How Children Evolved to Whine

Little kids are diabolically engineered to make their parents do what they want. That’s the overwhelming impression I got when I talked to a bunch of academics about the origins of whining. “Children are good at co-opting whatever arsenal of behaviors they have” to get parental attention, said James A. Green, Ph.D., a University of Connecticut psychology professor who studies early social development.

The scholars I spoke to agreed that whining was both an under-researched area in developmental psychology, and such common kid behavior that it was likely a cultural universal. Even certain types of monkeys whine, said Rose Sokol-Chang, Ph.D., who studied whining at Clark University, and now works at the American Psychological Association.

Monkey and human children alike use “whining to bridge a gap with an adult,” said Dr. Sokol-Chang — which is to say, they’re whining to get your attention, and fast. Babies may develop a whiny type of cry as early as 10 months, but full-blown whining doesn’t pick up until they learn to speak, Dr. Sokol-Chang said. Though whining typically peaks in toddlerhood and decreases with age, “I’m not sure it really goes away,” she said, pointing out that adults even whine to their partners.

What distinguishes whining from other types of vocalization is how deeply annoying it is — which is why it’s such a successful tactic for getting a parent’s attention. Dr. Sokol-Chang led an experiment where she asked 26 parents and 33 nonparents to complete simple math problems while listening to various human sounds (infants crying, neutral speech and “motherese,” in addition to whining). Whether or not they were parents, participants forced to listen to whining made more mistakes and completed fewer problems; whining proved even more distracting than the sound of infants crying.

Though whining is awful for everyone within earshot, kids (to say nothing of aggrieved spouses and, apparently, monkeys) reserve whining for people they are emotionally attached to; this isn’t behavior they’ll try with strangers, Dr. Sokol-Chang said.

Even baby monkeys understand that an annoying noise gets them a faster response — especially in public. One study of rhesus macaques showed that mothers attended to their crying infants faster when there were unrelated monkeys around; the researchers surmised that the rhesus mothers were concerned that their babies’ cries, which are “high-pitched, grating and nasty to listen to,” per the BBC, might provoke the other monkeys. As Dr. Sokol-Chang put it, even monkey parents think, “don’t embarrass me in front of my friends.”

So how do you get your whiny kid to cut it out already?

by Jessica Grose, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Francesco Ciccolella
[ed. See also: The Taxonomy of Whining (The Week); and, A Field Guide to Taming Tantrums in Toddlers (NYT).]

OK Boomer, Who’s Going to Buy Your 21 Million Homes?

When this Phoenix suburb opened on Jan. 1, 1960, it was billed as the original retirement community. From above, it would look like a UFO landing site, laid out in rings to mimic halos surrounding the sun. Just past the entrance, a billboard flanked by rows of palm trees promised “An Active New Way Of Life.”

On the weekend Sun City opened, cars were backed up for 2 miles as some 100,000 visitors waited to gawk at a village built specifically for adults over the age of 50. They found a new nine-hole golf course and a community center with 250-seat auditorium, swimming pool, shuffleboard court and lawn bowling green. Elsewhere there was a 30,000-square-foot Grand Shopping Center, a Safeway grocery store and a Hiway House Motor Hotel, where you could have a cup of coffee or something stronger at the bar. “The finest resort couldn’t supply more,” boasted a fictional resident of Sun City in a promotional video from the period.

The concept was a huge hit. The developer, Del Webb, sold about as many homes in the first year as executives had expected to sell in three. Six decades later Sun City is home to 38,000 people.

But the same demographics that propelled Sun City’s rise now pose an existential challenge to this suburb as baby boomers age. More than a third of Sun City’s homes are expected to turn over by 2027 as seniors die, move in with their children or migrate to assisted living facilities, according to Zillow. Nearly two thirds of the homes will turn over by 2037.

The big question looming in this neighborhood—and dozens of others like it in the Southeast and Rust Belt—is what happens to everything from home prices to the local economy when so many homes post ‘For Sale’ signs around the same time?

The U.S. is at the beginning of a tidal wave of homes hitting the market on the scale of the housing bubble in the mid-2000s. This time it won’t be driven by overbuilding, easy credit or irrational exuberance, but by an inevitable fact of life: the passing of the baby boomer generation.

One in eight owner-occupied homes in the U.S., or roughly nine million residences, are set to hit the market from 2017 through 2027 as the baby boomers start to die in larger numbers, according to an analysis by Issi Romem conducted while he was a senior director of housing and urban economics at Zillow. That is up from roughly 7 million homes in the prior decade.

By 2037, one quarter of the U.S. for-sale housing stock, or roughly 21 million homes will be vacated by seniors. That is more than twice the number of new properties built during a 10-year period that spanned the last housing bubble.

Most of these homes will be concentrated in traditional retirement communities in Arizona and Florida, according to Zillow, or parts of the Rust Belt that have been losing population for decades. A more modest infusion of new housing is expected in pricey coastal neighborhoods of New York or San Francisco where younger Americans are still flocking in large numbers.

On the face of it, this doesn’t sound all bad. Dying homeowners have always needed to be replaced by younger ones and the U.S. has for a number of years suffered from a shortage of housing, a development that has dampened recent home sales activity and kept many millennials stuck in rentals.

But the buyers coming behind the baby boomers, the Gen Xers, are a smaller and more financially precarious generation with different preferences, posing a new kind of test for the housing market.

One problem is that the bulk of the supply won’t necessarily be in places where these new buyers want to live. Gen Xers and the younger millennials have shown thus far they would rather be in cities or suburbs in major metropolitan areas that offer strong Wi-Fi and plenty of shops and restaurants within walking distance—like the Frisco suburbs of Dallas or the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.

