The 2-Ingredient Espresso Tonic is the Drink of Spring

Here’s how to make the best one.

Espresso tonic

As Merlyn Miller wrote for Food & Wine, the espresso tonic first gained traction in Sweden in the mid-2000s, as it was allegedly created by a barista at Koppi Roasters in 2007. "It grew in popularity throughout Scandavia, and eventually made its way abroad through barista competitions, like the World Barista Championship," she wrote.

As she points out, its popularity is not incredibly widespread in the States, but the refreshing drink can be found on menus at Nashville's Barista Parlor, Brooklyn's Konditori and Chicago's F.R.O.T.H.

 

Now, I say it's refreshing because I personally love the taste of tonic water, which is a little different from club soda or sparkling water; tonic water is made with dissolved quinine and a hint of added sugar, resulting in a bitter, slightly citrusy flavor. As such, it actually enhances both some of the more bracing and floral notes in a shot of espresso.

You only really need two ingredients to make an espresso tonic so, as basic as it sounds, the key to making a great one is to choose good ingredients. While for a long time tonic water was a pretty limited category on American shelves, in recent years, a ton of craft makers have hit the market. One of my favorites is the grapefruit and lime-flavored Indian Tonic Water from Milwaukee's Top Note. The addition of the citrus flavor is really stellar. For a more classic "gin and tonic" tonic flavor, you really can't go wrong with Fentiman's Tonic Water.

In terms of espresso, you don't need a machine to get a good shot at home. You just need pressure — which can come from an AeroPress, a Moka Pot or even a French press. I found the brew guides from Intelligentsia to be incredibly helpful when learning how to do this myself. You can also use a bottled espresso or espresso concentrate, from brands like High Brew and Chameleon, which have become even more popular thanks to the espresso martini renaissance.

I've found a good ratio to be four ounces of tonic to two shots of espresso — ideally served over a single, outrageously large ice cube in a stout little glass. People argue about which goes in the glass first, but I'm partial to topping the tonic with the espresso simply because it looks cooler in the glass. See below:

By the way, if you are willing to add a third ingredient, a little squeeze of orange juice would take this drink over the top (though if you want to go all in on the orange juice/coffee mash-up, check out Mary Elizabeth Williams' recipe for orange coffee soda, inspired by Nashville's Steadfast Coffee). Also, if you don't tend to take your coffee black or find straight espresso to be too bitter, consider adding a swirl of flavored simple syrup to the mix.

by Ashlie D. Stevens, Salon |  Read more:

Images: Getty Images/Dudits; and, therustycoffeeopera/Instagram

Toots Thielemans

[ed. As Quicy Jones says, a bad MF. See also: this with Stevie Wonder.]

Paul Merwart (1855-1902, Polish) ~ Refuge before a Storm, 1880

via:

Gorillaz ft. Adeleye Omotayo

[ed. Official, animated version here.]

Michael de Adder

via:

'Crisis' Looms as 800,000 More Nurses Plan to Leave by 2027

The critical nursing shortage in the United States is going to get worse — much worse — according to results of a comprehensive National Council of State Boards of Nursing and National Forum of State Nursing Workforce Centers study released April 13.

About 800,000 nurses say they intend to leave the workforce by 2027, according to the study. To put this number in perspective, consider that approximately 100,000 nurses left the workforce during the pandemic — a fact that has already sounded alarm bells throughout U.S. healthcare. Combined, these numbers equate to one-fifth of the 4.5 million nurses in the workforce today.

"While we anticipated there would be a loss in the number of nurses in the workforce due to the pandemic, we did not expect to see data that clearly indicates we are headed towards a national health care crisis," Maryann Alexander, PhD, RN, chief officer of nursing regulation at the NCSBN, told Becker's.

"Most disconcerting and apart from any other data collected, our study indicates that of the 800,000 nurses with an intent to leave the workforce in the next five years, 24 percent of them are new, younger nurses," she said. "This is dramatically different from past surveys that have indicated that 'nurses with an intent to leave in the next five years' were of or nearing retirement age." (...)

"The data is clear: the future of nursing and of the U.S. health care ecosystem is at an urgent crossroads," said Dr. Alexander. "The pandemic has stressed nurses to leave the workforce and has expedited an intent to leave in the near future, which will become a greater crisis and threaten patient populations if solutions are not enacted immediately."

The NCSBN pointed out that "disruptions in prelicensure nursing programs have also raised concerns about the supply and clinical preparedness of new nurse graduates."

"There is an urgent opportunity today for healthcare systems, policymakers, regulators and academic leaders to coalesce and enact solutions that will spur positive systemic evolution to address these challenges and maximize patient protection in care into the future," Dr. Alexander said.

She presented the study findings April 13 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. This study examines a subset of the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey for analysis and provides population-based estimates. This is the largest national study that includes all levels of nursing practice (RNs, LPNs and APRNs) and includes data from over 300,000 nurses.

