Peak Hydration

In 2023 Hydration Became a Lifestyle. Giant Stanley cups, WaterTok, Erewhon’s $26 luxury water. This year it seems we were thirstier than ever.

This September, Brooke Shields had a rough night at L’Artusi in Manhattan. She’d been preparing for her one-woman show, “Previously Owned by Brooke Shields,” by hydrating. A lot. Shortly after she entered the restaurant, everything started to go black. She was having a grand mal seizure. “I had had too much water,” she told Glamour. “I flooded my system, and I drowned myself.” Luckily, L’Artusi’s sommelier called an ambulance, and Shields made a full recovery at the hospital. “I didn't know. I just kept thinking I was hydrating," she said in a later interview.

You can hardly blame Shields for her overhydration. Drinking more water is good for us we’re always told, and hydration is the key to health. Drinking enough water each day has been a pillar of wellness advice for years, but in 2023, something tipped hydration culture into overdrive. The viral water brand Liquid Death is a cult favorite of Gen Z, and Liquid IV, which bills itself as a “hydration multiplier” and is used as a preemptive hangover cure, claims to be closing in on a billions dollars in net sales. Prime Hydration, the beverage line created by social media giants Logan Paul and KSI, is also on track to pass a billion dollars in sales this year, even as experts raise eyebrows at its caffeine content. A Le Creuset-like fandom has sprung up around those enormous and apparently indestructible Stanley reusable water bottles, and the widely panned AirUp bottle somehow went viral on TikTok, where #WaterTok also surged in popularity. In 2023, it seems we were thirstier than ever.

Plain tap water isn’t enough because it’s not doing enough for us; drinking a glass of tap water only slakes our thirst for a moment. In our endless quest for hydration, we need Water Plus: It must have vibes, or taste like candy, or go through a rebranding process so mind-bending that it self-describes as a “nonalcoholic seltzer.” It’s no longer good enough to drink only when you’re literally thirsty. We’re told to consume our beverages, be they water, electrolyte solutions, or influencer-peddled caffeine bombs, more often and faster than ever. In exchange, we’re promised more energy, a better immune system, better sleep, a better life.

You might know Ophora water—”water for wellness,” as its website proclaims in large letters—from one of several TikToks that went viral this year. It’s sold at Erewhon for a bold $26. It is the ultimate Water Plus, the apex of uber-hydration. It starts with purity: Ophora claims to filter out contaminants like microplastics and potentially harmful chemicals that many other filtered waters still contain. It balances pH to make the water alkaline, and the big sell is its “hyper-oxygenation”—which means oxygen is stabilized in the h2O at a density of 40 parts per million, the company says. Ophora claims to have patents pending for the technology it uses to infuse the water with “high levels of molecular oxygen,” which creates water that allegedly increases energy, decreases inflammation, enhances cell detoxification, and reduces sports recovery time.

Ophora is more than just $26 bottled water: The company will install a complete water filtration system in your home, or set you up with an entire hot tub or pool filled with nothing but Ophora water. “The skin is the largest organ on your body,” a spokesperson says earnestly in one video. “Imagine soaking in a hot tub that's 102 degrees that has 30 parts per million of oxygen penetrating your body.” That’s a lot of penetration. Ophora says drinking and bathing in its water will lead to benefits including more energy and less sickness. Testimonials claim the water has led to weight loss, improved metabolism, and the sensation that “the ocean doesn’t feel as cold.” Meanwhile, water experts are skeptical.

For four days, I only drank Ophora water. Its bold claims of being “the world’s healthiest water” rang in my ears as I hoped that true hydration would be all it’s been promised to be. I had four jugs of 64 ounces that I would drink over four days. Near the cap, each jug had a single loop big enough for one finger to slip in—not ergonomic, but perfect for tilting it up to your mouth for a quick swill. I recorded my weight, body fat percentage, and resting heart rate at the start of my journey, feeling optimistic. (...)

With a pH level of 8, Ophora water is slightly basic. Studies on the effects of alkaline water on the body have shown mixed results—some studies (funded by companies that sell alkaline water) suggest it could improve hydration in athletes, but experts are doubtful of other claims, like detoxification. Still, I felt vindicated to learn that nausea, stomach aches, and even vomiting are side effects to drinking alkaline water as it can upset the pH balance of your body. Were four days of intense stomach pain simply the price I had to pay for the ocean to feel less chilly? (...)

Even if I did, not even Ophora could fill the colossal role we’ve created for hydration. Anistacia Barrak-Barber is a water sommelier (yes, it’s a real thing) and holds a Water Center Certificate from Columbia University—basically, she loves water and has studied its effect on our bodies. Barack-Barber is a great proponent in the supposed healing properties of mineral waters—specifically as it pertains to digestion and the absorption of minerals our body needs, like calcium. (Some mineral waters have been shown to aid in digestion, and have increased bioavailable calcium.) When it comes to Ophora, though, she’s a non-believer. “The scientific testing doesn't really bear out what Ophora promises,” she wrote in an email. Some research seems to agree. A 2006 study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine concluded that “oxygenated water fails both quantitative analysis and practical physiological tests of exercise performance and recovery,” and that “significant intestinal absorption of O2 is unsubstantiated.” In other words, it acted a lot like normal water.

There have always been those who proselytize about the healing effects of water, but bottled water didn’t take off in America until the 1970s, when Perrier essentially created the market. In the 2000s, the big beverage makers Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola got into the bottled water game with familiar brands like Dasani and Aquafina. As more people became distrustful of tap water (rightfully so, in some regions), and diet culture became more prevalent in the American psyche, waters branded as speciality and small-batch, like Fiji Water, became more coveted. In the mid-2010s, brands like SmartWater that offer features like pH balance and added electrolytes defined what optimized water might look like—that is, water formulated for athletic performance. Now, we get our hydration from any number of products, from sports drinks to electrolyte powders to ionized, antioxidant-producing water.

by Sam Stone, Bon Appétit |  Read more:

Image: Qianhui Yu
[ed. See also: Why People Are Camping Out at Target for the Valentine’s Stanley Tumbler; and, #WaterTok: What Ever Happened to Just Drinking Water? (NYT); and, We’ve Reached Peak Beverage (BA):]

***

"At seemingly every supermarket and drugstore, I’ve tripped over a dozen hard seltzer displays spilling into the aisles. I kept my cool through the influx of cactus, hop, birch, aloe, probiotic, and adaptogenic waters; through the canned highballs, sake spritzes, and margaritas (a few quite good), flavored lattes, sparkling cold brews, and redundantly conceived “hard” kombuchas. I didn’t even overreact that time I brought home an energy drink I’d mistaken for tangerine-flavored sparkling water—mostly due to humiliation that I somehow missed ENERGIZE shouting in all caps on the box. (...)

The global ready-to-drink (RTD) market reached $89 billion as of 2022, according to research company Transparency Market Research. The firm also estimates that the North American RTD beverage market will hit somewhere between $13.9 and $22.3 billion by the end of this year. Between 2020 and 2021, premade, spirits-based RTD makers increased revenues by 42 percent in the US, no doubt buoyed by recurring periods of at-home happy hours due to the pandemic."

College Bowl Games: Send in the Memes

After winning the Pop-Tarts Bowl on Dec. 28 in Orlando, Fla., Kansas State’s football team gathered on the field around a garage-size toaster that was protected by a pair of mall cops wearing “Snack Security” shirts.

An unusual chant erupted — “Toast that mascot! Toast that mascot!” — as Strawberry, a giant Pop-Tart with limbs, climbed to the top of the toaster, bopping along to the disco-era beat of “Hot Stuff,” by Donna Summer.

