Bodily Curiosities

I am not altogether incurious, but one entity about which I have over the years felt little curiosity is my own body. Until recently, I could not have told you the function of my, or anyone else’s, pancreas, spleen, or gallbladder. I’d just as soon not have known that I have kidneys, and was less than certain of their exact whereabouts, apart from knowing that they reside somewhere in the region of my lower back. As for my entrails, the yards of intestines winding through my body, the less I knew about them the better, though I have always liked the sound of the word “duodenum.” About the cells and chromosomes, the hormones and microbes crawling and swimming about in my body, let us not speak.

For better and worse, these deficiencies in my knowledge have been addressed by a splendid book by Bill Bryson called The Body: A Guide for Occupants. The book is an account of human parts, inside and out, and what is known and still unknown about them. It catalogues the diseases and mechanical failures to which flesh is heir; establishes a pantheon of heroic medical researchers and a rogues’ gallery of quacks; sets out some of the differences between humans and other mammals and between the male and female of our own species—and does all this in a ­fluent, often amusing, never dull manner. The point of view is ironical yet suffused with awed appreciation for that endlessly complex machine, the human body.

In the first hundred pages of The Body, one learns that there are microbes in one’s belly button, that the average adult touches his face sixteen times an hour, that the number of human facial expressions ranges between 4,100 and 10,000, that tears come in three varieties, that the human eye can distinguish between 2 million and 7.5 million colors, that humans choke more easily than any other mammal, that people who have had their tonsils removed when young may have a 44 percent greater risk of heart attack later in life, that one of the inventors of the lobotomy won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1949, and that ­Leonardo’s Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. Scores of such items float through the book.

But beyond this rich factual matter—the number of heartbeats in a lifetime (up to 1.6 billion), famous stutterers, “the complicated hydraulics of the male erection,” the world’s tallest human being (Robert Wadlow at 8 feet 11 inches), the world’s oldest human being (Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to be 122, and quit smoking only at 117), the removal of Samuel Pepys’s gallstone (but not Montaigne’s), the many functions of the liver (which does everything, Bryson tells us, but kick extra points)—reading The Body naturally throws one back on thoughts about one’s own body. The book has caused me to feel that, on balance, I have been fairly fortunate in my body. I have no serious deformity, suffer no chronic illness of note, and have arrived in my eighties in relatively decent health, though, an old joke has it, one definition of a healthy person is someone who has not had a recent medical examination.

by Joseph Epstein, First Things |  Read more:

Image: via

An Arrangement

You know that it is a truth rarely universally acknowledged that the straights, once they’ve coupled, are very dramatic about their breakups. Take, for example, your friend Linda. Blond, Botoxed absolute darling who, despite living in Irvine, still has a rich inner life. When she found out that her husband was fucking their neighbor—who was also a friend, who every summer Friday had sat by Linda’s side at her pool, in her backyard, drinking the sangria that she had made—well, she marched right up to that backstabbing floozie’s door, her husband’s dirty laundry in hand, threw it on the floor and said, Why don’t you do his fucking laundry, bitch.

Or when your aunt and uncle finally decided to cut the knot, they didn’t know it would take seven full years of fucking each other in attorney fees. In year two and a half, something snapped inside him: he broke into her house, shut off the hot lamp keeping the two iguanas alive, then smoked a cigarette and left it in the ashtray like a giant middle finger for her to discover. (And the poor iguanas, Bob and Marley, may they rest in peace.)

You never imagine that it will happen to you. Your partner of six years, Victor, is a level-headed infectious disease researcher. He is working on the newest iteration of PrEP, a shot people can have administered at a clinic every two months. He explains the science but you never fully comprehend it, other than that there will no longer be a need for a daily pill. You love how smart he is, and how he has used his intelligence for the betterment of mankind. You, on the other hand, are an artist of moderate success. You sometimes feel guilty about this and wonder what role oil paintings play in society, especially when the world feels like it is calling out like a dumpster fire.

Still, you paint. You say to yourself, At least I’m not Thomas Kinkade.

There is the day you catch Victor looking at an unfinished canvas in your studio, an oil portrait of a Pomeranian named Biscuit whose dog-parents in Palo Alto have commissioned you to complete for three thousand dollars plus materials. (The money is nothing to balk at, but you joke that the task is so absurd, it might turn you into a Marxist.) When you walk in, Victor turns to you and says, This is exquisite. And he kisses you with such passion that you feel lucky.

And you should feel lucky because the two of you have an Instagrammable life—a small modern apartment in the Bay that gets amazing natural light, the occasional vacation, a solid credit score, healthy bodies that say gym membership. You are both in your early thirties and in love. You dream of the day he will present you with a ring and you can craft your registry at Bloomingdale’s. All the flatware and vases and frames you will ask people to shower you with. Neither of you has student loans and you both make sure to never bring this up at dinner parties.

But now, in a blinding turn of events, it does happen to you.

by Joseph Cassara, Boston Review |  Read more:

Image: Erik Cooper

Harry Stooshinoff
via:

This is Neoliberalism

[ed. I'd imagine even if you think you know what the term 'neoliberalism' means, this simple and concise overview will probably surprise you (with bi-partisan support, one of the few things both Democrats and Repubicans have agreed on over the last 40 years). See also: Part 2 and Free Speech, Incorporated (Boston Review).]

Why the Young Ruled This Decade

There are eras in history, like the 1950s, when older people set the cultural and moral terms for the young. And there are eras, like the 1960s, when it’s the other way around.

