New Nukes Are Coming

America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane. It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot.

The US Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them.

On September 8, the Air Force gave the defense company Northrop Grumman an initial contract of $13.3 billion to begin engineering and manufacturing the missile, but that will be just a fraction of the total bill. Based on a Pentagon report cited by the Arms Control Association Association and Bloomberg News, the government will spend roughly $100 billion to build the weapon, which will be ready to use around 2029.

To put that price tag in perspective, $100 billion could pay 1.24 million elementary school teacher salaries for a year, provide 2.84 million four-year university scholarships, or cover 3.3 million hospital stays for covid-19 patients. It’s enough to build a massive mechanical wall to protect New York City from sea level rise. It’s enough to get to Mars.

One day soon, the Air Force will christen this new war machine with its “popular” name, likely some word that projects goodness and strength, in keeping with past nuclear missiles like the Atlas, Titan, and Peacekeeper. For now, though, the missile goes by the inglorious acronym GBSD, for “ground-based strategic deterrent.” The GBSD is designed to replace the existing fleet of Minuteman III missiles; both are intercontinental ballistic missiles, or ICBMs. Like its predecessors, the GBSD fleet will be lodged in underground silos, widely scattered in three groups known as “wings” across five states. The official purpose of American ICBMs goes beyond responding to nuclear assault. They are also intended to deter such attacks, and serve as targets in case there is one.

Under the theory of deterrence, America’s nuclear arsenal—currently made up of 3,800 warheads—sends a message to other nuclear-armed countries. It relays to the enemy that US retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place. Many consider American deterrence a success, pointing to the fact that no country has ever attacked the United States with nuclear weapons. This argument relies on the same faulty logic Ernie used when he told Bert he had a banana in his ear to keep the alligators away: The absence of alligators doesn’t prove the banana worked. Likewise, the absence of a nuclear attack on the United States doesn’t prove that 3,800 warheads are essential to deterrence. And for practical purposes, after the first few, they quickly grow redundant. “Once you've dropped a couple of nuclear bombs on a city, if you drop a couple more, all you do is make the rubble shake,” said Air Force Maj. Gen. (Ret.) Robert Latiff, a Bulletin Science and Security Board member who, early in his career, commanded a unit of short-range nuclear weapons in West Germany.

Deterrence is the main argument for having a nuclear arsenal at all. But America’s land-based missiles have another strategic purpose all their own. Housed in permanent silos spread across America’s high plains, they are intended to draw fire to the region in the event of a nuclear war, forcing Russia to use up a lot of atomic ammunition on a sparsely populated area. If that happened, and all three wings were destroyed, the attack would still kill more than 10 million people and turn the area into a charred wasteland, unfarmable and uninhabitable for centuries to come.

The GBSD’s detractors include long-time peace activists, as you’d expect. But many of the missile’s critics are former military leaders, and their criticism has to do with those immovable silos. Relative to nuclear missiles on submarines, which can slink around undetected, and nuclear bombs on airplanes—the two other legs of the nuclear triad, in defense jargon—America’s land-based nuclear missiles are easy marks.

Because they are so exposed, they pose another risk: To avoid being destroyed and rendered useless—their silos provide no real protection against a direct Russian nuclear strike—they would be “launched on warning,” that is, as soon as the Pentagon got wind of an incoming nuclear attack. But the computer systems that warn of such incoming fire may be vulnerable to hacking and false alarms. During the Cold War, military computer glitches in both the United States and Russia caused numerous close calls, and since then, cyberthreats have become an increasing concern. An investigation ordered by the Obama administration in 2010 found that the Minutemen missiles were vulnerable to a potentially crippling cyberattack. Because an error could have disastrous consequences, James Mattis, the former Marine Corps general who would go on to become the 26th US secretary of defense, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2015 that getting rid of America’s land-based nuclear missiles “would reduce the false alarm danger.” Whereas a bomber can be turned around even on approach to its target, a nuclear missile launched by mistake can’t be recalled.

William J. Perry, secretary of defense during the Clinton administration (and the chair of the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors), argued in 2016 that “[w]e simply do not need to rebuild all of the weapons we had during the Cold War” and singled out the GBSD as unnecessary. Replacing America’s land-based nuclear missiles, he wrote, “will crowd out the funding needed to sustain the competitive edge of our conventional forces, and to build the capabilities needed to deal with terrorism and cyber attacks.”⁠ Russia has about 4,300 nuclear warheads, the only arsenal on par with America’s, and is also trading up for new weapons. Yet as Perry pointed out, “If Russia decides to build more than it needs, it is their economy that will be destroyed, just as it was during the Cold War.” China—a bigger long-term threat to the United States than Russia, in the eyes of many national security analyses—seems to understand that excessive spending on nuclear weapons would be self-sabotage. Even if, as the Pentagon expects, Beijing doubles the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal—now estimated at less than 300—it will still have far fewer than either the United States or Russia.