They have little interest in migrating to planned, age-restricted retirement enclaves in sunnier corners of the U.S. lined with golf courses, community centers and man-made lakes—like The Villages, a community of 115,000 in central Florida. Innovations such as voice-recognition technology and ride-share drivers are also making it easier for older people to stay in their existing homes and eschew these retirement communities altogether.

Another challenge is that younger buyers also may not have the financial strength to absorb all of this new supply. New research from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that households in their preretirement years, age 50 to 64, are less likely to own a home than prior generations, have suffered from stagnant income growth since 2000, and are more debt-burdened, including by student loans.

The consequences of a housing sales glut are potentially wide-reaching. A mismatch between supply and demand in places like Florida, Arizona and Nevada could offer new fiscal challenges that are already familiar to aging cities of the Rust Belt: a shrinking tax base and less money for crucial services like roads and police. Home construction could also falter, dampening an important contributor to the local economy.

by Laura Kusisto, WSJ | Read more:
Image: Cassidy Araiza
[ed. May be paywalled so try here (MSN).]

World's Best Sushi Restaurant Stripped of its Three Michelin Stars

The world’s best sushi restaurant has been stripped of its three Michelin stars.

But the decision, which was announced in Tokyo on Tuesday, has nothing to do with the quality of the restaurant’s tuna belly or the consistency of its vinegared rice. It is because it is no longer open to the public.

“We recognise Sukiyabashi Jiro does not accept reservations from the general public, which makes it out of our scope,” a spokeswoman for the Michelin Guide, said as it unveiled its latest Tokyo edition.

She added: “It was not true to say the restaurant lost stars but it is not subject to coverage in our guide. Michelin’s policy is to introduce restaurants where everybody can go to eat.”

Sushi Saito in Tokyo, which was awarded three stars in the 2019 guide, was removed from the latest edition for the same reason.

Jiro, a famously exclusive restaurant where Barack Obama dined with the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, in 2014, had received three Michelin stars every year since the culinary guide’s first Tokyo edition in 2007, and was the subject of the 2011 documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Its owner, Jiro Ono, is still serving sushi into his 90s with the help of his eldest son, Yoshikazu. His younger son runs a branch of the restaurant that is open to the public and has retained its two stars. (...)

Demand means it has never been easy to make a reservation, but now diners willing to part with at least 40,000 yen (£285) for the chef’s selection must be regulars, have special connections or book through the concierge of a luxury hotel.

Jiro’s website said it was “currently experiencing difficulties in accepting reservations” and apologised for “any inconvenience to our valued customers”.

It added: “Unfortunately, as our restaurant can only seat up to 10 guests at a time, this situation is likely to continue.”

It isn’t the first time the Ono sushi dynasty has ruffled feathers. Yoshikazu Ono once said that women make inferior sushi chefs because their menstrual cycle affects their sense of taste – a claim that has been dismissed by Japan’s female sushi chefs.

Jiro is a far cry from cheap kaiten conveyer belt sushi restaurants that have become established parts of the dining scene in cities such as London as part of the global popularity of Japanese food.

Obama reportedly said the sushi he ate with Abe was “the best I’ve ever had” and was particularly fond of the chutoro, a fatty, expensive, cut of tuna. But his appetite was apparently no match for the 20-piece menu selected by the chef, with reports at the time claiming that he stopped eating with half the course yet to come.

Michelin’s 2020 guide reinforces Tokyo’s status as arguably the world’s culinary capital, with 226 starred restaurants, more than any other city. Eleven restaurants have been awarded three-star ratings, three of them for the 13th year in a row, it said on its website.

by Justin McCurry, The Guardian | Read more:
Image:Everett Kennedy Brown/EPA

[ed. No more sushi for you! (billionaires and politicians exluded). At least it'll keep the riff-raff out and I can dine in peace again.]

The 20 Best Novels of the Decade

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels, the best short story collections, the best poetry collections, the best memoirs, the best essay collections, the best (other) nonfiction, and the best translated novels of the decade. We have now reached the eighth and most difficult list in our series: the very best novels written and published in English between 2010 and 2019.

You may be shocked to learn that we had a hard time deciding on 10. So, being captains of our own destiny, we decided we were allowed to pick 20 . . . plus almost that many dissents. We did not allow reissues, otherwise you had better believe this list would include The Last Samurai, Speedboat, and Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, among a robust host of others. We also, for this list, discounted novels in translation, as they got their very own list last week, and including them would have necessitated a list twice as long. (My beloved Sweet Days of Discipline, certainly in the top ten novels I personally read this decade, is doubly ineligible, but luckily I also write these introductions.)

Now, for the last time: the following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below. (...)

***

DAVID MITCHELL, THE THOUSAND AUTUMNS OF JACOB DE ZOET (2010)

It is easier to conjure the intellectual-literary atmosphere of an era when it is 30 years’ past than when it is a mere decade ago. It is hard to see 2010 right now, as we wait for time and the canon to true the lens, but I have a very clear sense-memory of revelation and exhilaration as I sped through David Mitchell’s epic-historical ghost story, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, wondering if the spirit of Robert Louis Stevenson had momentarily taken possession of Haruki Murakami. Here was a reminder that the world of a novel—in this case, a very detailed rendering of an 18th-century Dutch trading post in the port of Nagasaki—can be fuller, more vivid, than our own, that it can exist as a hothouse for the reader’s moral imagination.