The current decade has been in the latter mold. Its true beginning was Dec. 17, 2010, when a 26-year-old street vendor in Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire, setting off protests that quickly toppled governments across the region. Now it approaches its end with the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg named Time’s Person of the Year.

In between, the decade has been fundamentally shaped by the technological creations of the young, in the form of social media and mobile apps; by the mass migrations of the young, from Africa and the Middle East to Europe and from Latin America to the U.S.; by the diseases of the (mostly) young, notably addiction and mental illness; and by the moral convictions of the young, from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements in the U.S. to mass demonstrations from Cairo to Hong Kong.

Why and how did the young dominate the decade? Let’s narrow the focus to America.

Demography first. What history usually thinks of as “the sixties” (beginning around 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution) coincided, in the United States, with the coming-of-age of the baby boomers, roughly 75 million strong. Our current decade coincides with the coming-of-age of millennials, another generation of about 80 million. More people, more power — or at least more influence. By comparison, my generation, the underwhelming Generation X, numbers only 65 million.

Next, anger. History is often a series of reactions and counterreactions. We remember the nonconformism of the 60s as a response to the conformism of the 50s. This decade, too, has been a reaction to the last: to two wars that began in moral fervors and ended in strategic fizzles; and to a financial crisis whose victims numbered in the millions and for which nobody accepted blame.

Not surprisingly, this decade has been marked by the intense hostility of the young toward truisms that once governed our thinking. As they saw it, the liberal international order didn’t uphold the peace — it bled us dry. Capitalism didn’t make the country rich — it made the rich richer. Silicon Valley didn’t innovate technology — it mined our data. The Church didn’t save souls — it raped children. The cops didn’t serve and protect — they profiled and killed. The media didn’t tell the news — they spun it.

This hostility isn’t manifest just on the progressive left. It also accounts for the rise of the populist right.

As for tech, not only did the young invent and shape social media, social media shaped and reinvented the young. This was the decade when algorithms meant to cater to our tastes succeeded mainly in narrowing those tastes; when the creation of online communities led to our Balkanization into online tribes and the dissemination of disinformation and hate; when digital connection deepened our personal isolation, vulnerability and suggestibility; and when the ubiquity of portable screens with infinite data meant there was always something more interesting to do than interact with the person before us.

One result has been a kind of shallowing of our inner life: of time spent wondering, wandering, reading, daydreaming and just thinking things over. Another result has been a shallowing of our political life via the replacement of wit with snark and of reasoned arguments with rapid-fire tweets and hot takes.

Technology had another effect: It vastly accelerated the speed with which previously outlying ideas became, in the hands of their mainly youthful advocates, moral certitudes.

Some of those ideas, like marriage equality (the single greatest moral victory of the decade) were long overdue. Others, like intersectionality, gender fluidity, new standards of sexual consent or the purported centrality of racism to American identity, are much more debatable. Moral certitude isn’t the exclusive posture of the young. But it is an easier one to hold when life hasn’t yet given you sufficient time to leaven idealism with experience, second-guess yourself and learn that the things you once thought were most true aren’t quite so.

by Bret Stephens, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

Jonas Wood (American, b. 1977), Jersey City Apartment, 2019
via:

More a Voyeur

Me by Elton John
Macmillan, 376 pp., £25, October, 978 1 5098 5331 1

Elton​ John was born Reg Dwight in 1947 in the north-west London suburb of Pinner. His mother was a nightmare, his father a bully. He was a boy who did not start thinking about sex until he was 21. While he shared an interest in football with his father – they both supported Watford – his father didn’t approve of his taste in music. From early on, Reg loved shopping and acquiring things. Like many of his generation, he found his first glimmer of true happiness in record shops on Saturdays, flicking through all the new releases, finding a life in them that was, for him, unimaginable in its glamour and its excitement. Even when he grew famous, he never stopped remembering that his nose had spent time up against the window of this world. It filled him with wonder and surprise when he escaped and got to perform with and befriend singers whose music he was crazy about.

While his mother emerges in Me, his memoir, as one of the sourest people who ever walked the earth, she plays a heroic role at the beginning by introducing her only child to the music she loved. After work on Fridays, she often bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the way he was standing.’

Reg’s parents were a war couple. His dad was an amateur trumpet-player who spotted his mother in the audience one night. ‘They were both stubborn and short-tempered,’ he writes, ‘two delightful characteristics that it’s been my huge good fortune to inherit. I’m not sure if they ever really loved each other ... The rows were endless.’ Since his father remained in the army after the war, Reg was brought up mostly by his mother and his grandmother, living in fear of his mother’s moods, the ‘awful, glowering, miserable silences that descended on the house without warning ... she always seemed to be looking for a reason not to be happy.’ She had unusual views on potty- training, he tells us, ‘hitting me with a wire brush until I bled if I didn’t use the potty’. She also had strong views on constipation: ‘She laid me on the draining-board in the kitchen and stuck carbolic soap up my arse.’

The young Reg didn’t like himself: ‘I was too fat, I was too short, my face just looked weird, my hair would never do what I wanted it to.’ As his parents fought, he found solace in his bedroom, where everything was kept in perfect order. He began to study the singles charts, ‘then compiling the results, averaging them out into a personal chart of charts. I’ve always been a statistics freak ... I’m just an anorak.’