“We will always love you, Strawberry,” the announcer Jason Ryan Perry said over the stadium’s public address system. “Can’t wait to eat you.”

For nearly three hours, Strawberry had worked the crowd as one of the surprise stars of the game — and of the entire college bowl season, which was no small feat for an anthropomorphized breakfast pastry. By the time Strawberry tossed aside a sign that read “Dreams Really Do Come True” so that it could happily slide through a slot and have its crust toasted to golden-brown perfection, the internet was about to crater.

Sure enough, Strawberry soon emerged from the toaster as an edible version of itself. The victorious players pounced, gorging themselves on Strawberry by the handful until all that was left — R.I.P., Strawberry — was its left eye.

“I think those guys were really hungry,” Heidi Ray, the senior director of brand marketing for Pop-Tarts, said in a telephone interview.

In a crowded marketplace, the Pop-Tarts Bowl — renamed this year after having previously been the Cheez-It Bowl, the Camping World Bowl and several other monikers — managed to do something special: elevate an otherwise ordinary game into a viral sensation.

Michigan and Washington will face off in the College Football Playoff national championship game Monday night, but in an era in which there are more than 40 bowl games a season, with only two of them — the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl, serving as national championship semifinals — carrying any sort of significance, the Pop-Tarts Bowl won the internet.

Or, at the very least, it shared the internet championship with the Duke’s Mayo Bowl. (...)

With so many mostly meaningless bowls — the Guaranteed Rate Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl, the Radiance Technologies Independence Bowl and the Avocados from Mexico Cure Bowl — the most intense competition is not necessarily between teams on the field but among the brands that are hoping for a fleeting (and profitable) moment of virality. (...)

When Duke’s Mayo, a condiments company based in Richmond, Va., began sponsoring the game in 2020 — it had previously been sponsored by, among others, Meineke Car Care Center — the feeling was that the company “needed to do something different to make mayonnaise cool again,” said Joe Tuza, the condiments president of Sauer Brands, which owns Duke’s Mayo. In partnering with college football, the brand has sought to capitalize on its share of made-for-the-internet moments, both planned and unplanned.

Since 2021, the winning coach of the game has gotten drenched with a cooler full of mayonnaise as Tubby, the brand’s aggressively eyebrowed mascot, triumphantly raises his arms and Mr. Tuza stands nearby with a cartoon-size check. The incentive for the coach is that $10,000 goes to a charity of his choice.

“Every time I’m up onstage with the trophies, the players start chanting, ‘Mayo dump! Mayo dump!’” Mr. Tuza said. “It’s like a payoff for them to see their coach get doused after all the hard work they’ve put in.”

And while various skeptics, including Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs, a noted mayonnaise hater, have questioned whether it is actually mayonnaise, Mr. Tuza and Mr. Yoho both vouched for its authenticity.

“It’s 100 percent mayonnaise,” Mr. Yoho said. “I’ve smelled it. They have to stir it to get the viscosity right.”

by Scott Cacciola, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeremy Reper/USA Today Sports, via Reuters
[ed. Grumpy old man comment: appalling. Beyond the corporate branding of nearly everything in life, this'll probably be the last game most players in these bowls ever play. Imagine working all season (all your life actually) building toward a goal and be awarded the Pop-Tarts Championship and trophy (to show your grandkids)? Ackk.]

via:
[ed. Blog maintenance]

Down In the Groove

 

“Sometimes I feel like Forrest Gump,” Ray Wylie Hubbard says. “I’m just hanging around, and things happen.”

Like Forrest Gump, the character played by Tom Hanks in the 1994 film of the same name, Hubbard has a history of seemingly stumbling into connections with famous people. His past albums have contained guest appearances by Lucinda Williams, Eric Church, Joe Walsh, Chris Robinson, Ronnie Dunn, Patty Griffin, Tony Joe White and Ashley McBryde, His newest album, Co-Starring Too, features Ringo Starr, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, Randy Rogers, James McMurtry, Hayes Carl and Wynonna Judd.

It’s easy to get the wrong impression from this roster of guests. While it’s true that Hubbard hasn’t chased after these big names, neither is it true that the collaborations were as accidental as Gump’s. When you’re 75 years old and have been releasing albums for 57 of those years, your music has a way of sneaking into places you’d never suspect. “When you put these records out,” Hubbard marvels over the phone from his home in Wimberly, “you never know who’s listening to them.”

A case in point is his unexpected friendship with Starr. “About eight years ago,” Hubbard recalls, “someone told me, ‘Ringo’s been talking you up on his website.’ I went to the site, and Ringo had written, ‘This is what I’ve been listening to: some mono Beatles tracks that George Martin sent me, the new Dylan thing, and this guy from Texas going, ‘Snake farm, ooh-woo-woo.’

“A few months later, my drummer Rick Richards and I are playing McCabe’s in California, and Brent Carpenter, the guy who does all of Ringo’s videos, is there. He says, ‘Ringo’s at the Greek Theatre tomorrow night, and he wants you to come.’ So we go, and I introduce Rick as ‘my band.’ Ringo liked that my whole band was a drummer. He asked me to come on stage and sing ‘With a Little Help from my Friends’ with him at the end of his show.

“Six months after that, my wife Judy is opening the mail, and she says, ‘Damn, I have to lose seven pounds.’ Why’s that? I ask. ‘Because we’ve been invited to the wedding of Joe Walsh and Marjorie Bach.’ It turns out that after his divorce, Joe was living with Ringo and his wife Barbara Bach. When Ringo put ‘Snake Farm’ on, the two Bach sisters started dancing around, and when Joe’s eyes met Marjorie’s, the rest was history.”

Like Gump, Hubbard presents a mirror that allows other people to see themselves. In contrast to Gump, whose very blankness invited reflection, however, Hubbard presents a mirror crowded with paradoxical aspects to identify with. Hubbard’s song “Snake Farm,” for example, championed by Starr and recorded by Paul Thorn, Bobby Bare, Waymore’s Outlaws and many more, has something for everyone.

If, like Starr and Bare, you have a weakness for jovial humor, you’ll enjoy the song’s suggestion that the Texas tourist trap “just sounds nasty” and it “pretty much is.” If, like Hubbard’s Red Dirt disciples, you enjoy barroom sing-alongs, the song’s “ooh-woo-woo” refrain is hard to beat. If, like Thorn, you appreciate the more gothic aspects of Southern culture, the song’s python-tattooed, malt-liquor-swilling, ticket-taking protagonist Ramona is made for you. And if, like the song’s original producer, Gurf Morlix, you savor a greasy blues groove, this song boasts one of the best.

“Ray is deep down in the mud with those grooves,” says Morlix, who plays bass and/or guitar on six of the new album’s 11 tracks. “All the emotions are mixed in — it’s the lowdown rhythm of the earth itself. It’s the blues, of course, but it’s also that dirty beat. There are a handful of songwriters I know of who can approximate that same feeling with the rhythm, but none can write lyrics like Ray does. No one. Dylan could maybe come close, but … no … not even him.” 

There’s a song on the new album simply called “Groove” that explicates the musical side of Hubbard’s appeal. Opening with the funkiest of bass lines by the late George Reiff and supplemented by Bukka Allen’s high-pitched organ squeal, the song practices what it preaches. The groove, Hubbard sings, “came about when a woman was walkin,’ sashayin’ down like she owned the street. A man with a guitar emulated that and fabricated a lowdown beat.” (...)

