Gutting NEPA

President Trump on Wednesday is set to unilaterally weaken one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines. (...)

Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to rollback 100 rules protecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change. (...)

Republican lawmakers, the oil and gas industry, construction companies, home builders and other businesses have long said the federal permitting process takes too long, and accused environmentalists of using the law to tie up projects they oppose.

“This will modernize and rationalize the permitting process so that we can get these projects built at a state and local level,” said Martin Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. The expected final rule, he said, “is a big step forward and it’s about our nation maintaining its global competitiveness.”

The final rule sets new hard deadlines of between one and two years to complete environmental studies, according to two people who have seen the document but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The rule will also allow agencies to develop categories of activities that do not require an environmental assessment at all.

And in one of the most bitterly contested provisions, the rule would free federal agencies from having to consider the impacts of infrastructure projects on climate change. It does so by eliminating the need for agencies to analyze a project’s indirect or “cumulative” effects on the environment and specifying they are only required to analyze “reasonably foreseeable” impacts.

“This may be the single biggest giveaway to polluters in the past 40 years,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group. He accused the Trump administration of “turning back the clock to when rivers caught fire, our air was unbreathable and our most beloved wildlife was spiraling toward extinction.” (...)

Conservationists like to call the National Environmental Protection Act the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. Just as the charter of rights protected English citizens from monarchical rule, activists note, the foundational environmental policy gives United States citizens a voice in every federal road, housing project, airport or major infrastructure development.

It requires agencies to analyze and disclose the extent to which proposed federal actions or infrastructure projects affect the environment, from local wildlife habitat to the projected levels of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

Activists opposed to fossil fuel expansion have used the environmental policy to challenge a proposed major coal terminal in Washington state. Last year a federal judge found that the Obama administration did not adequately take into account the climate change impact of leasing public land for oil gas drilling in Wyoming, a ruling that also presented a threat to Mr. Trump’s plans for fossil fuel development. (...)

Mr. Trump, a former real estate developer who has had personal run-ins with state-level versions of the law, had made weakening it a top priority of his administration.

But despite tasking at least a half dozen people from various agencies to finish the regulation this summer, the final rule is not likely to be safe from the Congressional Review Act, a law that had hardly been used until Mr. Trump took office. Under the law, Congress can overturn a federal agency’s rule-making within 60 days of its finalization, something Democrats have pledged to do next year if they have the votes. Otherwise, the rule is expected to be subject to a lengthy court battle.

The revisions, if they hold up in court, are expected to lead to more permitting for pipelines and other projects that worsen global greenhouse gas emissions. It could also make roads, bridges and other infrastructure riskier because developers would no longer be required to analyze issues like whether sea-level rise might eventually submerge a project.

by Lisa Friedman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

[ed. If you care about the environment, weakening NEPA is one of the biggest threats imaginable. It's also a good example of why government doesn't work these days - after years and decades of this type of death-by-a-thousand-cuts subversion, all that's left are zombie laws and regulations that no longer fulfill their intended purpose but exist only to give a false impression of government oversight and accountability.]

America is Not Prepared for Schools Opening This Fall

The public school district in Charlottesville, Virginia, has proposed a model for schooling this fall that resembles what most districts are trying to do. Because state health officials recommend putting three to six feet between students, and because classrooms were already crowded and schools over-enrolled, the district leadership has decided to alternate attendance. Half the student population will attend Mondays and Wednesdays. The other half will attend Tuesdays and Thursdays. Fridays will be for teacher preparation and deep cleaning.

As a working parent of a school-age child, the prospect of my child attending school for two days a week, and staying home alone to do school work (or not) the three days a week, is frustrating. I have the means, flexibility and job security to cope with it. My kid will be able to get lunch every day. She has good wifi and multiple computers at home. But she would still have to write off an entire year of high school as a wasted opportunity. The course quality will be lousy and she’ll have minimal social engagement. No club meetings. No homecoming. No “Friday night lights”. It’s heartbreaking. But because we have the resources, she will be fine in the long run.

It will be even harder for other people. Consider my neighbor. She’s a single parent with three school-aged children in three different schools. She works for an hourly wage as a food-service contract worker at the local university. She was furloughed in March when the university shut down. She hopes to work full-time this fall, but with most university classes moved online, there is no guarantee that she’ll get the hours she needs to pay her bills.

So she might have to pick up another hourly job as well – if any exist during the looming economic crash in this college town. Her kids don’t have the advantages that mine has. Under Covid-19 things will be even tougher for them than the general injustices of this country have already put on them.

Then consider my brother-in-law, a public school teacher married to my sister, who is immuno-suppressed after intensive cancer treatment. He looks at classroom plans for the fall and sees almost nothing to protect him from the aerosol spread of the virus. Once winter comes, air will recirculate among closed classrooms. Schoolchildren are hard to manage in normal times, and they cough on whatever is close. Given that many more children will be facing crises at home as parents and grandparents lose their jobs or their health or both, behavior will be even harder to manage. And given that he might only see each child two days a week, building trusting relationships will be impossible. Teaching online in the spring was a miserable failure, so his students will be well behind grade level in most subjects, making the task of catching them up even more daunting. He has already said goodbye to dear colleagues who have decided to leave the profession rather than deal with this impending disaster. (...)

