Nature Has Value. Could We Literally Invest in It?

“Natural asset companies” would put a market price on improving ecosystems, rather than on destroying them.

Picture this: You own a few hundred acres near a growing town that your family has been farming for generations. Turning a profit has gotten harder, and none of your children want to take it over. You don’t want to sell the land; you love the open space, the flora and fauna it hosts. But offers from developers who would turn it into subdivisions or strip malls seem increasingly tempting.

One day, a land broker mentions an idea. How about granting a long-term lease to a company that values your property for the same reasons you do: long walks through tall grass, the calls of migrating birds, the way it keeps the air and water clean.

It sounds like a scam. Or charity. In fact, it’s an approach backed by hardheaded investors who think nature has an intrinsic value that can provide them with a return down the road — and in the meantime, they would be happy to hold shares of the new company on their balance sheets.

Such a company doesn’t yet exist. But the idea has gained traction among environmentalists, money managers and philanthropists who believe that nature won’t be adequately protected unless it is assigned a value in the market — whether or not that asset generates dividends through a monetizable use.

The concept almost hit the big time when the Securities and Exchange Commission was considering a proposal from the New York Stock Exchange to list these “natural asset companies” for public trading. But after a wave of fierce opposition from right-wing groups and Republican politicians, and even conservationists wary of Wall Street, in mid-January the exchange pulled the plug.

That doesn’t mean natural asset companies are going away; their proponents are working on prototypes in the private markets to build out the model. And even if this concept doesn’t take off, it’s part of a larger movement motivated by the belief that if natural riches are to be preserved, they must have a price.

Beyond Philanthropy

For decades, economists and scientists have worked to quantify the contributions of nature — a kind of production known as ecosystem services.

By traditional accounting methods, a forest has monetary value only when it has been cut into two-by-fours. If a forest not destined for the sawmill burns down, economic activity actually increases, because of the relief efforts required in the aftermath.

When you pull back the camera, though, forests help us in many more ways. Beyond sucking carbon out of the air, they hold the soil in place during heavy rains, and in dry times help it retain moisture by shading the ground and protecting winter snowpack, which helps keep reservoirs full for humans. Without the tree-covered Catskills, for example, New York City would have to invest much more in infrastructure to filter its water.

Natural capital accounting, which U.S. statistical agencies are developing as a sidebar to their measurements of gross domestic product, puts numbers on those services. To move those calculations beyond an academic exercise, they need to be factored into incentives.

The most common way to do that is the social cost of carbon: a price per ton of emissions that represents climate change’s burdens on humanity, such as natural disasters, disease and reduced labor productivity. That number is used to evaluate the costs and benefits of regulations. In some countries — notably not the United States, at least on the federal level — it is used to set taxes on emissions. Efforts to remove carbon can then generate credits, which trade on open markets and fluctuate with supply and demand.

But carbon is just the simplest way of putting a price on nature. For the other benefits — wildlife, ecotourism, protection from hurricanes and so on — the revenue model is less obvious.

That’s what Douglas Eger set out to address. He wanted to work for an environmental group after college, but on his conservative father’s advice he instead made a career in business, running companies in pharmaceuticals, tech and finance. With some of his newly built wealth, he bought a 7,000-acre tract northwest of New York City to preserve as open space.

He didn’t think philanthropy would be enough to stem the loss of nature — a seminal 2020 report found that more than $700 billion was needed annually to avert a collapse in biodiversity. Government wasn’t solving the problem. Socially responsible investing, while making progress, wasn’t reversing damage to critical habitats.

So in 2017, Mr. Eger founded the Intrinsic Exchange Group with the goal of incubating natural asset companies, NACs for short. Here’s how it works: A landowner, whether a farmer or a government entity, works with investors to create a NAC that licenses the rights to the ecosystem services the land produces. If the company is listed on an exchange, the proceeds from the public offering of shares would provide the landowner with a revenue stream and pay for enhancing natural benefits, like havens for threatened species or a revitalized farming operation that heals the land rather than leaching it dry.

If all goes according to plan, investments in the company would appreciate as environmental quality improves or demand for natural assets increases, yielding a return years down the road — not unlike art, or gold or even cryptocurrency.

“All of these things, if you think about it, are social agreements to a degree,” Mr. Eger said. “And the beauty of a financial system is between a willing buyer and seller, the underlying becomes true.”

In discussions with like-minded investors, he found an encouraging openness to the idea. The Rockefeller Foundation kicked in about $1.7 million to fund the effort, including a 45-page document on how to devise an “ecological performance report” for the land enrolled in a NAC. In 2021, Intrinsic announced its plan to list such companies on the New York Stock Exchange, along with a pilot project involving land in Costa Rica as well as support from the Inter-American Development Bank and major environmental groups. By the time they filed an application with the S.E.C. in late September, Mr. Eger was feeling confident.

That’s when the firestorm began.

The American Stewards of Liberty, a Texas-based group that campaigns against conservation measures and seeks to roll back federal protections for endangered species, picked up on the plan. Through both grass-roots organizing and high-level lobbying, they argued that natural asset companies were a Trojan horse for foreign governments and “global elites” to lock up large swaths of rural America, particularly public lands. The rule-making docket started to fill up with comments from critics charging that the concept was nothing but a Wall Street land grab.