The roots of Hubbard’s two recent, guest-loaded albums go back to 2019. He was playing a show in Nashville, when Julian Raymond, an A&R rep for Big Machine Records, Taylor Swift’s original label and Tim McGraw’s current home, asked Hubbard what he’d been up to.

“I’ve been making a record,” the singer-songwriter replied, “and I’ve got a song with a Beatle, an Eagle, a Black Crowe and a Was (Not Was) on it.” He wasn’t lying. The album he was cutting for his own label, Bordello Records, opened with the song “Bad Trick,” which featured help from Starr, Walsh, Chris Robinson and Don Was. “I’d like to hear that,” replied Raymond. That’s how the album, Co-Starring, and this year’s sequel, Co-Starring Too, both wound up on Big Machine Records rather than Bordello.

So it wasn’t like this Nashville major label paired Hubbard with a bunch of guest stars. The collaborations were the result of folks volunteering to work with Hubbard on a record intended for his own small label. And they do so because songs like “Snake Farm” stand out like islands in an ocean of mere cleverness and competence. The lyrics are so surprising and visual and the music so slinky and catchy, fellow musicians want to be part of those songs. (...)

The devil makes three appearances on Hubbard’s 2017 album, Tell the Devil I’m Gettin’ There as Fast as I Can. On the title track, the devil is the promoter of a show at Austin’s Continental Club, and the narrator keeps calling from the interstate to say he’s running late — not just for the show but also for every dream he’s ever had. (...)

“I believe in spiritual awakening, not religious conversion,” says Hubbard, trying to explain his personal philosophy. “As an agnostic guy who believes in voodoo, you hope someone’s praying for you. I’ve resigned myself to the four possible outcomes: heaven, hell, nothing or reincarnation. All the comparative religions’ idea of hell is scary. I don’t know if I want to go to heaven because of the clientele. So I prefer reincarnation. I don’t understand it, but it’s as logical as the other three. I try not to steal anxiety from the future.”

by Geoffrey Himes, Texas Music |  Read more:

Videos: YouTube/Ray Wylie Hubbard

[ed. My buddy Jerry (from Texas) turned me on to this article. We're both big RWH fans and he just got back from a concert road trip to Luckenbach, Texas. Been enjoying Ray's music ever since his Up Against the Wall Redneck Mother got named dropped by Jerry Jeff Walker on his famous Viva Terlingua album (recorded in Luckenbach), which pretty much put country outlaw music on the map and shot it into orbit.]

Academia Will Not Love You Back

I have always loved academia. I am the only child of an academic, and I grew up thinking that the academy was the “last good place,” where there was intellectual freedom and inquiry coupled with a modest, middle-class income. I loved college. I admired my professors. I wanted to be like them. When I began graduate school in the 1990s, I was assured by my advisors that there would soon be a job boom: all of the faculty who were hired in American academia’s decades of expansion were about to retire. There would be a need for assistant professors in all fields, nationwide.

That did not happen.

Instead, as this older generation retired, university administrations replaced them with adjunct faculty, to whom they did not have to pay benefits and could pay a paltry wage, with non-tenure-track instructors, who would teach heavy course loads for low pay, and with graduate students, who cost next to nothing. As I went on the job market, there were often hundreds of applicants for every tenure-track job. (One very polite and considerate rejection letter informed me that the search committee was very impressed with my work, but that there were over seven hundred applicants for the position. I have since served on such committees, and it’s heartbreaking so see all of the wasted talent.)

The academic job market did not grow. It shrank—drastically.

It has since gotten much, much worse. I was one of the lucky ones—at least in one sense—because I landed a tenure-track job, one of the few available nationally in my field the year that I went on the market. I was fortunate enough to place an article in a top journal in my final year of graduate school, and that was just the edge that I needed. Since then the faculty in our department has aged in place, with very few hires. We have lost our specialists in the eighteenth century and British Romanticism to retirement, and these lines have not been replaced. With falling enrollments in the field, we cannot justify the hires, and we must cover those areas as well as we can with the faculty we have.

Our university administration clearly sees humanities faculty as a (barely) necessary annoyance, as is the case in most public universities these days. It is all about STEM fields and professional schools and grant money, especially as state appropriations for higher education have shrunk. The only values are economic. Students have gotten the message and are avoiding the humanities like the plague. We have had only one small raise in the last ten years (which amounted to less than one year of inflation), and we do not receive cost-of-living adjustments, so while I have no desire for great wealth, I find myself in the process of becoming poorer and poorer every year as I gain seniority in my profession, as my spending power diminishes to the point that a middle-class life seems to be slipping away. Again, I’m one of the lucky ones. My non-tenure-track colleagues are in even worse financial straits.

Meanwhile, the university has built a new football stadium and a deluxe football practice facility, has bought a second hospital, and has hired numerous vice presidents (don’t ask me what they do all day; they certainly don’t teach), all of whom make well into six figures. Our president (who does not hold an advanced degree and is not an academic but a former politician) is one of the most well-compensated of any regional public university in the country and makes a base salary of more than half a million dollars a year, not including perquisites. We have a brand new, luxurious alumni center. This is a national trend: see this recent article from The New York Times.

And here is the thing: our administration knows that they have us over a barrel. They hold all the cards. Pick your metaphor. They know that the job market is so bad that tenured faculty don’t have options if they want to remain in the field, so they don’t have to pay us a reasonable salary. And if we did end up leaving, they really wouldn’t care. Either they would replace us with even cheaper labor, or they wouldn’t replace us at all. (And I mean cheap labor. Our graduate students’ annual teaching stipends amount to $8000, a number that has not changed in over two decades. Adjunct pay is far below the poverty level, with no benefits and no health insurance.)

by John Halbrooks, Personal Canon Formation |  Read more:

Image: Vadim Sherbakov on Unsplash

[ed. I don't know. Seems like general stupidity and civic/political buffoonery are at epic levels these days and somehow universities keep wading into that swamp up to their necks (see post below about Harvard). Why? Why make political statements at all if you can avoid them? And these armies of bureaucratic paper shufflers. Dropping humanities programs left and right but infusing curricula with more and more DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) courses/policies, while STEM graduates face a bleak AI future. The whole enterprise is looking more corporate and lost every year. See also: Are Harvard Graduates Better Than Harvard Dropouts? (THB); and, Why the Humanities are Indeed Worth Teaching (NYT).]

Singing the Blues

Millgram et al (2015) find that depressed people prefer to listen to sad rather than happy music. This matches personal experience; when I'm feeling down, I also prefer sad music. But why? Try setting aside all your internal human knowledge: wouldn’t it make more sense for sad people to listen to happy music, to cheer themselves up?

A later study asks depressed people why they do this. They say that sad music makes them feel better, because it’s more "relaxing" than happy music. They’re wrong. Other studies have shown that listening to sad music makes depressed people feel worse, just like you’d expect. And listening to happy music makes them feel better; they just won’t do it.

I prefer Millgram’s explanation: there's something strange about depressed people's mood regulation. They deliberately choose activities that push them into sadder rather than happier moods. This explains not just why they prefer sad music, but sad environments (eg staying in a dark room), sad activities (avoiding their friends and hobbies), and sad trains of thought (ruminating on their worst features and on everything wrong with their lives).

Why should this be?

Let’s review control theory, ie the theory of homeostasis and bodily set points.

Many of your body systems have set points. For example, your temperature set point is usually around 98.6 degrees F. If you’re out in the snow and get colder than 98.6, your body will kick in various heating mechanisms (like shivering) until it’s back at the set point. If you’re out in the desert and get hotter than 98.6, it will kick in cooling mechanisms (like sweating) until it’s back.