Like Denmark, South Korea and dozens of other decently run countries around the world, the US could have schooling this fall five days a week – had we committed hundreds of billions of dollars to construction, desk separators, masks, internet and software upgrades (especially in rural communities), HVAC and ventilation fixes, food service delivery to classrooms, viral testing and tracing, and school nurses (most US schools did away with full-time nurses decades ago).

We would have had to have started all these projects in March. Instead, we’re in July, just weeks from schools opening, and almost nothing has been done.

President Donald Trump, invoking his power of positive thinking, has declared that schools will be open full-time this fall, regardless of consequences. Vice-President Mike Pence, acknowledging that the US Centers for Disease Control guidelines make that impossible, has pledged that the guidelines will change because Trump wants them to – thus destroying the CDC’s credibility, yet doing nothing to help schools.

Instead of massive infusions of federal funds, every school district faces budget cuts from reduced state and local taxes. So you can write off the education and safety of almost all American children. Millions will be at home alone, where they are most likely to be hurt or killed. Millions will be with abusive relatives. Millions will be without lunch or nurse care.

Americans are uncomfortable with situations like this. We’re used to relying on our myths and stories of innovation, mobilization and triumph. If we had a good run during which such myths were true enough to inspire confidence and drive us toward progress, that run is over. This realization isn’t just true of long-term, global maladies like climate change. Our inability to solve or even avoid devastating problems is now immediate, local and clear.

by Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: Cj Gunther/EPA
[ed. See also: What Do College Students Think of Their Schools’ Reopening Plans? (New Yorker).]

It’s 2022. What Does Life Look Like?

It’s 2022, and the coronavirus has at long last been defeated. After a miserable year-and-a-half, alternating between lockdowns and new outbreaks, life can finally begin returning to normal.

But it will not be the old normal. It will be a new world, with a reshaped economy, much as war and depression reordered life for previous generations.

Thousands of stores and companies that were vulnerable before the virus arrived have disappeared. Dozens of colleges are shutting down, in the first wave of closures in the history of American higher education. People have also changed long-held patterns of behavior: Outdoor socializing is in, business trips are out.

And American politics — while still divided in many of the same ways it was before the virus — has entered a new era.

All of this, obviously, is conjecture. The future is unknowable. But the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach, and the United States is suffering through a new virus surge that’s worse than in any other country.

With help from economists, politicians and business executives, I have tried to imagine what a post-Covid economy may look like. One message I heard is that the course of the virus itself will play the biggest role in the medium term. If scientific breakthroughs come quickly and the virus is largely defeated this year, there may not be many permanent changes to everyday life.

On the other hand, if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out (even if they would eventually be replaced by different restaurants).

The changes that I’m imagining in this article are based on neither an unexpectedly fast or slow resolution, but instead on what many scientists consider the baseline. In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

Before we get into the details, there is one more caveat worth mentioning: Many things will not change. That’s one of history’s lessons.

The financial crisis of 2007-9 didn’t cause Americans to sour on stocks, and it didn’t lead to an overhaul of Wall Street. The election of the first Black president didn’t usher in an era of racial conciliation. The 9/11 attacks didn’t make Americans unwilling to fly. The Vietnam War didn’t bring an end to extended foreign wars without a clear mission.

Yet if the pandemic really does shape life for the next year, it will probably be remembered as a more significant historical event than those precedents. It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression. Events that hold the world’s attention for long stretches — and that alter the rhythms of everyday life — do tend to leave a legacy.

Weak companies will die

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

His point is that companies with flawed business models can look healthy in good times. Out of habit, many customers continue to buy from them. But when the economy weakens, people have to make decisions about where to pull back. They often start with products and services that they find the least valuable or that they can replace with a cheaper alternative.

A downturn, says Emily Oster, a Brown University economist, “is an opportunity to revisit inefficiencies.” And the coronavirus is likely to cause a larger version of this phenomenon than a typical recession.

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling, because Google, Facebook and Craigslist had taken away their main source of revenue: print advertising. Between 2008 and 2019, American newspapers eliminated about half of all newsroom jobs.

The virus has led to further declines in advertising and more job cuts — and could end up forcing dozens more papers to fold or become tiny shells of their old selves. If that happens, their cities will be left without perhaps the only major source of information about local politics, business, education and the like.

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores. Many Americans have decided they prefer either specialty stores (like Home Depot) or discount stores (like Costco) over the one-stop-shopping experience that Sears, Macy’s and J.C. Penney have long offered.

Now the virus has interrupted in-person shopping and caused many consumers to shift even more business online, to Amazon, Target and Walmart. “The retailers doing fair to poorly are absolutely not coming out of this,” said Mark Cohen, a former executive at Sears and Federated Department Stores who teaches at Columbia Business School. “Many, many of them are going to fail, have already failed or will fail when they reopen.”

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic. The roughly 250 fancier malls around the country, like The Westchester in suburban New York and The Galleria in Houston, are likely to survive, Mr. Cohen predicted. Some will convert old stores into spaces for experiences, like dining, bowling, medical care or a golf driving range.

But many of the country’s remaining 1,100 or so traditional malls are at risk of failing. Even before the virus, Amazon turned two former malls near Cleveland into warehouses, a physical manifestation of changing shopping habits.

A third at-risk industry — higher education — is a bit different from the others, because it’s so heavily subsidized by the government. Yet dozens of colleges, both private and public, are facing real trouble.

