Depressive Realism

We keep chasing happiness, but true clarity comes from depression and existential angst. Admit that life is hell, and be free.

I remember being depressed. It was a frightening state of mind that seemed to go on indefinitely. The very idea of waking up was riddled with dread. A state of internal turbulence, apprehension and negativity about the future propelled the total collapse of a positive and optimistic attitude. I felt like my mind suddenly became sick and twisted. I didn’t recognise my new self, and wondered what had happened to the cheerful person I used to be.

The reason for my depression was a breakup. But what led to depression was not so much the reaction to our split, but the realisation that the one you believed loved you, who was closest to you and promised to be with you forever, had turned out to be someone else, a stranger indifferent to your pain. I discovered that this loving person was an illusion. The past became meaningless, and the future ceased to exist. The world itself wasn’t credible any more.

In that state of depression, I found the attitude of others changed dramatically. Depression is not particularly tolerated in society, and I realised that those around me were of two persuasions. One group of people wanted to fix me, telling me to pull myself together or recommending professional help. The other group tended to shun me like a leper. In hindsight, I understand this reaction: after all, I had become cynical, agnostic and pessimistic, and I hadn’t bothered to be polite.

On the other hand, I developed a deeper understanding of the genuine suffering of others. In my depression, I learned about the dark side of the world, about which I knew little before. I could no longer ignore suffering and delusion, opening a new window on reality that was unpleasant indeed. My experience is not unique, but it was in some sense heightened because, in addition to being a regular human encountering a pathetic breakup, I’m also a philosopher. As a philosopher, I know that what seems to be obvious is far from always so, and therefore requires rigorous critical analysis. So, in the wake of my experience, I was especially inclined to doubt the equation of positive moods with health, and of negative moods with distortion. Could it be that, in my depression, I was finally seeing the world as it was?

Before my own descent, I’d been confused when my PhD mentor, the philosopher Alenka Zupančič at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, suggested that the common striving for happiness constitutes a repressive ideology. What in the world could be wrong or repressive about the desire to make the world a happier place?

Yet, after observing myself, I came to agree with her. Look around and you’ll notice we demand a state of permanent happiness from ourselves and others. The tendency that goes together with overpromotion of happiness is stigmatisation of the opposite of happiness – emotional suffering, such as depression, anxiety, grief or disappointment. We label emotional suffering a deviation and a problem, a distortion to be eliminated – a pathology in need of treatment. The voice of sadness is censored as sick.

The American Psychological Association defines depression as ‘a common and serious medical illness that negatively affects how you feel, the way you think and how you act’. The very term stigmatises the sufferer and implies the need for her to be cured. It’s hard to say whether therapists and the medical establishment are imposing this attitude or are influenced by the prevailing cultural paradigm. Either way, most therapies today aim to eliminate negative moods. (...)

During my depression, under the influence of the friends I had left, I went to a CBT therapist. As you can see, I wasn’t completely cured and still find myself full of ‘depressogenic’ thinking. My feelings about the therapy varied, from a desire to trust myself and the care of the therapist to irritation at this very desire. I felt like I was told what I wanted to hear, like a child in need of comfort with a pleasant night-time story to get away from the harsh reality that was surrounding me. Depressogenic thoughts are unpleasant and even unbearable, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are distorted representations of reality. What if reality truly sucks and, while depressed, we lose the very illusions that help us to not realise this?

What if, to the contrary, positive thinking represents a biased grasp of reality? What if, when I was depressed, I learned something valuable, that I wouldn’t be able to learn at a lower cost? What if it was a collapse of illusions – the collapse of unrealistic thinking – and the glimpse of a reality that actually caused my anxiety? What if, when depressed, we actually perceive reality more accurately? What if both my need to be happy and the demand of psychotherapy to heal depression are based on the same illusion? What if the so-called gold standard of therapy is just a comforting pseudoscience itself?

by Julie Reshe, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Ostend, Belgium, 1988. Photo by Harry Gruyaert/Magnum Photos
[ed. See also: Under the Weather (The Believer), and “The Cost Of Sanity, In This Society, Is A Certain Level Of Alienation” (Caitlin Johnstone).]

Slow-Walking Changes

Facebook Says Encrypting Messenger by Default Will Take Years (Wired)

Image: Casey Chin

They Made a Movie Out of It

We are now in the mature stage of a book-to-film boom that is quietly transforming how Americans read and tell stories—and not for the better. The power of this force is hard to quantify because intellectual property is now being bought in Hollywood in such unprecedented volume and diversity of source material. Almost all written works that achieve prominence today (and many more that don’t) will be optioned, and increasingly it is becoming rare for film and television projects to move forward without intellectual property attached. America’s higher echelon of long-form journalists can now expect to make more money from Hollywood than they do from the publications that print their stories. The emergence of streaming services from Amazon, Netflix, Apple, Disney, and even Walmart has driven a demand for writing on a bulk commodity scale at a time when the business of publishing—especially but not only in the world of magazines—has largely abdicated its responsibility for paying writers an amount that would secure a decent life. (...)