Your inner thermostat acts through both conscious and unconscious processes. The examples above - shivering and sweating - are mostly unconscious. The conscious process is that when your body goes too far below 98.6, it makes “your conscious mind” “feel” “cold”. That “incentivizes” “you”, the “conscious” “actor”, to do things like go indoors, or put on a jacket, or turn on your space heater. You can think of the feeling of coldness as the conscious projection of the wider homeostatic drive to become warmer.

Although specific set points (eg 98.6) are set by evolution, they’re not hard-coded. Master regulatory systems can change set points in response to changing demands. For example, when you get infected by a heat-sensitive pathogen, your immune system might choose to boil it away, and increase your inner thermostat to (let’s say) 102 (instead of 98.6). Now you have a fever.

The funny thing about fevers is that you feel cold. Someone with a fever shivers. They demand to cover themselves in blankets. All of this makes sense, right? Your inner thermostat notices you’re at 98.6, and that’s colder than the desired temperature of 102. So it activates unconscious regulatory processes (like shivering) and conscious regulatory processes (like making you feel cold). Since you consciously feel cold, you engage in heat-seeking behaviors. You cover yourself in blankets, or turn up the space heater. This seems paradoxical (why does someone with a fever, ie someone who is too hot, feel cold?!) but it’s perfectly logical from the control theory perspective. (...)

Now let’s take it all the way:

In depression, you are dangerously sad, but instead of trying to cheer up, you feel “driven” to perform behaviors that make you even sadder. (...)

Depression is often precipitated by some psychosocial event (like loss of a job, or the death of a loved one). It’s natural to feel sad for a little while after this. But instead of correctly activating regulatory processes to get mood back to normal, the body accepts the new level as its new set point, and tries to defend it.

By “defend it”, I mean that healthy people have a variety of mechanisms to stop being sad and get their mood back to a normal level. In depression, the patient appears to fight very hard to prevent mood getting back to a normal level. They stay in a dark room and avoid their friends. They even deliberately listen to sad music!

The feverish person feels too cold, and the anorexic person feels too fat, so we might expect the depressed person to feel too happy. I think something like this is true, if we put strong emphasis on the “too”. One of the official DSM symptoms of depression is “feelings of guilt/worthlessness”. A depressed person will frequently think things like “I don’t deserve my friends / job / money / talents.” In other words, they believe they’re too happy! They think they deserve to be sadder! (...)

Psychologists already suspect the existence of a happiness set point (thymostat?); this is the principle behind ideas like the "hedonic treadmill". So my theory here is that at least some cases of depression involve recalibrated happiness set points. A set point can either recalibrate randomly (ie for poorly understood biological reasons) or after a specific shock (ie interpreting a prolonged period of sadness as "the new normal"). Once a patient has a new, lower, happiness set point, their control system works to defend it. It enlists both biological systems (possibly changing the levels of various neurotransmitters?) and behavioral systems to defend the new set point. If it "succeeds", the person maintains an abnormally low mood.

by Scott Alexander, ACX |  Read more:

Video: Tony Joe White/YouTube

[ed. Here's Tony feeling better: Undercover Agent for the Blues.]

Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own: Harvard's Claudine Gay Resigns

In retrospect, Claudine Gay’s fate was sealed by a single word. (She resigned the presidency of Harvard on Tuesday, just six months into her tenure.) It wasn’t “plagiarism” or “genocide” — the fearsome fighting words most publicly associated with her case — but rather a careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect. The word was “context.”

Testifying at a congressional hearing in early December with two other university presidents — only one of whom, Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T., still has her job — she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (Republican of New York; Harvard ’06) whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated “Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment.” Dr. Gay replied that it might, “depending on the context,” a formulation she reiterated when Ms. Stefanik rephrased the question. Dr. Gay later apologized for those remarks, but they had already entered the media bloodstream, making her and her fellow witnesses an overnight meme representing the insensitivity and cluelessness of elite academic leadership.

Now that Dr. Gay is out (following M. Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned shortly after the hearing), there is more than enough context to go around. Her career, until last July a steady, brisk climb through faculty and administrative ranks to the pinnacle of American higher education, has become a punditic bonanza and a culture-war Rorschach test. (...)

The Israel-Hamas conflict and American election-year politics are not the only salient context here. Academia seems to be in the grip of a multidimensional crisis that goes beyond ideology, and also beyond Harvard. Higher learning is plagued by opaque admissions policies; runaway tuition costs; administrative bloat; grade inflation; helicopter parents; cancel culture. The list goes on. An assiduous scholar might connect these phenomena with recent events in Harvard Yard. An enterprising writer could weave the whole thing into a bristling campus novel, something worthy of Paul Beatty or Mary McCarthy.

Instead, for now, we will have to make do with Dr. Gay’s letter of resignation — emailed to students, faculty, alumni and others with the subject line “Personal News” — and the message from the Harvard Corporation (the university’s secretive governing body) about her departure.

What is most striking about these texts — each amounting to little more than 600 words, all of them carefully measured, few of them memorable — is their rigorous avoidance of context. No mention is made of Congress, or Gaza, or anything that might actually explain what happened. “We live in difficult and troubling times,” the corporation’s letter asserts, “and formidable challenges lie ahead.” The nature of the trouble is mainly left unspoken, in keeping with an overall commitment to abstraction, as if bland, nonspecific language could wash away the difficulty. It’s only when the letters note what the corporation calls the “repugnant and in some cases racist vitriol” Dr. Gay faced as Harvard’s first Black president that they register some of the rawness and rage of contemporary reality. (...)

What’s curious, though, is that Harvard, which compels its undergraduates to master expository writing in their freshman year, cannot find the language to defend itself. The corporation does not apologize or explain. Instead, it throws up its hands in prayer: “May our community, with its long history of rising through change and through storm, find new ways to meet those challenges together, and to affirm Harvard’s commitment to generating knowledge, pursuing truth and contributing through scholarship and education to a better world.”

The clouds of mystification gather early. Can a nearly 400-year-old entity that began as a seminary for young Protestant men and grew into a global educational brand with a $50 billion endowment be said in any meaningful sense to constitute a community? The sentence then succumbs to a storm of clattering prose and conceptual incoherence. It’s hard to know just what or how many things Harvard is committed to, or what new ways of affirming that commitment might be found.

by A.O. Scott, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Adam Glanzman for The New York Times
[ed. Covered previously here, in this post: 'The Only War is Culture War'. Now: Harvard Must Learn The Lessons of President Gay’s Troubled Tenure; and, The Rise and Fall of Harvard President Claudine Gay (Harvard Crimson). Finally, see also: Fire Them All; God Will Know His Own (Harvard Crimson):]

***

"Across the University, for every academic employee there are approximately 1.45 administrators. When only considering faculty, this ratio jumps to 3.09. Harvard employs 7,024 total full-time administrators, only slightly fewer than the undergraduate population. What do they all do? (...)

For example, last December, all Faculty of Arts and Sciences affiliates received an email from Dean Claudine Gay announcing the final report of the FAS Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage, a task force itself created by recommendation of the Presidential Task Force on Inclusion and Belonging. This task force was composed of 24 members: six students, nine faculty members, and nine administrators. The task force produced a 26-page report divided into seven sections, based upon a survey, focus groups, and 15 separate meetings with over 500 people total. The report dedicated seven pages to its recommendations, which ranged from “Clarify institutional authority over FAS visual culture and signage” to “Create a dynamic program of public art in the FAS.” In response to these recommendations, Dean Gay announced the creation of a new administrative post, the “FAS campus curator,” and a new committee, the “FAS Standing Committee on Visual Culture and Signage.”