It is difficult to say what another 25 years will make of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. In the context of Mitchell’s more recent novels, and their space-operatic excesses, the plot of De Zoet seems worryingly baroque, show-offy, even. But it is clearly the work of the same writer who gave us the near-perfect coming-of-age novel, Black Swan Green, its language similarly precise and unexpected, all in aid of a story that seems somehow to tell itself, a true history that never quite happened.

by Emily Temple/LitHub Staff, LitHub |  Read more:
Image: Random House
[ed. As with any list of this type it would be hard to agree with all the selections (for example, A Visit From the Goon Squad left almost no impression on me), but some definitely deserve to be included, while others inexplicably excluded (The Goldfinch (Tartt), Telegraph Avenue (Chabon), Orphan Master's Son (Johnson), All the Light We Cannot See (Doerr), Preparation for the Next Life (Lish), etc.). But, back to the list. Of the ones I've read, I can recommend The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, Outline, The Sympathizer, and, maybe Underground Railroad.]

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Dial Up!

Even on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, the radio lines were busy. Other people might send a card or go out for a family breakfast, but on Hmong radio shows, you waited your turn to speak into the ether, to tell strangers across the world about your parents. Some were living, some already dead, and others were still missing years after the war. No matter the specifics, almost every speaker cried, whether in longing, regret, or simply for the foreign feeling of saying out loud what a mother or father meant to them. But what could these strangers listening know about this grief, contained for so long and finally given a place to expand and breathe?

Callers joined in from across the US, France, Canada, and Australia, some using fake names to conceal themselves as they memorialized their parents to their people scattered by war. Even years later, Mee Vang remembers the crying. She tuned in from her St. Paul, Minnesota home. For many Hmong refugees who ended up in the United States, like Mee, the two holidays were yet another piece of American culture to adjust to. But on the radio shows, they became an unexpected opportunity to discover solidarity.

Once you remove the idea of pirate radio from its mythology, you realize that it exists largely for people who live in the margins. This special series of features and podcasts explores a complicated narrative of what illegal transmissions can do and who they reach.

The shows weren’t the traditional kinds you’d find by tuning to an AM or FM band; they were operated independently from media companies by ordinary Hmong citizens, aired live all-day, every day and were free to call into for as long as you’d like. They used free conference call software to do it, a network that is still in place to this day.

“We did not have a social opportunity to appreciate our mom and dad, and then they died,” Mee says. “Then this telephone conference became available.”

These were built by and for Hmong people, pulled together with whatever resources were available. Any hour of the day, a Hmong person somewhere in America could call in and hear a familiar language — and not just listen but respond.

Mee has been listening since those nascent years around 2009 when there were only two main shows. She tuned in again this year, but the Mother’s and Father’s Day programs sounded different. What will you do with your family this weekend? What did your children do for you? Most of the crying had stopped. It was a flash of an immigrant community’s transformation — people grieving less and celebrating more.

Hmong conference radio feels more intimate than AM / FM, all the more when you understand the work that goes into sustaining it. Callers are typically greeted with a recorded message welcoming them to the line in Hmong, punctuated by an automated English message saying how many callers are on the line.

Once you’re in, it’s easy to get lost in the aural sensation of hearing a language you don’t often encounter; as someone who doesn’t understand Hmong, it’s enveloping, almost nerve-wracking to listen in via phone, a communication mode we think of as private, two-way, and closed. For non-Hmong speakers, the only hints of each show’s topic come from the occasional English words sprinkled in: “B2 Bomber,” “Iran,” “recreational marijuana,” “California Assembly,” “CNN dot com.” Sometimes, one DJ will deliver what appears to be news for almost an hour uninterrupted. Other times, a few voices stack on top of one another — less of a cacophony, more of a discussion, not in chaos but in organic conversation. There’s occasional background noise, the shuffling of papers, clearing of throats, chuckles. Each hour is different, a testament to the coordination required of owners and DJs.

But most non-Hmong people — even experts who study media and communications — have no idea that this system exists.

When Lori Kido Lopez, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying Asian American media, first moved to Wisconsin, she began researching Hmong media consumption and production. She first observed that though towns with larger Hmong populations might have a community newspaper or the rare community radio segment, it was difficult for Hmong people to find robust and consistent media about their community. She was missing what she would later find to be the most popular form of mass media for the Hmong.

by Mia Sato, The Verge |  Read more:

Image:Annabelle Marcovici & Phyllis B. Dooney
[ed. This was a popular (and necessary) component of living in bush Alaska as well, where select airwaves were filled with birthday greetings, expressions of love, logistical arrangements (tell Ted to bring more fuel out to the cabin tomorrow), obituaries, hunting successes, weather reports, emergencies, and all of life's scope and general weirdness, every night, for anyone to hear.]

The Men’s Cardigan Makes a Comeback

Paternal. Sexless. Infinitely square. The cardigan sweater is generally considered the Mister Rogers of men’s wear, and for good reason: Fred Rogers made sure of it.

Over the course of 895 episodes and 33 years of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Mister Rogers advertised his gentle, nonthreatening nature by slipping from a jacket and tie — symbols of the messy, scary adult professional world — into a humble knit zip-up that was homely both in the British definition (“Simple but cozy and comfortable, as in one’s own home”) and the American (I mean, yikes).

Mister Rogers’s many, colorful cardigans — one of which is now in the Smithsonian — were originally knitted by Mr. Rogers’s mother, Nancy McFeely Rogers. According to a recent article on Smithsonian.com, she made a new one for her famous son every Christmas (a McTouchy McFeely detail if there ever was one).

After she died in 1981, the show’s art director looked to that bastion of saucy style, the United States Postal Service, for inspiration, relying on hand-dyed versions of mail-carrier cardigans.