College enrollment in the United States has been growing almost continually since the Civil War. It kept growing even after the baby boomers finished college, because a rising percentage of young people were enrolling. But the 150-plus-year boom appears to have ended about a decade ago. Undergraduate enrollment fell 8 percent between 2010 and 2018.

Why? Birthrates have fallen, and the percentage of young people going to college isn’t rising significantly anymore. The population trends are especially stark in the Northeast and Midwest, where many colleges are. Late last year, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a bracing report called, “The Looming Enrollment Crisis.”

The virus is exacerbating almost every problem that colleges faced. They have already lost revenue from summer school, food service, parking fees and more. Perhaps most significant, the recession is hammering state budgets, which will probably lead to future cuts in college funding.

The immediate question is whether colleges will be able to bring back students this fall, as administrators are desperately hoping. If they can’t, enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

Yuval Levin, a conservative policy expert and the founding editor of National Affairs, put it this way: “The top 20 schools are probably not going to change. But what is actually higher education — more than 4,000 universities — I think will change a lot.”

Of course, business failures can be healthy. They are part of the “creative destruction” that the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously described, allowing more efficient and innovative rivals to rise. The disappearance of many old department stores won’t be a tragedy if they are replaced by stores people prefer.

But some of the virus-related destruction will have damaging side effects. When local newspapers close, corruption and political polarization tend to rise, while voter turnout tends to fall, academic research has found. Cuts to higher-education budgets could make it even harder for poor and middle-class students to graduate.

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector,” Ted Mitchell, a former college president who now runs the American Council on Education, an industry group, told me, “is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

by David Leonhardt, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Illustration by Zak Tebbal; Photographs from Getty Images

[ed. I expect it to get a lot worse, but some efforts might help. For example, we might finally resolve our epidemic homelessness problem by repurposing malls and similar large facilities with on-site improvements: apartments, medical services, security, government offices, etc. (assuming a potential tidal wave of homelessness just around the corner); modernizing and improving our national infrastructure (roads and bridges and dams, electric grid, water and sewage facilities, broadband, rail, shoreline protection, parks, etc.) with a massive WPA type effort designed for the 21st century (and impending climate change), employing every class of expert and worker: engineers, construction companies, managers, laborers, planners, scientists, etc.); funding to keep our creative class alive, providing subsidies for a variety of artistic endeavors, with enough economic support to find expression in a variety of venues; affordable health care for all that's simple, straightforward and cost-efficient; a new political system that prioritizes constituent services and legal protection over corporate predation and economic inequality. Is this all possible? Yes. Is it likely? Nope. It would take a complete realignment of political thinking and will, and extraordinary leadership, the likes of which we've never seen in our lifetimes (even during FDR's time, and worse now because the forces preventing it have become so institutionalized). So, my feeling is, we're pretty much screwed. But that's to be expected at the end stages of empire.

See also: Naomi Klein: 'We must not return to the pre-Covid status quo, only worse (The Guardian).]

Meet the Company That Sells Your Lost Airplane Luggage

Imagine this: An airline loses your checked bag. After an extensive search, customer support comes up empty-handed. They compensate you and life goes on.

But life goes on for your suitcase, too. Written off as “unclaimed,” it sits in a musty collection depot for 3 months. Eventually, the airline sells it — along with hundreds of other lost suitcases and cargo shipments — to a private company, sight unseen.

The new owner cracks the lock, sifts through your former possessions, and marks them for sale.

A few days later, a retired mechanic named Charlie buys your grandfather’s watch for $150. A 19-year-old line cook acquires your Beats headphones. And a nurse from Florida becomes the proud new owner of the scarf your mom knitted you for Christmas.

This is the bizarre secondary market for lost luggage.

Every year, 4.3B bags are checked by airlines around the world. Around 25m of them (5.7 per 1k bags checked) end up lost or misdirected. The 0.03% of bags that are still not reunited with their owners after 90 days are sold by the airline.

Chances are, they are purchased by a company called Unclaimed Baggage.

Nestled in the small town of Scottsboro, Alabama (pop: 14.7k), Unclaimed Baggage holds the distinction of being “the nation’s only retailer of lost luggage.” Its massive 40k-sq-ft warehouse holds thousands of treasures lost in transit, ranging from rare instruments to monogrammed engagement rings.

Every now and then, a piece of luggage contains something truly extraordinary, like a suit of armor, an Egyptian artifact, or a camera used in NASA’s Space Shuttle program.

What are the ethics of reselling travelers’ intimate items? How does the process work? And how did one company come to monopolize this niche market?

The story begins 50 years ago

Back in 1970, a man named Hugo Doyle Owens was at a crossroads.

Born and raised in Scottsboro, Owens had served in the Korean War and returned to his hometown to sell insurance. Between shifts, he spent every waking hour by his ham radio, using radio frequency spectrum to communicate to friends and strangers. At 39, he was restless and looking for his next adventure.

One day, through the radio chatter, he learned that a bus company in Washington, DC, had an enormous stack of unclaimed luggage it was looking to get rid of.

In those days, unclaimed bags were often thrown away or auctioned off to local junk shops. Few saw value in travelers’ lost wares. But to Owens, the suitcases — and the intrigue of their contents — were a perfect foundation to build a business on.

