showed up and picked me up actually at a bus station where I was coming back from a little town called Lake City, about 30 minutes away, where I’ve gone up by myself and played this little women’s tea party in the afternoon.

So he had a car, he was 16. He picked me up at the bus station and actually wound up replacing Stevens Stills in that band. And Bernie went on to become one of the founding members of the Eagles. We’ve known each other since high school. So Stephen, Bernie, and Tom and myself all went to the same high school, Gainesville High School, together so …

RITHOLTZ: That’s astonishing.

FELDER: I don’t know how that all happened, but it did.

RITHOLTZ: And — and what first got you interested in music? The — the legend is you see Elvis Presley on television and that just sparks a lifelong interest.

FELDER: Well, there was a huge interest in that explosion of rock and roll in that time. It had a just a really strong, exciting energy about it, whether it was Little Richard singing Tutti Frutti or Elvis on stage shaking and gyrating, and flipping his greasy hair around, snarling his upper lip. And watching all those young girls screaming at him, I kind of said, you know, I think I’d like to do that. That looks like fun.

And so I traded a handful of cherry bombs to a kid that lived across the street for a broken guitar. It had a crack in it, it was missing strings. And I found the guy around the corner that helped me tune the thing, replace some of the strings on it. And I used to sit on my front porch down there on this dirt road in Gainesville on this metal collider just sliding back and forth and back and forth, trying to figure out how that guitar work. Where do you put your fingers? How do you make chords?

And there wasn’t a music school. There was no money to be had in my family for lessons if there was a music school. So I was pretty much self-taught, and it turned out that I gave myself kind of basic ear training by listening new stuff on the radio or listening to my stuff on my dad’s tape recorder and just playing it over and over and over until I could figure it out on guitar. And eventually, even today I can hear something two or three times and just play it right away because I’ve trained my mind and my body and my inside into music to be able to hear something and play it. (...)

RITHOLTZ: You start working at a music store, like an instrument store, and you were working essentially to be able to earn money for instruments. Is that …

FELDER: Yeah, I wasn’t getting paid money, I was given credit for every hour or every lesson that I taught there. I was given a credit on the store card. They had this thing, you know, they put in the register and give me $5 or $10 for every much I done, and I could use that money for strings, for pedals, for chords. If I saved up enough I could trade in my old guitar and get a better guitar and — or an amp or some tubes or I blew out a speaker and my amp had needed to be replaced, which happened frequently in those days. I would be able to work until I got enough money to get a speaker replacement. So yes, that’s where I was learning how to make money was in working in a music store.

RITHOLTZ: And — and where did the music theory in Gainesville first come into your experiences?

FELDER: There was a great guitar player that lived there whose name was Paul Hillis. He left the Gainesville and went to the Berklee School of Music in Boston and came back a few years later, but he given up guitar and started playing piano cause he thought you could see in compositions, and chord clusters, and progressions much easier on piano than on guitar, which is true. It’s a repetitive octave on piano, and guitar, everything is a different fingering as you go up the scale or up the neck.

So he opened a school of music, and for every hour that I taught there these incoming young kids who had gotten a guitar for Christmas who were complaining about their calluses hurting on their fingers, for every hour I taught them, he would teach me music theory, composition, chord progressions, how to read music. And I basically got a — the cheap version of a Berklee College of Music education for ball. (...)

RITHOLTZ: I want to talk about California right now. Hotel California, let’s talk a little bit about your writing that song because my — I — I mentioned my pet theory is the Eagles were kind of thought of as like a kickback mellow country, not quite rock band. And I know the rest of the band really wanted to be more of a Led Zeppelin type of both with hotels destruction and with rock and roll. And Hotel California just took the band to an entirely different level, not only is the song ranked 49 on the list of greatest songs of all time.

The album sold 17 million copies in the U.S., 32 million worldwide. I think it was number three on the all-time list, something like that. So — so you deserve a whole lot of credit for really taking the band up and to the next level. I have to ask because it’s so different from everything else that was done. How did you come up with that that intro and then how did you basically just write the music for that song?

FELDER: At the time I was living in a rental beach house on Malibu Beach, and I had two little kids. One was about a year old, one was about 2.5 years old. And I was sitting on the couch one day just playing an acoustic guitar and looking out at the sun glistening on the Pacific Ocean, and watching my two kids playing in the sand and this little swing set we had on the beach. And out came that progression two or three times and I — I had to go record a little bit of it so I wouldn’t forget it.