Key findings of the study:

Here's a breakdown of the study's main finding that one-fifth of 4.5 million nurses employed in the profession today say they intend to leave the workforce in the next four years. (Again, this statistic includes the 100,000 nurses who left the profession in the past two years.)

by Bari Faye Dean, Becker's |  Read more:

Image: via

Remembering Paul Allen

Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American business magnate, computer programmer, researcher, investor, and philanthropist. He is best known for co-founding Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which helped spark the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Microsoft went on to become the world's largest personal computer software company. Allen was ranked as the 44th-wealthiest person in the world by Forbes in 2018, with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death.

Allen quit from day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 after a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, remaining on its board as vice-chairman. He and his sister, Jody Allen, founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986, a privately held company that managed his business and philanthropic efforts. He had a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, including technology and media companies, scientific research, real estate holdings, private space flight ventures, and stakes in other sectors. He owned the Seattle Seahawks of the National Football League and the Portland Trail Blazers of the National Basketball Association, and was part-owner of the Seattle Sounders FC of Major League Soccer. In 2000 he resigned from his position on Microsoft's board and assumed the post of senior strategy advisor to the company's management team.

Allen founded the Allen Institutes for Brain Science, Artificial Intelligence, and Cell Science, as well as companies like Stratolaunch Systems and Apex Learning. He gave more than $2 billion to causes such as education, wildlife and environmental conservation, the arts, healthcare, and community services. In 2004, he funded the first crewed private spaceplane with SpaceShipOne. He received numerous awards and honors, and was listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2007 and 2008. (...)

Allen achieved a perfect SAT score of 1600 and went to Washington State University, where he joined the Phi Kappa Theta fraternity. He dropped out of college after two years to work as a programmer for Honeywell in Boston near Harvard University where Gates was enrolled. Allen convinced Gates to drop out of Harvard in order to found Microsoft.

by Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image:Jordanatvulcan/Wikipedia

[ed. My son's been invited to bring his physics students to one of Paul Allen's Institutes for a visit (I can't remember which one) and last night we were talking about his (Allen's) amazing achievements. Quite an extraordinary person. See also: Paul G. Allen, Microsoft’s Co-Founder, Is Dead at 65 (NYT). Plus, there's this: In Conversation: Quincy Jones (Vulture): 

Wasn’t Hendrix supposed to play on Gula Matari?
He was supposed to play on my album and he chickened out. He was nervous to play with Toots Thielemans, Herbie Hancock, Hubert Laws, Roland Kirk — those are some scary motherfuckers. Toots was one of the greatest soloists that ever fucking lived. The cats on my records were the baddest cats in the world and Hendrix didn’t want to play with them. (...)

Were there any rock musicians you thought were good?
I used to like Clapton’s band. What were they called?

Cream.
Yeah, they could play. But you know who sings and plays just like Hendrix?

Who?
Paul Allen. The Microsoft co-founder and multibillionaire has a collection of yachts and guitars to rival the world’s finest, both of which he apparently makes good use of..

Stop it. The Microsoft guy?
Yeah, man. I went on a trip on his yacht, and he had David Crosby, Joe Walsh, Sean Lennon — all those crazy motherfuckers. Then on the last two days, Stevie Wonder came on with his band and made Paul come up and play with him — he’s good, man.

Netflix: 'All The Light We Cannot See'

Fans of Anthony Doerr’s 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning novel All The Light We Cannot See have something to chew on today, with the release of the first trailer for Netflix’s adaptation, directed by Deadpool and Stranger Things(?!) producer Shawn Levy. Steven Knight, creator of Peaky Blinders, adapted the book for television.

The story follows Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a French girl blinded by cataracts at age 6, whose locksmith father taught her in childhood to understand the world through touch and memory, as she attempts to contact her father and uncle via a radio across enemy lines from a village in France, after the outbreak of World War II. Living alone in German-occupied Saint-Malo as a young woman, Marie-Laure comes into contact over the radio with Werner Pfennig, a German soldier and savant of sorts.

Levy told Vanity Fair that he went to great lengths to cast an actor in the role of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, finding Aria Mia Loberti in the haypile of audition tapes. Loberti is legally blind, and pursuing a doctorate in ancient rhetoric at Penn State. (Nell Sutton plays Marie-Laure in flashbacks.) Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and Louis Hofmann are also cast.

by Janet Manley, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Loved the book, trailer looks good. See also: 13 Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On; and, 22 (More) Adaptations Better Than the Books They’re Based On (LitHub).]

"Anti-Woke" Beer

"Anti-woke" Bud Light knockoff is $35 for a six-pack (Boing Boing)

Image: Ultra Right Beer

[ed. Faux indignation for profit. It's the American Way. (War on Christmas? Is that over already? Who won?)]

"In recent weeks, conservative activists have thrown an epic tantrum over the fact that Bud Light launched a Pride promotional campaign with a trans influencer because we live in capitalism and it is profitable for companies to launch PR campaigns that make their products appeal to different audiences. Now, a conservative political operative who previously worked on Donald Trump's presidential campaign has launched a Bud Light alternative called "Ultra Right Beer." At $20 per six-pack and roughly $12 in shipping, here's what you get:"

***

See also: Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Thick, Cracked Goggles of Grievance (NYT):

"But they have everything to do with the manner in which an alarming fraction of Americans regard and respond to political developments today. They look for evidence of offense to, and persecution of, whatever group of people they identify with. They invent that proof when it’s not there; when it is, they upsize it. Either way, their predetermined sense of grievance is the prism through which all is passed and all is parsed. It’s their Rosetta stone. It’s their binky."