He began to take piano lessons, studied at the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my father ... he thought the whole thing was morally wrong.’ Then his parents split up and his mother found a new partner whom Reg called Derf. In their two-bedroom flat, Reg acquired an electric piano and joined a band called Bluesology. They released two singles; neither was a success, but even so they were asked to be the support act for groups and singers whose names they recognised. ‘The whole thing was a dream come true for me. I was playing with artists whose records I collected.’ Even when the band went to Hamburg in 1966 and played at the Top Ten Club on the Reeperbahn, where the Beatles had played, Reg, aged 19, kept his innocence: ‘I barely drank and I still wasn’t interested in sex ... I had no idea about penetration, no idea what a blowjob was ... There I was, in one of Europe’s most notorious fleshpots ... All I cared about was playing and going to German record shops. I was totally absorbed by music. I was incredibly ambitious.’

He decided to become a solo artist and changed his name to Elton John. In 1967, he made the mistake of singing a Jim Reeves song (‘He’ll Have to Go’) at an audition for a new, progressive label. The offices, he noticed, were chaos. ‘There were piles of reel-to-reel tapes and hundreds of envelopes everywhere.’ The manager ‘seemed to pull an envelope out at random, just to give me something to take away, so the meeting didn’t feel like a dead loss ... That envelope had my future in it: everything that’s happened to me since happened because of what it contained.’ The envelope contained some lyrics by a songwriter called Bernie Taupin from Owmby-by-Spital in Lincolnshire. He was 17 years old and ‘long-haired, very handsome, very well read, a huge Bob Dylan fan’.

Taupin moved in with the singer previously known as Reg; they slept in bunk beds in the second bedroom of the flat owned by Reg’s mother and her new husband in Frome Court in Pinner. ‘We would spend the days writing,’ Elton remembers, ‘Bernie tapping out lyrics on a typewriter in the bedroom, bringing them to me at the upright piano in the living room ... If we weren’t writing, we spent all our time together, in record shops, at the cinema.’ (...)

Elton and Bernie worked fast: ‘Bernie got the lyrics to “Your Song” over breakfast one morning in Frome Court, handed them to me and I wrote the music in 15 minutes flat.’ He didn’t go around with melodies in his head. ‘I don’t even think about songwriting when I’m not actually doing it. Bernie writes the words, gives them to me, I read them, play a chord and something else takes over, something comes through my fingers.’ They made the album Elton John in four days and it appeared in 1970. The reviews were good. Famous singers, such as Pete Townsend, Jeff Beck and Dusty Springfield, began to turn up at Elton’s gigs to check him and his band out. The album’s cover photo showed a moody, nerdy-looking guy with glasses; his face was lit, but the space around him was black. He could easily have been someone’s answer to Leonard Cohen, the songwriter as lonely, fucked-up guy. He looked like a recluse, introspective, overeducated; his voice sounded weird, the accent fake American. At the time, it took me ages to work out that the opening two words of ‘Border Song’ were ‘Holy Moses’. He had sort of chewed them before he sang them. It was hard to make them out.

No one was sure where to place him. In Paris, when he supported Sérgio Mendes, he was booed off. In London, he played at the Royal Albert Hall supporting Fotheringay, the band formed by Sandy Denny in 1970. ‘They thought they were getting a sensitive singer-songwriter,’ Elton writes, ‘and instead they got rock’n’roll and Mr Freedom clothes and handstands on the piano keyboard. They couldn’t follow us: we had so much adrenaline ... I felt terrible. Sandy Denny was one of my heroes ... I scuttled home, absolutely mortified, before they came on stage.’

Between the album’s release and the Albert Hall concert, Elton had been in America. Before he set out, he’d found a clothes shop in Chelsea called Mr Freedom: ‘The stuff in the window was so outrageous that I hung around on the pavement outside for ages, trying to pluck up the courage to go in.’ When he played the Troubadour in LA, ‘the audience was greeted by the sight of a man in bright yellow dungarees, a long-sleeved T-shirt covered in stars and a pair of heavy workman’s boots, also bright yellow, with a large set of blue wings sprouting from them. This was not the way sensitive singer-songwriters in America in 1970 looked.’ (...)

Elton began to enjoy parties. ‘Life was heaven. I was finally able to be who I was, to have no fear about myself, to have no fear about sex. I mean it in the nicest possible way when I say John taught me how to be debauched.’ He got to meet all sorts of people, including Neil Young – who performed his forthcoming album, Harvest, at a party in John’s house – and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who, when Elton went to see him, sang the chorus of ‘Your Song’ (‘I hope you don’t mind/I hope you don’t mind’) over and over. ‘By now, the novelty of hearing the chorus of “Your Song” sung to me by one of pop history’s true geniuses was beginning to wear a little thin.’

In the last months of 1970, Elton went to a party at Mama Cass Elliot’s house in LA to find many of his favourite singers present. ‘They were all there. It was nuts, like the record sleeves in the bedroom at Frome Court had come to life: what the fuck is happening?’

by Colm Tóibín, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Why Trump's Impeachment Feels Like an Anti-Climax

There is something unsatisfying about the impeachment of Donald Trump. Many of us who loathe him would like nothing more than to see him removed from office. Yet as the Democrats move forward on charges of obstruction and abuse of power, it does not feel like the triumph of righteousness that it should.