Much like a dream, when something comes through me, I have to write it down or record it or, you know, two days later I can’t remember what it was.

RITHOLTZ: It’s gone, right.

FELDER: It’s gone, you know. So I run into my daughter’s back bedroom who was almost a year, and when she was awake I’d set up this little recording studio back there where I could go in and make demos. So I went back and recorded that little progression three or four times, and turned it off, and went out and played with my kids on the beach.

Years — well, months later when it was time to sit down and write the songs that we’re going to become candidates for what was going to be the Hotel California record, I had put together about 15 or 16 song ideas. And I heard the little three-time loop through the progression and I said, “I got to finish that,” so I really rebuilt the whole idea of playing acoustic guitar, 12 strings starting it off, and I played bass on the overdub. I played the drum machine that ran through it. This sounded kind of like a cha-cha beat or something.

And I thought Joe how should just joined the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record Joe Walsh should just the band and was going to be the first appearance on this record. And Joe and I had been playing together a lot before he joined the band. If you go online and look at Joe Walsh and friends, you can see him and I doing all this guitar trading and jamming together. I wanted to have something on this record that he and I could do together. (...)

RITHOLTZ: So — so let me ask you a few questions about that because I’m — I’m fascinated by this process. First, the — the guitar duel at the end, so you want to incorporate Joe Walsh more into the band, what — what did you use as inspiration for that because when I was thinking about this I immediately think of the end of — of Layla or the Beatles Abbey Road Medley where there’s three guys swapping a — a guitar licks back and forth. What — what was the driving force that said, hey, let’s do a little guitar duel on here.

FELDER: I think Joe and I had already been doing that, and you were talking about Layla, that was Duane Allman playing …

RITHOLTZ: Right.

FELDER: … the high slide guitar part on that and Eric playing below it. It was just — it was something that all guitar players like to do, to go together against somebody that plays really well, and it pushes you up to another level. And so I wanted to do that with Joe on this record, so I kind of designed that whole track with that in mind.

by Barry Ritholtz, The Big Picture |  Read more:

Image: via

Jean-Pierre Lourdeau - Emigrations, 2019
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Experts on Warren's $100 Billion Opioid Plan: 'There's a Tremendous Amount to Like'

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has become known for her lengthy policy proposals ahead of the 2020 election. Her latest one is a detailed plan to tackle the nation’s opioid addiction problem.

In a recent Medium post, Team Warren described the plan as “a comprehensive plan to end the opioid crisis by providing these resources needed to begin treating this epidemic like the public health crisis that it is.”

Warren is partnering with Rep. Elijah Cummings for the CARE Act, which would give $100 billion in federal funding over the next decade to states and communities that have been hit the hardest by opioid addiction because, she stated, “that’s what’s needed to make sure every single person gets the treatment they need.”

‘There’s a tremendous amount to like’

Drug policy experts who spoke with Yahoo Finance praised Warren’s opioid plan.

“There’s a tremendous amount to like here,” said Bradley Stein, director of RAND’s Opioid Policy Center. “The magnitude of the investment really matches the needs of the crisis. A lot of the investment prior to this everyone has recognized as being insufficient or a drop in the bucket. For a crisis of this magnitude, it’s going to take that type of investment.”

States, territories, and tribal governments would receive $4 billion. Another $2.7 billion would go towards the hardest hit counties and cities, with over half of it towards those with the highest overdose levels. Health professionals would get $1.7 billion for public health surveillance, research, and improved training. About $1.1 billion would go towards public and nonprofit entities “on the front lines,” while another $500 million would be given to expanding naloxone access and providing it to first responders, public health departments, and the public.

Warren’s plan would pay raise funds from a proposed ultra-millionaire tax on the richest 75,000 American families. (...)

‘This crisis has been driven by greed‘

In her post, Team Warren singled out OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma — founded and owned by the Sackler family — for its key role in the rise of opioid addiction.

“This crisis has been driven by greed, pure and simple,” the plan stated. “If you don’t believe that, just look at the Sackler family. They own Purdue Pharma, a privately-held pharmaceutical company. Started by three brothers in the 1950s, the Sacklers grew their company into an empire — and got very rich along the way.”

While Marino agreed that greed is a factor, he made it clear that the blame for the number of opioid overdose deaths cannot solely be placed on the Sackler family and Oxycodone.