A collection of 25 Republican attorneys general called it illegal and part of a “radical climate agenda.” On Jan. 11, in what may have been the final straw, the Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee sent a letter demanding a slew of documents relating to the proposal. Less than a week later, the proposal was scratched.

by Lydia DePillis, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Alex Merto

[ed. Long overdue. The economic value of natural, unspoiled ecosystems and wilderness-related benefits are frequently downplayed or ignored but can be greater than the material products they produce (minerals, timber, water, wildlife, wetlands, etc.), because they extend over time. The value of animals themselves can be estimated using a process called contingent valuation.]

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The New Luddites

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a 44-year-old academic wearing a grey polo shirt, rocks slowly on his office chair and explains with real patience – taking things slowly for a novice like me – that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines. “The difficulty is, people do not realise,” Yudkowsky says mildly, maybe sounding just a bit frustrated, as if irritated by a neighbour’s leaf blower or let down by the last pages of a novel. “We have a shred of a chance that humanity survives.”

It’s January. I have set out to meet and talk to a small but growing band of luddites, doomsayers, disruptors and other AI-era sceptics who see only the bad in the way our spyware-steeped, infinitely doomscrolling world is tending. I want to find out why these techno-pessimists think the way they do. I want to know how they would render change. Out of all of those I speak to, Yudkowsky is the most pessimistic, the least convinced that civilisation has a hope. He is the lead researcher at a nonprofit called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute in Berkeley, California, and you could boil down the results of years of Yudkowsky’s theorising there to a couple of vowel sounds: “Oh fuuuuu–!”

“If you put me to a wall,” he continues, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.” By “remaining timeline”, Yudkowsky means: until we face the machine-wrought end of all things. Think Terminator-like apocalypse. Think Matrix hellscape. Yudkowsky was once a founding figure in the development of human-made artificial intelligences – AIs. He has come to believe that these same AIs will soon evolve from their current state of “Ooh, look at that!” smartness, assuming an advanced, God-level super-intelligence, too fast and too ambitious for humans to contain or curtail. Don’t imagine a human-made brain in one box, Yudkowsky advises. To grasp where things are heading, he says, try to picture “an alien civilisation that thinks a thousand times faster than us”, in lots and lots of boxes, almost too many for us to feasibly dismantle, should we even decide to.

Trying to shake humanity from its complacency about this, Yudkowsky published an op-ed in Time last spring that advised shutting down the computer farms where AIs are grown and trained. In clear, crisp prose, he speculated about the possible need for airstrikes targeted on datacentres; perhaps even nuclear exchange. Was he on to something?

Along way from Berkeley, in the wooded suburb of Sydenham in south London, a quieter form of resistance to technological infringement has been brewing. Nick Hilton, host of a neo-luddite podcast called The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, has invited me over for a cup of tea. We stand in his kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil, while a beautiful, frisky greyhound called Tub chomps at our ankles. “Write down ‘beautiful’ in your notebook,” encourages Hilton, 31, who as well as running a podcast company works as a freelance journalist. He explains the history of luddism and how – centuries after the luddite protesters of an industrialising England resisted advances in the textile industry that were costing them jobs, destroying machines and being maligned, arrested, even killed in consequence – he came to sympathise with its modern reimagining.

“Luddite has a variety of meanings now, two, maybe three definitions,” says Hilton. “Older people will sometimes say, ‘Ooh, can you help me with my phone? I’m such a luddite!’ And what they mean is, they haven’t been able to keep pace with technological change.” Then there are the people who actively reject modern devices and appliances, he continues. They may call themselves luddites (or be called that) as well. “But, in its purer historical sense, the term refers to people who are anxious about the interplay of technology and labour markets. And in that sense I would definitely describe myself as one.”

Edward Ongweso Jr, a writer and broadcaster, and Molly Crabapple, an artist, both based in New York, define themselves as luddites in this way, too. Ongweso talks to me on the phone while he runs errands around town. We first made contact over social media. We set a date via email. Now we let Google Meet handle the mechanics of a seamless transatlantic call. Neo-luddism isn’t about forgoing such innovations, Ongweso explains. Instead, it asks that each new innovation be considered for its merit, its social fairness and its potential for hidden malignity. “To me, luddism is about this idea that just because a technology exists, doesn’t mean it gets to sit around unquestioned. Just because we’ve rolled out some tech doesn’t mean we’ve rolled out some advancement. We should be continually sceptical, especially when technology is being applied in work spaces and elsewhere to order social life.”

Crabapple, the artist luddite, broadly agrees. “For me, a luddite is someone who looks at technology critically and rejects aspects of it that are meant to disempower, deskill or impoverish them. Technology is not something that’s introduced by some god in heaven who has our best interests at heart. Technological development is shaped by money, it’s shaped by power, and it’s generally targeted towards the interests of those in power as opposed to the interests of those without it. That stereotypical definition of a luddite as some stupid worker who smashes machines because they’re dumb? That was concocted by bosses.” (...)