Perhaps this is in part because Trump is not being charged for his most serious actual crimes. Like Al Capone being brought down by tax evasion charges, Trump is facing impeachment for one of the least consequential bad acts of his career. The string of alleged sexual assaults? Deporting desperate migrants to their deaths? Destroying the possibility of preventing catastrophic climate change? Causing thousands of deaths by rescinding environmental rules and then covering up the human toll? Escalating drone strikes and then hiding the civilian deaths? These crimes will go uncharged and unpunished. Instead, Congress’s focus is entirely on the question of whether Trump unethically pressured the Ukrainian government to investigate Joe Biden and his ne’er-do-well son. It’s an issue. But given the number of terrible things Trump has done, does it deserve this level of disproportionate focus?

The Democrats’ outrage over the Ukraine scandal feels a little contrived. Would they have been calling so vehemently for impeachment if Barack Obama had pressured another country’s government to investigate one of Trump’s sons’ shady dealings? Republicans are correct when they say that the impeachment is “politically” motivated and is about trying to remove a president from office who they never liked in the first place. It is, and it should be. Some “political” acts are beyond the pale, and every procedural weapon should be utilized in trying to remove a president from office if they are using that office to despoil the earth and terrorize civilians at home and abroad.

A satisfying set of impeachment articles, then, would list the various ways in which Trump has put the future of humanity at risk, and the urgent need to remove him in order to secure peace and a stable planet. But Democrats are not willing to be that confrontational and political (and of course, if they start calling drone strikes and deportation crimes, it will be easy to point out that they did it first). So Ukraine it is.

One also senses that this impeachment carnival may be exactly the sort of thing Trump wants. He knows that he’s not actually going to be removed from office, thanks to the protection of Republicans in the Senate. Now he has the opportunity to portray himself as a persecuted victim, and to accuse the Democrats of being “sore losers” who refuse to accept his legitimacy and are using underhanded means to try to remove him. He will use this impeachment to rally his supporters, telling them that Democrats do not respect the will of the people and want to undo it. (This is precisely what Boris Johnson told British voters about attempts to undo the Brexit referendum, and it proved very successful for him.)

On the one hand, impeaching Donald Trump seems like a no-brainer: the man almost defines “unfit for office” and the list of possible “high crimes and misdemeanors” is endless. On the other hand, impeaching Trump creates a spectacle that voters might not care too much about. The underlying issues do not affect the material wellbeing of working-class Americans in any noticeable way, and not many people are emotionally invested in protecting the reputations of Joe and Hunter Biden. Every moment spent discussing impeachment is a moment not spent discussing healthcare, educational inequity, the black-white wealth gap, the sprawling prison system, the surveillance state, the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and the country’s appalling treatment of immigrants. The easy reply is that it’s possible to “do both”, but time and energy are zero-sum: you have to pick and choose what you focus on. Trump would probably love a 2020 election cycle dominated by the impeachment issue, because it relieves him from having to defend his appalling record.

One can even see impeachment as a symptom of the continuing failure of the Democratic party to articulate a substantive agenda. Democrats in 2016 focused excessively on Trump’s personal attributes rather than giving disaffected voters a real reason to go to the polls. Now, they’re doing it again: instead of telling people what the Democratic party stands for and why it would be good for the country, they are obsessed with the figure of Donald Trump, and define themselves in opposition to him. Joe Biden’s entire campaign is centered around a promise to restore honor to the White House and purge it of the “malarkey”. But when Trump dominates every discussion, we lose sight of the actual human stakes of politics.

by Nathan J. Robinson, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
[ed. See also: Christianity Today Calls for Trump to be Removed From Office (The Hill).]

Sweden Retreats from Negative Interest Rate Experiment

For some time, we’ve maintained that negative interest rates would fail at achieving their intended results, which was to stimulate spending. Honestly, it beggars belief that economists could have convinced themselves of that idea. As we’ll discuss, the Swedish central bank has just thrown in the towel on them.

We’ve heard for years that the Fed had privately come to the conclusion that its experiment with super low interest rates was a bust, even though it still hasn’t figured how to move away from them to a more normal rate posture. In keeping with that line of thinking, the Fed had also concluded that negative interest rates were a bad idea and was unhappy that other central banks hadn’t figured that out. The Fed’s distaste for negative interest rates was finally made official with the release of FOMC minutes saying as much last month.

One of the many times we debunked the official rationale for negative interest rates was in a 2016 post, Economists Mystified that Negative Interest Rates Aren’t Leading Consumers to Run Out and Spend. We’ll hoist at length:

It been remarkable to witness the casual way in which central banks have plunged into negative interest rate terrain, based on questionable models. Now that this experiment isn’t working out so well, the response comes troubling close to, “Well, they work in theory, so we just need to do more or wait longer to see them succeed.” 

The particularly distressing part, as a new Wall Street Journal article makes clear, is that the purveyors of this snake oil talked themselves into the insane belief that negative interest rates would induce consumers to run out and spend. From the story:

Two years ago, the European Central Bank cut interest rates below zero to encourage people such as Heike Hofmann, who sells fruits and vegetables in this small city, to spend more. 

Policy makers in Europe and Japan have turned to negative rates for the same reason—to stimulate their lackluster economies. Yet the results have left some economists scratching their heads. Instead of opening their wallets, many consumers and businesses are squirreling away more money. 

When Ms. Hofmann heard the ECB was knocking rates below zero in June 2014, she considered it “madness” and promptly cut her spending, set aside more money and bought gold. “I now need to save more than before to have enough to retire,” says Ms. Hofmann, 54 years old. 

Recent economic data show consumers are saving more in Germany and Japan, and in Denmark, Switzerland and Sweden, three non-eurozone countries with negative rates, savings are at their highest since 1995, the year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development started collecting data on those countries. Companies in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Japan also are holding on to more cash.