For many and perhaps most Americans, nuclear weapons are out of sight and mind. That $100 billion to replace machines that would, if ever used, kill civilians on a mass scale and possibly end human civilization is just another forgotten subscription on auto-renew. But those who do think about the GBSD mostly don’t want it. In a survey of registered voters conducted in October 2020 by the Federation of American Scientists, 60 percent said they would prefer other alternatives to the new missile, ranging from refurbishing the Minutemen to scrapping nuclear weapons altogether. Those results echo a 2019 voter survey, conducted by the Program for Public Consultation at the University of Maryland, that asked if the government should phase out its fleet of land-based nuclear missiles. Sixty-one percent of respondents—53 percent of Republicans and 69 percent of Democrats—said yes.

Which all leads to one question: Given the expense, doubtful strategic purpose, and lack of popularity, why is Washington spending so much to replace the Minuteman III?

The answers stretch from the Utah desert to Montana wheat fields to the halls of Congress. They span presidential administrations and political parties. They come from airmen and farmers and senators and CEOs.

by Elisabeth Eaves, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists |  Read more:

Image: ICBM launch site, Minot, North Dakota. Charlie Riedel/AP

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Vaccine Passports Don’t Have to Work to Be Effective

As more Americans get vaccinated, there is increasing talk of “vaccine passports.” There are strong emotional reactions to this idea, positive and negative, but my attempt at a more analytical view leads me to a conclusion that is not entirely satisfying (even to me): America should work to develop vaccine passports but never actually require them.

First, I am not impressed by the criticisms that vaccine passports will create an unfair two-tier society. Covid-19 already has done that. Not only are the 500,000 dead already in a highly disadvantageous “tier,” but the U.S. has been divided between those who can work at home — often higher earners — and those who cannot. If a vaccine passport system can help clean up this mess and accelerate recovery, it is likely to increase fairness on average.

The biggest advantage of vaccine passports is that they would encourage people to get the vaccine. Many people who are indifferent about getting it but want to be able to fly or attend a sporting event would have a strong inducement to hurry up and claim their doses. Getting vaccinated would also boost their health and job prospects, as well as protect others.

So far, so good. What are the problems?

One issue is what exactly constitutes proof of vaccination. For my vaccinations, I have been issued a rather flimsy, easy-to-forge paper document from the Centers for Disease Control. Unlike a passport or a dollar bill, it has no embedded watermarks or other protections. Anyone with a moderately sophisticated copy machine could create many fake documents, or perhaps steal an existing stash of these documents and sell them on the black market. Once you have the documents, you can simply note that you have been vaccinated, and it is not easy for outside parties to dispute such claims.

Soon enough, of course, it may be easier for most adults to get a vaccine than to forge a vaccine passport. Still, U.S. laws and regulations work better when they can refer to clear, verifiable standards of evidence. It is hard to imagine a set of laws or procedures based on criteria so loose that they basically allow anyone to claim they are vaccinated. A more stringent standard, however, would be hard for most vaccinated Americans to meet.

Another knotty question is which vaccines will count for the passport. Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s for sure, but what if you are a U.S. citizen living in Canada who received AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has been approved by some 15 nations but not the U.S.? Is the federal government willing to tell a whole class of responsible individuals that they cannot fly on U.S. planes? Or will the vaccine-passport bureaucracy be willing to approve vaccines that the Food and Drug Administration will not?

by Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: CommonPass via

Experimental Alzheimer's Drug Could Slow Cognitive Decline

Eli Lilly and Company's experimental intravenous drug donanemab could slow the cognitive decline of patients with Alzheimer's disease, according to early clinical trial results, published in The New England Journal of Medicine on Saturday.

The study included 257 patients with early symptomatic Alzheimer's disease; 131 received donanemab, while 126 received a placebo. The researchers found donanemab slowed the decline of cognition and daily function in Alzheimer's patients by 32% after 76 weeks, compared to those who received a placebo.

Taken over 18 months, that 32% slowing of decline could be noticeably impactful for Alzheimer's patients, noted Maria Carrillo, chief science officer at the Alzheimer's Association, who was not involved in the study.

'Six more months of better cognition'

"Out of 18 months, in comparison to the people that did not get the drug, these folks were declining six months slower," Carrillo said. "That's six more months of better cognition, better memories, better enjoyable times with your family."

Decline was measured using the Integrated Alzheimer's Disease Rating Scale, which measures both cognitive and functional ability, like memory and the ability to perform daily tasks.

Carrillo said the Phase 2 trial results are early but promising, and represent some of the most robust data on a single drug's ability to slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease.

"This has a lot of potential," Carrillo added. "It could be a first step towards slowing more significantly, or stopping, cognitive decline in these earlier stages, which would really be transformational for our field."

The researchers also looked at the drug's impact on the buildup of amyloid beta plaque and tau proteins, which are considered hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.

At 52 weeks, almost 60% of participants had reached amyloid-negative status, meaning their levels were at those of otherwise healthy people. At 76 weeks, amyloid plaque levels -- measured in centiloids -- decreased by 85 centiloids more than in those who received the placebo, the researchers reported.

Patients who reached these low levels of amyloid beta plaque were taken off of donanemab and given the placebo.

by Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN | Read more:
Image: Juan Gaertner/Shuterstock

17 Reasons to Let the Economic Optimism Begin

The 21st-century economy has been a two-decade series of punches in the gut.

