Tag: Premium

Jenny Diski, age 66, pens a thoughtful essay about growing old:

[One] definitive non-sexual way of knowing you’re old is the moment when your doctor tells you that ‘you’ll have to learn to live with it,’ or that whatever ails or pains you is ‘the result of wear and tear’. You wait for the suggestion of a procedure, the next appointment, and then realise that you aren’t going to be considered for it. You see a virtual shrug that says you are no longer young enough for a resource-strapped institution to be overly concerned with getting you back to full health. There are higher priorities, and they are higher because the patients are younger.

It comes to you that whatever ailment you’ve got at this point is decay inflected by decay, in one form or another, and, to people who aren’t you, only to be expected. It is, to put it simply, which they won’t, a recognition of the beginnings of the approach of death. … None of the gung-ho books on ageing has more than a brief mention of the proximity of death as one of the symptoms of old age to be dealt with. ‘Acceptance’, they say, without much elaboration, and then move rapidly on. Even if it won’t kill you imminently, the degeneration of the body will alter and limit how you can live, whether you can get out, continue to work and travel. I can’t think of anything about the reality of ageing which improves a person’s life. The wisdom people speak of that is supposed to come to us in old age seems to be in much shorter supply than I imagined, and apart from that, it’s a matter of how self-deceptively, or stoically, you are able or prepared to put up with the depletions, dependency and indignities of getting old.

Those waiting for #explodingwhale to pop will be disappointed. It’s running out of gas. View Sunday (left) and today. pic.twitter.com/ytI8GfHxW0

— Don Bradshaw (@DonBradshawNTV) May 2, 2014

Last week, Svati Kirsten Narula covered the Internet’s infatuation with a dead whale:

A dead blue whale washed up on the shore of a small fishing town in Newfoundland last week. A bloated, beached, blubbery bomb of a blue whale. As of 3:30 pm Eastern Time [April 30th], the carcass is still intact, but onlookers are worried that it might soon explode. Literally.

The concerned marine science communicators at Upwell and Southern Fried Science have created a website devoted to monitoring this situation:

HasTheWhaleExplodedYet.com. I kid you not.

Ian Crouch reviews the history of exploding whales:

The idea of spontaneous combustion is certainly compelling, but the truth of the matter is that history’s famous exploding whales had a little help from humans.

A whale blew up last year in the Faroe Islands, but only after a seam had been cut by a researcher, who just managed to dodge the gooey shrapnel. Another whale, which showered the streets of the Tawainese city of Tainan in a mess of innards in 2004, was being transported on the back of a truck when it burst. And the most famous exploding whale in history went sky-high thanks to some inventive, if ill-considered, meddling. In 1970, members of the Oregon Highway Division rigged up a dead beached whale with dynamite in an attempt to obliterate it. But it turned out that they were low on firepower, and so, rather than blasting the body into tiny bits of seagull food, they instead sprayed huge chunks of whale over a crowd of people across a wide radius. Thankfully, there was a television crew on hand to capture the full arc of the scene—from hopeful preparation to grim postmortem. Onlookers fled the dunes. An Oldsmobile was flattened. Nobody died.

Two decades ago, when Junot Diaz arrived at Cornell to pursue his MFA in creative writing, he confronted “the standard problem of MFA programs”: “That shit was too white.” He notes that, in his experience, not much has changed:

It’s been twenty years since my workshop days and yet from what I gather a lot of shit remains more or less the same. I’ve worked in two MFA programs and visited at least 30 others and the signs are all there. The lack of diversity of the faculty. Many of the students’ lack of awareness of the lens of race, the vast silence on these matters in many workshop. I can’t tell you how often students of color seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they’re facing in their programs, from both their peers and their professors. In the last 17 years I must have had at least three hundred of these conversations, minimum. I remember one young MFA’r describing how a fellow writer (white) went through his story and erased all the ‘big’ words because, said the peer, that’s not the way ‘Spanish’ people talk. This white peer, of course, had never lived in Latin America or Spain or in any US Latino community—he just knew. The workshop professor never corrected or even questioned said peer either. Just let the idiocy ride.

Another young sister told me that in the entire two years of her workshop the only time people of color showed up in her white peer’s stories was when crime or drugs were somehow involved. And when she tried to bring up the issue in class, tried to suggest readings that might illuminate the madness, her peers shut her down, saying Our workshop is about writing, not political correctness. As always race was the student of color’s problem, not the white class’s. Many of the writers I’ve talked to often finish up by telling me they’re considering quitting their programs. Of course I tell them not to. If you can, please hang in there. We need your work. Desperately.