Fashion, of course, was not the point. Mister Rogers’s talismanic cardigan, which is faithfully recreated by Yasemin Esmeck for the new film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks, was the sartorial equivalent of a lullaby — sweet, comforting, bland — and it helped lull generations of American preschoolers into the cozy Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where there are no bad people and no bad thoughts.

This worked well for children, but did no favors for the sweater itself, helping brand the cardigan — any cardigan — as doofuswear, the male equivalent of a chastity belt. (Likewise considered slightly sorority sister for women, it got a power boost after being worn by Michelle Obama for, among other occasions, drinks with the Queen of England.)

It wasn’t all Mr. Rogers’s fault. Unlike the standard form-fitting pullover, many midcentury male cardigans artfully hid the male physique inside a woolly tomb with the contours of a sleeping bag. Generally speaking, this was comfort clothing, designed to steer men toward the den, not the bedroom.

Lingering associations with sitcom dads (think Ward Cleaver) and lettermen sweaters of the Pat Boone ’50s (sis-boom-blah) only underscored the point: The cardigan was a buttoned-up sweater for a buttoned-up era. Would it ever recover?

Lately, there are signs.

Searches for men’s cardigans on Poshmark, a fashion resale site, spiked 79 percent since the Tom Hanks film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September, as Rachel Tashjian recently reported in GQ.

Last month, the shabby-chic olive-green cardigan that Kurt Cobain wore for his famous “MTV Unplugged” performance in 1993 made headlines, selling at auction for $334,000, apparently a record for a sweater.

With thrift-store origins, unkempt mohair fibers and early-’90s stains intact, the Cobain sweater is a fitting rebuttal to the Rogers cardigan. A symbol of shaggy punk nihilism, it is the knitwear equivalent of a power chord loud enough to scare the meow-meow out of Henrietta Pussycat.

by Alex Williams, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Lacey Terrell/Sony-Tristar Pictures, via Associated Press
[ed. Thumbs up to the postal service cardigans.]

Why the Searing Politics of the Moment Might Give Hope

As impeachment mania grips Washington, it is easy to descend into an ever-deepening political pessimism. But as odd as it may seem, for the first time in years, I’m optimistic about the future of American democracy. It might be because I’ve been reading more history and less news. And from the long arc of American political history, I see the bright flashing arrows of a new age of reform and renewal ahead.

Eras of reform follow a general pattern. First, a mood of impending crisis prevails. Unfairness and inequality feel overwhelming, and national politics feels stuck and unresponsive to growing demands. But beneath the shattered yet still stubborn national stasis, new social movements organize. Politics becomes exciting and full of moral energy. New writers, empowered by new forms of media, invent new narratives. And future-oriented politicians emerge to channel that energy and challenge the old establishment.

America has gone through periodic eras of political reform, every 60 years or so. The Revolutionary War; the Age of Jackson; the Progressive Era; the civil rights movement. In each era, the old rules of politics changed, the old centers of politics collapsed, and American democracy became a little more participatory and inclusive.

Of the reform periods, the Progressive Era holds the clearest parallels to ours. In the 1890s, inequality, partisanship and discontent were all sky-high. The depression of 1893-97 shattered faith that a growing industrial economy would lift all boats. New leviathan railroad and public-utility corporations seemed imposingly powerful, and partisan politics seemed thoroughly corrupted by them. Mass immigration was changing the face of the nation.

As public dissatisfaction built, and pressure grew from multiple directions, the political system eventually responded, led by a new generation of reform-oriented activists and politicians. New forms of participatory democracy — the primary, direct elections for the Senate, the initiative and the referendum — reshaped a political system that seemed to privilege the few over the many.

Women achieved the right to vote, first in cities and states, then finally nationwide in 1920. New regulatory agencies wrestled with the size and scope of giant corporate enterprises, cutting some down to size, putting stricter boundaries on others. But even as late as 1902, it was far from obvious that the years ahead would bring so much change.

A crucial Progressive Era lesson for today is that reform had no obvious order, and there was no one unified progressive movement — only a long list of social movements that sometimes made common causes and sometimes bitterly disagreed and often worked separately. Populist farmers caught in debt mobilized against the railroads. Liberal professional-class cosmopolitans grew disgusted with urban graft and devoted themselves to good-government municipal reforms. Many efforts suffered repeated setbacks before making progress. For example, women’s suffrage faced many battles before it eventually passed. In short: don’t plan too much, build coalitions opportunistically, and don’t give up.

Nor was there one leader, or even one political party, that drove change. A menagerie of ambitious politicians fused together different platforms and programs, and fought over fundamental issues: How much should rest on direct as opposed to representative democracy? Was it better to break up big companies, or just strengthen the ability of government to regulate them? Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, Woodrow Wilson and the coalitions backing them all had different ideas. Reform was incoherent and chaotic. It is inherently experimental — new problems demand new solutions. In short: Don’t expect one politician or one reform to hold all the answers.

The Progressive Era left a mixed record, largely because progressives were too hostile to political parties as crucial engines of political engagement and overly optimistic about the power of independent, rational judgment. But the era’s reforms solved a particular problem of corrupt, top-down power at a particular moment. Each reformist movement can be expected only to resolve its most pressing problems in a way that keeps democracy going for a future era of reform

When future historians look back on the 2010s, they will observe three larger trends that paved the way for a new era of reform by clearing away the old consensus: a loss of faith in “neoliberal” economics, the breakdown of white male-dominated social and cultural hierarchies, and the collapse of the “normal” political process.

by Lee Drutman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse/Getty

Texans and Their Boots: Reflections From a Few Favorite People

I started wearing boots consistently when I went to college. You get to A&M and see guys that have a certain, very consistent look. For me, it was one less fashion variable to have to think about.

