Monday, October 21, 2019
The Silent Heart Attack You Didn’t Know You Had
When my Aunt Gert suffered a heart attack in her mid-70s, the examining doctor told her that it was not her first. Tests done to assess the damage to her heart revealed a section of dead muscle from a previous unrecognized heart attack. Sometime in the past, she had had what doctors call a “silent myocardial infarction,” or S.M.I., silent in that any symptoms she might have had at the time did not register as related to her heart and were not brought to medical attention.
My aunt was lucky. She survived her second heart attack and, by keeping cardiac risk factors under control, lived another two decades without further heart-related problems.
There are millions of people walking around in this country who, like my aunt, are oblivious to the fact that they have had an S.M.I. and face an increased risk of having another, more obvious one that could cause severe heart damage and possibly death.
You might think a silent heart attack is better than a recognized one: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Unfortunately, it can. Although knowing you’re at risk of a heart attack can be emotionally distressing, not knowing can have much more serious consequences, prompting you to continue living in ways that endanger the health of your heart and your life.
A recognized heart attack is a wake-up call to adopt medical and lifestyle measures that can minimize cardiac risk, like normalizing blood pressure and cholesterol levels, quitting smoking, losing weight if you’re overweight, getting regular exercise and controlling Type 2 diabetes. If diet and exercise are not sufficiently protective, there are now many medications that can help nature along.
Even without medication, if everyone at increased coronary risk adhered to a heart-healthy lifestyle, “the incidence of heart disease would be reduced by 80 percent,” Dr. Rekha Mankad, cardiologist and director of the Women’s Heart Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told me.
Recent studies conducted in Iceland and Finland, which maintain excellent medical records on all citizens, have helped to determine how often S.M.I.s occur and the long-term consequences associated with them. The findings, published in JAMA Cardiology last October, highlight the critical importance of not waiting until your heart sends a clear message that its life-sustaining ability has been compromised; instead, acknowledge the presence of coronary risk factors and take preventive measures to bring them under control before it’s too late.
Perhaps most revealing was the very thorough study conducted in Iceland among 935 men and women initially aged 67 to 93 who were followed for up to more than 13 years. When they enrolled in the study, each participant underwent a noninvasive test called cardiac magnetic resonance imaging that can most reliably show whether a silent heart attack had already occurred. Initially, 17 percent were found to have had an S.M.I. and 10 percent had had a recognized attack. (...)
“A silent heart attack is not always so silent, but its symptoms — mild chest discomfort, heartburn, nausea, shortness of breath — happen to lots of people and are typically attributed to other causes and not brought to medical attention,” Dr. Robert O. Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told me. Women, whose symptoms are often vague, are especially unlikely to realize they are having a heart attack. (...)
“While screening with cardiac M.R.I. is not recommended, identification of risk factors certainly is,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the Iceland study.
“It’s important for doctors to recognize people at risk and prescribe appropriate treatments to reduce that risk,” he said in an interview. “Although it’s human nature to ignore certain things until you have an event, adherence to preventive treatment can be lifesaving. In the United States, a heart attack is the leading cause of sudden death in people 65 and older.”
My aunt was lucky. She survived her second heart attack and, by keeping cardiac risk factors under control, lived another two decades without further heart-related problems.
There are millions of people walking around in this country who, like my aunt, are oblivious to the fact that they have had an S.M.I. and face an increased risk of having another, more obvious one that could cause severe heart damage and possibly death.
You might think a silent heart attack is better than a recognized one: “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” Unfortunately, it can. Although knowing you’re at risk of a heart attack can be emotionally distressing, not knowing can have much more serious consequences, prompting you to continue living in ways that endanger the health of your heart and your life.A recognized heart attack is a wake-up call to adopt medical and lifestyle measures that can minimize cardiac risk, like normalizing blood pressure and cholesterol levels, quitting smoking, losing weight if you’re overweight, getting regular exercise and controlling Type 2 diabetes. If diet and exercise are not sufficiently protective, there are now many medications that can help nature along.
Even without medication, if everyone at increased coronary risk adhered to a heart-healthy lifestyle, “the incidence of heart disease would be reduced by 80 percent,” Dr. Rekha Mankad, cardiologist and director of the Women’s Heart Center at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told me.
Recent studies conducted in Iceland and Finland, which maintain excellent medical records on all citizens, have helped to determine how often S.M.I.s occur and the long-term consequences associated with them. The findings, published in JAMA Cardiology last October, highlight the critical importance of not waiting until your heart sends a clear message that its life-sustaining ability has been compromised; instead, acknowledge the presence of coronary risk factors and take preventive measures to bring them under control before it’s too late.
Perhaps most revealing was the very thorough study conducted in Iceland among 935 men and women initially aged 67 to 93 who were followed for up to more than 13 years. When they enrolled in the study, each participant underwent a noninvasive test called cardiac magnetic resonance imaging that can most reliably show whether a silent heart attack had already occurred. Initially, 17 percent were found to have had an S.M.I. and 10 percent had had a recognized attack. (...)
“A silent heart attack is not always so silent, but its symptoms — mild chest discomfort, heartburn, nausea, shortness of breath — happen to lots of people and are typically attributed to other causes and not brought to medical attention,” Dr. Robert O. Bonow, a cardiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told me. Women, whose symptoms are often vague, are especially unlikely to realize they are having a heart attack. (...)
“While screening with cardiac M.R.I. is not recommended, identification of risk factors certainly is,” he wrote in an editorial accompanying the Iceland study.
“It’s important for doctors to recognize people at risk and prescribe appropriate treatments to reduce that risk,” he said in an interview. “Although it’s human nature to ignore certain things until you have an event, adherence to preventive treatment can be lifesaving. In the United States, a heart attack is the leading cause of sudden death in people 65 and older.”
by Jane E. Brody, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Gracia Lam
The Case for Checking a Bag
Travel is a chaotic, exhausting experience exacerbated by people who forget the social contract the moment they step foot in an airport. I travel constantly. I chase miles and have status on three airlines. I read websites about how to best manage airline and hotel loyalty programs, airline credit cards, and the like. I have an app that shows me where every single plane currently flying is and other aviation geek information. I have an app that lets me listen to air traffic control chatter. There is a small park near the edge of LAX where I sit and watch incoming planes landing. I have favorite planes (Airbus 380, Boeing 787, Boeing 757, Boeing 737) and planes I truly despise (CRJ 700, Embraer 145). In short, I have made a necessary condition of my work something of a hobby.
As you might expect, I have a great many travel-related opinions, most but not all of which are wildly uncharitable. For instance, United is Satan’s airline and I will take almost any convoluted route to avoid flying them. Alaska Airlines planes smell weird. The food on American Airlines flights is worse than what I imagine dog food tastes like. Delta serves delicious Biscoff cookies and the flight attendants wear festive purple uniforms. The Atlanta airport is a cruel mistress. There is a bathroom attendant in the Charlotte Airport who likes to sing gospel as she does her work, serenading weary passengers and she is a delight. LaGuardia is unspeakable. You basically have to walk ten miles from the gate to customs in Montreal. The Indianapolis airport is the best airport in the United States; fight me. There aren’t nearly enough women or people of color serving as pilots. It is incredibly grating to get a chatty pilot who wants to narrate the entire flight when all you want to do is sleep or stare into the Grand Canyon. The way people treat flight attendants is, for the most part, absolutely disgraceful.
People have no sense of personal space when sitting at the gate. They use the seats around them for their personal items and luggage as if it is entirely reasonable to take up three seats while countless people stand, staring at them with fatigued malice. People are strangely obsessed with boarding early as if they want to sit on the plane longer than necessary. They hover around the boarding gate, no matter how often the gate agents provide clear, concise instructions about boarding. There is signage. There are often overhead monitors detailing the process. And still people hover whether they are in Group 1 or Group 7 and boarding has yet to begin. Then there are those who feel the need to monitor the boarding line, questioning the presence of anyone they deem wrongly positioned within the hierarchy of the travel universe. They love to ask if you are in the appropriate line or they try, inelegantly, to glance at your boarding pass, or they huff aggressively, desperate for you to acknowledge that they have something to say.
Airlines oversell flights and then act like they had no hand in it as they frantically call for volunteers to change their travel plans and take later flights. There are all kinds of mysterious “mechanical issues” that delay flights in infuriating fifteen-minute increments until the airline gives up and stops communicating to passengers altogether. When flights are cancelled, airlines will do anything to abdicate responsibility, handing you a $10 meal voucher even though there is nothing open and $10 in an airport will probably only get you a bottle of water because the prices, for everything, are outrageous.