There are techno sceptic sceptics, of course, those who would think Yudkowsky a scaremonger, the modern luddites doomed to the trivia bin of history, along with their 19th-century antecedents. In 2019, the political commentator Aaron Bastani published a persuasive manifesto titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, describing a tech- and AI-enriched near-future beyond drudgery and need, there for the taking – “if we want it”, Bastani wrote. Last year, the Tory MP Bim Afolami published an editorial in the Evening Standard that called pessimism about technology “irrational”. Afolami advised the paper’s readers in bold type: Ignore the Luddites. His boss, Rishi Sunak, recently used his position as the leader of the nation to serve as a sort of chatshow host for the tech baron Elon Musk. On stage at an AI summit in Lancaster House, London, in November, Musk described AI as the “most disruptive force in history”, something that will end human labour, maybe for good, maybe for ill. “You’re not selling this,” joked Sunak at one point.

Why are we being sold this? In an early episode of his luddite podcast, Hilton pointed out that to do away with work would be to do away with a reason for living. “I think what we’re risking is a wide-scale loss of purpose,” Hilton says. (...)

Maybe luddism is the answer. As far as I can make out, talking to all these people, it isn’t about refusing advancement, instead it’s an act of wondering: are we still advancing our relish of the world? How queasy or unreal or threatened do we need to feel before we stop seeing these conveniences as convenient? The author Zadie Smith has joked in the past that we gave ourselves to tech too cheaply in the first instance, all for the pleasure, really, of being a moving dot on a useful digital map. Now bosses can track their workers’ every keystroke. Telemarketing firms put out sales calls with AI-generated voices that mimic former employees who have been let go. A few weeks back, in January, the largest-ever survey of AI researchers found that 16% of them believed their work would lead to the extinction of humankind.

“That’s a one-in-six chance of catastrophe,” says Alistair Stewart, a former British soldier turned master’s student. “That’s Russian-roulette odds.”

by Tom Lamont, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Lisa Sheehan/The Guardian

[ed. See also: The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism (The Atlantic).]

Art Deco style Phillips radio from 1931

Philips model 930A, the so-called “canned ham” radio, manufactured during the early thirties in several European countries including the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Italy, the UK, and Spain.

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Starfish Prime

Satellites make many aspects of our daily lives possible, from navigation and weather forecasting to TV broadcasts and financial transactions. Over 90 percent of spacecraft are commercial, fueling a $546 billion global space economy. Space is also fundamental to how our military fights. We use satellites to collect intelligence and to detect missile launches, and for navigation, communications and controlling precision weapons.

The idea of a nuclear detonation in space is not new. Both the Soviet Union and United States conducted high-altitude nuclear detonation (HAND) tests in the 1950s and 1960s, including the U.S. Starfish Prime test in 1962 when the United States detonated a 1.4 megaton warhead atop a Thor missile 250 miles above the Earth. The explosion created an electromagnetic pulse that spread through the atmosphere, frying electronics on land hundreds of miles away from the test, causing electrical surges on airplanes and in power grids, and disrupting radio communications. The boosted nuclear radiation in space accumulated on satellites in orbit, damaging or destroying one-third of them.

Is This a Sputnik Moment? (NYT)

Image:Dimitar Dilkoff/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
[ed. Some nuclear weapons history I wasn't aware of. Learn something new every day. Re: Purported Russian plans to deploy nuclear weapons in space.]

Aleksei Navalny, Russian Opposition Leader, Dies in Prison at 47

Aleksei A. Navalny, an anticorruption activist who for more than a decade led the political opposition in President Vladimir V. Putin’s Russia while enduring arrests, assaults and a near-fatal poisoning, died Friday in a Russian prison, according to Russia’s Federal Penitentiary Service. He was 47.

The prison authorities said that Mr. Navalny lost consciousness on Friday after taking a walk in the Arctic penal colony where he was moved late last year. He was last seen on Thursday, when he had appeared in a court hearing via video link, smiling behind the bars of a cell and making jokes.

Kira Yarmysh, Navalny’s press secretary, said in a live broadcast Friday that Navalny’s advisers were not yet able to issue an official confirmation of his death but believed that he had perished. And while acknowledging that the United States did not know the details of what happened, President Biden at a White House news conference said, “Make no mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death.”

Mr. Navalny had been serving multiple sentences that would most likely have kept him in prison until at least 2031 on charges that his supporters say were largely fabricated in an effort to muzzle him. Despite increasingly harsh conditions, including repeated stints in solitary confinement, he maintained a presence on social media, while members of his team continued to publish investigations into Russia’s corrupt elite from exile.

Mr. Navalny was given a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence in February 2021 after returning to Russia from Germany, where he had been recovering from being poisoned the previous August. In March 2022, he received a nine-year sentence for embezzlement and fraud in a trial that international observers denounced as “politically motivated” and a “sham.” And in August 2023, he was sentenced to 19 years in prison for “extremism.”

Mr. Navalny had effectively returned from the dead after he was poisoned with a nerve agent in Siberia in 2020, and he conducted multiple hunger strikes to improve his treatment. During his detention, Mr. Navalny was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement and complained about severe illnesses. In December, he disappeared for three weeks during his transfer to a penal colony 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Yet even from prison, Mr. Navalny remained an unflinching critic of Mr. Putin, a former K.G.B. officer whom he accused of corruptly skimming the country’s oil profits to enrich his friends and entourage in the security services. Mr. Putin’s political party, he once said, was a party of “swindlers and thieves,” and he accused the president of trying to turn Russia into a “feudal state.” (...)

Mr. Navalny was known for his innovative tactics in fighting corruption and promoting democracy. Defying expectations, he cannily used street politics and social media to build a tenacious opposition movement even after much of the independent news media in Russia was squelched and other critics were driven into exile or killed in unsolved murders. In the years before Russia invaded Ukraine, many of Mr. Navalny’s associates, and in some cases their relatives, were arrested or forced into exile.

At his death, he was the most prominent critic of Mr. Putin still standing in Russia, at a time when the president has engineered a path to remain in power until at least 2036. (...)

He had spoken openly of the possibility that he might be assassinated.

“I’m trying not to think about it a lot,” he said in an interview with CBS News in 2017. “If you start to think about what kind of risks I have, you cannot do anything.”

On Aug. 20, 2020, Mr. Navalny became violently ill and fell into a coma shortly after boarding a flight from Siberia, where he had met with opposition candidates for local office.

The flight made an emergency landing in the Russian city of Omsk, where doctors for two days resisted his wife’s pleas that he be transferred to Germany for treatment.

Mr. Navalny was eventually evacuated to Berlin on an air ambulance flight after a team of German doctors who had arrived in Omsk stated that it was safe for him to travel. A little more than a week later, the German government announced that he had been poisoned with a nerve agent from the highly potent Novichok family of toxins. The evidence, German officials said, was “unequivocal.”

“Mr. Navalny has been the victim of a crime,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said at the time. “It raises very serious questions that only the Russian government can and must answer.” (...)

Despite the attacks and the jail terms, Mr. Navalny persevered, he said, out of a desire to change the course of his country and not let down the people who worked with him. He was angry at what he called Mr. Putin’s self-dealing inner circle and the security services that protected it.

“I do this because I hate these people,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 2011, before he rose to prominence.

Still, he struggled to unite the feuding pro-democracy opposition parties, a fractured state of affairs that has plagued Russia’s politics since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991.(...)

Mr. Navalny’s support among the middle class — mostly in the capital, Moscow, where he ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2013 — brought a new type of politics to the country, one focused not on the woes of striking miners or the aloof intellectual class but on bread-and-butter issues of the new capitalist era, like protecting home equity and investments in stocks.

Social media outlets like Twitter, now rebranded as X, and Vkontakte, a Russian analogue to Facebook, propelled Mr. Navalny’s rise. A breakthrough came in 2011, when he used social networking sites to promote street protests opposed to Mr. Putin’s return to power for a third presidential term. The protests breathed new life into a beleaguered opposition, and he came to be seen as the movement’s leader.

Years of arrests and attacks followed. (...)

In one searing exposé in 2017, he laid out a web of foundations and shell companies, all connected to former President Dmitri A. Medvedev, whose mansions, country estates, 18th-century palace in St. Petersburg and vineyard in Tuscany were displayed in the video.

“The system has turned so rotten that it doesn’t have any healthy parts at all,” Mr. Navalny said.

Mr. Navalny was detained so many times that he once joked to a judge that he wouldn’t take up the court’s time with a final statement before sentencing, because he would surely have another chance to do so again.

“The last word of the accused should be a dramatic moment in his life,” he said. “But they opened so many cases against me that this will not be my last chance to have a last word.”

by Valerie Hopkins and Andrew E. Kramer, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Sergey Ponomarev/Associated Press; Anatoly Maltsev/EPA, via Shutterstock
[ed. And just like that, a nation's hopes are dashed. See also: Navalny Challenged Russians to ‘Live Not by Lies’ (NYT); Trump, Putin, Carlson and the Shifting Sands of Today’s American Politics (NYT); and The Republican Party has grown much more supportive of Russia in recent years (NPR).]

Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed

Press Release

Today, Tuesday 7 March 2017, WikiLeaks begins its new series of leaks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Code-named "Vault 7" by WikiLeaks, it is the largest ever publication of confidential documents on the agency.

The first full part of the series, "Year Zero", comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA's Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virgina. It follows an introductory disclosure last month of CIA targeting French political parties and candidates in the lead up to the 2012 presidential election.

Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized "zero day" exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.

"Year Zero" introduces the scope and direction of the CIA's global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of "zero day" weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple's iPhone, Google's Android and Microsoft's Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.

Since 2001 the CIA has gained political and budgetary preeminence over the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA found itself building not just its now infamous drone fleet, but a very different type of covert, globe-spanning force — its own substantial fleet of hackers. The agency's hacking division freed it from having to disclose its often controversial operations to the NSA (its primary bureaucratic rival) in order to draw on the NSA's hacking capacities.

By the end of 2016, the CIA's hacking division, which formally falls under the agency's Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other "weaponized" malware. Such is the scale of the CIA's undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook. The CIA had created, in effect, its "own NSA" with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.

In a statement to WikiLeaks the source details policy questions that they say urgently need to be debated in public, including whether the CIA's hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency. The source wishes to initiate a public debate about the security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.

Once a single cyber 'weapon' is 'loose' it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike. (...)

Analysis

CIA malware targets iPhone, Android, smart TVs

CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA's DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).

The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.

The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell's 1984, but "Weeping Angel", developed by the CIA's Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.

The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom's MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a 'Fake-Off' mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In 'Fake-Off' mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.

by Wikileaks |  Read more:

Image: CIA

[ed. I don't recall hearing anything about this issue. Must have gotten downplayed somehow, or I just wasn't paying attention. Got it from this story, about The Artist Holding Valuable Art Hostage to Protect Julian Assange (using a thirty-two-ton Swiss bank safe, Andrei Molodkin says he will destroy works by Picasso, Rembrandt, and Warhol if the WikiLeaks founder dies in prison - New Yorker).]

Stuart Davis, Yellow Truck; Pablo Picasso, Nu Couche (Reclining Nude)
via: (Brooklyn Museum)

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[ed. I like the cat. Reminds me of the dirty looks I'd get from my grandmother.]

My Time with Kurt Cobain

My Time with Kurt Cobain (New Yorker)

by Michael Azerrad
Images: Adams Carvalho, Charles Peterson
"In early 1992, when I first met Kurt Cobain, he and Courtney Love were living in a little apartment in a two-up-two-down building on an ordinary street in the Fairfax section of Los Angeles. I had flown there from New York to interview him for a Rolling Stone cover story, the one with a famous photograph of him wearing a homemade T-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck.” I was nervous. Not much was known about Kurt at that point, other than he was this guy from Seattle who screamed in his songs, smashed his guitars, and might be a heroin addict. He was also the most celebrated rock musician on the planet. (...)

“Hi,” he said, and two things struck me instantly. The first was: oh, wow, I know this guy. He wasn’t some sort of rock-and-roll space alien—he was actually like a lot of the stoners I went to high school with. (I was kind of a stoner in high school myself.) All the nervousness went away. The other thing I realized is uncomfortable to say: I sensed that he was one of those rock musicians who dies young. I’d never met someone like that before or even known many people who had died at all. I just sensed it. It turns out that a lot of other people around him did, too: his bandmate Dave Grohl sensed it, and so did Kurt’s wife, Courtney Love. Even Kurt’s own mother acknowledged it. It just wasn’t something that anyone would say out loud at the time."

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This Drug Can Mend a Broken Heart

Though the details of each case vary, romantic betrayal through infidelity, abandonment, or emotional manipulation can upend one’s life in an instant. For Lantoine, her future plans, and the person they were attached to, were suddenly gone, and her functioning along with them.

Exhausted and an emotional wreck after almost a year, Lantoine learned about a clinical trial at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, a Canadian psychiatric hospital in Montreal, that sought to ease the pain of romantic betrayal. The study did not rely on traditional psychotherapy sessions. It claimed it would dampen the emotional reverberations of what happened to her by pairing a beta-blocker medication called propranolol with a series of “memory reactivation sessions.” She signed up.

It sounds like science fiction, or science romantic-fiction. The 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind often gets brought up, says Michelle Lonergan, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa who led the trial as part of her Ph.D. In the film, a couple, post-breakup, use a service to erase their memories of one another in response to the suffering of heartbreak.

But the experiments that Lantoine enrolled in were an attempt to use a very real feature of the brain—albeit one we’re still learning the ins and outs of—called memory reconsolidation to attenuate agonizing romantic memories.

“Memory reconsolidation” describes how, when we recall a memory, it can become pliable. There is hope—and some intriguing early data—that, at the moment of recollection, we might be able to intentionally change a memory and make it less burdensome. This ability to modulate distressing memories is being investigated as an intervention to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, phobias, and is thought to have promise for depression or anxiety more broadly. It rests on an idea that’s emerged from our understanding of memory over the past few decades: Memories are not fixed, even the ones that haunt us the most.

Described this year in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the study Lantoine enrolled in is the first application of a memory reconsolidation-focused treatment for adjustment disorder resulting from romantic betrayal. (Adjustment disorder is defined as an emotional and behavioral maladaptive reaction to a stressful event, but not a life threatening one, so it doesn’t meet criteria for PTSD.)

Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Lantoine’s memories didn’t vanish in a dramatic collapse of a beach house into the Montauk coastline. She still had the declarative memory of what had happened. But, as Lantoine describes it, the memories were no longer debilitating.

“The treatment doesn’t remove the remembrance of the events,” Lantoine says. “It just removes the pain that was associated with the events. It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” (...)

It soon became clear that memory reconsolidation could be a powerful therapeutic tool. But the methods used in animal studies to interfere with reconsolidating were often harmful to humans. Enter propranolol: a common beta blocker used for lowering blood pressure as well as for treating anxiety and preventing migraines. Propranolol impairs adrenaline hormones in the brain and is thought to impact the production of other molecules needed for memory reconsolidation.

Starting in the early 2000s, researchers showed that, in rats, the drug could have similar post-retrieval effects as the more toxic compounds. And in 2009, researchers found that propranolol could help people disengage from a learned fear response. In this study, scientists showed human participants images of spiders, paired with an electric shock. One day later, some were given propranolol and others a placebo. On the third day, when participants saw the same images, those who had received the placebo noticeably startled, a physical manifestation of the fear response usually paired with a negative emotional state. But those who had been given the propranolol no longer had that reaction. These participants could still remember what had happened to them; propranolol didn’t erase the facts. But they no longer exhibited the biological signs of being afraid.

by Shayla Love, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Max4e Photo/Shutterstock
[ed. See also: The Curse of Valentine's Day (UnHerd). Certainly has been cursed for me.]

The Method of Becoming a Character

On the surface level, acting can seem like a relatively fun job. You memorize lines, put on costumes, play pretend, and hang out on set with creative and engaging people. But like all jobs, there’s a reality that most people don’t consider. For acting, it’s executing it in an authentic manner.

To put that into perspective, not only do actors need to memorize pages and pages of script (and that can be a lot), but they also need to deliver it genuinely, as if they were speaking it for the first time. Their reactions and the way they display emotions also have to be read as genuine. Moreover, some actors have to memorize how to perform additional activities on the side, such as a dance, a walk, or an accent. All the while, they can’t look at the camera or break character. They must always be in a state that best impersonates their character. This is often why actors have to shoot multiple takes, even for just one sentence, to get a scene just right.

 

In our increasingly critical society, where every detail is scrutinized, clichéd acting can doom a film to irrelevance. So how does an actor realistically capture a character’s role? One infamous technique is method acting.

Method acting is the process in which an actor adapts to their character’s physical or emotional state through a range of techniques. This, in theory, veers away from clichéd acting and instead exhibits originality in their portrayal of a character. No wonder that Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison and endured hypothermic conditions during his role as Hugh Glass in The Revenant; he was nominated six times for the Academy Award for it.

However, despite these great performances, this level of dedication to play a role can come with major health risks ranging from physical strain and injury to mental health issues such as trauma, fatigue, depression, anxiety, sleep deprivation, and their accompanying psychotic disorders.

The Birth of Method Acting

In the early 20th century, Russian actor and theater director Konstantin Stanislavski set out to revolutionize the novice world of stagecraft. He created a systematic approach to acting through a combination of techniques from various theaters and entertainment companies, calling it “the system.” Some could say he was feeling rather creative that day.

Thus, the method was born out of the system, designed to allow actors to realistically experience their roles rather than trying to imitate them. Stanislavski believed that by reforming their emotional and mental outlook, actors’ performances would accurately embody their characters.

Stanislavski then taught this innovative approach to his students, and when they performed in the United States, their techniques piqued many American actors’ interests. Deciding to commercialize this opportunity, a few of Stanislavski’s students relocated to the United States and established the American Laboratory Theatre. There, they began teaching the method to a new generation of actors who would go on to star in Hollywood, popularizing the mechanisms of method acting, and the rest became history.

Over time, three students of Stanislavski’s system stood out: Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and Stanford Meisner, all of whom would become prominent figures in method acting. They defined “the method” in their unique way, each emphasizing their techniques and beliefs. Thus, the modern version of “the method” is essentially a combination of three, each a refined version of the original system, all aimed at helping actors connect more deeply with their characters.

Adler and Strasberg, now two of the most famous method coaches, parted ways due to their differing interpretations of “the method.” Strasberg, whose students included Al Pacino and Marilyn Monroe, focused on the emotional aspects of the system. He advocated for the use of personal experiences to portray a character, with the belief that the most natural performance could only come from immersing yourself in real experiences or events, leading to a genuine expression of emotion.

On the other hand, Adler, who trained well-known actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro, emphasized the importance of “given circumstances.” This meant encouraging her students to draw their performances from their imaginations rather than their personal experiences.

Adler heavily disagreed with this approach, stating, “Drawing on the emotions I experienced – for example, when my mother died – to create a performance is sick and schizophrenic.” Despite her intense statement, Strasberg’s emphasis on personal experience is agreed to be the definition of the method, which may explain why it remains so controversial today.

Actors Who Took Their Roles to the Next Level

Several actors have made headlines for their extreme dedication to Method Acting. These on-set moments in acting history highlight the lengths actors will go through to embody their characters despite the detrimental impact on their health. From losing or gaining significant amounts of weight to living in isolation, these actors push the boundaries of what it means to be a character.

Natalie Portman in Black Swan

Natalie Portman’s role as Nina, a dedicated ballerina in Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 film Black Swan, is one of her most notable performances. The film follows Nina’s obsession with perfecting the contrasting roles of the White and Black Swan in a ballet production of Swan Lake. Portman’s preparation for the role mirrored her character’s dedication, involving rigorous training with former New York City Ballet dancer, Mary Helen Bowers.

In addition to ballet training, she incorporated swimming a mile a day into her routine. Her training schedule was rigorously brutal, starting with two hours of ballet a day for the first six months for strengthening and injury prevention. Later, at about six months, she increased to five hours a day, which included swimming and ballet classes. Two months before filming, she added choreography to her routine, extending her training to approximately eight hours a day. On top of this, Portman lost 20 pounds and lived primarily off carrots and almonds in order to achieve the slender frame of a ballerina.

by Ashley Chen, The Science Survey | Read more:
Image: Avel Chuklanovon/Unsplash

Letters from a Missing Doll

At 40, Franz Kafka (1883-1924), who never married and had no children, was strolling through Steglitz Park in Berlin. He chanced upon a young girl crying her eyes out because she had lost her favorite doll. She and Kafka looked for the doll without success. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would look again.

The next day, when they still had not found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter “written” by the doll that said, “Please do not cry. I have gone on a trip to see the world. I’m going to write to you about my adventures.”

Thus began a story that continued to the end of Kafka’s life.

When they would meet, Kafka read aloud his carefully composed letters of adventures and conversations about the beloved doll, which the girl found enchanting. Finally, Kafka read her a letter of the story that brought the doll back to Berlin, and he then gave her a doll he had purchased. “This does not look at all my doll,” she said. Kafka handed her another letter that explained, “My trips, they have changed me.” The girl hugged the new doll and took it home with her. A year later, Kafka died.

Many years later, the now grown-up girl found a letter tucked into an unnoticed crevice in the doll. The tiny letter, signed by Kafka, said, “Everything you love is very likely to be lost, but in the end, love will return in a different way.”

by Dan MacGuill, Snopes | Read more:
Image: Dora Diamant and Franz Kafka, Wikipedia
[ed. True? Maybe.]

Atsuko Tanaka

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The Rowdy Golf Tournament That Got Too Rowdy

The Phoenix Open calls itself “the greatest show on grass.” The annual tournament, held at TPC Scottsdale, is basically what LIV Golf wants to be: Four days of raucous, alcohol-soaked mayhem—or at least as much mayhem as a golf tournament can possibly provide. The 16th hole is flanked by grandstands from tee to green. It’s a short, easy hole; it has become known for fans booing when golfers miss the green and wild celebrations when someone gets a hole-in-one.

As with a lot of things about the event, it’s a bit much—and seemingly becoming more so every year. When Sam Ryder got that hole-in-one two years ago, beer cans flew from the stands onto the course. This year, things got a little messier. (...)

The weather stayed cold, but the beer eventually started flowing. At one point the gates were closed and alcohol sales were halted; organizers said that was to encourage fans to move toward the course so more could get in. Some fans were turned away. Golf Magazine said the atmosphere calmed down a bit after this, but this is still the Phoenix Open. This means that "calmed down" was relative.

Things did not always go well for the fans who got in over the weekend. One was carried out. A woman fell from the grandstands at the 16th green and suffered serious injuries. There were fights. One shirtless guy ran onto the 16th green and jumped into a sand trap. Cops and fans had altercations all weekend. And our friend in the lead photo of this story, dressed as William Wallace from Braveheart, ran onto a green and mooned a police officer before being taken away.

I would say he did not stick the landing pic.twitter.com/Y8bI8Eu9IK— Paige Spiranac (@PaigeSpiranac) February 10, 2024

Fans almost never run onto the course at golf tournaments—except at the Phoenix Open. Last year a guy in a speedo ran onto the 16th green, pole danced on the flag stick, and jumped into a water hazard. In 2018 a streaker ran onto the course; he said he remembered having eight drinks beforehand. “The alcohol helped,” he said. “I definitely wouldn’t have done it if I was sober.”

The golfers were not any more pleased by this than you'd expect. Jordan Spieth (14-under, T6) said he had trouble getting to the course. Zach Johnson (3-under, T60) yelled at fans: “Don't ‘sir’ me. Somebody said it. I’m just sick of it. Just shut up!” He stormed off. (...)

Billy Horschel (6-under, T41) defended the honor of Nicolo Galletti (2-over, 73): “Buddy, when he's over the shot, shut the hell up, man. Come on, he's trying to hit a damn golf shot here. It's our fucking job.” Spieth, once he got on the course, said “what the fuck” to the gallery. “Shitshows,” Byeong Hun An (1-under, T66) tweeted. “Totally out of control on every hole.”

Johnson told the Arizona Republic he probably wouldn’t be back next year. “This tournament has been inappropriate and crossed the line since I’ve been on tour,” he said, “and this is my 21st year.” (Incidentally: Nick Taylor and Charley Hoffman both finished at 21-under, and Taylor won on the second playoff hole.)

Maybe the golfers are just being babies at the one event where fans let loose. But it seems like things really were out of control. Fans told the Republic conditions were bad for them, too. “It was hard to enjoy the event when it took 30-plus minutes at any concessions and bathrooms were long waits, too,” Todd Williams said. “I felt cramped and anxious,” Elizabeth Suchocki said. “People just kept packing in and packing in and there were people all over. And I was like OK, this is a lot of people, this is very uncomfortable.”

Here’s what happened when things got better, per Golf Magazine’s James Colgan:

Even if social media remained a steady stream of fan misbehavior, the acts remained largely within the realm of traditional WM Phoenix Open debauchery: faceplants, public urination and an apparent mudslide (the act, not the drink). Offenses worthy of the ire of players—screaming in backswings, crowd movement around the putting green, blatant disregard for typical golf etiquette—continued too, but at that point in the weekend, it was hard to feign surprise.

The tournament has leaned into this, and by now the debauchery is something like their sales pitch. They sell shirts joking about the tournament’s mass drunkenness. The PGA Tour flaunts the event’s crowds. And why not? The tournament is unique. It makes people money. But when you build your event around people getting plastered, well, sometimes this is what you get.

by Dan McQuade, Defector |  Read more:

Image: Christian Petersen/Getty Images
[ed. Shitshow is right. Ask anyone on the Champions (aka old guys) Tour if they'd put up with anything like that and you'd probably regret asking. But when you build a Colosseum-like arena and fill it with drunken partiers, what else would you expect? See also: Tensions mount at WM Phoenix Open as Zach Johnson, Billy Horschel have had enough of a few obnoxious fans (GD; w/video); and, Let the Phoenix Open learn from its wicked hangover (GD).]

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TEQ63.Moderns RMXワープ

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Is Temu Legit?

If you're a frequent online shopper and have been bombarded with ads from a site called Temu, you may wonder what the website is all about. Temu is a Chinese-owned digital marketplace that took the internet by storm over the last year. According to Statista, Temu sees over 30 million new downloads every month, making it the number one shopping app in the App Store and Play Store.

If you've hesitated to place an order, it may be because you're unsure if the items are real, how long they take to get to your door, and if the items are of good quality. Well, look no further because this article addresses all the questions you might have about Temu. Let's get into it.

What is Temu?

Temu is an online shopping megastore that offers just about any product you can imagine. You can buy car accessories, clothing, kitchen appliances, electronics, outdoor furniture, power tools, baby clothes, and everything in between.

Temu's stand-out feature is that many of the site's products are incredibly cheap. You can buy shoes for $15, necklaces for $1, and wireless keyboards for $10. In fact, whatever you can think of is probably on Temu for less than $50.

Some people compare Temu to sites like Shein, Wish, and AliExpress, but Temu is a little different. Shein primarily focuses on fashion and clothing items, while customers can buy almost anything on Temu. Wish and AliExpress are known for having lower-quality items, longer shipping times, and a shorter item return window.

Temu launched in late 2022 and quickly rose to the top spot in the App Store and Play Store's shopping categories. People found out about Temu from ads and were attracted to the site's low prices.

Is Temu a legitimate website?

It depends on your definition of 'legitimate'. Yes, most of the products on Temu are real, as in, you will receive them, and it takes about 10 days before they reach your doorstep.

But any tech products you order on Temu are not name-brand unless they have a blue checkmark on their product listing. However, you can buy items like laptops, smartphones, and tablets, but they're from lesser-known manufacturers.

Last year, an HP representative told ZDNET that the company could not verify that the HP products on Temu were "from an authorized reseller or are authentic HP devices." Since ZDNET's inquiry, there are no products on Temu advertised as HP products.

Some customers say the items they ordered look slightly different than they did on the website or were lower quality than they expected.

What can I expect when I place an order?

Buying items from Temu follows the same formula as buying from any e-commerce site. You find things you like, add them to your cart, then check out.

However, there is one caveat before you purchase your items: You must have at least $10 worth of items in your cart before you can check out. Temu says the $10 minimum is to cover shipping fees for users who want free shipping.

If your items arrive late, Temu offers a $5 credit for packages purchased with standard shipping that arrive late. The company will credit you $13 for packages purchased with express shipping that arrive late.

In other cases, the items can arrive on time, can be decent or good quality, and can be exactly how they look on Temu's website. Product quality can be unpredictable, which is not so different from offerings on other online stores.

If you receive your items and they don't look like their online listing, or they arrive damaged, or they don't arrive at all, your order is eligible for Temu's Purchase Protection Program. This program guarantees your money back with a full refund if you return your items within 90 days of purchase.

Item prices on Temu are constantly fluctuating. If you buy an item and it decreases in price after your purchase, you can request a price adjustment. After you request a price adjustment, the difference will be available on your account as a Temu credit within minutes.

Why is Temu controversial?

Temu was accused by the U.S. government of potential data risks after its sister site, e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, was suspended by Google for containing malware. However, according to CNBC, analysts say Temu is less of a threat, and the risks associated with Pinduoduo were targeted at Chinese users.

Additionally, the U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party published a report that states Temu does not take the necessary steps to ensure the products on the site comply with the Uyghur Forced Labor Act.

The same report asserts that Temu exploits a U.S. commerce loophole that allows the company to avoid paying tariffs and complying with U.S. commerce laws and regulations.

Are the products on Temu good quality?

Temu is not accredited by the Better Business Bureau (BBB) and has an average rating of two-and-a-half out of five stars. Many recent complaints about Temu on the BBB website say that items never arrived or, if they did, took weeks or even months to arrive.

On social media, particularly on TikTok, many people are pleased with their Temu purchases. From little gadgets and household items to clothes and shoes, Temu is one of TikTok's popular obsessions.

I've tried products from Temu, and I encountered minimal problems. Of course, some items are cheaply made, but that's to be expected for a $1 to $3 item. However, generally, the items on Temu are what you would expect them to be.

by Jada Jones, ZDNET |  Read more:

Image: Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

[ed. See also: We’re all addicted to cheap stuff — and Temu knows it (Vox); and, Temu Is Speedrunning American Familiarity (Atlantic).]

Game Day Dress Up

Celebrities at the Super Bowl – in Pictures (The Guardian)

Image: Joe Camporeale/USA Today Sports
[ed. Guess who. What a weirdo. Also along for the fun - his two kids. (Hopefully this will be the last thing I'll ever post here about Super Bowl LVIII, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, Kanye West (above), more celebrities, and anything or anyone else associated with this whole over-the-top spectacle. Hopefully. Great game though.]