James Hamblin examines research connecting warmth and human metabolism:
[Former NASA materials scientist Ray]Cronise believes that our thinking about the modern plagues of obesity and metabolic disease (like diabetes) has not addressed the fact that most people are rarely cold today. Many of us live almost constantly, year-round, in 70-something-degree environments. And when we are caught somewhere colder than that, most of us quickly put on a sweater or turn up the thermostat. …
Cronise, [Andrew] Bremer, and [Harvard geneticist David] Sinclair propose what they call the “Metabolic Winter” hypothesis: that obesity is only in small part due to lack of exercise, and mostly due to a combination of chronic overnutrition and chronic warmth. Seven million years of human evolution were dominated by two challenges: food scarcity and cold. “In the last 0.9 inches of our evolutionary mile,” they write, pointing to the fundamental lifestyle changes brought about by refrigeration and modern transportation, “we solved them both.” Other species don’t exhibit nearly as much obesity and chronic disease as we warm, overfed humans and our pets do. “Maybe our problem,” they continue, “is that winter never comes.”
Alison Griswold finds that, over “the past five years, ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit and Allegiant have consistently outperformed their peers in terms of operating profit”:
That airlines like Virgin America and JetBlue can’t turn a strong profit while maintaining a better level of service speaks to the odd tastes of the American air traveler. As Matt Yglesias put it in Slate two years ago, “the basic moral of the story is that airline service is bad because customers want bad airline service. Or, rather, they don’t want to pay a premium for better service.” As far as consumer preferences go, this attitude is an outlier. The restaurant industry, for example, is well aware that diners are willing to spend more for what fast-casual Chipotle and Shake Shack serve up than for the stuff at Taco Bell and McDonald’s. “There’s a lot of customers who believe that every airline is the same,” says Paul Berry, a spokesman for Spirit Airlines. “They don’t think that way when it comes to restaurants … but they think the airline industry is different. And really, it isn’t.”
Also commenting on airfare economics, Tim Wu ponders the airlines’ increasing reliance on extra fees:
If fees are great for airlines, what about for us? Does it make any difference if an airline collects its cash in fees as opposed to through ticket sales? The airlines, and some economists, argue that the rise of the fee model is good for travellers. You only pay for what you want, and you can therefore save money if you, for instance, don’t mind sitting in middle seats in the back, waiting in line to board, or bringing your own food. That’s why American Airlines calls its fees program “Your Choice” and suggests that it makes the “travel experience even more convenient, cost-effective, flexible and personalized.”
But the fee model comes with systematic costs that are not immediately obvious. Here’s the thing: in order for fees to work, there needs be something worth paying to avoid. That necessitates, at some level, a strategy that can be described as “calculated misery.” Basic service, without fees, must be sufficiently degraded in order to make people want to pay to escape it. And that’s where the suffering begins.
The biggest single thing I can think of is nonviolence. The thing that I most value about Jesus was his clear commitment to nonviolence in a very violent world. That message has never had more importance, especially for me as an American. The United States of America threatens the world with violence in ways that no other country does, and that boils down to our refusal to disarm after the end of the Cold War. This unchecked, monumental national security establishment that is defining our nation in terrible ways—the nonviolence of Jesus speaks directly to the American condition.
Obviously, this is defining for me because of my life history. I’m the son of a military man; I see everything through his eyes in some way.
More about that “life history”:
I was part of the anti-war movement. I was a Catholic priest and chaplain at Boston University, which was a center of the anti-war movement, and those were defining years for me. My father was an Air Force general, very much involved in the administration of the Vietnam War. He was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, charged, among other things, with picking targets for our bombers in Vietnam. The war was the occasion of my break with my father. But my dad gave me my love of this country and he gave me my love of the Church, and those two things remain defining for me.
I’ve been working all these years to rescue, to protect my faith as a Catholic, and “Christ Actually” is the latest effort to do that. I’ve been working all these years to rescue my love of America, despite my dread of its unchecked militarism.
Taking stock of the conflagration in Iraq and Syria at year’s end, Wayne White sees the jihadist group on the defensive:
Despite the jitters many have concerning the sweep of Islamic State forces, the view from the IS capital of Raqqa is hardly rosy. Still stalled in front of embattled Kobani, IS could not stop a sweeping Iraqi Kurdish, Yazidi, and Iraqi Army drive across northern Iraq to take Sinjar Mountain (again rescuing Yazidi refugees) and wrest from IS much of the town of Sinjar by December 21. Back in mid-December, the Pentagon also confirmed that an air strike killed Haji Mutazz, a deputy to IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, as well as the IS military operations chief for Iraq, and the IS “governor” of Mosul. Meanwhile, daily coalition air strikes grind away at various targets within IS’s “caliphate” (now increasingly wracked by shortages).
The implications of ISIS’s retreat from Sinjar are significant; Khales Joumah reports that the group’s grip on Mosul may be weakening as a result:
In the city of Mosul itself it seems as though ISIS is at a loss. Members of ISIS are still on the city’s streets but most of the foreign fighters appear to have gone.
The ones left on the streets tend to be younger, local fighters some of whom don’t even seem to be 25 yet. Some of the fighters on the streets admit that they’ve been forced to withdraw from Sinjar but only very quietly.
“For the first time you can sense the feelings of fear and frustration in ISIS’s fighters,” one Mosul doctor, who had been seeing ISIS casualties come in, told NIQASH; he had to remain anonymous for security reasons. “As the number of dead and wounded from among their ranks increases, they look more and more like they’ve lost confidence in their leadership.”
Juan Cole also stresses the importance of Sinjar’s liberation:
Historians refer to polities that exist on both sides of a mountain range, united by passes, as a “saddlebag empire.” These were common in South Asia, where southern Afghanistan and Punjab were often part of the same kingdom despite the barrier of the Hindu Kush mountains. What I have called the ‘neo-Zangid’ state of the Daesh unites the area from Aleppo to Damascus, across Mt. Shinjar , just as had the medieval ruler `Imad al-Din Zangi. It is a sort of contemporary saddlebag empire.
But now not only have the Peshmerga taken the Mt. Shinjar area away from Daesh, helping rescue the besieged Yezidis but they have at the same time cut the supply routes between the terrorist group’s Syrian capital, Raqqa, and its Iraqi power base, Mosul. If you take shears to a saddlebag, it can’t straddle the horse’s back any more and will fall down.
Still, hold off on the celebrations for now. As Loveday Morris reports, the humanitarian situation in Iraq remains grim:
U.N. officials acknowledge that the assistance is insufficient. The U.N. response plan for displaced Iraqis remains only 31 percent funded, while the World Food Program has stopped procuring supplies for the displaced because of a lack of money. That means the distribution of boxes of food to families, the only assistance many get, will end by February unless emergency funding is found.
“It’s not that we can do more with less; it’s that we don’t have anything and the needs on the ground are immense,” said Barbara Manzi, the outgoing Iraq representative for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which is overseeing the organization’s response to the displacement crisis.
(Photo: Smoke rises as Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) fighters burn tires to obstruct the sight of warcraft during clashes with Peshmerga forces in Sinjar district of Mosul, Iraq on December 22, 2014. Peshmerga forces stage attacks against ISIL to liberate ISIL occupied Sinjar. By Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Walter Laqueur asserts that for a “considerable time the element of fantasy in Russian political discourse has been strong (and growing stronger), not only at the popular level but in official statements.” Not surprising, exactly, but the details he marshals are remarkable:
A Russian citizen watching television in the evening will be exposed to the historical programme of Nikolai Starikov (to mention but one representative of this genre) which “prove” in convincing detail that the Russian revolutions of 1917 were engineered by the British secret service (the question of whether Somerset Maugham played the decisive role in this context is left open), and that Hitler too was an agent of MI5 or MI6 but did not really want to attack the Soviet Union. He was egged on, however, by Churchill and Roosevelt.
This will be followed by a documentary demonstrating that Trotsky was the father of German Nazism (this also happens to be the title of the series).
If the viewer still has an appetite for sensational revelations, he can switch to yet another series dealing with the connection of the “German patriot Martin Heidegger” and the Balfour Declaration. Retiring to bed with a good book he may well chose the immensely popular Maxim Kalashnikov (no relation of the weapon designer) maintaining that while the present Russian generation is pretty hopeless, a new generation of heroes could be produced in record time, following the pioneering work done by the SS Ahnenerbe in the study of the Aryan race which will put right everything that is wrong or imperfect in contemporary Russia.
The Stalinist system came to Russia 90 years ago and with it the frequent belief in manifestly untrue assertions. This practice has been more pronounced in some periods than in others. It has been denounced on various occasions by experts, but it has by no means been rejected. If in recent years there has been increased sympathy, even a certain longing, for the Stalin period in Russian history, it should not be surprising that this includes the readiness to believe manifestly untrue assertions. President Putin himself argued not long ago that Stalin was no worse than Oliver Cromwell.
A member of the Indonesian Air Force looks out the window from a C-130 Hercules aircraft over the Java Sea during search and rescue operations for missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 on December 29, 2014. By Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images.
Research into the genetic and biological foundations of autism is surely worthwhile, but it’s a long-term game. The time from discovery to deployment of an approved therapy is measured in decades, while the autism community needs help right away. If we accept that autistic people are neurologically different rather than sick, the research goal changes from finding a cure to helping us achieve our best quality of life.
One way to do so, he suggests, is to “put autistic people in charge”:
The fact is, researchers have treated autism as a childhood disability, when in fact it’s a lifelong difference. If childhood is a quarter of the life span, then three-quarters of the autistic population are adults. Doesn’t it make sense that some of us would want to take a role in shaping the course of research that affects us? If you’re a researcher with an interest in autism—and you want to really make a difference—open a dialogue with autistic people. Ask what they want and need, and listen.
Meanwhile, Stephen S. Hall examines how genetic mutations appear to contribute to autism spectrum disorders. He consults researcher Evan Eichler, who suggests “it’s like autism is the price we pay for having an evolved human species”:
Copy number variations in one specific [genetic] hot spot on the short arm of chromosome 16, for example, have been associated with autism. By comparing the DNA of chimpanzees, orangutans, a Neanderthal, and a Denisovan (another archaic human) with the genomes of more than 2,500 contemporary humans, including many with autism, Xander Nuttle, a member of Eichler’s group, has been able to watch this area on the chromosome undergo dramatic changes through evolutionary history known as BOLA2 that seems to promote instability. Nonhuman primates have at most two copies of the gene; Neanderthals have two; contemporary humans have anywhere from three to 14, and the multiple copies of the gene appear in virtually every sample the researchers have looked at. This suggests that the extra copies of the BOLA2 gene, which predispose people to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism, must also confer some genetic benefit to the human species. …
In other words, the same duplications that can lead to autism may also create what Eichler calls genetic “nurseries” in which new gene variants arise that enhance cognition or some other human trait.
Touch me, touch me,
Little cool grass fingers,
Elusive, delicate grass fingers.
With your shy brushings,
Touch my face—
My naked arms—
My thighs—
My feet.
Is there nothing that is kind?
You need not fear me.
Soon I shall be too far beneath you,
For you to reach me, even,
With your tiny, timorous toes.
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Keli Goff contends that “we are not a nation at war over race. We are a nation suffering growing pains”:
For starters, the number of interracial married couples reached an all-time high in 2012, three years after President Obama took office, jumping from 7 percent in 2000 to 18 percent. Those numbers don’t include those who are dating or cohabitating, an indication that the number of interracial couples is actually higher, as American marriage rates are at an all-time low.
And while a majority of Americans may not be in interracial relationships, a large number of Americans are now either related to someone or know someone who is in one or has been in one. Furthermore, mixed race children are the fastest growing population in the country. Someone who once may have been less evolved on race relations could very well now have a grandchild, niece, nephew, or godchild who is of mixed race, which will likely spark an evolution of some sort. That evolution can be seen in Gallup’s tracking of national attitudes on interracial relationships. In 1958 4 percent of Americans approved of such couples. By 1997 half of Americans approved, and by 2012 the number was 87 percent, a steady year-to-year increase in the years since the Obama presidency began.
If the North Korean regime had hoped to stop anyone from seeing The Interview with its cyberattack on Sony and unsubstantiated terrorist threats, they didn’t quite pull it off. After initially deciding to pull the film, Sony backtracked and released it online on Christmas Eve. The Interviewpulled in nearly $18 million over the holiday weekend, including $15 million online:
According to Sony, more than half the online revenue came from the Google Play Store and YouTube (both owned by Google), and after being limited to U.S. residents in its first few days, the online release was later expanded to Canada. Sony reports that the film has been downloaded or streamed more than 2 million times so far. The 331 theaters that screened the film generated significantly less revenue, with a reported $2.8 million in ticket sales. Many of the larger theater chains declined to screen the film due to Sony’s decision to make it available online on the same day as the theatrical release.
While that’s hardly a good take for a major Hollywood release (its total production costs were somewhere in the $100 million range), it sure beats the zero dollars it would have made had Sony capitulated and pulled the film entirely. Still, Ian Morris observes, the studio could have made more money had it not limited the digital release to the US and Canada:
According to various sites, BitTorrent downloads on public trackers were at nearly 1 million viewers after 24 hours. Those numbers exclude private trackers and places like newsgroups, IRC and “locker” based copies (those hosted on Dropbox or similar sites). Factor all those in, and it’s plausible that more people pirated the movie than paid. … Of course, you’ll never stop piracy, but blocking the film from being watched in other English-speaking countries is just foolish. Sony could, perhaps have doubled its money if it had allowed non-US residents to watch the film. And even if this had penalties with distributors, it feels like this might be the ideal time to try the model out anyway.
Todd VanDerWerff seesThe Interview as “an important test of whether movies can now sustain themselves with day-and-date releases in theaters and at home”:
And though that $15 million weekend was undoubtedly boosted by curiosity seekers drawn by the controversy around the film, it’s still an incredibly impressive number. A Marvel superhero movie, which requires a much larger opening weekend than that, probably won’t be using day-and-date releases soon, but it stands as an increasingly viable alternative for smaller budget projects. … Of course, the big question in online releasing is how studios will balance the potential for money made there against the needs of movie theaters, which are still necessary to open big studio tentpole films, at least for the time being. And by so utterly outperforming theatrical sales with online sales, The Interview has also shown why theater owners are so worried.
So what, then, was Pyongyang’s game? Shortly before the holiday, Suki Kim advanced a compelling theory:
This scandal seems to be following the usual course designed by North Korean propagandists, where the more serious and consequential story gets buried behind the sensational headlines that benefit no one more than the North Korea regime. What is being overshadowed this time is the one thing Pyongyang desperately wants the world to ignore. The United Nations’ General Assembly recently voted, by an overwhelming majority of 116 to 20 (with 53 abstentions), to refer North Korea to the International Criminal Court, and the U.N. Security Council met on Monday and voted in favor of adding North Korea’s human rights issues to its agenda over the objection of China and Russia. … I am not sure how much Kim Jong-un really cares about being facetiously killed by actors in a Hollywood comedy, but it appears that he doesn’t want to have an arrest warrant issued against him by an international court the crimes against humanity.
Sony’s last-minute decision to release the film after all should give some comfort to Flemming Rose, who had linked the initial decision to pull the movie to the worldwide trend of “grievance fundamentalism” (a subject the Dish knows all too well):
In today’s grievance culture, with its identity politics and cultivation of the victim, the grievance lobby has succeeded in shifting the fulcrum of the human rights debate from freedom of speech to the necessity of countering hate speech; from the individual pursuing individual liberties to the individual being aggrieved by the liberties taken by others. That shift becomes counterintuitive, the logic increasingly absurd. Those aggrieved by free speech are defended, while others whose speech is perceived as offensive to such a degree that they are exposed to death threats, physical assault, and sometimes even murder are deemed to have been asking for it: “What did they expect offending people like that?”
Thus, perpetrators are transformed into victims, victims into perpetrators, and it’s impossible to know the difference. The distinction between critical words and violent actions, between a picture and a violent reaction, between tolerance and intolerance, between civilization and barbarism is being dissolved.
The Dish 