The article then discusses that these consumers all went on a saving binge..because demographics! because central banks did a bad job of PR! Only then does it turn to the idea that the higher savings rates were caused by negative interest rates. 

How could they have believed otherwise? Do these economists all have such fat pensions that they have no idea what savings are for, or alternatively, they have their wives handle money? 

People save for emergencies and retirement. Economists, who are great proponents of using central bank interest rate manipulation to create a wealth effect, fail to understand that super low rates diminish the wealth of ordinary savers. Few will react the way speculators do and go into risky assets to chase yield. They will stay put, lower their spending to try to compensate for their reduced interest income. Those who are still working will also try to increase their savings balances, since they know their assets will generate very little in the way of income in a zero/negative interest rate environment. 

It is apparently difficult for most economists to grasp that negative interest rates reduce the value of those savings to savers by lowering the income on them. Savers are loss averse and thus are very reluctant to spend principal to compensate for reduced income. Given that central banks have driven policy interest rates into negative real interest rate terrain, this isn’t an illogical reading of their situation. Ed Kane has estimated that low interest rates were a $300 billion per year subsidy taken from consumers and given to financial firms in the form of reduces interest income. Since interest rates on the long end of the yield curve have fallen even further, Kane’s estimate is now probably too low.

Aside from the effect on savings (that economists expected negative interest rates to induce savers to dip into their capital to preserve their lifestyles and make up for lost interest income), a second reason negative interest rates hurt, or at least don’t help spending is by sending a deflationary signal. If things might be cheaper in a year, why buy now?

Some economists had nevertheless believed they could force consumers to spend in a negative rate regime by getting rid of physical cash. If citizens could not hoard cash, their monies would (presumably) be in bank accounts, where bank would charge them to hold funds, providing an incentive to go out and buy things. Note that negative interest rate fan Ken Rogoff has been a noisy advocate of getting rid of currency as important for this very reason.

by Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: WSJ
[ed. From the comments section: “The bank is slowly taking away my savings, better spend it all right now” – No one, ever. See also: First Central Bank Exits Negative Interest Rates (Wolf Street).]

The Miseducation of the American Boy

I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him; he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor). The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. As I rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting—it had to be him. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting loosely on his thighs.

My first reaction was Oh no.

It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. Cole would later describe himself to me as a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw. At 18, he stood more than 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the following fall. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d tell me. “They’re what you’d expect, I guess. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would never open up to me, it would have been him.

But Cole surprised me. He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist, and a bedrock of emotional support. He also confided how he’d worried four years earlier, during his first weeks as a freshman on a scholarship at a new school, that he wouldn’t know how to act with other guys, wouldn’t be able to make friends. “I could talk to girls platonically,” he said. “That was easy. But being around guys was different. I needed to be a ‘bro,’ and I didn’t know how to do that.”

Whenever Cole uttered the word bro, he shifted his weight to take up more space, rocking back in his chair, and spoke from low in his throat, like he’d inhaled a lungful of weed. He grinned when I pointed that out. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s part of it: seeming relaxed and never intrusive, yet somehow bringing out that aggression on the sports field. Because a ‘bro’ ”—he rocked back again—“is always, always an athlete.”

Cole eventually found his people on the crew team, but it wasn’t a smooth fit at first. He recalled an incident two years prior when a senior was bragging in the locker room about how he’d convinced one of Cole’s female classmates—a young sophomore, Cole emphasized—that they were an item, then started hooking up with other girls behind her back. And the guy wasn’t shy about sharing the details. Cole and a friend of his, another sophomore, told him to knock it off. “I started to explain why it wasn’t appropriate,” Cole said, “but he just laughed.”

The next day, a second senior started talking about “getting back at” a “bitch” who’d dumped him. Cole’s friend spoke up again, but this time Cole stayed silent. “And as I continued to step back” and the other sophomore “continued to step up, you could tell that the guys on the team stopped liking him as much. They stopped listening to him, too. It’s almost as if he spent all his social currency” trying to get them to stop making sexist jokes. “Meanwhile, I was sitting there”—Cole thumped his chest—“too afraid to spend any of mine, and I just had buckets left.

“I don’t know what to do,” he continued earnestly. “Once I’m in the military, and I’m a part of that culture, I don’t want to have to choose between my own dignity and my relationship with others I’m serving with. But …” He looked me in the eye. “How do I make it so I don’t have to choose?”

I’ve spent two years talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen and unseen, that shape them as men. Though I spoke with boys of all races and ethnicities, I stuck to those who were in college or college-bound, because like it or not, they’re the ones most likely to set cultural norms. Nearly every guy I interviewed held relatively egalitarian views about girls, at least their role in the public sphere. They considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities. They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well. That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40, maybe even 20 years ago. They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day). It’s not that all of these qualities, properly channeled, are bad. But while a 2018 national survey of more than 1,000 10-to-19-year-olds conducted by the polling firm PerryUndem found that young women believed there were many ways to be a girl—they could shine in math, sports, music, leadership (the big caveat being that they still felt valued primarily for their appearance)—young men described just one narrow route to successful masculinity. One-third said they felt compelled to suppress their feelings, to “suck it up” or “be a man” when they were sad or scared, and more than 40 percent said that when they were angry, society expected them to be combative. In another survey, which compared young men from the U.S., the U.K., and Mexico, Americans reported more social pressure to be ever-ready for sex and to get with as many women as possible; they also acknowledged more stigma against homosexuality, and they received more messages that they should control their female partners, as in: Men “deserve to know” the whereabouts of their girlfriends or wives at all times.