I pick my seat on any given flight for specific reasons but all too often, some couple didn’t pick seats together and just have to sit next to each other or, like, they won’t survive the flight. They plead for someone, anyone, to switch seats with them and then the flight attendants get in on it and everyone is staring at you, judging you for being reluctant to give up your seat when all you want to do is put your noise-cancelling headphones on and get to your destination. Some flights feel more like a menagerie, so many little dogs in overpriced purses, yipping and yapping while their owners coo at them and expect you to be charmed. I’m allergic, no thank you.
There are, inevitably, crying babies and overexcited children who have simply had enough four hours into a seven-hour flight. I actually don’t mind the children and feel quite a lot of tenderness toward them on a plane because I, too, want to not be on a plane. I, too, want to cry and be held. What I mind is all the adults who sigh and roll their eyes and mutter under their breath while children act like children and are generally doing the best they can as their parents pray for mercy or death. (...)
I have opinions about how people walk through the concourse, how people should go through security, how there should be separate lanes for experienced travelers and infrequent travelers, how people watch videos on their phones without headphones, how they stand, even in the last row, the minute the plane pulls into the gate, even though it will be quite some time before they deplane, and on and on and on the list goes.
I reserve my most passionate opinions, however, for carry-on luggage. If you are ever wondering if you should check your luggage or carry-on, the answer is that you should check your luggage. I don’t care why you want to carry-on your luggage. You should check your bag. I say this with the caveat that air travel is prohibitively expensive and baggage fees are horrible and if you can’t afford the fees, you do what you must. For everyone else, check your bag.
In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back. Once people realized they were going to have to pay even more than the cost of their plane ticket to travel, all hell broke loose with carry-ons. Suddenly packing for trips of most any length became an exercise in austerity.
Writers, in particular, love to discuss the ways in which they contort themselves toward austerity to go on book tour. Nearly every writer active on social media has discussed, at length, how they will travel or have traveled with only a carry-on suitcase for a five-day trip or ten-day trip or three-week trip. It is something of a competition, as if there is valor in self-imposed deprivation. They offer tips, like rolling your clothes or stuffing your socks in your shoes or traveling without toiletries. They talk about wearing the same, increasingly soiled outfit for days on end because hey, you can wash it in the hotel bathroom sink or not.
When people talk about checking a bag, the conversations are ominous. There is always a story, a dark, dark story about the one time a suitcase was lost. Ultimately, life went on but there were moments of unbearable inconvenience. This story of the lost suitcase is so terrifying, people are willing to do anything to avoid it even though in reality, most airlines have a pretty solid grasp on luggage handling. In April 2019, airlines only mishandled 5.44 of every 1,000 bags they processed.
This fear of lost luggage is so wildly blown out of proportion that sometimes, checking a bag feels like an act of rebellion. I almost always check a bag. I check a very big bag.
[ed. Spare me. Here's the kicker: "In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back."]
As you might expect, I have a great many travel-related opinions, most but not all of which are wildly uncharitable. For instance, United is Satan’s airline and I will take almost any convoluted route to avoid flying them. Alaska Airlines planes smell weird. The food on American Airlines flights is worse than what I imagine dog food tastes like. Delta serves delicious Biscoff cookies and the flight attendants wear festive purple uniforms. The Atlanta airport is a cruel mistress. There is a bathroom attendant in the Charlotte Airport who likes to sing gospel as she does her work, serenading weary passengers and she is a delight. LaGuardia is unspeakable. You basically have to walk ten miles from the gate to customs in Montreal. The Indianapolis airport is the best airport in the United States; fight me. There aren’t nearly enough women or people of color serving as pilots. It is incredibly grating to get a chatty pilot who wants to narrate the entire flight when all you want to do is sleep or stare into the Grand Canyon. The way people treat flight attendants is, for the most part, absolutely disgraceful.People have no sense of personal space when sitting at the gate. They use the seats around them for their personal items and luggage as if it is entirely reasonable to take up three seats while countless people stand, staring at them with fatigued malice. People are strangely obsessed with boarding early as if they want to sit on the plane longer than necessary. They hover around the boarding gate, no matter how often the gate agents provide clear, concise instructions about boarding. There is signage. There are often overhead monitors detailing the process. And still people hover whether they are in Group 1 or Group 7 and boarding has yet to begin. Then there are those who feel the need to monitor the boarding line, questioning the presence of anyone they deem wrongly positioned within the hierarchy of the travel universe. They love to ask if you are in the appropriate line or they try, inelegantly, to glance at your boarding pass, or they huff aggressively, desperate for you to acknowledge that they have something to say.
Airlines oversell flights and then act like they had no hand in it as they frantically call for volunteers to change their travel plans and take later flights. There are all kinds of mysterious “mechanical issues” that delay flights in infuriating fifteen-minute increments until the airline gives up and stops communicating to passengers altogether. When flights are cancelled, airlines will do anything to abdicate responsibility, handing you a $10 meal voucher even though there is nothing open and $10 in an airport will probably only get you a bottle of water because the prices, for everything, are outrageous.
I pick my seat on any given flight for specific reasons but all too often, some couple didn’t pick seats together and just have to sit next to each other or, like, they won’t survive the flight. They plead for someone, anyone, to switch seats with them and then the flight attendants get in on it and everyone is staring at you, judging you for being reluctant to give up your seat when all you want to do is put your noise-cancelling headphones on and get to your destination. Some flights feel more like a menagerie, so many little dogs in overpriced purses, yipping and yapping while their owners coo at them and expect you to be charmed. I’m allergic, no thank you.
There are, inevitably, crying babies and overexcited children who have simply had enough four hours into a seven-hour flight. I actually don’t mind the children and feel quite a lot of tenderness toward them on a plane because I, too, want to not be on a plane. I, too, want to cry and be held. What I mind is all the adults who sigh and roll their eyes and mutter under their breath while children act like children and are generally doing the best they can as their parents pray for mercy or death. (...)
I have opinions about how people walk through the concourse, how people should go through security, how there should be separate lanes for experienced travelers and infrequent travelers, how people watch videos on their phones without headphones, how they stand, even in the last row, the minute the plane pulls into the gate, even though it will be quite some time before they deplane, and on and on and on the list goes.
I reserve my most passionate opinions, however, for carry-on luggage. If you are ever wondering if you should check your luggage or carry-on, the answer is that you should check your luggage. I don’t care why you want to carry-on your luggage. You should check your bag. I say this with the caveat that air travel is prohibitively expensive and baggage fees are horrible and if you can’t afford the fees, you do what you must. For everyone else, check your bag.
In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back. Once people realized they were going to have to pay even more than the cost of their plane ticket to travel, all hell broke loose with carry-ons. Suddenly packing for trips of most any length became an exercise in austerity.
Writers, in particular, love to discuss the ways in which they contort themselves toward austerity to go on book tour. Nearly every writer active on social media has discussed, at length, how they will travel or have traveled with only a carry-on suitcase for a five-day trip or ten-day trip or three-week trip. It is something of a competition, as if there is valor in self-imposed deprivation. They offer tips, like rolling your clothes or stuffing your socks in your shoes or traveling without toiletries. They talk about wearing the same, increasingly soiled outfit for days on end because hey, you can wash it in the hotel bathroom sink or not.
When people talk about checking a bag, the conversations are ominous. There is always a story, a dark, dark story about the one time a suitcase was lost. Ultimately, life went on but there were moments of unbearable inconvenience. This story of the lost suitcase is so terrifying, people are willing to do anything to avoid it even though in reality, most airlines have a pretty solid grasp on luggage handling. In April 2019, airlines only mishandled 5.44 of every 1,000 bags they processed.
This fear of lost luggage is so wildly blown out of proportion that sometimes, checking a bag feels like an act of rebellion. I almost always check a bag. I check a very big bag.
by Roxanne Gay, Medium | Read more:
Image: Kyle Griggs[ed. Spare me. Here's the kicker: "In 2007, airlines began instituting baggage fees to offset the cost of jet fuel and once they realized they could charge for luggage and other basic amenities of air travel, there was no looking back."]
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Heel Turns: The History of Modern Celebrity
When future historians study these troubled times, they will marvel at the relentless rise of sea levels, strongman politics and Kardashians. The fame-babies of a double murder (their father Robert Kardashian represented O. J. Simpson), the Kardashians and their extension pack, the Jenners, morphed from Los Angeles socialites into seemingly inevitable magnets of scandal, desire and money. Kim set the pace with a leaked sex tape in 2007, teaching the clan to cheerfully break the boundaries of good taste and common sense, to absorb the energy of the world’s criticism and translate it into cash. Keeping Up with the Kardashians, a reality show centred on the lives and careers of the family, first aired in late 2007 and is now in its sixteenth series. In 2014, Kim posed for Paper Magazine holding a champagne bottle, the foamy liquid squirting over her head and into the glass perched on her extended backside. Critics noted the channelling of the eighteenth-century Khoikhoi woman Sara “Saartjie” Baartman and debated whether Kim understood that she was the butt of an old racist joke. That year she made $28 million, overtaking Meryl Streep, Stephen King and J. K. Rowling on Forbes’s list of highest-paid celebrities. Her little sister, meanwhile, plumped her lips with filler, lied about it, and became the unwitting namesake of the “Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge”, in which masses of people pressed their lips into shot glasses, sucked as hard as possible, and then recoiled in horror at their own self-mutilation. Kylie responded by selling lipstick and, at twenty-one, quietly became the world’s youngest billionaire. No doubt the gang’s current racket hawking laxative teas, diet lollipops and candy-coloured vitamins will leap right over the naysayers and fuddy-duddys to reach the kids who can truly appreciate it. Like Antaeus drawing his fighting strength from the earth, the family is invigorated by Mother Notoriety, growing more powerful every time it seems to fall.
The Kardashian-Jenners have all the external trappings of charisma without its sacred core. This makes them useful for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity, much as a body whose soul has departed is handier for studying anatomy. They are famous for being famous, but why, after all, are they famous? Why, of all the personal stylists, exhibitionists and rich kids in Calabasas, CA, did they become such magnets for attention? You may not be one of Kim’s 143 million Instagram followers but you do know who she is.
There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
by Irina Dumitrescu, TLS | Read more:
The Kardashian-Jenners have all the external trappings of charisma without its sacred core. This makes them useful for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity, much as a body whose soul has departed is handier for studying anatomy. They are famous for being famous, but why, after all, are they famous? Why, of all the personal stylists, exhibitionists and rich kids in Calabasas, CA, did they become such magnets for attention? You may not be one of Kim’s 143 million Instagram followers but you do know who she is.There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. Glory usually came after death, in monuments and songs and rumours of miracles near their graves. They were kings and heroes and saints, embodiments of the highest and most precious values of their communities. Their example inspired the young and chastened the reprobate. Their touch healed the sick, their flesh a direct conduit to the divine. Then came modernity, with wires and steamships and women shameless enough to strut the stage. A celebrity changed from a man who had done useful, important things in the world to an entertainer, often female and young, with a knack for fascinating audiences. The religious fanatic transformed into a fan, eager for stolen glimpses of the beloved star, hungry for private gossip and salacious revelations, ready to buy an endorsed cigarette or shoe or perfume for the feeling of having come closer to her image. The internet sped up the process and took it to its inevitable conclusion. Celebrity became its own performance. Reality itself turned into a show, and ordinary people began to polish their personal brand. Fame was the accomplishment, the great deed, the healing salve, the song that sang itself.
The second version of the story is not as breathless, and suggests that celebrity has been around much longer. Even when women were kept from performing in the high drama of the ancient Roman stage, some captivated audiences with dance and music and bawdy mime. There was usually someone around to say it was a bad idea. In his treatise “On the Spectacles”, the second-century Christian writer Tertullian railed against the cross-dressing actors, pantomimes and women prostitutes on the stage, claiming that the entire allure of the theatre lay in its filth. The great heroes of old were contradictory figures, too: Mark Antony’s fame came with a dose of scandal and erotic transgression, as did Joan of Arc’s. Before being canonized and neutralized, saints and prophets enchanted their followers by refusing contemporary notions of the good life. Their disciples sought out the places where they had slept and suffered, travelled to touch a slip of skin or cloth or hair. Kings and queens may have paid less attention to their great deeds and more to their public image, to the masques and poems and ceremonies that cemented their exceptional status. Some, such as Elizabeth I, had a talent for turning a personal failing (her lack of children, for example) into evidence of divine nature. Contemporary celebrity culture is a pumped-up, sped-up version of an old dance between people who want to be special and the folks who want to watch them try.
In The Drama of Celebrity Sharon Marcus takes a middle path between these two narratives. Marcus acknowledges the long prehistory of modern-day stardom, but focuses on the flowering of celebrity culture in the West since the eighteenth century. In lucid prose, she describes celebrity as a drama with three main characters: celebrities, the public that adores and judges them, and the media producers who exalt, criticize and satirize. The star of the book is Sarah Bernhardt, the genial actress and calculatedly charismatic “godmother of modern celebrity culture”, whose success in shaping her public persona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was unprecedented. Marcus introduces a predictable supporting cast – Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Anna Pavlova, Madonna – but Bernhardt remains the magnetic centre of the story. The book reproduces a rich trove of archival material which, if it does not bring Bernhardt back to life, at least reveals the scintillating liveliness of her image a century ago. Photographs, engravings, paintings, fan scrapbooks, outlandish caricatures, letters and diaries all speak to Bernhardt’s hold on the public attention.
Bernhardt’s methods may sound familiar. She took little account of society’s rules for women or even of its lowered expectations of actresses. We might expect this in the sexual arena, and indeed, Bernhardt had a child out of wedlock, briefly married a much younger man, and had a long, possibly intimate relationship with another woman, the painter Louise Abbéma. But Bernhardt outraged in other ways, too, breaking her contract with the Théâtre-Français, managing her own productions, flitting around in a hot-air balloon and writing a book about her travels in the clouds. Her very body was an affront, slender at a time when public taste preferred plump and curvy women. Marcus explains the appeal of celebrity scandal as a kind of wish fulfilment. While most people who break the rules are stigmatized as a result, defiant celebrities – and notorious politicians – do not lose face. They hold out the promise of winning all of society’s rewards – money, fame, adoration – while ignoring its precepts. Obedient, scared mortals need not suffer the penalties of nonconformism to enjoy its pleasure: they can watch a star do it for them.
by Irina Dumitrescu, TLS | Read more:
Image: Kevin Tachman/MG19/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue
We Need A Truth-In-Advertising Commission For Voters
It was a pretty good troll. On Friday, Elizabeth Warren’s campaign ran an ad on Facebook saying that the social media giant had endorsed President Trump.
It hasn’t, of course — as the ad acknowledged a few sentences later. The goal, which it achieved and then some, was to draw attention to Facebook’s recent refusal to take down a Trump campaign ad that makes an objectively false claim about former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, and the threat that stance poses to fair elections. Let’s see how you like having lies told publicly about you, Warren was saying to Mark Zuckerberg and company.
Facebook’s decision on the Biden ad wasn’t a one-off. As Warren later noted on Twitter, Facebook recently tweaked its policies to make its stance on false political content even more hands-off than before. “It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” a company VP wrote in explaining the move.
Attacks that play fast and loose with the facts may seem like the kind of hardball politics that’s gone on forever. After all, in 1828, Andrew Jackson’s campaign falsely accused President John Quincy Adams of pimping out an American girl to the Russian czar earlier in his career. But when voters make decisions based on false information spread virally to millions, the damage to the integrity of our elections is profound.
Think of it this way: We understand the harm done by voter suppression schemes that tell people the wrong location for their polling place or that the election is Wednesday not Tuesday, and the Brennan Center has helped draft legislation to crack down on them. There’s also the danger from “deep fakes” — manipulated images, spread online, that aim to falsely discredit or embarrass a candidate — a threat California recently aimed to tackle with a new law. Why should false facts aimed at affecting voters’ decisions be treated differently?
Or consider a different analogy: if advertisers make false claims about their own products or their competitors’, they can be fined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That’s because we recognize that the free market can’t function effectively if consumers don’t have accurate facts — just as voters need accurate facts for free elections to work properly.
This isn’t just about Facebook. It shouldn’t be up to for-profit companies alone to decide which campaign messages can responsibly be aired and which aim to mislead voters. Instead, that should be done by an entity whose only goal is to further the public interest.
That’s why we need a neutral government regulator tasked with ensuring misinformation doesn’t undermine our elections. In my perfect world, this body would be empowered to block or punish false or substantially misleading campaign speech — whether in the form of campaign ads or comments by candidates and their backers. But the Supreme Court’s broad reading of the First Amendment makes that a nonstarter for the foreseeable future. Indeed, as of 2014, 27 states barred false political statements, but four of those laws have since been struck down. And state-level bans seem poorly suited to regulate campaign speech that, especially in a presidential race, is national in reach.
So for now, this body would function simply as an authoritative fact-checker, stamping “False” — or perhaps in some cases, a designation like “Unproven” or “Dubious”— on any political communication that merited it based on a careful, transparent investigation, just as health authorities stamp warnings on cigarettes.
That’s a role that appears to put it on much firmer constitutional ground than if it were authorized to actually block false speech. And it still falls well short of some measures adopted by other advanced democracies, including Canada, which criminalizes “knowingly making or publishing a false statement of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of a candidate with the intention of affecting the result of an election.”
Of course, voters are deceived not only by ads that make flatly false claims, but also by broader attacks or storylines that are based on a false or misleading premise, even if no specific assertion is narrowly untrue. These kinds of made-up scandals can often be even more damaging than narrowly false statements, since the mainstream media has more trouble ignoring them. A prime example is the Biden-Ukraine story — in which Trump and his allies charge Biden had Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired in order to protect Biden’s son, even though the evidence shows Biden did no such thing — which despite being essentially false, may have done real damage to the former vice president’s campaign.
That’s why this body might also be authorized to declare such storylines broadly illegitimate. Yes, that would force it to make more subjective judgments about which attacks are fundamentally bogus and which are valid. But again, the FTC is authorized to go beyond narrow true or false determinations when considering whether an ad misleads consumers. Why should voters get less protection?
Perhaps the most obvious danger of a body like this is that it would be captured by one side. After all, giving Trump the power to upgrade his claims of “fake news” into official government rulings would be disastrous. So the issue of how its members would be chosen to ensure it stayed unbiased would be crucial. But that concern shouldn’t kill this conversation in its cradle. Perhaps the answer is to split membership between the two parties, or maybe it’s to try to ensure that commissioners are genuinely nonpartisan. But if states can create independent commissions to handle redistricting — an area that’s no less politically fraught — we shouldn’t assume it’s impossible to do the same here.
Of course, in the current political climate, plenty of highly engaged partisan voters will automatically view the decisions of a government panel — however fairly its members are appointed, and however transparent its decision-making —as illegitimate if the decision hurts that voter’s favored candidate. But having a claim officially declared false might still make an impression on some swing voters. More importantly, it could lead news outlets and fair-minded opinion-shapers to avoid amplifying the message, ultimately starving it of oxygen.
by Zachary Roth, TPM | Read more:
Image: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
It hasn’t, of course — as the ad acknowledged a few sentences later. The goal, which it achieved and then some, was to draw attention to Facebook’s recent refusal to take down a Trump campaign ad that makes an objectively false claim about former Vice President Joe Biden and Ukraine, and the threat that stance poses to fair elections. Let’s see how you like having lies told publicly about you, Warren was saying to Mark Zuckerberg and company.
Facebook’s decision on the Biden ad wasn’t a one-off. As Warren later noted on Twitter, Facebook recently tweaked its policies to make its stance on false political content even more hands-off than before. “It is not our role to intervene when politicians speak,” a company VP wrote in explaining the move.
Attacks that play fast and loose with the facts may seem like the kind of hardball politics that’s gone on forever. After all, in 1828, Andrew Jackson’s campaign falsely accused President John Quincy Adams of pimping out an American girl to the Russian czar earlier in his career. But when voters make decisions based on false information spread virally to millions, the damage to the integrity of our elections is profound. Think of it this way: We understand the harm done by voter suppression schemes that tell people the wrong location for their polling place or that the election is Wednesday not Tuesday, and the Brennan Center has helped draft legislation to crack down on them. There’s also the danger from “deep fakes” — manipulated images, spread online, that aim to falsely discredit or embarrass a candidate — a threat California recently aimed to tackle with a new law. Why should false facts aimed at affecting voters’ decisions be treated differently?
Or consider a different analogy: if advertisers make false claims about their own products or their competitors’, they can be fined by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). That’s because we recognize that the free market can’t function effectively if consumers don’t have accurate facts — just as voters need accurate facts for free elections to work properly.
This isn’t just about Facebook. It shouldn’t be up to for-profit companies alone to decide which campaign messages can responsibly be aired and which aim to mislead voters. Instead, that should be done by an entity whose only goal is to further the public interest.
That’s why we need a neutral government regulator tasked with ensuring misinformation doesn’t undermine our elections. In my perfect world, this body would be empowered to block or punish false or substantially misleading campaign speech — whether in the form of campaign ads or comments by candidates and their backers. But the Supreme Court’s broad reading of the First Amendment makes that a nonstarter for the foreseeable future. Indeed, as of 2014, 27 states barred false political statements, but four of those laws have since been struck down. And state-level bans seem poorly suited to regulate campaign speech that, especially in a presidential race, is national in reach.
So for now, this body would function simply as an authoritative fact-checker, stamping “False” — or perhaps in some cases, a designation like “Unproven” or “Dubious”— on any political communication that merited it based on a careful, transparent investigation, just as health authorities stamp warnings on cigarettes.
That’s a role that appears to put it on much firmer constitutional ground than if it were authorized to actually block false speech. And it still falls well short of some measures adopted by other advanced democracies, including Canada, which criminalizes “knowingly making or publishing a false statement of fact in relation to the personal character or conduct of a candidate with the intention of affecting the result of an election.”
Of course, voters are deceived not only by ads that make flatly false claims, but also by broader attacks or storylines that are based on a false or misleading premise, even if no specific assertion is narrowly untrue. These kinds of made-up scandals can often be even more damaging than narrowly false statements, since the mainstream media has more trouble ignoring them. A prime example is the Biden-Ukraine story — in which Trump and his allies charge Biden had Ukraine’s top prosecutor fired in order to protect Biden’s son, even though the evidence shows Biden did no such thing — which despite being essentially false, may have done real damage to the former vice president’s campaign.
That’s why this body might also be authorized to declare such storylines broadly illegitimate. Yes, that would force it to make more subjective judgments about which attacks are fundamentally bogus and which are valid. But again, the FTC is authorized to go beyond narrow true or false determinations when considering whether an ad misleads consumers. Why should voters get less protection?
Perhaps the most obvious danger of a body like this is that it would be captured by one side. After all, giving Trump the power to upgrade his claims of “fake news” into official government rulings would be disastrous. So the issue of how its members would be chosen to ensure it stayed unbiased would be crucial. But that concern shouldn’t kill this conversation in its cradle. Perhaps the answer is to split membership between the two parties, or maybe it’s to try to ensure that commissioners are genuinely nonpartisan. But if states can create independent commissions to handle redistricting — an area that’s no less politically fraught — we shouldn’t assume it’s impossible to do the same here.
Of course, in the current political climate, plenty of highly engaged partisan voters will automatically view the decisions of a government panel — however fairly its members are appointed, and however transparent its decision-making —as illegitimate if the decision hurts that voter’s favored candidate. But having a claim officially declared false might still make an impression on some swing voters. More importantly, it could lead news outlets and fair-minded opinion-shapers to avoid amplifying the message, ultimately starving it of oxygen.
by Zachary Roth, TPM | Read more:
Image: Robert Alexander/Getty Images
[ed. Everyone hates the refs, but at least accept some objective authority calling the penalties.]
Revolution? There's an App For That.
Tsunami Democrà tic is a radical, decentralized wing of the resurgent Catalan independence movement, centered around an anonymously authored app designed to coordinate revolutionary uprisings.
The Tsunami Democrà tic app embodies the "be water" motto of the Hong Kong uprising and builds on the Sukey anti-kettling app from the UK's 2011 student protests: it can only be activated by scanning a QR code from an existing member, and once it is activated, it places you in a "cell" with nearby users and shows you actions taking place nearby -- measures designed to both coordinate protests and to limit the exposure when the police get ahold of the app.
The app is a sideloaded Android app and there's no Ios version, meaning that there's no way for either Google or Apple to remove the app from their stores under pressure from Madrid (Apple bans sideloading apps so it's Android-only).
The app was first made available on Oct 14 and in-app messages have promised its first major use tomorrow, on Oct 21. The app's had more than 270,000 downloads.
The app is a fork of an existing tool, Retroshare, and some of its source has been published for inspection. No one is sure whether the fork was created by a team of programmers or a dedicated individual, and without a full code audit, it's impossible to say whether it is either maliciously or accidentally exposing its users.
This is essentially a reworking of the revolutionary tactical doctrine set out by Heinlein in his 1966 science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (which also served as the inspiration for Ian McDonald's incredible Luna trilogy).
The Tsunami Democrà tic app embodies the "be water" motto of the Hong Kong uprising and builds on the Sukey anti-kettling app from the UK's 2011 student protests: it can only be activated by scanning a QR code from an existing member, and once it is activated, it places you in a "cell" with nearby users and shows you actions taking place nearby -- measures designed to both coordinate protests and to limit the exposure when the police get ahold of the app.