So, he borrowed $300 (~$2k in 2020 dollars) from his father-in-law and purchased the whole lot.

On the edge of town, Owens set up an informal storefront, crafted a sign (“Unclaimed Baggage”) by the door, and, with the help of his wife and 2 sons, splayed out his acquired items on card tables. He ran a small ad in the local paper, informing Jackson County deal-seekers of his new venture.

In less than 24 hours, he sold out of inventory and pocketed a tidy profit.

The novelty of sifting through lost luggage soon spread by word-of-mouth and Owen’s repeated the process. His boss eventually gave him an ultimatum: Sell insurance, or sell baggage. He quit and set out to turn his side hustle into a full-time job.

By 1978, Owens had struck deals to buy luggage from Eastern Airlines, National Airlines, and Air Florida (now defunct). In constant transit between DC, Miami, Cleveland, and Dallas, he was soon acquiring 3k pieces of luggage per month, with help from a staff of 6 people.

“We never know what’s in those suitcases until we open them,” he told the AP that year. “It’s like buying a pig in a poke.”

Even the most macabre of items seemed to intrigue his customers: A marble tombstone inscribed with a name and a date of death was purchased by a gentleman who made it into a coffee table. An Amazonian shrunken head (found in a suitcase in the pre-TSA days) found a home with a doctor in Birmingham.

Over the years, the business expanded — largely thanks to a number of secretive, exclusive deals Owens inked with major airlines, hospitality groups, and cargo carriers.

By the time he died in 2016, he’d received 3 keys from 3 different Scottsboro mayors. Everyone in town knew his name. And his one-of-a-kind business had become an internationally recognized tourist destination.

by Zachary Crockett, The Hustle |  Read more:

Image: Peter Morris/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

The Absolute Emptiness of Slogans

The two most powerful political slogans of our era are “Make America Great Again”, and “Black Lives Matter.” Both of them, once uttered, seemed to invite immediate, obvious, simple-minded rejoinders. “America is already great,” say Trump’s opponents. “All Lives Matter,” say those who are made uncomfortable by the hint of exclusion in BLM. But for the initiated, the rejoinders almost prove the necessity of repeating the slogan.

In other words, the genius of both phrases is that they are self-authenticating.

When pundits and think-tankers shout back “America is already great,” they confirm that they were servants for the winners of the last 30 years of American politics. Trump’s signature mantra is aimed directly at the places that have lost their manufacturing jobs to Mexico or China, the places that suddenly have a major drug problem or an abundance of unemployed middle-aged men, the places where life expectancy is going down and confidence in the next generation doing better than the last is at an all-time low.

The people shouting “All Lives Matter” energize anti-racist activists, to whom they seem obtuse. For most of its adherents, “Black Lives Matter” isn’t meant as a slur or slight on non-blacks. It is a cry for attention to problems that uniquely afflict black lives in America. It is a demand for addressing those problems specifically. It is a call for dignity. The black experience in America is unique to blacks. That matters, or at least it should. The very discomfort with acknowledging that of course black lives matter is evidence that the assertion has to be repeated over and over again until people get it.

There’s just one problem with all of this: MAGA and BLM turn out to be entirely empty slogans on close inspection. Or at least, any substance they might have represented has been emptied out by the pre-existing and elite interests that commandeered them.

What is the MAGA agenda? There isn’t much of one. There’s been no real plan for the opioid crisis or the revival of declining regions, no credible promise of great new infrastructure projects. Beyond a few easily reversed executive orders Trump has done nothing to make our immigration system sensible or serve the interests of lower-wage Americans. There’s been a lot of empty gesturing meant to look like substantive action — a phony trade war with China that ended in Trump begging for a few extra soybean purchases from swing states, a few hundred miles of border fencing funded out of the Pentagon’s coffers, rather than Mexico’s. Insofar as Trump has an agenda of any substance, it is a pre-existing one that he didn’t invent or modify: A massive tax cut for corporations paired with the partial elimination of a tax break for affluent blue-staters and the confirmation of lots of judges approved by the conservative legal establishment.

What is the Black Lives Matter agenda? The official BLM organization, the one that’s been in receipt of millions of dollars from the titans of global capitalism, has a statement of belief. The statement begins with racism and policing issues, which do rank in almost every survey as vitally important if not the most important issues among black voters. But what comes next? Do a search for words like “education” or “housing.” Nothing. Do a search for the most important institution in black life, the church. Nothing. A significant majority of blacks list “health-care” as one of the major issues that determines their vote. It’s not even referenced.

Instead, what do you find? The vapid cultural politics of academia talking to itself in the mirror. “Gender identity” and “gender expression” come ahead of the first mention of economics. “Cisgender privilege” is denounced. The only life-shaping institution mentioned is the “nuclear family,” which BLM vows to “disrupt.” (As if the nuclear family hadn’t already been disrupted in black lives! 65 percent of black children live in a single-parent home.) This is a manifesto for grad students and radical journalists.

by Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review via Yahoo News |  Read more:

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Long nights
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Kenny Vaughn

"Grosse Fatigue" Tells the Story of Life on Earth

The French artist Camille Henrot’s thirteen-minute video-art masterpiece, “Grosse Fatigue” (“Major Exhaustion,” or, as a 1994 comedy translated the phrase, “Dead Tired”), is a Wunderkammer of and for the Internet era. Made in 2013, the piece is now streaming on YouTube until July 16th as part of an online exhibition called “Video Lives,” from the Museum of Modern Art. (Because video art is so rarely displayed in full online, it is something of a rare item in its own right.) “Grosse Fatigue” emerges from and dissects the endless archives we’ve created online. It’s somewhere between a video essay (that arcane format) and a supercut, collaging found archival clips, Henrot’s own footage, meme gifs, and documentary shots from inside the Smithsonian, where Henrot developed the piece during a residency.

“Grosse Fatigue” depicts, more or less, the evolution of life on Earth, mashing up creation myths and scientific theories, art, poetry, and the human body, with a conspicuous lack of boundaries that recalls the seventeenth century, when all of those categories were thought to have more in common. The video takes place on a computer screen: on a familiar Mac desktop, with a hard drive labelled “HISTORY_OF_UNIVERSE,” a cursor opens a file titled “GROSSE_FATIGUE_.” Offscreen, the artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh recites an epic poem written by Henrot and the poet Jacob Bromberg, and a propulsive beat composed by Joakim Bouaziz plays in the background. File-browser frames pop up and close, nesting in one another, piling up. It’s a digital data binge in which resonance matters more than fact or logic. (...)

Henrot’s work has moved between drawing, sculpture, video, and installation, often collaging different media and subject matters together. Her themes are sprawling: hope, archives, classical myth, the way the detritus of the mind spills out into the world of objects. The format of “Grosse Fatigue” is particularly successful at illuminating the crush of information we face in the twenty-first century, daunting and confusing but also magical, infinitely recombinable. The seventeenth-century Wunderkammer gained its value because of a scarcity of knowledge, which is now obsolete—we can Google anything and see what it looks like. Henrot, working in a period of overwhelming accessibility, restores a sense of wonder and discovery, the epiphany of holding a mysterious specimen in your hands.

by Kyle Chayka, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

US Universities Are Charging Full Fees For 'Virtual' Class This Fall. This Is Absurd

Colleges and universities are in an unprecedented bind. Coronavirus continues to rage in many parts of America, making the sort of communal gatherings that are hallmarks of collegiate life outright dangerous. Lecture halls, libraries, football games and dorm-room parties can all be superspreader events.

Some educational institutions have already declared that almost the entire academic year will occur remotely, while others are forging on with in-person learning. Two of the schools I teach at, NYU and St Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, are attempting the latter, which will carry its own risks, depending on how New York City progresses in its continuing battle to keep infection rates low.

For schools that have decided against most in-person instruction, the caution exercised is understandable. The University of California system, Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Rutgers have all declared that the bulk of their course offerings will be online. But about 60% of schools nationwide are still planning an in-person start to the year.

What they all aren’t doing is reducing tuition, even though a significant portion of the value these educational institutions provide is now lost indefinitely. Only Princeton has offered a 10% price cut. Harvard, with its $40bn endowment, is still charging full tuition. So are Rutgers and the University of California schools, both public universities.

Though they charge less than private institutions, Rutgers or a University of California school aren’t cheap. In-state students at California public universities still pay about $14,000 a year to attend. At Rutgers, in New Jersey, in-state students pay a little more than $12,000. (At both schools, out-of-state tuition is far higher, more than $40,000 and $30,000 respectively.)

Remote learning, no matter how well-intentioned, is a diluted product, and students deserve a tuition reduction for sitting at home and staring at a laptop screen. As someone who taught remotely this past semester, I strained to provide a comparable experience to what students were used to. Ultimately I could not. Professors cannot connect with students in the same way. And the ancillary benefits of college – making friends, networking with peers, joining clubs, playing intramural sports – are all lost.

There is an argument that students, especially at prestige schools, are still getting the value of a degree and therefore should pay the full freight. Isn’t the diploma ultimately what matters? But that’s not how colleges and universities pitch themselves to unsuspecting freshmen.

College life is not merely about scoring a dream job right after graduation. It’s supposed to be an experience. Behold our manicured lawns, our successful basketball team, our state-of-the-art fitness center, the newly revamped computer lab – and pay dearly for them. Part of the tradeoff of taking on crippling debt is supposed to be the creation of unforgettable memories, those four life-changing years you’ll never have again. Remote learning promises none of that.

by Ross Barkan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Charles Krupa/AP
[ed. The same could be said about hospitals and telemedicine. Where's the price cut for reduced services?]

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Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?

“In a strange room, you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.” I am not in a strange room, but my familiar room is in a strange world, and this passage from a novel by William Faulkner haunts me.

Having lived abroad for all of my adult life, I have been thinking about the effects of distance for years. My family, several friends and I live on different continents, and most of the time we meet online, and in person only in the summer. So whenever we see each other in the flesh, we take in quietly the subtle differences between who we are and the versions of each other we’ve lived with in our heads, a little abstract for lack of contact: a tighter or more relaxed smile, a few more white hairs, children who look a little more grown-up, a pale complexion that might suggest illness, a deeper quality to someone’s silence, an averted gaze when a particular topic is mentioned… All point to the thick accumulation of days, of every day we have not been together.

Now I have to pretend that my friends here, my colleagues and students also live abroad, and that my neighbors are glass-shielded in an intangible dimension. It feels odd to live in exile from almost everybody, as if we had each been sucked through a portal to a remote island, or a distant planet.

When you empty yourself for sleep, at the end of a day populated so sparsely by actual persons, but overflowing with abstracted silhouettes—of people who have lost their jobs or who couldn’t bid a final farewell to their loved ones, of friends who wave from a screen and give you news you can’t do much about, of family far away who will remain so far in this long present—what are you?

There is hardly a reason, and often no time, to think about our everyday life when we are in it. The rituals we engage in without thinking, the distracted habits of thought; they are unfamiliar through excess of familiarity, like the shape of our shoes molded onto our feet, or the intimate space of the night table where we reach without looking.

There is something of that taken-for-granted involvement with the world in the sphere of social relations too: not only the family and friends we usually choose to hang out with, or the colleagues we work with, but all those people we might run into on a daily basis in the improvised sociability of ordinary life—people we see only from the corner of the eye, or even not at all, but whose presence gives us a sense of life unfolding.

Such presence is felt in the electrifying energy of a crowd that dissolves you—in a stadium where hundreds or thousands of gazes are tethered to a basketball, or in a concert hall, tuned with hundreds of people to the rhythm of a performance. I both know and ignore what I’m missing these days. I suspect my unease has something to do with not being able to interact with my students in person. The energy they give me in the classroom is hard to retrieve from pixelated smiles, the end of each session slightly disconcerting, given everyone’s abrupt disappearance at the push of a button.

I miss the carefree exuberance of the playgrounds where I take my daughter to play alongside other children, and the cozy cinema in my neighborhood where I used to go every now and then just to watch a movie in the quiet company of other people. It’s as if all these venues were hosting a version of John Cage’s 4’33”, rendered meaningless by the lack of closure.

A few years ago I finished working on a book called The Art of Distances, which became my baseline for trying to understand the meaning of this episode we’re all writing together, through our collective experiment in social distancing. What value can one ascribe to distance? What insights do we gain by staying away from others, and at such close quarters with ourselves?

by Corina Stan, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Evidence Found of Epic Prehistoric Pacific Voyages

New evidence has been found for epic prehistoric voyages between the Americas and eastern Polynesia.

DNA analysis suggests there was mixing between Native Americans and Polynesians around AD 1200.

The extent of potential contacts between the regions has been a hotly contested area for decades.

In 1947, Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl made a journey by raft from South America to Polynesia to demonstrate the voyage was possible.

Until now, proponents of Native American and Polynesian interaction reasoned that some common cultural elements, such as a similar word used for a common crop, hinted that the two populations had mingled before Europeans settled in South America.

Opponents pointed to studies with differing conclusions and the fact that the two groups were separated by thousands of kilometres of open ocean.

Alexander Ioannidis from Stanford University in California and his international colleagues analysed genetic data from more than 800 living indigenous inhabitants of coastal South America and French Polynesia.

They were looking for snippets of DNA that are characteristic of each population and for segments that are "identical by descent" - meaning they are inherited from the same ancestor many generations ago.

"We found identical-by-descent segments of Native American ancestry across several Polynesian islands," said Mr Ioannidis.

"It was conclusive evidence that there was a single shared contact event."

In other words, Polynesians and Native Americans met at one point in history, and during that time children with both Native American and Polynesian ancestry were born.

Statistical analyses confirmed the event occurred around AD 1200, at about the time Pacific islands were originally being settled by Polynesians.

Asked who he thought made contact first, Mr Ioannidis ventured that it may have been Polynesian navigators reaching South America.

"Because the timing is exactly at the time that the Polynesians were embarking on their longest voyages of discovery and soon after they discovered Easter Island, which is extremely remote, and also later settling New Zealand and Hawaii, they had no idea there was going to be a continent eventually and they were going to run out of islands, so I think they probably did find a continent," he said.

by BBC |  Read more:

Image: Thor Heyerdahl uncredited

Opioid Overdoses Are Skyrocketing

In West Virginia, they are bracing for the second wave.

The epidemic that hit the Appalachian state harder than any other in the US finally looked to be in retreat. Now it’s advancing again. Not coronavirus but opioid overdoses, with one scourge driving a resurgence of the other.

Covid-19 has claimed 93 lives in West Virginia over the past three months. That is only a fraction of those killed by drug overdoses, which caused nearly 1,000 deaths in the state in 2018 alone, mostly from opioids but also methamphetamine (also known as meth).

That year was better than the one before as the Appalachian state appeared to turn the tide on an epidemic that has ravaged the region for two decades, destroying lives, tearing apart families and dragging down local economies.

Now coronavirus looks to be undoing the advances made against a drug epidemic that has claimed close to 600,000 lives in the US over the past two decades. Worse, it is also laying the ground for a long-term resurgence of addiction by exacerbating many of the conditions, including unemployment, low incomes and isolation, that contributed to the rise of the opioid epidemic and “deaths of despair”.

“The number of opioid overdoses is skyrocketing and I don’t think it will be easily turned back,” said Dr Mike Brumage, former director of the West Virginia office of drug control policy.

“Once the tsunami of Covid-19 finally recedes, we’re going to be left with the social conditions that enabled the opioid crisis to emerge in the first place, and those are not going to go away.” (...)

The American Medical Association said it was “greatly concerned” at reported increases in opioid overdoses in more than 30 states although it will be months before hard data is available.

Public health officials from Kentucky to Florida, Texas and Colorado have recorded surges in opioid deaths as the economic and social anxieties created by the Covid-19 pandemic prove fertile ground for addiction. In addition, Brumage said significant numbers of people have fallen out of treatment programmes as support networks have been yanked away by social distancing orders.

“I’m a firm adherent to the idea that the opposite of addiction is not sobriety, the opposite of addiction is connection. Clearly, what we have lost with the pandemic is a loss of connection,” he said.

by Chris McGreal, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image:Uncredited/AP

[ed. And a climate crisis that's not going away, either. See also: Life after opioids: 'We have not served our patients well' (Guardian); and ‘Cries for help’: Drug overdoses are soaring during the coronavirus pandemic (Washington Post).]

This fish ladder on the Sorne in the Pichoux Gorge, Delémont, Switzerland is a prefabricated fish pass with 24 tanks and a height of 12.5 feet/3.80 m, & was built in 2008 to allow fish to migrate across elevations between the lakes & rivers. Fish swim up the gradual level between pools.

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Is Everyone Depressed?

Over the past month, Jennifer Leiferman, a researcher at the Colorado School of Public Health, has documented a tidal wave of depressive symptoms in the U.S. “The rates we’re seeing are just so much higher than normal,” she says. Leiferman’s team recently found that people in Colorado have, during the pandemic, been nine times more likely to report poor mental health than usual. About 23 percent of Coloradans have symptoms of clinical depression.

As a rough average, during pre-pandemic life, 5 to 7 percent of people met the criteria for a diagnosis of depression. Now, depending how you define the condition, orders of magnitude more people do. Robert Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, extrapolates from a recent Lancet study in China to estimate that about 50 percent of the U.S. population is experiencing depressive symptoms. “We are witnessing the mental-health implications of massive disease and death,” he says. This has the effect of altering the social norm by which depression and other conditions are defined. Essentially, this throws off the whole definitional rubric.

Feelings of numbness, powerlessness, and hopelessness are now so common as to verge on being considered normal. But what we are seeing is far less likely an actual increase in a disease of the brain than a series of circumstances that is drawing out a similar neurochemical mix. This poses a diagnostic conundrum. Millions of people exhibiting signs of depression now have to discern ennui from temporary grieving from a medical condition. Those at home Googling symptoms need to know when to seek medical care, and when it’s safe to simply try baking more bread. Clinicians, meanwhile, need to decide how best to treat people with new or worsening symptoms: to diagnose millions of people with depression, or to more aggressively treat the social circumstances at the core of so much suffering.

Clearly articulating the meaning of medical depression is an existential challenge for the mental-health profession, and for a country that does not ensure its people health care. If we fail, the second wave of death from this pandemic will not be directly caused by the virus. It will take the people who suffered mentally from its reverberations.

Like COVID-19, depression takes erratic courses. Some predictable patterns exist, but no two cases are exactly alike. Depression can percolate for long periods then quickly become severe. Some people will barely notice it, and others will be tested in the extreme.

Andrew Solomon, the author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, groups people based on four basic ways they’re responding to the current crisis. Two are straightforward. In the first are people who are drawing on huge stockpiles of resilience and truly doing okay. When you ask how they feel and they say “eh, fine,” they actually mean it. In the second, at the opposite end of things, are people who already have a clinical diagnosis of major depressive disorder or a persistent version known as dysthymia. Right now, their symptoms are at high risk of escalating. “They develop what some clinicians call ‘double depression,’ in which the underlying disorder coexists with a new layer of fear and sorrow,” Solomon says. Such people may need higher levels of medical care than usual, and may even need to be hospitalized.

The remaining two groups constitute more of a gray area. One group consists of the millions of people now experiencing depressive symptoms in a real way, but who nonetheless will return to their baseline eventually, as long as their symptoms are addressed. People in this group are in urgent need of basic interventions that help create routine and structure. Those might involve regularizing sleep and food, minimizing alcohol and other substances, exercising, avoiding obsessions with the news, and cutting back on other aimless habits that might be easier to moderate in normal times.

The fourth group encompasses people who are starting to develop clinical depression. More than simply a wellness regimen or a Zoom with friends, they need some type of formal medical intervention. They may have seemed fine and had adequate resilience in normal times, to deal with normal difficulties, but they’ve always had a propensity to develop overt depression. Solomon describes this group as “hanging on the precipice of what could be considered pathologic.” It can be especially precarious because people in this state—what some researchers refer to as “subclinical depression”—have not dealt with depression before, and may not have the capacity or resources to proactively seek treatment. (...)

Today, depression—the clinical condition, otherwise known as major depressive disorder—is defined by the American Psychiatric Association in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a mood disorder.* To receive the diagnosis, a person must have five or more symptoms such as the following, nearly every day during a two-week period: fatigue or loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or inappropriate guilt, reduced physical movement, indecisiveness or impaired concentration, a decreased or increased appetite, and a greatly diminished interest or pleasure in regular activities.

Experts are trained to identify exactly how much “impaired concentration” or “loss of energy” is enough to qualify for a diagnosis, and the criteria are intentionally flexible enough to factor in patients’ individual circumstances. But as the pandemic has made clear, the DSM-5 and medical model as a whole don’t provide the richness of language to account for all the nuanced ways people might look or feel depressed, even when they don’t need medical intervention. Well-meaning attempts to standardize the diagnostic process have created a false binary wherein you are a person with depression, or you are not.

Outside of medicine, depression has been most cogently defined through metaphor. As Sylvia Plath wrote: “The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” David Foster Wallace described depression as feeling that “every single atom in every single cell in your body is sick.” Even some clinical models reach for alternative ways of articulating despair beyond the conventional medical model. James Hollis, a psychodynamic analyst and the author of Living Between Worlds: Finding Resilience in Changing Times, says that depression is sometimes the result of “intrapsychic tension,” a conflict between two areas of our psyche, or identity. The tension is created, Hollis observes, “when we’re forced to try to make acquaintances with ourselves in new ways.”

by James Hamblin, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Namrata Gosavi
[ed. See also: This Is Not a Normal Mental-Health Disaster (Atlantic).]

Tokyo, Japan, 1913 - 1915 (Colorized)

[ed. See also: Japan's devastating rains move north as millions told to evacuate (Guardian).]

Carl Reiner's Life Should Remind Us: If You Like Laughing, Thank FDR and The New Deal

Has Stephen Colbert ever made you laugh? Or Jordan Peele? Or Steve Carell? Or Will Ferrell, Tina Fey, Keegan-Michael Key, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Amy Poehler, Cecily Strong, Chris Redd, Aidy Bryant, Jason Sudeikis, Amy Sedaris, Kristen Wiig, Adam McKay, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Bill Murray, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Elaine May, or Mike Nichols? Unless you’re way off the normal human spectrum, the answer is yes.

But here’s something few comedy fans — including some comedians themselves — realize: An incredible amount of the development of American comedy, including the training and platforms that helped start the careers of every comedian above, can be traced directly back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal provided government support for the arts at a level never to be repeated.

This forgotten history surfaced briefly when Carl Reiner died Monday night at age 98. By this point, Reiner is probably best known to normal people as the father of film director Rob Reiner (“The Princess Bride,” “When Harry Met Sally,” “This Is Spinal Tap”). But in the comedy world, Reiner is revered as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He was a writer and performer on Sid Caesar’s “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s; he created “The Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s; he recorded the “2000 Year Old Man” records with Mel Brooks; he directed four of Steve Martin’s early movies, starting with “The Jerk”; and much more.

In Reiner’s memoir “My Anecdotal Life,” he wrote that “I owe my show business career to two people: Charlie Reiner” — his brother — “and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.”

When Carl Reiner was 17 in 1939, he was working as a machinist’s helper, bringing sewing machines to hat factories. Then Reiner’s brother saw a small ad in the New York Daily News about free acting lessons being offered in lower Manhattan by the Works Progress Administration. Reiner had never contemplated acting before in his life, but his brother insisted, so he went.

The WPA had been established several years prior to carry out public works projects during the Great Depression, with workers put directly on the government payroll, keeping the struggling economy afloat while also expanding the infrastructure of the U.S. Its initial outlays were huge — the gross domestic product equivalent of about $1.3 trillion today. The WPA paved roads, built bridges, and constructed Camp David and the Tennessee Valley Authority. But it went beyond these physical public works to enhance America’s human infrastructure via Federal Project Number One, which employed writers, musicians, and actors. The Federal Theatre Project, part of Federal Project Number One, funded live performances and acting classes — including the ones Carl Reiner attended.

“All the good things that have happened to me in my life I can trace to that two-inch newspaper item my brother handed to me,” Reiner explained. “Had Charlie not brought it to my attention, I might very well be writing anecdotes about my life as a machinist or, more likely, not be writing anything about anything.”

But Reiner’s life was just one small aspect of the WPA’s impact. A few years earlier in Chicago, a sociologist named Neva Boyd had begun working with immigrant children by teaching them dance, movement, and improvisational games. She soon brought this work to Hull House, a progressive “settlement house” — a central place where anyone regardless of age, class, or culture could go to learn, share, engage with art, express themselves, and grow.

Boyd viewed creativity and playfulness as essential for a democratic society. “Social living cannot be maintained on the basis of destructive ideologies — domination, hate, prejudice, greed and dishonesty,” she wrote in a famous essay. “Play involves social values, as does no other behavior. The spirit of play develops social adaptability, ethics, mental and emotional control, and imagination.”

Boyd worked for the WPA during the Great Depression and recommended one of her disciples named Viola Spolin for a job as drama supervisor for the WPA’s local recreational projects. Spolin expanded on Boyd’s work, reaching poor children and adults (including recent immigrants who weren’t fluent in English) with playful stage exercises. One innovation of Spolin’s games was performers generating improvised scenes based on suggestions from the audience.

For Boyd and Spolin, the spirit of play was for all people, not just a tiny “creative” minority. “Everyone can act,” Spolin said. “Everyone can improvise. Anyone who wishes to can play in the theater and learn to become stage-worthy. We learn through experience and experiencing. … ‘Talent’ or ‘lack of talent’ has little to do with it.” Thanks to the funding from the WPA, Spolin was able to create a formal body of “Theater Games” that lay the groundwork for the improv comedy canon to this day.

by Bob Harris, Jon Schwarz, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Bob Riha Jr/Getty Images via

Mike Ryczek
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