Feminism may have provided girls with a powerful alternative to conventional femininity, and a language with which to express the myriad problems-that-have-no-name, but there have been no credible equivalents for boys. Quite the contrary: The definition of masculinity seems to be in some respects contracting. When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2 percent of male respondents in the PerryUndem survey said honesty and morality, and only 8 percent said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. When I asked my subjects, as I always did, what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. “Huh,” mused Josh, a college sophomore at Washington State. (All the teenagers I spoke with are identified by pseudonyms.) “That’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what is wrong with guys.”

While following the conventional script may still bring social and professional rewards to boys and men, research shows that those who rigidly adhere to certain masculine norms are not only more likely to harass and bully others but to themselves be victims of verbal or physical violence. They’re more prone to binge-drinking, risky sexual behavior, and getting in car accidents. They are also less happy than other guys, with higher depression rates and fewer friends in whom they can confide.

It wasn’t always thus. According to Andrew Smiler, a psychologist who has studied the history of Western masculinity, the ideal late-19th-century man was compassionate, a caretaker, but such qualities lost favor as paid labor moved from homes to factories during industrialization. In fact, the Boy Scouts, whose creed urges its members to be loyal, friendly, courteous, and kind, was founded in 1910 in part to counter that dehumanizing trend. Smiler attributes further distortions in masculinity to a century-long backlash against women’s rights. During World War I, women proved that they could keep the economy humming on their own, and soon afterward they secured the vote. Instead of embracing gender equality, he says, the country’s leaders “doubled down” on the inalienable male right to power, emphasizing men’s supposedly more logical and less emotional nature as a prerequisite for leadership.

Then, during the second half of the 20th century, traditional paths to manhood—early marriage, breadwinning—began to close, along with the positive traits associated with them. Today many parents are unsure of how to raise a boy, what sort of masculinity to encourage in their sons. But as I learned from talking with boys themselves, the culture of adolescence, which fuses hyperrationality with domination, sexual conquest, and a glorification of male violence, fills the void.

For Cole, as for many boys, this stunted masculinity is a yardstick against which all choices, even those seemingly irrelevant to male identity, are measured. When he had a choice, he would team up with girls on school projects, to avoid the possibility of appearing subordinate to another guy. “With a girl, it feels safer to talk and ask questions, to work together or to admit that I did something wrong and want help,” Cole said. During his junior year, he briefly suggested to his crew teammates that they go vegan for a while, just to show that athletes could. “And everybody was like, ‘Cole, that is the dumbest idea ever. We’d be the slowest in any race.’ That’s somewhat true—we do need protein. We do need fats and salts and carbs that we get from meat. But another reason they all thought it was stupid is because being vegans would make us pussies.”

by Peggy Orenstein, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Anthony Blasko

Martin Parr
[ed. See also: Beach Therapy, Everybody Dance Now, Manchester.]

Insurance Company Annoyed With Customer Who Didn't Realize They Were Just Being Polite

LOUISVILLE, KY—Wondering if the woman had any idea how normal interactions like this are supposed to work, employees at Humana Insurance were becoming annoyed Wednesday with a customer who did not seem to realize that offers to pay for healthcare were just supposed to be a polite gesture. “Offering to cover 80% of surgery cost is just something you kind of say to make people feel better, nobody is actually supposed to follow through on that offer,” said case manager Raymond Carberry, who expressed frustration when a customer stepped completely outside the bounds of a normal, courteous interaction with her submission of a claim form for a broken arm. “Every non-crazy person knows how this works, they’re just supposed to pay us a premium and then move on. What kind of weirdo actually asks for money? It’s deranged. She even wants us to pay for her ambulance ride, that’s just something you throw on a contract because it’s expected, it doesn’t actually mean anything.” At press time, a relieved Carberry had noticed that the customer misspelled the name of the hospital and denied the claim in full.

by The Onion |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

Who are you?

via:

Hilario Duran

This is What Insanity Sounds Like

One of the dumbest, most lantern-jawed songs of all time was a major rock radio hit back in 2010. Through astoundingly dim-witted lyrics, Godsmack’s “Cryin Like a Bitch” rehashes the tired conceit that showing emotional vulnerability isn’t manly: “I’m tougher than nails. / I can promise you that. / Step out of line / And you get bitch-slapped back.” Too distracted by his own machismo, singer Sully Erna never specifies why he has such harsh words for whomever “you” is supposed to be, and he doesn’t have to. Erna isn’t posturing for just any listener but a select audience he knows will cheer on his every roided tantrum.

Godsmack is part of an aggressive, no-cowards-allowed milieu of hard rock known as “post-grunge” (or pejoratively “butt rock”), which was at its most lucrative during the late 1990s and throughout the aughts, when it dominated both the rock and pop charts. Obscuring the stylistic boundaries between neighboring genres—country, grunge, and the genre which grunge supposedly killed, hair metal—post-grunge is characterized by its dragging tempos, down-tuned chord progressions, sporadic twanginess, and overly passionate vocals. If you took an eighties power ballad’s major key and turned it minor, you’d have a post-grunge song more or less. Even today, as its pop appeal has vanished, it remains viable in the realm of mainstream rock, selling out amphitheaters and filling up the playlists on “Alt Nation”-type stations. It soundtracks WWE pay-per-views; it’s what plays over the loudspeakers in Six Flags food courts. (...)