In January, long before I had the idea of writing this piece, I went for a meeting with Dan Fierman, the erstwhile editor-in-chief of Epic Magazine, a company that has become the poster child of this new order. My purpose was not to get information for a jeremiad against tech and Hollywood’s baleful impact on American writing. It was to try to get paid. But the meeting got me thinking.

Epic’s business model is, in part, to commission and place pieces that are designed to feed the new rapacity of tech and media companies for buyable IP. They offer a remarkably full-service product: they assign stories with an eye to how valuable they’ll seem to Hollywood’s buyers, and they negotiate magazine placement and the sale of rights in advance. The writer and Epic share the proceeds. From a writer’s perspective, this money allows for the ferocious level of focus and dedication that once seemed like a normal requirement to produce important nonfiction but which is now difficult for anyone who doesn’t have wealthy parents to summon while working for the cut-rate wages that even big outlets like The New York Times Magazine offer today. Epic then edits the pieces in-house and delivers them in more or less final form to a magazine like GQ.

The publications get a fully formed piece and in some cases don’t need to do any more work before publishing than to apply a fact-check and copy edit, a fact that anyone who has worked much in magazines could see as a dramatic illustration of the enervation of American journalism in the last couple of decades. Until recently, one of the few endearing qualities of many corporate magazine editors was the intensity they brought to shaping a piece, in the belief—which in a few cases was fair—that it was only their singular vision that could bring a story to a level of quality that made it the best possible exponent of what a publication and a writer hoped to show to the world. This feeling still exists in patches—again, largely in the rarefied precincts of publications like The New Yorker and the Times mag that are still able to regularly produce widely read feats of storytelling and reporting. The lower class of publications—basically everyone else—have mostly given up the pretense that they are actors capable of regularly producing major work without outside help, and even when streaming services aren’t subsidizing the writing they publish, they often turn to nonprofits funded by generous donors like the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, or Type Investigations (formerly the Nation Investigative Fund) to pay for the work. Not so long ago, Epic’s pitch would have seemed wildly offensive to the pride of most magazine editors. Today it represents an uncontroversial and welcome offering to outlets who can’t pretend to have other options. (...)

The Format is the Message

But what kind of writing does this machine want? This is where it gets tricky. Epic has a decent description of it right there on their website, and presumably they know what pleases Hollywood, since they only assign stories that get optioned. “As fun as fiction, but full of facts,” it starts.

“You know that feeling you get when a good true-life tale grabs you right from the start? You can’t stop turning the page—because you realize incredible things happen to real people—and it’s hard to believe that what you’re reading is nonfiction. That is the kind of story we like to tell. Epic writers travel the world searching for encounters with the unknown. Wartime romance, unlikely savants, deranged detectives, gentlemen thieves, and love-struck killers: stories that tap into the thrill of being alive.”

This is more or less how most editors I know describe what they want these days. One—clearly hoping to land stories that would get bought for film since he was hardly offering enough money to make writing a feature for him worth it otherwise—recently sent me a call asking for “ripping yarns, stories of true crime, of loves lost and won. Rivalries in sports, tech, and entertainment. Chronicles of dreams realized and broken. We want to take readers on spell-binding adventures, introduce them to powerful jerks they don’t know (or don’t know enough about), weirdos, eccentrics, and folks in search of redemption.”

This email almost made me throw my laptop off my balcony. We all know this kind of storytelling, even if we don’t exactly have a name for it. It is your non-friend’s favorite true-crime podcast. It is the magazine story that the documentary you just watched was based on, and it is the novel that was based on the real event that the even-better magazine piece described and that will soon be a television show. It is the books that now dominate the bestseller lists by writers like Grann or Patrick Radden Keefe or Gillian Flynn, which have all been pre-engineered to read like movie thrillers long before anyone even sat down to start on the script.

We think less about what this kind of writing isn’t. These editors asking you to rip the yarn never talk about politics beyond a possible desultory nod toward wanting stories from writers of “diverse backgrounds.” They do not talk about voice or literary style. They do not ask for excavations of an inner life or the forces of history or any of the things that once would have made a work of writing lasting. A writer may find clever ways to worm these things in, but in the end they are ancillary goods. The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview. Which is a workable definition of the kind of writing most easily converted into IP.

by James Pogue, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Kiel Mutschelknaus
[ed. See also: The Man Who’s Spending $1 Billion to Own Every Pop Song (Medium).]

What Intellectual Progress Did I Make in the 2010s?

One of the best parts of writing a blog is being able to answer questions like this. Whenever I felt like I understood new and important, I wrote a post about it. This makes it easy to track what I learned.

I think the single most important thing I discovered this decade (due to a random comment in the SSC subreddit!) was the predictive coding theory of the brain. I started groping towards it (without knowing what I was looking for) in Mysticism And Pattern-Matching, reported the exact moment when I found it in It’s Bayes All The Way Up, and finally got a decent understanding of it after reading Surfing Uncertainty. At the same time, thanks to some other helpful tips from other rationalists, I discovered Behavior: The Control Of Perception, and with some help from Vaniver and a few other people was able to realize how these two overarching theories were basically the same. Discovering this area of research may be the best thing that happened to me the second half of this decade (sorry, everyone I dated, you were pretty good too).

Psychedelics are clearly interesting, and everyone else had already covered all the interesting pro-psychedelic arguments, so I wrote about some of my misgivings in my 2016 Why Were Early Psychedelicists So Weird?. The next step was trying to fit in an understanding of HPPD, which started with near-total bafflement. Predictive processing proved helpful here too, and my biggest update of the decade on psychedelics came with Friston and Carhart-Harris’ Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics And The Anarchic Brain, which I tried to process further here. This didn’t directly improve my understanding of HPPD specifically, but just by talking about it a lot I got a subtler picture where lots of people have odd visual artifacts and psychedelics can cause slightly more (very rarely, significantly more) visual artifacts. I started the decade thinking that “psychedelic insight” was probably fake, and ended it believing that it is probably real, but I still don’t feel like I have a good sense of the potential risks.

In mental health, the field I am supposed to be an expert on, I spent a long time throwing out all kinds of random ideas and seeing what stuck – Boorsboom et al’s idea of Mental Disorders As Networks, The Synapse Hypothesis of depression, etc. Although I still think we can learn something from models like those, right now my best model is the one in Symptom, Condition, Cause, which kind of sidesteps some of those problems. Again, learning about predictive processing helped here, and by the end of the decade I was able to say actually useful things that explained some features of psychiatric conditions, like in Treat The Prodrome. Friston On Computational Mood might also be in this category, I’m still waiting for more evidence one way or the other.

I also spent a lot of time thinking about SSRIs in particular, especially Irving Kirsch (and others’) claim that they barely outperform placebo. I wrote up some preliminary results in SSRIs: Much More Than You Wanted To Know, but got increasingly concerned that this didn’t really address the crux of the issue, especially after Cipriani et al (covertly) confirmed Kirsch’s results (see Cipriani On Antidepressants). My thoughts evolved a little further with SSRIs: An Update and some of my Survey Results On SSRIs. But my most recent update actually hasn’t got written up yet – see the PANDA trial results for a preview of what will basically be “SSRIs work very well on some form of mental distress which is kind of, but not exactly, depression and anxiety”. (...)

One of the big motivating questions I keep coming back to again and again is – what the heck is “willpower”? I started the decade so confused about this that I voluntarily bought and read Baumeister and Tierney’s book Willpower and expected it to be helpful. I spent the first few years gradually internalizing the lesson (which I learned in the 2000s) that Humans Are Not Automatically Strategic (see also The Blue-Minimizing Robot as a memorial to the exact second I figured this out), and that hyperbolic discounting is a thing. Since then, progress has been disappointing – the only two insights I can be even a little happy about are understanding perceptual control theory and Stephen Guyenet’s detailed account of how motivation works in lampreys. If I ever become a lamprey I am finally going to be totally content with how well I understand my motivational structure, and it’s going to feel great.

by Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex |  Read more:
[ed. Lots of good links.]

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A Comedy Education From Late Legend Buck Henry

What working on The Graduate, Get Smart, SNL, and more taught him about making timeless humor.

Buck Henry is going to be missed for many reasons, not least of which are his brilliant script of The Graduate, the creation of Get Smart, and the ahead-of-its-time but short-lived TV sci-fi satire Quark, as well as his SNL characters, a lot of whom (as the saying goes) would never get anywhere close to airtime these days — such as his version of Charles Lindbergh, who, on his first solo flight across the Atlantic, anxiously passes the time by jerking off to the pornographic magazines he brought with him.

With Buck’s passing on Wednesday at the age of 89, I’d love for you to read the extended version of the interview I conducted with him back in 2009, before it was cut down for inclusion in my book.

There’s a Heaven Can Wait reference I could use right now, but I’ll save you the time and agony. Instead, I’ll just say this:

Plastics.

Is there a more prophetic line in all of comedy?

Buck Henry seemed destined for a life in show business from an early age. At just sixteen, he was performing as one of the sons in the touring production of the mega-hit Life with Father (1947). A few years later, stationed in Germany and maintaining helicopters and aircraft, he found time to write, direct, and star in a cheerful (if somewhat unorthodox) musical review called Beyond the Moon, in which two GIs are accidentally rocketed to a distant planet, where they find a race of “weird but gorgeous women.”

The sixties were, by all accounts, a golden era for Henry. In 1965, he and Mel Brooks co-created the Emmy Award–winning sitcom Get Smart, which ran until 1970. Though fans and critics adored its obvious spoofing of the James Bond spy genre, Get Smart was also a satire of government incompetence (and possible menace), a topic Henry revisited in his Oscar-nominated adaptation of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970). But, arguably, Henry’s biggest cultural impact was the screenplay for The Graduate (1967), the Mike Nichols–directed comedy about alienation, plastics, and MILFs, which would soon come to define the baby-boomer generation. (...)

You’ve mentioned in the past that you have a voyeur nature. Is this an example?

I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening.

How do you achieve this? Where do you look and when do you listen?

I think the problem is that, if you live in California — and especially if you live in Hollywood — you aren’t connected to what the rest of the world thinks of as real life. Your observations are based on what you see on television and not what is going on in reality.

If you ride in limos for too long, you tend to forget what cabs, buses, and subways are like. You lose contact. I think it’s important to stay in contact with the outside world. (...)

Did you always gravitate toward comedy rather than other genres? Did it always come easily to you?

Yes, but I’m actually more a fan of other genres than I am of comedy. I rarely go to comedies. I just don’t find comedy as interesting as the forms that I don’t do myself. It’s harder to make me laugh than it is to make me cry.

You once said that comedy covers a lot of faults.

It is defensive in nature. With comedy, you deflect danger. You cover up emotion. You engage your enemy without getting your face smashed in.

Comedy is also harder to write. Things are either funny or they’re not. If you were writing, say, a story about Jesus getting married and having children, you can go for a long period of time faking it before you have to do anything even pretending to be meaningful. You can’t fake it with comedy. (...)

Did you see the potential right away in the Charles Webb book The Graduate when you were asked to write the screenplay?

Yes, but I don’t think I read the book until Mike Nichols gave it to me. Once I did, my feeling was, This is going to make a very good movie. There were strong characters and a good story.

The book is dialogue-heavy. Did that make the process of translating it to the screen easier for you?

Sure. The more there is to steal, the easier the job — although, in some cases, it isn’t. In fact, sometimes it’s just the opposite, because you can’t figure out what to get rid of.

I was going to ask if you had any idea whether The Graduate would become such a phenomenon, but does anyone ever really know?

Oh, absolutely not. You never really know.

With The Graduate, nobody expected that what happened was going to happen. I mean, I thought the movie was going to be a hit, but I didn’t know it was going to be that kind of hit.

How about specific lines and jokes? As a screenwriter, do you ever really know if a line or joke will break through?

I can usually tell if a joke will work, but I can’t predict if a joke or a line will become iconic.

Such as the famous “plastics” line?

Right. I had no idea what would happen with that line. I just thought that the line was good as a passing moment. Everything about that scene appealed to me, and the “plastics” line was only a part of it.

The line was not in the book. What made you want to write it into the movie?

I had a professor of philosophy at Dartmouth, and he would rail against the “plastic world.” I always remembered that phrase. The party scene needed something, just a little something, and “plastics” seemed to be the right word to use. I could have used “mohair” or another word, and if the actors had done it right, it still would have received a laugh. But “plastics” was just perfect. It captured something in that scene that another word never could have.

Everyone’s been through it. Me especially. Every guy in my generation who went to college and had ambivalent relationships with his parents. Every guy who stood around talking with his parents’ friends, who were perfectly nice but who were people you’d have paid to not have to stand around with … Well, we’ve all been through that. Everybody in the middle class, anyway.

by Mike Sacks, Vulture |  Read more:

Image: NBC/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

Seaweed 'Forests' Can Help Fight Climate Change

As the Amazon burns, there’s growing interest in cultivating forests that absorb planet-warming carbon emissions, but that are fireproof.

That’s because these forests are underwater.

An increasing body of research is documenting the potential of seaweed farming to counter climate change as deforestation decimates rainforests and other crucial carbon sinks. Fast-growing oceanic jungles of kelp and other macroalgae are highly efficient at storing carbon. Seaweed also ameliorates acidification, deoxygenation, and other marine impacts of global warming that threaten the biodiversity of the seas and the source of food and livelihoods for hundreds of millions of people.

“Seaweed is finally having its moment in the spotlight,” says Halley Froehlich, a marine scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

She is the lead author of a new study that for the first time quantifies the global capacity of large-scale seaweed farming to offset terrestrial carbon emissions and maps areas of the ocean suitable for macroalgae cultivation.

Farming seaweed in just 3.8 percent of the federal waters off the California coast—that’s 0.065 percent of the global ocean suitable for growing macroalgae—could neutralize emissions from the state’s $50 billion agriculture industry, according to the paper published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.

Seaweed is currently grown on a small scale for use in food, medicines, and beauty products. The scientists, however, propose the establishment of industrial-size farms to grow seaweed to maturity, harvest it, and then sink it in the deep ocean where the captured carbon dioxide would be entombed for hundreds to thousands of years.

They found that raising macroalgae in just 0.001 percent of seaweed-growing waters worldwide and then burying it at sea could offset the entire carbon emissions of the rapidly growing global aquaculture industry, which supplies half of the world’s seafood. Altogether, 18.5 million square miles of the ocean is suitable for seaweed cultivation, the study concluded.

There’s a catch

“The technology doesn’t yet exist” to sequester seaweed in the deep ocean, notes Froehlich. “Hopefully this paper spurs conversation among engineers and economists about what would it take for the actual mechanisms to be put in place.” (...)

Beyond seaweed’s potential to counteract acidification and deoxygenation, absorb excess nutrients and provide habitat for marine life in at least 77 countries, seaweed can be processed into biofuel. And research has shown that adding seaweed to livestock feed can reduce potent methane emissions from the burps of cows and other grazing livestock—a significant source of global greenhouse gases—by as much as 70 percent. Seaweed can also be used as an agricultural soil supplement, replacing petroleum-based fertilizers.

“The math shows you that seaweed can be a very effective tool to fight climate change, but it has to be validated by the market,” says Scotty Schmidt, chief executive of Primary Ocean, a Los Angeles company working on a United States government-funded project to develop technologies to deploy large-scale seaweed farms.

“Farming seaweed just for carbon sequestration is not a viable business case at this time as there's barely a carbon market that's willing to accept seaweed offset credits,” he says.

by Todd Woody, National Geographic |  Read more:

Image: divedog, Adobe Stock 2019 via:
[ed. Only if it's profitable.]

Japanese stamp depicting marimo moss balls, 1956.

via:

Ho Sung Choi

[ed. Whatever works. See also: 2019 SMBC Singapore Open.]

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Deaths of Despair: Who Killed the Knapp Family?

Chaos reigned daily on the No. 6 school bus, with working-class boys and girls flirting and gossiping and dreaming, brimming with mischief, bravado and optimism. Nick rode it every day in the 1970s with neighbors here in rural Oregon, neighbors like Farlan, Zealan, Rogena, Nathan and Keylan Knapp.

They were bright, rambunctious, upwardly mobile youngsters whose father had a good job installing pipes. The Knapps were thrilled to have just bought their own home, and everyone oohed and aahed when Farlan received a Ford Mustang for his 16th birthday.

Yet today about one-quarter of the children on that No. 6 bus are dead, mostly from drugs, suicide, alcohol or reckless accidents. Of the five Knapp kids who had once been so cheery, Farlan died of liver failure from drink and drugs, Zealan burned to death in a house fire while passed out drunk, Rogena died from hepatitis linked to drug use and Nathan blew himself up cooking meth. Keylan survived partly because he spent 13 years in a state penitentiary.

Among other kids on the bus, Mike died from suicide, Steve from the aftermath of a motorcycle accident, Cindy from depression and a heart attack, Jeff from a daredevil car crash, Billy from diabetes in prison, Kevin from obesity-related ailments, Tim from a construction accident, Sue from undetermined causes. And then there’s Chris, who is presumed dead after years of alcoholism and homelessness. At least one more is in prison, and another is homeless.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

“The meaningfulness of the working-class life seems to have evaporated,” Angus Deaton, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, told us. “The economy just seems to have stopped delivering for these people.” Deaton and the economist Anne Case, who is also his wife, coined the term “deaths of despair” to describe the surge of mortality from alcohol, drugs and suicide.

The kids on the No. 6 bus rode into a cataclysm as working-class communities disintegrated across America because of lost jobs, broken families, gloom — and failed policies. The suffering was invisible to affluent Americans, but the consequences are now evident to all: The survivors mostly voted for Trump, some in hopes that he would rescue them, but under him the number of children without health insurance has risen by more than 400,000.

The stock market is near record highs, but working-class Americans (often defined as those without college degrees) continue to struggle. If you’re only a high school graduate, or worse, a dropout, work no longer pays. If the federal minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with inflation and productivity, it would now be $22 an hour. Instead, it’s $7.25.

We were foreign correspondents together for many years, periodically covering humanitarian crises in distant countries. Then we would return to the Kristof family farm in Yamhill and see a humanitarian crisis unfolding in a community we loved — and a similar unraveling was happening in towns across the country. This was not one town’s problem, but a crisis in the American system.

“I’m a capitalist, and even I think capitalism is broken,” says Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater, the world’s largest hedge fund.

by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Dee Knapp
[ed.  See also: (Andrew Sullivan, Intelligencer - The Poison We Pick):

"And so we wait to see what amount of death will be tolerable in America as the price of retaining prohibition. Is it 100,000 deaths a year? More? At what point does a medical emergency actually provoke a government response that takes mass death seriously? Imagine a terror attack that killed over 40,000 people. Imagine a new virus that threatened to kill 52,000 Americans this year. Wouldn’t any government make it the top priority before any other? (...)

One of the more vivid images that Americans have of drug abuse is of a rat in a cage, tapping a cocaine-infused water bottle again and again until the rodent expires. Years later, as recounted in Johann Hari’s epic history of the drug war, Chasing the Scream, a curious scientist replicated the experiment. But this time he added a control group. In one cage sat a rat and a water dispenser serving diluted morphine. In another cage, with another rat and an identical dispenser, he added something else: wheels to run in, colored balls to play with, lots of food to eat, and other rats for the junkie rodent to play or have sex with. Call it rat park. And the rats in rat park consumed just one-fifth of the morphine water of the rat in the cage. One reason for pathological addiction, it turns out, is the environment. If you were trapped in solitary confinement, with only morphine to pass the time, you’d die of your addiction pretty swiftly too. Take away the stimulus of community and all the oxytocin it naturally generates, and an artificial variety of the substance becomes much more compelling.

One way of thinking of postindustrial America is to imagine it as a former rat park, slowly converting into a rat cage. Market capitalism and revolutionary technology in the past couple of decades have transformed our economic and cultural reality, most intensely for those without college degrees. The dignity that many working-class men retained by providing for their families through physical labor has been greatly reduced by automation. Stable family life has collapsed, and the number of children without two parents in the home has risen among the white working and middle classes. The internet has ravaged local retail stores, flattening the uniqueness of many communities. Smartphones have eviscerated those moments of oxytocin-friendly actual human interaction. Meaning — once effortlessly provided by a more unified and often religious culture shared, at least nominally, by others — is harder to find, and the proportion of Americans who identify as “nones,” with no religious affiliation, has risen to record levels. Even as we near peak employment and record-high median household income, a sense of permanent economic insecurity and spiritual emptiness has become widespread. Some of that emptiness was once assuaged by a constantly rising standard of living, generation to generation. But that has now evaporated for most Americans." ]

America Can End Its War On Drugs. Here's How.

Decades into the war on drugs, the world doesn't have much to show for it. The US is now in the middle of an opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic that has killed tens of thousands each year, despite tough-on-crime policies enforced under the drug war. Mexico has suffered from tens of thousands of deaths annually as the black market for drugs finances drug cartels that are so powerful they can wage war against governments and conquer cities. And drug use and trafficking haven't declined by an appreciable amount for decades.

These circumstances led more than 1,000 world leaders, including Bernie Sanders, to call for an end to the "disastrous" war on drugs in a recent letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

But what exactly does it mean to end the war on drugs? (...)

Through interviews with some of the world's smartest drug policy experts and my review of the research, I put together three of the best ideas on dismantling the current system. These are by no means the only options for ending the war on drugs. But they are the ones that seemed, based on my reporting on the issue and data, to have the most merit.

There were some points of agreement. Experts agreed that, regardless of how legal regimes change, countries should boost public health programs for drugs, including treatment and prevention. And whether drugs have medical use, such as marijuana or hallucinogens, is also something that can be evaluated separately.

But there was a lot of disagreement about what legal regimes for drugs should look like. So here are the three plans that came from my conversations.

Approach 1: Pull back harsh enforcement, but keep criminalization (...)

Approach 2: Decriminalization, smart prohibition, and smart legalization (...)

Approach 3: Legalize and tightly regulate all drugs

The most radical approach — and one most Americans don't agree with — is legalizing and regulating all drugs. This is something no country has done in modern times, as many recreational drugs remain illegal to sell virtually everywhere in the world. So it's difficult to say for certain what would happen.

Still, there was one consistent group that drug policy experts and historians pointed me to when I asked whether anyone had a realistic legalization model: the Transform Drug Policy Foundation. While many don't agree with Transform's plan, it was consistently cited as the most detailed, evidence-based proposal.

Explaining his approach, Steve Rolles, senior policy analyst for Transform, said his group applied what we already know about other vice markets — particularly alcohol, tobacco, and gambling — to illegal drugs.

To be clear, this would not mean letting people buy any drug they want at the grocery store. "Different drugs would be regulated in different ways," Rolles explained. "The determinant of how you would regulate a drug would be what the risks and behaviors associated with that particular drug were. So the more risky a drug is, clearly, the more justification you have for more intrusive or intense regulation."

In its very detailed blueprint, Transform lays out its regulatory models based on tiers that ramp up restrictions based on a drug's dangers. Here's a quick summary of the five tiers, which divide up where and how the drugs would be available based on how potentially dangerous they are:

Medically supervised venues: Drugs put in this category, including heroin or amphetamines, would only be allowed with a prescription (typically for people with drug use disorders) and the direct supervision of a trained expert, like a doctor in a controlled facility.

Pharmacies: Drugs in this tier, such as MDMA, powder cocaine, or amphetamine, would only be dispensed through pharmacies with a prescription or over the counter. While it is currently the case that pharmacies focus on medical applications, the blueprint suggests that pharmacists could also act as trained and licensed gatekeepers for drugs used in recreational settings.

Licensed sales: Drugs in this classification, like marijuana and stimulant-based drinks, would be dispensed by licensed, regulated vendors. These sellers don't have to be for-profit entities; they could be nonprofits or government-controlled.

Licensed premises: These regulated establishments would dispense drugs, such as smoked opium, psychedelics, or poppy tea, much like alcohol is sold and consumed in bars today — although in some cases, as with psychedelics, the vendors would need training to help guide people through their experiences.

Unlicensed sales: Drugs in this category, like coca tea, would be available easily, much like caffeine.

Rolles emphasized that commercialization should be avoided. So even the drugs that are more accessible could still fall under strict regulations, such as a ban on marketing, taxes to keep the prices high, and even price controls. This could make up for at least part of the price drop that comes with the end of prohibition.

The new regulations could also be applied to alcohol and tobacco, as well as marijuana in states that already legalized the drug. (Rolles said he doesn't like that marijuana is moving to a commercialized legal model in parts of the US.)

But why go for legalization and regulation? There are two main reasons for this, Rolles argued: One, it completely eliminates the black market for drugs that enables so much violence around the world, particularly Latin America. Two, it could potentially make drug consumption safer.

The first point is relatively uncontroversial. It is clear that the war on drugs has had an enormously negative effect in several countries around the world, particularly Mexico in recent years. Again, a study found that violence from the drug war caused Mexico's life expectancy to stagnate — and, in men's cases, drop — after decades of increases.

On the second point, Rolles argues that legalizing and regulating drugs could make for safer drug use. So if people get their drugs from a regulated source, governments can ensure there's nothing that would make an already dangerous substance even more dangerous (such as fentanyl in heroin).

It may also eliminate the incentives in the black market to make drugs as potent as possible, since in a black market it's much easier to smuggle a highly potent pound of a drug (such as heroin) than it would be to smuggle a few pounds of something that's not as potent (such as smoked opium).

A similar black market phenomenon occurred during Prohibition, when the US banned alcohol from 1920 to 1933. During Prohibition, the market quickly went to spirits. After Prohibition, it has shifted toward wine and beer. (...)

"The idea that we're trying to promote in the blueprint is that a regulatory model can tilt the market the other way," Rolles said. "So the less risky, less potent products are more available, and the higher risk products are increasingly less available or not available at all." 

by German Lopez, Vox |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock

[ed. See also: The rise in meth and cocaine overdoses, explained; and How the war on drugs has made drug traffickers more ruthless and efficient (Vox).]

New Demand For Old, Low Tech Farm Tractors

Farmers are increasingly sick of high-tech tractors that are expensive to buy and usually impossible to fix yourself due to their integrated digital technology. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, "Tractors manufactured in the late 1970s and 1980s are some of the hottest items in farm auctions across the Midwest these days." To be sure, the farmers buying these old machines aren't luddites. In fact, they often customize and retrofit them with contemporary tech like GPS for automatic steering. From the Star Tribune:

“The newer machines, any time something breaks, you’ve got to have a computer to fix it,” (BigIron owner Mark) Stock said. 

There are some good things about the software in newer machines, said Peterson. The dealer will get a warning if something is about to break and can contact the farmer ahead of time to nip the problem in the bud. But if something does break, the farmer is powerless, stuck in the field waiting for a service truck from the dealership to come out to their farm and charge up to $150 per hour for labor. “That goes against the pride of ownership, plus your lifetime of skills you’ve built up being able to fix things,” (Machinery Pete founder Greg) Peterson said... 

The cheaper repairs for an older tractor mean their life cycle can be extended. A new motor or transmission may cost $10,000 to $15,000, and then a tractor could be good for another 10 or 15 years. 

Folland has two Versatile 875s manufactured in the early 1980s in Winnipeg and bought a John Deere 4440 last year with 9,000 hours on it, expecting to get another 5,000 hours out of it before he has to make a major repair.
“An expensive repair would be $15,000 to $20,000, but you’re still well below the cost of buying a new tractor that’s $150,000 to $250,000. It’s still a fraction of the cost,” (farmer Kris) Folland said. “That’s why these models are so popular. They’ve stood the test of time, well built, easy to fix, and it’s easy to get parts.”

by David Pescovitz, Boing Boing |  Read more:

Image: "John Deere 3020" by Artiez (CC BY-SA 3.0)

[ed. Also a problem with personal vehicles and trucks outfitted with new technologies, making repair bills a nightmare. Not to mention "Right to Repair" issues. See also: here, here and here.]

White House Moves to Exempt Big Projects From Environmental Review

President Trump on Thursday capped a three-year drive to roll back clean air and water protections by proposing stark changes to the nation’s oldest and most established environmental law that could exempt major infrastructure projects from environmental review.

The revisions to the law — the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act, a landmark measure that touches nearly every highway, bridge, pipeline and other major federal construction in the country — underscored Mr. Trump’s focus on stripping away regulations, to the consternation of conservationists. In the middle of a foreign-policy crisis and on the cusp of an impeachment trial in the Senate, Mr. Trump appeared in his element on Thursday, flanked by men in hard hats and orange safety vests.

“America’s most critical infrastructure projects have been tied up and bogged down by an outrageously slow and burdensome federal approval process, and I’ve been talking about it for a long time,” he said.

Mr. Trump, who made his fortune as a real estate developer, spoke as if personally aggrieved: “The builders are not happy. Nobody’s happy.”

Since taking office Mr. Trump has proposed nearly 100 environmental rollbacks, including weakening protections for endangered species, relaxing rules that limit emissions from coal plants and blocking the phaseout of older incandescent light bulbs. Hundreds of thousands of public comments against the president’s moves have flowed in. Scientists have spoken out in opposition. Democrats have vowed to stop him, all with little effect.

“He sees himself as the kingpin of an anti-federal-regulatory movement,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University who has written about environmental policy.

But haste and zeal may work against administration. Nearly 70 lawsuits have been filed to challenge the administration’s deregulatory moves, asserting that officials have violated federal procedures in their rollback efforts. The Trump administration has, so far, been successful just four times, according to New York University School of Law data.

Some of Mr. Trump’s moves have been never been tried before, such as the reversal of national monument designations by his predecessors. Some have been remarkably defiant, like Thursday’s effort to alter a half-century-old law by decree, carving out a new category of infrastructure projects not subject to environmental review.

The interior secretary, David Bernhardt, who has overseen plans to weaken limits on the release of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and loosen offshore drilling safety rules, called the proposed changes to the National Environmental Policy Act the Trump administration’s most significant deregulatory proposal yet.

Critics agreed. James A. Thurber, a political-science professor at American University, described Mr. Trump’s latest actions to “altering the Ten Commandments of environmental policy.”

All told, Mr. Trump has gone further than any other president, including Ronald Reagan, in dismantling clean air and water protections. The National Environmental Protection Act was signed into law by Richard M. Nixon after calls for greater oversight when the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire and a tanker spilled three million gallons of crude off the coast of Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1969. (...)

Under the National Environmental Policy Act, major federal projects like bridges, highways, pipelines or power plants that will have a significant impact on the environment require a review, or environmental impact statement, outlining potential consequences.

The proposed new rules would change the regulations that guide the implementation of the law in a number of ways, including by narrowing the range of projects that require such an assessment and by imposing strict new deadlines on completing the studies.

The changes would also eliminate the need for agencies to consider the “cumulative impacts” of projects. In recent years, courts have said that includes studying the planet-warming consequences of emitting more greenhouse gases. Mary B. Neumayr, the chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, said the change did not prevent or exclude consideration of the impact of greenhouse gases; consideration would no longer be required.

And the changes would set hard deadlines of one year to complete reviews of smaller projects and two years to complete reviews of larger ones.

Richard L. Revesz, a professor of environmental law at New York University, said he did not believe the changes would hold up in court. The National Environmental Policy Act requires that all the environmental consequences of a project be taken into account, he said, and that core requirement cannot be changed by fiat.

“A regulation can’t change the requirements of a statute as interpreted by the courts,” Mr. Revesz said. In fact, he argued, under the Trump administration’s guidance, federal agencies are more likely to be sued for inadequate reviews, “leading to far longer delays than if they had done a proper analysis in the first place.”

by Lisa Friedman, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Charles Mostoller/Reuters
[ed. Everyone is familiar with Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). NEPA is the cornerstone, the gold standard of environmental protection. I spent my whole career implementing its policies and navigating its laws. If anyone thinks this is going to be good for business they're sadly mistaken. Without a formal process for identifying and resolving potential issues up front (environmental, technical, legal, economic, social), projects will be tied up in courts for years and may never get built. See also: How the Process Works - An Outsider's Guide to Cherry Point; and Megaproject Management (Duck Soup).]

Lauritz Hartz, Landscape
via:

Rickie Fowler, professional golfer,  fashion trendsetter. 
Image: Instagram via
[ed. Yikes.]

Millions of Animals Lost in Australia's Wildfires

Koala Mittens and Baby Bottles: Saving Australia’s Animals After Fires (NY Times)

Image: Christina Simons for The New York Times

[ed. Loss in the millions (if not billions), including up to 30% of Australia's koala's. See also: Bugpocolypse.]

Tom Petty on Songwriting

“Sometimes songwriting is pretty lonely work. I don’t think a lot of people have the patience for it. You’re not necessarily going to get one every time you try. In fact most times you try you’re not going to get one. It’s like fishing. You’re fishing, and you either caught a fish or you didn’t. If you did, there’s one in the boat; if you didn’t, there’s not. But you’re going to go back and keep your pole in the water. That’s the only way you’re going to get a bite.”

~ Tom Petty (Billboard)

[ed. See also: How Tom Petty Wrote Songs for Everyone (The Ringer)

The Superpowers of Super-Thin Materials

In materials science, 2-D is the new 3-D.

In recent years, internet-connected devices have colonized a range of new frontiers — wrists, refrigerators, doorbells, cars. But to some researchers, the spread of the “internet of things” has not gone nearly far enough.

“What if we were able to embed electronics in absolutely everything,” Tomás Palacios, an electrical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently. “What if we did energy harvesting from solar cells inside highways, and had strain sensors embedded in tunnels and bridges to monitor the concrete? What if we could look outside and get the weather forecast in the window? Or bring electronics to my jacket to monitor my health?”

In January of 2019, Dr. Palacios and his colleagues published a paper in Nature describing an invention that would bring that future a little closer: an antenna that can absorb the ever-thickening ambient soup of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cellular signals and efficiently turn it into usable electrical energy.

The key to the technology is a promising new material called molybdenum disulfide, or MoS₂, that can be deposited in a layer just three atoms thick. In the world of engineering, things can’t get much thinner.

And thin is useful. For instance, a layer of MoS₂ could wrap around a desk and turn it into a laptop charger, without any power cords.

As researchers like Dr. Palacios see it, two-dimensional materials will be the linchpin of the internet of everything. They will be “painted” on bridges and form the sensors to watch for strain and cracks. They will cover windows with transparent layers that become visible only when information is displayed. And if his team’s radio wave-absorber succeeds, it will power those ever-present electronics. Increasingly, the future looks flat.

by Amos Zeeberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tony Luong for The New York Times
[ed. From 2D to holographics (see next post).]