“There’s also been a lot of other problems,” he said. “Specifically, the government has criminalized opioid use and addressed the supply side, but hasn’t addressed the demand side at all.” (...)

“For Purdue Pharma, we know they did bad things and should be held accountable,” Marino said. At the same time, “focusing on just pharmaceutical companies and criminalizing people [isn’t] going to solve the crisis. I’m not saying they should get a free pass, but there are other issues that we need to focus on, too.”

‘A big deficiency in this proposal’

The primary issue with Warren’s plan, according to experts, involves the number of restrictions on medications for opioid treatment.

The same criticism arose after President Trump signed opioid legislation in October 2018. At the time, RAND’s Drug Policy Research Center co-Director Dr. Rosalie Pacula noted that the bill didn’t eliminate the requirement for physicians to obtain a waiver needed to prescribe buprenorphine, a medication that is crucial for treating opioid addiction.

The reason why she found that to be “really crazy” is because physicians don’t need a special waiver to prescribe addiction-causing opioids to begin with.

“If the issue is fear of getting addicted, we should have a waiver on every opioid prescribed — but we don’t,” Pacula said. “Why make it harder for them to do treatment than for the drug that causes the problem in the first place?”

Marino, the emergency medicine physician, argued that the current restrictions on methadone and buprenorphine medications — two of the best addiction-treating medicines — is “the biggest single issue that could be addressed by our federal government and create the most amount of change with one action.”

He explained: “There’s still significant restrictions where the people I work with, who are physicians or other practitioners, can’t prescribe medications for addiction even if they know it’s safe and know how to do it. Whereas, they could prescribe as much Oxycodone as they want, essentially, with no restrictions.”

Marino added that a situation in which “medicine like buprenorphine that are much safer than Oxycodone are unavailable … it’s a big deficiency in this proposal.” (...)

For the most part, though, Marino said Team Warren’s opioid proposal is “definitely a significant step in the right direction. I don’t think it’s necessarily the perfect solution, but it makes me very happy as someone who sees these patients [with] these problems and has been hoping to get some of these solutions for quite a while.”

by Adriana Belmonte, Yahoo Finance |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/John Minchillo

[ed. Personally, I think financing should be extracted from the pharmaceutical companies responsible (if it wouldn't take years of litigation) or from our bloated $700 billion annual military budget, but that's a minor quibble. Nice to see someone finally get it that politicians and state and federal governments are making the problem worse by focusing on supply side restrictions rather than demand (thereby forcing more and more people out of doctor's offices and medical oversight into risky, unregulated alternatives, and punishing legitimate patients that can no longer obtain their medications).]     

US Press Reaches All-Time Low on Venezuela Coverage

As famed Latin American author Eduardo Galeano once wrote, “every time the US ‘saves’ a country, it converts it into either an insane asylum or a cemetery.” Of course, as we look over the wreckage left by the US in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, we see that this statement is demonstrably true. And yet, now that the US is poised for another intervention, this time in Venezuela, the press is right there again to cheer it along.

Analyzing 76 total press articles of the “elite” press from January 15 to April 15, 2019, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) could find not one voice that opposed Trump’s regime plans in Venezuela. Meanwhile, 54 percent openly supported these plans. Of course, this should not be all too surprising given the press’s usual complicity in past US war efforts — e.g., by pushing such war lies as the Gulf of Tonkin, the killing of babies in Kuwait, the WMDS of Iraq and the alleged Viagra-fueled rapes in Libya. The current war lies are coming fast and furious from such outlets as CNN which lied about seeing Maduro forces lighting aid containers on fire at the Colombian border (it was in fact opposition forces which did so as the NYT admitted two weeks later), and which claimed that US puppet Juan Guaido actually won the presidential election against Nicolas Maduro when in fact Guaido never even ran for president.

What is quite stunning, however, is the total unanimity of the press in uncritically covering and supporting the ongoing coup in Venezuela. This is baffling because the same press outlets which have been rightly critical of Trump for all of his stupidity, lying and meanness, have suddenly found him brilliant, true and benevolent when it comes to Venezuela. This is particularly remarkable given that his partners in this crime are Neo-Con John Bolton; former CIA Director Mike Pompeo who recently joked that the CIA’s true motto is “We lied, We Cheated, We Stole”; and convicted liar Elliott Abrams. As for Abrams, he is infamous for his role in the illegal funding of the Nicaraguan Contras; his covering up of the El Mazote massacre in El Salvador in which around 1000 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed by US-backed forces; and his aiding and abetting the US-backed genocide in Guatemala.