The app is a sideloaded Android app and there's no Ios version, meaning that there's no way for either Google or Apple to remove the app from their stores under pressure from Madrid (Apple bans sideloading apps so it's Android-only).The app was first made available on Oct 14 and in-app messages have promised its first major use tomorrow, on Oct 21. The app's had more than 270,000 downloads.
The app is a fork of an existing tool, Retroshare, and some of its source has been published for inspection. No one is sure whether the fork was created by a team of programmers or a dedicated individual, and without a full code audit, it's impossible to say whether it is either maliciously or accidentally exposing its users.
This is essentially a reworking of the revolutionary tactical doctrine set out by Heinlein in his 1966 science fiction novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (which also served as the inspiration for Ian McDonald's incredible Luna trilogy).
But another theory is also gaining ground. “I think it's a change of strategy of the main groups, which were involved in the first of our referendum two years ago,” says Luján. He believes that Tsunami Democrà tic is a proxy group for the larger separatist organisations, and former members of the former Catalan government, currently residing in Brussels after fleeing the country in 2017.
Some Catalan politicians – including president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra; its vice president, Pere Aragonès, and the president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent – have publicly supported the group on social media. Tsunami Democrà tic denies any link.
Spain’s interior ministry has expressed the desire to discover who is behind the group and the app, but this will likely be difficult – given it could be set up and run from anywhere in the world.Catalonia has created a new kind of online activism. Everyone should pay attention [Laurie Clarke/Wired UK]
by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Radical Survival Strategies for Struggling Colleges
When Steve Thorsett crunched the numbers, things looked grim.
Business was flagging. His flow of customers had fallen to a 10-year low, down nearly 20 percent since 2015. By the year after that, annual expenses were outpacing operating revenues by $14 million.
In an increasingly unforgiving market, Mr. Thorsett needed to do more than chip away at the margins of this problem. He could make cuts, but that was complicated in his industry, and would likely only speed the downward spiral. To differentiate himself from his competitors, this chief executive determined that his operation needed to grow bigger, not smaller.
So Mr. Thorsett took a classic shortcut to expansion. He found a partner that was on even shakier ground. The resulting acquisition will bring with it several hundred new consumers, allowing efficiencies of scale that can lower costs.
Now Mr. Thorsett radiates optimism about the future — something rare these days among his counterparts, many of whom face challenges as bad as or worse than he did.
Mr. Thorsett is the president of Willamette University, part of a higher education sector grappling with a sharp decline in enrollment and financial challenges that cry out not for incremental change, but for radical solutions. Colleges and universities that fail to adapt risk joining the average of 11 per year that the bond-rating firm Moody’s says have shut down in the last three years.
Thanks, among other reasons, to a decline in the number of 18-year-olds and low unemployment luring potential students straight into the work force, enrollment is down by more than 2.9 million since the last peak, in the fall of 2011, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. More than 400 colleges and universities still had seats available for freshmen and transfer students after the traditional May 1 deadline to enroll for this fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports.
More are likely to go under; Moody’s projects that the pace of closings will soon reach 15 per year. Yet when asked what steps they are taking to avoid this fate, some campus leaders responded like the president of one small private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. It would, he said, “continue to graduate students who will make a tangible and constructive difference in the world.”
The crisis has advanced beyond the point where those sorts of good intentions are enough, Mr. Thorsett said. He and others in higher education have been actively searching for concrete new ways to rebuild enrollment and produce much-needed revenue.
“This is a business,” Mr. Thorsett said. “It’s not for profit, but we have to keep the lights on. We have to build a model that’s sustainable.”
One way is through acquisitions like the one his university has made of the Claremont School of Theology in California, or C.S.T., which is being moved to the Salem, Ore., campus of Willamette, just as private companies might do to increase their size and cost-effectiveness.
The pace of mergers and acquisitions is predicted to pick up so quickly that the self-described first full-service university and college merger consulting firm, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, hung out its shingle in August. “Will there be more? Yeah, we’re betting on it,” said Brian Weinblatt, the firm’s founder.
Colleges are also working to reduce the number of dropouts, on the principle that it’s cheaper to provide the support required to keep tuition-paying students than to recruit more. A few are pushing job and on-time graduation guarantees as selling points. Several are getting into the business of corporate training, which is lucrative because employers foot the bill for workers who don’t need financial aid or fitness centers.
Many institutions are adding programs tied to real-time workplace demand, including online courses that appeal to people who are balancing their educations with families and work. Some are even squeezing small amounts of money from such things as renting out their dorm rooms in the summers on Airbnb, catering weddings and licensing their logos for products including (in the case of 48 universities and colleges) caskets and urns.
“You have to be thinking beyond the current business model, whoever you are,” said Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Babson College, whose Academy for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurial Learning makes money for the business university by training educators worldwide how to teach entrepreneurship. “That’s what higher education is going to have to do if it’s going to survive.”
Distinguishing itself is also part of Willamette’s even more aggressive strategy in acquiring the 134-year-old C.S.T., which was suffering multimillion-dollar annual shortfalls that, unlike Willamette, it could not make up from its endowment.
Among the institutions Willamette considers its competitors are small liberal-arts colleges such as Reed and Whitman. But it has something they don’t: several graduate divisions (Reed offers one master’s degree in liberal studies) and a goal of increasing its enrollment from the current 2,700 to 4,000 over the next 10 years, starting with about 400 from the theology school.
“‘Midsize university’ is a sweet spot,” said Mr. Thorsett, who is working to position his school as small enough to promise personal attention but big enough to offer lots of choice, while not coincidentally lowering per-unit costs by serving a larger study body. “The university nature of our institution lets us do things our competitors can’t do.”
[ed. Tip: The NY Times paywall seems to have gotten tighter lately, so if you're having trouble accessing articles I'd recommend Cookie Remover (Chrome extension). Another tip for articles that require disabling your ad-blocker: just cut and paste the url in Outline.]
Business was flagging. His flow of customers had fallen to a 10-year low, down nearly 20 percent since 2015. By the year after that, annual expenses were outpacing operating revenues by $14 million.
In an increasingly unforgiving market, Mr. Thorsett needed to do more than chip away at the margins of this problem. He could make cuts, but that was complicated in his industry, and would likely only speed the downward spiral. To differentiate himself from his competitors, this chief executive determined that his operation needed to grow bigger, not smaller.
So Mr. Thorsett took a classic shortcut to expansion. He found a partner that was on even shakier ground. The resulting acquisition will bring with it several hundred new consumers, allowing efficiencies of scale that can lower costs.Now Mr. Thorsett radiates optimism about the future — something rare these days among his counterparts, many of whom face challenges as bad as or worse than he did.
Mr. Thorsett is the president of Willamette University, part of a higher education sector grappling with a sharp decline in enrollment and financial challenges that cry out not for incremental change, but for radical solutions. Colleges and universities that fail to adapt risk joining the average of 11 per year that the bond-rating firm Moody’s says have shut down in the last three years.
Thanks, among other reasons, to a decline in the number of 18-year-olds and low unemployment luring potential students straight into the work force, enrollment is down by more than 2.9 million since the last peak, in the fall of 2011, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. More than 400 colleges and universities still had seats available for freshmen and transfer students after the traditional May 1 deadline to enroll for this fall, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports.
More are likely to go under; Moody’s projects that the pace of closings will soon reach 15 per year. Yet when asked what steps they are taking to avoid this fate, some campus leaders responded like the president of one small private liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. It would, he said, “continue to graduate students who will make a tangible and constructive difference in the world.”
The crisis has advanced beyond the point where those sorts of good intentions are enough, Mr. Thorsett said. He and others in higher education have been actively searching for concrete new ways to rebuild enrollment and produce much-needed revenue.
“This is a business,” Mr. Thorsett said. “It’s not for profit, but we have to keep the lights on. We have to build a model that’s sustainable.”
One way is through acquisitions like the one his university has made of the Claremont School of Theology in California, or C.S.T., which is being moved to the Salem, Ore., campus of Willamette, just as private companies might do to increase their size and cost-effectiveness.
The pace of mergers and acquisitions is predicted to pick up so quickly that the self-described first full-service university and college merger consulting firm, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions, hung out its shingle in August. “Will there be more? Yeah, we’re betting on it,” said Brian Weinblatt, the firm’s founder.
Colleges are also working to reduce the number of dropouts, on the principle that it’s cheaper to provide the support required to keep tuition-paying students than to recruit more. A few are pushing job and on-time graduation guarantees as selling points. Several are getting into the business of corporate training, which is lucrative because employers foot the bill for workers who don’t need financial aid or fitness centers.
Many institutions are adding programs tied to real-time workplace demand, including online courses that appeal to people who are balancing their educations with families and work. Some are even squeezing small amounts of money from such things as renting out their dorm rooms in the summers on Airbnb, catering weddings and licensing their logos for products including (in the case of 48 universities and colleges) caskets and urns.
“You have to be thinking beyond the current business model, whoever you are,” said Stephen Spinelli Jr., president of Babson College, whose Academy for the Advancement of Global Entrepreneurial Learning makes money for the business university by training educators worldwide how to teach entrepreneurship. “That’s what higher education is going to have to do if it’s going to survive.”
Distinguishing itself is also part of Willamette’s even more aggressive strategy in acquiring the 134-year-old C.S.T., which was suffering multimillion-dollar annual shortfalls that, unlike Willamette, it could not make up from its endowment.
Among the institutions Willamette considers its competitors are small liberal-arts colleges such as Reed and Whitman. But it has something they don’t: several graduate divisions (Reed offers one master’s degree in liberal studies) and a goal of increasing its enrollment from the current 2,700 to 4,000 over the next 10 years, starting with about 400 from the theology school.
“‘Midsize university’ is a sweet spot,” said Mr. Thorsett, who is working to position his school as small enough to promise personal attention but big enough to offer lots of choice, while not coincidentally lowering per-unit costs by serving a larger study body. “The university nature of our institution lets us do things our competitors can’t do.”
by Jon Marcus, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ashlee Culverhouse/Chattanooga Times Free Press, via Associated Press[ed. Tip: The NY Times paywall seems to have gotten tighter lately, so if you're having trouble accessing articles I'd recommend Cookie Remover (Chrome extension). Another tip for articles that require disabling your ad-blocker: just cut and paste the url in Outline.]
Saturday, October 19, 2019
Surveying the Entire Great Barrier Reef
Massive Citizen Science Effort Seeks to Survey the Entire Great Barrier Reef (Smithsonian).
Image: Damian Bennett
Watching and Its Implications
In the 35 years that I have followed boxing, I’ve witnessed perhaps a dozen fighters killed or catastrophically injured. Indeed, most fights are in part spectacles of risk and are marketed as such. I once left an arena with the blood of the great American cruiserweight Steve Cunningham spattered over my lapels, a measure of the cost he paid in a fight that he nearly won. It was a thrilling evening, not because Cunningham shed blood but because he held his dignity against great odds fighting a much younger and stronger man. He was down four times, but he ended the bout on his feet. I hope that Cunningham, who has since retired, has no regrets.
Once among America’s most popular sports, boxing was brought low by its inveterate corruption—and the National Football League was a primary beneficiary of its downfall. Professional football’s violence is somewhat more sanitized, and it replaces the ethnic tribalism of boxing with slightly less corrosive regional loyalties. It’s therefore more appealing to the affluent audiences that advertisers want to reach. We’re discovering, though, that football is nearly as dangerous as boxing, and in the same way. Head trauma, it turns out, doesn’t discriminate.
A number of writers have recently suggested that moral disgust should cause spectators to turn their backs on football, or more saliently, to turn off their televisions. Though I disagree with this argument, we should take it seriously. A sports spectator is implicated in the violence of the games he watches, if only because the games wouldn’t be played without him. The NFL’s enormous television audience—now 45 percent female—creates the incentive structure that induces players to take risks with their health. The categorical imperative works like this: if no one watched football, the games wouldn’t be played, at least not on the same scale; less football would mean less head trauma; head trauma can generate debilitating chronic conditions in later life; therefore, we should not watch football.
Harvard professor Steven Pinker claims in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that, notwithstanding what we see on the evening news, the broad arc of human history is moving away from violence and toward cooperation and community. Evolutionary biology increasingly rewards those who channel their aggression into productive work. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal, but in the end, it’s as much narrative as science, and the story may seem to take one shape in Cambridge and quite another in Camden or Kabul. For now, it remains true that violence is endemic to human life. The terms on which we engage it may be more or less in our control, depending upon our environment, but it finds us all eventually.
The ethical implications of spectatorship have inspired many books, though it’s doubtful as to how practically useful that literature is for people deciding whether they can permit themselves to watch a college football game or a Mixed Martial Arts fight. A leading work in the field is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, a book-length essay that explores war photography and its effect on the viewer, securely away from the front lines. Sontag doesn’t speak directly where circumlocution is possible, and what she believes about the ethics of spectatorship is not always evident, but she gave the subject a vocabulary. She notes that war photography often recapitulates an insidious process of war itself—the depersonalization of the individual. Wars kill indiscriminately and in large numbers, and the images captured by war photographers are often of soldiers destined to remain anonymous.
Surely the opposite is true in sports, however. A fighter who dies in the ring retains his personhood. Indeed, he gains a kind of unsought immortality. Any serious fight fan can toll the names: Benny Paret, Davey Moore, Duk-Koo Kim—or 27-year-old Patrick Day, who died on Wednesday from injuries suffered in a bout last weekend. (...)
Each of us has his own ethical economy. Often that economy stems from how we were raised: with religion or without; with or without respect for the law; with our eyes trained to local or universal concerns. That some retired athletes suffer from terrible injuries incurred from competition is a fact that we should not turn away from. But what is the precise ethical principle being invoked by the claim that we may not watch contests in which adults voluntarily compete, and with the usual social goods as their quarry—money, fame, sexual opportunity—along with psychic benefits impossible to quantify? We know that athletes derive enormous satisfaction from pursuing excellence in sports, in addition to significant material benefits. Most of those walking around on artificial knees say that they would do it all again, even knowing the costs. We should not lightly assume that athletes don’t know what is good for them—or that we are responsible for protecting them from themselves.
by Jonathan Clarke, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
Once among America’s most popular sports, boxing was brought low by its inveterate corruption—and the National Football League was a primary beneficiary of its downfall. Professional football’s violence is somewhat more sanitized, and it replaces the ethnic tribalism of boxing with slightly less corrosive regional loyalties. It’s therefore more appealing to the affluent audiences that advertisers want to reach. We’re discovering, though, that football is nearly as dangerous as boxing, and in the same way. Head trauma, it turns out, doesn’t discriminate.A number of writers have recently suggested that moral disgust should cause spectators to turn their backs on football, or more saliently, to turn off their televisions. Though I disagree with this argument, we should take it seriously. A sports spectator is implicated in the violence of the games he watches, if only because the games wouldn’t be played without him. The NFL’s enormous television audience—now 45 percent female—creates the incentive structure that induces players to take risks with their health. The categorical imperative works like this: if no one watched football, the games wouldn’t be played, at least not on the same scale; less football would mean less head trauma; head trauma can generate debilitating chronic conditions in later life; therefore, we should not watch football.
Harvard professor Steven Pinker claims in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature that, notwithstanding what we see on the evening news, the broad arc of human history is moving away from violence and toward cooperation and community. Evolutionary biology increasingly rewards those who channel their aggression into productive work. This argument has enormous intuitive appeal, but in the end, it’s as much narrative as science, and the story may seem to take one shape in Cambridge and quite another in Camden or Kabul. For now, it remains true that violence is endemic to human life. The terms on which we engage it may be more or less in our control, depending upon our environment, but it finds us all eventually.
The ethical implications of spectatorship have inspired many books, though it’s doubtful as to how practically useful that literature is for people deciding whether they can permit themselves to watch a college football game or a Mixed Martial Arts fight. A leading work in the field is Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, a book-length essay that explores war photography and its effect on the viewer, securely away from the front lines. Sontag doesn’t speak directly where circumlocution is possible, and what she believes about the ethics of spectatorship is not always evident, but she gave the subject a vocabulary. She notes that war photography often recapitulates an insidious process of war itself—the depersonalization of the individual. Wars kill indiscriminately and in large numbers, and the images captured by war photographers are often of soldiers destined to remain anonymous.
Surely the opposite is true in sports, however. A fighter who dies in the ring retains his personhood. Indeed, he gains a kind of unsought immortality. Any serious fight fan can toll the names: Benny Paret, Davey Moore, Duk-Koo Kim—or 27-year-old Patrick Day, who died on Wednesday from injuries suffered in a bout last weekend. (...)
Each of us has his own ethical economy. Often that economy stems from how we were raised: with religion or without; with or without respect for the law; with our eyes trained to local or universal concerns. That some retired athletes suffer from terrible injuries incurred from competition is a fact that we should not turn away from. But what is the precise ethical principle being invoked by the claim that we may not watch contests in which adults voluntarily compete, and with the usual social goods as their quarry—money, fame, sexual opportunity—along with psychic benefits impossible to quantify? We know that athletes derive enormous satisfaction from pursuing excellence in sports, in addition to significant material benefits. Most of those walking around on artificial knees say that they would do it all again, even knowing the costs. We should not lightly assume that athletes don’t know what is good for them—or that we are responsible for protecting them from themselves.
by Jonathan Clarke, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Dustin Bradford/Getty Images
Friday, October 18, 2019
Flacks and Figures
I'm getting paid $1,000 for this article. Last year, I made roughly $50,000 between a 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. freelance gig writing celebrity news and publishing some one-off articles. I grew up middle class, though my divorced father eventually worked his way well into the upper-middle class. Financially speaking, I’m fine, though I live alone in Toronto, and I likely won’t be able to afford a house unless my parents die or my dad provides the cash for a down payment. You probably don’t need to know these details, but it may color what I say next: it is my opinion that wealthy journalists should disclose their wealth when matters of finance, taxation, or any public policy they report on will affect their bottom line.
Back in January, Anderson Cooper, scion of the Vanderbilt family, conducted a one-on-one 60 Minutes interview with the newly sworn-in congressional representative from New York’s 14th District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The splashy interview generated its biggest moment when Cooper suggested that Ocasio-Cortez’s policy agenda of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal was “radical,” asking her, “Do you call yourself a radical?” “Yeah. You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical,” she responded, defiantly.
Less viral but more telling was the exchange leading up to that moment, with Cooper pressing Ocasio-Cortez about the revenue needed to pay for her programs. “This would require, though, raising taxes,” he said, as though the very notion were absurd. When Ocasio-Cortez agreed that “people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” Cooper pressed her again, almost annoyed: “Do you have a specific on the tax rate?” This gave the first-year congresswoman space to explain top marginal tax rates because Cooper and the 60 Minutes producers evidently had no interest in doing so themselves. Which gets to what was so clarifying about the back-and-forth: not Cooper’s questions about how a politician intended to pay for her agenda, but his disbelief verging on indignation at the prospect of a tax increase for the wealthiest Americans. It’s an idea with broad popular support, though perhaps not among the Vanderbilts.
Imagine, for a moment, if, at the top of the segment, Cooper had told his audience—reminded them—that he is a multimillionaire. That he is the primetime anchor at one of the country’s biggest cable news outlets. Though CNN and CBS don’t disclose the value of their contracts with on-air talent, pegging Cooper’s earnings in the tens of millions isn’t a stretch. Take a look at Megyn Kelly’s $30 million exit package from NBC News—after being fired for being racist, no less!—and you’ll get a good sense of the exorbitant salaries networks pay their top anchors. So, imagine it. Cooper, before launching into a loaded line of questioning about Ocasio-Cortez’s tax policy, openly states to the audience, “In the interest of full-disclosure: I, Anderson Cooper, heir to a vast fortune, currently make more money per year than you plebs at home could dream of, and I would be directly affected by Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax on incomes over $10 million.” Would he then have had the gall to highlight the tax increase? And would any reasonable viewer have bought into his bullshit?
Avoiding conflicts of interest is basic ethical practice for journalists. Check any news organization or journalism school’s handbook on ethics, and you’ll find the concept is central to maintaining credibility in journalism. “Any personal or professional interests that conflict with [our allegiance to the public], whether in appearance or in reality, risk compromising our credibility,” explains NPR’s Ethics Handbook. “We are vigilant in disclosing to both our supervisors and the public any circumstances where our loyalties may be divided—extending to the interests of spouses and other family members—and when necessary, we recuse ourselves from related coverage.”
Watching for potential conflicts, understanding them, acknowledging and disclosing them, publicly where necessary, are among the core jobs of any journalist with a shred of self-respect. Consumers of journalism, meanwhile, are already accustomed to such disclosures, which often come in the form of “so-and-so company is owned by our parent company.” When spouses or family members are involved, a recusal is usually in order, but it’s not unheard of for a journalist or news anchor to state that one of the subjects in a story is a friend. This is all a matter of simple honesty, though it’s not always adhered to in the strictest terms. Still, the prejudicial effects of a journalist’s net worth never enter into the equation at all.
Searching through various publications’ codes of ethics, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, directly named conflicts of interest tend to fall into categories of familial relation, partisan work, direct financial entanglements, work outside the organization, and the accepting of gifts, travel, or direct payment. Listed nowhere is the matter of salary or wealth. Given a few moments’ thought, it’s staggering to consider all of the effort that went into the New York Times’ eleven-thousand-word “Ethical Journalism” handbook without its writers ever considering, at least on the page, their salaries or inherited wealth as potential conflicts. Then again, the paper that employs Bari Weiss to garner hate-clicks may not be the ideal place to search for structural critiques of capitalism.
Back in January, Anderson Cooper, scion of the Vanderbilt family, conducted a one-on-one 60 Minutes interview with the newly sworn-in congressional representative from New York’s 14th District, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The splashy interview generated its biggest moment when Cooper suggested that Ocasio-Cortez’s policy agenda of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal was “radical,” asking her, “Do you call yourself a radical?” “Yeah. You know, if that’s what radical means, call me a radical,” she responded, defiantly.Less viral but more telling was the exchange leading up to that moment, with Cooper pressing Ocasio-Cortez about the revenue needed to pay for her programs. “This would require, though, raising taxes,” he said, as though the very notion were absurd. When Ocasio-Cortez agreed that “people are going to have to start paying their fair share in taxes,” Cooper pressed her again, almost annoyed: “Do you have a specific on the tax rate?” This gave the first-year congresswoman space to explain top marginal tax rates because Cooper and the 60 Minutes producers evidently had no interest in doing so themselves. Which gets to what was so clarifying about the back-and-forth: not Cooper’s questions about how a politician intended to pay for her agenda, but his disbelief verging on indignation at the prospect of a tax increase for the wealthiest Americans. It’s an idea with broad popular support, though perhaps not among the Vanderbilts.
Imagine, for a moment, if, at the top of the segment, Cooper had told his audience—reminded them—that he is a multimillionaire. That he is the primetime anchor at one of the country’s biggest cable news outlets. Though CNN and CBS don’t disclose the value of their contracts with on-air talent, pegging Cooper’s earnings in the tens of millions isn’t a stretch. Take a look at Megyn Kelly’s $30 million exit package from NBC News—after being fired for being racist, no less!—and you’ll get a good sense of the exorbitant salaries networks pay their top anchors. So, imagine it. Cooper, before launching into a loaded line of questioning about Ocasio-Cortez’s tax policy, openly states to the audience, “In the interest of full-disclosure: I, Anderson Cooper, heir to a vast fortune, currently make more money per year than you plebs at home could dream of, and I would be directly affected by Ocasio-Cortez’s proposed 70 percent marginal tax on incomes over $10 million.” Would he then have had the gall to highlight the tax increase? And would any reasonable viewer have bought into his bullshit?
Avoiding conflicts of interest is basic ethical practice for journalists. Check any news organization or journalism school’s handbook on ethics, and you’ll find the concept is central to maintaining credibility in journalism. “Any personal or professional interests that conflict with [our allegiance to the public], whether in appearance or in reality, risk compromising our credibility,” explains NPR’s Ethics Handbook. “We are vigilant in disclosing to both our supervisors and the public any circumstances where our loyalties may be divided—extending to the interests of spouses and other family members—and when necessary, we recuse ourselves from related coverage.”
Watching for potential conflicts, understanding them, acknowledging and disclosing them, publicly where necessary, are among the core jobs of any journalist with a shred of self-respect. Consumers of journalism, meanwhile, are already accustomed to such disclosures, which often come in the form of “so-and-so company is owned by our parent company.” When spouses or family members are involved, a recusal is usually in order, but it’s not unheard of for a journalist or news anchor to state that one of the subjects in a story is a friend. This is all a matter of simple honesty, though it’s not always adhered to in the strictest terms. Still, the prejudicial effects of a journalist’s net worth never enter into the equation at all.
Searching through various publications’ codes of ethics, from the Washington Post to the New York Times, directly named conflicts of interest tend to fall into categories of familial relation, partisan work, direct financial entanglements, work outside the organization, and the accepting of gifts, travel, or direct payment. Listed nowhere is the matter of salary or wealth. Given a few moments’ thought, it’s staggering to consider all of the effort that went into the New York Times’ eleven-thousand-word “Ethical Journalism” handbook without its writers ever considering, at least on the page, their salaries or inherited wealth as potential conflicts. Then again, the paper that employs Bari Weiss to garner hate-clicks may not be the ideal place to search for structural critiques of capitalism.
by Corey Atad, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Zoë van Dijk
Pentagon Budget Could Pay for Medicare for All While Creating Progressive Foreign Policy Americans Want
The Institute for Policy Studies on Thursday shared the results of extensive research into how the $750 billion U.S. military budget could be significantly slashed, freeing up annual funding to cover the cost of Medicare for All—calling into question the notion that the program needs to create any tax burden whatsoever for working families.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a New York Times op-ed at a "chorus of scolds" from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night's debate, while Medicare for All proponents Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.
At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was criticized by some opponents for saying that "costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families" under Medicare for All, without using the word "taxes." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they'll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles, and other medical costs.
"All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag," wrote Koshgarian. "Proposals to fund Medicare for All have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?"
"Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary)."
"While we can't un-spend that $4.9 trillion," Koshgarian continued, "imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20 years."
Koshgarian outlined a multitude of areas in which the U.S. government could shift more than $300 billion per year, currently used for military spending, to pay for a government-run healthcare program. Closing just half of U.S. military bases, for example, would immediately free up $90 billion.
"What are we doing with that base in Aruba, anyway?" Koshgarian asked.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a New York Times op-ed at a "chorus of scolds" from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night's debate, while Medicare for All proponents Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.
At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was criticized by some opponents for saying that "costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families" under Medicare for All, without using the word "taxes." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they'll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles, and other medical costs."All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag," wrote Koshgarian. "Proposals to fund Medicare for All have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?"
"Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary)."
"While we can't un-spend that $4.9 trillion," Koshgarian continued, "imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20 years."
Koshgarian outlined a multitude of areas in which the U.S. government could shift more than $300 billion per year, currently used for military spending, to pay for a government-run healthcare program. Closing just half of U.S. military bases, for example, would immediately free up $90 billion.
"What are we doing with that base in Aruba, anyway?" Koshgarian asked.
by Julia Conley, Common Dreams | Read more:
Image: David B. Gleason/Flickr/cc
My Adventures in Psychedelia
It all began with a book review. Last year, I read an article by David Aaronovitch in The Times of London about Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. The book concerns a resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs, which were widely banned after Timothy Leary’s antics with LSD, starting in the late 1960s, in which he encouraged American youth to “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In recent years, though, scientists have started to test therapeutic uses of psychedelics for an extraordinary range of ailments, including depression, addiction, and end-of-life angst.
Aaronovitch mentioned in passing that he had been intrigued enough to book a “psychedelic retreat” in the Netherlands run by the British Psychedelic Society, though, in the event, his wife put her foot down and he canceled. To try psychedelics was something I’d secretly hankered after doing ever since I was a teenager, but I was always too cautious and risk-averse. As I got older, the moment seemed to pass. Today I am a middle-aged journalist working in London, the finance editor of The Economist, a wife, mother, and, to all appearances, a person totally devoid of countercultural tendencies.
And yet… on impulse, I arranged to go. Only after I booked did I tell my husband. He was bemused, but said it was fine by him, as long as I didn’t decide while I was under the influence that I didn’t love him anymore. My eighteen-year-old son thought the whole thing was hilarious (it turns out that your mother tripping is a good way to make drugs seem less cool).
I had a foreboding that, besides whatever psychedelic experience I might have, there would also be a lot of chanting and holding strangers’ hands. I’m an atheist and devout skeptic: I don’t believe in chi or acupuncture, and have no time for crystals and chimes. But, mindful that it’s arrogant to remain aloof in such circumstances, I decided I would throw myself into whatever was asked of me.
And so, I not only did yoga and meditation, but also engaged in lengthy periods of shaking my whole body with my eyes closed and “vocal toning”—letting a sound, any sound, escape on every out-breath. I looked into the eyes of someone I had just met and asked, again and again, as instructed: “What does freedom mean to you?” I joined “sharing circles.” All this was intended to prepare us for the trip. The facilitators talked of the importance of your “set” (or state of mind) and of feeling safe and comfortable in your “setting” (where you are and who you’re with).
One of my fellow trippers had taken part in a psilocybin trial at King’s College London. He and three others received at random either a placebo or a low, normal, or high dose of the drug in pill form. It was obvious, he said, that he was the only one given the placebo. To make bad trips less likely, the researchers had advised the participants not to resist anything that happened: “If you see a dragon, go toward it.” The misery of sitting, stone sober, in a room with three people who were evidently having a fascinating time was why he had come on this retreat. “They all had dragons,” he told me. “I wanted a dragon, too.”
People who have taken psychedelics commonly rank the experience as among the most profound of their lives. For my part, I wasn’t searching for myself, or God, or transcendence; nor, with a happy, fulfilling life, was I looking for relief from depression or grief. But I was struck by something Pollan discusses in his book: studies in which therapists used trips to treat addiction.
I’ve never smoked and have no dramatic vices, but the habits of drinking coffee through the morning and a glass of wine or two most evenings had crept up on me in recent years. Neither seemed serious but both had come to feel like necessities—part of a larger pattern of a rushed, undeliberative life with too much done out of compulsion, rather than desire or pleasure. It is the middle-aged rather than the young who could most benefit from an “experience of the numinous,” said Carl Jung, quoted by Pollan.
Aaronovitch mentioned in passing that he had been intrigued enough to book a “psychedelic retreat” in the Netherlands run by the British Psychedelic Society, though, in the event, his wife put her foot down and he canceled. To try psychedelics was something I’d secretly hankered after doing ever since I was a teenager, but I was always too cautious and risk-averse. As I got older, the moment seemed to pass. Today I am a middle-aged journalist working in London, the finance editor of The Economist, a wife, mother, and, to all appearances, a person totally devoid of countercultural tendencies.
And yet… on impulse, I arranged to go. Only after I booked did I tell my husband. He was bemused, but said it was fine by him, as long as I didn’t decide while I was under the influence that I didn’t love him anymore. My eighteen-year-old son thought the whole thing was hilarious (it turns out that your mother tripping is a good way to make drugs seem less cool).
***
One day, after closing that week’s finance and economics section of The Economist, I boarded a Eurostar train to Amsterdam. The next day, I met my fellow travelers—ten of them in all, from various parts of Europe and the United States—in a headshop in Amsterdam. Per the instructions we’d received, we each bought two one-ounce bags of “High Hawaiian” truffles—squishy, light brown fungi in a vacuum pack—at a discounted price of 40 euros, and headed off for four days in a converted barn in the countryside.I had a foreboding that, besides whatever psychedelic experience I might have, there would also be a lot of chanting and holding strangers’ hands. I’m an atheist and devout skeptic: I don’t believe in chi or acupuncture, and have no time for crystals and chimes. But, mindful that it’s arrogant to remain aloof in such circumstances, I decided I would throw myself into whatever was asked of me.
And so, I not only did yoga and meditation, but also engaged in lengthy periods of shaking my whole body with my eyes closed and “vocal toning”—letting a sound, any sound, escape on every out-breath. I looked into the eyes of someone I had just met and asked, again and again, as instructed: “What does freedom mean to you?” I joined “sharing circles.” All this was intended to prepare us for the trip. The facilitators talked of the importance of your “set” (or state of mind) and of feeling safe and comfortable in your “setting” (where you are and who you’re with).
One of my fellow trippers had taken part in a psilocybin trial at King’s College London. He and three others received at random either a placebo or a low, normal, or high dose of the drug in pill form. It was obvious, he said, that he was the only one given the placebo. To make bad trips less likely, the researchers had advised the participants not to resist anything that happened: “If you see a dragon, go toward it.” The misery of sitting, stone sober, in a room with three people who were evidently having a fascinating time was why he had come on this retreat. “They all had dragons,” he told me. “I wanted a dragon, too.”
People who have taken psychedelics commonly rank the experience as among the most profound of their lives. For my part, I wasn’t searching for myself, or God, or transcendence; nor, with a happy, fulfilling life, was I looking for relief from depression or grief. But I was struck by something Pollan discusses in his book: studies in which therapists used trips to treat addiction.
I’ve never smoked and have no dramatic vices, but the habits of drinking coffee through the morning and a glass of wine or two most evenings had crept up on me in recent years. Neither seemed serious but both had come to feel like necessities—part of a larger pattern of a rushed, undeliberative life with too much done out of compulsion, rather than desire or pleasure. It is the middle-aged rather than the young who could most benefit from an “experience of the numinous,” said Carl Jung, quoted by Pollan.
by Helen Joyce, NYRB | Read more:
Image: United Archives/Carl Simon/Bridgeman Images
Thursday, October 17, 2019
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