Regardless of your stance on the goal of fostering a more inclusive visual culture, the procedural absurdity is clear. A presidential task force led to the creation of an FAS task force which, after expending significant time, effort, and resources, led to the creation of a single administrative job and a committee with almost the exact name as the second task force. I challenge anyone other than the task force members themselves to identify the value created for a single Harvard student’s educational experience.

Such a ridiculous process may seem relatively harmless, but the aggregation of these frivolous, bureaucratic time-and-money-wasters may have made college as outrageously expensive as it is. In 1986, Harvard’s tuition was $10,266 ($27,914 adjusted for inflation). Today, Harvard’s tuition is $52,659, representing an 89 percent increase in real cost. The Harvard education is certainly not 89 percent better than it was 36 short years ago, nor is it 89 percent more difficult to provide. Rather, the increased cost seems to lie within the administration and its tendency to solve problems by hiring even more administrators. In a 25-year timespan within the same window, American colleges added over 500,000 administrators at a hiring rate double that for faculty."

Hula Girl Obsessions

How America's Obsession With Hula Girls Almost Wrecked Hawai'i (Collector's Weekly)

You’ve seen her hanging around tiki bars, swiveling her hips seductively but woodenly indifferent to the scene around her. She’s often found bobbing and playing ‘ukulele on the dashboard of cars, dangling from key rings, lounging under palm trees on matchbook covers, and thanklessly holding up lampshades. Often scantily clad or topless, her uniform may include a grass skirt, a coconut bra, bright floral fabrics, and flowers in her hair. She beams from Hawaiian tourism brochures, and her most modest incarnation meets travelers arriving by plane or ship, lovingly placing a lei around their necks.

She’s the comely Hula Girl, the ever-present icon beckoning Westerners to Hawai‘i—and she’s about as grounded in reality as Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room. Certainly, the hula is an actual ancient Hawaiian dance form, which has shifted and morphed during 200-plus years of Western contact. But popularized images of female hula dancers have deviated far from their origins, perpetuating stereotypes that have had devastating impacts on perceptions of Hawai‘i.

Image: Universal Fruit & Produce Co.

Disjunction & Surprise

Row, row, row your boat
gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
life is but a dream.

What happens in the first three lines of this familiar poem? In the first line the scene is set. The reader and the speaker are rowing a boat. Note how the repetition of the word ‘row’ and the repetitive rhythm textually mirror the real-life act of rowing. The sentence of the first line continues on the second line. Where are we? We are still in the stream. Still rowing. ‘gently down the stream’ modifies all those verbs ‘row’ in the first line. Again, note how the rhythm is expressive of the act – which does a lot to put us, as readers, in the world of the poem, with the speaker. The lines are moving with the pace and feel of a boat being rowed through water. What happens on the third line? A bunch of ‘merrily’’s over and over. Are we still in the stream? Certainly. Merrily modifies or describes the emotional state of the rowing.

But what about the fourth line? It’s a pretty grand declaration – about the nature of existence, no less – and one that has little, specifically, to do with boats and rowing. In some ways this poem, as a whole, is built entirely to set us up for a surprise ending. To lull us into a state of dreamy, lazy ‘merriment’ – only to pull the rug out from under us at the end with a deceptively simple commentary on the fleeting, and possibly even false, nature of life itself. Is life ‘but a dream’?

Mark Leidner, University of Iowa | Read more:
Image: uncredited via

[ed. I know, not rowing, and those aren't boats. Disjunction and surprise. See also: The Disjunctive Dragonfly: A Study of Disjunctive Method and Definitions in Contemporary English‑language Haiku (Haiku Research); with a more concise/understandable summary here.]

The Hofmann Wobble

Wikipedia and the problem of historical memory

At twenty-six, in 2006, the year before the iPhone launched, I found myself driving a red Subaru Outback—the color was technically “claret metallic,” the friend who’d lent me the car had told me, in case I ever wanted to touch up the paint—on Highway 12 in Utah. I was heading to the East Bay after a painful breakup in New York. I remember, wrongly, that I was listening to a book on tape, a work by a prominent linguist, as I moved through the alien landscape, jagged formations of red rock towering against a cloudless sky.

Consider the metaphorical association of argument and war, the linguist says in my memory, the way we speak of “attacking” or “defending” our “position.” If we frame an argument metaphorically as armed conflict then we will think of our interlocutor as an enemy. But what would happen, the voice asked me as I gripped the wheel with both hands, tense from fifteen hours of continuous driving, having pulled over only for gas and Red Bull and granola bars and Camels since departing Omaha, where I’d napped and showered at the childhood home of a college friend—what would happen if we shifted the metaphorical frame and thought of argument as a kind of dance, as a series of steps undertaken with the goal of mutual expression, satisfaction, even pleasure?

The wheel began to shake in my hands; the road had grown slick, as though with oil. I thought something was wrong with the car and I slowed down, then pulled over. There was no traffic; my solitude was total. I got out to look at the tires. It took me a few seconds to comprehend what I was seeing, what I was standing on. There were these very large, very black crickets everywhere, a dark sensate carpet covering the road, extending hundreds of yards into the distance on either side of me. I must already have crushed thousands of them. They were perfectly indifferent to my presence; without adjusting their pace, they moved over my shoes. If I’d had a smartphone, I would have protected myself by taking a video, establishing a frame. A slow black wave spilling over the highway and across the arid soil. My car was still on, the audiobook still playing: Here are three tools for identifying implicit metaphor.

The mass of migrating insects, the sound of the voice in the empty car talking of inducers and concurrents over the engine noise—in my mind, this is where this story began. There was simply no contact between the language filling the car and the world to which it supposedly referred. It was as though I heard the recorded voice the way the crickets might, not through my ears, but through tympanal organs on my leg that vibrate in response to vibrating air. Or maybe I heard the voice in the car as mere stridulation, and the prominent linguist was the insect. Needless to say, all of these words are wrong. But as I stood there—dusk was falling, or dusk was rising from the ground, from the innumerable exoskeletons—the terms of my own life reached a point of total unintelligibility. It began with the crickets, although Wikipedia says that what I saw were not “true crickets,” but a kind of shield-backed katydid.

The linguist had founded a think tank to bring his ideas about framing into progressive politics. You can’t argue effectively against something called “tax relief” from a left perspective because the metaphorical frame makes taxation an affliction. If a progressive assents to that frame—and so finds herself having to argue for “less relief,” more affliction—she has already lost. We have to generate new frames: taxation is patriotic investment.

Let’s say that I, having looked for any excuse to flee Brooklyn, had moved to the East Bay for a “new-media fellowship” at the linguist’s institute. I rented the first apartment I looked at, a studio I couldn’t afford in the rear of a yellow Arts and Crafts building on Derby Street, half a mile from the Berkeley campus. My windows opened onto a back garden with lemon and magnolia trees. I went to the Ikea in Emeryville and then, praying nobody would steal my boxes, had a ten-minute consultation in downtown Oakland with a doctor my sister had recommended, so I could get my medical marijuana prescription. Back “home” in my apartment, I unloaded and assembled a coffee table, two chairs, and a queen-size bed. See the little hex key. I’m alarmed to recall I got my mattress for free off Craigslist from a floridly insane woman who was wearing a bathrobe over her sweatshirt and jeans. I did not get bedbugs, but that first night in my apartment I seemed to dream the woman’s dreams. A man was chasing me (but I wasn’t me) down Telegraph with a knife, yelling that the knife was mine, that he just wanted to return it to me.

