Year: 2013

Male fertility is on the decline. Some startling statistics:

In 1992, Danish scientists published a meta-analysis of 61 studies on semen quality from around the world, concluding that the average sperm concentration had declined by nearly 50 percent over a 50-year period, from 113 million to 66 million sperm per milliliter. “Every man sitting in this room today is half the man his grandfather was,” reproductive biologist Lou Guillette told Congress in 1993. “Are our children going to be half the men we are?” …

In 2000, American researchers not only confirmed results from the original Danish semen quality study, they found sperm density in the United States and Europe to be falling at an even faster clip: by 1.5 to 3 percent per year. And last summer, an Israeli study noted a steady decline in semen quality at one local bank over the past 15 years. A full 38 percent of all sperm-donation applicants are now rejected, up from one-third prior to 2004. That year, the bank lowered its minimum sperm count for acceptance to widen its net for donors. Under those more stringent standards, 88 percent of contemporary samples would have been rejected.

Sperm-bank rejects aren’t necessarily infertile. But if the downward trend continues, by 2030 the researchers predict that even above-average men will reach “subfertility” levels. Globally, an average of 15 percent of men are considered infertile, up from 10 percent 20 years ago.

Anne Curzan spots a growing trend among her undergrads:

[S]ome students are also using slash to introduce an afterthought that is also a topic shift, captured in this sample text from a student:

12. JUST SAW ALEX! Slash I just chubbed on oatmeal raisin cookies at north quad and i miss you

This innovative conjunction (or conjunctive adverb, depending on how you want to interpret it) occurs, students tell me, even more commonly in speech than in writing. And in writing, it is often getting written out as slash, even in electronically mediated communication, where one might expect the quicker punctuation mark (/) rather than the five-letter word slash.

Slash is clearly a word to watch. Slash I do mean word, not punctuation mark. The emergence of a new conjunction/conjunctive adverb (let alone one stemming from a punctuation mark) is like a rare-bird sighting in the world of linguistics: an innovation in the slang of young people embedding itself as a function word in the language. This use of slash is so commonplace for students in my class that they almost forgot to mention it as a new slang word this term.

John McWhorter also discussed the rise of “slash” while unpacking the linguistics of texting.

Gavin McInnes tried some high-potency pot, had a bad trip, and wrote an article about it while baked. The conclusion:

I have always been pro-legalization, but what I just endured has made me reconsider the whole discussion. When they talked about legalization in the 80s and 90s, they kept saying it was just like having a few beers and it was. Today, while advocates push the medicinal angle, the benign drug they’re defending has morphed into a heavy drug. It’s been an hour and a half since I looked death in the face and cried. I am obviously still incredibly high. I’m so high, in fact, that I no longer see legalization of marijuana as such a no brainer. The debate has shifted to, “Should we legalize a really, really heavy drug?”

It’s never a good idea to write and publish something while stoned. Mike Riggs rolls his eyes:

I can’t bring myself to feel bad for McInnes. He hadn’t used marijuana in years, and yet he intentionally chose “a very strong strain” and to consume it by taking a “big rip off a bong,” not in spite of his colleagues telling him pot is stronger than it used to be, but because they told him that. If he just wanted to take this new marijuana for a spin, he could’ve nibbled a bit of edible, taken a modest pull off a vaporizer, or bought a milder strain. Instead, he chose the equivalent of butt-chugging two shots of Bacardi 151, and then turned that bad decision into a disjointed screed against legalization, when really it’s just a cautionary tale about over-doing it.

(Chart from a White House fact-sheet (pdf) on marijuana)

Joe Biden is now on board with getting the most authoritative of the investigations into the Bush-Cheney war crimes out in the open. You’d think the veep and the Senate Intelligence Committee would be enough to over-rule the CIA’s bed-wetting. But the CIA seems to me increasingly a shadow government, immune to the constraints and governance of the real one. We’re going to get the truth about them once we seize it from their cold and bloodied hands.

Withstanding bears, frostbite and potential madness, Brian Phillips recently tracked the Iditarod by land and air. At one point his plane, named “Nugget”, froze up on the ground during a visit to the Diomedes Islands, the border between Russian and US territory:

We were stranded out there for three hours. It was the first time I ever understood why freezing to death is sometimes described as peaceful or soothing or just like falling asleep, descriptions that had always seemed to hint at some unfathomable mind-transformation within the freezing person, some power extreme cold had to enchant the brain’s basic mechanisms of homeostasis. It didn’t feel violent, that was the thing. Even with the wind ripping past you. It was like certain parts of your body just accrued this strange hush. Like you were disappearing piece by piece. I thought I’d be warmer outside and walking around than inside Nugget, so I would sort of exaggeratedly move one limb at a time, my left arm or whatever, and while I was concentrating on my left arm my right leg would start to be erased.

More than affecting my sense perceptions, though, the cold seemed to affect the way I thought about my sense perceptions. I’d take my glove off to adjust a zipper and lose feeling in my hand almost immediately and instead of thinking Holy no I need to get my glove back on right this second I’d sort of pause and go My, how interesting that my hand feels as though it’s visibly translucent. Then my brain’s inbox would gently ding. PLEASE DON’T DIE.

A personal anecdote: the priest who gave me my first Holy Communion and Sacrament of Reconciliation, and whom I served as an altar boy, died a couple of years’ ago. He was walking home on a cold night and was discovered the next day dead on the street. He had died of hypothermia. He was one of the gentlest priests I ever knew – a quietly devout and simple fellow – and it seemed horrifying that this man died on a street, alone, perhaps after a fall. But it’s also a relief to think that freezing to death is not as painful and as wretched as one might imagine. One reason I have not given up the faith is because of the kind of humility and sincerity I saw in that first priest. Others were not so lucky. But we shouldn’t let evil obscure the great good so many priests do every day, in ways others will never know about, but that, bit by bit, begin to heal the broken world.

(Photo: A herdsman whose fingers were injured by frost bite lies in a hospital January 9, 2006 in Fuyun County of Altay Prefecture, Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, northwest China. A blizzard that swept in from Siberia and plunging temperatures to as low as 43 degrees below zero centigrade forced the evacuation of almost 100,000 people and stranded a further 220,000 in Xinjiang, according to the National Disaster Reduction Centre. By China Photos/Getty Images)

Matthew O’Brien fears that “Spain is beyond doomed”:

Spain’s labor market problems fall into two big buckets: too much regulation, and not enough education. It’s almost impossible for companies to get rid of older workers, which creates a horribly bifurcated labor market. There are permanent workers who can’t be fired, and temporary ones who can — and are. Indeed, as Clive Crook points out, about a third of Spain’s workforce are temporary workers who enjoy few protections and fewer opportunities. Companies go through these younger workers without bothering to invest much in their human capital, because why would they? These temporary workers will be let go at the first sign of economic trouble. Young people get stuck in a never-ending cycle of under-and-unemployment since firms are always hesitant to hire permanent workers who will always be on their books.

But it gets worse. The housing bust hasn’t just cast a shadow over household and bank balance sheets; it’s cast one over young people’s educations too. At its peak, building made up a whopping 19 percent of Spain’s economy, which, as Tobias Buck of the Financial Times points out, lured many young men into dropping out of school for well-paying construction gigs. But now that building has gone into hibernation, all of those young men are left with no work and no education to fall back on. And, again, even if they can find temporary jobs, it’s not as if the companies will spend money to develop their skills.