The century began in economic triumphalism in the United States, with a sense that business cycles had been vanquished and prosperity secured for a blindingly bright future. Instead, a mild recession was followed by a weak recovery followed by a financial crisis followed by another weak recovery followed by a pandemic-induced collapse. A couple of good years right before the pandemic aside, it has been two decades of overwhelming inequality and underwhelming growth — an economy in which a persistently weak job market has left vast human potential untapped, helping fuel social and political dysfunction.

Those two decades coincide almost precisely with my career as an economics writer. It is the reason, among my colleagues, I have a reputation for writing stories that run the gamut from ominous to gloomy to terrifying.

But strange as it may seem in this time of pandemic, I’m starting to get optimistic. It’s an odd feeling, because so many people are suffering — and because for so much of my career, a gloomy outlook has been the correct one.

Predictions are a hard business, of course, and much could go wrong that makes the decades ahead as bad as, or worse than, the recent past. But this optimism is not just about the details of the new pandemic relief legislation or the politics of the moment. Rather, it stems from a diagnosis of three problematic mega-trends, all related.

There has been a dearth of economy-altering innovation, the kind that fuels rapid growth in the economy’s productive potential. There has been a global glut of labor because of a period of rapid globalization and technological change that reduced workers’ bargaining power in rich countries. And there has been persistently inadequate demand for goods and services that government policy has unable to fix.

There is not one reason, however, to think that these negative trends have run their course. There are 17.

1. The ketchup might be ready to flow

In 1987, the economist Robert Solow said, “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Companies were making great use of rapid improvements in computing power, but the overall economy wasn’t really becoming more productive.

This analysis was right until it was wrong. Starting around the mid-1990s, technological innovations in supply chain management and factory production enabled companies to squeeze more economic output out of every hour of work and dollar of capital spending. This was an important reason for the economic boom of the late 1990s.

The Solow paradox, as the idea underlying his quote would later be called, reflected an insight: An innovation, no matter how revolutionary, will often have little effect on the larger economy immediately after it is invented. It often takes many years before businesses figure out exactly what they have and how it can be used, and years more to work out kinks and bring costs down.

In the beginning, it may even lower productivity! In the 1980s, companies that tried out new computing technology often needed to employ new armies of programmers as well as others to maintain old, redundant systems.

But once such hurdles are cleared, the innovation can spread with dizzying speed.

It’s like the old ditty: “Shake and shake the ketchup bottle. First none will come and then a lot’ll.”

Or, in a more formal sense, the economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Daniel Rock and Chad Syverson call this the “productivity J-curve,” in which an important new general-purpose technology — they use artificial intelligence as a contemporary example — initially depresses apparent productivity, but over time unleashes much stronger growth in economic potential. It looks as if companies have been putting in a lot of work for no return, but once those returns start to flow, they come faster than once seemed imaginable.

There are several areas where innovation seems to be at just such a point, and not just artificial intelligence.

2. 2020s battery technology looks kind of like 1990s microprocessors

Remember Moore’s Law? It was the idea that the number of transistors that could be put on an integrated circuit would double every two years as manufacturing technology improved. That is the reason you may well be wearing a watch with more computer processing power than the devices that sent people into outer space in the 1960s.

Battery technology isn’t improving at quite that pace, but it’s not far behind it. The price of lithium-ion battery packs has fallen 89 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2010, according to BloombergNEF, and is poised for further declines. There have been similar advances in solar cells, raising the prospect of more widespread inexpensive clean energy.

Another similarity: Microprocessors and batteries are not ends unto themselves, but rather technologies that enable lots of other innovation. Fast, cheap computer chips led to software that revolutionized the modern economy; cheap batteries and solar cells could lead to a wave of innovation around how energy is generated and used. We’re only at the early stages of that process.

by Neil Irwin, NY Times | Read more
Image: Jordy van den Nieuwendijk

Fujimoto Masaru

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Roy Lichtenstein, The Sower from the Landscapes 1985
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Julien Baker

[ed. See also: Julien Baker - Rejoice | Audiotree Live.]

How Google's New Career Certificates Could Disrupt the College Degree

This morning, Google is announcing the next steps in its plan to disrupt the world of education, including the launch of new certificate programs that are designed to help people bridge any skills gap and get qualifications in high-paying, high-growth job fields--with one noteworthy feature:

No college degree necessary.

The new tools could be a game changer for a growing number of people who consider the current educational system broken, or for the millions of Americans who are currently unemployed, much due to fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.

"The pandemic has led to a truly horrible year," Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai tells Inc. in an interview. "But it has also created profound shifts along the journey to digital transformation in ways no one could have imagined."

The plan includes:

• The release of three new Google Career Certificates on Coursera in project management, data analytics, and user experience (UX) design
• A new Associate Android Developer Certification course
• Over 100,000 need-based scholarships
• Partnerships with more than 130 employers working with Google to hire graduates of its certificate program
• A new Google Search feature that makes it easier for people to find jobs for their education level, including no degree and no experience

Most enrollees will finish in six months or less, putting the cost at about $240 for U.S. students. Some may need only three months, cutting that cost in half. Google is offering 100,000 need-based scholarships in the U.S.

In an exclusive interview with Inc., Google shared further details and the thinking behind the new certificate programs and the broader "Grow With Google" initiative, its plan to help accelerate economic recovery and provide millions the opportunity to find a job or grow their career or business.

Why now

While the shift to digital was greatly accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, Google was in a unique position to observe a more gradual shift over the past several years. But as more and more digital jobs became available, it became obvious that there was a skills gap.

"You can't just say the next generation will naturally have the skills they need," says Pichai. "We saw a lot of unfilled positions when it came to jobs in tech. It was a supply mismatch. Yet people were hungry to fill those positions. So we asked ourselves, 'Why is there a gap?'"

One reason, explains Pichai, is that not everyone has access to a four-year degree, because of socioeconomic and other factors.

For example, when analyzing the data, Google noticed that the Google IT Support Professional Certificate program, which the company launched on Coursera in 2018 and served as a model for the new courses, enrolled a high percentage of students from nontraditional backgrounds. In addition to many not having a degree, 46 percent reported being in the lowest-income bracket, reporting less than $30,000 annual income.

So Google concluded it was important to offer programs that were available to as many people as possible ... and that taught in-demand, real-world skills. The programs should offer a clear path to a high-paying job and a stable career, or even be a steppingstone to starting a business.

Lisa Gevelber, vice president, Grow With Google, sums up the company's ambitious goal: "How do we create economic opportunity for everyone?" The result is a continually developing plan, with the online certificate programs at its core.

Each of the new certificate programs is available on the online course platform Coursera, which works with universities and organizations like Google to offer courses, certifications, and degrees in various subjects. Students will need to enroll with Coursera to take the new certificate programs.

But while the new programs offer a fast track to new skills and possibly even a new job in a fraction of the time of a degree program, students shouldn't expect the courses to be a walk in the park. "Gaining a certificate is based on passing the assessments," says Gevelber. "That proves someone can do the job."

And passing those assessments isn't easy. Gevelber describes them as "rigorous," with more than 100 assessments for each course. "It's not uncommon for a student to stumble even on their first assessment," she explains. "But we've worked with our course designers and a behavioral science team, along with Coursera, to make sure students know they're not alone, and help keep them from getting discouraged."

by Justin Bariso, Inc. |  Read more:

Image: Getty. Illustration: Chloe Krammel

The Case For Prince

The Case for Prince (Current Affairs)

Videos: YouTube

[ed. New fans always welcome. See also: Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists.]

The Bears Are in a Perfect Position to End Russell Wilson's Seahawks Career

Russell Wilson is the latest franchise star to put himself forward for this offseason’s game of quarterback musical chairs.

Wilson, his agent has been at pains to point out, has not officially demanded a trade from Seattle, but he has – in a delightfully passive-aggressive, Wilson-esque way – made it clear to the team’s decision-makers that he is unhappy with the direction of the franchise and that he would prefer to leave.

According to a detailed report in The Athletic, Wilson is unhappy with the team’s roster construction, the style of head coach/chief decision-maker Pete Carroll, and the Seahawks’ offensive system.

At the center of the rift are two practical elements. First, Wilson’s desire to play in a modern, pace-and-space system similar to that which the Kansas City Chiefs have built around Patrick Mahomes, with everything flowing through the quarterback. Second, Seattle’s awful offensive line, one that has ranked dead stinking last in pressure rate in three out of the past five seasons.

Carroll is an old-school, pound-the-run, play-solid-defense, don’t-turn-the-ball-over, coach. That served Wilson and the Seahawks well during the early years of the duo’s partnership. Behind an all-time defense, a bulldozing run-game led by Marshawn Lynch, and the playmaking brilliance of Wilson, the team went to back-to-back Super Bowls, winning one and losing the other. But as Wilson matured into one of the most well-rounded quarterbacks in the game and the roster around him disintegrated, Carroll did not evolve. He freed up the scheme and catered the system to Wilson in part, but the foundations remained run-first and risk-averse.

Whereas Wilson looked in the mirror and saw Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning – quarterbacks with the freedom to change the play at the line of scrimmage and who had near-complete autonomy over the system – Carroll looked at his quarterback and saw a fantastic cog in his machine. The scheme still won out. All the while, Wilson was taking a beating – no quarterback has been hit more since he entered the league, and no quarterback has been hit at the same rate over a three-year span as Wilson has between 2018-2021.

There was a change in philosophy last season though. After a three-year drum beat of #LetRussCook, an online movement that began to infiltrate the locker room – shorthand for Let Russell Wilson Pass More – Carroll handed Wilson the reins to the offense.

Still: the quarterback was seen as a player, not a collaborator. He was not offered the kind of quarterback-coach partnership that Rodgers, Manning and Brady had at the peak of their powers, the kind that Wilson believes he has earned over nine years. “I know that I’m a great football player,” Wilson said last season. “I know I’ve been great, I know I will be great, and I know I’ll continue to be great.”

And Wilson was great at the start of the 2020 season. Behind’s Wilson’s excellence, Seattle averaged four-and-a-half touchdowns per game over the first half of the season, the kind of total matched only by the Brady led Patriots of 2007, Manning’s 2013 Broncos, and the 2000 Rams – widely regarded as the best offensive teams of this century.

It was a stunning rebuke of the Carroll doctrine. Wilson had finally been allowed to cook, and he proved to be the best chef in the game. Through eight weeks, he topped the MVP charts; even Mahomes could not keep pace. Wilson was able to maintain all of the efficiency that has defined his game with even more explosiveness.

And then he cratered. After his best start to a season, Wilson flatlined over the final eight weeks. For the first time in his career, he finished outside the top 10 in Football Outsiders’ DVOA metric, a measure of a quarterback’s down-to-down efficiency (Wilson has been a demigod of DVOA over the span of his career). In a blink, Carroll returned to the Seahawks’ style of old. When Wilson tried to offer some input into the gameplan in the middle of last season’s decline, he was rebuffed by the coaching staff. Wilson stormed out of the meeting.

Like any great drama, Wilson’s real beef is not about how the team does things. It’s about respect. He wants to be a partner, a part of a decision-making board, not an employee. “The most important people in the building,” Seahawks general manager John Schneider told reporters back in 2018, “are the head coach and the quarterback.” Wilson wants to hold him to that.

by Oliver Connolly, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Seattle Seahawks

[ed. If the Hawks let Russ slip away I'll never forgive them. Do whatever it takes.]

JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace

JPG File Sells for $69 Million, as ‘NFT Mania’ Gathers Pace (NYT)

Image: Beeple, Everydays — The First 5000 Days

[ed. Rich people and their money. See also: 'Beeple Mania' (Duck Soup).]

The Philosophy of the Midlife Crisis

When he was thirty-five, Kieran Setiya had a midlife crisis. Objectively, he was a successful philosophy professor at the University of Pittsburgh, who had written the books “Practical Knowledge” and “Knowing Right from Wrong.” But suddenly his existence seemed unsatisfying. Looking inward, he felt “a disconcerting mixture of nostalgia, regret, claustrophobia, emptiness, and fear”; looking forward, he saw only “a projected sequence of accomplishments stretching through the future to retirement, decline, and death.” What was the point of life? How would it all end? The answers appeared newly obvious. Life was pointless, and would end badly.

Unlike some people—an acquaintance of mine, for example, left his wife and children to move to Jamaica and marry his pot dealer—Setiya responded to his midlife crisis productively. In “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide” (Princeton), he examines his own freakout. “Midlife” has a self-soothing quality: it is, Setiya writes, “a self-help book in that it is an attempt to help myself.” By methodically analyzing his own unease, he hopes to lessen its hold on him.

Setiya finds that the history of the midlife crisis is both very long and very short. On the one hand, he identifies a text from Twelfth Dynasty Egypt, circa 2000 B.C., as the earliest description of a midlife crisis and suggests that Dante might have had one at the age of thirty-five. (“Midway on life’s journey, I found myself / In dark woods, the right road lost.”) On the other, he learns that the term itself wasn’t coined until 1965, when a psychologist named Elliott Jaques wrote an essay called “Death and the Mid-life Crisis.” (Jaques quotes a patient’s eloquent lament: “Up till now, life has seemed an endless upward slope, with nothing but the distant horizon in view. Now suddenly I seem to have reached the crest of the hill, and there stretching ahead is the downward slope with the end of the road in sight.”) John Updike published “Rabbit Redux” in 1971. (“What you haven’t done by thirty you’re not likely to do.”) Richard Ford published “The Sportswriter” in 1986. (“You can dream your way through an otherwise fine life, and never wake up.”) In between, Gail Sheehy’s book “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” published in 1977, explored the midlife crisis from a psychological point of view. Sheehy, an accomplished investigative journalist—she also wrote “The Secret of Grey Gardens”—became an anthropologist of middle age. After interviewing many midlifers, she concluded that women, too, experienced midlife crises; they just had them earlier than men. “The years 35 to 39 are the infidelity years for women,” she told People, in 1976. Having “packed their last child off to school,” middle-aged women “want to restore illusions of youthful appearance, romantic love.”

After Sheehy’s book was published, everybody seemed to be having a midlife crisis. Perhaps, Setiya writes, people married too early during the conservative postwar decades, then reëvaluated their lives as the counterculture flowered. On the whole, though, research on the frequency of midlife crises tends to be equivocal. Many long-term studies of well-being show that people actually get happier as they age. (This lends credence, Setiya suggests, to Aristotle’s view that we grow into a “prime of life,” with the body achieving its fullest development at thirty-five and the mind at forty-nine.) Other studies show that there is a “U-shaped curve” to life satisfaction, such that we’re happiest when we’re young and old and unhappiest in between. (There are even studies of great apes, conducted by zoologists, which show that they get sad in middle age.) “Shit happens in midlife,” Setiya writes, “with kids and parents, work and health.” He is drawn to the work of the German economist Hannes Schwandt, which shows that “younger people tend to overestimate how satisfied they will be, while midlifers underestimate old age.” According to this theory, we could avoid midlife crises by calibrating our expectations.

If you’re a jerk, it’s useful to have a midlife crisis; it gives your irresponsible behavior an existential sheen. Almost certainly, the term is overused. Still, having experienced a midlife crisis himself, Setiya ends up convinced that they are an ordinary part of a well-lived life. He identifies a number of intellectual traps into which even the most levelheaded people can fall. Many have to do with the way we think about freedom and choice. Because the lives of middle-aged people have settled into more or less permanent shapes, for instance, people in midlife often become nostalgic for the feeling of choosing: they think, I want to do my job because I want to do my job, not because I need to pay the bills. With philosophical exactitude, Setiya explains the flaws in this kind of thinking. Suppose, he writes, that you can have just one of three desirable things—A, B, or C, in order of preference. Because there’s value in having a choice, there are situations in which a choice between B and C is actually preferable to A. Even so, the satisfaction offered by choice has a limit. Most of the time, the value of B or C plus the value of choosing won’t actually add up to the value of A. It’s exciting to choose a new career, but you’ll probably end up with an inferior job; it’s fun to date again, but your new spouse probably won’t be better than your current one.

Some middle-aged people wonder if they shoulda, coulda, woulda, or spend time wishing they could undo their worst mistakes; Setiya, for instance, wonders if he should’ve become a doctor rather than a philosophy professor. He urges the middle-aged to think in detail about what the alternative realities they contemplate would actually entail. Thanks to the “butterfly effect,” he argues, the alternative world in which you hadn’t made those mistakes would almost certainly exclude many of the things you currently value. (Had you chosen a different career, your children might not exist.) Setiya points out that the decisions that vex us most in retrospect also tend to be choices between “incommensurable goods.” Should you have worked on your novel or spent time with your family? Become a musician or an engineer? In Setiya’s view, regrets over such choices are good signs, since they reflect a healthy, multidimensional appreciation of life. “To wish for a life without loss is to wish for a profound impoverishment in the world or in your capacity to engage with it,” he writes. (Someone with a darker sensibility might have put it differently: there is no escaping loss, no matter how rich your life is.)

To many people, the increasing proximity of death is the worst thing about middle age. It doesn’t seem to bother Setiya very much: he points out that immortality would probably get frustrating after a while, and suggests getting over your own death in advance by imagining yourself coming to terms with the death of a friend. Instead, what really unnerves him is midlife ennui—the creeping sense of aimlessness and exhaustion that sometimes overtakes people as they age. The problem, Setiya finds, is that there’s something intrinsically self-defeating about getting things done. Once you’ve done them, you can’t do them anymore. “Having a child, writing a book, saving a life—the completion of your project may be of value, but it means that the project can no longer be your guide,” he writes. There’s a sense in which all goal-directed behavior is ironic: “In pursuing a goal, you are trying to exhaust your interaction with something good, as if you were to make friends for the sake of saying goodbye.” Setiya quotes Arthur Schopenhauer, who argued that life “swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom”; according to Schopenhauer’s rather grim view of existence, we spend our days struggling, then are rewarded for struggle with emptiness. “This is the problem with being consumed by plans,” Setiya concludes. “They are schemes for which success can only mean cessation.”

In an effort to evade this conundrum, Setiya brings out the philosophical heavy artillery. He draws on an Aristotelian distinction between “incomplete” and “complete” activities. Building yourself a house is an incomplete activity, because its end goal—living in the finished house—is not something you can experience while you are building it. Building a house and living in it are fundamentally different things. By contrast, taking a walk in the woods is a complete activity: by walking, you are doing the very thing you wish to do. The first kind of activity is “telic”—that is, directed toward an end, or telos. The second kind is “atelic”: something you do for its own sake.

by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Bernd Vogel / Getty

The Senate’s F-Bomb

Wow, stuff is … happening.

Joe Biden’s big virus relief plan is about to become law. And the Senate has confirmed Merrick Garland as attorney general.

“The president and his team must be thrilled that Senate Republicans are proving to be more fair and more principled on personnel matters than the Democratic minority’s behavior just four years ago,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell just before the Garland vote.

We will stop here for one second to recall that Garland would probably be on the Supreme Court now if McConnell had not refused to bring his nomination up for a vote when he was Senate majority leader. Along with blocking Barack Obama from filling 105 other judicial vacancies.

But hey, who’s bitter?

Not Biden, who’s ready to move on to the rest of his agenda: immigration, climate change, education, infrastructure …

Think about it, people. Spring is just around the corner. Soon you’ll be vaccinated, going out for dinner or the theater, or having a drink with friends. You can talk about the issues of the day, down to highway construction policy. Or the Biden German shepherds. When you want to keep things moving, just try bringing up pets, even the biters.

Or you can worry about filibusters. The only thing standing between Biden and real White House happiness is Republicans’ ability to demand 60 votes for passage of important legislation in a body that has 50 Democrats.

The coronavirus bill made it through because of something called budget reconciliation. We will say only that it just requires a majority, it doesn’t work for most bills and it’s not necessary for you to think about it any more right now. Really, contemplating filibusters is enough.

When it comes to something like the rules of the Senate, filibustering is a superstar. In our mind’s eye, we have a vision of an exhausting marathon in which a brave senator has the gumption to stand up and keep orating until his or her colleagues see the point.

That was a version that worked better in movies than in real life. In the hands of Southern racists, filibusters were a prime tool to stop change. And even now in the Senate, they’re mainly a threat to legislation aimed at helping minorities or the poor.

Alexander Hamilton certainly wasn’t a fan. He wrote that the point of demanding a supermajority to pass a bill is to “destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junto to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

When all else fails, it always helps to quote Alexander Hamilton. And if you’re trying to imagine a corrupt junto, picture McConnell hanging out with Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, with Lindsey Graham for a mascot.

We also tend to think of a filibusterer as somebody who has a way with words. But in the real world, oration is to filibuster as essay writing is to texting. Imagine somebody who waits to be recognized, says “pretend I’m talking,” and closes down the process for everybody else.

“It’s way too easy,” says Senator Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat who’s been a long-running opponent of the filibuster as it stands today. His solution, which makes perfect sense, is that anybody who wants to stall the Senate by staging a filibuster should actually have to keep talking.

Maybe they could also require everybody to listen to the debate. That’d certainly be the end of the game.

The bottom line on the filibuster is that it’s really, really hard to get anything ambitious through the U.S. Senate. There are exceptions — like nominations. And, as we just saw, some money bills. And, the Republicans insist, tax cuts. But once we get past celebrating Biden’s big coronavirus victory, all those proposals on immigration, voting rights, the environment and protecting union organizers are going to run into a Republican demand that the 50 Democrats produce a 60-vote majority or throw in the towel.

by Gail Collins, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter

[ed. See also: For Democracy to Stay, the Filibuster Must Go; and, Joe Biden Is a Transformational President (NYT). Biden (and especially the team he's assembled) have learned from Obama's big mistake of being overly cautious and trying to work with Republicans (the party of NO). Go big or go home, that's a progressive position, and the popularity of this bill should make moderate Dems reevaluate their usual reflexive timidity. Plus, it never hurts to give people money in politics (in this case, poor and middle class Americans who've never seen anyone but the 1 percent benefit).] 

RC Airbus A380 Second Flight

RC AIRBUS A380 SECOND FLIGHT
Rainer Kamitz was at the sticks and did an impressive flight. 

Builder and owner: Christopher Ferkl from Austria 

Scale 1/13 

Span: 6.13m / 20 feet 

Length: 5.60 m / 18.5 feet 

Weight: 102.7 kg / 226 pounds 

Turbine: 4 x JetsMunt 166 (here)​ 

Fuel capaticy: 12 liters / 2.2 gallons (UK)
Time to build 3 years / 1700 hours

via:

Gary Player: On Shooting His Age

When Gary Player is invited to reflect on the fact he is now the oldest living Champion Golfer, he instantly raises a smile.

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing,” he asks, before bursting into laughter.

In the course of a lengthy interview with Player to mark his 85th birthday on November 1, it soon becomes clear the statistic is one that understandably provokes feelings of great pride for the three-time Open winner.

“I think the word that comes to mind is gratitude,” says Player. “A lot of my golfing friends have passed away, so every day I’m aware of this and fortunately I’m very fit at the moment. (...)

Player’s extraordinary commitment to a healthy and active lifestyle is well-known, and he remains remarkably fit as he enters his 86th year. Such is his enduring energy, it is hard to believe 65 years have passed since he first travelled to The Open. (...)

The South African cannot recall the last time he completed 18 holes in a score higher than his age, and he continues to set new golfing goals for the years to come.

“The highest score I can think that I’ve shot in the last I don’t know how many years, I’m taking a guess, maybe 10 years, is 77,” he states emphatically. “On a normal golf course I average 72. I smash my age. I don’t beat it, I smash it.

“I’d like to beat it 3,000 times in a row. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that. And my other dream is to beat my age by 18 shots, a shot a hole.

“So the older I get, the easier it is, as long as I stay well. I work out hard, I rest well, I laugh a lot and I try to do the things to lead to longevity, but we cannot take health for granted.”

Player’s current fitness regime includes the “hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups” he has sworn by for decades, and he insists he feels much younger than his actual age.

“I try and exercise four times a week,” he says. “The things that I’m doing are showing that it’s right and leading to longevity.

“I still run the treadmill at max (speed) and I can run, I can swim, I can ride a horse. All these things at 85.

“Today it’s astounding when you hear that and it shouldn’t be. Because actually at 85 I feel like a young man.”

by The Open |  Read more:
Image: via
[ed. I saw something on Golf Channel about Gary shooting his age over 3000 times. I thought that couldn't be right, too crazy. Hardly anyone does that even once. Well...]

***

If you were playing in this era and having the benefit in using today’s equipment would your total number of majors and PGA TOUR wins be the same or even greater?

Definitely more! Hard to hit the ball off-line with today’s equipment. I have broken my age well over 2000 times and with the old equipment I couldn’t have done that. Don’t forget traveling without jets played a large part, plus perfect greens and bunkers that are exactly the same all over the world today.

Moby

Ricardo Montinez, Moby Dick
via:

[ed. See also: Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby-Dick (Journal of Humanist Mathematics - pdf); also One Drawing for Every Page of Moby Dick (Matt Kish).]

Melville spent almost four years at sea on several different ships, at one point spending a month in the South Pacific with a Polynesian tribe called the Typee. There was also time in Tahiti, Honolulu and elsewhere, finally returning to Boston on October 3rd 1844. On his return, after encouragement from friends and family, he began writing a fictionalised account of his experiences with the Typee tribe. The book, Typee, was submitted in the summer of 1845 to Harper Brothers, who immediately rejected it on the grounds that it was “impossible it could be true”. The manuscript was eventually accepted by Wiley and Putnam, and appeared in February 1846. He followed it up with Omoo (the title is the transliteration of a Polynesian word meaning “wanderer”). 

Omoo appeared in the spring of 1847. Melville was married in August 1847, to Elizabeth Shaw, and they moved to New York with Herman’s younger brother Allan and his new wife. From 1847 to 1849, Herman was very productive, writing most of Mardi, all of Redburn and White-Jacket, and in the first weeks of 1850 the first few chapters of a new book that would eventually metamorphose into Moby-Dick. Seafaring tales were popular at that time, and Melville’s books, especially the first two, were well received as part of that type. However with each succeeding book the reception was less positive, and indeed Melville himself was rather scathing about his own work. About Redburn he said “I, the author, know [it] to be trash, and wrote it to buy some tobacco with”. However, this was a fertile time creatively for Melville. As well as writing three novels, Melville was reading voraciously: “I have swam through libraries”, he said. He read Virgil, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Mary Shelley, Dante, Schiller, Thackeray and many others. It was also around this time that he met and became close friends with the author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who supplied one of the few descriptive remarks we have about Melville as a man: he was apparently, though a gentleman, “a little heterodox in the matter of clean linen”. 

Melville moved out of New York in the summer of 1850 and completed Moby Dick over the next year. It was published on November 14th 1851. Reviews were, to say the least, mixed. It was completely different from, and hugely more ambitious than, anything he had produced before. Readers hoping for a standard seafaring yarn would have been sorely disappointed. It almost sunk without trace in his lifetime — his lifetime earnings from it were a grand total of $556.37. Things got worse: his next novel Pierre was universally panned as was the vast majority of his subsequent work. He wrote almost no prose after 1853, the memorable exceptions being the compelling but strange novella Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853) and the late work Billy Budd (1889), which remained unpublished until 1924. He spent most of the last two decades of his life working for the United States Customs Service. He died on September 28, 1891, largely forgotten. 

(Ahab's Arithmetic: The Mathematics of Moby Dick)

Cesare Maggi, Playing golf in Sestriere, 1929

via:

Dr. B: Standby Site Wants to Help

Here in the U.S., the COVID-19 vaccination picture looks far rosier than it did even a few weeks ago. Nearly one in five Americans have received at least one dose, according to TIME’s vaccine tracker, the authorization of Johnson & Johnson’s shot brings a third vaccine onto the public health battlefield, and President Joe Biden recently moved up his vaccination timetable, saying on March 2 that the U.S. will have enough doses to cover all American adults by the end of May.

Yet spend any amount of time in one of the many ad-hoc Facebook groups where volunteers are helping eligible vaccine recipients book appointments, and it becomes clear that actually getting a shot remains a challenge for many—especially people who are less tech-savvy, less connected, or simply less able to spend hours on end refreshing websites in the hunt for a slot. Meanwhile, no-shows are a problem for vaccine providers: if somebody books a vaccine appointment but doesn’t show up—perhaps because they booked multiple appointments and forgot to cancel their extras—a dose could go to waste (since all doses in a vial must be administered within a certain amount of time after the vial is punctured), or at least be given to someone who doesn’t yet qualify.

Dr. B, an online vaccine standby list that quietly launched in January, aims to help solve both problems. Users enter their name, contact information and other details related to their vaccination priority ranking, like their occupation and medical risk factors. If a vaccine provider partnering with Dr. B has an extra dose, the platform sends a text message to nearby users based on their prioritization as set by their state or other jurisdiction. Users then have a limited window of time to claim that dose and get to the provider for their shot.

“We thought there needed to be a nationwide standby system where any vaccine provider who has excess doses indicates how many vaccines are available, and immediately it goes out to the appropriately-prioritized people based on local government priority criteria,” says Dr. B founder Cyrus Massoumi, a technology executive and investor best known as the founder and former CEO of medical appointment-booking site Zocdoc. Massoumi says he’s self-funding Dr. B, which is free for both vaccine recipients and providers.

At the moment, demand for Dr. B’s offering is clearly outstripping supply. More than half a million people have signed up for the service, but only two pilot providers are currently on board: one in New York and another in Arkansas. However, Massoumi says more than 200 other providers across 30 states have expressed interest. “They range everywhere from individual pharmacies in rural settings to homeless shelters, academic medical centers, you name it—it’s a pretty representative set of who’s actually giving the vaccine,” says Massoumi, though he declined to say how many people have been vaccinated so far via Dr. B. “It’s still early innings…we’re just trying to get every site up and running as quickly as we can.” While vaccination sites often have their own manually-run standby lists, there are obvious advantages to having a more universal tool, with more automated processes—Massoumi’s team is working on a way to occasionally ask registrants if they have already gotten their shot through other means, so they can trim the list and improve efficiency, for instance.

by Alex Fitzpatrick, Time |  Read more:

Image: Dr B 

[ed. Worth a try. More providers soon, so get on the list as early as possible. Dr B site here.]