On my first day at the institute, a smiling man in his sixties named Anderson (I would never learn if this was his first or last name) who wore an I HEART ARUBA baseball cap and thrice mentioned his PhD in cog sci introduced me to the “team” (the linguist wasn’t there; nobody from the board was there) and then showed me to my desk, which was basically a library carrel. That they placed their New Media Fellow in a ponderous wooden structure (not even a cubicle) that could have been from the nineteenth century allowed me to relax about how badly I’d exaggerated my “tech savvy” in my application. (...)

I did an okay job talking about getting up to speed on the institute’s research (I’m particularly taken with the recent work around “tax relief”), its online presence, the lay of the land. I used some vocabulary from her books, but in a fashion that suggested I’d so thoroughly internalized her work that I was not aware of the homage I was paying it. I was performing like a person, but the periphery of my vision contracted just a little as I spoke, the crickets closing in. We are very hopeful that with your experience, Dr. Hofmann said, you can help us to figure out how best to leverage new technologies to get our message out. I did a lot of nodding. I wondered what she thought of as my relevant experience. Did “new technologies” mean anything more specific than the internet? “Settling in,” “up to speed,” “lay of the land,” dead metaphors; I vibrated in response to vibrating air. Perhaps at our group meeting the following month I would walk us through my plan.

I need another character so let’s say my cousin introduced me over email to a woman named Tam who taught social studies at Berkeley High. Even as I walked to the coffee shop I wasn’t sure I’d go in. I actually liked the musical staff tattoo she had on her left bicep, how there weren’t any notes. She had her niece’s EKG around the other. We took a walk in the rose garden and got high and when she asked about my work I cracked her up by telling her the truth: I have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing. The Ikea bed frame I’d assembled with a hex key barely held. I had not been with anyone but the woman in Brooklyn in several years. And for the past year or so it was always shadowed with the impasse over kids. I saw my room through the eight eyes of the yellow garden spider whose large circular web was just outside my window when I came. I can tell you’ve been carrying a lot of pain, Tam said. I picture her as in a long-term open relationship with a woman who was in Bolivia doing fieldwork for her PhD.

We were in bed one night in the third month of my fellowship, passing the vape balloon back and forth, real cats or raccoons setting off the fictional backyard motion lights at intervals, lighting up the foliage, the star-shaped flowers. She told me she’d had a funny experience in her summer-school class. A kid had clearly plagiarized his paper on Malcolm X. She googled the suspiciously coherent if not particularly well-written paragraphs and there they were, word for word, on Wikipedia, which was at that point relatively new. (New enough that I remembered that a lawyer friend had been absolutely scandalized to discover that a colleague had had it open on his desktop; he thought it was worse than porn, that the colleague should be fired.) Tam confronted the student in class about the plagiarism a day or two later and he denied it. So she walked him to the computer center and summoned the page to show him the passages. But they were gone. The kid’s smile, Tam said, made clear that he’d deleted or radically altered the text in question. Tam didn’t have any idea how to look at the edit history of the page so she just let it go. We laughed at his mixture of ingenuity, bravado, stupidity (wasn’t this more work than just writing a couple of boilerplate paragraphs?), and the strange mutability of sources now, with the dawn of open source. We went to sleep.

An hour later I sat up, wide awake. I went to the coffee table and opened my laptop and googled Malcolm X. Of course the first hit was Wikipedia; it had become the first hit for everything. Contained in Tam’s story were several things I’d only half-known at the time: People, especially young people, had begun to go first to Wikipedia for any and all information. Wikipedia was apparently so easy to edit that a failing student in summer school could do it. And even pages on major historical figures were alterable, up for grabs, not just the entries on obscure athletes or operas.

I spent an hour creating and editing a page for Elaine Hofmann, then made a page for her institute, adding links to Hofmann and the institute to a variety of other Wikipedia pages—I had no particular computer aptitude but the edits were easy enough to make. Then I turned my attention to “tax relief.” First and foremost I made it so that “tax relief” redirected you to a larger page called “tax loopholes.” I organized all the material in a way that emphasized—with various levels of subtlety—evasion, structural inequality, the patriotic importance of investing in the future. I added a slew of progressive sources from other websites. By dawn I was familiar with almost every aspect of the editorial interface and had some sense of how the talk pages—the pages behind the pages, where editors debate changes that they’ve made—functioned. When Tam, wearing one of my shirts, brought me coffee, I asked her to do me a big favor: I need her to assign the students an extra credit paper where they researched “tax relief” (her class had a unit on “government”). I explained why, probably making little sense. But she said she would and I asked her to show me anything that quoted Wikipedia or might be plagiarized from it.

At the institute’s all-group meeting a week later I presented a PowerPoint. A couple of slides about Wikipedia becoming the world’s “largest clearinghouse for information,” its scale, its reach. A slide of the old “tax relief” entry. A slide of the new one. And then I showed them slides from the student papers, demonstrated the uptake: “according to Wikipedia, what is often described as ‘tax relief’ is actually a type of ‘tax evasion,’ in which . . . ”; I highlighted language I’d written (stoned, in my underwear) and put it beside unattributed language in a second paper about taxation as patriotic. I kept pausing, thinking somebody would say something; others kept looking at Hofmann, who’d put her glasses on, and whose personal page (before and after) I now pulled up to flatter her. In their stunned silence, birdsong was audible. Only I could hear the silence of the crickets.

What we need, what I’m going to establish, is an ever-expanding phalanx of Wikipedia editors to create, reframe, and defend these pages, which are treated by more and more of the human population as both encyclopedia and news source. Of course, there will be challenges, complexities. But the fact that you have had, Dr. Hofmann, your groundbreaking insights into the importance of metaphorical framing at the precise moment when all existing frames are up for grabs at Wikipedia—well, I’ve been so excited about this project I’ve been finding it very hard to sleep.

by Ben Lerner, Harper's |  Read more:

Image: Dima Kashtalyan
[ed. A wild west story about early Wikipedia editing. More fascinating than you might think, and excellent writing!]

Banksy, champagne bottle rat
via:

On Cousins

And  the great cousin decline

Perhaps you’ve heard: Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. In the future, the elderly could outnumber the young, leaving not enough workers to pay taxes and fill jobs. Kids already have fewer siblings to grow up with, and parents have fewer kids to care for them as they age.

Oh, and people also have fewer cousins. But who’s talking about that?

Within many families—and I’m sorry to have to say this—cousins occupy a weird place. Some people are deeply close to theirs, but others see them as strangers. Some cousins live on the same block; some live on opposite sides of the world. That can all be true about any family relationship, but when it comes to this one, the spectrum stretches especially far. Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family. 

... cousin connections can be lovely because they exist in that strange gray area between closeness and distance—because they don’t follow a strict playbook. That tenuousness means you often need to opt in to cousin relationships, especially as an adult. And the bond that forms when you do might not be easy to replace. (...)

Your “vertical,” intergenerational bonds can be tight and tremendously meaningful, but they also tend to come with care duties, and a clear hierarchy: Think of a grandparent babysitting their child’s toddler, or an adult tending to their aging parent. At the same time, siblings can easily develop fraught dynamics because of their intense familiarity: Perhaps in childhood you fight over toys, and in adulthood, you argue over an inheritance or your parents’ eldercare.

The classic cousin relationship, relative to that, is amazingly uncomplicated. ... Pop culture is full of sibling antics: bickering, pranking, sticking up for one another in school. Fewer models demonstrate how cousins are supposed to interact.

