Images: My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away (Deviant Art)
[ed. Gotta say, Spirited Away is my favorite.]
Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best
Music Therapy
‘She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk’: music therapy helped Joni Mitchell recover from a stroke – could it ward off depression and dementia too?
In 2015, Joni Mitchell suffered a catastrophic stroke. According to her friend, the musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “when she got back from the hospital, she couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, and the doctors were so pessimistic about her recovery, they hadn’t scheduled any follow-ups”. For a while it looked as though one of the most gifted songwriters of the 20th century would be permanently silenced.
One day, though, the nurses caring for her at her home found Levitin’s number on a piece of paper in the kitchen, and called him. They had noticed that Mitchell perked up when she heard music coming from their phones, and wondered if he had any suggestions for songs she might respond to. Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). Their picks ranged from Debussy to Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen.
Here was the perfect solution, then: a tailor-made music therapy programme. The personalised aspect is something Levitin, whose new book is called Music As Medicine, knows to be all-important. As he explains to me from his home office in Los Angeles, “If you’re talking about therapeutic effects, you have to like the music. If you don’t like it, your walls are going to go up, your cortisol levels will spike. [You’ll say] ‘Get me away from this.’” As luck would have it, Mitchell had set down exactly what she’d need in these circumstances while she was well, and Levitin knew precisely where the nurses could find it – in the corner of the bookcase at the far end of her living room. He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.”
Mitchell made steady progress with the help of speech and physical therapists, but Levitin sees music as a crucial part of the picture. “One of the things we know is that music you like increases dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical that motivates you to do things … having that music as a reminder of who she is, who she was, and what she cares about, helped her to do the very difficult job of recovery, and to follow through with the protocols of the therapists.”
In a touching anecdote from the book, Levitin describes how, a year after Mitchell’s stroke, he brought flowers on one of his regular visits. “She walked over to a cabinet by herself to get a vase for them,” he writes. “She moved some vases out of the way to find a particular one in the back, a glass vase with a single handle and flowers painted on it. ‘That’s a beautiful vase, where did you get it?’ I asked. ‘I bought it when I was living in Laurel Canyon with Graham.’ Oh. That vase.” (...)
In 2006 he published This Is Your Brain on Music, a mix of the technical and personal that became a runaway bestseller and was translated into 18 languages. It covered the gamut of musical theory – from rhythm, harmony and pitch (including the “Levitin effect” – the fact that even non musicians usually remember songs in the correct key) to their neural correlates and why our musical preferences are defined by what we hear up to the age of 18.
Music As Medicine marks a return to his core subject, after successful books on the neuroscience of ageing and the psychology of misinformation. “When I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, I wanted to have at least a chapter on medical benefits of music, but there really wasn’t any good science about it – and I’m not one of those who doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a story. So I couldn’t write about it until now, because there’s actually been some good work,” he tells me. “We’re learning enough about the underlying mechanisms of music and brain and body that we can apply them, not just in the laboratory, but in clinics and hospitals and care facilities and outpatient treatments.” (...)
Since prevention is better than cure, is there any evidence that engaging with music can protect against dementia? Yes and no. “It’s not going to prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will prevent you from seeing the effects or symptoms of Alzheimer’s for some time.” And the more active your engagement, the better. “Playing an instrument is neuroprotective, because you’re creating something. You’re orchestrating your limbs and your fingers and your vocal cords in ways that you haven’t before. No two performances are ever identical, and so they’re creating new neural pathways.” This is the concept of cognitive reserve: “I think of it as being like an athlete. If you can bench press 250 pounds on a regular basis, even with a cold and a sore arm, you’re going to be able to bench press more than I can.”
So is music a bit like a workout for the brain? “Yeah: it engages every part of the brain that we know of. It invokes memory, emotion, reward systems, eye-hand coordination, planning. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you’re not a professional musician or particularly good at it, you get all the benefits.”
That’s why Levitin recommends (prescribes?) playing music, whatever your ability or age. For anyone who can’t see the point when someone like Yo-Yo Ma has a 65-year head start, he has a clear message: the idea that you need to emulate professionals or be well trained in theory is “bullshit”. “It was 500 years ago or so, when the Europeans built the first concert halls, that we created this artificial distinction between the performers and the audience. But for tens of thousands of years, music was participatory. Still, in most cultures on the planet – not in our hyper-success-oriented western culture – people are singing unselfconsciously in groups, and nobody’s making a big deal out of it.”[ed. See also: Ted Gioia's excellent (and free) serialized book Music to Raise the Dead (HB).]
Here was the perfect solution, then: a tailor-made music therapy programme. The personalised aspect is something Levitin, whose new book is called Music As Medicine, knows to be all-important. As he explains to me from his home office in Los Angeles, “If you’re talking about therapeutic effects, you have to like the music. If you don’t like it, your walls are going to go up, your cortisol levels will spike. [You’ll say] ‘Get me away from this.’” As luck would have it, Mitchell had set down exactly what she’d need in these circumstances while she was well, and Levitin knew precisely where the nurses could find it – in the corner of the bookcase at the far end of her living room. He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.”
Mitchell made steady progress with the help of speech and physical therapists, but Levitin sees music as a crucial part of the picture. “One of the things we know is that music you like increases dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical that motivates you to do things … having that music as a reminder of who she is, who she was, and what she cares about, helped her to do the very difficult job of recovery, and to follow through with the protocols of the therapists.”
In a touching anecdote from the book, Levitin describes how, a year after Mitchell’s stroke, he brought flowers on one of his regular visits. “She walked over to a cabinet by herself to get a vase for them,” he writes. “She moved some vases out of the way to find a particular one in the back, a glass vase with a single handle and flowers painted on it. ‘That’s a beautiful vase, where did you get it?’ I asked. ‘I bought it when I was living in Laurel Canyon with Graham.’ Oh. That vase.” (...)
In 2006 he published This Is Your Brain on Music, a mix of the technical and personal that became a runaway bestseller and was translated into 18 languages. It covered the gamut of musical theory – from rhythm, harmony and pitch (including the “Levitin effect” – the fact that even non musicians usually remember songs in the correct key) to their neural correlates and why our musical preferences are defined by what we hear up to the age of 18.
Music As Medicine marks a return to his core subject, after successful books on the neuroscience of ageing and the psychology of misinformation. “When I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, I wanted to have at least a chapter on medical benefits of music, but there really wasn’t any good science about it – and I’m not one of those who doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a story. So I couldn’t write about it until now, because there’s actually been some good work,” he tells me. “We’re learning enough about the underlying mechanisms of music and brain and body that we can apply them, not just in the laboratory, but in clinics and hospitals and care facilities and outpatient treatments.” (...)
Since prevention is better than cure, is there any evidence that engaging with music can protect against dementia? Yes and no. “It’s not going to prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will prevent you from seeing the effects or symptoms of Alzheimer’s for some time.” And the more active your engagement, the better. “Playing an instrument is neuroprotective, because you’re creating something. You’re orchestrating your limbs and your fingers and your vocal cords in ways that you haven’t before. No two performances are ever identical, and so they’re creating new neural pathways.” This is the concept of cognitive reserve: “I think of it as being like an athlete. If you can bench press 250 pounds on a regular basis, even with a cold and a sore arm, you’re going to be able to bench press more than I can.”
So is music a bit like a workout for the brain? “Yeah: it engages every part of the brain that we know of. It invokes memory, emotion, reward systems, eye-hand coordination, planning. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you’re not a professional musician or particularly good at it, you get all the benefits.”