If anything, what makes post-grunge contemptible is that its hypermasculinity is so hysterically intense and over-the-top. Instead of depth or nuance, post-grunge singers rely on cliches: sweeping imagery and violent sentiments that communicate the frustration they feel towards vague, looming enemies. Groups like Nickelback, Creed, and 3 Doors Down aren’t despised because their singers attempt to confess their feelings, supposedly a feminine gesture, but because their attempts are ultimately evasive in spite of the music’s overbearing fervor. These men keep reassuring themselves that they deserve to be mad and sad as all hell, but they don’t seem to be sure about what exactly.

Which is perhaps to state the obvious: while white male rage and despair went on to define American domestic terrorism in the 2010s, post-grunge—a predominantly white genre—was celebrating these same emotions on the foremost rock and pop stations throughout the country. The problem was not that bands were vocalizing these emotions in the first place, but that rather than looking deeper into rage and despair, they romanticized their surface-level irrationality in one radio hit after another. As a result of its prolonged presence on the airwaves and in other media, such bands helped normalize the extent to which listeners might be willing to articulate their own similar feelings. It’s why the ambiguous, deflective fury of post-grunge has always harbored a largely conservative audience. (...)

In varying forms, hard rock has been at the heart of World Wrestling Entertainment since it began releasing soundtrack albums in the mid-1980s, but at that time the organization was having trouble deciding on a specific direction of hard rock to pursue—evidenced by the track list of an early release, the 1987 Piledriver soundtrack, which includes contributions from various washed-up rockers. Glam guitarist Rick Derringer composed Hulk Hogan’s theme, and he re-recorded with “Mean Gene” Okerlund his only hit, “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” from 1973. Singing “Girls in Cars,” the theme for wrestling duo Strike Force, was the very minor yacht-rocker Robbie Dupree, known for his one 1980 hit “Steal Away.” By 1996’s WWF Full Metal soundtrack, the organization had replaced these puzzling classic rock selections with the Slam Jam band, comprised of members of thrash metal groups like Anthrax and Overkill. Still, the WWE couldn’t afford to stick with thrash metal since the music wasn’t consistently comprehensible; the speedy tempo and screamed vocals on a Slam Jam track like “Thorn in Your Eye” are enlivening, though they obfuscate lyrics which explain how wrestling in a cage is a liberating activity. For the sake of pay-per-view viability, the organization needed a hard rock that could express themes of anguish and toughening up at as steady a tempo as possible.

It was with 2002’s Forceable Entry soundtrack that the WWE established its signature sound, hellbent on nu-metal and rap metal, but most of all, post-grunge. The material on this album encapsulates how the latter genre definitively morphed grunge’s mopey navel-gazing into macho self-aggrandizement that guaranteed violence on all fronts: Disturbed has a track about lining people up to murder all of them (they don’t specify how); Creed has one about how being a boy is not the same thing as being a man (in the context of the WWE, should we wonder if what makes this distinction is a tendency for violent behavior?). These bands, however, didn’t reflect the wrestlers’ personal tastes; in fact, it was the complete opposite for someone like Mick Foley, who has written extensively on his Tori Amos fandom.

Staged and comical as it is, the WWE was instrumental in post-grunge’s metamorphosis into aggressive gloominess, thus enabling other domination-oriented sentiments—objectifying women is a big one—to fester throughout discographies. Brace yourself. From Puddle of Mudd’s “Famous,” which has been used in numerous WWE events: “‘Cause I just wanna be famous / Be so fuckin jaded / ‘Cause all the Playboy bunnies take my money from me / Show up at the Oscars / Smoke out Dennis Hopper / The money is for nothing and the chicks are for free.” From Saving Abel’s “Addicted,” not a WWE song unfortunately: “I’m so addicted to / All the things you do / When you’re going down on me / In between the sheets / Oh, the sounds you make / With every breath you take / It’s unlike anything / When you’re loving me.” In these two examples at least, the choppy, gauche lyricism shows how awkward these bands were at performing their sexism, as if they just wanted to meet the bare minimum of commercial hard rock’s required objectification of women. They would have opted to sing about the absence of a lover—giving them the chance to glorify, say, brooding alone in their bedroom—rather than any active romance. “Addicted” comes close to this; besides getting a blow job, it’s about lying face-up in bed and doing nothing.

by Eli Zeger, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Godsmack

Polo Montañez

Whack-A-Mole

TULSA, Okla. — The teenager had pink cheeks from the cold and a matter-of-fact tone as she explained why she had started using methamphetamine after becoming homeless last year.

“Having nowhere to sleep, nothing to eat — that’s where meth comes into play,” said the girl, 17, who asked to be identified by her nickname, Rose. “Those things aren’t a problem if you’re using.”

She stopped two months ago, she said, after smoking so much meth over a 24-hour period that she hallucinated and nearly jumped off a bridge. Deaths associated with meth use are climbing here in Oklahoma and in many other states, an alarming trend for a nation battered by the opioid epidemic, and one that public health officials are struggling to fully explain.

The meth problem has sneaked up on state and national leaders. In Oklahoma, meth and related drugs, including prescription stimulants, now play a role in more deaths than all opioids combined, including painkillers, heroin and fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The spending package that lawmakers agreed on this week includes legislation from Senators Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, and Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, that would allow states to address the resurgence of meth and cocaine by using some of the billions of dollars that Congress had appropriated to combat opioid addiction.