Without a clear answer, some cousins just … don’t interact often. Only about 6 percent of adult cousins live in the same census tract (typically about the size of a neighborhood); the rest live an average of 237 miles apart. Jonathan Daw, a Penn State sociologist, told me that the rate at which adults donate a kidney to a cousin is quite low: While siblings make up 25 percent of living kidney-donor relationships, cousins constitute less than 4 percent. That’s likely not because they’d decline to give up a kidney, but because many people wouldn’t ask a cousin for something that significant in the first place. Organ donations, he told me, raise the question “What do we owe to each other?” For cousins, the answer might be “Not much.”

Still, a bond that’s light on responsibility doesn’t need to be weak. Researchers told me that cousins can be deeply important—perhaps because of the potential distance in the relationship, not in spite of it. (...)

They might also play a specific role in your larger support network (even if you wouldn’t ask them for a kidney). In one study, Reed and her colleagues found that in the fall of 2020, in the midst of pandemic isolation, about 14 percent of participants reported increasing communication with at least one cousin. The relationship, she said, seemed to be “activated in this time of crisis.” She thinks the fact that cousins are less likely to depend on one another for material help might actually make them well suited to give emotional solace. That can be especially relevant when family difficulties come up; a cousin might be one of the few people who understand your relatives’ eccentricities, virtues, and role within the clan. When a parent dies, Verdery told me, many people bond with their cousins, who just get it in a way others don’t.

That’s the funny thing about cousins: In all other areas of your life, you might not be alike at all. But knowing the nuances of your family ties through decades of exposure—however sporadic—is a form of closeness in itself. The low stakes of your own relationship can make you perfect allies—but the potential for detachment also means you have to work for it. You can intentionally insert yourselves into each other’s lives, or you can slowly fade out of them.

The latter scenario can be understandable. A lot of people, when they’re kids, might run around with their cousins on special occasions—and then go months without seeing them. Perhaps they start to realize that their bonds are somewhat arbitrary; they grow less and less relevant, and ever more awkward. Consider this, though: In middle age and older, the cohesion of a whole family can begin to depend on the bonds between cousins. Along with siblings, cousins become the ones organizing the reunions and the Thanksgiving meals. The slightly random houseguests in your younger years become the stewards of the family in your older ones—as do you.

by Faith Hill, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Stella Blackmon

Pat Metheny Group

[ed. Pat and Lyle. If you haven't seen Fandango (with a young Kevin Costner) you're missing one of the best movies ever  : )]

Twenty-One Species Declared Extinct This Year

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

‘Grief is a rational response’: the 21 US species declared extinct this year (The Guardian)

Image: WikiMediaCommons

[ed. While extinction is a fairly common phenomenon (over time and various species), it appears to be accelerating. For a variety of reasons. See also: the post following this one.]

The bird flitted away – but a few moments later, when they hiked down to an old nest tree, they heard it again. Jacobi wanted to make sure his recorder was ready and working, so he rewound the tape and played it back.

Suddenly, ʻōʻō came soaring toward the researchers, singing its mellifluous song. It came so close that they didn’t need binoculars to see its glossy black feathers, and the peek of yellow at its tail.

“I thought, wow, this is fantastic!” Sincock said. Almost immediately, he deflated. The ʻōʻō had been drawn to a recording of its own voice – thinking it was another bird. “It came because it thought it heard something that it probably hadn’t heard for a long time – another of its kind,” he said. This bird was perhaps the last of his species, singing for a mate that would never come.

The Endangered Species Act: 50 Years Later

Fifty years ago tomorrow, on December 28, 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act into law. Declaring that Congress had determined that “various species of fish, wildlife, and plants in the United States have been rendered extinct as a consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation,” the act provided for the protection of endangered species.

Just over a decade before, in 1962, ecologist Rachel Carson had published Silent Spring, documenting how pesticides designed to eliminate insects were devastating entire ecosystems of linked organisms. The realization that human destruction of the natural world could make the planet uninhabitable spurred Congress in 1970 to create the Environmental Protection Agency. And in 1973, when Nixon called for stronger laws to protect species in danger of extinction, 194 Democrats and 160 Republicans in the House—99% of those voting—voted yes. Only four Republicans in the House voted no.

 

Such strong congressional support for protecting the environment signaled that a new era was at hand. While President Gerald Ford, who succeeded Nixon, tended to dial back environmental protections when he could in order to promote the development of oil and gas resources, President Jimmy Carter pressed the protection of the environment when he took office in 1977.

In 1978, Carter placed 56 million acres of land in Alaska under federal protection as national monuments, doubling the size of the national park system. “These areas contain resources of unequaled scientific, historic and cultural value, and include some of the most spectacular scenery and wildlife in the world,” he said. In 1979 he had 32 solar panels installed at the White House to help heat the water for the building and demonstrate that it was possible to curb U.S. dependence on fossil fuels. Just before he left office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting more than 100 million acres in Alaska, including additional protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, the cattle industry, and local officials eager for development strongly opposed Carter’s moves to protect the environment. In Alaska, local activists deliberately broke the regulations in the newly protected places, portraying Carter as King George III—against whom the American colonists revolted in 1776—and insisting that the protection of lands violated the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness promised in the Declaration of Independence.

For the most part, though, opposition to federal protection of the environment showed up as a drive to reform government regulations that, opponents argued, gave far too much power to unelected bureaucrats. In environmental regulations, the federal government’s protection of the public good ran smack into economic development.

In their 1980 presidential platform, Republicans claimed to be committed to “the conservation and wise management of America’s renewable natural resources” and said the government must protect public health. But they were not convinced that current laws and regulations provided benefits that justified their costs. “Too often,” they said, “current regulations are…rigid and narrow,” and they “strongly affirm[ed] that environmental protection must not become a cover for a ‘no-growth’ policy and a shrinking economy.”

In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Ronald Reagan explained that he wanted to see the U.S. produce more energy to fuel “growth and productivity. Large amounts of oil and natural gas lay beneath our land and off our shores, untouched because the present Administration seems to believe the American people would rather see more regulation, taxes and controls than more energy.”

In his farewell address after voters elected Reagan, Carter urged Americans to “protect the quality of this world within which we live…. There are real and growing dangers to our simple and our most precious possessions: the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land which sustains us,” he warned. “The rapid depletion of irreplaceable minerals, the erosion of topsoil, the destruction of beauty, the blight of pollution, the demands of increasing billions of people, all combine to create problems which are easy to observe and predict, but difficult to resolve. If we do not act, the world of the year 2000 will be much less able to sustain life than it is now.”

“But,” Carter added, “[a]cknowledging the physical realities of our planet does not mean a dismal future of endless sacrifice. In fact, acknowledging these realities is the first step in dealing with them. We can meet the resource problems of the world—water, food, minerals, farmlands, forests, overpopulation, pollution if we tackle them with courage and foresight.”

Reagan began by appointing pro-industry officials James G. Watt and Anne M. Gorsuch (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) as secretary of the interior and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, respectively; they set out to gut government regulation of the environment by slashing budgets and firing staff. But both resigned under scandal in 1983, and their replacements satisfied neither those who wanted to return to the practices of the Carter years nor those who wanted to get rid of those practices altogether.

Still, with their focus on developing oil and gas, when workers repairing the White House roof removed the solar panels in 1986, Reagan administration officials declined to reinstall them.

Forty years later, we are reaping the fruits of that shift away from the atmosphere that gave us the Endangered Species Act and toward a focus on developing fossil fuels. On November 30 the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), an agency of the United Nations, reported that global temperatures in 2023 were at record highs both on land and in the seas, Antarctic sea ice extent is at a record low, and devastating fires, floods, outbreaks of disease, and searing heat waves have pounded human communities this year. (...)

And yet the forces that undermined that spirit are still at work. In the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, the Supreme Court claimed that Congress could not delegate “major questions” to executive agencies, thus limiting the EPA’s ability to regulate the emissions that create climate change; and House Republicans this summer held a hearing on “the destructive cost of the Endangered Species Act,” claiming that it “has been misused and misapplied for the past 50 years” with “disastrous effects on local economies and businesses throughout the United States.” Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources Bruce Westerman (R-AR) accused the Biden administration of stifling “everything from forest management to future energy production through burdensome ESA regulations.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Letters from an American |  Read more:

Image: NOAA

[ed. Early in my career I had the dubious distinction of being the Federal Oil and Gas Review Coordinator for the State of Alaska's only Fish and Wildlife agency, developing policy and mitigation measures for all federal oil and gas activities affecting the state. Early battles included things like leasing in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, expanding North Slope oil development, drilling in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas (which, among other things, would affect endangered bowhead whales), and responding to then Interior Secretary James Watt's accelerated OCS Leasing Program, which essentially put the entire Outer Continental Shelf adjacent to the state up for grabs over a short period of time ("area-wide leasing"). It was an intense and very busy time (for someone just in their late-20s!). For an excellent overview of the entire process and history see: Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Development in the Alaskan Arctic - Natural Resources Journal, (pdf):]

***

"A vital component of the ESA and another wildlife management statute, the Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act of 1976 (FWCA)"' is the requirement that federal agencies consult with the appropriate wildlife protection agency"' regarding the wildlife impacts of a proposed activity. Though the FWCA requires consultation to ensure that "equal consideration"' 's  is given to wildlife values when undertaking federal actions, " it is the responsibility of the agency proposing the activity to determine whether it has complied with the act. The ESA consultation provision is more powerful, particularly since formal procedures for a highly structured process are established in the statute... During the section 1536 consultation, no "irreversible or irretrievable commitment of resources" can occur that would preclude the choice of alternative actions. 

By the time the D.C. Circuit court in October 1981 had issued its remand, James Watt had been appointed Secretary of the Interior by the Reagan administration. Earlier that year, Secretary Watt had already submitted his proposed five-year leasing schedule for 1982-1987 to Congress, " and after preparing more drafts to comply with the court's order, Watt approved his final, program in July 1982. Watt's "accelerated" leasing schedule planned to offer for lease nearly the entire OCS, almost 1 billion acres, which was 20 times the acreage offered by Andrus, and 25 times the acreage offered from 1953 to 1980. Forty-two lease sales were scheduled, with half of the acreage to be offered lying in the frontier area off of Alaska.

 "In addition to this drastic plan to lease nearly the entire OCS, Watt instituted fundamental changes to the leasing administrative process. The new "area-wide" leasing program replaced the former "tract selection" process by which the industry, states, and other groups nominated certain tracts within a large area to be included or deleted from a lease sale. The U.S. Geological Survey then narrowed the choice of tracts to those with the most promising hydrocarbon potential, and an environmental impact statement was prepared only for these tracts. Under the areawide system, Watt divided the United States' OCS into 18 large planning areas, ranging from 8 to 133 million acres, with lease sales offered annually in planning areas within the Gulf of Mexico and biennially elsewhere. An environmental impact statement is prepared for an entire OCS planning area, and information is gathered on industry interest and on other concerns which will determine the actual tracts to be offered, though the tracts are not determined until right before the sale. Tracks are also no longer evaluated prior to the lease sale to set a minimum bid, but are evaluated after bids are accepted based on the Secretary's revised system. Watt's area-wide leasing program was highly criticized22 except by the oil industry. Soon after Watt approved his leasing schedule, the state of Alaska, four other states, and several environmental organizations filed suit."

The Selfie Camera Has Gotten Too Good.

My New iPhone Is Making Me Look Uglier

This past spring, I participated in the sacred tradition that comes around once every few years: I got a new iPhone. The speaker on my old one had broken, forcing my hand. But let’s be clear. I didn’t care about the speaker. The real reason you upgrade an iPhone, of course, is to get a better camera.

Within a couple of weeks of unboxing my new iPhone 14 Pro, however, I noticed something odd happening. I’d take a selfie, think I looked great, and lock my phone, satisfied. Later, I’d open my camera roll to find that the same photo was different than I remembered. My skin no longer looked smooth, the way it had on my old phone, and even in the preview on my new one before I snapped the photo. Instead, every selfie seemed to intensify my imperfections. I could see the budding wrinkles on my 30-something forehead and the faint red glow of the eczema patches around my eyes. Startled, I began questioning my appearance. Then I began questioning my device.

Other new iPhone owners have done the same: “I’ve noticed that my skin looks awful on this new camera,” read one post on Reddit. A commenter complained that the iPhone 14 “turns you into [an] ugly panda with dark circles.” A woman on TikTok posted a plea, asking that someone from the Apple “community” please tell her “how to fix this raggedy colorless front camera.” Another called it a “travesty.” Hundreds of posts and comments across the internet complain about the selfie camera, and debate exactly what could be causing its problems. (...)

In recent years, complaints about the selfie camera seem to pop up whenever people upgrade their iPhones. The launch of the new iPhone 15 this fall seems to have set off another round of whining. A few models in particular—the 13, 14, and 15—dominate internet grumbling about how selfies now look too detailed (and worse, in the eyes of would-be posters). A recurring theme is also that selfies look better in the preview, before the person presses the shutter.

All three of these iPhones have a 12-megapixel front-facing camera, compared with the 7-megapixel lens on my old phone. But the reason that selfies are now so detailed isn’t because of megapixels. (The iPhone 12 also has a 12-megapixel selfie camera, but I haven’t seen many complaints about it.) Apple didn’t comment on what, if anything, might have changed beginning with the iPhone 13, but noted that the device has gotten more advanced at processing images after they are taken. An iPhone 14 and above can perform 4 trillion operations per photo to enhance the details and render a more natural skin tone, and not all of these changes are previewed in the Camera app before you press the shutter. The goal is to make your final photos as accurate as possible, Apple said. (...)

It’s hard to build a camera that’s just right. Five years ago, the iPhone presented the opposite problem. In 2018, Apple’s newly launched XR and XS models took photos that made people look suspiciously good. The phones were accused of artificially smoothing skin, in what came to be known as “beautygate.” Apple later said that a software bug was behind these unusually hot photos, and shipped a fix. “Do you want a nicer photo or a more accurate representation of reality?” Nilay Patel, the editor in chief of The Verge, wrote in his review of the XR. “Only you can look into your heart and decide.”

The answer to Patel’s question seems to be that people want something in the middle—not too hot, but not too real either. People are chasing a Goldilocks ideal with the selfie camera: They want it to be real, authentic, and messy, just not too real, authentic, or messy.

“When someone thinks of a perfect selfie, they don’t think of having no pores,” Maria-Carolina Cambre, an education professor at Concordia University in Montreal, told me. “And they don’t think of having every single pore visible. It’s neither one of those extremes.” For more than years, Cambre and a colleague ran selfie focus groups in Canada, discussing the style of photography with more than 100 young people. They found that people examine selfies in a very specific way, which they termed the “digital-forensic gaze.” People inspect such images closely, pinching in to look for details and for evidence of any filtering. They look for flaws and inconsistencies. “This is the paradox,” she told me. “Everything is optimized, but the best selfies look like they haven’t been optimized. Even though they have.”

Every smartphone tackles this selfie challenge in a slightly different way. But because devices mediate so much of our self-perception at this point, switching them out can knock us off balance.

by Caroline Mimbs Nyce, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Ben Kothe/The Atlantic. Source: Getty

via: