Monday, May 25, 2020
Too Little Or Too Much Time With The Kids? Grandparenting Is Tough In A Pandemic
Back in pre-pandemic times, Richard and Denise Victor would get to see their four grandchildren almost every day. One set of kids lives around the block from them in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; the others are half an hour away, all close enough for frequent visits and sleepovers.
"With the younger ones, we have a routine of stories when they spend the night," Richard Victor says.
But when the coronavirus hit, the couple were at their vacation home in Florida, and suddenly it wasn't safe to leave. They've been sheltering there for three months, missing their grandkids and struggling with an absence that FaceTime just can't fill.
"It's very, very difficult," says Victor, a 70-year-old lawyer and founder of the nonprofit Grandparents Rights Organization. "You have to try your best, because we don't know when this will be over with."
Of all the hardships imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, among the most poignant is the reshaping of relationships between children and the grandparents who love them.
Across the U.S., where more than 70 million people are grandparents, the effort to prevent infection in older people, who are most at risk of serious COVID-19 illness, has meant self-imposed exile for many. On the other hand, some grandparents have taken over daily child care duties to help adult children who must work.
"All the grandparents in the country are aching," says Madonna Harrington Meyer, a sociology professor at Syracuse University in New York. "Some are aching because they can't see their grandchildren — and some are aching because they can't get away from them."
Both situations are the result of a fast-moving pandemic that forced families to decide quickly whether to isolate with grandparents "inside the bubble or out," Harrington Meyer says. Three months later, many are still grappling with those decisions — and worrying about an uncertain future.
"I think we all have the exact same set of issues," says Harrington Meyer, author of the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work: Juggling Families and Jobs. "What will August bring? All of us need to be prepared for this to be fluctuating."
Even as some regions begin easing restrictions, the risks posed by gathering in person haven't changed for grandparents separated from their grandchildren, says Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an affiliated clinical assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at Stanford University. Rates of serious illness and death caused by COVID-19 remain much higher in older people than among the young, and children can easily spread the disease.
"It's hard to know if a child has been exposed or whether they have an asymptomatic infection," Kuppalli says. "I would definitely recommend staying away or definitely continuing to wear masks and perform good hand hygiene."
At the same time, maintaining a connection with grandkids is important for the well-being of everyone, says Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"There's an incredible health benefit to them to interact with their grandparents," she says. The bond is special.
"With the younger ones, we have a routine of stories when they spend the night," Richard Victor says.
But when the coronavirus hit, the couple were at their vacation home in Florida, and suddenly it wasn't safe to leave. They've been sheltering there for three months, missing their grandkids and struggling with an absence that FaceTime just can't fill.
"It's very, very difficult," says Victor, a 70-year-old lawyer and founder of the nonprofit Grandparents Rights Organization. "You have to try your best, because we don't know when this will be over with."Of all the hardships imposed by the coronavirus pandemic, among the most poignant is the reshaping of relationships between children and the grandparents who love them.
Across the U.S., where more than 70 million people are grandparents, the effort to prevent infection in older people, who are most at risk of serious COVID-19 illness, has meant self-imposed exile for many. On the other hand, some grandparents have taken over daily child care duties to help adult children who must work.
"All the grandparents in the country are aching," says Madonna Harrington Meyer, a sociology professor at Syracuse University in New York. "Some are aching because they can't see their grandchildren — and some are aching because they can't get away from them."
Both situations are the result of a fast-moving pandemic that forced families to decide quickly whether to isolate with grandparents "inside the bubble or out," Harrington Meyer says. Three months later, many are still grappling with those decisions — and worrying about an uncertain future.
"I think we all have the exact same set of issues," says Harrington Meyer, author of the 2014 book Grandmothers at Work: Juggling Families and Jobs. "What will August bring? All of us need to be prepared for this to be fluctuating."
Even as some regions begin easing restrictions, the risks posed by gathering in person haven't changed for grandparents separated from their grandchildren, says Dr. Krutika Kuppalli, an affiliated clinical assistant professor of medicine in the infectious diseases division at Stanford University. Rates of serious illness and death caused by COVID-19 remain much higher in older people than among the young, and children can easily spread the disease.
"It's hard to know if a child has been exposed or whether they have an asymptomatic infection," Kuppalli says. "I would definitely recommend staying away or definitely continuing to wear masks and perform good hand hygiene."
At the same time, maintaining a connection with grandkids is important for the well-being of everyone, says Dr. Preeti Malani, chief health officer and professor of medicine at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
"There's an incredible health benefit to them to interact with their grandparents," she says. The bond is special.
by Jonel Accecia, NPR | Read more:
Image: Victor Family
My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
It all adds up.
So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late ’80s/early ’90s (as far back as I can clearly remember these things—I am sure the list of someone growing up in the 1940s would include many hassles I’ve never known at all).
Progress is usually debated in terms of the big things like lifting the Third World out of poverty, or science & tech: discovering gravitational waves, creating world champion AIs, turning AIDS into a treatable rather than terminal disease, conquering hepatitis C or, curing deadly cancers with genetically-engineered T-cells. But as cool as those big things are, and matters of life-and-death for many, such achievements tend to be remote from ordinary people, and not your everyday sort of thing (or so one hopes). Small stuff matters too.What about the little things in an ordinary life?
The seen and the unseen.When I think back, so many hassles have simply disappeared from my life, and nice new things appeared. I remember my desk used to be crowded with things like dictionaries and pencil sharpeners, but between smartphones & computers, most of my desk space is now dedicated to cats. Ordinary life had a lot of hassles too, I remembered once I started thinking about it.
These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list of improvements to my ordinary life.
COMPUTERS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIETY
FOOD
by Gwern, Gwern.net | Read more:
These things rarely come up because so many of them are about removing irritations or creating new possibilities—dogs that do not bark, and ‘the seen and the unseen’—and how quickly we forget that the status quo was not always so. The hardest thing to see can be that which you no longer see. I thought it would be interesting to try to remember the forgotten. Limiting myself to my earliest relatively clear memories of everyday life in the mid-1990s, I still wound up making a decent-sized list of improvements to my ordinary life.
COMPUTERS
TECHNOLOGY
SOCIETY
FOOD
by Gwern, Gwern.net | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Dredging Up the Past
Growing up on the Mississippi River just north of New Orleans, it was not uncommon for a spring deluge to turn our deadend street into a waist-high pool. Just like rings on a tree, hurricane events marked the passing of generations. My parents each had their various tales from Hurricane Betsy in 1965. My own childhood was shaped, in large part, by more recent storms and evacuations. Ask any Gulf Coast resident about that “pre-hurricane feeling” and you’ll likely hear a description of anticipation, giddiness, and dread.
In May 1995, a massive flood inundated our home with three feet of water. All summer long, as workers piled moldy sheetrock and insulation along our street, my twin sister and I explored the strip of woods between our house and the Mississippi River. Drinking cans of Dr. Pepper, we imagined ourselves explorers as we watched the barges and container ships float pass us. I was fascinated by the parade of river traffic—and that fascination stuck with me throughout my childhood. As I grew, so did the size of maritime vessels. Globalization increased the amount of freight traversing the oceans and entering the Port of New Orleans. Larger boats needed deeper ports to safely dock and unload cargo. But this was somewhat of a Sisphyean endeavor, because the Mississippi River is akin to a fire hose of mud and silt. To prevent shoaling (the buildup of sand and sediment), boats called dredge vessels were needed to keep waterways navigable and ports deep enough for vessels to dock.
Dredge vessels are also ships that (literally) shape the land we live on, at least in coastal areas. They were used to build the Palm Islands off the coast of Dubai, and they’re how the low-lying Netherlands fight off the North Sea. There are many kinds of dredge vessels, but for the purposes of this story, the ones we care about are trailing suction hopper dredges, commonly known as “hopper dredges.” These are ocean-going vessels that can endure fierce currents. They do their work by deploying long pipes that suck up sediment on the seafloor, which is then deposited into a large bin, or “hopper,” and then transported to a site for restoration or land-building. I’ve always felt it helpful to think of hopper dredges as the Megamaid from Spaceballs.
