Monday, June 3, 2019
Kelp Has Been Slow To Catch On
A few years ago, many news stories announced that "kelp is the new kale." That the global seaweed harvest is worth more than lemons and limes. That it's the "next great food craze." And that it will be "everywhere by the next decade."
Where are we now?
Kelp is a type of seaweed that grows in large underwater forests and looks a little like green lasagna noodles with curly edges.
Seaweed farming has a lot going for it: It doesn't require any fertilizer, can actually be used as fertilizer, helps fight climate change, and cleans up ocean water by taking in nitrogen compounds. It's also a nutritious sea vegetable — rich in vitamins C and K and minerals like iron and calcium.
But now, the growing industry in the U.S. needs to build infrastructure and to change people's tastes on a larger scale.
Bren Smith is a leading advocate for what he calls restorative ocean farming — growing seaweed alongside shellfish like mussels and oysters, which absorb carbon dioxide and nitrogen compounds, protect shorelines from storm surges, and rebuild marine ecosystems. He co-founded a nonprofit called GreenWave to promote the movement and train aspiring farmers.
"The momentum's been unbelievable ... we have requests to start farms in every coastal state in North America, 20 countries around the world," Smith says.
Smith's farm is just off the coast of Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. There are now farms up and down the New England coast, with more getting started in California and the Pacific Northwest.
"We're growing, and people are eating it," Smith says. "This isn't like a cute little Brooklyn bee farm project creating nice little bottles of honey at the farmers market. ... There are hundreds of thousands of pounds being produced and sold at this point."
Kelp can be used as a pasta substitute, as noodles, sautéed with butter and mushrooms, or ground into powder to use as seasoning. High end restaurants have also used seaweed as a side vegetable and on cookies.
However, some industry specialists say growing seaweed has become perhaps too popular. Anoushka Concepcion is an assistant extension educator with the Connecticut Sea Grant; she works with seafood producers and researchers and answers questions about the latest technology and trends.
"The idea sort of took off before all the practical challenges could be addressed," Concepcion says. "Farmers are finding it difficult now just to get rid of their seaweed."
Where are we now?
Kelp is a type of seaweed that grows in large underwater forests and looks a little like green lasagna noodles with curly edges.
Seaweed farming has a lot going for it: It doesn't require any fertilizer, can actually be used as fertilizer, helps fight climate change, and cleans up ocean water by taking in nitrogen compounds. It's also a nutritious sea vegetable — rich in vitamins C and K and minerals like iron and calcium.But now, the growing industry in the U.S. needs to build infrastructure and to change people's tastes on a larger scale.
Bren Smith is a leading advocate for what he calls restorative ocean farming — growing seaweed alongside shellfish like mussels and oysters, which absorb carbon dioxide and nitrogen compounds, protect shorelines from storm surges, and rebuild marine ecosystems. He co-founded a nonprofit called GreenWave to promote the movement and train aspiring farmers.
"The momentum's been unbelievable ... we have requests to start farms in every coastal state in North America, 20 countries around the world," Smith says.
Smith's farm is just off the coast of Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. There are now farms up and down the New England coast, with more getting started in California and the Pacific Northwest.
"We're growing, and people are eating it," Smith says. "This isn't like a cute little Brooklyn bee farm project creating nice little bottles of honey at the farmers market. ... There are hundreds of thousands of pounds being produced and sold at this point."
Kelp can be used as a pasta substitute, as noodles, sautéed with butter and mushrooms, or ground into powder to use as seasoning. High end restaurants have also used seaweed as a side vegetable and on cookies.
However, some industry specialists say growing seaweed has become perhaps too popular. Anoushka Concepcion is an assistant extension educator with the Connecticut Sea Grant; she works with seafood producers and researchers and answers questions about the latest technology and trends.
"The idea sort of took off before all the practical challenges could be addressed," Concepcion says. "Farmers are finding it difficult now just to get rid of their seaweed."
by Alan Yu, NPR | Read more:
Image: Flip Nicklin/Plainpicture via
A Kafkaesque List of Things
Today is the 95th anniversary of the death of Franz Kafka. And I love Franz Kafka. He was one of my earliest literary obsessions—I even read Philip Roth’s The Breast, for him. I know: sacrifice. So on the day of his death, I decided to grease (if only slightly) what really must be a constant spinning of his corpse in his grave by collating a number of things that we, as a societal group, have decided to count as “Kafkaesque.”
Many people have pointed out that the term “Kafkaesque” is grossly overused. Others have noted how it is quite often misused. For the record, in 1991, Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way:
But that’s no really excuse for the following list of things that have been called, at one time or another, “Kafkaesque”—from the deadly serious to the extremely silly, from the actually Kafkaesque to the merely annoying. I present this list with my apologies to Franz.
Many people have pointed out that the term “Kafkaesque” is grossly overused. Others have noted how it is quite often misused. For the record, in 1991, Kafka biographer Frederick R. Karl defined the term this way:
Other definitions suggest that it describes something with “oppressive or nightmarish qualities,” or “having a nightmarishly complex, bizarre, or illogical quality.” Sure, all of the above. Maybe the problem is that the term only technically (or at least etymologically) means “like Kafka,” so it could really refer to any element the user has identified both in the writer’s work and in the world.What’s Kafkaesque is when you enter a surreal world in which all your control patterns, all your plans, the whole way in which you have configured your own behavior, begins to fall to pieces, when you find yourself against a force that does not lend itself to the way you perceive the world. You don’t give up, you don’t lie down and die. What you do is struggle against this with all of your equipment, with whatever you have. But of course you don’t stand a chance. That’s Kafkaesque.
But that’s no really excuse for the following list of things that have been called, at one time or another, “Kafkaesque”—from the deadly serious to the extremely silly, from the actually Kafkaesque to the merely annoying. I present this list with my apologies to Franz.
The Annuity Trap That Teachers Need to Avoid
Tony Isola was the kind of guy other teachers liked to approach for help with their retirement plans. Which investments should they be in? They felt Tony would know, because he used to be a currency trader, and because his wife, Dina Isola, worked on Wall Street. Plus, a guy who could teach social studies to hormone-addled middle schoolers was good at making simple financial concepts intelligible.
“Ask me a question, and I’ll give you the answer,” he’d say. “Usually, it’s ‘I don’t know.’ ” But his colleagues didn’t even know where to start. So, save regularly, he told them. Stay in the market through thick and thin—it will reward you. “Focus on things you have control over: Your costs. Your behavior.” They asked Tony to look at their statements.
He couldn’t believe what he saw. Many of his fellow teachers were in high-cost annuities, lured by tax-deferred growth and a lifetime stream of income. It made no sense—savers don’t need income; they need growth. And they don’t need tax-deferred products, since their retirement plans were already tax shelters. For these unnecessary “features,” the annuities imposed high sales charges on every paycheck withdrawal. And a 2% annual management fee. And large surrender fees of, say, 7%.
Why was this even possible? Teacher retirement plans, known as 403(b)s, are similar to private-sector 401(k)s, with one important difference: Because they evolved separately, they are exempt from protections of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. That act says 401(k) plan providers have a fiduciary duty to participants—in other words, they have to put the investors’ interests first. Teachers’ 403(b) plans are sold directly to individuals, rather than to employers, so the interest of the salesman was coming first. “Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher and they’ve given you a 400-page prospectus about variable annuities,” Tony says. That’s why three-quarters of $1 trillion in 403(b) plans are in annuities, which enjoy record sales. Insurance is a high-commission business, which you can see from Tony’s Twitter feed, where he likes to share screenshots of insurance agent literature. One says “6% commission.…Finally! A short-term FA that pays you the commission you deserve.”
Dina, too, was horrified. At firms where she had worked, brokers were rewarded with lavish vacations for beating sales quotas. When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a broker tried to make her mother liquidate their portfolio, creating an unneeded tax bill.
Thus began a journey to educate teachers about retirement and to push for reforms—specifically, that 403(b) investors should have the same protections as people in 401(k) plans. In 2005, Tony began offering financial planning while keeping his social-studies job. A couple of years later, after their twins turned three and Dina left her job in financial communications, she joined his advisory firm. They both started blogs: His is called A Teachable Moment, and hers, Real$martica. In 2015, Tony decided to work full-time as an advisor. He and Dina joined Ritholtz Asset Management, specifically to manage 403(b) plans. Operating from Stony Brook, N.Y., they manage $100 million in assets, including $12 million in 403(b) plans for teachers. Using index funds, they average 0.62% in annual fees in each account. There is no account minimum for 403(b) plans.
The stories continued to make their heads spin. How high were the fees? One young teacher was paying 3% a year to own the market, with a guarantee that he’d get his original investment at the end of 20 years. Dina shook her head. There has never been a 20-year period in the stock market’s history when it has lost value. Another teacher was paying $2,418 a year in fees on an $80,000 account. To get out, she needed to pay $3,000 in surrender fees.
“Ask me a question, and I’ll give you the answer,” he’d say. “Usually, it’s ‘I don’t know.’ ” But his colleagues didn’t even know where to start. So, save regularly, he told them. Stay in the market through thick and thin—it will reward you. “Focus on things you have control over: Your costs. Your behavior.” They asked Tony to look at their statements.
He couldn’t believe what he saw. Many of his fellow teachers were in high-cost annuities, lured by tax-deferred growth and a lifetime stream of income. It made no sense—savers don’t need income; they need growth. And they don’t need tax-deferred products, since their retirement plans were already tax shelters. For these unnecessary “features,” the annuities imposed high sales charges on every paycheck withdrawal. And a 2% annual management fee. And large surrender fees of, say, 7%.Why was this even possible? Teacher retirement plans, known as 403(b)s, are similar to private-sector 401(k)s, with one important difference: Because they evolved separately, they are exempt from protections of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act. That act says 401(k) plan providers have a fiduciary duty to participants—in other words, they have to put the investors’ interests first. Teachers’ 403(b) plans are sold directly to individuals, rather than to employers, so the interest of the salesman was coming first. “Imagine you’re a kindergarten teacher and they’ve given you a 400-page prospectus about variable annuities,” Tony says. That’s why three-quarters of $1 trillion in 403(b) plans are in annuities, which enjoy record sales. Insurance is a high-commission business, which you can see from Tony’s Twitter feed, where he likes to share screenshots of insurance agent literature. One says “6% commission.…Finally! A short-term FA that pays you the commission you deserve.”
Dina, too, was horrified. At firms where she had worked, brokers were rewarded with lavish vacations for beating sales quotas. When her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a broker tried to make her mother liquidate their portfolio, creating an unneeded tax bill.
Thus began a journey to educate teachers about retirement and to push for reforms—specifically, that 403(b) investors should have the same protections as people in 401(k) plans. In 2005, Tony began offering financial planning while keeping his social-studies job. A couple of years later, after their twins turned three and Dina left her job in financial communications, she joined his advisory firm. They both started blogs: His is called A Teachable Moment, and hers, Real$martica. In 2015, Tony decided to work full-time as an advisor. He and Dina joined Ritholtz Asset Management, specifically to manage 403(b) plans. Operating from Stony Brook, N.Y., they manage $100 million in assets, including $12 million in 403(b) plans for teachers. Using index funds, they average 0.62% in annual fees in each account. There is no account minimum for 403(b) plans.
The stories continued to make their heads spin. How high were the fees? One young teacher was paying 3% a year to own the market, with a guarantee that he’d get his original investment at the end of 20 years. Dina shook her head. There has never been a 20-year period in the stock market’s history when it has lost value. Another teacher was paying $2,418 a year in fees on an $80,000 account. To get out, she needed to pay $3,000 in surrender fees.
by Leslie P. Norton, Barron's | Read more:
Image: Twitter
[ed. See also: Confusing Options May Be Coming to Your 401(k). It Could Cost You. (NY Times).]
[ed. See also: Confusing Options May Be Coming to Your 401(k). It Could Cost You. (NY Times).]
Sunday, June 2, 2019
Our College Sports System is Broken
The college admissions scandal dubbed Operation Varsity Blues has served up a powerful cocktail of outrage and schadenfreude. We’ve witnessed unabashed “Aunt Becky” blithely signing autographs outside Boston’s federal courthouse and learned about CEO dads staging photos of their fake-athlete kids as haplessly as Mr. Felicity Huffman’s car salesman character in Fargoattempted fraud with his pencil.
The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.
Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.
So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.
The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.
It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?
The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.
Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.
Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.
The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”
The details exposing the vanity and amorality of the rich and famous who used the so-called side door to get their kids into elite colleges are so delicious that they can mask a darker truth: When it comes to college sports, these grasping parents, entitled offspring, scheming advisers, and corrupt coaches aren’t the only ones who’ve lost their way.
Girls and boys are being saddled with adult-strength pressure to secure their future by delivering on the field or court, leading to the craziness of recruits committing to college teams even before they’ve had a chance to finish middle school. Meanwhile, youth sports have become beset with runaway professionalization, commercialization, and overuse injuries. And an overall sense of panic has taken hold of many parents who spend years chasing the rabbit of college scholarships for their children and become desperate for a return on their investment of so much time and so many resources.Please don’t misunderstand me. I love college sports. Although my undistinguished athletic career ended when I left high school, my connection to sports never did. In college, two of my closest friends led Tufts’ Division III football team. I wrote a book about the power of high school basketball to help propel boys out of Boston’s toughest neighborhoods and onto college campuses that offered them the promise of a better future. As a student, a journalist, a mentor, a parent, and a fan, I’ve seen sports at their transcendent best.
So I take no joy in reporting that our college sports system is fundamentally broken.
The American higher education system is the only one on the planet that is also intertwined with a professional-in-all-but-name, multibillion-dollar college sports system that can warp academics and sometimes even swallow it whole. We see this on the Division I level, of course, but the problems go all the way down to Division III. And the damage is increasingly leaching into fields far from campus. Remember, the side door through the athletics department, which rich and famous parents allegedly exploited, was available only because our unhealthy emphasis on sports had already distorted the college admissions process.
It’s time that we all ask ourselves: What are we really doing here?
The outsized influence of sports on campus is not a new problem. Robin Lester, in his book on the history of football at the University of Chicago, describes how the Chicago superintendent of schools accused shameless college coaches at Chicago and Michigan of “practically stealing boys out of high school for athletic purposes” before they could even earn their diplomas. When did he level his accusation? Try 1903. Just two years later, Harvard hired its first paid football coach, at almost twice the average salary of a full professor.
Before we get to the abuses in lower-profile, lower-level college sports, let’s start where the insanity began: big-money football and men’s basketball programs. If you haven’t read the 2011 Atlantic piece “The Shame of College Sports,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian Taylor Branch, it’s truly worth your time. Even eight years later, almost all the points in Branch’s indictment of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and its top Division I programs hold up. How pioneering NCAA honcho Walter Byers — he of the toupee and cowboy boots — cagily crafted the term “student-athlete” in the 1950s. How colleges have since used that magical hyphenate as a fig leaf to avoid having to pay athletes in top programs for all the revenue they bring in to university coffers, and to avoid having to pay out workers’ compensation claims when student-athletes get injured “on the job.” And, most of all, how the fiction of amateurism pushed by the NCAA denies many top college athletes a genuine college education and all top college athletes their true economic rights. This fiction reduces them to serfs who are perpetually at risk of punishment for violating the overlord’s regime of arcane, arbitrary rules.
Imagine if Harvard had classified Mark Zuckerberg as a “student-technologist” and demanded ownership of Facebook (total valuation: more than half a trillion dollars) because he created the platform as an undergraduate. Or if UCLA had garnisheed “student-actor” James Franco’s take from starring in Spider-Man 3 (worldwide gross: $890 million) while he was enrolled there.
The only point from Branch’s 2011 argument that doesn’t hold up is his confidence that several lawsuits threatened the NCAA’s Vulcan grip on the college game. During a recent conversation, Branch admits to me that he was overly optimistic. “They’re like the Vatican,” he says. “They’re going to hang onto their lock on the market as long as they can. Reform has got to be imposed on them.”
by Neil Swidey, Boston Review | Read more:
Image: Adobe Stock
Am I Too Poor to Play Golf?
A few years back, I was traveling down the West Coast when I realized I was near a famous course. For the heck of it, I went online to check if a last-minute tee time was available. I can’t recall if I could get on, but I remember doing a double take at the green fee, which was slightly more than my weekly salary.
Looking back, I’m shocked at how shocked I was. What was I expecting? It costs me at least $80 to play at my local courses. It stands to reason I might need to borrow against my 401k to play a world-renowned course.
Eighty dollars is about the average weekend rate for the three public golf courses closest to me, one of which is a city-run venue. That’s just for the tee time; if I want to grab a hot dog and Coke at the turn, or a couple drinks after the round, add another $20. Forget hobby; at those prices, golf really is an addiction.
I have a stable income with my family’s business, and I’m good at it, too, recognized as one of the Top 40 Under 40 in my industry. My wife has a steady job as well. At first glance, we shouldn’t have to think twice about our recreation budget. However, we own a home, have car and school payments, and are saving to start a family—realities most young couples face. That we reside in Connecticut, one of the most expensive states for living in the country, doesn’t help. In short, dropping $80 for 18 holes is a difficult decision for me. (...)
Am I too poor to play golf?
That’s not self-pity; my friends—all relatively in the same tax bracket—discuss it as well. I know I’m well off compared to a lot of people, but golf makes me question that.
It’s a feeling that can lead to cognitive dissonance when my friends and I play. Instead of standing on the first tee ready for our round, we think, Well, let’s hope this is worth it, because there goes getting dinner and a movie. It’s hard enough to hit the fairway as is. Add that thought, and, well, no wonder my scores stink. (Maybe I’d consider taking lessons if they weren’t $120 an hour.)
When I hear about initiatives designed to grow the game—which typically include faster pace or ancillary-themed activities like Topgolf—they don’t resonate with my friends and me. If we want to make golf more accessible, that conversation starts and ends with lowering the cost of entry.
Many public courses have junior rates and programs that make the game affordable for kids, which is great. But once kids turn 18 years old, they’re often out of luck. Why can’t more courses designate a day or league, or perhaps six and 12-hole rounds, at lower prices? There are pockets around the country with such endeavors, and The First Tee does its part at the youth level, but it hasn’t spread around the country yet.
Yes, it will attract inexperienced golfers, which brings its share of etiquette breaches and slow play, but new customers are something the game needs. Discounted greens fees could be exactly what’s needed to open the funnel.
What’s worse, some of the public club pros and workers understand this, but far too often these decisions are made by public administrators, not golf-specific officials. It’s tough to get that conversation started when they view the sport not as a passion but as a number in the accounting books.
by Brian Zimmerli (with Joel Beall), Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Guy Billout
[ed. It's always been a problem. What's really frustrating is to pay crazy prices then feel like you're stuck in a traffic jam once you get on the course.]
Looking back, I’m shocked at how shocked I was. What was I expecting? It costs me at least $80 to play at my local courses. It stands to reason I might need to borrow against my 401k to play a world-renowned course.
Eighty dollars is about the average weekend rate for the three public golf courses closest to me, one of which is a city-run venue. That’s just for the tee time; if I want to grab a hot dog and Coke at the turn, or a couple drinks after the round, add another $20. Forget hobby; at those prices, golf really is an addiction.I have a stable income with my family’s business, and I’m good at it, too, recognized as one of the Top 40 Under 40 in my industry. My wife has a steady job as well. At first glance, we shouldn’t have to think twice about our recreation budget. However, we own a home, have car and school payments, and are saving to start a family—realities most young couples face. That we reside in Connecticut, one of the most expensive states for living in the country, doesn’t help. In short, dropping $80 for 18 holes is a difficult decision for me. (...)
Am I too poor to play golf?
That’s not self-pity; my friends—all relatively in the same tax bracket—discuss it as well. I know I’m well off compared to a lot of people, but golf makes me question that.
It’s a feeling that can lead to cognitive dissonance when my friends and I play. Instead of standing on the first tee ready for our round, we think, Well, let’s hope this is worth it, because there goes getting dinner and a movie. It’s hard enough to hit the fairway as is. Add that thought, and, well, no wonder my scores stink. (Maybe I’d consider taking lessons if they weren’t $120 an hour.)
When I hear about initiatives designed to grow the game—which typically include faster pace or ancillary-themed activities like Topgolf—they don’t resonate with my friends and me. If we want to make golf more accessible, that conversation starts and ends with lowering the cost of entry.
Many public courses have junior rates and programs that make the game affordable for kids, which is great. But once kids turn 18 years old, they’re often out of luck. Why can’t more courses designate a day or league, or perhaps six and 12-hole rounds, at lower prices? There are pockets around the country with such endeavors, and The First Tee does its part at the youth level, but it hasn’t spread around the country yet.
Yes, it will attract inexperienced golfers, which brings its share of etiquette breaches and slow play, but new customers are something the game needs. Discounted greens fees could be exactly what’s needed to open the funnel.
What’s worse, some of the public club pros and workers understand this, but far too often these decisions are made by public administrators, not golf-specific officials. It’s tough to get that conversation started when they view the sport not as a passion but as a number in the accounting books.
In Scotland, the home of golf, it really is the people’s game. Residents can access some of the best courses in the world for $200 a year, and there are no cart fees, because only the disabled ride. Players aren’t passed on the unnecessary maintenance costs: Scottish links depend on nature, not sprinkler systems, for water, and if there’s not much rain in a summer, well, the fairways will be rolling. Last I checked, things are still going strong over there. Some of the tenets are being applied in the United States, but nowhere near the scale it needs to be successful.
by Brian Zimmerli (with Joel Beall), Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Guy Billout
[ed. It's always been a problem. What's really frustrating is to pay crazy prices then feel like you're stuck in a traffic jam once you get on the course.]
Saturday, June 1, 2019
Fleabag: Season 2
The Pain and Pleasure of the ‘Fleabag’ Dinner Party From Hell (Eater)
[ed. Such a good show. I especially like her relationship with her sister Claire (the meditation retreat in the first season was totally bonkers.] See also: When Your Dad Gets You Therapy For Your Birthday]
Friday, May 31, 2019
The Fed's Dangerous 'New Normal'
The American public doesn’t have much appetite for monetary matters, and most of that limited attention has been riveted on the political fights over President Donald Trump’s controversial nominees to the Federal Reserve Board. But there’s a far more serious piece of news on the Fed front.
The Fed’s once-revered independence and traditional controls on government spending have been dangerously eroded, with almost no public notice or debate. And unless the Fed itself or Congress does something about it, our financial system is at risk.
When did this happen? In a news conference in March, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would stop unwinding its balance sheet this September. That decision, phrased in the typically dry language of central bank news releases, didn’t make headlines. Yet it was a watershed: It was the most obvious sign yet that the Fed’s program to “normalize” monetary policy, as it had promised to do since 2009, was coming to an end. In essence, the Fed has decided to keep its emergency monetary powers and stick to its new methods of managing the supply of money in the economy indefinitely.
That “new normal,” which the Fed adopted during the financial crisis, includes novel methods for controlling interest rates. During the crisis, those methods allowed the Fed to engage in “quantitative easing,” meaning large-scale purchases of government bonds and other securities. But while they helped it fight the Great Recession, the Fed’s quantitative easing powers also fudged the traditional boundary line between fiscal policy, which Congress controls and which includes decisions about government funding, and monetary policy, which the Fed controls and which is supposed to be dedicated solely to fighting recessions and limiting inflation.
By blurring that boundary line, the Fed’s new methods threaten to undermine its critically important independence. An independent central bank ensures that neither the president nor Congress can decide to fund special projects or tweak economic growth by compelling the Fed to print more money. But the longer the Fed retains its “new normal,” the more that independence is at risk.
To understand why this new normal is so risky, you first need to understand how we got here.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed controlled inflation by creating or destroying bank reserves. When the Fed created reserves, interest rates declined, banks increased their lending and the supply of money in the economy expanded. When it supplied fewer reserves, it checked inflation.
But after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Fed started paying interest on banks’ reserves — the cash that banks must hold to meet reserve requirements and settle accounts with one another. Its goal was to get banks to stockpile reserves its emergency lending was creating instead of lending them, to avoid excessive money growth in the economy and prevent inflation. The decision to pay interest on reserves effectively allowed the Fed to control inflation no matter how many reserves it created — something it never could do before.
Second, in its first round of what later became known as quantitative easing, the Fed took the extraordinary move of buying large quantities of mortgage-backed securities from banks to keep their value from plummeting as the asset markets froze. In later rounds of quantitative easing, it also bought large amounts of long-term Treasury securities.
These two new policies left banks holding more than $2.5 trillion in reserves and quadrupling the overall size of the Fed’s assets. In the past, such a large increase in bank reserves would have led to high inflation. But the Fed could now avoid that result simply by making sure the rate it paid banks stayed high enough to get them to hoard any reserves the Fed created. That’s why quantitative easing hasn’t made prices skyrocket, as many Republicans feared it would when they were still a party of monetary hawks.
When quantitative easing began, then-Chairman Ben Bernanke promised that after the recession ended the Fed would revert to its “normal” self — meaning that the central bank would go back to a modest-size balance sheet and stop encouraging banks to hoard reserves. Later, the Fed released a normalization plan explaining how it would “unwind” its swollen balance sheet — letting it shrink as its bond holdings matured — and otherwise get back to business as usual.
Now that Powell has announced an end to that unwinding, is the Fed almost back to normal? Hardly. Far from resembling its precrisis self, it looks and operates much as it did in the worst days of the recession, bloated balance sheet and all. When Lehman Brothers failed, the Fed held $900 billion in assets, consisting mainly of short-term Treasury bills. Quantitative easing added another $3.6 trillion, all in long-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. When its unwinding ends in September, the Fed’s assets will still top $3.8 trillion.
The Fed’s once-revered independence and traditional controls on government spending have been dangerously eroded, with almost no public notice or debate. And unless the Fed itself or Congress does something about it, our financial system is at risk.
When did this happen? In a news conference in March, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell announced that the central bank would stop unwinding its balance sheet this September. That decision, phrased in the typically dry language of central bank news releases, didn’t make headlines. Yet it was a watershed: It was the most obvious sign yet that the Fed’s program to “normalize” monetary policy, as it had promised to do since 2009, was coming to an end. In essence, the Fed has decided to keep its emergency monetary powers and stick to its new methods of managing the supply of money in the economy indefinitely.
That “new normal,” which the Fed adopted during the financial crisis, includes novel methods for controlling interest rates. During the crisis, those methods allowed the Fed to engage in “quantitative easing,” meaning large-scale purchases of government bonds and other securities. But while they helped it fight the Great Recession, the Fed’s quantitative easing powers also fudged the traditional boundary line between fiscal policy, which Congress controls and which includes decisions about government funding, and monetary policy, which the Fed controls and which is supposed to be dedicated solely to fighting recessions and limiting inflation.By blurring that boundary line, the Fed’s new methods threaten to undermine its critically important independence. An independent central bank ensures that neither the president nor Congress can decide to fund special projects or tweak economic growth by compelling the Fed to print more money. But the longer the Fed retains its “new normal,” the more that independence is at risk.
To understand why this new normal is so risky, you first need to understand how we got here.
Before the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed controlled inflation by creating or destroying bank reserves. When the Fed created reserves, interest rates declined, banks increased their lending and the supply of money in the economy expanded. When it supplied fewer reserves, it checked inflation.
But after the failure of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the Fed started paying interest on banks’ reserves — the cash that banks must hold to meet reserve requirements and settle accounts with one another. Its goal was to get banks to stockpile reserves its emergency lending was creating instead of lending them, to avoid excessive money growth in the economy and prevent inflation. The decision to pay interest on reserves effectively allowed the Fed to control inflation no matter how many reserves it created — something it never could do before.
Second, in its first round of what later became known as quantitative easing, the Fed took the extraordinary move of buying large quantities of mortgage-backed securities from banks to keep their value from plummeting as the asset markets froze. In later rounds of quantitative easing, it also bought large amounts of long-term Treasury securities.
These two new policies left banks holding more than $2.5 trillion in reserves and quadrupling the overall size of the Fed’s assets. In the past, such a large increase in bank reserves would have led to high inflation. But the Fed could now avoid that result simply by making sure the rate it paid banks stayed high enough to get them to hoard any reserves the Fed created. That’s why quantitative easing hasn’t made prices skyrocket, as many Republicans feared it would when they were still a party of monetary hawks.
When quantitative easing began, then-Chairman Ben Bernanke promised that after the recession ended the Fed would revert to its “normal” self — meaning that the central bank would go back to a modest-size balance sheet and stop encouraging banks to hoard reserves. Later, the Fed released a normalization plan explaining how it would “unwind” its swollen balance sheet — letting it shrink as its bond holdings matured — and otherwise get back to business as usual.
Now that Powell has announced an end to that unwinding, is the Fed almost back to normal? Hardly. Far from resembling its precrisis self, it looks and operates much as it did in the worst days of the recession, bloated balance sheet and all. When Lehman Brothers failed, the Fed held $900 billion in assets, consisting mainly of short-term Treasury bills. Quantitative easing added another $3.6 trillion, all in long-term Treasury and mortgage-backed securities. When its unwinding ends in September, the Fed’s assets will still top $3.8 trillion.
Fed officials were once proud of the Fed’s lean, clean portfolio: “lean” because it was small relative to the size of the U.S. economy; “clean” because it was free of risky, including long-term, assets. Having it so, a 2002 Fed study said, kept the central bank from interfering with “relative asset values and credit allocation within the private sector.” That decision kept the Fed clear of fiscal policy, leaving support for particular markets, such as housing, and responsibility for funding the government entirely to the Treasury and Congress.
But today, the Fed’s willingness to hold on to the massive reserves, coupled with its ability to gobble up debt — including government debt — without fueling inflation, make it harder for Fed officials to resist a Republican administration’s own call for renewed quantitative easing. Instead of more “quantitative tightening,” Trump said in April, the Fed “should actually now be quantitative easing. … You would see a rocket ship.” Fed officials might scoff at Trump’s rocket ship analogy, but they can no longer claim that caving in to his demands would mean losing their ability to control inflation.
Trump is not the only politician Fed officials have to worry about: Politicians of either party are equally likely to lean on it. While Republicans are learning to love the Fed’s printing press — not one Republican senator scolded Powell for the Fed’s decision to stop raising interest rates and prematurely end its unwind — Democrats see more quantitative easing as a painless way to finance their own favorite projects. Instead of being a fluke, in other words, Trump’s call for more quantitative easing may turn out to be a taste of things to come.
But today, the Fed’s willingness to hold on to the massive reserves, coupled with its ability to gobble up debt — including government debt — without fueling inflation, make it harder for Fed officials to resist a Republican administration’s own call for renewed quantitative easing. Instead of more “quantitative tightening,” Trump said in April, the Fed “should actually now be quantitative easing. … You would see a rocket ship.” Fed officials might scoff at Trump’s rocket ship analogy, but they can no longer claim that caving in to his demands would mean losing their ability to control inflation.
Trump is not the only politician Fed officials have to worry about: Politicians of either party are equally likely to lean on it. While Republicans are learning to love the Fed’s printing press — not one Republican senator scolded Powell for the Fed’s decision to stop raising interest rates and prematurely end its unwind — Democrats see more quantitative easing as a painless way to finance their own favorite projects. Instead of being a fluke, in other words, Trump’s call for more quantitative easing may turn out to be a taste of things to come.
by George Selgin, Politico | Read more:
Image: Mark Wilson/Getty
The “Zero Waste” People Must be Stopped
My feelings regarding the “zero-waste movement” are vast and varied, but come in many shades of upset. I’m upset when I see a friend wracked with guilt when she succumbs to buying a plastic water bottle on an oppressively hot afternoon. I’m upset when a bratty roommate preaches the zero-waste gospel to me when I know they drive half a mile to work every day. I’m upset that I’m expending energy being upset over a movement that is well-intentioned instead of on one that is not.
According to the Zero Waste International Alliance, the zero-waste movement is “the conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health,” or, put more simply, consuming less shit so you have less shit to throw away. The movement has become prominent in recent years as a response to increasingly alarming news of plastic-clogged waterways, growing landfills, and insufficiently low recycling rates.
It all sounds pretty good. I am definitely a proponent of resource conservation and waste reduction. I would love for consumption to be less of a strain on the environment. My exasperation rests in the gap between this definition and its real-life execution, which seems to be focused primarily on one type of waste: household plastic.
Before we go any further, let’s talk about the problem with the word “zero” in zero-waste movement. Perhaps if the name was “less-waste movement” or “not-as-much-waste movement” or something equally pragmatic, I wouldn’t be so bothered. But, and I’m sorry to have to say this, the “zero” in zero-waste is impossible first and foremost due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the quality of energy degrades as it is used. Your banana will either be eaten and partially excreted by you or left to rot somewhere; neither is zero waste and entropy is undeniable. Therefore, discussions about waste should be framed around reduction, not some fundamentally unattainable “zero.” This sets everyone up for failure, making the movement fertile grounds for some of the same damaging psychology present in movements like “clean eating.”
Next on my list of grievances is how gender and zero-waste intersect. A casual glance at the #zerowaste hashtag on Instagram or at the author bio pages of numerous zero-waste blogs will highlight how feminine this movement skews. I suspect this movement is prone to an even larger gender gap than other environmental initiatives due its focus on how household waste can be reduced, a domain over which women still seem to reign. This is annoying, mostly because being zero-waste is time-consuming and expensive. Living a zero-waste lifestyle involves very inconvenient things like making your own toothpaste and never ordering takeout. Moreover, it’s well-documented that men tend to recycle less, litter more, and have larger carbon footprints. I would love for men and women to at least be inconvenienced equally.
More insidiously, I am concerned that zero-waste is narrowing people’s perceptions of waste to consist only of what they physically put in the garbage. Those who write about their individual reduction efforts tend to use phrases like “plastic-free” interchangeably with “zero-waste” (exemplified in a post on the popular blog Going Zero Waste titled “3 Zero-Waste Shops for All Your Plastic-Free Needs”) These phrases are not synonymous — waste comes in many forms. And even if a business claims to be zero-waste, such can be misleading. According to a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine, there is growing tide of grocery stores that claim to be “zero waste” by selling only bulk items. But while this might mean there is no visible packing waste for the shopper, there is definitely some unseen amount of packaging with which the store itself had to contend — it’s not as if a truck of loose Brazil nuts showed up for delivery.
Zero-wasters think that producing teeny-tiny amounts of garbage — specifically, one mason jar’s worth — is the pinnacle of environmentally conscious behavior. But the notion that the packaging of your purchased end product is an accurate reflection of the waste generated in the entire production process of that item is insane. You might buy minimally packaged meat, but eating meat is one of the most wasteful consumption habits in which you can partake. While some zero-wasters proudly announce that they have avoided food packaging at the airport, one flight can negate a year’s worth of otherwise environmentally conscious behavior.
Further, there is inherent tension between packaging food to minimize food waste and the waste from the packaging itself. Compared to its sinful plastic counterpart, the virtuous glass bottle requires much more packaging to not break in transit. The plastics industry itself was borne from repurposing the waste from petroleum refining; the affordability of plastic goods, from kitchenware to clothing, has democratized consumption and blurred class lines, facilitating social mobility for many and ultimately leading to a more sustainable (ahem, less wasteful) use of human capital. (...)
The whole point is that the stuff shouldn’t be made in the first place, or that the environmental externalities of those items should be forcibly internalized so that prices spike precipitously. If purchasing more items — like a plastic-free toilet brush or Goop-sanctioned “Zero Waste Starter Kit” — makes you feel like you are helping the environment, perhaps ask yourself why.
According to the Zero Waste International Alliance, the zero-waste movement is “the conservation of all resources by means of responsible production, consumption, reuse, and recovery of products, packaging, and materials without burning and with no discharges to land, water, or air that threaten the environment or human health,” or, put more simply, consuming less shit so you have less shit to throw away. The movement has become prominent in recent years as a response to increasingly alarming news of plastic-clogged waterways, growing landfills, and insufficiently low recycling rates.
It all sounds pretty good. I am definitely a proponent of resource conservation and waste reduction. I would love for consumption to be less of a strain on the environment. My exasperation rests in the gap between this definition and its real-life execution, which seems to be focused primarily on one type of waste: household plastic.Before we go any further, let’s talk about the problem with the word “zero” in zero-waste movement. Perhaps if the name was “less-waste movement” or “not-as-much-waste movement” or something equally pragmatic, I wouldn’t be so bothered. But, and I’m sorry to have to say this, the “zero” in zero-waste is impossible first and foremost due to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the quality of energy degrades as it is used. Your banana will either be eaten and partially excreted by you or left to rot somewhere; neither is zero waste and entropy is undeniable. Therefore, discussions about waste should be framed around reduction, not some fundamentally unattainable “zero.” This sets everyone up for failure, making the movement fertile grounds for some of the same damaging psychology present in movements like “clean eating.”
Next on my list of grievances is how gender and zero-waste intersect. A casual glance at the #zerowaste hashtag on Instagram or at the author bio pages of numerous zero-waste blogs will highlight how feminine this movement skews. I suspect this movement is prone to an even larger gender gap than other environmental initiatives due its focus on how household waste can be reduced, a domain over which women still seem to reign. This is annoying, mostly because being zero-waste is time-consuming and expensive. Living a zero-waste lifestyle involves very inconvenient things like making your own toothpaste and never ordering takeout. Moreover, it’s well-documented that men tend to recycle less, litter more, and have larger carbon footprints. I would love for men and women to at least be inconvenienced equally.
More insidiously, I am concerned that zero-waste is narrowing people’s perceptions of waste to consist only of what they physically put in the garbage. Those who write about their individual reduction efforts tend to use phrases like “plastic-free” interchangeably with “zero-waste” (exemplified in a post on the popular blog Going Zero Waste titled “3 Zero-Waste Shops for All Your Plastic-Free Needs”) These phrases are not synonymous — waste comes in many forms. And even if a business claims to be zero-waste, such can be misleading. According to a recent article in Smithsonian Magazine, there is growing tide of grocery stores that claim to be “zero waste” by selling only bulk items. But while this might mean there is no visible packing waste for the shopper, there is definitely some unseen amount of packaging with which the store itself had to contend — it’s not as if a truck of loose Brazil nuts showed up for delivery.
Zero-wasters think that producing teeny-tiny amounts of garbage — specifically, one mason jar’s worth — is the pinnacle of environmentally conscious behavior. But the notion that the packaging of your purchased end product is an accurate reflection of the waste generated in the entire production process of that item is insane. You might buy minimally packaged meat, but eating meat is one of the most wasteful consumption habits in which you can partake. While some zero-wasters proudly announce that they have avoided food packaging at the airport, one flight can negate a year’s worth of otherwise environmentally conscious behavior.
Further, there is inherent tension between packaging food to minimize food waste and the waste from the packaging itself. Compared to its sinful plastic counterpart, the virtuous glass bottle requires much more packaging to not break in transit. The plastics industry itself was borne from repurposing the waste from petroleum refining; the affordability of plastic goods, from kitchenware to clothing, has democratized consumption and blurred class lines, facilitating social mobility for many and ultimately leading to a more sustainable (ahem, less wasteful) use of human capital. (...)
The whole point is that the stuff shouldn’t be made in the first place, or that the environmental externalities of those items should be forcibly internalized so that prices spike precipitously. If purchasing more items — like a plastic-free toilet brush or Goop-sanctioned “Zero Waste Starter Kit” — makes you feel like you are helping the environment, perhaps ask yourself why.
by Tara Conway, The Outline | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Not to mention all those Amazon boxes.]
Molecules of US Freedom
US Department of Energy is now referring to fossil fuels as “freedom gas” (Ars Technica)
In a press release published on Tuesday, two Department of Energy officials used the terms "freedom gas" and "molecules of US freedom" to replace your average, everyday term "natural gas."
Image: Craig Hartley/Bloomberg via Getty Image
[ed. A for effort.]
Thursday, May 30, 2019
All-American Despair
The Centers for Disease Control recorded 47,173 suicides in 2017, and there were an estimated 1.4 million total attempts. Many of society’s plagues strike heavier at women and minorities, but suicide in America is dominated by white men, who account for 70 percent of all cases. Middle-aged men walk the point. Men in the United States average 22 suicides per 100,000 people, with those ages 45 to 64 representing the fastest-growing group, up from 20.8 per 100,000 in 1999 to 30.1 in 2017. The states with the highest rates are Montana, with 28.9 per 100,000 people; Alaska, at 27 per 100,000; and Wyoming, at 26.9 per 100,000 — all roughly double the national rate. New Mexico, Idaho and Utah round out the top six states. All but Alaska fall in the Mountain time zone.
Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men. The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliché has a dark turn — when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves. I found men who sought help and were placed on a 72-hour hold in a hospital ward, and say they were sent home at the end of their stay without any help, collapsing back into the fetal position — the only thing accomplished was everyone in the small town now knew they were ill. I found men on both sides of the Trump divide: One whose anger toward his abusive parents was exacerbated by hours in his basement watching Fox News and Trump while drinking vodka; the other was a Buddhist mortician whose cries for help were met by scorn in a cowboy county that went 70 percent for Trump.
“I have no one,” a man told me quietly over coffee. Outside, an unforgiving wind whipped through the tall grass. “The winters here are killing me.”
I found something else: guns, lots of them. Guns that could be procured in an hour. A house where a wife did a gun sweep and found dozens hidden. I found suicidal men who balked at installing gun locks on their pistols because they were afraid of being caught unarmed when mythical marauders invaded their homes. And I found that the men who survived suicide attempts had one thing in common: They didn’t use guns. Pills can be vomited, ropes can break, but bullets rarely miss.
For years, a comfortable excuse for the ascending suicide rate in the rural West was tied to the crushing impact of the Great Recession. But it still climbs on a decade later.
“There was hope that ‘OK, as the economy recovers, boy, it’s going to be nice to see that suicide rate go down,’ ” says Dr. Jane Pearson, a suicide expert at the National Institute of Mental Health. “And there’s a lot of us really frustrated that didn’t happen. We’re asking, ‘What is going on?’ ”
The impact of hard times can linger long after the stock market recovers. A sense of community can disintegrate in lean years, a deadly factor when it comes to men separating themselves from their friends and family and stepping alone into the darkness.
“There’s been an increase in the ‘every-man-for-himself mentality,’ ” says Dr. Craig Bryan, who studies military and rural suicide at the University of Utah. “There doesn’t seem to be as strong a sense of ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s much more ‘Hey, don’t infringe upon me. You’re on your own, and let me do my own thing.’ ”
The climactic scene in Westerns has always been the shootout. Now that’s being acted out in a deadly monologue. Activists in gun-friendly states tiptoe around the issue of eliminating guns, instead advocating locking them up to keep them out of the hands of the desperate and angry. Their efforts are noble, but futile. In Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides. One of the shocking things Bryan learned was that many of these deaths were suicides of passion — impulsive, irrevocable acts.
“A third of the firearm suicides in Utah happened during an argument,” says Bryan. “Two people were having at it. Not necessarily physically violent, but they were yelling. And someone in the moment, almost always a man, basically just says, ‘I’m done,’ grabs a gun, shoots himself, and he’s dead.”
No segment of the population is more likely to be impacted by these horrifying numbers than middle-aged men in rural America. They not only own guns and lack mental-health resources — by one estimate, there are 80 or so psychiatrists licensed to practice in Wyoming — but they also have chosen a life that values independence above all else.
“It becomes a deterministic thing,” says Pearson. “You are the type of man who has chosen to isolate himself from town, health care and other people. Then you shoot yourself, and you’re hours from a trauma center.”
It’s easy to bash white middled-aged men in America. As a member of that privileged group, I’ll admit that much of the bashing has been warranted: No group in the history of the world has been given and squandered more than the white man. Yet the American white man is responsible for enough suicides annually that Madison Square Garden could not hold all the victims. And no matter how privileged, that’s somebody’s dad, someone’s friend, someone’s brother and someone’s husband. (...)
I spent the next day driving nine hours on two-lane blacktop across the vast, empty part of America from Ketchum to Casper, Toby Lingle’s hometown. In between Sean Hannity braying at me from every AM station, I listened to Marc Maron’s WTF podcasts with Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams, two of the more notable recent examples of the middle-aged white-male suicide epidemic.
Both men had battled depression, and had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, a prevalent factor in suicides particularly in the area I was driving through — 30 percent of male suicide victims nationwide have alcohol in their systems, but in states like Wyoming, experts say, it is closer to 40 percent. Otherwise, they couldn’t have been more different.
Bourdain sounded self-deprecatingly ebullient, a gourmand bon vivant who had kicked cocaine and heroin after decades of abuse.
“When you know how low you can go, when you’ve hurt and disappointed people and humiliated yourself for many years, you’re not going to start complaining about the wrong bottled water,” said Bourdain with a small laugh.
He sounded happy and in control, but there were other signs. After Bourdain’s suicide, a fan counted up the times that he uttered lines on his show like “I determine not to hang myself in the shower stall of my lonely hotel room.” That is precisely how Bourdain killed himself in Kaysersberg, France.
Williams offered more-obvious clues. During the Maron interview, Williams talked about an alcohol relapse while filming in Alaska. He sounded exhausted and told a seemingly funny story about the discussion he had with his “conscious brain” about suicide.
“There was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, ‘Fuck life,’ ” Williams told Maron. He then re-created the inner dialogue:
“You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed the girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed that things are pretty good . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“OK, let’s put the suicide over here under ‘discussable’. . . . First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, ‘Have you thought about buying a gun?’ ”
“No.”
“What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik?”
His conscious brain asked him what he was currently up to.
“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?”
“Possibly.”
Williams then riffed that maybe he would talk about it on a podcast two years down the road. Maron couldn’t help but laugh.
Four years later, suffering from undiagnosed Lewy body dementia, Williams would hang himself in the same Marin County home where the interview took place.
Two of the more famous men of the past 50 years fell into the same existential pit that has gripped so many their age: a curtain slowly falling over a life that outsiders saw as filled with privilege and promise.
Even the famous leave few breadcrumbs.
by Stephen Roderick, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Image: Brian Stauffer for Rolling Stone
Last summer, I began a 2,000-mile drive through the American West, a place of endless mythology and one unalterable fact: The region has become a self-immolation center for middle-aged American men. The image of the Western man and his bootstraps ethos is still there, but the cliché has a dark turn — when they can no longer help themselves, they end themselves. I found men who sought help and were placed on a 72-hour hold in a hospital ward, and say they were sent home at the end of their stay without any help, collapsing back into the fetal position — the only thing accomplished was everyone in the small town now knew they were ill. I found men on both sides of the Trump divide: One whose anger toward his abusive parents was exacerbated by hours in his basement watching Fox News and Trump while drinking vodka; the other was a Buddhist mortician whose cries for help were met by scorn in a cowboy county that went 70 percent for Trump.“I have no one,” a man told me quietly over coffee. Outside, an unforgiving wind whipped through the tall grass. “The winters here are killing me.”
I found something else: guns, lots of them. Guns that could be procured in an hour. A house where a wife did a gun sweep and found dozens hidden. I found suicidal men who balked at installing gun locks on their pistols because they were afraid of being caught unarmed when mythical marauders invaded their homes. And I found that the men who survived suicide attempts had one thing in common: They didn’t use guns. Pills can be vomited, ropes can break, but bullets rarely miss.
For years, a comfortable excuse for the ascending suicide rate in the rural West was tied to the crushing impact of the Great Recession. But it still climbs on a decade later.
“There was hope that ‘OK, as the economy recovers, boy, it’s going to be nice to see that suicide rate go down,’ ” says Dr. Jane Pearson, a suicide expert at the National Institute of Mental Health. “And there’s a lot of us really frustrated that didn’t happen. We’re asking, ‘What is going on?’ ”
The impact of hard times can linger long after the stock market recovers. A sense of community can disintegrate in lean years, a deadly factor when it comes to men separating themselves from their friends and family and stepping alone into the darkness.
“There’s been an increase in the ‘every-man-for-himself mentality,’ ” says Dr. Craig Bryan, who studies military and rural suicide at the University of Utah. “There doesn’t seem to be as strong a sense of ‘We’re all in this together.’ It’s much more ‘Hey, don’t infringe upon me. You’re on your own, and let me do my own thing.’ ”
The climactic scene in Westerns has always been the shootout. Now that’s being acted out in a deadly monologue. Activists in gun-friendly states tiptoe around the issue of eliminating guns, instead advocating locking them up to keep them out of the hands of the desperate and angry. Their efforts are noble, but futile. In Utah, 85 percent of firearm-related deaths are suicides. One of the shocking things Bryan learned was that many of these deaths were suicides of passion — impulsive, irrevocable acts.
“A third of the firearm suicides in Utah happened during an argument,” says Bryan. “Two people were having at it. Not necessarily physically violent, but they were yelling. And someone in the moment, almost always a man, basically just says, ‘I’m done,’ grabs a gun, shoots himself, and he’s dead.”
No segment of the population is more likely to be impacted by these horrifying numbers than middle-aged men in rural America. They not only own guns and lack mental-health resources — by one estimate, there are 80 or so psychiatrists licensed to practice in Wyoming — but they also have chosen a life that values independence above all else.
“It becomes a deterministic thing,” says Pearson. “You are the type of man who has chosen to isolate himself from town, health care and other people. Then you shoot yourself, and you’re hours from a trauma center.”
It’s easy to bash white middled-aged men in America. As a member of that privileged group, I’ll admit that much of the bashing has been warranted: No group in the history of the world has been given and squandered more than the white man. Yet the American white man is responsible for enough suicides annually that Madison Square Garden could not hold all the victims. And no matter how privileged, that’s somebody’s dad, someone’s friend, someone’s brother and someone’s husband. (...)
I spent the next day driving nine hours on two-lane blacktop across the vast, empty part of America from Ketchum to Casper, Toby Lingle’s hometown. In between Sean Hannity braying at me from every AM station, I listened to Marc Maron’s WTF podcasts with Anthony Bourdain and Robin Williams, two of the more notable recent examples of the middle-aged white-male suicide epidemic.
Both men had battled depression, and had struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, a prevalent factor in suicides particularly in the area I was driving through — 30 percent of male suicide victims nationwide have alcohol in their systems, but in states like Wyoming, experts say, it is closer to 40 percent. Otherwise, they couldn’t have been more different.
Bourdain sounded self-deprecatingly ebullient, a gourmand bon vivant who had kicked cocaine and heroin after decades of abuse.
“When you know how low you can go, when you’ve hurt and disappointed people and humiliated yourself for many years, you’re not going to start complaining about the wrong bottled water,” said Bourdain with a small laugh.
He sounded happy and in control, but there were other signs. After Bourdain’s suicide, a fan counted up the times that he uttered lines on his show like “I determine not to hang myself in the shower stall of my lonely hotel room.” That is precisely how Bourdain killed himself in Kaysersberg, France.
Williams offered more-obvious clues. During the Maron interview, Williams talked about an alcohol relapse while filming in Alaska. He sounded exhausted and told a seemingly funny story about the discussion he had with his “conscious brain” about suicide.
“There was only one time, even for a moment, where I thought, ‘Fuck life,’ ” Williams told Maron. He then re-created the inner dialogue:
“You know you have a pretty good life as it is right now. Have you noticed the two houses?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed the girlfriend?”
“Yes.”
“Have you noticed that things are pretty good . . . ?”
“Yes.”
“OK, let’s put the suicide over here under ‘discussable’. . . . First of all, you don’t have the balls to do it. I’m not going to say it out loud. I mean, ‘Have you thought about buying a gun?’ ”
“No.”
“What were you going to do, cut your wrist with a Waterpik?”
His conscious brain asked him what he was currently up to.
“You’re sitting naked in a hotel room with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s?”
“Yes.”
“Is this maybe influencing your decision?”
“Possibly.”
Williams then riffed that maybe he would talk about it on a podcast two years down the road. Maron couldn’t help but laugh.
Four years later, suffering from undiagnosed Lewy body dementia, Williams would hang himself in the same Marin County home where the interview took place.
Two of the more famous men of the past 50 years fell into the same existential pit that has gripped so many their age: a curtain slowly falling over a life that outsiders saw as filled with privilege and promise.
Even the famous leave few breadcrumbs.
by Stephen Roderick, Rolling Stone | Read more:
Apply Directly to the Forehead
Like many preteens prescribed heavy-duty amphetamines, I had difficulty sleeping. This manifested in a variety of ways, but the most common was sneaking out of my room to watch my favorite late-night channel, The Weather Channel, until I passed out from exhaustion on my family’s Southwestern-patterned sofa. (For an experience enhancer while reading this essay, please see this video).
The year was 2006, and I was twelve (sorry, old people). I had just started middle school, and, frankly, I was not having a good time. In addition to being put on high-strength narcotics, I was beset with a kind of permanent feverish anxiety.
So imagine, if you will, a vibrating preteen trying to command their cortisol levels, immersing themselves in the mundanity of forecasts interspersed with outdated Local on the 8s interludes courtesy of rural cable, when suddenly, interrupting a commercial for super-sharp knives that has already started, is this:
The year was 2006, and I was twelve (sorry, old people). I had just started middle school, and, frankly, I was not having a good time. In addition to being put on high-strength narcotics, I was beset with a kind of permanent feverish anxiety.
So imagine, if you will, a vibrating preteen trying to command their cortisol levels, immersing themselves in the mundanity of forecasts interspersed with outdated Local on the 8s interludes courtesy of rural cable, when suddenly, interrupting a commercial for super-sharp knives that has already started, is this:
A woman of rather conservative appearance stares into the abyss like a military commander on a Maoist poster as she rubs what appears to be a glue-stick on her forehead. In the background, an Eisenmanian grid, and a voice, not quite human, but not quite automated, chants:
HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead. HeadOn: Apply directly to the forehead.We cut to an image of the product in its packaging, while the voice-over tells us that
HeadOn is available without a prescription at retailers nationwide.The whole event is over in fifteen seconds, but I remember thinking to myself, what the fuck did I just witness? (...)
Back when Head On was only airing during late night television on non-primetime networks, it gave the unsettling impression that one had just witnessed something they were not supposed to be witnessing, that aliens had descended to earth and hijacked the television networks with this fucked up commercial for a bullshit headache remedy consisting mostly of wax. Slowly but surely, it snatched up ad spots on primetime and daytime television and evolved into an annoyance; but for a brief, mystical time, the commercial would have been a proper subject for investigation by Mulder and Scully.
A combination of elements made the initial run of Head On so bizarre. First, it aired during times, and on networks, with very low viewership, borrowing a mood from the existing isolation of being up late at night watching something probably very few people are watching, like The Weather Channel or infomercials on HGTV. Once the aura of the witching hour was no longer a part of the Head On experience, it quickly became charmless.
Second, the commercial would reappear in erratic fashion. Sometimes, a different commercial would already begin to air, when, about two to five seconds later, it would be cut off by the Head On commercial, as if it had swooped in from above to smite its 1-800-number competition. After seeing it the first time, it took a while before I saw the Head On commercial again—probably several days. This left me in a state of suspense, which allowed me to question my reality—had I really seen that weird commercial or was I just imagining it in the throes of an anxiety fugue? When I saw it the second time, at least I knew it was a real commercial. But beneath the surface I still questioned whether or not I, the 2 a.m. Weather Channel watcher in rural North Carolina, was still the only person who had witnessed it.
Finally, the commercial itself is just plainly weird—absurd, even. The aesthetics of the commercial were decidedly low-fidelity; it could have been made by anyone with a green screen and text processor. The local car dealership ads had a greater production value. The content of the commercial, its short duration, the loud, repetitive urgency of the brand name, the woman staring into space rubbing a glue stick on her forehead, were so freakishly unlike anything actual humans would reasonably produce to sell something—it gave the ad the eerie feeling of pirate television. It was an anti-advertisement; instead of trying to persuade the viewer to purchase a product, like pretty much every advertisement, it just yelled the product name over the image of a hypnotized actress. Rather than building a case for why someone should buy this confounding stick (or even telling viewers what the product does), it simply lobs a brick into the unsuspecting consciousness of the consumer.
Absurdist advertising is everywhere now. The Burger King and KFC Colonel have metamorphosed from folksy, gentlemanly mascots into big-headed horrors and misguided sex symbols, respectively. Skittles tried to sell Skittles by likening them to the plague. Geico, that ever-present representative of the weird commercial, recently started to slip in their old ad campaigns from the 1990s back into the mix. Old Spice did the “I’m on a Horse” campaign. The list goes on. Combined with brands pretending to have depression on Twitter, the indication is largely that brands are too online, and what was once an amusing wink wink nudge nudge to the strange world of internet culture is beginning to give off more of a Hello Fellow Kids vibe.
When fast food chains and insurance companies get weird, the sentiment, while at first amusing (at least, ten years ago it was), now elicits a dour reaction: oh, the Brands™ are at it again. Big brands can release absurdist commercials ’til the cows come home, but they’ll never truly be weird because, honestly, people know what Skittles are. Part of what makes Head On so weird, even to this day, is that it isn’t a brand that has been around in the public consciousness forever. When the ads debuted nobody knew what the fuck it was, and most people probably still wonder if it was ever a real product. It was a real product.
by Kate Wagner, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: YouTube
Born to Be Eaten
The caribou cow gives birth on her feet. She stands with legs wide apart, or turns on the spot, shuffling in slow circles, craning her long neck to watch as her calf emerges inch by inch from below her tail, between her hips. It’s oddly calm, this process — a strange thing to witness for us two-legged mammals, more accustomed to the stirrups and the struggle and the white-knuckled screaming of a Hollywood birth scene.
The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.
Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.
The days and weeks immediately after his birth are critical. That’s why, if at all possible, his mother will have sought out a known quantity, a place of relative safety, before he arrived. That’s why, every year, tens of thousands of heavily pregnant caribou cows return, salmon-like, to the places where they were born.
For the Porcupine caribou herd, 218,000 strong, that means a long march through snow-choked mountains to one of two calving grounds. One, lesser used, is in Canada, in the northwestern corner of the Yukon Territory between the Firth and Babbage rivers. It’s protected by the invisible boundaries of Ivvavik National Park.
The other, the most commonly used by the herd, is a small slice of land just across the border in northeastern Alaska, a flat patch tucked between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea. The land is unassuming but critical: When, every so often, the herd fails to make it to the calving grounds on time — as can be the case when deep snow lingers late into the spring — their calves’ mortality rate can climb by as much as 20 percent.
This primary calving ground lies within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but unlike its counterpart across the border, it has not been formally sealed off from large-scale human activity. Instead, for 40 years, a debate has raged about its status. On one side are those who want the oil that could lie below the calving grounds extracted. On the other are those who want the area protected from industry forever.
The Porcupine caribou herd is caught between the two, its fate tied up in Washington committee rooms and the fine print of legislation. And intimately connected to the caribou is the Gwich’in nation, roughly 9,000 people scattered across Alaska and northern Canada. In fighting to protect the caribou, they are fighting for their own survival. (...)
In mid-1967 and early 1968, the Prudhoe Bay oil field was discovered along the Arctic coast just west of the Porcupine herd’s territory. In 1973, the OPEC crisis hit, ratcheting up concerns about a domestic oil supply. In 1977, the Trans-Alaska pipeline system was completed, and Alaska’s oil began to flow.
In November 1980, the United States Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Among other changes, it more than doubled the size of ANWR, to about 19 million acres — just slightly smaller than South Carolina. The act changed the name of the area, from the “Wildlife Range” to “Wildlife Refuge.” And within those 19 million acres, it formally designated 8 million as “wilderness” under the terms of the 1964 act.
The 1980 act also set aside 1.5 million non-wilderness acres on the refuge’s northern edge for further study — an area of ANWR’s coastal plain that encompasses the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. Section 1002 of the act, titled “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain Resource Assessment,” outlined a process of inventory and assessment of resources, and analysis of potential impacts of development, before oil and gas development would be authorized.
In other words: Wait and see. Full-blown oil and gas development was not yet permitted on the coastal plain, but the possibility of future extraction remained.
After decades of campaigning by conservationists, ANWR as we know it today was born. The refuge was built on the strength of powerful words and lofty ideals. Its founders envisioned it as a place that would feed the soul of humanity worldwide. Simply by continuing to exist in its natural state, “where man himself is a visitor,” it would provide an example to the world of what once was. (...)
The Thirty Years’ War
On December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. The complex bill had only narrowly made it through the Senate, by a final vote of 51–48, and while it contained an array of changes to the tax code, it also contained something else: a provision to explore drilling possibilities on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That provision was widely regarded as securing the vote of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, whose support of the tax bill had not been assured. Nearly 40 years after the 1002 loophole was created, and after 30 years of successful lobbying and resistance by the Gwich’in, ANWR was formally open to oil development. It had been a long fight.
It wasn’t long after the 1988 gathering that the Gwich’in had faced their first challenge. In March 1989, a bill to allow leasing across nearly a quarter of the 1002 area had passed a Senate subcommittee. But then, eight days later, the tanker Exxon Valdez tore itself open in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling millions of gallons of crude oil. Suddenly, even for some of the pro-drilling politicians in Washington, the calculus changed.
The Edmonton Journal called the spill a “gift” to the caribou. Doug Urquhart, a Canadian member of the transnational Porcupine Caribou Management Board, wrote in the Yukon’s Dan Sha News that “every cloud has a silver lining.”
“The only positive aspect of the Valdez disaster,” he wrote, “is that it might save the Arctic National Refuge, the Porcupine Caribou Herd, and the thousands of Alaskan and Canadian native people who rely on the herd for economic and cultural survival.”
In the Lower 48, editorials supporting the preservation of the refuge, at least for the time being, popped up like morel mushrooms after a forest fire. “Until it is necessary to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, it is clearly necessary not to,” went the slightly ambivalent line in the Philadelphia Enquirer. The Dallas Times Herald was more forceful: “It would be wrong to destroy about 1.5 million acres of natural habitat for no valid reason.” The Boston Globe called the energy security argument “a decoy,” and argued that, “on balance, the evidence suggests that risking ecological damage to the wildlife refuge is not justified.”
Vying with images of oil-slicked seals and birds, the Senate subcommittee bill withered. So did another, in 1991, the Johnston-Wallop National Energy Security Act. In 1995, yet another attempt made it through the House and the Senate before running headlong into President Clinton’s veto. There were more legislative skirmishes in 2002, and each time, the ban on oil exploration in the calving grounds held. The 1002 area remained in limbo.
In 2005, the issue came to a head again. In the Republican-led Congress, two different energy bills contained provisions that would have essentially opened the 1002 to drilling. Both were defeated by coalitions of Democrats and moderate Republicans. A third bill, one that targeted Pentagon spending, also included a drilling provision, but that provision was yanked after a successful filibuster.
Meanwhile, with every bill and every counter-campaign, the Arctic Refuge grew in public stature and was mythologized in the American consciousness. It had become a symbol, a talisman, to both sides. The fight over the refuge drew in not only all the major conservation groups — the Sierra Club, the Wilderness League, the World Wildlife Fund, and so on — but also an array of celebrities and mainstream brands. (During the 2005 skirmishes, Ben & Jerry’s produced a 900-pound Baked Alaska and had it carried on a litter of plywood and two-by-fours to Capitol Hill. “This is not going to last very long,” one of the company’s “flavor gurus” announced to a small crowd of protesters. “Just like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, if you drill up there.”)
After 2005, things quieted down some. When President Obama was elected in 2008, the Democrats took the Senate and the House as well. Notwithstanding Republicans’ call to “drill, baby, drill,” there was no legislative path forward for the pro-development side.
Early in 2015, Obama recommended that Congress designate the coastal plain, and other non-wilderness areas of ANWR, as wilderness. But that never happened, and as his term wound down, and the 2016 election loomed, people on both sides of the debate wondered if he would exercise his power to declare the area a national monument. He did not. Then came the 2016 election and the 2017 tax bill. The federal government shutdown in early 2019 delayed the commenting and review process for activity in the refuge, meaning that seismic exploration work originally planned for this winter will be held off a year. But the Bureau of Land Management still plans to hold ANWR’s first ever lease sale later this year.
The calf, when he comes, emerges hooves first. He climbs into the world fully extended, like a diver stretching toward the water. Out come the front pair of hooves, capping spindly legs, then the long narrow head, the lean, wet-furred body, and finally, another set of bony legs and sharp little hooves. His divergence from his mother leaves behind nothing but some strings of sticky fluid and a small patch of bloody fur. He doesn’t know it, but the land he is born on is one of the most contentious stretches of wilderness in North America.
Still slick with mucus, the calf takes his first steps within minutes, stumbling awkwardly to his feet as his mother licks him clean. Within 24 hours, he is able to walk a mile or more. Soon, if he survives long enough, he will be capable of swimming white-water rivers, outrunning wolves, and trotting overland for miles upon miles every day. His life will offer myriad dangers and only the rarest respite; for the caribou, staying alive means staying on the move.
The days and weeks immediately after his birth are critical. That’s why, if at all possible, his mother will have sought out a known quantity, a place of relative safety, before he arrived. That’s why, every year, tens of thousands of heavily pregnant caribou cows return, salmon-like, to the places where they were born.For the Porcupine caribou herd, 218,000 strong, that means a long march through snow-choked mountains to one of two calving grounds. One, lesser used, is in Canada, in the northwestern corner of the Yukon Territory between the Firth and Babbage rivers. It’s protected by the invisible boundaries of Ivvavik National Park.
The other, the most commonly used by the herd, is a small slice of land just across the border in northeastern Alaska, a flat patch tucked between the Brooks Range and the Beaufort Sea. The land is unassuming but critical: When, every so often, the herd fails to make it to the calving grounds on time — as can be the case when deep snow lingers late into the spring — their calves’ mortality rate can climb by as much as 20 percent.
This primary calving ground lies within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but unlike its counterpart across the border, it has not been formally sealed off from large-scale human activity. Instead, for 40 years, a debate has raged about its status. On one side are those who want the oil that could lie below the calving grounds extracted. On the other are those who want the area protected from industry forever.
The Porcupine caribou herd is caught between the two, its fate tied up in Washington committee rooms and the fine print of legislation. And intimately connected to the caribou is the Gwich’in nation, roughly 9,000 people scattered across Alaska and northern Canada. In fighting to protect the caribou, they are fighting for their own survival. (...)
In mid-1967 and early 1968, the Prudhoe Bay oil field was discovered along the Arctic coast just west of the Porcupine herd’s territory. In 1973, the OPEC crisis hit, ratcheting up concerns about a domestic oil supply. In 1977, the Trans-Alaska pipeline system was completed, and Alaska’s oil began to flow.
In November 1980, the United States Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Among other changes, it more than doubled the size of ANWR, to about 19 million acres — just slightly smaller than South Carolina. The act changed the name of the area, from the “Wildlife Range” to “Wildlife Refuge.” And within those 19 million acres, it formally designated 8 million as “wilderness” under the terms of the 1964 act.
The 1980 act also set aside 1.5 million non-wilderness acres on the refuge’s northern edge for further study — an area of ANWR’s coastal plain that encompasses the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd. Section 1002 of the act, titled “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Coastal Plain Resource Assessment,” outlined a process of inventory and assessment of resources, and analysis of potential impacts of development, before oil and gas development would be authorized.
In other words: Wait and see. Full-blown oil and gas development was not yet permitted on the coastal plain, but the possibility of future extraction remained.
After decades of campaigning by conservationists, ANWR as we know it today was born. The refuge was built on the strength of powerful words and lofty ideals. Its founders envisioned it as a place that would feed the soul of humanity worldwide. Simply by continuing to exist in its natural state, “where man himself is a visitor,” it would provide an example to the world of what once was. (...)
The Thirty Years’ War
On December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act into law. The complex bill had only narrowly made it through the Senate, by a final vote of 51–48, and while it contained an array of changes to the tax code, it also contained something else: a provision to explore drilling possibilities on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. That provision was widely regarded as securing the vote of Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, whose support of the tax bill had not been assured. Nearly 40 years after the 1002 loophole was created, and after 30 years of successful lobbying and resistance by the Gwich’in, ANWR was formally open to oil development. It had been a long fight.
It wasn’t long after the 1988 gathering that the Gwich’in had faced their first challenge. In March 1989, a bill to allow leasing across nearly a quarter of the 1002 area had passed a Senate subcommittee. But then, eight days later, the tanker Exxon Valdez tore itself open in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, spilling millions of gallons of crude oil. Suddenly, even for some of the pro-drilling politicians in Washington, the calculus changed.
The Edmonton Journal called the spill a “gift” to the caribou. Doug Urquhart, a Canadian member of the transnational Porcupine Caribou Management Board, wrote in the Yukon’s Dan Sha News that “every cloud has a silver lining.”
“The only positive aspect of the Valdez disaster,” he wrote, “is that it might save the Arctic National Refuge, the Porcupine Caribou Herd, and the thousands of Alaskan and Canadian native people who rely on the herd for economic and cultural survival.”
In the Lower 48, editorials supporting the preservation of the refuge, at least for the time being, popped up like morel mushrooms after a forest fire. “Until it is necessary to drill in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, it is clearly necessary not to,” went the slightly ambivalent line in the Philadelphia Enquirer. The Dallas Times Herald was more forceful: “It would be wrong to destroy about 1.5 million acres of natural habitat for no valid reason.” The Boston Globe called the energy security argument “a decoy,” and argued that, “on balance, the evidence suggests that risking ecological damage to the wildlife refuge is not justified.”
Vying with images of oil-slicked seals and birds, the Senate subcommittee bill withered. So did another, in 1991, the Johnston-Wallop National Energy Security Act. In 1995, yet another attempt made it through the House and the Senate before running headlong into President Clinton’s veto. There were more legislative skirmishes in 2002, and each time, the ban on oil exploration in the calving grounds held. The 1002 area remained in limbo.
In 2005, the issue came to a head again. In the Republican-led Congress, two different energy bills contained provisions that would have essentially opened the 1002 to drilling. Both were defeated by coalitions of Democrats and moderate Republicans. A third bill, one that targeted Pentagon spending, also included a drilling provision, but that provision was yanked after a successful filibuster.
Meanwhile, with every bill and every counter-campaign, the Arctic Refuge grew in public stature and was mythologized in the American consciousness. It had become a symbol, a talisman, to both sides. The fight over the refuge drew in not only all the major conservation groups — the Sierra Club, the Wilderness League, the World Wildlife Fund, and so on — but also an array of celebrities and mainstream brands. (During the 2005 skirmishes, Ben & Jerry’s produced a 900-pound Baked Alaska and had it carried on a litter of plywood and two-by-fours to Capitol Hill. “This is not going to last very long,” one of the company’s “flavor gurus” announced to a small crowd of protesters. “Just like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, if you drill up there.”)
After 2005, things quieted down some. When President Obama was elected in 2008, the Democrats took the Senate and the House as well. Notwithstanding Republicans’ call to “drill, baby, drill,” there was no legislative path forward for the pro-development side.
Early in 2015, Obama recommended that Congress designate the coastal plain, and other non-wilderness areas of ANWR, as wilderness. But that never happened, and as his term wound down, and the 2016 election loomed, people on both sides of the debate wondered if he would exercise his power to declare the area a national monument. He did not. Then came the 2016 election and the 2017 tax bill. The federal government shutdown in early 2019 delayed the commenting and review process for activity in the refuge, meaning that seismic exploration work originally planned for this winter will be held off a year. But the Bureau of Land Management still plans to hold ANWR’s first ever lease sale later this year.
by Eva Holland, Longreads | Read more:
Image: Peter Mather
Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, Ft Collins CO, May 23, 1976, recorded for an NBC TV special “Hard Rain”, aired September 13.
via:
[ed. What a day. I lived about a quarter mile from CSU stadium and could just walk over.]
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Micro Feedback Loops and Learning
I recently discovered Singer’s Studio, an iPhone app for voice training that is approximately the Best Thing Ever (h/t Raemon). It’s a work of pedagogical art, and describing what it does right pulls together various nebulous thoughts I’ve had about learning and developing intuitions for a particular domain.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
How the app works: it gives me various singing exercises, and then tells me in real-time, via a pretty graph, if I’m singing on pitch. That’s it.
Okay, it does have a few other features, like:
- A total score and breakdown by % of notes correct after each exercise.
- Letting me play myself back to see what being on vs slightly off pitch sounds like.
- Helpful text prompts such as “keep your tongue behind your teeth.”
- A built-in progression from easier to more complicated exercises.
- Exercises for a specific skill, like switching from head to chest voice.
- The ability to add challenge by turning down/off the piano playing my notes as I sing them.
- Not a built-in part of the app, but I can glance away from the screen and sing without the visual feedback, and then immediately check how I did. (...)
Rewardingness
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.
(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
It occurs to me that another feature, which I think is less key than the instantaneous pitch contour but still pretty important, is how it slightly gamifies the entire thing, and thus makes it addictive. There are % scores at the end of the exercise! And points! It logs my all-time high score for each exercise so I can try to beat it! It also logs how many minutes a day I’ve practiced. All of this makes me more likely to use it, and actually putting in the time is a key part of training any skill.
It’s also cool that I can listen to my voice and, in addition to catching mistakes (ouch!), notice when hey, wow, I actually sounded good there. This lets me gradually figure out what correlates with liking how my voice sounds, and it also gives me a warm glow of satisfaction and helps me feel like a Real Singer.(I’m not sure if the app is cheating by doing some kind of post-processing on these recordings to make them sound pretty. Normally I hate recordings of myself speaking, let alone singing. Still, I’ll take it.)
It also seems relevant that there’s zero embarrassment factor – this isn’t a human watching me and judging me for daring to sing when I kind of suck. I’m pretty shameless, as humans go, but I’ve been slightly nervous with every voice teacher I’ve had – they’re an expert! they’re probably really unimpressed! – and tension is not good for singing well. With this, I can sing my heart out in the privacy of my apartment, and even feel safe experimenting.
How does this generalize?
This is a post about singing, but it’s also a post about learning skills in general.
Learning to sing (or to play the piano, tie one’s shoes, draw, dance, swim; all the things commonly known as procedural memory) isn’t like memorizing a list of dates for a history test. There are some steps that can usefully happen in the explicit verbal loop, like “remember to breathe from the diaphragm”, but the end goal is that basically nothing is being held in working memory, and everything happens on the level of microsecond-to-second intuitions and muscle memory. (...)
Implications
This app is a really cool category of thing, that’s only possible at all due to fairly recent technological advances, and there are probably a ton more instances that I don’t know about.
I’m curious where else this has been explored. Singing may be an easy case, because measuring a single straightforward variable, pitch, gets you so far. I can imagine an app that trains, say, krav maga fighting techniques, via video analysis and/or accelerometer data, but I’m not sure that’s possible yet given current tech.
It has me thinking about other pedagogical techniques, though. Martial arts teachers will shout real-time feedback at you ("turn your hips more! get your knee higher!") I’ve taught swimming, and one issue is that waiting until a swimmer finishes a lap before giving any feedback introduces a huge delay, but grabbing onto them every time they do something slightly wrong is incredibly irritating and disruptive. Now I’m imagining giving them waterproof headphones and narrating the feedback in real time (“elbow higher please”, “roll your shoulder deeper into the water”, “keep your head back when you breathe”, etc etc.) This would be so cool.
by Swimmer963, Less Wrong | Read more:
Image: via
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