How To Explain Lab-Grown Meat Simply

Winston Churchill once wrote that in the future, “we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” Churchill was arguably predicting and describing lab-grown meat (or cultivated or cultured meat, as the burgeoning industry and activists are trying to rebrand it). Almost a century after Churchill made his prediction, it’s almost here. Over the last decade, the science of lab-grown meat has made striking advancements, and has the potential to fundamentally change how humans eat and produce food.

But if you’re not a scientist, it can be difficult to know how to understand or explain lab-grown meat. Here are the basics, and a few common misconceptions about cultivated meat, debunked.

Why Is Lab-Grown Meat Better for Animals and the Environment?

The Short Answer:

Lab-grown meat offers a potential way to feed our appetite for meat without inflicting so much damage on animals and the environment. If it’s able to be produced cheaply at scale — still a big “if” at this point — it’s a product that could eventually eliminate factory farming, methane from cows and other pollution, save water and limit deforestation.

The Longer Answer:

Make no mistake: most humans these days like eating meat. Between 1961 and 2020, the average person’s yearly meat consumption almost doubled, according to Our World In Data, from around 50 pounds to 92 pounds. In the United States, the average person eats a staggering 280 pounds of meat per year.

But there are a number of serious environmental and ethical issues with the meat industry as it currently exists, and lab-grown meat was created in hopes of overcoming them.

Perhaps the most obvious is the pain and suffering inflicted on animals in order to produce meat. The list is too long to recount in full here, but in factory farms, where approximately 99 percent of livestock is raised, most of the animals are mutilated, dismembered and separated from their parents as a matter of procedure. They are crammed into confined spaces barely bigger than their bodies, forced to live in their own feces and slaughtered in gruesome ways without anesthetic.

Over 100 billion animals die in factory farms every year. For many, that’s reason enough to transition away from eating meat. But it’s not the only reason.

The meat industry also takes a staggering toll on the environment. Livestock production accounts for around 14 percent of all greenhouse gasses and 37 percent of all methane emissions, according to the United Nations. The meat industry is the driving force behind deforestation around the world, most notably in the Amazon, and industrially grown feed crops are responsible for decades of topsoil erosion, a serious problem that has the potential to cause catastrophic food shortages within decades.

How Exactly Is Lab-Grown Meat Made?

The Short Answer:

Lab-grown meat is made by extracting a single cell from an animal and placing it into a solution with nutrients that cause the cell to multiply and develop into muscle tissue. Once enough tissue has been formed, it’s removed and shaped into a nugget, burger or other meat product.

The Longer Answer:

Unlike plant-based meat replacements, lab-grown meat is actual, bona fide meat. What sets it apart from traditional meat is that you don’t have to slaughter billions of animals to get it.

The process begins by extracting a single stem cell from a living animal — a cow, for instance. Stem cells are unspecialized, which means that they have the ability to develop into any other type of cell (muscle, fat, etc.). That single stem cell is then placed into a broth with nutrients and proteins that cause the cell to develop and multiply; this process is called culturing, and the nutrient broth is commonly referred to as growth medium. The stem cell and growth medium are collectively placed in a bioreactor that creates the necessary atmospheric and temperature conditions for growth.

That’s the gist of the process, but there are some more nuances and complications that are important to note. For instance, although growing muscle tissue is sufficient to recreate a chicken nugget or ground beef (often made with some plant-based ingredients in the mix), some companies also want to recreate meat products that have structure and visible fat in them — a cut of steak, for instance. To accomplish this, they place the stem cells into a different growth medium that allows some of the cells to grow into muscle and others to become fat, a process known as co-differentiation.

Additionally, there are several different ways of shaping muscle tissue into the final meat product. For highly processed foods like chicken nuggets or hot dogs, it can be sufficient to simply mold the muscle tissue into the shape of the product in question. For meat products with more complex textures and compositions, such as steak, a 3-D printer is often used instead, as this allows manufacturers to specify and fine-tune the compositional properties of the meat. (...)

Does Lab-Grown Meat Hurt Animals?

The Short Answer:

The initial development of lab-grown meat often utilizes something called Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS), which requires the slaughter of a cow. Companies are aggressively searching for cruelty-free alternatives to this, and some have already removed it from their process entirely.

The Longer Answer:

While lab-grown meat is the best shot we have of eliminating the suffering of animals in factory farms, there remains the thorny issue of fetal bovine serum (FBS). One of the most important parts of the lab-grown meat process is finding the right ingredients for the growth medium in which the cells are cultured. The broth needs to have the precise mixture of vitamins, sugars, proteins and nutrients needed to culture the cells into meat, and it just so happens that one of the most efficient ingredients to help accomplish this is FBS.

by Seth Millstein, Sentient Food |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

River Eckert (with George Porter Jr, Terence Higgins, and John Fohl)

[ed. Pretty amazing for someone so young.]

How Ships Escaped the Great Stagnation

In January 2024 the largest passenger ship ever built, Icon of the Seas, set sail from Miami on her maiden voyage. Icon is five times larger than the Titanic by gross tonnage (the internal volume of a ship) and spans 20 decks containing more than 2,500 passenger rooms. At full capacity she can carry nearly 10,000 people – up to 7,600 passengers along with 2,350 crew. Passengers can enjoy 40 bars and restaurants across eight ‘neighborhoods’, plus several theaters and a top-deck aquapark comprising seven swimming pools and nine waterslides. The ship is 365 meters long and 65 meters wide, giving a population density equivalent to approximately 420,000 people per square kilometer. That’s about 70 times the density of London and 50 percent higher than Dharavi in Mumbai, often cited as the world’s densest urban area.

 

Airplanes today fly no faster than they did in the 1970s. In many countries, road speeds have decreased. Flying cars never showed up. In developed countries, the tallest buildings have only inched higher. Most rich countries produce less energy per capita than they did 20 years ago, and the cost of building new physical infrastructure like railways seems to rise inexorably. Yet cruise ships continue to grow: a natural experiment in what can be achieved outside the constraints that have stifled progress on dry land. (...)

The great stagnation in everything but cruise ships

New buildings, airplanes, bridges, and trains built today are often barely distinguishable from those built decades earlier, apart from often costing much more money. There is some incremental progress, especially in safety and energy efficiency, but in many areas we have stopped making performance records at all. In some, like the speed of the fastest passenger airplanes, we have even gone backward. (...)

The cruise industry, in contrast, continues to break records. The title of world’s largest passenger ship has been broken nine times so far this century, including three times in the last five years. The trend for ever-larger cruise ships accelerated around the turn of the millennium when Carnival Cruise Line’s Sunshine became the first passenger ship to exceed 100,000 gross tons in 1995. By 2008 Oasis of the Seas had more than doubled that record at 226,000 gross tons. (...)

Passenger numbers have also increased from just over 7 million passengers per year in 2000 to 31.7 million in 2023. The industry suffered badly during the Covid-19 pandemic, beginning with the high-profile Covid outbreak aboard the Diamond Princess off the coast of Japan in February 2020, resulting in the quarantine of the 3,700 people on board. Subsequent lockdowns, capacity limits, and mask mandates that persisted long after widespread vaccination all contributed to depressed passenger numbers. But new megaships like Icon have driven a strong post-Covid recovery, and passenger numbers and revenues in 2023 surpassed pre-pandemic records. 

Part of the reason for the relatively slower progress of physical infrastructure projects, compared to rapid progress in digital technologies, is sheer technological difficulty. Software products can be built rapidly and iteratively improved. Mistakes can usually be easily rectified by editing offending lines of code. When, on the other hand, Ford discovered in the late 1990s that ignition switches in its cars could cause fires, it had to recall 14.9 million vehicles.

But not all differences between the rates of progress in the worlds of bits and of atoms can be explained by technological difficulty. In the United States, housing, medical care, and childcare costs have risen faster than overall inflation since 2000, while consumer electronics, digital services, and small manufactured goods have become significantly cheaper in real terms. British researchers found something similar: in industries where increasing supply requires building new physical infrastructure, like houses, electricity pylons, power stations, and new railway lines, prices have risen. (...)

Compared with large-scale construction projects on land, the cruise industry is something of an outlier. Large modern cruise ships are sometimes even cheaper in real terms to manufacture than flag carriers of the past when measured per gross ton in 2024 dollars. The steady improvement of European shipbuilding suggests that it isn’t technological difficulty, a lack of skills, or the prices of raw materials that make infrastructure expensive in Europe, but flawed rules and institutions.

Cruise fares have also fallen in real terms. A cruise forum user unearthed a Royal Caribbean brochure from 1983 that shows pricing for its first dedicated cruise ship, Song of Norway. The prices indicated are per person based on two people sharing a room. The cheapest seven-day Caribbean cruise fare is $995 (about $3,000 dollars in 2024 prices) per person for an interior room. An equivalent cruise in 2024 aboard Royal Caribbean’s Freedom of the Seas was roughly five times cheaper, at around $600 dollars per person. A balcony room in 1983 cost $1,750 ($5,500 per person in 2024 prices) while a balcony on an equivalent weeklong Caribbean cruise aboard Wonder of the Seas (constructed in 2022) only cost around $1,000 per person in 2024. Even on Icon, which is in greatest demand, a balcony cabin costs around $1,700 dollars per person.

And it’s not simply that cruise lines are managing to cram more people into a smaller space on modern ships. If we divide the gross tonnage of a ship by its passenger capacity we find that each passenger on Icon of the Seas has about 33 percent more space than they would aboard Song of Norway. (...)

Cruise ships spend their lives either temporarily docked at a port or out at sea, where they impose almost no localized negative externalities and there is therefore little drive to subject them to national regulation.

They also have a trump card they can play to escape regulation that might come their way: the flag of convenience. Each ship sails under a specific nation’s flag, obliging it to abide by the laws and regulations of that nation. Cruise liners, because they are mobile, can choose which flag to fly. (...)

Cruise ships are held back – by land

Cruise ships could be even bigger and more numerous. The main limiting factor is not the ships themselves, but the land-based infrastructure with which they interact, such as ports, bridges, and canals.

The issue with ports is depth. Engineers therefore aim to maximize gross tonnage (the overall internal volume of a ship) without excessively increasing its length or draught (how deep a ship projects into the water). Typically, a heavier ship would be built with a larger draught to provide stability, but this curtails the range of ports that large cruise ships can access. Popular tourist destinations like Venice and Santorini have ports that can no longer accommodate the largest cruise ships. Deepwater ports like Miami and Barcelona have the necessary depth to handle vessels with significant draughts and typically provide better infrastructure for large numbers of passengers. As large cruise ships proliferate, more artificial deepwater ports like the international cruise port in Cozumel, Mexico, are being built to meet demand.

While the depth of existing ports constrains the maximum draught of cruise ships, the height of key bridges limits size in the opposite direction, placing a cap on the maximum sailing height. This was illustrated recently when Icon of the Seas could barely sail under the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark during her maiden voyage from the Turku shipyard in Finland to her final destination in Miami. The bridge has a clearance of 65 meters above sea level, requiring Icon’s engineers to partially disassemble the ship’s masts and travel at high speed during the lowest tides to safely clear it. Symphony of the Seas has retractable funnels that allow it to shrink from its usual sailing height of 72.5 meters and squeeze under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge (clearance 69 meters).

With ports limiting maximum draughts and important bridges restricting maximum sailing heights, the latest generation of megaships has expanded outward, resulting in the distinctive wide profile of modern vessels. The largest cruise ships are now too wide to use the Panama Canal, which can only take ships up to 51.5 meters in width, and must instead sail around Cape Horn if they are being redeployed from America’s East Coast to the West Coast or South Pacific.

by Michael Hopkins, Works in Progress | Read more:
Images: uncredited

Alphonse Mucha

Alphonse Mucha - Timeless Mucha: The Magic of Line (Phillips Collection)

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Neil Young

"Roll in Peace" 1970 (The Loner/Cinnamon Girl)

Dan Steven
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Over 13 Million to Lose Health Insurance Under GOP Plan

The House leadership late Sunday released the GOP’s plan for cutting health care spending to pay for tax breaks for the rich and large corporations. It whacks both Medicaid and the expanded subsidies that make individual plans sold on the Obamacare exchanges affordable.

While they pitched their plan as a modest program designed to appeal to Republican moderates, there is no way they can generate more than $700 billion in savings without making major cuts to both programs.

Mainstream media coverage is aiding and abetting the subterfuge. “Republicans Propose Paring Medicaid Coverage but Steer Clear of Deeper Cuts,” the New York Times online headline read this morning. “House bill includes work requirements but not deeper reductions some fiscal hawks demanded,” the subhead in the Wall Street Journal read.

Using Congresstional Budget Office estimates, Democrats on Capitol Hill immediately released an analysis that showed 4.2 million people will lose Obamacare coverage over the next decade under the plan. It is largely due to expiration of the expanded premium tax credits passed in 2022 that made the plans affordable for millions.

Another estimated 1.8 million people will lose coverage through new rules making it harder to enroll. The bill calls for shortening the enrollment period, demands more income verification paperwork and excludes non-citizens from the program.

The Medicaid cuts would go deeper, driving an estimated 7.7 million people from the rolls. The GOP bill includes a moratorium on Biden-era rules for streamlining the enrollment process; an 80-hour monthly work requirement (unless you’re a student or pregnant); a monthly redetermination process for eligibility; and denies enrollment to non-citizens without “satisfactory immigration status.” The latter provision eliminates so-called dreamers (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) from qualifying for the program.

Very few people on Medicaid are able-boded, working age adults who are unemployed. Work requirements are not designed to help them find work; they are meant to drive people from the rolls through increased paperwork for the already employed, which is more than half of all working age recipients.

The combined effects of those changes will drive the uninsured rate back into double digits — possibly as high as one in every eight Americans.

There’s more. The proposal, which will be marked up in the House tomorrow, eliminates the 90% federal match for the nine states that have yet to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, which allows individuals earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line to qualify for the program. It also gives states the right to impose up to a $35 co-pay for every service (capped at 5% of income), which will discourage many people from signing up and discourage those already in the program from seeking health care when they need it.

Little room to lose votes

With narrow majorities in both houses, the Trump-loyal GOP leadership can’t afford to lose many votes. It’s questionable whether the proposed plan will mollify Republican representatives in swing districts or Senators from conservative states that have come around to embracing Obamacare’s health coverage expansion.

On the same day the House plan was released, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) wrote on the op-ed page of the New York Times that “slashing health insurance for the working poor … is both morally wrong and politically suicidal.” In August 2020, Missouri voted by a 53% to 47% margin to enshrine expanding Medicaid under Obamacare in its state constitution over the objections of the state’s GOP leadership. (...)

In true GOP fashion, there are several provisions in the bill aimed at appeasing corporate lobbyists and their employers. The bill repeals the rule passed by the Biden administration that requires minimum staff-to-patient ratios in the nation’s nursing homes. It also reins in the middleman charges that pharmacy benefit managers lard onto prescription drug costs. It allows insurance companies to deny future coverage to anyone who once fell behind on their exchange plan premiums. And it further delays cuts in the extra payments some hospitals receive for serving a disproportionate share of the poor.

What’s noticeably absent from the bill is any effort to limit insurance companies’ upcoding in Medicare Advantage plans, which costs taxpayers as much as $80 billion a year. Simply paying MA plans the same amount as their members would cost had they remained in traditional Medicare would save more money over the next decade than all the provisions in the bill released Sunday combined.

by Merrill Goozner, GoozNews | Read more:
Image: KFF

[ed. Think homelessness is bad now?]

Kazuo Ishiguro: A Pale View of Hills

Kazuo Ishiguro still remembers where he was when he wrote A Pale View of Hills: hunched over the dining room table in a bedsit in Cardiff. He was in his mid-20s then; he is 70 now. “I had no idea that the book would be published, let alone that I had a career ahead of me as a writer,” he says. “[But] the story remains an important part of me, not only because it was the start of my novel-writing life, but because it helped settle my relationship with Japan.”

First published in 1982, A Pale View of Hills is a charged family story that connects England with Japan and the present with the past. Now along comes a film version to provide a new frame for the mystery, a fresh view of the hills. Scripted and directed by Kei Ishikawa, it is a splendidly elegant and deliberate affair; a trail of carefully laid breadcrumbs that link a mothballed home in early 80s suburbia with wounded, resilient postwar Nagasaki. Middle-aged Etsuko is long settled in the UK and haunted by the fate of her displaced eldest child. Her younger daughter, Niki, is a budding writer, borderline skint and keen to make a name for herself. Niki has a chunky tape-recorder and plenty of time on her hands. She says, “Mum, will you tell me about your lives before, in Japan?”

In awarding Ishiguro the Nobel prize for literature in 2017, the Swedish Academy paid tribute to the emotional force of his prose and his focus on “memory, time and self-delusion”. These are the themes that colour all his fiction, whether he is writing about the below-stairs staff at a stately home (The Remains of the Day), sacrificial children at an elite boarding school (Never Let Me Go) or aged wanderers in Arthurian Britain (The Buried Giant), although they seem closest to home in A Pale View of Hills.

The story lightly excavates the author’s family history and his own hybrid identity as a child of Nagasaki, transplanted to the UK at the age of five. Fittingly, the movie version premieres at the Cannes film festival, where it risks getting lost amid the palm trees, yachts and bling. Cultural dislocation, in large part, is what the tale is about.

I’m tempted to view Niki – the bumptious young writer from whom no family secret is safe – as Ishiguro’s alter ego. Actually, he says, she was conceived as “more a ‘reader proxy’ than a writer one”. She’s our entry point to the story; possibly our red thread through the maze. It’s hard to believe today, he adds, but most contemporary British readers were resistant to Japanese stories and characters and needed a reassuring western presence to help ease them in.

Niki is played in the film by Camilla Aiko, a recent graduate of the Bristol Old Vic theatre school. She sees the character as the story’s truth-seeker, the eyes of the audience, and the picture itself as the tale of two women who struggle to connect. “It didn’t cross my mind – maybe it should have – that I was playing Ishiguro,” she says.

What she shares with the author is the same blended cultural heritage. Aiko is British mixed-race – her mother is Japanese. “And the thing about being mixed-race is that I find it difficult speaking for Japanese people or British people because I’m not sure which side I’m on. In Japan I’m a foreigner; here I’m Asian. As an actor I’m someone who tries to slip through the cracks.”

Niki isn’t Ishiguro. Nonetheless, the author admits that there are parallels. He says, “Where I see myself in Niki – and I was reminded of this watching Camilla Aiko’s fine performance – is in her sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes coy and cunning curiosity when coaxing memories from her mother of another, more troubled time.”

It is the mother, after all, who looms largest in the tale. Etsuko in a sense has led two lives and been two different people. In 80s England she is a respectable widowed music teacher. In Nagasaki seven years after the atomic bomb dropped, she’s a harried young bride, contaminated with radiation and a potential hazard to her unborn child. She needs a friend or an escape route, whichever comes first. But she is never an entirely reliable narrator – and the family story she tells Niki finally doesn’t add up.

What did Ishiguro’s own mother make of A Pale View of Hills? “I believe it remained special to her among my books,” he says. “A little before I started the book, with cold war tensions intensifying in the Reagan-Brezhnev era, she said to me she felt it was important she should relate to me some of her experiences in Nagasaki. Partly because I was of the next generation, but also because I was wanting to be a writer and had a chance to pass things on … A Pale View of Hills didn’t use any of her stories directly, but I think she thought the book was some sort of evolution of them, and closer to her than the books I wrote later.” Ishiguro’s mother died in 2019, aged 92. After watching Ishikawa’s adaptation, he thought: “What a pity she wasn’t here to see this film.”

Cinema is an enduring passion for Ishiguro and influences his writing as much as literature does. His favourite recent films include the Oscar-winning animation Flow, about a small soot-grey cat who survives a great flood, plus the French legal dramas Anatomy of a Fall and Saint Omer (“Is French justice really conducted like this? Or are these hallucinatory versions of French courts?”).

A few years back, between novels, he wrote the screenplay for Living – a quietly wrenching adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic Ikiru, relocated to London and starring Bill Nighy and Aimee Lou Wood. The poster for Ikiru, incidentally, can be glimpsed on the street in A Pale View of Hills.

Loving film can be a double-edged sword. Is it a help or a hindrance when it comes to having his own work adapted? Hopefully the former, Ishiguro says, so long as he maintains a safe distance. “I have a strict rule not to attempt to adapt any of my novels myself,” adds the writer, who is speaking to me by email. “As long as I keep well in the background, I don’t think I’m necessarily a hindrance. I always emphasise to film-makers that they have to own the film – that it shouldn’t be approached reverentially.”

Merchant-Ivory managed a near perfect adaptation of The Remains of the Day. Mark Romanek and Alex Garland crafted an appropriately haunting, chilly version of Never Let Me Go. Both films preserve Ishiguro’s distinctive style and flavour. The restraint and simplicity; the sense of deep mystery. Both, though, remain films first and foremost. They have been allowed to migrate and adapt to a new habitat.

“This is personal to me,” he says, “but I lean toward the film version moving the story on – not being a faithful translation the way a foreign language edition of a book might be. I know many novelists who’d be annoyed to hear me say this … The thing is, I watch many, many films and when an adaptation of a well-known book doesn’t work, 95% of the time it’s because the film-makers have been too reverential to the source.” Books and films are very different, he thinks. “They’re sometimes almost antithetical.”

In A Pale View of Hills, Etsuko hands her story on to Niki. Niki, in turn, will write it up how she likes. So this is a family story about family stories, aware of how they warp and change in the telling. Every tale is subject to the same cultural static. They are adapted and extrapolated, lost and found in translation. One might even say that’s what keeps a story alive.

by Xan Brooks, The Guardian |  Read more:

Images:Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP; Pale View Partners; YouTube

[ed. See also: Living review – Bill Nighy tackles life and death in exquisitely sad drama (Guardian).]

The Most Widespread Global Restaurant Chains

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[ed. See also: Mixue Ice Cream & Tea (Wikipedia). Chinese.]

Globalization Did Not Hollow Out the American Middle Class

For years, I’ve been calling for the U.S. to promote manufacturing. When Americans started getting excited about reindustrialization, I cheered. I was a big supporter of Joe Biden’s industrial policy, and I even praised Donald Trump for smashing the pro-free-trade consensus in his first term.

Trump’s tariffs haven’t changed my mind about any of that. Yes, the tariffs are a disaster. But they’re not a disaster because they promote manufacturing; indeed, they are deindustrializing America as we speak, by destroying American manufacturers’ ability to leverage supply chains and export markets. When America has finally realized the futility of Trump’s approach, it will be time to turn once again to the task of reindustrialization — in fact, that task will be even more urgent, given the damage that Trump will have done.

And yet at the same time, I think there’s a misguided narrative about globalization, manufacturing, and the American middle class that has taken hold across much of society. The story goes something like this:

In the 1950s and 1960s, America was a smokestack economy. Unionized factory jobs built a broad-based middle class, and we made everything we needed for ourselves. Then we opened up our country to trade and globalization, and things started going downhill. Wages stagnated due to foreign competition, and good manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. American cities hollowed out, and we became a nation of winners and losers. The college-educated upper middle class thrived in their professional jobs, while regular Americans were forced to fall back on low-wage service work. Eventually the rage of the dispossessed working class boiled over, resulting in the election of Donald Trump. (...)

Like all such narratives, this one consists of layers of myth wrapped around a core of truth. But not all grand economic narratives are created equal — in this case, the layers of myth are thick and juicy, while the core of truth is thin and brittle. Everyone knows about the China Shock paper and the collapse of manufacturing employment by about 3 million in the 2000s. That’s the core of the story, and it’s very real. But there are a lot of big important economic facts that place that story in perspective, which most of the people talking about this topic seem not to know.

Ultimately, the trade-driven collapse in manufacturing was only a small part of the economic story of America over the last half century.

America is not actually that globalized

Pundits and politicians alike talk incessantly about the flood of cheap Chinese goods into America. But overall, this is a small percent of what we buy. The U.S. is actually an unusually closed-off economy; as a fraction of GDP, imports are much lower than in most rich countries, and lower even than China: (...)

In terms of imported components, America manufactures most of what it uses in production. China’s exports to the U.S. are actually more likely to be intermediate goods rather than the consumer goods we see on the shelves of Wal-Mart — another thing the typical narrative misses. But even so, China makes only about 3.5% of the intermediate goods that American manufacturers need: (...)

The American middle class was never hollowed out

Americans, as a people, are startlingly rich. This isn’t just true because a few very rich people pull up the average. If you take median disposable household income, the U.S. comes out way ahead of the pack:

Note that this includes taxes and transfers, including in-kind transfers like government-provided health care.

Other countries may have protected their manufacturing sectors, but middle-class Americans are richer than the middle classes in other countries.

And middle-class Americans’ income has not been stagnant over the years. Here’s real median personal income, which isn’t affected by the shift to two-earner families:

This is an increase of 50% since the early 70s. I wish it had been more, of course, and it has its ups and downs, but 50% is nothing to sneeze at.

As for middle-class wages, they’ve grown less than incomes, since some of the increased income has been in the form of corporate benefits (health care, retirement accounts), investment income, and government benefits. But they have still grown:

Wage growth has resumed since the mid-1990s, despite increasing trade deficits. Note that the China Shock, which threw millions of manufacturing workers out of their jobs, utterly failed to stop wages from resuming their upward climb. Wage stagnation and hyperglobalization just don’t line up, timing-wise. Jason Furman has another good chart that shows this very clearly:

A lot of commentators have gotten so used to the idea that incomes are stagnant that they have trouble believing this data is correct. But as Adam Ozimek points out, the Economic Policy Institute — a pro-union think tank that frequently complains that wages are too low — chooses a very similar measure for median wages. EPI writes that wages “have not been stagnant”, but “have…been suppressed”.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:
Images: Maximillian Conacher on Unsplash; OECD/Wikipedia; US Census Bureau.]

Paperwork
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Earth To Moon

Fame came early for Moon Unit Zappa, eldest daughter of legendary musician Frank and his wife Gail, though not by choice. Her unusual name, dreamt up by her dad – “Unit” supposedly signified their familial bond – meant everyone knew who she was from infancy. Her teens brought a fresh wave of celebrity which, she notes, “I also didn’t ask for.” A rare and spontaneous moment with her father in his home studio, during which he recorded her delivering a stream of exaggerated California teen-speak – “It’s, like, grody to the max!” – became the centrepiece of the novelty single “Valley Girl”. Released in 1982, it was Frank’s biggest hit and propelled a reluctant Moon, then an acne-ridden, desperately awkward 14-year-old, into the spotlight.

In her memoir, Earth to Moon, she recalls appearing alongside Frank on TV talk shows, including Late Night with David Letterman, where she quickly learnt that certain stories would get “a big reaction. Like the one about the Kiwi groupie moving in [to the family home]… or the unconventional parenting story about the time Gail handcuffed me and [younger brother] Dweezil together by the ankles, recorded our fight and played it back for us.” It was, she says now, “a confusing time”.

Moon, 57, is talking over Zoom from her living room in Los Angeles. She is terrific company: open, articulate and quick to laugh. During our hour-long conversation, she moves between dryly sanguine and palpably livid about her treatment by her narcissistic parents (along with Dweezil, she has two more siblings: Ahmet and Diva). Her book, out in paperback this month, is a wild read, both shocking and improbably funny as it catalogues life in their rambling home in Laurel Canyon, a place that was permanently under construction, rarely cleaned and had a painting of an orgy in the living room.

Childhood, we learn, was a time of deep anxiety and turmoil for Moon, whose name turned out to be the least of her woes. (Though she will say that Elon Musk’s outré names for children, which include X Æ A-Xii, prompted “a definite eye roll”.). As the eldest child, she was simultaneously devastated by her father’s lack of interest in his children and a hostage to her mother’s erratic moods. She recalls Frank waking her up one night and telling her: “Gail is on a rampage. I need you to hide the gun.”

And so while the writing process was occasionally cathartic, it was also painful as old wounds were reopened. “I had to remember that I was hatching a new me as I was going through this reliving of truly the worst experiences of my life,” Moon reflects. “At times, it really felt like I was falling through space.” Even the promotional process brings up complicated feelings. “I’ve been doing events, and people have this righteous anger on my behalf, and it’s like a wave of emotion hits me again. You go through life and put one foot in front of the other and then somebody says, ‘I’m so angry for you.’ And then you think, ‘Oh my God, it was worse than I even thought’.”

A celebrated musical maverick, Frank Zappa found fame in the early 1960s following an appearance on The Steve Allen Show during which he played a bicycle as a musical instrument. Later, he blended complex jazz and classical stylings with surreal storytelling on cult hits such as “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow” and “Bobby Brown” (lyrics), about a proud misogynist who contemplates raping a cheerleader. Frank was a self-confessed workaholic who released 62 albums in his lifetime – he died from pancreatic cancer in 1993 aged 52 – and inspired zealous devotion from his fans who hailed him as a creative genius. When he wasn’t away touring with his band The Mothers of Invention, he was ensconced in his home studio and determinedly keeping his family at arm’s length.

Mention of the G-word prompts a snort of derision from Moon. “There’s this strange dichotomy of my father being called a genius and the fact that he didn’t even make sure [his children] knew how day-to-day [life] worked. He didn’t invest in our educations or our futures. He didn’t even say, ‘How are you doing?’ to his kids. This is outrageous to me. If that’s what genius is about then, pah! No thank you!” Yet Moon acknowledges her father’s charisma and can see his appeal to those fortunate enough not to be his dependants. “To them he represented freedom, integrity, being civic-minded and speaking out against injustice. He spoke to the marginalised and the weirdos. I did observe it, and him, as being very meaningful to people. And they’re still rabid, the people that love him love him forever.”

Dad didn’t even say, ‘How are you doing?’ to his kids. This is outrageous to me. If that’s what genius is about then, pah! No thank you! (...)

Little wonder that, by the time Moon reached her mid-teens, she was determined to leave home. At 17, using money she had earned from “Valley Girl”, and the sporadic acting jobs that followed (her credits include the crime series CHiPs and the sitcom The Facts of Life), she bought her first home. Once there, she recalls, “I literally just lay on the floor and stared at the ceiling because I had gotten out, but I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was like I had been serving jail time for something I didn’t commit, and then, on being released, not knowing how to be in the world.” She sought guidance from a spiritual guru, since “I was primed for subservience. I had been trained to want nothing and be nothing. Thank God that guru did not let me cut my hair off, become a renunciate and move to India. She told me: ‘You belong in the world’.”

In any case, Moon’s independence was to be short-lived. Not long after Frank was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, Gail paid her a visit and announced: “You cost us $200,000 to raise, so we need to sell your house to pay for your father’s cancer treatments because he has no health insurance.” Ever the pliant daughter, Moon sold up and moved back home.

After Frank’s death, she slowly found her way in the working world, making art, continuing to act and writing a semi-autobiographical novel, America the Beautiful, in 2001. The following year, Moon married Paul Doucette, from the band Matchbox Twenty, and they had a daughter, Mathilda (Moon and her husband divorced in 2014). Becoming a mother brought home just how little she had been mothered herself. “It was, like, ‘Wow, I’m giving from a place where there’s no map. I wasn’t taught how to do this.’ And so the wound got pricked again, because I couldn’t help thinking: ‘Nobody did this for me’.”

Asked why she waited so long to write about her parents, she replies: “Because I always thought it was Gail’s story to tell. Gail loved the music. Gail picked my dad as [a partner] and had a life with him.” But then she changed her mind. This was partly because “it became clear people had an interest in wanting to hear what it was like as his daughter”, but mostly because of her mother’s infamous will.

In 2015, Gail died from lung cancer, leaving behind massive debt just as her husband had. She also left the lion’s share of the Zappa estate to her younger children, giving Diva and Ahmet 30 per cent each and Dweezil and Moon 20 per cent. This put the younger siblings firmly in charge of all matters Frank, meaning they make the decisions about his legacy and trust, and are also set to receive a bigger share of any future profits (this despite Moon having cared for her mother in her final year). A decade of battles ensued between the Zappa children, often involving lawyers. Moon has since decided her mother did her a favour “though I don’t thank her for it”. Rather than managing the family business, she has spent recent years nurturing her own talents and career. “That’s literally what it took for my stubborn brain to understand ‘You have to invest in your own life.’ It was either become a casualty of this circumstance or take a chance on myself.”

by Fiona Sturges, MSN |  Read more:

Image: Randall Slavin

[ed. Seems pretty well-adjusted, considering.]

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Anjel / Boris Anje (Cam. 1993), Restoration (2024)

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Does One Line Fix Google?

Earlier this week, Google announced some big changes to its search engine that are, in a word, infuriating.

Simply put, Google has started adding “AI overviews” to many of its search results, which essentially throw pre-processed answers that often do not match the original intent of the search. If you’re using Google to actually find websites rather than get answers, it $!@(&!@ sucks. Admittedly though, it’s not the first time Google has adulterated its results like a food manufacturer in the 19th century—knowledge panels have been around for years.

But in the midst of all this, Google quietly added something else to its results—a “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago, no extra junk. While Google made its AI-focused changes known on its biggest stage—during its Google I/O event—the Web filter was curiously announced on Twitter by Search Liaison Danny Sullivan.

As Sullivan wrote:

We’ve added this after hearing from some that there are times when they’d prefer to just see links to web pages in their search results, such as if they’re looking for longer-form text documents, using a device with limited internet access, or those who just prefer text-based results shown separately from search features. If you’re in that group, enjoy!

The results are fascinating. It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the "More" menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.

Oh, unadulterated Google, how I’ve missed you.

Ever use a de-Googled Android phone? Here’s a de-Googled Google, or as close to one as you’re going to get on the google.com domain.

It’s such a questionably fascinating idea to offer something like this, and for power searchers like myself, it’s likely going to be an amazing tool. But Google’s decision to bury it ensures that few people will use it. The company has essentially bet that you’ll be better off with a pre-parsed guess produced by its AI engine.

It’s worth understanding the tradeoffs, though. My headline aside, a simplified view does not replace the declining quality of Google’s results, largely caused by decades of SEO optimization by website creators. The same overly optimized results are going to be there, like it or not. It is not Google circa 2001—it is a Google-circa-2001 presentation of Google circa 2024, a very different site.

But if you understand the tradeoffs, it can be a great tool. Power users will find it especially helpful when doing deep dives into things. However, is there anything you can do to minimize the pain of having to click the “Web” option buried in a menu every single time?

The answer to that question is yes. Google does not make it easy, because its URLs seem extra-loaded with cruft these days, but by adding a URL parameter to your search—in this case, “udm=14”—you can get directly to the Web results in a search.

That sounds like extra work until you realize that many browsers allow you to add custom search engines by adding the %s entry as a stand-in for the search term you put in. I use it all the time to create shortcuts to site-specific searches I regularly use. And it works great in the case of Google.

by Ernie Smith, Tedium |  Read more:

Image: Google

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The Tombstone Mentality

The Tombstone Mentality

For obvious evolutionary reasons, we are excellent at responding to experience. If something goes horribly wrong, we learn, we adapt, we act to reduce the risk of it going horribly wrong again. But something that could go wrong, but hasn’t yet? No matter how foreseeable — even obvious — the threat is, that is a mere abstraction. It doesn’t move us. We don’t act.

Until it actually goes horribly wrong. Then we act.

Cynics have dubbed this the “tombstone mentality.” History is littered with exhibits of its handiwork. So are cemeteries.

by Dan Gardner, PastPresentFuture |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Check out these predictions: AI Takeoff Forecast 2027; Review: AI 2027; and AI 2027: Media, Reactions, Criticism. I don't know, 2027 isn't looking good.]

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Love Bites

Relationship status: It’s complicated

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