Open Sesame

I’m not sure if I really believe in the AI doomerism stuff, but one thing I find discouraging is how often we screw up similar problems that are analogous to AI alignment (predicting how a complex system will behave given a set of rules) — but much easier.

For example, recently a law was passed with the goal of protecting people with sesame allergies, and the result is that now sesame is being put in many more products.

Seriously, I’m not kidding. The Food Allergy Safety, Treatment, Education and Research (Faster) Act, which was passed with bipartisan support, basically said:

• If you’re selling a food that contains sesame, it has to be labelled.

• If you’re selling a food that doesn’t contain sesame, you need to follow a bunch of burdensome rules, including careful cleaning of manufacturing equipment, to be absolutely 100% sure there is no contamination.

The result is that now a lot of companies are choosing to add small amounts of sesame to products that had previously been sesame-free, and labeling it. According to the article, this is causing some pretty serious hardship for people who are allergic to sesame:

The article also quotes some consumer protection advocates and politicians who had lobbied for the passage of the law. None of them apologized or took responsibility for the situation. (...)

This is a general problem in public policy. Sometimes political conflicts happen when different groups have competing interests, public choice theory, etc, and advocate for policies accordingly. But other times there are these alignment problems where we simply fail to correctly predict what the results of a policy will be, so the results don’t match our desired outcome even when we get the policy we’re advocating for.

by Mike Saint-Santoine, Mike's Blog |  Read more:

Image: via Wikipedia

Lawyers Lawyering

Fox was resigned to a tough trial. Then, a secret mediator stepped in.

For months, as the pretrial proceedings wore on and the embarrassing internal messages kept spilling into public view, executives at Fox News slowly resigned themselves to a miserable slog of a trial followed by a possible loss before a jury in the blockbuster $1.6 billion lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

Viet Dinh, the highest-ranking legal officer at Fox News’s parent company, Fox Corp., had offered a glimmer of hope. He had walked company founder and chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, who is Fox’s chief executive, through the legal issues and reassured them that the company could eventually prevail on appeal, even if it required going all the way to the Supreme Court, according to people familiar with the internal deliberations who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential conversations.

But at the close of Friday’s hearing in the blockbuster defamation case against Fox News, Judge Eric M. Davis of Delaware Superior Court asked the lawyers for both companies to try to work out their differences. Trial was set to begin Monday, and he implored them to see if they could find common ground.

The two sides obliged, and their lawyers spent the weekend attempting to hammer out a deal without getting far. The space between them was still vast. Running out of time, they sent an emergency email Sunday morning to longtime mediator Jerry Roscoe, who was floating down the Danube River.

As calculations by both companies slowly played out, the stakes were clear, not just for them but for the news media and even for the country itself: Dominion was seeking accountability for Fox’s role in spreading the false claim that Dominion machines had been used to steal the White House from former president Donald Trump, a democracy-shaking lie that helped spark violence on Jan. 6, 2021, and, more than two years later, this consequential defamation battle in court.

But now, there was one last shot for resolution on the eve of the most highly anticipated libel lawsuit in a generation.

“Would I be willing to mediate an important case?” Roscoe said, recalling the dramatic email he received while on vacation.

In an interview, Roscoe said he was soon reading thousands of pages of documents, scrolling through them on his phone overnight in preparation for swooping in at the last minute to try to end the dispute.

Publicly, there was no sign of change in the posture of the two companies. So it was a surprise Sunday night, as dozens of reporters were checking into their hotels in Wilmington, Del., girding themselves for a weeks-long stay, when a strange note was circulated by the public information officer for the court: Judge Davis would delay the trial by one day. No explanation was provided, only an assurance that Davis would say more in court the next morning.

Two people familiar with the case told The Washington Post on Sunday night that the delay was to allow time for the two sides to try to reach a deal. The talks were coming at the insistence of the judge, one said, lowering expectations of success.

But behind the scenes, Roscoe said, he commissioned calls with lawyers for both sides, trying to feel out their red lines. On Monday morning, he brought them together for their first call.

An hour later, Davis gaveled the court into session only briefly to announce that he would proceed with seating a jury in 24 hours and declared that such delays in complicated suits were hardly “unusual.” Dominion sent just one lawyer to sit in the courtroom for Davis’s low-key remarks, a hint that the real action might have been taking place elsewhere.

Roscoe said expectations were muted at first. The companies’ lead trial attorneys, Justin Nelson for Dominion and Dan Webb for Fox, had minimal roles, too busy continuing to prepare for the planned courtroom clash.

“The parties weren’t too optimistic that it was going to resolve,” he said.

Fox staff and executives had watched in horror as their unvarnished, and often vicious, internal messages about one another — and Trump — became public throughout the pretrial proceedings. Many of Fox News’s top executives, including CEO Suzanne Scott, arrived at the network at its founding, and some have never worked anywhere else. And since Roger Ailes, Fox News’s late co-founder, was forced out in a sexual harassment scandal in 2016, Fox has operated without a domineering force leading it.

Inside Fox, as the trial date neared, staffers dreaded the witness testimony that might come with it. Rupert Murdoch was expected to be called second in the witness lineup, right after Dominion’s PR representative, Tony Fratto, according to people familiar with the witness lineup. Lou Dobbs was expected to be the third witness. High-profile Fox News hosts such as Maria Bartiromo, Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity were also expected to be called, along with several behind-the-scenes staffers.

Revelations from pretrial discovery had been excruciating for the cable network, exposing a backbiting internal culture that featured employees who regularly doubted the content that aired nightly for millions of viewers. They privately rejected the myth that Trump had won the election, even as the network put forth conspiracy theories in the weeks after the November 2020 election. (...)

But Fox had insisted publicly it was standing up for the First Amendment by refusing to settle, claiming that Dominion was unfairly blaming it for airing allegations that at the time were being promoted by the president and his lawyers.

Despite the reassurance from Dinh, a trusted Murdoch adviser (and godfatherto one of Lachlan’s sons), who had taken on an outsize role at Fox Corp., Murdoch himself was inclined to settle the matter financially, as he has done many times in his career, the people familiar with the Fox deliberations said.

After that first call Monday morning, others quickly followed. Over Monday and into Tuesday, Roscoe estimated that he conducted as many as 50 calls with both sides. Some were long, others short, some on Zoom, others traditional phone calls. Lawyers and company executives joined, he said. When asked if Rupert Murdoch had joined the calls, Roscoe said that no potential witnesses had been part of the discussions with him.

“We were on the phone nonstop,” he said. “Emotions ran high.”

By Monday evening, they still hadn’t made progress, and both parties went to bed expecting a trial the next day. On Tuesday morning, the lawyers suited up and headed for the courtroom.

But outside the courtroom, Roscoe was making headway.

For the vacationing mediator, that required calling in from his hotel, a boat, even a bus, holding his phone in his winter coat for privacy.

Roscoe said that he quickly ascertained that Dominion’s monetary demand was not the only issue keeping the two apart. They were also divided by a dispute over the language that Fox would release acknowledging the court’s ruling that Fox had spread falsehoods about the company.

But over many calls, the sides got closer.

by Sarah Ellison, Josh Dawsey and Rosalind S. Helderman, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Rachel Wisniewski/Washington Post

[ed. Oh to be a fly on the wall to those conversations.]

Masters Champions Dinner

Masters 2023: What really goes on at the Champions Dinner, according to those in the room (Golf Digest)

Image: Augusta National GC/uncredited

[ed. One of the most exclusive dinners on earth.]

"Winning the Masters brings many rewards, but attending the Masters Club dinner might be the most intrinsically meaningful. However far removed each man is from his respective success, he gets to bask in the glow of his triumph as part of golf’s most cherished brotherhood. Through that prism, the memories become amplified, shared nostalgia stirring an elixir of renewal. Something happens at that dinner; it’s a feast of fulfillment."

The Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but Should

You might think you already know your family’s stories pretty well—between childhood memories and reunions and holiday gatherings, you may have spent hours with your parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles soaking up family lore. But do you really know as much as you think?

As a professor of anthropology, I have always been fascinated by the stories that families tell, and a few years ago, I started researching the tales that are passed down from generation to generation. Part of my motivation was personal. When my mother died in 2014, I realized how much I didn’t know about her life. I never asked the questions that haunt me now—questions about what interactions she had, what it was like to live in her time in the places she did. I wish I had a fuller sense of her as a person, especially how she was when she was young, with a lust for life.

In my research, I have been astonished to find that so many other people also know little of the lives of their parents and grandparents, despite the fact that they lived through some pretty interesting decades. Even my students, some of whom majored in history and excelled at it, were largely in the dark about their own family history. Our elders may share some familiar anecdotes over and over again, but still, many of us have no broader sense of the world they lived in, and especially what it was like before we came along. The people I interviewed knew so little about their grandparents’ or parents’ early lives, such as how they were raised and what they experienced as young people. Few could remember any personal stories about when their grandparents or parents were children. Whole ways of life were passing away unknown. A kind of genealogical amnesia was eating holes in these family histories as permanently as moths eat holes in the sweaters lovingly knitted by our ancestors.

As I interviewed more people, many of them parents or grandparents themselves, I became interested in hearing their stories and learning about their childhood. I developed a set of questions designed to get a person talking about the past in a way they never had before. Their answers opened whole new worlds to me, and reflected each person’s unique place in history. I heard some things I expected, but I was also surprised and delighted. I gained a new appreciation for those I interviewed—and for humanity as a whole. And I became convinced of the value of preserving these family histories. Doing so helps you learn more about not only your relatives, but also yourself and a period in history that might otherwise feel remote. 

The questions I created, which I lay out in my new book, The Essential Questions: Interview Your Family to Uncover Stories and Bridge Generations, span 13 different topics. They include basic background information, such as where someone was born, as well as more abstract inquiries, such as how someone conceives of their identity, what they believe in, and what they’ve noticed about the passage of time. Specificity is key, so after asking a relative about the home they grew up in, follow up with requests for details: What did their windows look out onto? What did they hear when they woke up in the morning? When you ask for descriptions of an elder’s childhood home and the neighborhoods they roamed around, you’ll hear stories that place you in a rich sensory world you knew little about. So ask what family dinners were like and what your relatives were taught about expressing emotion. Ask about their worst first dates and where they bought their clothes. And remember that the most important questions can also be the plainest. One of my favorites is just “What do you wish people knew about you?”

The reason many people don’t know very much about their grandparents or even their parents is surprisingly simple: They’ve never thought to ask and didn’t have the right questions.  (...)

But even hearing about ordinary life can be interesting—because what was ordinary for your grandparents is likely not what’s ordinary for you.

So give it a try. You may be surprised by how much your parents and grandparents haven’t told you, perhaps because they thought you wouldn’t be interested, or they weren’t sure how you’d judge them. Just as the precious oral literatures and histories of whole communities are being lost the world over through rapid change, migration, language death, and a failure to ask, there is a risk that your family’s personal stories, too, will be lost forever. Your parents and grandparents have unique snapshots and memories of the world they knew, and in learning about them, you can not only preserve the past but also create lasting meaning and connection. In families and communities, there are secrets to be discovered.

by Elizabeth Keating, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty; The Atlantic
[ed. This is certainly something I wish I'd done more of. I don't know a thing about my great- grandparents, and only a few memories of the times I spent with my grandparents. As for my parents - there's the period I spent growing up with them, and vacations as an adult, but otherwise, their interior lives and most personal experiences remain a mystery. That kind of information, perspective, and continuity is something I'd like to pass on. How much they'd have disclosed is another matter.]

The Gentrification of Disability

When I was in my late 20s (early 2007 to mid 2009, maybe) I worked for the local public school district in my hometown. For the bulk of my time there I was in a special program for kids with severe emotional disturbance, which I’ve written about once or twice. But I worked in a number of capacities in those years, and for a little while I helped out in a conventional special ed classroom for the middle school. I guess you’d say I was a paraprofessional, just extra coverage when they needed it.

In that class there were two boys who had autism which resulted in severe academic and social and communicative impairments. One of them was completely nonverbal and had been his entire life. As I understood it, he had never been capable of speaking or reading, could not dress himself, wore sanitary garments, could not go to the bathroom without assistance. He would occasionally screech very loudly, without clear cause. I believe these days he would be referred to as having Level Three autism, as defined by the DSM. He needed a lot of help, and though he was unable to complete what might conventionally be called academic work the school provided him with structure, support, and time during which his mother didn’t have to care for him. I met her on several occasions when she came to pick him up after school. She would sometimes talk about the difficulties of raising a disabled child in language that would be frowned on today, but I admired how frank and honest she was.

She was really not a fan of the autism awareness community of the time. This was well before the “neurodiversity” movement and all of its habits. It was all about awareness, raising awareness, 5ks for awareness, bumper stickers for awareness. That was precisely what angered her the most. She said to me once, “What does awareness do for my kid? How does it help me?” Words to that effect. It was a good question, one I couldn’t answer. Today I don’t hear about awareness so much, but there’s still plenty of the basic disease of awareness thinking - the notion that what people who deal with a particular disability need is a vague positivity, that what every disabled person requires is the laurel of strangers condescendingly wishing them the best. Now, with the rise of neurodiversity and the notion that autism is only different, not worse, we are confronted with similar questions. When a mother struggles every day to care for someone who will likely never be able to care for himself, what value could it hold for her that his condition is called diversity, rather than disorder? What value can it have for him, who cannot speak to comment on the difference?

I thought of that mother when I read about the recent cancelation of an academic panel at Harvard. It seems a panel of experts was slated to speak on the subject of how best to help those with autism. But as they planned to speak about treatment, about treating autism as a hindrance to be managed, the event was decried as “violently ableist” by Harvard activists and swiftly shut down. It’s worth looking at the petition that was organized as part of this effort. One part reads

Autism is a neurodevelopmental and neurobiological disability that is not treatable or curable. It is not an illness or disease and most importantly, it is not inherently negative. Autistic people at Harvard and globally have advocated in the face of ableism to defend ourselves from such hateful, eugenicist logic.

This is, I think, nonsensical. It asserts that autism is a disability, a dis-ability, but also that it’s not an illness, a disease, or inherently negative. But the very concept of disability depends on the notion that disabilities are inherently negative. If they are not in some sense disabling, the term has no meaning. What’s more, the entire moral and legal logic that underpins the concept of reasonable accommodation - the affordances we make for people with disabilities, mandated by the Americans with Disabilities Act - depends on the idea that these things are both unchosen and harmful. If they’re not, then there’s no communal obligation to accommodate them. What would they even need accommodation for? (...)

In the years that followed my brief employment at the school district, the ideology that led to people like King was born. In the early 2010s there was a flurry of interest in autism. Dozens of books and hundreds of essays were written about autism, almost all of which talked about it as a set of valuable personality quirks rather than as a disorder. In article after ponderous article, autism was described as a newer, perhaps better way of thinking, sometimes even a “new evolution” for the human species. Always, always, always, this navel-gazing fixated relentlessly on the highest-functioning people with autism. You could read tens of thousands of words in this genre without ever once being informed about the existence of those whose autism debilitates them. Whenever I read yet another article talking about how some high-achieving computer scientist saw their autism as the key to their success, I would think of those whose autism has prevented them from enjoying all manner of elements of human life. Where were those people in all of that hype? Will Tyler Cowen ever write a book about them? Are they ever going to appear on the cover of Forbes magazine or whatever the fuck? No. They have been replaced; in their stead, we have members of the striving classes whose autism has never prevented them from flourishing at everything they’ve ever tried. And since “autism is not a disorder” has become the enforced opinion, those whose autism plainly is a disorder have to be marginalized - by the very people who complain about the marginalization of the “neurodiverse.” Autism has been gentrified.

This is a dynamic I now cannot stop seeing: once a human attribute like autism or mental illness becomes seen as an identity marker that is useful for social positioning among the chattering class, the conversation about that attribute inevitably becomes fixated on those among that chattering class. It becomes impossible to escape their immense social gravity. The culture of that attribute becomes distorted and bent towards the interests and biases of those who enjoy the privilege of holding society’s microphone. Because you must be able to effectively communicate to take part in the conversation, and because all of the usual privileges of class and circumstance influence whose voice sounds the loudest, the discussion becomes just another playground for college-educated urbanites. To speak you must be able to speak, literally, and you must also enjoy the privileges of communicative competence and educated-class signaling mechanisms. So we will always tend toward a conversation that defaults to the interests of the least afflicted. This is inevitable; it’s baked into the system.

We could overcome this problem if the people in the arena were dedicated to fronting (excuse me, “centering”) the interests of the most afflicted. But we can’t have that. We can’t have that because contemporary disability ideology is obsessively fixated on telling people to center themselves. That is perceived to be the entirety of the work: every individual with a disability must demand that the world sees them as “valid,” that they are just as authentically disabled as anyone else, that their ADHD grants them perfectly equal priority in receiving accommodation as someone who’s paralyzed from the neck down. The whole social culture of disability activism and studies is leveraged to support the individual’s demand for attention and proper respect; it cannot countenance the notion that there are those who we should put before ourselves. And the obvious impulse to say that someone who faces total debilitation from their disorder should, in fact, be a higher priority for the medical and therapeutic communities is treated as the height of bigotry.

I am watching, in real time, as the same process of gentrification that overtook autism overtakes mental illness. (...)

We used to say, “you wouldn’t stigmatize someone with diabetes, would you?” And there was wisdom in that. An obvious corollary is that you wouldn’t make having diabetes core to your identity, either; you wouldn’t try to sell diabetes as the most interesting thing about you. I don’t know why we walked away from that insight. Today we have the usual demand to have it both ways, to be seen as one’s disorder when convenient for differentiating ourselves from the pack and then setting aside that definition when uncomfortable. Again, the truly disabled can’t do this. They do not deftly craft facades from their disorders, lacking the self-control and capacity for social scheming required to do so. They aren’t afforded the possibility of ignoring their condition when convenient. Yet the voice of the ambitious and shameless patient seeking validation and coin for being sick is becoming the voice of mental illness, those unprincipled enough to treat it all as marketing. Mental illness should not be fodder for building your personal brand. (...)

Our mental disorders are a part of us, and thus are inevitably a part of our personalities. I have never said that those who suffer from them should try to excise their mental illnesses from their sense of self or treat it as a troubling secret to be hidden from the world. (That would be weird, if I said that.) I have said that it’s unhealthy to define your essence through what are, I remind you, diseases. For one thing, as I recently pointed out this tactic may seem to provide succor when you’re young but will inevitably fail you when you grow older. For another, there’s this awful, prurient tendency now for young people who want to have careers as “creatives” to leverage their mental illness for book deals and YouTube hits, making themselves spectacles and trading dignity for attention. They splash their diagnoses on every part of their self-presentation online, hoping to appear cool and romantically unstable and fuckable in doing so. (“Dude, I’ve always wanted to hook up with like a really crazy girl!”) I find this psychically perverse, but it also means that their direct incentive is to not get better. If your career is being mentally ill, your financial stability depends on not effectively treating that mental illness. 

by Freddie deBoer, FdB |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. I'm reminded of Cat Marnell's autobiography, How To Murder Your Life. A couple reviews here and here. Excerpt here.]

via:

The Empty Basket

Economics is the language of power and affects us all. What can we do to improve its impoverished menu of ideas?

Up to the 1970s, economics was populated by a diverse range of ‘schools’ containing different visions and research methods – classical, Marxist, neoclassical, Keynesian, developmentalist, Austrian, Schumpeterian, institutionalist, and behaviouralist, to name only the most significant. These schools of economics – or different approaches to economics – had (and still have) distinct visions in the sense that they had conflicting moral values and political positions, while understanding the way the economy works in divergent ways. I explain the competing methods of economists in my book Economics: The User’s Guide (2014), in a chapter called ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom – How to “Do” Economics’.

Not only did the different methods coexist but they interacted with each other. Sometimes, the competing schools of economics clashed in a ‘death match’ – the Austrians vs the Marxists in the 1920s and ’30s, or the Keynesians vs the neoclassicals in the 1960s and ’70s. At other times, the interactions were more benign. Through debates and policy experiments tried by different governments around the world, each school was forced to hone its arguments. Different schools borrowed ideas from each other (often without proper acknowledgement). Some economists even tried the fusion of different theories – for example, some economists fused the Keynesian and the Marxist theories and created ‘post-Keynesian’ economics. (...)

Since the 1980s, however, economics has become the British food scene before the 1990s. One tradition – neoclassical economics – is the only item on the menu. Like all other schools, it has its strengths; it also has serious limitations. This ascent of the neoclassical school is a complex story, which can’t be adequately considered here.

If told, the story would have many ingredients. Academic factors – like the merits and demerits of different schools, and the increasing dominance of mathematics as a research tool (which advanced knowledge of particular kind while suppressing others) – have mattered, of course. However, the ascent has also been critically shaped by power politics – both within the economics profession and in the outside world. ... In terms of power politics beyond the profession, the neoclassical school’s inherent reticence to question the distribution of income, wealth and power underlying any existing socioeconomic order has made it more palatable to the ruling elite. The globalisation of education during the post-Second World War era, in which the disproportionate ‘soft’ cultural power of the United States has been the biggest influence, has played a crucial role in spreading neoclassical economics, which had become dominant in the US first (in the 1960s).

But, whatever the causes, neoclassical economics is today so dominant in most countries (Japan and Brazil, and, to a lesser extent, Italy and Turkey are exceptions) that the term ‘economics’ has – for many – become synonymous with ‘neoclassical economics’. This intellectual ‘monocropping’ has narrowed the intellectual gene pool of the subject. (...)

Some readers may legitimately ask: why should I care if a bunch of academics become narrow-minded and engage in intellectual monocropping? However, you should all care, because, like it or not, economics has become the language of power. You cannot change the world without understanding it. In fact, I think that, in a capitalist economy, democracy cannot function effectively without all citizens understanding at least some economics. These days, with the dominance of market-oriented economics, even decisions about non-economic issues (such as health, education, literature or the arts) are dominated by economic logic. I have even met some British people who are trying to justify the monarchy in terms of the tourist revenue it allegedly generates. I am not a monarchist, but how insulting is it for the institution to be defended in that kind of way?

When so many collective decisions are formulated and justified with the help of the dominant economic theory, you don’t really know what you are voting for or against, if you don’t understand at least some economics. (...)

We all know that economic theories affect government policies regarding taxes, welfare spending, interest rates and labour market regulations, which in turn affect our daily material lives by influencing our jobs, working conditions, wages and the repayment burdens on our mortgages or student loans. Economic theories also shape the long-term collective prospects of an economy by influencing policies that determine its abilities to engage in high-productivity industries, to innovate, and to develop in an environmentally sustainable way. But beyond even that: economics doesn’t just influence economic variables, whether personal or collective. It changes who we are.

Economics shapes us in two ways. First, it creates ideas: different economic theories assume different qualities to be at the essence of human nature, so the prevailing economic theory forms cultural norms about what people see as ‘natural’ and ‘human nature’. The dominance in the last few decades of neoclassical economics, which assumes that human beings are selfish, has normalised self-seeking behaviour. People who act in an altruistic way are derided as ‘suckers’ or are suspected of having some (selfish) ulterior motives. Were behaviouralist or institutionalist economic theories dominant, we would believe that human beings have complex motivations, of which self-seeking is only one of many; in these views, different designs of society can bring out varying motivations and even shape people’s motivations in diverse ways. In other words, economics affects what people see as normal, how people view each other, and what behaviour people exhibit to fit in.

Economics also influences who we are by affecting the way the economy develops and thus the way we live and work, which in turn shapes us. For example, different economic theories offer contrasting views on whether developing countries should promote industrialisation through public policy intervention. Different degrees of industrialisation, in turn, produce a variety of types of individuals. For example, compared with those who live in agrarian societies, people who live in more industrialised countries tend to be better at time-keeping, as their work – and consequently the rest of their lives – is organised according to the clock. Industrialisation also promotes trade union movements by amassing large numbers of workers in factories where they also need to cooperate much more closely with each other than in farms. These movements in turn create centre-Left political parties that push for more egalitarian policies, which may be weakened but do not disappear even when factories disappear, as has happened in most rich countries in the past few decades.

We can go further and assert that economics influences the kind of society we have. First, by shaping individuals differently, varying economic theories make societies of contrasting types. Thus, an economic theory that encourages industrialisation will lead to a society with more forces pushing for more egalitarian policies, as explained above. For another example, an economic theory that believes humans to be (almost) exclusively driven by self-interest will create a society where cooperation is more difficult. Second, different economic theories have different views on where the boundary of the ‘economic sphere’ should lie. So, if an economic theory recommends privatisation of what many consider to be essential services – healthcare, education, water, public transport, electricity and housing, for example – it is recommending that the market logic of ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ should be expanded against the democratic logic of ‘one-person-one-vote’. Finally, economic theories represent contrasting impacts on economic variables, such as inequality (of income or wealth) or economic rights (labour vs capital, consumer vs producer). Differences in these variables, in turn, influence how much conflict exists in society: greater income inequality or fewer labour rights generate not just more clashes between the powerful and those under them but also more conflicts among the less privileged, as they fight over the dwindling piece of pie available to them.

Understood like this, economics affects us in many more fundamental ways than when it is narrowly defined – income, jobs and pensions. That is why it is vital that every citizen needs to learn at least some economics. If we are to reform the economy for the benefit of the majority, make our democracy more effective, and make the world a better place to live for us and for the coming generations, we must ensure some basic economic literacy.

by Ha-Joon Chang, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Christopher Furlong/Getty
[ed. Also, from the comments:]

"The effect of economics on politics is an important force which is mentioned in this piece. However, the effect of politics on economics is an idea which doesn’t seem to get much attention anywhere despite, as this article points out, the fact that neoliberalism has reached a point of largely unchallenged orthodoxy.

At least at one time, there was a saying that if you want to find the truth follow the money. Can it be entirely coincidental that neoliberalism, which inherently skews the distribution of wealth massively towards the wealthy, has reached ascendancy independant of political considerations?"

Barry: Awesome Chase Scene

Barry: this hitman comedy is one of the most overlooked and brilliant shows on TV (The Guardian)
[ed. Wow. An awesome chase scene that really takes it's time.]

This Planet Will Not Survive Capitalism

Alan MacLeod: This planet will not survive capitalism. (Twitter)

[ed. I'm waiting for zippered bananas.]

Ahmad Jamal

Ahmad Jamal, influential jazz pianist, dies aged 92 (The Guardian)

[ed. See also: Jazz Piano Innovator Ahmad Jamal Is Dead at Age 92 (Honest Broker).]

Hypebeast Culture: An Introduction

At its origins, hypebeast is a derogatory term. A hypebeast is a person who lives and breathes fashion and gets most expensive, most ‘hyped’ streetwear. If every culture has its geeks, then hypebeasts, are the geeks of streetwear. A hypebeast is someone who gets sucked in and absorbed with all the latest drops from streetwear brands - often paying big money to get hold of the latest gear.

The other defining feature of a hypebeast is that they love their brands – and most importantly the logo on their clothes - to be seen. The clothes produced by hypebeast-type brands are intentionally conspicuous. Based on streetwear styles, they invariably feature big, bold logos that make it more about the brand than the cut, the style, or anything else. It’s almost a case of if the logo isn’t seen, then what’s the point?

The hypebeast blog

The word hypebeast is also significant because it’s the name of an influential media site, which, at its origins, was all about hypebeast culture. In 2005, the underground blog known as HYPEBEAST was founded by Kevin Ma. At the time, it was difficult to find information about exclusive sneaker drops, so the site proved to be a useful resource for fashion-obsessed youth.

After attracting the attention of hip-hop artist Lupe Fiasco, and eventually Kanye West (the site even got a mention in one of Kanye’s tracks) the once underground blog was propelled to international renown. In recent years, the blog - now a fully-fledged media site - has branched out from its origins to cover other aspects of fashion and culture. But it remains true to hypebeast culture, covering product drops from all the brands that hypebeasts rave about.

Hypebeast and status

Hypebeasts are primarily interested in the most expensive streetwear brands on the market. This means that hypebeast culture clearly carries an aspirational element. In theory, it symbolises self-made success, rising from humble origins on the streets. But for many, that narrative has long gone, and hypebeast fashion has just become a generic status symbol that’s lost much of its authenticity. It still clearly serves the function of a status symbol though & shows that the person who owns it can afford it.

It’s for this reason that streetwear, and hypebeast culture in particular, occupy a fascinating space in culture today. The roots of hypebeast culture come from streetwear. But what happens when a streetwear brand becomes a multinational brand? And what happens when a streetwear brand uses exclusivity to drive prices up? The answer is that a swathe of young men and women, looking to establish a sense of identity, and looking for symbols to affirm their place in the world, latch onto it.

There’s nothing wrong with status symbols, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with aspiration. But the most common critique you’ll hear of hypebeast culture is that hypebeasts are ultimately being mugged off by the brands they love so much. You might imagine that everyone understands that fashion brands are profit-driven enterprises. But hypebeasts seem to lack a certain level of awareness about their relationship to the brand. Looking at it one way, hypebeasts spend a lot of money to become walking billboards.

Hypebeast vs streetwear?

When you think about the origins of streetwear - which is about individuality and self-expression - the idea of today’s hypebeast culture can seem almost unrelated. How did we get here, and how will streetwear and hypebeast culture co-exist in the future?

It’s clear that streetwear means different things to different people. And the words ‘hypebeast’ and ‘streetwear’ don’t belong to anyone, so no one gets to define it. It may have come from the streets, but now it’s out there in the open, and in the global marketplace. That means it’s up for the taking for anyone who wants to have a say.

by Nautica |  Read more:

Image: uncredited