But there have always been a few general rules when it comes to boots. First, wear your pants long enough. Real cowboys have a stacked effect with their jeans. When they rest on the foot of the boot, they kind of wrinkle up. That way, if you’re in the saddle, they’re still long enough. If you see somebody whose pants aren’t long enough, it might be a tell that it’s their first pair of boots.

If you’re wearing a black hat, you wear black boots. Your belt should match your boots and your hat.

And I wouldn’t wear a pair of python boots to church. I wear boots that would be the equivalent of a dress shoe. That’s just common sense.

Guy Clark first took me over to Texas Traditions, in Austin, in 1985. It was the legendary bootmaker Charlie Dunn’s shop. Charlie worked at Capitol Saddlery before opening his own place. Lee and Carrlyn Miller, who own Texas Traditions now, met while working for Charlie. Charlie was famous for firing people, so I asked Lee one day, “How did you survive Charlie? How did Charlie never fire you?” And Lee said, “Oh, Charlie fired me every day. I just kept coming back.”

Lee and Carrlyn made me my first pair of custom boots in 1989. They were a pair of bone kangaroo-skin boots with a twelve-inch top and a half-inch box toe. Before that, I grew up wearing Tony Lama and Justin Boots, until I finally graduated to a pair of Luccheses. By my front door I keep a pair of off-the-shelf Lucchese ropers. They’re really easy to slip in and out of, so I wear them to go to the trash can or get the newspaper. (...)

With boots, there are a million design choices, and those choices can define who you are. Different activities require different kinds of boots. I mainly wear a style that would be considered a dress boot, but if I’m home on the farm or going to a horse show, I’ll wear boots that are really functional—tough enough for being knocked around all day in the pasture.

So much comes down to color and the type of skin. A nicely finished cowhide or kangaroo, something that takes a really nice shine, always dresses up whatever you’re wearing. With jeans, you can more easily wear an exotic skin that might make a bolder statement. Alligator always makes for a beautiful dress boot but looks great with jeans too. (...)

There’s no such thing as an out-of-style boot. There’s an era for that style, and it can be fun to go back, especially if you understand the tradition.

Real cowboys haven’t worn pointed-toe boots like mine since the fifties or sixties. In the seventies, a round-toe boot became fashionable. The last twenty years, it’s gone from a blunt round toe, among the horse folks that I associate with, to a really square toe. So if I’m around real cowboys with my half-inch-box-toe, fifties-throwback sort of dress boots, they ask me if I’ve been hanging out in Hollywood and tease me about it. But if you’re a musician or you do something unconventional for a living, you get forgiven for a lot. They assume you just don’t know any better.

Typically, the fanciest part of the boot is the top, but if you wear your pant leg over it, it’s like you’re not showing off. And it’s fun to be able to reveal the top of your boots to somebody that might be interested. Somebody says, “Oh, those are nice boots!” and then you show them the tops. It’s the next level of the conversation.

by Lyle Lovett, as told to Andy Langer, Texas Monthly |  Read more:
Image: LeAnn Mueller
[ed. See also: The Power of Boots (Texas Monthly)]

Tribal Rain

[ed. Talented Nepalese band. But lead singer Rahul Rai was another victim of the 27 club last year. See also: Narisauna, Traditional Swang, and It's Ok]

The Apocalypse: It’s Not the End of the World

Abstract

Humanity is facing multiple possible apocalypses, with narratives that often miss an important point: The apocalypse probably won’t be quick or final. It will be an environment, not an event or an end point for humanity. The apocalypse is more likely to bring misery than catharsis or salvation. Although worst-case scenarios theoretically make it easier to prevent dire outcomes, in the case of slow-moving apocalypses such as climate change, it’s difficult for humans to envision the scale of the problem and to imagine how we will actually experience it.

It’s not fun to be a futurist these days. The role of a foresight specialist is to keep tabs on global trends in fields such as technology, politics, and environmental science – and to imagine how they might interact to bring about future changes. It’s not about making predictions; it’s about illuminating the various possible consequences of the choices humans make today. Sadly, a growing number of those possible consequences are awful. One could even call them apocalyptic.

Humanity seems to be suffering from a horrible luxury of potential apocalypses at the moment. If nuclear warfare, accelerated climate disruption, and pandemic disease don’t wipe us out, we have a variety of less likely but still quite deadly natural events (from asteroid impacts to supervolcanoes) and human-engineered technological cataclysms (be they nanotech-, biotech-, or artificial-intelligence-delivered) waiting in the wings to do us in. If we’re really unlucky, it might turn out that the entire universe is in an unstable energy state known as a “false vacuum,” which could decay at any moment. The universe as we know it would blink out of existence in a sudden, irreversible, and rather esoteric end of everything.

Perhaps an even more horrible reality is this: False vacuum decay aside, few of the ways the world could end would be abrupt and final. Instead, most would be miserable, protracted collapses, with dwindling numbers of people simply trying to grapple with the basic needs of existence. The apocalypse isn’t an event; it’s an environment.

As such, any real apocalypse would be complex, with most being the emergent result of bad decisions, ineffective institutions, and an utter inability to think through long-term consequences. These kinds of systemic problems may not necessarily be obvious. We can make all sorts of improvements to global lifestyles, healthcare, and political stability and still fall victim to the failure of our underlying political, economic, and social structures to be prepared for the deep tangles of collapse.