By building up the shoreline, hopper dredges help keep Louisiana safe from the sea, but we don’t have nearly enough of them to protect the coastline of my home state, let alone the rest of the country. Currently, the United States’ hopper dredge fleet consists of just 19 vessels, four of which are mothballed by Congress. The other 15 are owned by five private companies. Compare this to the 55 hopper dredges in the Netherlands’ private fleet or China’s ever-growing land-building fleet. With such a paltry collection of vessels, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which we’ll refer to as “the Corps” going forward) is responsible for maintaining 12,000 miles of inland and intracoastal waterways, 180 ports, and 95,471 miles of shoreline.
History shows the Corps does not have the tools it needs to do its job. Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s and is projected to lose another 674 square miles before 2050. This is land that slows hurricanes down—land that could have slowed Hurricane Katrina down, for example. Louisiana is not the only place in need of dredge vessels, but as with other poor coastal states, many communities are forced to languish on a waiting list that moves too slow to address these emergencies in time. At the time of this writing, most of the nation’s dredge vessels were either drydocked for repairs or deployed across eight far-flung states. (...)
Since the 1970s, the private dredging industry has fought a relentless war to eliminate competition from the public sector. Between 1899 and 1949, the Corps built 150 dredges which were used to develop waterways and ports. But when it came time to replace these aging vessels in the mid-1960s, private businesses saw an opportunity to seize those lucrative contracts for themselves.
by Megan Milliken Biven, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
In May 1995, a massive flood inundated our home with three feet of water. All summer long, as workers piled moldy sheetrock and insulation along our street, my twin sister and I explored the strip of woods between our house and the Mississippi River. Drinking cans of Dr. Pepper, we imagined ourselves explorers as we watched the barges and container ships float pass us. I was fascinated by the parade of river traffic—and that fascination stuck with me throughout my childhood. As I grew, so did the size of maritime vessels. Globalization increased the amount of freight traversing the oceans and entering the Port of New Orleans. Larger boats needed deeper ports to safely dock and unload cargo. But this was somewhat of a Sisphyean endeavor, because the Mississippi River is akin to a fire hose of mud and silt. To prevent shoaling (the buildup of sand and sediment), boats called dredge vessels were needed to keep waterways navigable and ports deep enough for vessels to dock.
Dredge vessels are also ships that (literally) shape the land we live on, at least in coastal areas. They were used to build the Palm Islands off the coast of Dubai, and they’re how the low-lying Netherlands fight off the North Sea. There are many kinds of dredge vessels, but for the purposes of this story, the ones we care about are trailing suction hopper dredges, commonly known as “hopper dredges.” These are ocean-going vessels that can endure fierce currents. They do their work by deploying long pipes that suck up sediment on the seafloor, which is then deposited into a large bin, or “hopper,” and then transported to a site for restoration or land-building. I’ve always felt it helpful to think of hopper dredges as the Megamaid from Spaceballs.By building up the shoreline, hopper dredges help keep Louisiana safe from the sea, but we don’t have nearly enough of them to protect the coastline of my home state, let alone the rest of the country. Currently, the United States’ hopper dredge fleet consists of just 19 vessels, four of which are mothballed by Congress. The other 15 are owned by five private companies. Compare this to the 55 hopper dredges in the Netherlands’ private fleet or China’s ever-growing land-building fleet. With such a paltry collection of vessels, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (which we’ll refer to as “the Corps” going forward) is responsible for maintaining 12,000 miles of inland and intracoastal waterways, 180 ports, and 95,471 miles of shoreline.
History shows the Corps does not have the tools it needs to do its job. Louisiana has lost nearly 1,900 square miles of land since the 1930s and is projected to lose another 674 square miles before 2050. This is land that slows hurricanes down—land that could have slowed Hurricane Katrina down, for example. Louisiana is not the only place in need of dredge vessels, but as with other poor coastal states, many communities are forced to languish on a waiting list that moves too slow to address these emergencies in time. At the time of this writing, most of the nation’s dredge vessels were either drydocked for repairs or deployed across eight far-flung states. (...)
Since the 1970s, the private dredging industry has fought a relentless war to eliminate competition from the public sector. Between 1899 and 1949, the Corps built 150 dredges which were used to develop waterways and ports. But when it came time to replace these aging vessels in the mid-1960s, private businesses saw an opportunity to seize those lucrative contracts for themselves.
by Megan Milliken Biven, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sunday, May 24, 2020
The Prophecies of Q
If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.
You know all this because you believe in Q.
I. GENESIS
The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Comet happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my then-baby daughter tried her first-ever sip of water. Kids gather there with their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands perform on the weekends. In the back, children challenge their grandparents to Ping-Pong matches as they wait for their pizzas to come out of the big clay oven in the middle of the restaurant. Comet Ping Pong is a beloved spot in Washington.
That day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, but especially at a place like Comet. As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.
Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks made public a trove of emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish corners of the internet (such as 4chan) and then spread to more accessible precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to “pizza” and “pasta” were interpreted as code words for “girls” and “little boys.”
Shortly after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.
Welch seems to have sincerely believed that children were being held at Comet Ping Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, describing him as a dedicated father, a devout Christian, and a man who went out of his way to care for others. Welch had trained as a volunteer firefighter. He had gone on an earthquake-response mission to Haiti with the local Baptist Men’s Association. A friend from his church wrote, “He exhibits the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply it.” Welch himself expressed what seemed like genuine remorse, saying in a handwritten note submitted to the judge by his lawyers: “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.” He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Pizzagate seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news channel One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal action by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio show, apologized for promoting Pizzagate.
While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.
All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: uncredited
You know all this because you believe in Q.
I. GENESIS
The origins of QAnon are recent, but even so, separating myth from reality can be hard. One place to begin is with Edgar Maddison Welch, a deeply religious father of two, who until Sunday, December 4, 2016, had lived an unremarkable life in the small town of Salisbury, North Carolina. That morning, Welch grabbed his cellphone, a box of shotgun shells, and three loaded guns—a 9-mm AR-15 rifle, a six-shot .38‑caliber Colt revolver, and a shotgun—and hopped into his Toyota Prius. He drove 360 miles to a well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington, D.C.; parked his car; put the revolver in a holster at his hip; held the AR-15 rifle across his chest; and walked through the front door of a pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong.
Comet happens to be the place where, on a Sunday afternoon two years earlier, my then-baby daughter tried her first-ever sip of water. Kids gather there with their parents and teammates after soccer games on Saturdays, and local bands perform on the weekends. In the back, children challenge their grandparents to Ping-Pong matches as they wait for their pizzas to come out of the big clay oven in the middle of the restaurant. Comet Ping Pong is a beloved spot in Washington.That day, people noticed Welch right away. An AR-15 rifle makes for a conspicuous sash in most social settings, but especially at a place like Comet. As parents, children, and employees rushed outside, many still chewing, Welch began to move through the restaurant, at one point attempting to use a butter knife to pry open a locked door, before giving up and firing several rounds from his rifle into the lock. Behind the door was a small computer-storage closet. This was not what he was expecting.
Welch had traveled to Washington because of a conspiracy theory known, now famously, as Pizzagate, which claimed that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of Comet Ping Pong. The idea originated in October 2016, when WikiLeaks made public a trove of emails stolen from the account of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and then the chair of Clinton’s presidential campaign; Comet was mentioned repeatedly in exchanges Podesta had with the restaurant’s owner, James Alefantis, and others. The emails were mainly about fundraising events, but high-profile pro–Donald Trump figures such as Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones began advancing the claim—which originated in trollish corners of the internet (such as 4chan) and then spread to more accessible precincts (Twitter, YouTube)—that the emails were proof of ritualistic child abuse. Some conspiracy theorists asserted that it was taking place in the basement at Comet, where there is no basement. References in the emails to “pizza” and “pasta” were interpreted as code words for “girls” and “little boys.”
Shortly after Trump’s election, as Pizzagate roared across the internet, Welch started binge-watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. He tried to recruit help from at least two people to carry out a vigilante raid, texting them about his desire to sacrifice “the lives of a few for the lives of many” and to fight “a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” When Welch finally found himself inside the restaurant and understood that Comet Ping Pong was just a pizza shop, he set down his firearms, walked out the door, and surrendered to police, who had by then secured the perimeter. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The New York Times after his arrest.
Welch seems to have sincerely believed that children were being held at Comet Ping Pong. His family and friends wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, describing him as a dedicated father, a devout Christian, and a man who went out of his way to care for others. Welch had trained as a volunteer firefighter. He had gone on an earthquake-response mission to Haiti with the local Baptist Men’s Association. A friend from his church wrote, “He exhibits the actions of a person who strives to learn biblical truth and apply it.” Welch himself expressed what seemed like genuine remorse, saying in a handwritten note submitted to the judge by his lawyers: “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.” He was sentenced to four years in prison.
Pizzagate seemed to fade. Some of its most visible proponents, such as Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who is now a correspondent for the pro-Trump cable-news channel One America News Network, backed away. Facing the specter of legal action by Alefantis, Alex Jones, who runs the conspiracy-theory website Infowars and hosts an affiliated radio show, apologized for promoting Pizzagate.
While Welch may have expressed regret, he gave no indication that he had stopped believing the underlying Pizzagate message: that a cabal of powerful elites was abusing children and getting away with it. Judging from a surge of activity on the internet, many others had found ways to move beyond the Comet Ping Pong episode and remain focused on what they saw as the larger truth. If you paid attention to the right voices on the right websites, you could see in real time how the core premises of Pizzagate were being recycled, revised, and reinterpreted. The millions of people paying attention to sites like 4chan and Reddit could continue to learn about that secretive and untouchable cabal; about its malign actions and intentions; about its ties to the left wing and specifically to Democrats and especially to Clinton; about its bloodlust and its moral degeneracy. You could also—and this would prove essential—read about a small but swelling band of underground American patriots fighting back.
All of this, taken together, defined a worldview that would soon have a name: QAnon, derived from a mysterious figure, “Q,” posting anonymously on 4chan. QAnon does not possess a physical location, but it has an infrastructure, a literature, a growing body of adherents, and a great deal of merchandising. It also displays other key qualities that Pizzagate lacked. In the face of inconvenient facts, it has the ambiguity and adaptability to sustain a movement of this kind over time. For QAnon, every contradiction can be explained away; no form of argument can prevail against it.
by Adrienne LaFrance, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: uncredited
State Colleges and Universities Face a Tough Financial Future
Washington’s public colleges and universities are bracing for a money crisis this fall that is likely to decimate higher education budgets.
Not only will schools likely lose some students — and the tuition money that comes with them — but the state is expected to slash funding, since higher education dollars aren’t protected by the state constitution in the same way K-12 dollars are.
With the coronavirus pandemic raging this spring, universities lost hundreds of millions in residence hall rents, meal plans, parking fees and sports tickets. At community colleges, many hands-on vocational programs were canceled. And at the state’s flagship University of Washington, which runs a medical center that has been key to keeping people alive, the hospital is expected to lose a staggering $500 million through September. On Monday, it announced it would furlough 1,500 workers.
The virus lockdown has also struck at the heart of what makes college years so satisfying — the intellectual rewards of wrestling with new ideas, developing a passion for a subject, building friendships with people from other states and countries, living on one’s own. In March, most college students were forced to return home, trying to make what they could of the college experience through the blue light of a computer screen.
When — or if — they return, campus is likely to feel quite different, with big lectures taught online, dorm rooms reconfigured to keep people apart and social distancing measures that will discourage parties.
“I’m a little worried people don’t understand quite how bad this is going to be,” said Western Washington University English professor Bill Lyne, president of United Faculty of Washington State, a faculty union for four Washington public schools (Eastern, Western and Central Washington universities and The Evergreen State College). A veteran of the 2008 recession, he believes a pandemic-induced economic downturn will be particularly hard on higher education. (...)
What the 2008 recession was like, and why this will be different
During the 2008 recession, higher education institutions were among the hardest-hit state agencies. State funding per student declined by about 35 percent in Washington between 2007 and 2012. Only five other states cut higher-education funding by a higher percentage than Washington during the recession years.
Colleges and universities laid off workers, eliminated academic programs, restricted admissions, increased class sizes, decreased the number of advisers, and froze faculty recruitments and salaries. Yet the crisis wasn’t ruinous for the system because state lawmakers also allowed four-year colleges to raise tuition. The UW increased tuition by 82% between 2008 and 2012, arguing the price was justified. Other schools hiked college costs by double-digit amounts, too.
After 2008, state lawmakers made a series of choices that included tuition rollbacks and a generous program to give low- and middle-income families more money to send their children to college. National leaders hailed those choices, but they will surely complicate efforts to stabilize higher education funding here.
In 2015, state legislators rolled back tuition by 5 to 20 percent over the 2015-17 biennium, making Washington one of the few states in the nation to cut tuition rates. At the same time, lawmakers passed a bill that capped tuition increases, tying them to the average annual growth in median hourly wages. That means that under existing laws, tuition can only be raised by about 2.5% this year.
Legislators are expected to return to the Capitol this summer for a special session to help fix the impending budget crisis, and it’s possible they could amend the law capping tuition. But leaders acknowledge it’s going to be hard to raise tuition much anyway, because so many families are dealing with dire financial problems too. “We’re in the middle of a crisis that, in terms of its effect across the population, is very, very deep,” Cauce said. “We’re not going to see double-digit tuition increases.”
Experts predict college enrollment will drop by as much as 20% at some schools, with regional public universities among the hardest hit. Students and their families are likely to demand, as some already have, a cut in the price if some or all classes are taught online.
by Katherine Long, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Donna Grethen/Special to The Seattle Times
Not only will schools likely lose some students — and the tuition money that comes with them — but the state is expected to slash funding, since higher education dollars aren’t protected by the state constitution in the same way K-12 dollars are.
With the coronavirus pandemic raging this spring, universities lost hundreds of millions in residence hall rents, meal plans, parking fees and sports tickets. At community colleges, many hands-on vocational programs were canceled. And at the state’s flagship University of Washington, which runs a medical center that has been key to keeping people alive, the hospital is expected to lose a staggering $500 million through September. On Monday, it announced it would furlough 1,500 workers.
The virus lockdown has also struck at the heart of what makes college years so satisfying — the intellectual rewards of wrestling with new ideas, developing a passion for a subject, building friendships with people from other states and countries, living on one’s own. In March, most college students were forced to return home, trying to make what they could of the college experience through the blue light of a computer screen.When — or if — they return, campus is likely to feel quite different, with big lectures taught online, dorm rooms reconfigured to keep people apart and social distancing measures that will discourage parties.
“I’m a little worried people don’t understand quite how bad this is going to be,” said Western Washington University English professor Bill Lyne, president of United Faculty of Washington State, a faculty union for four Washington public schools (Eastern, Western and Central Washington universities and The Evergreen State College). A veteran of the 2008 recession, he believes a pandemic-induced economic downturn will be particularly hard on higher education. (...)
What the 2008 recession was like, and why this will be different
During the 2008 recession, higher education institutions were among the hardest-hit state agencies. State funding per student declined by about 35 percent in Washington between 2007 and 2012. Only five other states cut higher-education funding by a higher percentage than Washington during the recession years.
Colleges and universities laid off workers, eliminated academic programs, restricted admissions, increased class sizes, decreased the number of advisers, and froze faculty recruitments and salaries. Yet the crisis wasn’t ruinous for the system because state lawmakers also allowed four-year colleges to raise tuition. The UW increased tuition by 82% between 2008 and 2012, arguing the price was justified. Other schools hiked college costs by double-digit amounts, too.
After 2008, state lawmakers made a series of choices that included tuition rollbacks and a generous program to give low- and middle-income families more money to send their children to college. National leaders hailed those choices, but they will surely complicate efforts to stabilize higher education funding here.
In 2015, state legislators rolled back tuition by 5 to 20 percent over the 2015-17 biennium, making Washington one of the few states in the nation to cut tuition rates. At the same time, lawmakers passed a bill that capped tuition increases, tying them to the average annual growth in median hourly wages. That means that under existing laws, tuition can only be raised by about 2.5% this year.
Legislators are expected to return to the Capitol this summer for a special session to help fix the impending budget crisis, and it’s possible they could amend the law capping tuition. But leaders acknowledge it’s going to be hard to raise tuition much anyway, because so many families are dealing with dire financial problems too. “We’re in the middle of a crisis that, in terms of its effect across the population, is very, very deep,” Cauce said. “We’re not going to see double-digit tuition increases.”
Experts predict college enrollment will drop by as much as 20% at some schools, with regional public universities among the hardest hit. Students and their families are likely to demand, as some already have, a cut in the price if some or all classes are taught online.
by Katherine Long, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Donna Grethen/Special to The Seattle Times
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Silent-Reading Party (The Stranger)
Image: uncredited
[ed. I don't know whether to feel heartened or depressed. Strange times.]
Saturday, May 23, 2020
Friday, May 22, 2020
The Ultimate Guide to Instant Noodles
As a semi-professional noodle slurper and collector, I’ve eaten hundreds of noodles in my life, but I have a particular soft spot for one type, specifically: the instant kind. You know, those hard squiggly bricks of dried, fried noodles with accompanying seasoning packets that have long been the foundation of the American collegiate diet. Since the pandemic started, I’ve been showing off my impressive collection of instant noodles to my friends on FaceTime like a YouTube beauty guru flaunting their makeup stash.
I love instant noodles for many reasons: They have a nearly indefinite shelf life; they are an easy breakfast, snack, or — with the right bolstering — a full meal; and, they come in a panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, and colorful packaging styles. But while there is nothing wrong with eating instant noodles according to the instructions, it’s their versatility that’s made me a devoted fan. Here’s how to mash-up, deconstruct, and upgrade the dorm room staple.
1. Load up on protein
Yes, many instant noodles come with their own packets of dehydrated vegetable or meat flavoring, but they rarely provide much real taste and add zero in the way of texture. Supplementing your own additional proteins will do a lot to make your instant noodles more satisfying and nutrition-rich. Try simple items like ground meat, sausage, tofu, and leftover fried chicken — or my personal favorite ramen topping, pork char siu. Meat shortage got ya down? Just crack an egg. You can stir it right in to create an egg-drop soup effect, or poach the egg gently in the soup broth to enjoy breaking the creamy yolk.Chicken-flavored ramen with garlicky sautéed kale, roasted chicken legs, and carrots.
2. Go big with toppings
Going nuts with the add-ons at ramen restaurants can mean spending $30 on a bowl of noodles (toppings normally cost between $1 and $3 each.) But at home, you can have as many toppings as the inventory of your fridge’s produce drawer allows: scallions, corn, mushrooms, kale, you name it. Not sure about what to do with all those weird greens in your CSA farm box? Add them to your instant noodles! Fact: There is no such thing as a lousy topping for instant noodles.
3. Deconstruct everything
Each element of the instant noodle package is a multi-purpose cooking superstar. The seasoning packets add a pop to stir-fried vegetables. Broken into bits, the uncooked noodles are an excellent crunchy topping for a salad or even another non-instant pasta dish. Do yourself a favor and add some ramen seasoning to mac and cheese, or how about using those instant noodles to make buns for an at-home ramen burger?
4. Switch up the liquid
To deepen the character of the soup, try cooking the noodles in vegetable or chicken broth instead of plain water. There are plenty of wilder recipes out there, including this one I’m skeptical of that uses milk, but homemade stock is a safe jumping off point.
5. Mash-up different styles
Mixing different instant noodle styles and seasoning packets is a culinary art form in itself, and can have big payoff. Jjapaguri (also called ram-don), the famous dish from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, is actually just a hybrid of two different kinds of instant noodles — Neoguri and Jjappaghetti — and has become one of Korea’s national dishes. The magic comes from the mixing of Neguri’s spicy seafood powder with Jjappaghetti’s savory black bean powder, which ignites a lethal umami bomb. But jjapaguri is just the start. Try mixing Neoguri and curry noodles to create an exuberant, spicy curry broth. Combining super spicy noodles with something cheesy is also 100 percent never a bad idea.
I love instant noodles for many reasons: They have a nearly indefinite shelf life; they are an easy breakfast, snack, or — with the right bolstering — a full meal; and, they come in a panoply of shapes, textures, flavors, and colorful packaging styles. But while there is nothing wrong with eating instant noodles according to the instructions, it’s their versatility that’s made me a devoted fan. Here’s how to mash-up, deconstruct, and upgrade the dorm room staple.
1. Load up on protein
Yes, many instant noodles come with their own packets of dehydrated vegetable or meat flavoring, but they rarely provide much real taste and add zero in the way of texture. Supplementing your own additional proteins will do a lot to make your instant noodles more satisfying and nutrition-rich. Try simple items like ground meat, sausage, tofu, and leftover fried chicken — or my personal favorite ramen topping, pork char siu. Meat shortage got ya down? Just crack an egg. You can stir it right in to create an egg-drop soup effect, or poach the egg gently in the soup broth to enjoy breaking the creamy yolk.Chicken-flavored ramen with garlicky sautéed kale, roasted chicken legs, and carrots.
2. Go big with toppings
Going nuts with the add-ons at ramen restaurants can mean spending $30 on a bowl of noodles (toppings normally cost between $1 and $3 each.) But at home, you can have as many toppings as the inventory of your fridge’s produce drawer allows: scallions, corn, mushrooms, kale, you name it. Not sure about what to do with all those weird greens in your CSA farm box? Add them to your instant noodles! Fact: There is no such thing as a lousy topping for instant noodles.3. Deconstruct everything
Each element of the instant noodle package is a multi-purpose cooking superstar. The seasoning packets add a pop to stir-fried vegetables. Broken into bits, the uncooked noodles are an excellent crunchy topping for a salad or even another non-instant pasta dish. Do yourself a favor and add some ramen seasoning to mac and cheese, or how about using those instant noodles to make buns for an at-home ramen burger?
4. Switch up the liquid
To deepen the character of the soup, try cooking the noodles in vegetable or chicken broth instead of plain water. There are plenty of wilder recipes out there, including this one I’m skeptical of that uses milk, but homemade stock is a safe jumping off point.
5. Mash-up different styles
Mixing different instant noodle styles and seasoning packets is a culinary art form in itself, and can have big payoff. Jjapaguri (also called ram-don), the famous dish from the Oscar-winning movie Parasite, is actually just a hybrid of two different kinds of instant noodles — Neoguri and Jjappaghetti — and has become one of Korea’s national dishes. The magic comes from the mixing of Neguri’s spicy seafood powder with Jjappaghetti’s savory black bean powder, which ignites a lethal umami bomb. But jjapaguri is just the start. Try mixing Neoguri and curry noodles to create an exuberant, spicy curry broth. Combining super spicy noodles with something cheesy is also 100 percent never a bad idea.
The Ones to Know
Here, then, are some of the best instant noodles to stock up on, categorized by whether or not they’re “brothy” (the noodle soup kind) or “saucy” (brothless noodles with a separate sauce).
BROTHY
MyKuali Penang White Curry Noodle
Here, then, are some of the best instant noodles to stock up on, categorized by whether or not they’re “brothy” (the noodle soup kind) or “saucy” (brothless noodles with a separate sauce).
BROTHY
MyKuali Penang White Curry Noodle
If you love Penang curry, try adding this noodle to your cart. These wildly popular Malaysian instant noodles are considered some of the best in the world on this heavily opinionated ranking. Three whole flavor pouches — one of them is a paste — make for a deep, coconut-y taste and hearty portion size that you rarely get from instant noodles. Add toppings like fried tofu or prawns.
Neoguri, Spicy Seafood Udon Noodles
Neoguri, Spicy Seafood Udon Noodles
Neoguri, a Korean word for raccoon dog (neither a raccoon nor a dog; discuss), has been my top choice for ramen since I started slurping noodles at the age of three. This beloved Korean instant noodle is known for two things: thick udon-like noodles and a spicy seafood broth with actual dried seafood. It’s fantastic with any fishy topping or add-ins.
Nongshim Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup
Nongshim Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup
Shin Ramyun might be the very first Korean instant noodle brand, as well as one of the easiest to find internationally: I still remember the exciting moment when I found Shin Ramyun in a random gas station in Alabama. It’s known for its spicy broth, and doubles as an excellent noodle for Korean ramen beginners. Top this with a slice of American cheese to tone down the spice and pump up the greatness.
Prima Taste Laksa Coconut Curry Lamian Noodles
Prima Taste Laksa Coconut Curry Lamian Noodles
This Singaporean instant noodle inspired by traditional laksa has a paste sachet that can and should be used for stir-frying vegetables, too. The noodles are rounder and less wavy than others, and the white powder adds the signature creaminess.
Mama Noodles
Mama Noodles
Thai cooking doesn’t shy away from acid, and neither do these Thai instant noodles, with just the right balance of acidic and salty flavors. The wavy noodles and the powdery seasonings make a great snack — though it may not be hearty enough to be a standalone meal. Beef it up with a hard-boiled egg and other vegetable toppings, like scallions.
Sapporo Ichiban Tokyo Chicken Momosan Ramen
Think Japanese shoyu ramen, in instant form: salty, slightly smokey, and clean tasting. It’s great with plain old white-meat chicken breast — which is hard to say about anything, really.
Paldo Gomtang Oriental Style Noodles with Beef Soup Base
Not all Korean instant noodles are spicy! This mild, creamy Korean noodle soup is inspired by gomtang, or beef bone broth. It has an intense beefiness and is excellent with hearty greens like cabbage or scallions. Add some ground beef to make it more filling.
Sapporo Ichiban Tokyo Chicken Momosan Ramen
Think Japanese shoyu ramen, in instant form: salty, slightly smokey, and clean tasting. It’s great with plain old white-meat chicken breast — which is hard to say about anything, really.
Paldo Gomtang Oriental Style Noodles with Beef Soup Base
Not all Korean instant noodles are spicy! This mild, creamy Korean noodle soup is inspired by gomtang, or beef bone broth. It has an intense beefiness and is excellent with hearty greens like cabbage or scallions. Add some ground beef to make it more filling.
SAUCY
Nongshim, Jjapaghetti (Noodle Pasta with jjajang Sauce)
“On Sundays, I’m the chef for Jjapaghetti” has been a Korean catchphrase for more than a decade. A combination of two dishes — jajangmyun (black bean noodles) and spaghetti— this saucy Korean instant noodle is also what spurred the ram-don trend after its crucial role in Parasite. The accompanying savory black bean sauce is all it really needs, though I highly recommend a luxe drizzle of truffle oil, too.
Indomie Mi Goreng Instant Stir Fry Noodles
If you haven’t tried this Indonesian instant noodle, stop what you’re doing and fix that immediately. The package comes with a liquid seasoning mix of savory onion-flavored oil, sweet-spicy chili sauce, and sweet soy sauce, creating a salty-and-sweet coating for the wavy noodles. Any optional toppings like grilled steak or boiled eggs are just gravy.
Nongshim, Jjapaghetti (Noodle Pasta with jjajang Sauce)
“On Sundays, I’m the chef for Jjapaghetti” has been a Korean catchphrase for more than a decade. A combination of two dishes — jajangmyun (black bean noodles) and spaghetti— this saucy Korean instant noodle is also what spurred the ram-don trend after its crucial role in Parasite. The accompanying savory black bean sauce is all it really needs, though I highly recommend a luxe drizzle of truffle oil, too.
Indomie Mi Goreng Instant Stir Fry Noodles
If you haven’t tried this Indonesian instant noodle, stop what you’re doing and fix that immediately. The package comes with a liquid seasoning mix of savory onion-flavored oil, sweet-spicy chili sauce, and sweet soy sauce, creating a salty-and-sweet coating for the wavy noodles. Any optional toppings like grilled steak or boiled eggs are just gravy.
by James Park, Eater | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Pacific Voyages
After shutting down Buck’s Restaurant my wife Margaret and I got down to the serious business of home defense from our redoubt in the Santa Cruz Mountains by making a half dozen stuffed dummies out of our old clothes from the 70s (‘look out, you vicious hoards, we have hippies on guard!’) and lashed them to the parapets of the hastily erected stockade, armed them with wooden muskets, posted the “Danger—rabid dogs with stainless steel teeth” signs (much to the pups amusement as they lolled about drooling and snoring on the couches) and battened down for the eventual zombie apocalypse
We then inventoried our 21 bags of flour and wondered whose job it was to pick up the yeast. In reality we are off the grid as we have been for 43 years. I realized I have been predicting the apocalypse for decades and thank god I’m finally right. Please send me likes.
And so, I launch Pacific Voyages which is a series of vignettes about mostly obscure islands of the Pacific which populate this ocean most abundantly.
So just sit back and take a break from the end of the world and travel with me to the ends of the world.
The Pacific, with its amazing history, is now going to be my main focus until the cows come home and if they do the dummies, vigilant at the ramparts, will probably shoot them anyway.
I’ll tell you about a French island named Clipperton. A place you have never heard of relatively near California.
And of course I will cover Pitcairn, where the Mutiny on the Bounty folks went and where their descents (at last count 58 of them) still live. They are among the least fun folks I have encountered. Certainly it’s one of most remote places to live. Half the population of the men alternate spending time in Australian prisons for pedophilia and then they switch with the other half because they need at least 10 men to launch the boat to the supply ships.
And I will discuss Ball’s Pyramid. This is an extremely narrow 1,844’ tall rock. It is only here that the third largest bugs in the world live in obscurity.
So trust me when I say I will take to places you will most likely never go. In any case this is a vacation from the cares of the world with not a wiff of virus. Just watch out for malaria, beriberi, blackwater fever, typhus, cannibals, murderous mosquitos, sharks, sea urchins, saltwater crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, political shenanigans, white bread with Spam and wildly overpriced pina coladas.
Behold, the world of mostly boring places awaits.
We then inventoried our 21 bags of flour and wondered whose job it was to pick up the yeast. In reality we are off the grid as we have been for 43 years. I realized I have been predicting the apocalypse for decades and thank god I’m finally right. Please send me likes.
And so, I launch Pacific Voyages which is a series of vignettes about mostly obscure islands of the Pacific which populate this ocean most abundantly.So just sit back and take a break from the end of the world and travel with me to the ends of the world.
The Pacific, with its amazing history, is now going to be my main focus until the cows come home and if they do the dummies, vigilant at the ramparts, will probably shoot them anyway.
I’ll tell you about a French island named Clipperton. A place you have never heard of relatively near California.
And of course I will cover Pitcairn, where the Mutiny on the Bounty folks went and where their descents (at last count 58 of them) still live. They are among the least fun folks I have encountered. Certainly it’s one of most remote places to live. Half the population of the men alternate spending time in Australian prisons for pedophilia and then they switch with the other half because they need at least 10 men to launch the boat to the supply ships.
And I will discuss Ball’s Pyramid. This is an extremely narrow 1,844’ tall rock. It is only here that the third largest bugs in the world live in obscurity.
So trust me when I say I will take to places you will most likely never go. In any case this is a vacation from the cares of the world with not a wiff of virus. Just watch out for malaria, beriberi, blackwater fever, typhus, cannibals, murderous mosquitos, sharks, sea urchins, saltwater crocodiles, deadly jellyfish, political shenanigans, white bread with Spam and wildly overpriced pina coladas.
Behold, the world of mostly boring places awaits.
by Jamis MacNiven, Pacific Voyages | Read more:
Trump Administration Moves to Ease Rules for Hunting Bears and Wolves on Federal Lands in Alaska
Two federal agencies this week took steps to increase hunting and trapping on several national preserves in Alaska and in the popular Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.
The moves drew alarm from conservation groups who said the new rules will support extreme measures to kill predators and their young in national preserves in Alaska. They said a proposed rule change would allow brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for the first time.
Alaska leaders praised the changes, and hunting groups and a tribal consortium said the new rules will support sport and subsistence hunters in the national preserves.
The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in separate statements that their actions are designed to align federal and state law.
In the broadest action, the park service announced a final rule that will roll back 2015 prohibitions, adopted under President Barack Obama, affecting hunting and trapping in national preserves in Alaska.
The agency manages 10 preserves in the state, including at Denali National Park and Preserve, where the preserve lies west of the park.
Park lands would not be affected by the new rule, the agency said. The new rule should be published in the Federal Register at the end of the month, said Peter Christian, a spokesman with the agency in Alaska.
He said the new rules are designed to allow hunters to take:
• Black bears, including cubs and sows with cubs, with artificial light at den sites.
• Black and brown bears over bait.
• Wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the denning season.
• Swimming caribou.
• Caribou from traveling motorboats.
“These harvest practices would be allowed in national preserves where authorized by the state of Alaska,” Christian said.
In a statement, Defenders of Wildlife called the plans part of an “onslaught” against wildlife by the Trump administration. They allege that the state wants to increase game populations by driving down carnivore numbers, and they say the federal changes are meant to support that effort.
“The Trump administration has shockingly reached a new low in its treatment of wildlife," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife. “Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane.”
by Alex DeMarban, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Bob Hallinen /ADN archive
[ed. Unbelievable.]
The moves drew alarm from conservation groups who said the new rules will support extreme measures to kill predators and their young in national preserves in Alaska. They said a proposed rule change would allow brown bear baiting in the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge for the first time.
Alaska leaders praised the changes, and hunting groups and a tribal consortium said the new rules will support sport and subsistence hunters in the national preserves.
The National Park Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said in separate statements that their actions are designed to align federal and state law.In the broadest action, the park service announced a final rule that will roll back 2015 prohibitions, adopted under President Barack Obama, affecting hunting and trapping in national preserves in Alaska.
The agency manages 10 preserves in the state, including at Denali National Park and Preserve, where the preserve lies west of the park.
Park lands would not be affected by the new rule, the agency said. The new rule should be published in the Federal Register at the end of the month, said Peter Christian, a spokesman with the agency in Alaska.
He said the new rules are designed to allow hunters to take:
• Black bears, including cubs and sows with cubs, with artificial light at den sites.
• Black and brown bears over bait.
• Wolves and coyotes, including pups, during the denning season.
• Swimming caribou.
• Caribou from traveling motorboats.
“These harvest practices would be allowed in national preserves where authorized by the state of Alaska,” Christian said.
In a statement, Defenders of Wildlife called the plans part of an “onslaught” against wildlife by the Trump administration. They allege that the state wants to increase game populations by driving down carnivore numbers, and they say the federal changes are meant to support that effort.
“The Trump administration has shockingly reached a new low in its treatment of wildlife," said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president of Defenders of Wildlife. “Allowing the killing of bear cubs and wolf pups in their dens is barbaric and inhumane.”
by Alex DeMarban, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Bob Hallinen /ADN archive
[ed. Unbelievable.]
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Nonessential Work
I have always been a dutiful reader. For most of my adult life, the question of what I want to read has never seemed as the urgent as the question of what I am supposed to read. Which means that, even now, I’m still basically the college freshman I once was, diligently crossing titles off the mental checklist that only ever grows longer. As with many compulsions, the reasons for this sense of obligation are mysterious to me. But I suppose I must at some point have believed that literature was a deeply important human experience, one that I could help foster by becoming an English professor. If I sound unsure, it’s because I have struggled lately to believe in the mission to which I have devoted myself.
I wish I could blame COVID-19 for my loss of faith, but I know it dates back further. Tasked with acting inspired, moved, transported by literature in front of roomfuls of students on a weekly basis, I have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to summon the requisite emotions. In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether literature really is worthy of devotion or whether I have just been conning myself and—with mixed results—my students. When, several weeks ago, all nonessential workers were asked to stay home, I felt a pang of self-recognition.
And yet, ironically, since the classes I was teaching at the time continued, I was also in a position where I had to urge my students to keep reading. I had to ask them to find a relatively quiet place in their crowded apartments and sit at their computers discussing what they had read. Why was I insisting on this? What purpose did it serve? One student told me he still had to go to the construction site where he worked, but everyone was trying to stay six feet apart. Another informed me that both her parents were sick, and she had been instructed to remain in her bedroom indefinitely. I expressed sympathy and then turned the conversation back to the text. “Stay safe, everyone!” I announced at the end of our Zoom session, “and don’t forget to read through chapter four.”
Since my whole family is now home all the time, I need to sequester myself in my son’s bedroom to get any work done. Through the door, I can hear him doing his math in the living room, arguing with my wife, food being eaten, dishes being done, news on the radio announcing fatality rates. I’m teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for my American Novel class, which I’m excited about because A) it’s a book that’s never before failed to revive my sense of the world as worthy of awe and wonder and B) I’ve taught it already and I know I can get through it quickly and return to all the other things I need to do.
I read:
Then I do what I’ve always done as a dutiful reader—move on to the next book on the syllabus. In this case, it’s Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum. I’ve never read it before, so I have to pay much closer attention than I did to Housekeeping. I feel guilty devoting several hours a day to reading, but in a kind of fight-or-flight reaction to all the pressures around me, my attention rivets itself to the text. I don’t find it extraordinary. But I do begin to feel the effects that reading literature carefully can have on me. My mind composes itself; the oxygen seems to reach deeper into my body; the world relaxes its grip.
Erdrich’s novel is about a drum made by a Native American man broken by his wife’s desertion and his daughter’s death. It’s about lives going off track and then sometimes righting themselves. It’s about how the labor of crafting well-made objects can be therapeutic, but also what happens when those objects are taken from the communities they are meant to serve. The cast of characters is large and initially confusing, but on my fourth day of reading I start to see how their storylines are going to converge. While I find the slow process of tracking the various characters’ journeys toward resolution almost hypnotically satisfying I also begin looking forward to the final page, to that moment of culmination that well-designed novels are sometimes able to produce when everything feels connected, when the end recalls the beginning, and when I briefly seem to experience the whole thing all at once. Ideally, after I’m finished, I’ll get that strange post-reading high, that feeling of being both outside and inside my own life, like my quotidian experiences have assumed a novelistic shape, like I’m revisiting this particular afternoon from the afterlife, free of all the worry and dread that prevented me from appreciating it the first time around.
But I don’t quite make it. (...)
At first I am annoyed. The narrator’s voice suddenly sounds trite, too eager for uplift. But then it occurs to me there might be another reason I’m resisting her experience. Contemplating a sacred object thought to heal and redeem those who come into contact with it, she admits she cannot say, “I believe, I am convinced.” Is it possible I identify too much with her? The source of the drum’s power, Erdrich suggests, is precisely the conviction of those who “come together around it”—a conviction inspired by the drum but also responsible for its transformative influence. Might there be an answer here to my own dilemma? If I had conviction, in other words, would literature magically regain its power?
[ed. As mentioned earlier, A Gentleman in Moscow is a great book for these tough times.]
I wish I could blame COVID-19 for my loss of faith, but I know it dates back further. Tasked with acting inspired, moved, transported by literature in front of roomfuls of students on a weekly basis, I have found it increasingly difficult in recent years to summon the requisite emotions. In fact, I have sometimes wondered whether literature really is worthy of devotion or whether I have just been conning myself and—with mixed results—my students. When, several weeks ago, all nonessential workers were asked to stay home, I felt a pang of self-recognition.
And yet, ironically, since the classes I was teaching at the time continued, I was also in a position where I had to urge my students to keep reading. I had to ask them to find a relatively quiet place in their crowded apartments and sit at their computers discussing what they had read. Why was I insisting on this? What purpose did it serve? One student told me he still had to go to the construction site where he worked, but everyone was trying to stay six feet apart. Another informed me that both her parents were sick, and she had been instructed to remain in her bedroom indefinitely. I expressed sympathy and then turned the conversation back to the text. “Stay safe, everyone!” I announced at the end of our Zoom session, “and don’t forget to read through chapter four.”Since my whole family is now home all the time, I need to sequester myself in my son’s bedroom to get any work done. Through the door, I can hear him doing his math in the living room, arguing with my wife, food being eaten, dishes being done, news on the radio announcing fatality rates. I’m teaching Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping for my American Novel class, which I’m excited about because A) it’s a book that’s never before failed to revive my sense of the world as worthy of awe and wonder and B) I’ve taught it already and I know I can get through it quickly and return to all the other things I need to do.
I read:
One evening that summer we came into the kitchen and Sylvie was sitting in the moonlight, waiting for us. The table was already set, and we could smell that bacon had already been fried. Sylvie went to the stove and began cracking eggs on the edge of the frying pan and dropping them shoosh into the fat. I knew what the silence meant, and so did Lucille. It meant that on an evening so calm, so iridescently blue, so full of the chink and chafe of insects and fat old dogs dragging their chains and belling in the neighbors’ dooryards—in such a boundless and luminous evening, we would feel our proximity with our finer senses.It’s a perfect passage for people trapped inside their apartments staring out their windows. Yet I am unmoved. I’m alarmed to discover my old underlinings practically gouged into the page. I remember spending an evening with the lights turned off to see what it was like. I look at my notes and find the following: “Idle chatter closes us off from the world. Robinson’s trying to capture the condition of silence, but she needs to put words on it. So the meaning of some of these moments resides in the silence after we finish the sentence.” I sit in silence after I finish the sentence, waiting for the epiphany to arrive. It doesn’t. The sentence is just syllables strung together. Have I lost my capacity to feel literature?
Then I do what I’ve always done as a dutiful reader—move on to the next book on the syllabus. In this case, it’s Louise Erdrich’s The Painted Drum. I’ve never read it before, so I have to pay much closer attention than I did to Housekeeping. I feel guilty devoting several hours a day to reading, but in a kind of fight-or-flight reaction to all the pressures around me, my attention rivets itself to the text. I don’t find it extraordinary. But I do begin to feel the effects that reading literature carefully can have on me. My mind composes itself; the oxygen seems to reach deeper into my body; the world relaxes its grip.
Erdrich’s novel is about a drum made by a Native American man broken by his wife’s desertion and his daughter’s death. It’s about lives going off track and then sometimes righting themselves. It’s about how the labor of crafting well-made objects can be therapeutic, but also what happens when those objects are taken from the communities they are meant to serve. The cast of characters is large and initially confusing, but on my fourth day of reading I start to see how their storylines are going to converge. While I find the slow process of tracking the various characters’ journeys toward resolution almost hypnotically satisfying I also begin looking forward to the final page, to that moment of culmination that well-designed novels are sometimes able to produce when everything feels connected, when the end recalls the beginning, and when I briefly seem to experience the whole thing all at once. Ideally, after I’m finished, I’ll get that strange post-reading high, that feeling of being both outside and inside my own life, like my quotidian experiences have assumed a novelistic shape, like I’m revisiting this particular afternoon from the afterlife, free of all the worry and dread that prevented me from appreciating it the first time around.
But I don’t quite make it. (...)
At first I am annoyed. The narrator’s voice suddenly sounds trite, too eager for uplift. But then it occurs to me there might be another reason I’m resisting her experience. Contemplating a sacred object thought to heal and redeem those who come into contact with it, she admits she cannot say, “I believe, I am convinced.” Is it possible I identify too much with her? The source of the drum’s power, Erdrich suggests, is precisely the conviction of those who “come together around it”—a conviction inspired by the drum but also responsible for its transformative influence. Might there be an answer here to my own dilemma? If I had conviction, in other words, would literature magically regain its power?
by Timothy Aubry, The Point | Read more:
Image: Ojibwa drum ca. 1875, Detroit Institute of Arts[ed. As mentioned earlier, A Gentleman in Moscow is a great book for these tough times.]
Why So Many People Are Unhappy in Retirement
There is a script to life that most of us have internalized, whether consciously or not. It’s in many of the most beloved fictional stories, and—from the outside, at least—it looks like the lives of successful people tend to follow it as well. It is often called the hero’s journey, or the monomyth.
The 19th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor was the first to identify the hero’s journey in literature. As he showed, many great adventure stories throughout history follow the basic formula. This is true from the Bible’s story of King David to Star Wars today. You can think of it as having three parts. The first is the call to adventure, where the hero-to-be is stimulated to act in some bold way, usually to meet a daunting task—say, fighting Goliath, or the Empire. The second is the ordeal, in which the hero is brutally tested and has to beat long odds—such as vanquishing a giant in battle or blowing up the Death Star. The third is victory, where the hero wins against these odds and returns home, triumphant.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that successful people tend to see their own lives through the lens of this myth. “He is no hero who never met the dragon,” Jung wrote. “Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.” Jung sounds like an egg-headed Tony Robbins there: Want to be a winner in your career? Then live your own hero’s journey—set your goals, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, win, and return victorious! The End.
It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.
Of course, some people enjoy retirement, but since I have been writing about happiness later in life, many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored. In search of—well, they’re not quite sure what—some have made bad choices, tanking their marriages (leading to what social scientists call “gray divorce,” which doubled in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015) or making stupid business decisions they don’t think they would have made when they were still employed. One person told me, “Since I quit working, I feel like a stranger to myself.”
The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.
The psychoanalyst Carl Jung believed that successful people tend to see their own lives through the lens of this myth. “He is no hero who never met the dragon,” Jung wrote. “Equally, only one who has risked the fight with the dragon and is not overcome by it wins the hoard…He alone has a genuine claim to self-confidence, for he has faced the dark ground of his self and thereby has gained himself.” Jung sounds like an egg-headed Tony Robbins there: Want to be a winner in your career? Then live your own hero’s journey—set your goals, struggle, suffer, sacrifice, win, and return victorious! The End.It’s a nice narrative, especially if you’ve worked hard and done pretty well in life. The problem is the real-life ending, after the triumphant return. People have no script for that part. There’s no Star Wars sequel where Luke Skywalker hangs around the house all day, yelling because someone touched the thermostat and telling his grandkids about blowing up the Death Star for the thousandth time while they roll their eyes.
Of course, some people enjoy retirement, but since I have been writing about happiness later in life, many people who were successful earlier in life have reached out to me to say that retirement has been brutal: They feel unhappy, aimless, and bored. In search of—well, they’re not quite sure what—some have made bad choices, tanking their marriages (leading to what social scientists call “gray divorce,” which doubled in the 25 years between 1990 and 2015) or making stupid business decisions they don’t think they would have made when they were still employed. One person told me, “Since I quit working, I feel like a stranger to myself.”
The hero’s journey is great when you’re in the middle of it. The trouble comes when your strengths start to wane, because now you’re off script. People rarely change the story they’ve constructed for their lives; they rage, instead, trying to pound their lives back into the story line, often with sad results.
by Arthur C. Brooks, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Jan Buchczik
[ed. See also: 4 Rules for Identifying Your Life’s Work; and Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think (The Atlantic).]
[ed. See also: 4 Rules for Identifying Your Life’s Work; and Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think (The Atlantic).]
Memory in a Time of Quarantine
Our memories make us who we are, subconsciously driving our behaviors and dictating how we view the world. One of the most interesting things about memory is its imperfection. Rather than serving as a precise record of past events, our memories are more like concocted reflections, filtered and distilled from pure reality into a personal brew that is formulated by our own unique physiologies and emotional backgrounds. The wholly unique universe we each create—separate from but still tethered to the actual universe—is the product of electrical signals zapping through the lump of fatty flesh inside our skulls. Biology gives birth to something that exists outside the boundaries of biology.
The neural machinery involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of memories is coming to light in labs across the world, but science has not yet solved this particular puzzle. In this issue, you’ll read about talented researchers who use modern tools such as optogenetics and genome editing to probe the biology underlying memory. In lab animals, these scientists can force the recall of memories at the flick of a molecular switch, implant false memories, and erode a real memory to the point of vanishing. Through these studies and others, perhaps science will one day robustly characterize memory’s biological nuts and bolts. But will we ever truly understand, and perhaps directly manipulate, the personal reality created by each individual’s brain?
What scares me most at this juncture in world history is how the COVID-19 pandemic will live in the memories of those affected by it. The patchiness of the current global predicament will dictate our individual familiarity with the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. Some will remain largely unscathed by illness, many will feel the economic pinch of societal lockdowns, many will also lose friends or loved ones to the virus, others will succumb to it themselves. No one will emerge unchanged.
Memories living within the survivors will mirror the array of individual experiences. For many, traumatic memories of the pandemic—whether that be illness from the virus or any of the hardships that come along with social isolation and the global economic downturn—will become uninvited guests, intruding on the daily business of living. On the opposite end of the spectrum, with any luck, many young people living through this reality will recall this period of their lives with a hazy bemusement. “Remember when we were kids, and we got to stay home from school with Mom and Dad for months on end?” Again, the mountain of memories that will accrue in this complicated time will not faithfully record the events now unfurling. Rather, they will form smudged reproductions of the difficulties we are all grappling with. Those memories, and the behaviors they drive, will linger, perhaps for generations.
The scientific enterprise is currently front and center. Millions around the world are counting on researchers and clinicians to pull us from the darkness of this pandemic, as dozens of drugs and vaccines make their way through development and organizations around the globe work to distribute accurate tests that can track the spread of the disease. And this is only the first battle. In the months and years to come, those of us who survive this episode will again call on healthcare providers and scientists to rescue us from the mental and physical aftereffects of the pandemic. For the foreseeable future, the world will need science and medicine more than ever before in recent history. And we will need humanity in equal measure.
The neural machinery involved in the formation, storage, and retrieval of memories is coming to light in labs across the world, but science has not yet solved this particular puzzle. In this issue, you’ll read about talented researchers who use modern tools such as optogenetics and genome editing to probe the biology underlying memory. In lab animals, these scientists can force the recall of memories at the flick of a molecular switch, implant false memories, and erode a real memory to the point of vanishing. Through these studies and others, perhaps science will one day robustly characterize memory’s biological nuts and bolts. But will we ever truly understand, and perhaps directly manipulate, the personal reality created by each individual’s brain?What scares me most at this juncture in world history is how the COVID-19 pandemic will live in the memories of those affected by it. The patchiness of the current global predicament will dictate our individual familiarity with the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. Some will remain largely unscathed by illness, many will feel the economic pinch of societal lockdowns, many will also lose friends or loved ones to the virus, others will succumb to it themselves. No one will emerge unchanged.
Memories living within the survivors will mirror the array of individual experiences. For many, traumatic memories of the pandemic—whether that be illness from the virus or any of the hardships that come along with social isolation and the global economic downturn—will become uninvited guests, intruding on the daily business of living. On the opposite end of the spectrum, with any luck, many young people living through this reality will recall this period of their lives with a hazy bemusement. “Remember when we were kids, and we got to stay home from school with Mom and Dad for months on end?” Again, the mountain of memories that will accrue in this complicated time will not faithfully record the events now unfurling. Rather, they will form smudged reproductions of the difficulties we are all grappling with. Those memories, and the behaviors they drive, will linger, perhaps for generations.
The scientific enterprise is currently front and center. Millions around the world are counting on researchers and clinicians to pull us from the darkness of this pandemic, as dozens of drugs and vaccines make their way through development and organizations around the globe work to distribute accurate tests that can track the spread of the disease. And this is only the first battle. In the months and years to come, those of us who survive this episode will again call on healthcare providers and scientists to rescue us from the mental and physical aftereffects of the pandemic. For the foreseeable future, the world will need science and medicine more than ever before in recent history. And we will need humanity in equal measure.
by Bob Grant, The Scientist | Read more:
Image: Andrzej Krause
Labor of Love
If the coronavirus has taught us anything, it’s that people will watch any old dating show under quarantine, no matter how staggeringly dumb it is. So with that in mind, Fox’s Labor of Love will probably end up as the biggest hit of the summer.
Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.
In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.
Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)
It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.
The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.
Because, and I really can’t stress this enough, Labor of Love is stupid. It is arguably the most knuckleheaded show I have seen in half a decade. You could take this show and bury it in the desert, and people would still be able to locate it from the stench of its utter, logic-defying stupidity. Watching Labor of Love is like pulling your brain out of your ear with a corkscrew and booting it into a lake. Let me try to explain.
In textbook dating show fashion, Kristy is a 41-year-old divorcee who must choose between 15 different hunks. Together they will, in the words of host Kristin Davis, “skip the dating and go straight to baby-making”. Because, that’s right, Labor of Love is a dating show where the prize is a real life flesh-and-blood baby. The entire show exists to help one woman choose a candidate to impregnate her. It’s a mating show, not a dating show. Love, as we’re told, is optional.Clearly, we were already headed this way. Dating shows cannot simply be dating shows any more. We’ve had Love is Blind, where couples propose to people they haven’t even seen. We’ve had Married at First Sight, where people get married the instant they meet. Of course there was eventually going to be a show about women being impregnated by men they barely know. (...)
It doesn’t help that the potential fathers all feel like dopey offcuts from other reality shows. They all uniformly, regardless of age or background or race, look like slabs of battered ham. They’re all a bit too dumb, their emotional problems a bit too overt. They say things like “I appreciate the interactions we had” instead of actual human words. They look, obviously, like the sort of people who’d sign up for a reality show about getting a woman pregnant.
The format is awful, especially the part where the woman eliminates potential fathers on an iPad app. The house they all live in is awful, not least because one of the rooms is an infantilised man cave called “The Father Hood”. The tasks are all awful, ranging from the annoying (“look after some children at a party”) to the insulting (“get your sperm analysed”) to the apparently randomly generated (“spraypaint negative adjectives on to a car and then beat the car to death with a hammer”). Labor of Love is so terrible that it doesn’t even feel like a television series. It feels like a document designed to be presented to God as an argument for the total eradication of the human race.
by Stuart Heritage, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Fox
[ed. Hard to believe the concept of "entertainment" has sunk this low.]
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