And yet, somehow, we are to believe from our “free” press that this band of rogues is going to deliver democracy and human rights to Venezuela. Never mind the fact that Trump himself is President after losing to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, and that the US, in the words of former President Jimmy Carter, no longer has a functioning democracy. As for Venezuela, on the other hand, Carter has said that its electoral system is “the best in the world.”

Meanwhile, this same captive press incessantly tells of us of all the deprivations and travails in Venezuela while refusing to explain how, as UN Expert Dr. Alfred de Zayas has concluded, this state of affairs is largely the result of brutal US sanctions. Recently, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs co-authored a report showing that, since August of 2017, over 40,000 Venezuelans have died due to the US sanctions which have deprived Venezuela of food and life-saving medicines. But few would know any of this because the voices of de Zayas and Sachs are never heard in the mainstream press.

Also unheard are any of the 6 million Venezuelans who voted for Nicolas Maduro in May of 2018, many of whom turn out for massive pro-government demonstrations. Instead, the press gives ink and air time only to mostly white, well-off and English-speaking individuals who support the opposition, giving the false impression that Maduro has no support.

Moreover, in Orwellian fashion, the press refuses to call the current push for a military uprising in Venezuela a “coup,” while the same time referring to Maduro invariably as “repressive” and as a “dictator,” and his government as a “regime.”

In short, instead of giving two sides of the story, the press gives us one, ignores crucial facts and tells us how we should be viewing the situation in Venezuela. This is not journalism at all, but naked propaganda, and it is shameful.

The fact that, despite all of the US pressure and threats, and despite all of the lies, the Venezuelan people have not risen up en masse in support of Juan Guaido – a man 80 percent of Venezuelans never heard of until he declared himself president with the US’s urging – should tell one that things are not as we are being led to believe.

by Daniel Kovalik, Counterpunch | Read more:
Image: Nathaniel St. Clair
[ed. See also: U.S. federal agents arrest protesters occupying Venezuelan Embassy (Reuters) and, Is John Bolton the most dangerous man in the world? (The Guardian).]

Winston Smith
via:

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.

Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."

According to Michels all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank and file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.

Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: Robert Michels

AI Defends Itself Against Malicious Messages Hidden in Speech

Computer scientists have devised a way of making computer speech recognition safer from malicious attacks — messages that sound benign to human ears but hide commands that can hijack a device, for example through the virtual personal assistants that are becoming widespread in homes or on mobile phones.

Much of the progress made in artificial intelligence (AI) in the past decade — driverless cars, playing Go, language translation — has come from artificial neural networks, programs inspired by the brain. This technique, also called deep learning when applied at a large scale, finds patterns in data on its own, without needing explicit instruction. But deep-learning algorithms often work in mysterious ways, and their unpredictability opens them up to exploitation.

As a result, the patterns that AI uses to, say, recognize images, might not be the ones humans use. Researchers have been able to subtly alter images and other inputs so that to people, they look identical, but to computers, they differ. Last year, for example, computer scientists showed that by placing a few innocuous stickers on a stop sign, they could convince an AI program that it was a speed-limit sign. Other efforts have produced glasses that make facial-recognition software misidentify the wearer as actress Milla Jovovich. These inputs are called adversarial examples.

Sounds suspicious

Audio adversarial examples exist, too. One project altered a clip of someone saying, “Without the data set, the article is useless” so that it was transcribed as, “Okay Google, browse to evil.com.” But a paper presented on 9 May at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) in New Orleans, Louisiana, offers a way of detecting such manipulations.

Bo Li, a computer scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her co-authors wrote an algorithm that transcribes a full audio clip and, separately, just one portion of it. If the transcription of that single piece doesn’t closely match the corresponding part of the full transcription, the program throws a red flag — the sample might have been compromised.

The authors showed that for several types of attack, their method almost always detected the meddling. Further, even if an attacker was aware of the defence system, attacks were still caught most of the time.

Li says that she was surprised by the method’s robustness, and that — as it often happens in deep learning — it is unclear why exactly it works.

by Matthew Hutson, Nature |  Read more:
[ed. We're already playing catch-up.]

Are Voters Just Lemmings?