That’s why Levitin recommends (prescribes?) playing music, whatever your ability or age. For anyone who can’t see the point when someone like Yo-Yo Ma has a 65-year head start, he has a clear message: the idea that you need to emulate professionals or be well trained in theory is “bullshit”. “It was 500 years ago or so, when the Europeans built the first concert halls, that we created this artificial distinction between the performers and the audience. But for tens of thousands of years, music was participatory. Still, in most cultures on the planet – not in our hyper-success-oriented western culture – people are singing unselfconsciously in groups, and nobody’s making a big deal out of it.”
Monday, March 10, 2025
How New York Drove a Steak Through the Heart of Texas
They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and that’s certainly true regarding the job of lieutenant governor. It’s an express train to obscurity in most states; in Texas, the lieutenant governor controls the state Senate and chairs the budget process. So when the incumbent, Dan Patrick, sketched his legislative priorities the other day, people paid heed — even when he was trolling the state of New York.
Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”
“Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” Patrick wrote on X after meeting with Texas cattle raisers last week.
Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)
In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”
How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.
But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.
But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.
And then they got killed.
Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”
Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.
Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).
[ed. Some days it feels like we're living in a Saturday Night Live skit. See also: No harm, no fowl: Trump recommends a return to subsistence farming (WSJ):]
Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.
“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”
In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)
Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.
This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]
Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”
Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)
In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”
How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.
But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.
But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.
And then they got killed.
Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”
Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.
Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).
by David Von Drahle, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post***
Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission. (...)Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.
“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”
In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)
Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.
This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]
NFL Teams See Aaron Rodgers Opportunity
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Barbarians at the Gate
Ten days or so ago, at the end of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, I found myself at a party. I’ve been to these sorts of things before, and more often than not they have been insufferable affairs: sweaty frat basements reeking of stale beer, bright young men outnumbering bright young women whose attention they desire. Starry-eyed, badly-dressed, trying way too hard — the essence of DC.
(Incidentally, Democrats are no better — every bit the caricature as their opposite. But these CPAC afterparties usually nail the Washington striver stereotype in singular fashion.)
This party was very different, however. It wasn’t even a CPAC party. It was billed as a “DOGE appreciation party.” And while that may sound plenty dorky, it surfaced something else that’s novel in Trump’s DC. It surfaced a kind of gleeful barbarism that I’ve just not seen before.
Everything about the party was over the top. After you RSVP’d, you needed to get vetted. (For whatever reason, I was approved fairly quickly.) An email went out the day of the party saying that the whole thing was “strictly off the record” — presumably because journalists had breached the defenses. The note was intentionally edgy. “Security will be tight, so arrive prepared.” There were guard goons at the door. Word had spread on social media that the party was hard-right, so a handful of cops were called in to protect attendees from a dozen or so people out front chanting “Fuck off, fascists!” in that familiar protester cadence. I couldn’t help but wonder whether this resistance was being paid by the organizers to be there, for ambience. It all felt curated.
The space was rented, I was told; Meta had apparently held a party there earlier in the week. Walking up to the third floor, you were confronted by a massive stuffed bison by the entrance. The whole place was shabby chic — a penthouse loft, with a massive split-level living room that no one would ever live in, with dusty bookshelves and odd furniture scattered about. There was an industrial-sized kitchen that looked unused. A bar in the living room and a second one at the exit to the rooftop were further tip-offs that this is an event space and not a home. (That said, I did wander into a bedroom decorated Buddhist-style, so who knows?)
Respecting the “off the record” injunction, I’ll stick with the mood, as in truth it was more instructive than any conversation I had.
The mood was jubilant. But it wasn’t just that sense of liberating triumph that Trump’s victory has injected into many conservatives. It was a kind of agitated truculence. The DOGE theme had everyone drunk on destruction. There certainly was a lot of camaraderie, you could feel it in all the conversations. But there was no sense of restraint, and no sense of positive mission. The mission itself was to tear down, to punish.
The evening was not free of cliché: At one point, I overheard a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire. My mind turned to the sack of Rome, a point of no return. Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when the Visigoths entered the city in 410AD, retold the instructions of Alaric, their Christian king:
I don’t want to pretend that I somehow stand above and apart from all of this. The giddy glee feels in part driven by the prospect of smashing decadence. And I feel it too. Moreover, I suspect that the feeling is shared much more broadly across the country — and that it’s what keeps Trump’s revolutionary radicalism still above-water in the polls. Only a slim majority voted for Trump, but the rejection of the progressive identity agenda — call it “wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever you want — feels broader. (...)
I saw a familiar face at the party at one point later in the evening. I drunkenly tried to communicate the above to him. “These people are having fun right now, but they don’t know what’s coming. This is not an organized army, these are bandits and vandals, and no one has full control. They’ll turn on each other eventually. Everyone is backslapping tonight, but they’ll all be swimming in each others’ blood in a year’s time!” Yes, drunkenly. But I still can’t shake the feeling.
[ed. Happily tearing the country apart and ruining people's lives over something as insignificant as political correctness. See also: 50 Thoughts on DOGE (Statecraft). And, There Is a Liberal Answer to the Trump-Musk Wrecking Ball (NYT).]
(Incidentally, Democrats are no better — every bit the caricature as their opposite. But these CPAC afterparties usually nail the Washington striver stereotype in singular fashion.)
This party was very different, however. It wasn’t even a CPAC party. It was billed as a “DOGE appreciation party.” And while that may sound plenty dorky, it surfaced something else that’s novel in Trump’s DC. It surfaced a kind of gleeful barbarism that I’ve just not seen before.
The space was rented, I was told; Meta had apparently held a party there earlier in the week. Walking up to the third floor, you were confronted by a massive stuffed bison by the entrance. The whole place was shabby chic — a penthouse loft, with a massive split-level living room that no one would ever live in, with dusty bookshelves and odd furniture scattered about. There was an industrial-sized kitchen that looked unused. A bar in the living room and a second one at the exit to the rooftop were further tip-offs that this is an event space and not a home. (That said, I did wander into a bedroom decorated Buddhist-style, so who knows?)
Respecting the “off the record” injunction, I’ll stick with the mood, as in truth it was more instructive than any conversation I had.
The mood was jubilant. But it wasn’t just that sense of liberating triumph that Trump’s victory has injected into many conservatives. It was a kind of agitated truculence. The DOGE theme had everyone drunk on destruction. There certainly was a lot of camaraderie, you could feel it in all the conversations. But there was no sense of restraint, and no sense of positive mission. The mission itself was to tear down, to punish.
The evening was not free of cliché: At one point, I overheard a group of young men eagerly talking about the Roman Empire. My mind turned to the sack of Rome, a point of no return. Edward Gibbon, describing the moment when the Visigoths entered the city in 410AD, retold the instructions of Alaric, their Christian king:
He encouraged his troops boldly to seize the rewards of valour, and to enrich themselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people; but he exhorted them at the same time to spare the lives of the unresisting citizens, and to respect the churches of the apostles St. Peter and St. Paul, as holy and inviolable sanctuaries.Today, the barbarians have also entered the gates. But King Trump has no Christian virtues to speak of, and he has counseled no restraint. His taunting address last night to a joint session of Congress brooked no pity for the vanquished. There will certainly be much plunder and self-enrichment as the wealthy and effeminate stand by helplessly and watch. But unlike back then, it feels like no denizen, and no institution, will be spared.
I don’t want to pretend that I somehow stand above and apart from all of this. The giddy glee feels in part driven by the prospect of smashing decadence. And I feel it too. Moreover, I suspect that the feeling is shared much more broadly across the country — and that it’s what keeps Trump’s revolutionary radicalism still above-water in the polls. Only a slim majority voted for Trump, but the rejection of the progressive identity agenda — call it “wokeness” or “DEI” or whatever you want — feels broader. (...)
I saw a familiar face at the party at one point later in the evening. I drunkenly tried to communicate the above to him. “These people are having fun right now, but they don’t know what’s coming. This is not an organized army, these are bandits and vandals, and no one has full control. They’ll turn on each other eventually. Everyone is backslapping tonight, but they’ll all be swimming in each others’ blood in a year’s time!” Yes, drunkenly. But I still can’t shake the feeling.
by Damir Marusic, Wisdom of Crowds | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Sunday, March 9, 2025
How AI Takeover Might Happen in Two Years
Image: uncredited
I’m not a natural “doomsayer.” But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety researcher is to think about the more troubling scenarios.
I’m like a mechanic scrambling last-minute checks before Apollo 13 takes off. If you ask for my take on the situation, I won’t comment on the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or describe how beautiful the stars will appear from space.
I will tell you what could go wrong. That is what I intend to do in this story.
Now I should clarify what this is exactly. It's not a prediction. I don’t expect AI progress to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It’s not pure fantasy either.
It is my worst nightmare.
It’s a sampling from the futures that are among the most devastating, and I believe, disturbingly plausible – the ones that most keep me up at night.
I’m telling this tale because the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story a fictional one.
by joshc, LessWrong | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Life Lessons From a Coastal Wolf Pack
Pleasant Island is two miles from the town of Gustavus, Alaska, and less than 30 miles from where we’d anchored. A wolf pack arrived there in 2013, after swimming across the narrow channel from the mainland. Initially, they did what wolves typically do: eat every ungulate they could clamp their jaws around. After they’d decimated the island’s limited deer population, their next act seemed obvious: The pack would move, or starve. Several decades earlier, an ill-fated and ethically dubious ecological experiment on Alaska’s far-flung Coronation Island demonstrated what happens when introduced wolves eat all the local deer and have nowhere else to go: In the absence of prey, the wolves starved, resorting to cannibalism before eventually dying out entirely.
But, as Juneau-based biologist Gretchen Roffler and her colleagues revealed in a pair of studies published in 2021 and 2023, the Pleasant Island wolves found another way. When deer disappeared from the menu, the pack shopped around, and did so with remarkable success.
Roffler’s first glimpse of a Pleasant Island wolf eating a sea otter seemed like an anomaly. But when she observed the same behavior again, she suspected a larger phenomenon might be at play. To test this, she and her colleagues began the unglamorous work of scooping poop from the island’s beaches and forested trails. By analyzing the scat using a technique called DNA metabarcoding — akin to a prey fingerprinting tool for feces — Roffler, Taal Levi and other partners at Oregon State University could determine whether the wolves were eating terrestrial herbivores, like deer, or marine predators, like seals or otters. Combining this research with on-the-ground field observations and GPS collars that tracked the wolves, they found that the pack was not merely sampling otters; they were devouring them en masse. Despite being fierce adversaries, with sharp teeth and claws, otters provided the wolves with a reliable alternative to venison.
The idea that carnivores’ dietary habits can influence their environments isn’t new. However, as our awareness of wolves’ ability to shift what they eat — quickly and sometimes dramatically — grows, so does the need for a more nuanced scientific approach. Traditionally, ecological theory has prioritized models that simplify relationships in the wild: Wolves dine on ungulates, predators need prey, and the lives of deer, beavers and otters have little in common. However, otter-eating wolves and other so-called exceptions may actually be teaching us just how capable some species are of responding rapidly when the need arises. Ecologists sometimes refer to this potential to pivot as “adaptive capacity;” i.e., how fast a species can change the rules of its own game.
by Caroline Van Hemert, High Country News | Read more:Image: Nature Picture Library/Alamy
But, as Juneau-based biologist Gretchen Roffler and her colleagues revealed in a pair of studies published in 2021 and 2023, the Pleasant Island wolves found another way. When deer disappeared from the menu, the pack shopped around, and did so with remarkable success.
The sea otters were relative newcomers themselves. After near-extirpation throughout much of the North Pacific, otters were reintroduced to the outer islands of Southeast Alaska in the 1960s, and their population rapidly expanded. Whether the first Pleasant Island otter meal was a lucky accident or the result of a strategically planned hunt, the pack wasted no time in capitalizing on this now-abundant resource. In 2015, wolf scats collected from the island consisted of approximately 98% deer; by 2018, deer had disappeared entirely and sea otters made up more than two-thirds of their diet.
Though what wolves eat for lunch might not seem revolutionary, this demonstration of their flexibility is, particularly when it comes to shaping our scientific understanding of their lives. Wolves are known to be opportunistic, but this pack’s quick and dramatic prey shift sent shock waves through the wildlife world: in just three years, they’d upended classic predator-prey dynamics and bent the supposed “rules” of their lives.
Most wolves specialize on ungulates, including deer, moose and elk. Pleasant Island’s wolves seemed no different until they amended the core tenets of this long-standing exchange, and did so in a matter of just a few years. By crossing a dietary threshold, they had propelled themselves across ecotones and trophic levels — switching their primary food source from a bottom-up terrestrial herbivore (deer) to a top-down marine carnivore (otters). This isn’t just a matter of semantics; conserving the health of wildlife populations requires knowledge about what animals eat, where they live, and what they might do next. And these island-hopping wolves were full of surprises. (...)
Though what wolves eat for lunch might not seem revolutionary, this demonstration of their flexibility is, particularly when it comes to shaping our scientific understanding of their lives. Wolves are known to be opportunistic, but this pack’s quick and dramatic prey shift sent shock waves through the wildlife world: in just three years, they’d upended classic predator-prey dynamics and bent the supposed “rules” of their lives.
Most wolves specialize on ungulates, including deer, moose and elk. Pleasant Island’s wolves seemed no different until they amended the core tenets of this long-standing exchange, and did so in a matter of just a few years. By crossing a dietary threshold, they had propelled themselves across ecotones and trophic levels — switching their primary food source from a bottom-up terrestrial herbivore (deer) to a top-down marine carnivore (otters). This isn’t just a matter of semantics; conserving the health of wildlife populations requires knowledge about what animals eat, where they live, and what they might do next. And these island-hopping wolves were full of surprises. (...)
The idea that carnivores’ dietary habits can influence their environments isn’t new. However, as our awareness of wolves’ ability to shift what they eat — quickly and sometimes dramatically — grows, so does the need for a more nuanced scientific approach. Traditionally, ecological theory has prioritized models that simplify relationships in the wild: Wolves dine on ungulates, predators need prey, and the lives of deer, beavers and otters have little in common. However, otter-eating wolves and other so-called exceptions may actually be teaching us just how capable some species are of responding rapidly when the need arises. Ecologists sometimes refer to this potential to pivot as “adaptive capacity;” i.e., how fast a species can change the rules of its own game.
[ed. Taking down a full grown otter would be quite a feat. They can grow up to nearly 5 ft. long and 100 lbs., with clam cracking jaws. Here's one (below) being cleaned of oil (took six people to hold him down, even moderately sedated):]
Image: markk
Saturday, March 8, 2025
Spruce Pine Powers the World's Electronics
We have already identified some key resources involved in AI development that could be restricted. The economic bottlenecks are mainly around high energy requirements and chip manufacturing.
Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can't currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won't be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.
A recent hurricane flooding high-purity quartz mines made headlines because chip producers require it for the crucibles used in making silicon wafers. Lower purity means accidental doping of the silicon crystal, which means lower chip yields per wafer, at best. Those mines aren't the only source, but they seem to be the best one. There might also be ways to utilize lower-purity materials, but that might take time to develop and would require a lot more energy, which is already a bottleneck.
The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now. LessWrong (...)
However, such pure quartz is rare—it can only be found at a handful of places on Earth. And a North Carolina town home to the world’s biggest deposit of the mineral was just hit by Hurricane Helene.
Sitting an hour northeast of Asheville, the small town of Spruce Pine, also known as Mineral City, is home to about 2,000 people. It also contains a crucial supply of the natural high-purity quartz required for the computers and devices that run our modern world.
When Hurricane Helene struck, Spruce Pine was doused in more than two feet of rain, flooding its downtown, knocking out power and forcing businesses to shutter. The quartz mines in Spruce Pine, owned by Belgian mining company Sibelco and the local Quartz Corp, supply 80 to 90 percent of all high-quality quartz in the world, per CNN’s Clare Duffy and Dianne Gallagher. But the two companies closed down operations a day before the storm crossed the region, with no word on when work would resume.
“I don’t think the nation really realizes how this little, small town is so critical,” Michael Vance, a local real estate developer who has been informally coordinating some relief efforts after the storm, tells the Washington Post’s Eva Dou. ~ Smithsonian
Energy is probably too connected to the rest of the economy to be a good regulatory lever, but the U.S. power grid can't currently handle the scale of the data centers the AI labs want for model training. That might buy us a little time. Big tech is already talking about buying small modular nuclear reactors to power the next generation of data centers. Those probably won't be ready until the early 2030s. Unfortunately, that also creates pressures to move training to China or the Middle East where energy is cheaper, but where governments are less concerned about human rights.
The very cutting-edge chips required for AI training runs require some delicate and expensive extreme-ultraviolet lithography machines to manufacture. They literally have to plasmify tin droplets with a pulsed laser to reach those frequencies. ASML Holdings is currently the only company that sells these systems, and machines that advanced have their own supply chains. They have very few customers, and (last I checked) only TSMC was really using them successfully at scale. There are a lot of potential policy levers in this space, at least for now. LessWrong (...)
***
High-quality quartz is the cornerstone of the semiconductors operating nearly every tech gadget worldwide. Cellphones, solar panels and artificial intelligence all rely on this resource.However, such pure quartz is rare—it can only be found at a handful of places on Earth. And a North Carolina town home to the world’s biggest deposit of the mineral was just hit by Hurricane Helene.
Sitting an hour northeast of Asheville, the small town of Spruce Pine, also known as Mineral City, is home to about 2,000 people. It also contains a crucial supply of the natural high-purity quartz required for the computers and devices that run our modern world.
When Hurricane Helene struck, Spruce Pine was doused in more than two feet of rain, flooding its downtown, knocking out power and forcing businesses to shutter. The quartz mines in Spruce Pine, owned by Belgian mining company Sibelco and the local Quartz Corp, supply 80 to 90 percent of all high-quality quartz in the world, per CNN’s Clare Duffy and Dianne Gallagher. But the two companies closed down operations a day before the storm crossed the region, with no word on when work would resume.
“I don’t think the nation really realizes how this little, small town is so critical,” Michael Vance, a local real estate developer who has been informally coordinating some relief efforts after the storm, tells the Washington Post’s Eva Dou. ~ Smithsonian
***
Ultra-high-purity quartz is an essential component to semiconductor chips, and the only places in the world that can meet this need are two mines in a small North Carolina town. The mines' owner, Sibelco, is investing $700 million to expand capacity, but is that enough to keep up with AI-fueled chip demand?
Spruce Pine is a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, NC. You can get to the general area via a number of ways, depending on your point of origin, but for the last stretch of the trip, you need to travel down Fish Hatchery Rd. It's a two-lane rural highway, as depicted in Google Maps, set amid a pleasant scenic backdrop.
It's on this road that the modern economy rests, according to Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick, who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. That's because the road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.
This is not the first time these mines – owned by Sibelco, which mines, processes, and sells specialty industrial minerals – have been highlighted as integral not only to the global semiconductor industry but also to the solar photovoltaic markets.
It is an alarming prospect to contemplate, and it is fair to wonder whether Mollick is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But there is no denying the fact that digital devices around the world contain a small piece of Spruce Pine's unique ultra-high-purity quartz. "It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you'll find quartz from Spruce Pine," Rolf Pippert, mine manager at Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, tells the BBC.~ TechSpot
by LessWrong, Smithsonian, TechSpot | Read more: here, here and here.
Spruce Pine is a small town about two hours drive northwest of Charlotte, NC. You can get to the general area via a number of ways, depending on your point of origin, but for the last stretch of the trip, you need to travel down Fish Hatchery Rd. It's a two-lane rural highway, as depicted in Google Maps, set amid a pleasant scenic backdrop.
It's on this road that the modern economy rests, according to Wharton associate professor Ethan Mollick, who teaches innovation and entrepreneurship and also examines the effects of artificial intelligence on work and education. That's because the road runs to the two mines that are the sole supplier of the quartz required to make the crucibles needed to refine silicon wafers.
This is not the first time these mines – owned by Sibelco, which mines, processes, and sells specialty industrial minerals – have been highlighted as integral not only to the global semiconductor industry but also to the solar photovoltaic markets.
It is an alarming prospect to contemplate, and it is fair to wonder whether Mollick is indulging in a bit of hyperbole. But there is no denying the fact that digital devices around the world contain a small piece of Spruce Pine's unique ultra-high-purity quartz. "It does boggle the mind a bit to consider that inside nearly every cell phone and computer chip you'll find quartz from Spruce Pine," Rolf Pippert, mine manager at Quartz Corp, a leading supplier of high-quality quartz, tells the BBC.~ TechSpot
by LessWrong, Smithsonian, TechSpot | Read more: here, here and here.
Image: uncredited via
[ed. So of course, guess what: Trump calls for an end to the Chips Act, redirecting funds to national debt (TechSpot). And, for once, Republicans finally find a backbone and say NO.]
The Empathy Struggle
“More federal layoffs at Eastern WA nuclear contamination site,” read the headlines this past week.
Prompted by the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting spree, the Department of Energy has in the past month slashed 16% of its administrators who oversee the cleanup of the old Hanford nuclear-bomb-making factories.
This has upset locals. The newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, recently excoriated their congressman, U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Sunnyside, for not doing anything to stop it.
“Residents of Washington’s 4th Congressional District did not elect Newhouse to stand idly by as President Donald Trump dismantles the federal government,” an editorial fumed.
To which I wondered: Didn’t they?
The 4th Congressional District runs from Canada to Oregon in a strip in Central Washington. It’s the reddest sector of the state, having just voted for Trump by a landslide 21-point margin.
Trump explicitly campaigned on taking a chain saw to federal programs and the civil service. Before the election, he said Musk would be his “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” and the two pledged to hack “at least $2 trillion” out of federal spending — about 30% of the total budget.
Where did the good residents of the 4th think that money was going to come from?
The 4th is famously the most government-dependent part of the state. It’s basically a company town, where the company is Uncle Sam.
Partly this is due to the $3 billion-per-year Hanford project. Partly it’s the system of federal dams and reclamation projects that provide farms with subsidized irrigation water. But it’s also the place in the state where residents rely most heavily on government assistance programs.
Example: 38% of the people in the 4th are enrolled in Medicaid, the low-income health program. This is by far the highest percentage in the state. By contrast, in Seattle’s 7th District it’s just 14%, according to the Washington State Health Care Authority.
Yet Republicans, led by Trump and including the 4th’s Newhouse, are pushing a budget downsizing that if adopted will lead to major cuts in Medicaid.
Or take education. Trump campaigned on shuttering the federal Department of Education completely. Which Washington district is most reliant on spending from that department? The 4th.
The anti-government politics of the 4th has been a paradox for decades. Fifteen years ago, its congressman was a leading national critic of the 2009 federal “stimulus” program that aimed to jump start America out of the Great Recession. Except out of all 435 congressional districts, which one got the most financial bang from that stimulus — more than $3,700 per person? You guessed it.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, has been doing what Newhouse has not — fighting like crazy against the worst of the above cuts that excessively target his district. But lately I’ve been thinking: Voters there keep asking for all this. So why not let them have it?
Same with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who this past week pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s tariffs in his first term cost Eastern Washington farmers millions, and that the repeat will be worse. It’s “a nightmare for our farmers,” she said.
OK, but Trump pledged endlessly in the campaign to impose big tariffs, and farmers tended to back him anyway. So surely nothing is so predictable as this nightmare?
I keep reading these interviews of Trump voters who got fired, or whose family member got deported, or whose business is being whipsawed by tariffs. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as it is for the 4th District: What in the world did you expect?
[ed. This seems to be the only plan Democrats have going forward - waiting for the realities of cuts to sink in (which should tell you something about their leadership as well). If you don't understand how a machine works, you won't know how to fix it when it's broke, or should expect it to run any better just by stripping out random parts.]
Prompted by the Elon Musk-led cost-cutting spree, the Department of Energy has in the past month slashed 16% of its administrators who oversee the cleanup of the old Hanford nuclear-bomb-making factories.
A Hanford site manager predicted more carnage is coming: “I don’t think we are at the end.”
“Residents of Washington’s 4th Congressional District did not elect Newhouse to stand idly by as President Donald Trump dismantles the federal government,” an editorial fumed.
To which I wondered: Didn’t they?
The 4th Congressional District runs from Canada to Oregon in a strip in Central Washington. It’s the reddest sector of the state, having just voted for Trump by a landslide 21-point margin.
Trump explicitly campaigned on taking a chain saw to federal programs and the civil service. Before the election, he said Musk would be his “Secretary of Cost-Cutting,” and the two pledged to hack “at least $2 trillion” out of federal spending — about 30% of the total budget.
Where did the good residents of the 4th think that money was going to come from?
The 4th is famously the most government-dependent part of the state. It’s basically a company town, where the company is Uncle Sam.
Partly this is due to the $3 billion-per-year Hanford project. Partly it’s the system of federal dams and reclamation projects that provide farms with subsidized irrigation water. But it’s also the place in the state where residents rely most heavily on government assistance programs.
Example: 38% of the people in the 4th are enrolled in Medicaid, the low-income health program. This is by far the highest percentage in the state. By contrast, in Seattle’s 7th District it’s just 14%, according to the Washington State Health Care Authority.
Yet Republicans, led by Trump and including the 4th’s Newhouse, are pushing a budget downsizing that if adopted will lead to major cuts in Medicaid.
Or take education. Trump campaigned on shuttering the federal Department of Education completely. Which Washington district is most reliant on spending from that department? The 4th.
The anti-government politics of the 4th has been a paradox for decades. Fifteen years ago, its congressman was a leading national critic of the 2009 federal “stimulus” program that aimed to jump start America out of the Great Recession. Except out of all 435 congressional districts, which one got the most financial bang from that stimulus — more than $3,700 per person? You guessed it.
Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat, has been doing what Newhouse has not — fighting like crazy against the worst of the above cuts that excessively target his district. But lately I’ve been thinking: Voters there keep asking for all this. So why not let them have it?
Same with Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell, who this past week pointed out, correctly, that Trump’s tariffs in his first term cost Eastern Washington farmers millions, and that the repeat will be worse. It’s “a nightmare for our farmers,” she said.
OK, but Trump pledged endlessly in the campaign to impose big tariffs, and farmers tended to back him anyway. So surely nothing is so predictable as this nightmare?
I keep reading these interviews of Trump voters who got fired, or whose family member got deported, or whose business is being whipsawed by tariffs. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as it is for the 4th District: What in the world did you expect?
by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Ted S. Warren/The Associated Press, 2022[ed. This seems to be the only plan Democrats have going forward - waiting for the realities of cuts to sink in (which should tell you something about their leadership as well). If you don't understand how a machine works, you won't know how to fix it when it's broke, or should expect it to run any better just by stripping out random parts.]
Geno Smith Trade Begs the Question: What are the Seahawks Doing?
It was hard to look at that Seahawks roster and see something beyond mediocrity. This was true last week and became even more so when receiver DK Metcalf requested a trade Wednesday.
It’s been a position Seattle has been stuck in for several years, missing the past two postseasons with winning records and sneaking into the playoffs three seasons ago at 9-8.
It’s about the most unexciting place you can be in sports — barely relevant but with no juice for the future. So it seems general manager John Schneider pressed reset, for better or for worse.
And it could very well be worse.
On Friday, reports surfaced that the Seahawks will trade starting quarterback Geno Smith to the Raiders for a third-round draft pick, which was confirmed by Seattle Times reporter Bob Condotta. Hey, there have been third-round picks that have changed franchises, but the odds of grabbing a true impact player that low are slim.
So the big question is: Are the Seahawks punting on the 2025 season? Or are they targeting another quarterback that they think can be an upgrade over Smith? (...)
It’s hard to find good quarterbacks in this league, and make no mistake — Smith was a good one. His iffy decision-making kept him shy of being a great one, but the man who passed for 4,320 yards (fourth in the NFL) last season while completing 70.4 percent of his passes (fifth) was more than productive behind center. Throw in that he had four game-winning drives and four fourth-quarter comebacks, all while playing behind one of the shoddiest lines in the league, and you have to wonder if they can find someone better anytime soon.
The Seahawks sit 18th in the draft order, staring at a draft class that isn’t particularly deep at QB. Might Shedeur Sanders be sporting green and blue?
If I had to pick one scenario, I would say the Seahawks go hard after Darnold in what just became an extremely intriguing offseason. They might even be thankful he played so poorly in his last two games so as to bring down his price. And if they don’t get him, my guess is Schneider is content with having a down year so that they can improve through the draft. That said, it’s fair to question the Seahawks’ draft acumen at this point.
Remember, they got back-to-back first- and second-round picks from the Broncos when they traded Russell Wilson. Yet they weren’t able to turn themselves into a contender despite having a surprisingly capable quarterback in Smith. If you’re a nervous 12 right now, it’s justified. It’s possible this team will struggle for a while.
As for Smith himself, he’ll always be welcomed in Seattle. He became an instant fan favorite after his 2022 debut against Denver, which started with “Ge-no!” chants and ended with his famous “they wrote me off, I ain’t write back, though” quote. And his incessant grace endeared him to the fan base even more. He might not have had the hardware, but he had the heart. That matters around here.
What matters more, however, are those W’s. And the best way to get them in the NFL is by having a productive quarterback. The Seahawks don’t have that right now, and might be without their most imposing receiver soon, too.
It’s been a position Seattle has been stuck in for several years, missing the past two postseasons with winning records and sneaking into the playoffs three seasons ago at 9-8.
And it could very well be worse.
On Friday, reports surfaced that the Seahawks will trade starting quarterback Geno Smith to the Raiders for a third-round draft pick, which was confirmed by Seattle Times reporter Bob Condotta. Hey, there have been third-round picks that have changed franchises, but the odds of grabbing a true impact player that low are slim.
So the big question is: Are the Seahawks punting on the 2025 season? Or are they targeting another quarterback that they think can be an upgrade over Smith? (...)
It’s hard to find good quarterbacks in this league, and make no mistake — Smith was a good one. His iffy decision-making kept him shy of being a great one, but the man who passed for 4,320 yards (fourth in the NFL) last season while completing 70.4 percent of his passes (fifth) was more than productive behind center. Throw in that he had four game-winning drives and four fourth-quarter comebacks, all while playing behind one of the shoddiest lines in the league, and you have to wonder if they can find someone better anytime soon.
The Seahawks sit 18th in the draft order, staring at a draft class that isn’t particularly deep at QB. Might Shedeur Sanders be sporting green and blue?
If I had to pick one scenario, I would say the Seahawks go hard after Darnold in what just became an extremely intriguing offseason. They might even be thankful he played so poorly in his last two games so as to bring down his price. And if they don’t get him, my guess is Schneider is content with having a down year so that they can improve through the draft. That said, it’s fair to question the Seahawks’ draft acumen at this point.
Remember, they got back-to-back first- and second-round picks from the Broncos when they traded Russell Wilson. Yet they weren’t able to turn themselves into a contender despite having a surprisingly capable quarterback in Smith. If you’re a nervous 12 right now, it’s justified. It’s possible this team will struggle for a while.
As for Smith himself, he’ll always be welcomed in Seattle. He became an instant fan favorite after his 2022 debut against Denver, which started with “Ge-no!” chants and ended with his famous “they wrote me off, I ain’t write back, though” quote. And his incessant grace endeared him to the fan base even more. He might not have had the hardware, but he had the heart. That matters around here.
What matters more, however, are those W’s. And the best way to get them in the NFL is by having a productive quarterback. The Seahawks don’t have that right now, and might be without their most imposing receiver soon, too.
by Matt Calkins, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Jennifer Buchanan
[ed. Well, crap. This really sucks. First Russell, then Bobby Wagner, Pete Caroll, Tyler Lockett, DK Metcalf, and now Geno. Some of the greatest, most endearing/loyal players/coaches in franchise history, all with some productive years left in their careers. Forget what the fans want. The NFL is as cutthroat and cold-hearted as any business in the world, focused solely on two bottom-line metrics: wins and money (as if we didn't already know this, but keep getting shocked anyway). So, they've finally depleted all my good will and interest. I don't root for corporations. See also: Seahawks trading quarterback Geno Smith to Raiders, source confirms (ST).]
Friday, March 7, 2025
From the Gut: A Literary History of Indigestion
Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
A decade ago, I would’ve been mortified to type those words. Recent years, however, have seen a surge in awareness of digestive disorders—IBS, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, ulcerative colitis—such that I find myself constantly trading war stories. A journalist friend doesn’t leave the house without his Lactaid. An art-historian pal goes days on white bread and rice, her stomach requiring the blandest fare possible. A musicologist colleague grimly claims he can’t eat “anything with a skin.”
Science and commerce have risen to meet the need: wide-ranging medical research into once arcane procedures like fecal-matter transplants, an over-the-counter digestive-remedy industry valued at more than $20 billion, and endless Instagram and #GutTok gurus hawking stomach cures like aloe-vera juice, ice-water baths, and left-side sleeping. A 2020 survey by the Rome Foundation, which promotes GI health, says that more than 40 percent of the globe suffers from a digestive disorder. Almost half the population, seemingly, feels something isn’t sitting right.
Some months ago, I began to wonder, Where has this crisis come from? And why, given all of this alimentary advocacy, and all of my own dietary austerity, is my stomach, at forty-five, still rioting? Doctors and the internet provided only partial answers, so I went looking in books, where I found a sprawling body of medical history and, surprisingly, literary history on these indelicate matters. The gastrointestinal agonies of writers, it turns out, forms practically its own canon, one that dates back almost to the beginning of Western science’s attempts to understand the digestive tract. For more than two hundred years, countless bizarre theories and treatments were adopted and feverishly promoted by men of letters, including such esteemed figures as Voltaire, Coleridge, Twain, Henry James, Kafka, and Beckett.
While the root causes of our collective dyspepsia eluded me, never mind a cure, I did find strange comfort in such company. And I got some context and understanding. The literary history of indigestion, I came to see, has much to tell us about why we seem to be living, once again, in an age of the stomach.
Early Enlightenment anatomists saw the gut as the seat of the imagination; it processed emotions and perception and was so spiritually attuned it perhaps even contained the soul. Any disruption below was of grave import. Following Ramazzini’s study of the learned, physicians theorized and investigated a set of conditions known as les maladies des gens de lettres, wherein mental exertion and overeating led to “engorgement of the viscera of the lower abdomen,” as well as “hypochondria, melancholy, and hysteria.”
Naturally, the patriarchal nexus of medicine and letters produced further absurdities. Women, due to supposed softness in their “cerebral pulp,” were thought incapable of the intellectual endeavor necessary to truly injure the bowels. Even as hysteria came to be seen as a feminine complaint, doctors remained stubbornly fascinated by the straining of men. Or, as Anne Vila, a scholar of French literature, puts it, science found a way for les gens de lettres to be “nervous in a manly way.” (...)
It wasn’t just food that became productively unsettling in the nineteenth century. Writers were similarly agitated by the expulsive and inspirational effects of coffee and tea. Balzac wrote that coffee “acts like a food and demands digestive juices…it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.” Across Europe, gut trouble became a mark of the consummate artist.
Literary men in America, however, were less sure. In 1858, an advice column, “Manly Health and Training,” appeared in the New York Atlas newspaper. One Mose Velsor stumped for early-rising, fresh air, and bare-knuckle boxing, and warned of “The Great American Evil—Indigestion.” Velsor advised against fried potatoes, prostitutes, condiments, and “too much brain action and fretting”—all of which might result in a sickly male specimen whose “bowels are clogged with accumulations of fearful impurity.”
Mose Velsor was one of Walt Whitman’s many pseudonyms and used for the hackwork he undertook after the first printing of Leaves of Grass received little notice. The Atlas columns can read less like advice than a wounded man’s self-exhortation. “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune.… Up!” And “Eat enough, and when you eat that, stop!”
Mark Twain also took up the cause. Motivated by either his notoriously bad business sense or his own frequent stomach pain (or, more likely, both), he peddled a digestive powder, licensed from the English Plasmon company, as both treatment for dyspepsia and a superfood: “One teaspoon is equivalent to an ordinary beefsteak.” George Bernard Shaw was convinced and “generally dined off a Plasmon biscuit and a bean.” To the novelist William Dean Howells, Twain instructed, “stir it into your soup…use any method you like, so’s you get it down.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, given such appeals, the Plasmon Company of America, like many of Twain’s other commercial ventures, quickly went bust.
Others fared far better. Particularly in America, new ideas about purity, diet, and hygiene proliferated in the second half of the century. A Connecticut minister, Sylvester Graham, introduced his Graham Bread (later, Graham Cracker), which was bland enough to stomach easily while also aiding in the avoidance of drink and masturbation. (Graham believed that sugar fueled intemperate feelings like lust and greed.) At his Battle Creek, Michigan, sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg (of Corn Flakes fame) treated his digestively ailing patients by prescribing them abstinence, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, phototherapy, and yogurt enemas. At one point, Kellogg claimed his sanitarium hosted more than seven thousand patients a year, many of them wealthy and willing to pay the rapidly increasing fees. A gastric boom was well underway and about to take another curious turn. (...)
By the late nineteenth century, constipation was dreaded as the “disease of diseases.” In 1895, an entrepreneur named Horace Fletcher set out to cure it. Fletcher had been a gifted athlete in his youth but at forty found his energies sapped by stoppages below. His solution: Produce as little bodily waste as possible. His system: digesting “in the head” by chewing his food at least two hundred times, into a slurry that slid down unaided.
Newly energized by his method, Fletcher set about promoting it, performing somersaults and high-dives in his underwear before crowds, mailing his own ash-like turds—no more odor than “a hot biscuit”—to scientists. He eventually converted Kellogg to his regimen; every meal at Battle Creek began with a “chewing song.” Other celebrity chewers included John D. Rockefeller, King Edward VII, and writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Twain (again), both William and Henry James, and Upton Sinclair, who called Fletcherism “one of the great discoveries of my life.” Its benefits, apparently, weren’t only physical. In 1903, Fletcher observed a “literary test subject” who subsisted off a glass of milk and four exhaustively chewed corn muffins per day. After eight days, the subject had made just one hot biscuit but had written sixty-four thousand words.
Legitimate medicine would soon discredit Fletcher, but the literary world’s infatuation with mastication lingered in the imagination of an insurance lawyer from Prague. In Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” an anonymous professional faster starves himself in view of the public, at first to great curiosity and acclaim, then absolute indifference, until finally he dies unnoticed and un-mourned. The story has been interpreted as religious parable, self-portrait, and as representing modern man’s alienation from family and nation. But perhaps we might read it more directly.
Kafka struggled with constipation. He visited sanitariums, tried laxatives made from powdered seaweed, and obsessively notated his meals and bowel movements, or lack of them. No surprise, then, that he was drawn to Fletcherism. Kafka’s father was so disgusted by his son’s incessant chewing he would hide behind his newspaper at dinner. The hunger artist is likewise unimpressed by his own feats of starvation. “I have to fast,” he says, “I can’t help it.… I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”
I read this line with a shudder of recognition. In the worst nights of my sleepless stomach, I ate nothing for days at a time. Sometimes wasting away seemed preferable to enduring yet more intestinal agony. I’m struck, too, by how much the family-dinner scene early in The Metamorphosis resembles Fletcherism. “It seemed remarkable to Gregor that among the various noises coming from the table he could always distinguish the sound of their masticating teeth.” Fletcher’s method seems insane now, but in the grip of dyspepsia, you’ll try anything. The internal turbulence doesn’t just “mar the soul’s serenest hour,” as Twain once wrote; it seems to choke the very life and joy out of you. (...)
Of course, indigestion hasn’t been the torment solely of the literati. Other artists suffered, too, some famously. There has been a surprising amount of scientific investigation into whether Beethoven had IBS. Kurt Cobain harbored for years an undiagnosed stomach pain. His love of Kraft mac & cheese and strawberry milk probably didn’t help, but lactose intolerance wasn’t much discussed, or not so publicly, in the 1990s. “Thank you all,” Cobain wrote in his suicide note in 1994, “from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach.”[ed. See also: Flushed Away: The crappy lie Americans still believe about their toilets (Slate).]
A decade ago, I would’ve been mortified to type those words. Recent years, however, have seen a surge in awareness of digestive disorders—IBS, celiac disease, lactose intolerance, ulcerative colitis—such that I find myself constantly trading war stories. A journalist friend doesn’t leave the house without his Lactaid. An art-historian pal goes days on white bread and rice, her stomach requiring the blandest fare possible. A musicologist colleague grimly claims he can’t eat “anything with a skin.”
Science and commerce have risen to meet the need: wide-ranging medical research into once arcane procedures like fecal-matter transplants, an over-the-counter digestive-remedy industry valued at more than $20 billion, and endless Instagram and #GutTok gurus hawking stomach cures like aloe-vera juice, ice-water baths, and left-side sleeping. A 2020 survey by the Rome Foundation, which promotes GI health, says that more than 40 percent of the globe suffers from a digestive disorder. Almost half the population, seemingly, feels something isn’t sitting right.
While the root causes of our collective dyspepsia eluded me, never mind a cure, I did find strange comfort in such company. And I got some context and understanding. The literary history of indigestion, I came to see, has much to tell us about why we seem to be living, once again, in an age of the stomach.
***
In 1700, Bernardino Ramazzini, a professor of medicine in Modena, Italy, published his seminal Diseases of Workers. His study of laborers—porters, bakers, blacksmiths, mirror makers—first identified what we now call repetitive-stress injuries: bowed legs, rounded shoulders, humped backs. Ramazzini also considered the travails of “the learned.” By hunching over books for hours on end, he argued, scholars and philosophers brought on arthritis, weak eyesight, and, through compression of their pancreatic juices, dire ventral infirmities. Ramazzini held that the stomach couldn’t properly mulch its food while the brain was busy digesting its own sustenance. Indeed, so deleterious was a life of contemplation, he contended, that it was even possible to “die of wisdom.”Early Enlightenment anatomists saw the gut as the seat of the imagination; it processed emotions and perception and was so spiritually attuned it perhaps even contained the soul. Any disruption below was of grave import. Following Ramazzini’s study of the learned, physicians theorized and investigated a set of conditions known as les maladies des gens de lettres, wherein mental exertion and overeating led to “engorgement of the viscera of the lower abdomen,” as well as “hypochondria, melancholy, and hysteria.”
Naturally, the patriarchal nexus of medicine and letters produced further absurdities. Women, due to supposed softness in their “cerebral pulp,” were thought incapable of the intellectual endeavor necessary to truly injure the bowels. Even as hysteria came to be seen as a feminine complaint, doctors remained stubbornly fascinated by the straining of men. Or, as Anne Vila, a scholar of French literature, puts it, science found a way for les gens de lettres to be “nervous in a manly way.” (...)
It wasn’t just food that became productively unsettling in the nineteenth century. Writers were similarly agitated by the expulsive and inspirational effects of coffee and tea. Balzac wrote that coffee “acts like a food and demands digestive juices…it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain.” Across Europe, gut trouble became a mark of the consummate artist.
Literary men in America, however, were less sure. In 1858, an advice column, “Manly Health and Training,” appeared in the New York Atlas newspaper. One Mose Velsor stumped for early-rising, fresh air, and bare-knuckle boxing, and warned of “The Great American Evil—Indigestion.” Velsor advised against fried potatoes, prostitutes, condiments, and “too much brain action and fretting”—all of which might result in a sickly male specimen whose “bowels are clogged with accumulations of fearful impurity.”
Mose Velsor was one of Walt Whitman’s many pseudonyms and used for the hackwork he undertook after the first printing of Leaves of Grass received little notice. The Atlas columns can read less like advice than a wounded man’s self-exhortation. “To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune.… Up!” And “Eat enough, and when you eat that, stop!”
Mark Twain also took up the cause. Motivated by either his notoriously bad business sense or his own frequent stomach pain (or, more likely, both), he peddled a digestive powder, licensed from the English Plasmon company, as both treatment for dyspepsia and a superfood: “One teaspoon is equivalent to an ordinary beefsteak.” George Bernard Shaw was convinced and “generally dined off a Plasmon biscuit and a bean.” To the novelist William Dean Howells, Twain instructed, “stir it into your soup…use any method you like, so’s you get it down.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, given such appeals, the Plasmon Company of America, like many of Twain’s other commercial ventures, quickly went bust.
Others fared far better. Particularly in America, new ideas about purity, diet, and hygiene proliferated in the second half of the century. A Connecticut minister, Sylvester Graham, introduced his Graham Bread (later, Graham Cracker), which was bland enough to stomach easily while also aiding in the avoidance of drink and masturbation. (Graham believed that sugar fueled intemperate feelings like lust and greed.) At his Battle Creek, Michigan, sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg (of Corn Flakes fame) treated his digestively ailing patients by prescribing them abstinence, hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, phototherapy, and yogurt enemas. At one point, Kellogg claimed his sanitarium hosted more than seven thousand patients a year, many of them wealthy and willing to pay the rapidly increasing fees. A gastric boom was well underway and about to take another curious turn. (...)
By the late nineteenth century, constipation was dreaded as the “disease of diseases.” In 1895, an entrepreneur named Horace Fletcher set out to cure it. Fletcher had been a gifted athlete in his youth but at forty found his energies sapped by stoppages below. His solution: Produce as little bodily waste as possible. His system: digesting “in the head” by chewing his food at least two hundred times, into a slurry that slid down unaided.
Newly energized by his method, Fletcher set about promoting it, performing somersaults and high-dives in his underwear before crowds, mailing his own ash-like turds—no more odor than “a hot biscuit”—to scientists. He eventually converted Kellogg to his regimen; every meal at Battle Creek began with a “chewing song.” Other celebrity chewers included John D. Rockefeller, King Edward VII, and writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Twain (again), both William and Henry James, and Upton Sinclair, who called Fletcherism “one of the great discoveries of my life.” Its benefits, apparently, weren’t only physical. In 1903, Fletcher observed a “literary test subject” who subsisted off a glass of milk and four exhaustively chewed corn muffins per day. After eight days, the subject had made just one hot biscuit but had written sixty-four thousand words.
Legitimate medicine would soon discredit Fletcher, but the literary world’s infatuation with mastication lingered in the imagination of an insurance lawyer from Prague. In Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist,” an anonymous professional faster starves himself in view of the public, at first to great curiosity and acclaim, then absolute indifference, until finally he dies unnoticed and un-mourned. The story has been interpreted as religious parable, self-portrait, and as representing modern man’s alienation from family and nation. But perhaps we might read it more directly.
Kafka struggled with constipation. He visited sanitariums, tried laxatives made from powdered seaweed, and obsessively notated his meals and bowel movements, or lack of them. No surprise, then, that he was drawn to Fletcherism. Kafka’s father was so disgusted by his son’s incessant chewing he would hide behind his newspaper at dinner. The hunger artist is likewise unimpressed by his own feats of starvation. “I have to fast,” he says, “I can’t help it.… I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone else.”
I read this line with a shudder of recognition. In the worst nights of my sleepless stomach, I ate nothing for days at a time. Sometimes wasting away seemed preferable to enduring yet more intestinal agony. I’m struck, too, by how much the family-dinner scene early in The Metamorphosis resembles Fletcherism. “It seemed remarkable to Gregor that among the various noises coming from the table he could always distinguish the sound of their masticating teeth.” Fletcher’s method seems insane now, but in the grip of dyspepsia, you’ll try anything. The internal turbulence doesn’t just “mar the soul’s serenest hour,” as Twain once wrote; it seems to choke the very life and joy out of you. (...)
Of course, indigestion hasn’t been the torment solely of the literati. Other artists suffered, too, some famously. There has been a surprising amount of scientific investigation into whether Beethoven had IBS. Kurt Cobain harbored for years an undiagnosed stomach pain. His love of Kraft mac & cheese and strawberry milk probably didn’t help, but lactose intolerance wasn’t much discussed, or not so publicly, in the 1990s. “Thank you all,” Cobain wrote in his suicide note in 1994, “from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach.”
You Should Start Worrying About the Raid on Social Security. Now.
I expressed skepticism about this pledge shortly after the election by listing all the oblique ways the Trump administration could hack away at the program.
It gives me no pleasure to update my observation with the words, “I told you so.”
Among the weapons Trump could wield, I wrote, was starving the program of administrative resources — think money and staff. Sure enough, on Feb. 28 the program, which is currently led by acting Commissioner Leland Dudek, announced plans to reduce the program’s employee base to 50,000 from 57,000.
Its news release about the reduction referred to the program’s “bloated workforce.”
To anyone who knows anything about the Social Security Administration, calling its workforce “bloated” sounds like a sick joke. The truth is that the agency is hopelessly understaffed, and has been for years.
In November, then-Commissioner Martin O’Malley told a House committee that the agency was serving a record number of beneficiaries with staffing that had reached a 50-year low. (...)
Nearly 69 million Americans were receiving benefits as of Dec. 31, according to the agency. That figure encompassed 54.3 million retired workers, their spouses and their children, nearly 6 million survivors of deceased workers and more than 8.3 million disabled workers and their dependents. Agency employment peaked in 2009 at about 67,000, when it served about 55 million people. (...)
Not only beneficiaries could be affected by Trump’s raid on Social Security. About 183 million people pay Social Security taxes on their earnings. Their right to collect what they’re entitled to based on their contributions is dependent on the system recording those payments and calculating their benefits accurately, to the last penny. Any incursion by DOGE into the program’s systems or the scattershot firings that Dudek forecasts puts all that at risk.
In his testimony, O’Malley talked about how the agency had struggled to establish an acceptable level of customer service. In 2023, he said, wait times on the program’s 800 number had ballooned to nearly an hour. Of the average 7 million clients who called the number each month for advice or assistance, 4 million “hung up in frustration after waiting far too long.” The agency had worked the wait down to an average of less than 13 minutes, in part by encouraging customers to wait off the line for a call back.
Disability applicants faced the worst frustrations, O’Malley said. The backlog of disability determinations, which often require multiple rounds of inquiries, hearings and appeals, had reached a near-record 1.2 million. The program estimated that about 30,000 applicants had died in 2023 while awaiting decisions.
O’Malley had asked for a budget increase in fiscal 2025 to add at least 3,000 workers to the customer-service ranks, but it wasn’t approved.
Make no mistake: The starving of Social Security’s administrative resources, which is currently taking place under the guise of ferreting out fraud and waste, is no accident. It’s part of a decades-long Republican project aimed at undermining public confidence in the program.
Back in 1983, for example, the libertarian Cato Institute published an article by Stuart Butler and Peter Germanis calling for a “Leninist” strategy to “prepare the political ground” for privatizing Social Security on behalf of “the banks, insurance companies, and other institutions that will gain from providing such plans to the public.” Political opposition, as it happens, resulted in the death of George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005.
Germanis has since become a fierce critic of conservative economics and politics. Butler, who had spent 35 years at the right-wing Heritage Foundation before joining the Brookings Institution in 2014, told me by email he now advocates a private retirement system as an “add-on” private option rather than an alternative to Social Security. He also said he thinks “cutting staff and the claim that Social Security is rife with fraud and abuse are both ridiculous.” (...)
By the way, the search for waste, fraud and abuse — call it WFA — has a long and discreditable history. Ronald Reagan pledged to ferret out enough WFA to cut the federal budget by more than 6% (sometimes he said 10%). One of his first steps, however, was to fire 15 departmental inspectors general, whose jobs involved finding WFA. Sound familiar? One of Trump’s first orders upon taking office was to fire inspectors-general at 17 federal agencies. (...)
The truth is that Social Security is one of the most efficient agencies in the federal government. Its administrative costs are one-half of one-percent of its total costs, which include benefit payments.
by Michael Hiltzik, LA Times/Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank via
[ed. Like everything else they're doing to hobble government and make it seem inefficient (which it definitely will be once they're done with it, ripe for privatization). Reposting this image in case anyone missed it. The ultimate wet dream of Republicans and Wall Street.]
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.
[ed. Repost. Just got back from a family reunion last week that included tons of cousins that I haven't seen since we were kids (60+ years ago). So much fun, especially since many had memories I'd forgotten or never known.]
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.
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
Thursday, March 6, 2025
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