Apocalypse stories

No matter its complexity, the apocalypse holds an important place in the broader cultural mythos. Writers of both fiction and commentary talk about “end times” and “minutes to midnight.” Clearly, the concept of an “apocalypse” is a useful metaphorical and narrative device. It focuses one’s attention on a particular problem. It clarifies the consequences of a failure to address said problem. It delivers a final statement on our fate.

If only.

In the real world, few of the kinds of events we label “apocalyptic” would be clear or final. If the initial signs of an apocalyptic cataclysm are in the slightest way ambiguous, people will argue and debate the reality of the situation and the utility of proposed solutions, increasing the confusion even while the world falls apart. There’s no question that the wealthy and powerful have ways to mitigate some of the worst consequences of a disaster. In any case, extinction can take a while; even the death of the dinosaurs happened over the course of months (Brugger, Feulner, and Petri 2016). For numerous reasons, “the apocalypse” is not likely to be an immediate off-switch for humanity.

Still, there is narrative value in stories of abrupt change: They let us imagine getting rid of the old ways of life. A violent end is a useful tool for paring away the messy details of day-to-day existence. An onrushing apocalypse renders irrelevant anything that isn’t directly related to the cataclysm, sweeping away all that is superficial, leaving only the raw need to survive. The protagonists of an apocalyptic story can act with absolute certainty.

It’s not just the explicitly fictional stories of the end of days that embrace sudden transformation. The immediacy of change is at the heart of how most people envision the coming of a new era. Think of the Rapture, or the Revolution, or the Singularity. In each case, a shattering, all-encompassing transformation swiftly gives us an entirely new paradigm for humanity.

Sometimes apocalypse stories have a normative twist. The apocalypse isn’t merely a crisis; it’s a lesson to be laid upon the doubters, the powerful, the people who think the wrong way. They didn’t listen, and now they’re paying the price. This plague, this war, this uplifting of a subset of humanity into the (heavenly or digital) cloud will show these fools that they chose the wrong path. If only they had listened to us.

We tell stories of the end of the world for catharsis, for validation, or even as promise of a reward at the end of one’s life. The apocalypse is the final moment of the old world, and potentially the onset of the new. Unfortunately, most of the stories we tell about the end of the world don’t line up well with a more realistic and complete understanding of what apocalyptic events would entail. The ones that do – the 1959 film On the Beach comes to mind – offer no catharsis, no validation, no promise of anything but sadness.

Implications of slow-moving apocalypse

If the apocalypse is going to be a drawn-out affair, what does that imply?

The first implication is that we may not notice that the apocalypse has begun until we’re well within it. This doesn’t apply to all possible forms an apocalypse might take, of course; it’s easy to notice a global thermonuclear exchange once it’s underway. But for some crises, we could pass a point of no return well before the symptoms become evident and inescapable. This is a particularly acute problem for climate disruption, due to what’s known as “hysteresis” – a significant lag between a cause and its physical effects.

There’s a 25- to 50-year lag between the emission of atmospheric carbon and its persistent impact on temperature. This means the environmental disruption attributable to global warming we’re seeing now is the result of carbon emissions up through the 1980s. It also means we could cut off all carbon emissions today, globally, and still see another generation of warming. Beyond the environmental, economic, and human consequences, imagine the political impact of taking bold action that produces no observable benefits for 20 years, or even longer.

by Jamais Cascio, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

[ed. See also: The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun (Vice). Also, Level 7 (M. Roshwald).]

YouTube Guitar Teachers You Might Want to Check Out

These Are Top 13 YouTube Guitar Teachers You Might Want to Check Out (Ultimate Guitar)

[ed. Justin Sandercoe (JustinGuitar) will always be my first choice (beginner to advanced, detailed theory and technique, great songs, all-around nice guy), with Dale Adams (tonedr of the amazing Lexington Lab Band) a close second. But I enjoy other teachers as well, like Marty Schwartz (here and here),  Paul Davids (cheerful, optimistic), Steve Stein (Guitar Zoom), Rick Beato (check out his Steely Dan tutorials and commentaries), David Taub (rockongoodpeople), and jazz, latin and other genres. What a great resource (for free!) YouTube lessons like these (along with accurate and cheap tuners like Snark and others) have been revolutionary in making guitar learning easy and accessible to everyone.]

Boo-Hoo Billionaires

The 1996 US election was all about the “soccer mom”; 2004 belonged to the “Nascar dads”; Donald Trump won the White House with a “basket of deplorables”. Every election cycle seems to have a key demographic said to define the race, and 2020 is no different. This is the campaign of the “boo-hoo billionaire”.

There’s a billionaire in the White House and two of the top Democratic rivals for Trump’s job, senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, have made ever-widening income inequality central to their campaign.

“I don’t think that billionaires should exist,” Sanders said recently, citing the “immoral level of income and wealth inequality” that has only deepened under the Trump administration.

One billionaire bid for the White House has already flamed out. Howard Schultz, Starbuck’s former barista-in-chief, ended his run almost as soon as it had begun chased away by angry crowds who labeled him an “egotistical billionaire asshole!”

That hasn’t stopped another billionaire, hedge-fund mogul Tom Steyer, running for the Democratic nomination. And now former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, founder of the eponymous media empire, is also making moves to enter the race, fired up by the billionaire bashing. Ironically, Bloomberg (net worth $52.3bn) signaled his intention to get in the race by getting his name on the ballot in Alabama, one of the poorest states in the union with a median household income of $48,123.

Kevin Kruse, professor of history at Princeton University and co-author of Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, believes there’ll be more to come. “The Trump candidacy made a lot of them think, ‘Well, if this guy with his inherited wealth, who went bankrupt all the time, if he can do it, why not me?’”

The mistake they make is ignoring Trump’s charisma and “huckster showmanship”, said Kruse. “They think because they have even more money they will have more charisma. That’s not the case, It wasn’t with Schultz, it isn’t with Steyer and it’s not going to be with Bloomberg,” he said. “The idea that Mike Bloomberg is going to do well in Alabama is insane.”

That’s not what the billionaires think. As Warren and Sanders have stepped up their attacks, a host of plutocrats have gone public with their anger at all this billionaire-bashing, and some are already coming out for Bloomberg.

For them, this is personal. The “great plute freakout of 2019” as Anand Giridharadas, the author of Winner Takes All, a recent study of the deleterious impact of elites, has called it, is literally reducing billionaires to tears.

Asked about his views on the 2020 election on CNBC earlier this month, moist-eyed investment giant Leon Cooperman, worth $3.2bn according to Forbes, could barely hold back the tears.

“I care. That’s it,” he sobbed, eyes cast down and shuffling papers.

Cooperman has clashed with Warren in recent months after she proposed higher taxes on the super wealthy. “I believe in a progressive income tax and the rich paying more. But this is the fucking American dream she is shitting on,” Cooperman told Politico. (...)

But that won’t stop the billionaires from wanting to add 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to their property portfolio – even if the peasants have gathered with their pitchforks at the gates.

“There is something about the very wealthy, they don’t have enough people telling them that they are full of shit,” said Kruse.

by Dominic Rushe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Scott Eisen/Getty Images

[ed. By the way, $52 billion = 52,000 millions. See also: Ok Billionaire: Why Do the Opinions of 600 Americans Get So Much Airtime? (LitHub).]

How to Make the Perfect Popcorn

Popcorn is tied to the deepest recesses of my memory. But not the popcorn you probably just thought of. Movie popcorn with a golden shower of fake butter? You might as well lick a wet, salty sponge. Bagged Smartfood from the dollar store? Please. Oh, you microwave your popcorn? Stop reading now; never speak to me again.

My popcorn memories go back to when I was ten years old, excavating the depths of a giant metal bowl in small-town New York state. Each Sunday, with Godzilla or James Bond blowing things up on TV, my dad filled this bowl with popcorn. My brothers and I passed it around like an enormous communion chalice. The only things we fought over were the slightly popped kernels at the bottom. We knew better than to ignore them as “failed popcorn.” These were nuggets of pure flavour.

Think of the difference between boiled and fire-roasted corn on the cob. Boiled is still corn . . . but is it the best corn it can be? No. It’s secretly ashamed of itself. The popcorn I’m talking about—the Platonic ideal of popped corn—is nutty, browned, toasted, and crunchy, with a sliver of kernel breaking through the crust.

But the half-popped kernels of my youth were tooth-chipping land mines, and I’m not a ten-year-old watching Godzilla anymore. (I’m a fifty-two-year-old watching Godzilla.) My entire life, I have searched for a way to get that amazing taste in a more dental-friendly form. Along the way, I chipped two teeth and almost burned down an apartment with oil. Now that I’ve found a combination of the right process and the right kernels, I eat popcorn at least four nights a week—sometimes for dinner.

Ignore the first thing that pops into your head when you think of popcorn (likely Orville Redenbacher). The kernels used by such commercial brands are too big. The moisture inside a kernel is what makes it pop, and these have way too much moisture: the popped kernels end up like Styrofoam. After years of trial and error, I’m convinced the best variety of corn is Amish Country Lady Finger hulless [ed. here or here]. Each kernel, if handled well, turns into a tiny, almost perfect explosion of taste. A wave of melted butter enhances the flavour. Hell, you don’t even need butter.

Using the proper popping technique is key. Microwave is out of the question. Oil (in a pot or pan on the stove) is fine, but it leaves an oily taste that masks the corn flavour. There’s only one way to release the kernels’ hidden treasures: pre-pop them, then air-pop them.

by Kevin Sylvester, The Walrus | Read more:
Image: Tallulah Fontaine

Back to the Future

Found in the the University of Washington Libraries's Special Collections, this 1898 photo of badass climate activist Greta Thunberg proves that she is a time traveler who is here to save us from ourselves. Or, perhaps Twitter user @bucketofmoney is correct: "The Greta Thunberg time-travel conspiracy theorists have got it wrong: the photo is from the future."

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The Nature of Creepiness

These days, ‘creepy’ is a popular pejorative. From ‘Creepy Uncle Joe’ Biden’s hair-smelling antics to Justin Trudeau standing ‘too close’ to a tennis star, from the random dude who just slid into your direct messages to Zach Braff holding hands with a much-younger actress, many people are invoking creepiness as a factor, even a decisive one, in considerations about what is socially acceptable and even who is fit for political office. Creeps, it seems, are everywhere.

It’s a strange development. Why are we calling so many people, usually men, creepy? Despite the prevalence of the creepiness discourse, real research into the nature of creepiness is pretty new. It suggests that creepiness is related to disgust, which is an adaptive emotional response that helps to maintain a physical barrier between our bodies and potentially injurious external substances. Disgust assists us in policing the line between inside and outside our bodies, but also to create and maintain interpersonal and social borders. Physical reactions – such as the shudder response, nausea, and exclamations of ‘ew’, ‘icky’ and ‘gross’ – can be important ways of producing and transmitting commitments to social norms. Signalling disgust helps society maintain the integrity of taboos around sexuality, including paedophilia and incest.

Biologically, being grossed out by, for example, the idea of ingesting faeces makes sense: it keeps us from getting ill. Feeling ‘creeped out’ by a person or a social situation, however, is less straightforward. Creepiness is different from disgust in that it refers to a feeling of unease in the face of social liminality, particularly where sex and death are involved. We become uncomfortable when events don’t easily fit our expectations or transgress social rules. In a 2016 study, the psychologists Francis McAndrew and Sara Koehnke at Knox College in Illinois concluded that ‘creepiness is anxiety aroused by the ambiguity of whether there is something to fear or not and/or by the ambiguity of the precise nature of the threat’. Emotionally, creepiness helps us externalise our internal sense of confusion and uncertainty when presented with situations that are not easily categorised. Feeling ‘creeped out’ justifies our decision to shut down, rather than undertake the task of analysing ambiguously threatening situations. It is a form of cognitive paralysis indicating that we are unsure how to proceed.

Because women are more likely than men to experience physical and sexual threat in their daily lives, they are also more likely to judge others (usually men) to be creepy. Judgments of creepiness, however, are not necessarily reliable.

Conventional wisdom tells us to ‘trust our gut’, but researchers say that our gut is concerned more with regulating the boundaries of social mores than keeping us safe. In a 2017 Canadian study, female undergraduates were shown images of Caucasian male faces from three groups: emotionally neutral faces taken from an image bank; images judged ‘creepy’ in a pilot study; and images of criminals from America’s Most Wanted. They were then asked to rate the faces according to creepiness, trustworthiness and attractiveness. Across all three groups, there was a strong correlation between faces that participants considered trustworthy and attractive, and in some instances general attractiveness was negatively correlated with judgments of creepiness. Further, the faces taken from America’s Most Wanted were not rated as significantly more creepy than the neutral group. Participants made their creepiness assessments in seconds, and reported high degrees of confidence in their judgments.

Participants thought that, rather than describing behaviours, creepiness adhered to certain kinds of people and occupations. This is important.

Unkempt and dirty men, men with abnormal facial features, and men between the ages of 31-50 were all very likely to be rated creepy. Furthermore, creepiness was positively correlated both with the belief that the person held a sexual interest in the person making the social judgment, and with individuals who engaged in non-normative behaviours. This finding aligns with the McAndrew and Koehnke study, in which clowns, sex-shop owners and those interested in taxidermy were among the creepiest kinds of people.

So rather than reliably detecting danger, our internal ‘spidey sense’ often signals social difference or otherness. When we judge a situation or person creepy, we participate in shunning and social ostracism. Creepiness can prevent us from responding to the odd, the new or the peculiar with curiosity, interest and generosity of spirit. (...)

What does this tell us about how we should think about creepiness when it comes to a co-worker, a politician or a celebrity? To date, little has been written about the social and psychological mechanisms that make #MeToo allegations compelling. But it has become common and acceptable to publicly evaluate and judge sexual conduct and experiences according to the capacious affective language of disgust. Today, sex that leaves a woman ‘feeling gross’, or sexually non-normative behaviour that reads as ‘creepy’, can be enough to cast a man out of polite society.

Much of the #MeToo movement purports to focus on bad behaviour; namely, the violation of the requirement of consent in sexual encounters. On its face, #MeToo discourse relies heavily on the supposedly clear line between consent and violation, where the trouble presented by ‘grey areas’ is understood to be fixable if only we better understood – and were more publicly aware of – the nature of consent. But for all the talk about the importance of consent, there is another slippery process at work under the surface. Here, the affective vector of creepiness allows us to express our discomfort with an age-gap relationship or a request for a masturbation audience, even in situations where consent is present.

Creepiness research shows us that our perceptual intuitions about people and situations are at least as important – and perhaps more important than – cognitive judgment based on bad conduct. The line between sex and assault – the line marked by consent – is just one place where evaluation occurs. A sexual encounter can be intensely creepy – and entirely legal.

by Heidi Matthews, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Boris Thaser/Flickr
[ed. Taxidermy?]

The Jesus and Mary Chain

Delisting Chinese Firms From U.S. Is a ‘Terrible Idea’

Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said calls to oust Chinese companies from American stock indexes was contrary to the foundations of capitalism, as he warned against the dangers of decoupling the world’s two largest economies.

Paulson, who’s now chairman of the Paulson Institute, told Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in Beijing that moves to reduce ties between the U.S. and China would weaken American leadership and New York’s leading role in finance. He said less cooperation between Washington and Beijing would also make it more difficult to tackle another financial crisis like the one he was forced to manage as treasury secretary in 2008.

“When the next crisis comes -- and a crisis will come, because financial crises are inevitable -- we will regret it if we lack mechanisms for the world’s first and second-largest economies to coordinate,” Paulson told the forum on Thursday, according to a prepared version of his remarks.

Paulson’s speech followed on from his warning at the same forum last year that an “economic iron curtain” was descending between the U.S. and Chinese economies. Since then, the relations between the two sides have grown even more strained by trade disputes, security spats and disagreement over human rights.

The Trump administration has been pressuring allies to stop using Chinese technology. U.S. officials are also discussing ways to limit American investors’ portfolio flows into China, Bloomberg News reported in September, citing people familiar with the internal deliberations.

The U.S. Treasury said that there was no plan “at this time” to block Chinese companies from listing on U.S. stock exchanges.

by Bloomberg News, Yahoo News |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. One might reasonably ask, "What the hell is he talking about, and why should I care?" Well, wonder no more: to protect Wall Street scammers (of course). See: Chinese Stock Collapses 98% in Hours After MSCI Flip-Flops: How Index Providers Saddle US Pension Funds with Stock Scams (Wolf Street).]

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