Meth use first ballooned in the United States from the 1990s into the early 2000s, when it was often made in small home labs with pseudoephedrine, the main ingredient in many drugstore cold medicines. But today’s meth, largely imported from Mexico, is far more potent.

“It’s way different from the meth people were using 20 years ago,” said Dr. Jason Beaman, the chairman of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Center for Health Sciences at Oklahoma State University. “It’s like they were drinking Mountain Dew and now they are injecting Red Bull.”

Nationally, since late last year, meth has turned up in more deaths than opioid painkillers like oxycodone and hydrocodone. In 14 of the 35 states that report overdose deaths to the federal government on a monthly basis, meth is also involved in more deaths than fentanyl, by far the most potent opioid.

Provisional data from the C.D.C. shows there were about 13,000 deaths involving meth nationwide in 2018, more than twice as many as in 2015. That is still far fewer than opioid deaths overall, which passed 47,000, but the pace is accelerating while opioid fatalities have flattened.

by Abby Goodnough, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joseph Rushmore
[ed. America's decades-long War on Drugs (like other metaphorical "Wars") has caused more misery than the drugs themselves, with no solution in sight. My prescription: Try Something Different. Legalize them (all of them), establish safe and controlled use sites, monitor and provide basic support and rehabilitation services. What's to lose, it can't get much worse. See also: Portugal’s radical drugs policy is working. Why hasn’t the world copied it? (The Guardian).]

Tiny Trumpets

Stentors — or trumpet animalcules — are a group of single-celled freshwater protozoa. This image won second prize in the 2019 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, and was captured at 40 times magnification by researcher Igor Siwanowicz at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia.

The best science images of the year: 2019 in pictures (Nature)

The Art of Dying

Lung cancer, rampant. No surprise. I’ve smoked since I was sixteen, behind the high-school football bleachers in Northfield, Minnesota. I used to fear the embarrassment of dying youngish, letting people natter sagely, “He smoked, you know.” But at seventy-seven I’m into the actuarial zone.

I know about ending a dependency. I’m an alcoholic twenty-seven years sober. Drink was destroying my life. Tobacco only shortens it, with the best parts over anyway.

I got the preliminary word from my doctor by phone while driving alone upstate from the city to join my wife, Brooke, at our country place. After the call, I found myself overwhelmed by the beauty of the passing late-August land. At mile eighty-one of the New York State Thruway, the gray silhouettes of the Catskills come into view, perfectly framed and proportioned. How many times had I seen and loved the sight? How many more times would I? I thought of Thomas Cole’s paintings, from another angle, of those very old, worn mountains, brooding on something until the extinction of matter.

Patsy Cline was playing on the car radio: “Walkin’ After Midnight.” Not a great song, but performed in Cline’s way of attending selflessly to the sounds and the senses of the words. Showing how art should be done. She was thirty when she died in a plane crash, consummate.

I was at the wheel of my first brand-new car since 1962, a blue Subaru Forester that I dote on. I wanted for nothing. I want for nothing. The other night, I dreamed that I fetched the car from a parking lot only to find that it was another Subaru Forester, with two hundred thousand miles on it, dirty and falling apart. (That’s diseased me now, I suppose.) But the real one sits gleaming on East Seventh Street today.

Twenty-some years ago, I got a Guggenheim grant to write a memoir. I ended up using most of the money to buy a garden tractor. I failed for a number of reasons.

I don’t feel interesting.

I don’t trust my memories (or anyone’s memories) as reliable records of anything—and I have a fear of lying. Nor do I have much documentary material. I’ve never kept a diary or a journal, because I get spooked by addressing no one. When I write, it’s to connect.

I am beset, too, by obsessively remembered thudding guilts and scalding shames. Small potatoes, as traumas go, but intensified by my aversion to facing them.

Susan Sontag observed that when you have a disease people identify you with it. Fine by me! I could never sustain an expedient “I” for more than a paragraph. (Do you imagine that writers speak “as themselves”? No such selves exist.) Playing the Dying Man (Enter left. Exit trapdoor) gives me a persona. It’s a handy mask. (...)

Death is like painting rather than like sculpture, because it’s seen from only one side. Monochrome—like the mausoleum-gray former Berlin Wall, which kids in West Berlin glamorized with graffiti. What I’m trying to do here.

Swatted a fly the other day and thought, Outlived you. (...)

Family and friends are being wonderful to me in my sickness. I’ve toiled all my life, in vain, to like myself. Now the task has been outsourced. I can’t go around telling everybody they’re idiots.

I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?

True story: a friend received a preliminary diagnosis suggesting advanced breast cancer. Normally shy, she took this as license to tell or show everyone in her circle how little she liked or respected them. False alarm. It was cat-scratch fever. She moved overseas.

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully,” per Samuel Johnson.

“Why isn’t Schjeldahl’s copy in?” “He’s dead.” “Uh, O.K., then.”

The best excuse. (...)

Life doesn’t go on. It goes nowhere except away. Death goes on. Going on is what death does for a living. The secret to surviving in the universe is to be dead.

Self-knowledge! Almost better never than this late. (I don’t mean that at all. But I enjoy the sound of it.) I am endeavoring to practice self-forgiveness. I believe it’s recommended.

As for folks out there in resentful and envious circles who will be glad to have me out of the way, they, by their pleasure, afford me a bonus credit for increasing human happiness.

by Peter Schjeldahl, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Courtesy of the author

Yumeji Takehisa 1910-20
via: