Month: April 2012

Are apocalyptic thoughts an excuse for inaction?:

The deeper we entangle the challenges of the 21st century with apocalyptic fantasy, the more likely we are to paralyze ourselves with inaction — or with the wrong course of action. We react to the idea of the apocalypse — rather than to the underlying issues activating the apocalyptic storyline to begin with — by either denying its reality ("global warming isn't real") or by despairing at its inevitability ("why bother recycling when the whole world is burning up?"). 

Many believe the end times have arrived:

A poll conducted last year by the Public Religion Research Institute found an incredible 44 percent of Americans (and 67 percent of white evangelical Christians) agreeing with the statement, "The severity of recent natural disasters is evidence that we are in what the Bible calls the end times."

Vatican City, 2.20 pm

A long review of Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve looks at how the rediscovery of Lucretius shaped the modern world. It's a brilliant essay, and hard to excerpt from, but the following (especially the bit about hunting for books as a refuge from trouble) gets at the core of what sets Greenblatt's story in motion .

In 1414, however, a swerve worthy of Epicurus himself brought On the Nature of Things back, not just to life but also into the cultural swim. Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist scholar who worked as a secretary for Pope John XXIII, accompanied his master to Konstanz, to attend a council of the Church, which was deep in trouble. The council had to deal with the fact that there were three rival popes, each with followers, as well as the Hussite heretics in Bohemia, one of whom it executed, breaking a promise of safe conduct. When John realized that his support was gone, he fled the city. Arrested and deposed he capitulated, bringing his papal name into such discredit that none of his successors would adopt it until Angelo Roncalli did so in 1958. Poggio found himself for the moment without a job. A passionate book hunter, he took refuge from his troubles throughout his life by hunting for truffles in libraries.

Now he decided to brave the difficulties of traveling in German lands, where he did not speak the language, and of hunting for books in dusty, cobwebbed monastic libraries guarded by obdurate and suspicious monks, whom he did not like. (In a tradition that went back to Boccaccio and before, Poggio suspected them of corruption and hypocrisy.) In 1417, in one of the collections that Poggio explored—probably that of the great Benedictine house of Fulda, in south Germany—he found the text of Lucretius. Poggio read the shocking book and changed the world. Or at least he let loose a text powerful enough to frighten some readers and fascinate others.

Virginia Hughes reports on an experimental new procedure:

In the 1970s, fertility treatments such as egg freezing emerged as a way to extend the upper limit of the childbearing years. But these came with caveats of their own. [For one patient] egg freezing would have required two weeks of hormone pills and injections, and frequent ultrasounds to monitor the ripening eggs – a regime that can cause mood swings and didn't fit into her gruelling work schedule. And each of these expensive, time-consuming, hormone-heavy cycles would only yield around 12 eggs. By contrast, if you bank ovarian tissue, you can theoretically preserve thousands of eggs after one short laparoscopic surgery.

In a follow-up post, Hughes doubts whether the procedure would really be a panacea:

If we had a technology that could stop the clock, would a bunch of Good Things happen to women?

Would we earn more money before having a kid, allowing us to give said kid better medical care and more educational opportunities? Would employers, no longer at risk of losing a young employee in her 30s, finally start paying us what they pay men for the same job? Would more women stay in science? Without the terrifying "use-it-or-lose-it" voice in the back of our heads, would more of us realize that, actually, we don’t want any of those smelly babies?

I wish I could say that if only the technology existed, it would give women (and their partners) more choices and help us make better decisions. But I’m not sure it would. There’s a surprisingly strong cultural resistance to the idea of delaying motherhood. When I mentioned this story to colleagues and peers, I heard over and over again, "Yeah, but is it good for the kid to be the one with the old mom?" or "I wouldn’t have enough energy to do it at that age" or "At some point, women have to make up their minds."

A study in contrast:

Anglo swearing is ornate, clever, and florid; American swearing is brutal,repetitious, and earthy. There’s a reason they sell t-shirts on St. Mark’s Place that read “FUCK YOU YOU FUCKIN FUCK.” Swearing in [the British comedy series] “The Thick of It” showed control in the midst of a tantrum, like a well-placed kick in the middle of a marital arts routine. It demonstrated that the speaker was ready to just let forth a string of invective but was powerful enough to channel it into something laced with cultural references and word-games.

In America, though, swearing tends to signal the threat of violence, the moment when coarse language gets even coarser. It’s a heightener. “He’s got his eight-track playing really fuckin’ loud” would, in the Anglo incarnation, be something like “His eight-track was so fucking loud that Helen Keller could hear it four fucking blocks away” or something. 

Because private sex is part of human nature:

In his landmark book, The Evolution of Human Sexuality, anthropologist Donald Symons suggests that since men can never get enough of it, sex is a precious commodity and therefore best enjoyed covertly to avoid inciting covetousness. "This is for the same reason that during a famine anyone with food is likely to consume it in private," says Steven Pinker of Harvard University. "A sexual act, even among consenting adults, has a high probability of upsetting someone," he adds. Parents or community members may disapprove and for children it can lead to the creation of rival siblings.

A young girl waits to audition during tryouts for the School of American Ballet in New York City on April 27, 2012. The prestigious school has trained the majority of New York City Ballet's dancers as well as hundreds of dancers for other major ballet companies around the world. By Allison Joyce/Getty Images.

In his latest book, Matthew Gavin Frank chronicled his summer working at a marijuana collective in California. An excerpt from Pot Farm:

[W]hether a grower is compliant or not, local law enforcement is known to raid these farms, arrest many of those involved in their operation, and, reportedly, decimate the crop. Helicopters piloted by the California Department of Justice often fly low over the pot farms, visually estimating the number of plants on the property. … Each grower is issued a government-certified permit to cultivate a certain number of plants for a fixed number of patients.  If an airborne law enforcement official, with binocular aid, suspects that the farm possesses even one more plant than the allowed number, the helicopter will land and, according to Lady Wanda, "All Hell will break loose."

Frank, in a interview, elaborated on the violence:

Pot Farms are raided all the time by both state agencies and private militias, oftentimes resulting not only in a decimation of the crop, but in the loss of human life.

Pot Farm owners have started employing ex-military folks as snipers who are stationed up in these tree forts in the redwoods as a security measure.  At the ground-level, there’s still a lot of uncertainty. AIDS patients and folks suffering from all kinds of chronic pain do light work on these farms in exchange for the medicine that works best for them and carries the fewest side-effects. Many of these folks are simply fighting for easy access to their meds, without the threat of taking a bullet.

Cord Jefferson recently profiled other temporary pot-farm workers:

The [harvest] season usually begins in October, when California’s high-grade marijuana farmers chop down their plants and let them cure in heated warehouses for several days. Three to four weeks later, when the crop is sufficiently dried, the growers import a team of temporary laborers. They’re like the migrant workers who follow seasonal fruit and vegetable crops, only they’re often young, white private-school kids armed with scissors. Their sole job is to trim away excess leaves from the pot buds, leaving only the most potent product for distribution. 

Mike Rugnetta makes the case:

A new profession:

A board-certified anesthesiologist with a medical degree from the University of North Carolina, Dr. Burke is, according to his website, the "first physician in the United States to formally dedicate his career to the treatment of hangovers."

Earlier this month, he unveiled his new treatment clinic, a 45-foot-long tour bus emblazoned with soothing blue and white graphics and his business’s name, "Hangover Heaven." Inside the bus, it looks like a cross between an ambulance and a conference room at Embassy Suites. IV drips hang from the ceiling, patients are swathed in blankets, but there are also spacious leather sofas with built-in beverage-holders and flat-screen TVs. EMTs administer relief to patients in the form of branded medical cocktails. The $90 Redemption package contains one bag of saline solution, vitamins, and an anti-nausea medication. The $150 Salvation package includes a double shot of saline solution, the vitamins, the anti-nausea medication and an anti-inflammatory as well.