In 2008, the political scientists Marty Cohen, David Karol, Hans Noel, and John Zaller released a book called The Party Decides: Presidential Nominations Before and After Reform. The basic argument is that, despite the ostensible democratic machinery of state primaries, party elites were the ones who really made the decisions. The authors showed that even after the presidential primary reforms in the late ’60s and early ’70s made the nomination process more reliant on voters, the candidate who collected the most endorsements from party grandees still ultimately locked up the nomination.

A semi-bastardized version of this argument quickly became conventional wisdom among the pundit class. Although The Party Decides itself contained extensive caveats and qualifications (especially concerning its minuscule sample size), the book came to be treated as all but ironclad proof that the voters had no say whatsoever in the selection of their party’s nominee. When it comes to presidential primaries at least, The Voters Are Stupid. They might think they have some say in choosing their party’s nominee—said the wonks, nodding sagely to one another—but in reality, they were merely validating the pre-existing choices of the elite class.

But by 2015, this consensus was melting like snow before a stream of hot urine, as Donald Trump contemptuously bulldozed the Republican establishment and locked up that party’s nomination. Indeed, not only did he casually brush aside unified opposition of nearly the entire Republican elite, but he did it despite having no formal political experience of any kind. It seemed the voters had some kind of a voice after all.

But this changed political context did not spell the end of the Stupid Voter narrative: It merely changed form. Whereas voters were previously deemed stupid because they had no influence on political outcomes, they were now deemed stupid because they had too much influence, influence that thwarted the wise and sensible aims of political elites who otherwise would have governed in the public interest. In 2016, political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels published a much more ambitious book called Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government. It is, basically, The General Theory of Stupid Voters. It has become the latest conventional wisdom about democracy, garnering near-universal praise in the elite press, from the London School of Economics to Foreign Affairs to the New York Review of Books. The Economist deems it “the most influential recent book on voting.” (...)

First, let’s take a look at the central argument of Democracy for Realists. Achen and Bartels assemble a huge body of evidence to demonstrate that the voting public is vastly ignorant about policy, tends to rationalize pre-existing biases, and blames the incumbent party for things they could not possibly control, like shark attacks. Even when voters can be shown to be making a sort of judgment about political success on the merits—namely, voting the bums out during times of economic crisis—their decision tends to be severely myopic. Voters generally judge economic performance only on the last few months before election day, not based on how the whole last electoral term has gone.

The authors take aim at something they call the “folk theory” of democracy, which they define as the idea that democracy is about simply representing the will of the voters. The “folk theory” of democracy is the animating force behind initiatives to increase popular participation in decision-making by adding ballot initiative and referendum procedures to various constitutions, so that “the people” can have a direct voice on policy matters. The authors demonstrate many severe problems with this sort of direct democracy — most notably, that it is at least as vulnerable to elite influence as any other sort of democracy, if not more so. Ordinary citizens really are not equipped to make decisions on complicated policy questions, and have often shot themselves in the foot by voting down water fluoridation measures and so forth (often egged on by well-funded right-wing extremists).

The trouble starts with their formal model of the folk theory, which they represent with an elaborate mathematical system descended from neoclassical economics called the “median voter theorem.” By this view, voters select candidates closest to their own ideology, and assuming voter preferences are represented by a single left-right spectrum with two equal-sized peaks, parties will rationally appeal to the median voter directly in the political middle. This predicts that each party will have the exact same centrist platform. The “rationally ignorant” median voter doesn’t have to do anything to see his preferences validated by the political system.

This model was directly based on similar economic models, which take a lot of assumed background conditions, run them through some intimidating math, and produce a result demonstrating that free market institutions automatically produce the best of all possible worlds. Voting, it’s just like buying peanut butter! It’s sort of an appealing notion, so long as it doesn’t make any close contact with reality.

Achen and Bartels blow this theory out of the water, thus defeating their conception of the folk theory of democracy. Most obviously, the parties do not have the same platform and never have, not even during the mid-20th-century period of relative political consensus when this kind of model was somewhat plausible. But since 1980 especially, the idea that the parties don’t have strong and increasingly stark disagreements is prima facie ridiculous.

The authors have a lot of smart things to say about the negative influence economics-style reasoning has had on political science. But they don’t consider the idea that using the median voter theorem to represent the folk theory may itself be misleading.