Eric Nelson sees a diversity deficit in publishing, too:

I have frequently presented books as an editor to a room full of only white people. And even from the sixteen books I’ve sold in the past twelve months, less than a third were by women, and only two were by non-white writers. The lack of diversity really is that bad.

But he also finds cause for hope:

[T]oday the market is already demanding a wider variety of books, and with the rise of electronic publishing, self-publishing, and so many websites that provide traffic and social media metrics, it’s harder than ever to ignore what the market is saying. … [I]t only makes sense for so long to promote exclusively books by and about white men, when clearly there is a huge appetite for a much wider range of material. My point, ultimately, is that—in publishing, at least—the camp for diversity and the market are now pulling in the same direction.

And what will be the argument when, sans gate-keepers, the diversity problem remains? Another definition of racism?

That’s the verdict of a propagandistic human rights report issued by North Korea’s state-run Korean Central News Agency. Nina Strochlic finds the report’s relative accuracy unnerving:

In North Korea, where accurate depictions of human rights never make it into the state-crafted news, the press doesn’t exist to focus investigations inward. But it’s also disturbing that Pyongyang felt little need to load up a report on the U.S. with hyperbole or farce. The words may be overwrought (“Such poor human rights records in the U.S. are an inevitable product of the ruling quarters’ policy against humanity,” one line reads), but the facts are plainly, and uncomfortably, laid out. Something’s off when the most notoriously abusive country in the world has the material to level criticism, even if it has no credibility to do so.

Adam Taylor also looks over the report:

[T]he only truly debatable part is on gun crime. While it’s true that the number of mass shootings has risen in the United States, violent crime in general has dropped over the past few years, with homicide rates down in most major cities. And while the April 10 U.N. report did note that the United States has a high murder rate, the top spot went to Honduras. (KCNA appears to have misread the report, which said the Americas were the region with most gun crime.)

After fact-checking the report in detail, Matt Ford concludes that “Pyongyang’s sins don’t make Washington a saint”:

While it’s easy to dismiss North Korea’s critiques as hypocritical, it isn’t the only country to criticize America’s human-rights record. When asked about Malaysia’s progress on human rights at a press conference in Kuala Lampur this past week, Obama said his host “has still got some work to do. Just like the United States, by the way, has some work to do on these issues. Human Rights Watch probably has a list of things they think we should be doing as a government.”

On cue, Human Rights Watch released that very list, urging the United States to improve its record on mass incarceration, NSA surveillance, and racial discrimination, among other topics.

Ben Blatt ruins everyone’s good time by pointing out the shortcomings of viral maps like this one, which shows the most popular names for baby girls by state over time:

In 1984, only 13 states are labeled Ashley; by 1992, 30 states are. But it turns out that in 1984, a female baby born in the United States was actually 8 percent more likely to be named Ashley than in 1992.

Ashley was still the most popular girls’ name in 1991 and 1992. But its newfound dominance of the map is not the result of its growing popularity. Ashley was on the decline by the early ’90s—but other names were declining even faster. The original maps don’t actually say that Ashley was increasing in popularity in the early ’90s, but the way the information is presented, that misunderstanding is almost unavoidable. …

Again, this doesn’t mean the baby-name maps are wrong. They don’t purport to show anything except the most commonly given name in each state. In fact, these particular maps are well-designed and informative, if you have time to wade through the implications of the data. But it’s easy to see false trends here. Behind each map is data for hundreds of names across 50 states that would need to be examined closely to find the real trends. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as a viral Excel sheet.

But then he makes amends with an interactive feature displaying some maps of his own:

Roger Pielke Jr. wonders why the speed of the fastest horses has plateaued while the fastest humans continue to break records:

One possibility, advanced by [Mark] Denny and others, is that thoroughbred race times may have leveled off because the narrow genetic diversity of racehorses limits the genetic diversity in the pool of potential thoroughbred champions. Modern thoroughbreds are descendants of a small number of horses (less than 30 in the 18th century), and 95 percent are thought to trace their ancestry to a single horse, The Darley Arabian. Today, there are fewer than 25,000 thoroughbreds born each year in the United States. Compare that with the more than 7 billion people worldwide. The size of the human population may simply lead to a greater number of potential athletes with extreme speed.

David Epstein’s TED Talk challenges the claim that today’s athletes are truly superior. A highlight from the transcript:

[C]onsider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from.Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens’ joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn’t have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride.

Cowen highlights other interesting parts of the speech.

Last week, J Street’s bid to join the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations was rejected. Michael Scherer argues that this illustrates how American Jews still think about Israel in starker, more existential terms than Israelis themselves do:

J Street … has as its mission an effort to “expand the very concept of what it means to be pro-Israel.” In practice, this means J Street is more closely aligned with the Israeli Labor party than the Likud Party; that it supports greater Israeli concessions to bring about a two-state solution; that it is more critical of Israeli history than most American Zionists; and that it does not share Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish views on Iran.

By a vote of 22 to 17, the American Jewish community’s largest umbrella group has decided that these views, which are widely debated in Israel, should not be allowed as a part of mainstream American Jewish identity. In short, the American Jewish community is still not ready to embrace the messiness of a real Democratic debate. To disagree over the best policies for Israel is, for a slight majority of American Jewish institutions, still an act of opposition to the nation itself.

You might imagine that some would see the entrenchment of apartheid-like rule on the West Bank, the dead end of the peace process, the potential rapprochement with Iran and the growing strength of the BDS movement, especially in Europe, as requiring a re-think with respect to blind support of anything Israel does. But you would be wrong. Yehuda Kurtzer calls the decision “an attempt to sustain a polity that no longer exists, and to imagine a firm dividing line between internal community dissent and external public debates”:

The fact that J Street wanted in to the establishment meant that in spite of policy differences with many of its members, they were ostensibly willing to try to belong to and perhaps even help sustain the declining Jewish consensus; the fact that they are kept out, essentially told to keep doing their work outside the framework of the normative community, actually reinforces the very breakdown of the communal structure from which Conference of Presidents is now a relic.

If once upon a time Jews held a line not to hang our dirty laundry in public, the American public square has become a Jewish Laundromat – all with the tacit endorsement of what was once the community’s mouthpiece and most influential instrument.

Joe Klein laments what he terms “a decidedly un-Jewish development”:

Where I come from–the outer boroughs of New York City–Jews were known for, and entertained ourselves by, arguing about everything. Nothing was ever off the table. But I’ve noticed a tendency of the neo-conservative Jews to denigrate those who disagree with their extreme right-wing positions. They bully. They refuse to engage in a serious debate. They have a cult-like devotion to the party line. They call groups like J Street “anti-Israel,” when it’s possible, perhaps even probable, that COPOMJAO’s hard line will compromise Israel’s ability to thrive in the future.

The CPOMJAO rejection will work well for J Street. It will be “good” publicity, especially among those Jews who have been dismayed by those who claim to Judaism’s official leaders in America. COPOMJAO, meanwhile, seems as silly as its name. It needs reform, including a new identity: I would suggest The Jew Crew as a replacement, but that would imply a lack of self-righteousness and openness to diverse opinions that COPOMJAO doesn’t seem to have.

But Jonathan Tobin argues that J Street, not the conference, is the divisive one:

The Conference was created to provide a way for a diverse and cantankerous Jewish community a single structure with which it could deal with the U.S. government. The point was, though its members have often disagreed and true consensus between left and right is often impossible, the Conference still provides Congress and the executive branch an address through which they can reach a broad and diverse coalition of Jewish organizations. Adding one more on the left wouldn’t have changed that but unlike other left-leaning groups, J Street has never had any interest in playing ball with rivals or allies. Its purpose is not to enrich and broaden that consensus but to destroy it. And that was something that groups that had no real ideological fight with J Street rightly feared.

Brad Plumer explains why recent nuclear power plant closings should alarm environmentalists:

So what happens when a nuclear power plant gets retired? It depends on the region. But one recent study of a shuttered nuclear plant in California found that greenhouse-gas emissions surged, as the nuclear plant got replaced by fossil fuels.

Back in February 2012, Southern California Edison shut off two nuclear reactors at the San Onofre plant after finding cracks in the steam generator system. (A year later, the company announced that it would retire the reactors for good, deciding it the repair and licensing process would take too long and involve too many lawsuits.)

That plant was massive, providing about 8 percent of California’s electricity. So the state went on a frenzy of construction, building mostly new natural gas units and some wind units. In the end, however, fossil fuels were the easiest to deploy. Overall carbon-dioxide emissions in the region rose by 9.2 million tons in the following year — equivalent to putting an extra 2 million cars on the road.

And look at the result of Germany’s decision to revoke nuclear: they’re not just hurting the planet but also enabling Putin. Sigh. To my mind, nuclear is an imperfect but real solution to disentangling ourselves from the Middle East and saving the planet. And yet the liberal coalition that should support it is AWOL – a victim largely of ideology.