This can best be seen in their implicit theory of reasoning, which is based on the same neoclassical bullshit. They define it in exclusively individual terms—a fundamental premise of this style of economics. By their lights, political reasoning happens when someone has pre-existing, fully worked-out ideology, and perfect knowledge of how the political system has affected their personal well-being , who then calculates the most rational political decision in terms of their own pocketbook and principles.

It is true that virtually nobody behaves in this way. Many people don’t have a clue what each party stands for, while others are egregiously mistaken about who believes what. But more importantly, Achen and Bartels argue that even very well-informed people tend to rationalize their group identities by adopting whatever the consensus view is—and then argue that, by definition, adopting a consensus view cannot be a “reasoned” decision: “[T]he political preferences and judgments that look and feel like the bases of partisanship and voting behavior are, in reality, often the consequences of party and group loyalties … the more information a voter has, often the better able she is to bolster her identities with rational-sounding reasons.”

There are a lot of problems with the premise of this argument.

by Ryan Cooper, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: Matt Lubchansky

Bill Nye On The Green New Deal

[ed. I don't usually watch John Oliver, but Bill Nye at 18:20 - 19:10 goes all Pulp Fiction on climate change. MFs. (Also check out: 10:10 - 11:45. I want to do this with my grandkids.] 

Ramadan

Introduction

Ramadan is considered the holiest month of the year for Muslims. In Ramadan, Muslims fast from food and drink during the sunlit hours as a means of learning self-control, gratitude, and compassion for those less fortunate. Ramadan is a month of intense spiritual rejuvenation with a heightened focus on devotion, during which Muslims spend extra time reading the Qur’an and performing special prayers. Those unable to fast, such as pregnant or nursing women, the sick, or elderly people and children, are exempt from fasting.

When does Ramadan take place?

Ramadan is the 9th month of the Islamic calendar, which is based on a 12 month lunar year of approximately 354 days. Because the lunar year is 11 days shorter than the solar year, each lunar month moves 11 days earlier each year. It takes 33 solar years for the lunar months to complete a full cycle and return to the same season. This year, the month long fast of Ramadan is set to begin on May 6th, 2019. The month traditionally begins and ends based on the sighting of the first crescent of the new moon. Starting on May 4th, Muslims throughout the United States and the rest of the world will begin to search the sky for the new crescent, or in some cases, they will follow a pre-determined date based on astronomical calculation. During this month, Muslims fast from pre-dawn until sunset, as a means to grow in God-consciousness and moral excellence.

The Length and Purpose of Fasting

Muslims fast from pre-dawn to sunset, a fast of between 11-16 hours depending on the time of year for a period of 29-30 days. The fast of Ramadan entails forgoing food and drink, and if married, abstaining from sex during the fasting hours. For Muslims, Ramadan is a time to train themselves both physically and spiritually by avoiding any negative acts such as gossiping, backbiting, lying or arguing. Muslims welcome Ramadan as an opportunity for self-reflection, and spiritual improvement. Ramadan is also a highly social time as Muslims invite each other to break fast together and meet for prayers at the mosque.

The ultimate goal of fasting is gaining greater God-consciousness, in Arabic, taqwa, signifying a state of constant awareness of God. From this awareness a person should gain discipline, self-restraint and a greater incentive to do good and avoid wrong. In commemoration of the revelation of the Qur’an, Muslim’s holy book, which began during the month of Ramadan, Muslims attempt to read the entire book during Ramadan and gather nightly at mosques to hold special prayers during which the entire Qur’an is recited by the end of the month. (...)

Family Routines

A Muslim family usually rises about 5:00 a.m. before the first of dawn and eats a modest, breakfast-like meal called suhur. After the meal, the family performs the morning prayer, and depending on the circumstances, the family goes back to bed or begins the day. Particularly during the long summer months, people often take a nap in the late afternoon after work or school. At sunset, family members break the fast with a few dates and water, and depending on the culture, other light foods such as soup, appetizers or fruit. This is referred to as iftar which means “breaking the fast.” After performing the sunset prayers, the family eats dinner. Inviting guests to break the fast or going to someone else’s house for iftar is very common in Ramadan. Many families then go to the mosque for the night prayer and a special Ramadan prayer called taraweeh. After completing their prayers, the families return home around 11:45 p.m. (All of these times vary depending on the time of year, with shorter days in the winter and longer days in the summer.)

by ING |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: IHOP And Ramadan: A Uniquely American-Muslim Tradition (WAMU 88.5).]

Amazon Offers Employees $10K and 3 Months’ Pay to Start Their Own Delivery Businesses

Following news of Amazon’s plans to reduce Prime shipping down to one day, the company this morning announced an expansion of its Delivery Service Partner program, which now includes a new incentive that encourages existing Amazon employees to start their own package delivery company. The partner program, first announced last year, includes access to Amazon’s delivery technology, hands-on training and a suite of other discounts for assets and services like vehicle leasing and insurance. For employees, it now includes a $10,000 incentive, too.

The retailer says it will fund startup costs up to $10,000, as well as the equivalent of three months of the former employee’s last gross salary, to give the employees the ability to get their new business off the ground without worrying about a break in pay.

Amazon said last year that people were able to start their own delivery business with only $10,000. At the time, military veterans were able to get that $10K reimbursed, as Amazon was investing a million into a program that funded their startup costs.

The new incentive to do the same for any employee — and offer them three months’ pay on top of that — is a much broader commitment. And it’s one that makes sense, given Amazon’s lofty ambitions to double the speed of its shipments.

Employees — or any other entrepreneur — who wants to become a delivery partner, are able to lease customized blue delivery vans with the Amazon smile logo on the side, and take advantage of other discounts, including fuel, insurance, branded uniforms and more.

Before the launch of the partner program, Amazon had relied on its Amazon Flex crowdsourced workforce to help it deliver packages to help it reduce costs. But these gig workers often faced too much uncertainty with regard to their pay because of things like fluctuating gas prices that cut into profits, lack of insurance and the general logistical challenges that come from trying to deliver packages from a smaller, unbranded personal vehicle.

Delivery partners, meanwhile, could earn as much as $300,000 in annual profit by growing their fleet to 40 vehicles, Amazon claims. The company said last year it expected that hundreds of small business owners will come to hire tens of thousands of drivers across the U.S.

That is already happening. Since the launch of the program in June 2018, more than 200 small businesses have hired “thousands” of local drivers, Amazon says this morning. It expects to add hundreds more small businesses this year, as well.

by Sarah Perez, TechCrunch |  Read more:

Image: Amazon

[ed. Hello, FedEx and UPS. See also: Amazon rolls out machines that pack orders and replace jobs (Reuters) and, since we're talking about corporations that exploit the gig economy: Democrats have an ambitious plan to save American labor unions (Vox).]

Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset

Is This the Warriors' Last Stand? Inside a Golden Basketball Sunset (SI)

Image: John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated

If God Is Dead, Your Time Is Everything

At a recent conference on belief and unbelief hosted by the journal Salmagundi, the novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson confessed to knowing some good people who are atheists, but lamented that she has yet to hear “the good Atheist position articulated.” She explained, “I cannot engage with an atheism that does not express itself.”

She who hath ears to hear, let her hear. One of the most beautifully succinct expressions of secular faith in our bounded life on earth was provided not long after Christ supposedly conquered death, by Pliny the Elder, who called down “a plague on this mad idea that life is renewed by death!” Pliny argued that belief in an afterlife removes “Nature’s particular boon,” the great blessing of death, and merely makes dying more anguished by adding anxiety about the future to the familiar grief of departure. How much easier, he continues, “for each person to trust in himself,” and for us to assume that death will offer exactly the same “freedom from care” that we experienced before we were born: oblivion. (...)

Or James Baldwin, that great recovering Christian, who once wrote, “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being.” Or Primo Levi, who, when faced with death in Auschwitz, was briefly tempted to pray for rescue, and then did not pray, lest he blaspheme his own secularity. Or Camus, especially in “The Myth of Sisyphus” (a philosophical articulation of the atheistic world view), and in his rapturous unfinished novel, “The First Man” (a novelistic embodiment of the secular world view), in which his alter ego is possessed, from childhood, of “a love of bodies” that exalted him when he was able “just to enter into their radiance, to lean his shoulder against his friend’s with a great sensation of confidence and letting go, and almost to faint when a woman’s hand lingered a moment on his in the crowd of the trolley—the longing, yes, to live, to live still more, to immerse himself in the greatest warmth this earth could give him.”

A systematic articulation of the atheistic world view, the one Marilynne Robinson may have been waiting for, is provided by an important new book, Martin Hägglund’s “This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom” (Pantheon). Hägglund doesn’t mention any of the writers I quoted, because he is working philosophically, from general principles. But his book can be seen as a long footnote to Pliny, and shares the Roman historian’s humane emphasis: we need death, as a blessing; eternity is at best incoherent or meaningless, and at worst terrifying; and we should trust in ourselves rather than put our faith in some kind of transcendent rescue from the joy and pain of life. Hägglund’s book involves deep and demanding readings of St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Martin Luther King, Jr. (with some Theodor Adorno, Charles Taylor, Thomas Piketty, and Naomi Klein thrown in), but it is always lucid, and is at its heart remarkably simple. You could extract its essence and offer it to thirsty young atheists.

His argument is that religious traditions subordinate the finite (the knowledge that life will end) to the eternal (the “sure and certain hope,” to borrow a phrase from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, that we will be released from pain and suffering and mortality into the peace of everlasting life). A characteristic formulation, from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, goes as follows: “Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” You die into Christ and thus into eternity, and life is just the antechamber to an everlasting realm that is far more wondrous than anything on earth. Hägglund, by contrast, wants us to fix our ideals and attention on this life, and more of it—Camus’s “longing, yes, to live, to live still more.” Hägglund calls this “living on,” as opposed to living forever. (...)

The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist (Hägglund is uninterested in the pin dancing of proof and disproof) but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration. Hägglund, who was born and reared in Sweden and now teaches comparative literature at Yale, begins his book by telling us that he returns every summer to the northern-Swedish landscape he knows from his childhood. His love of the place is premised on the knowledge that he will not always be able to return; that he, or it, will not be there forever:

When I return to the same landscape every summer, part of what makes it so poignant is that I may never see it again. Moreover, I care for the preservation of the landscape because I am aware that even the duration of the natural environment is not guaranteed. Likewise, my devotion to the ones I love is inseparable from the sense that they cannot be taken for granted. . . . Our time together is illuminated by the sense that it will not last forever and we need to take care of one another because our lives are fragile.

Once we seriously consider the consequences of existence without end, the prospect is not only horrifying but meaningless (as the philosopher Bernard Williams argued years ago). An eternity based on what Louise Glück calls “absence of change” would be not a rescue from anything but an end of everything meaningful. Hägglund puts forth his eloquent case: “Rather than making our dreams come true, it would obliterate who we are. To be invulnerable to grief is not to be consummated; it is to be deprived of the capacity to care. And to rest in peace is not to be fulfilled: It is to be dead.”

A liberal rabbi or pastor might object that Hägglund is unhelpfully hung up on eternity. Eternity is not at the heart of what such people care about; they hardly ever spend time envisaging it. But Hägglund’s central claim is that a good deal of what passes for religious aspiration is secular aspiration that doesn’t know itself as such. He wants to out religionists as closet secularists. When we ardently hope that the lives of people we love will go on and on, we don’t really want them to be eternal. We simply want those lives to last “for a longer time.” So his reply would probably be: Just admit that your real concerns and values are secular ones, grounded in the frailty, the finitude, and the rescue of this life. He makes a similar point in relation to Buddhism. He is happy to welcome, as essentially secular, those popular forms of meditation and mindfulness which insist on our being “present in the moment”; but he chides as religious and deluded those doctrinal aspects of Buddhism which insist on detachment, release from anxiety, and an overcoming of worldly desire. (...)

It is the same when Augustine, in the “Confessions,” mourns the loss of a close friend—of a friendship that was “sweet to me beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced”—only to remind his readers that, as a good Christian, he should not have loved someone who could be so easily lost, rather than loving God, who can never be lost. It is the same when Martin Luther, grieving the death of his daughter in 1542, reminds his congregation after the funeral that “we Christians ought not to mourn.” And the same when Kierkegaard, in “Fear and Trembling,” praises Abraham for being ready to sacrifice his son Isaac at God’s command, sure in the knowledge that God will redeem his loss. In all these cases, Hägglund identifies the true dynamic, the true anguish, as secular desire—a natural anxiety about loss, a natural mourning of the lost one—horribly distorted by its corrective religious gloss. The supposed attraction of eternity, Hägglund writes, is that you cannot lose anything there. “But if you can lose nothing in eternity,” he goes on, “it is because there is literally nothing left to lose.”

by James Wood, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Deanna Halsall
[ed. And if there is an afterlife? See: Don Juan in Hell (Act III), Man and Superman (George Bernard Shaw)].