IKEA Monkey

President Donald Trump was holding court at a rally in Montana Thursday evening where he of course tried to pan the anonymous review of him in the New York Times again, only this time it came out extra sloppy.

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Summer barbecue season might be drawing to a close, but a good meat thermometer can come in handy all year long, and you can score a rare 20% discount on the best one today.

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Daniel Mallory Ortberg is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here’s an edited transcript of this week’s chat. 

Burt Reynolds, one of Hollywood's most popular leading men during the '70s and early '80s via such films as "Deliverance," "Smokey and the Bandit, "The Longest Yard" and "Semi-Tough," has died. His rep confirmed that he died Thursday in Jupiter, Fla. He was 82.

Reynolds' appeal lay in his post-modern...

There are very few dishes—or moments—that can’t be improved by the addition of fat, salt, and heat, which may explain the popularity of nduja, a spicy, almost violently red pork salumi popping up on menus everywhere.

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“Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything”

Nike is making former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick the face of its 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign.

ESPN’s Darren Rovell broke the news on Twitter:

Nike had been paying Colin Kaepernick all along, waiting for the right moment. That moment is now, as he becomes the face of the company’s 30th anniversary of the “Just Do It” campaign.

Here’s the first image, posted by Kaepernick to his social media pages. It features the text “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” over a close-up of his face.

Kaepernick’s deal with Nike is a “wide endorsement,” according to Charles Robinson of Yahoo. That includes a branded line of apparel, including shoes, shirts, jerseys and more. The deal with Kaepernick is a “star” deal, on par with “a top end NFL player,” per Robinson.

The NFL released a statement on Tuesday regarding Kaepernick, in which they say ... not a whole lot at all, when you really look at it:

“The National Football League believes in dialogue, understanding and unity. We embrace the role and responsibility of everyone involved with this game to promote meaningful, positive change in our communities,” said Jocelyn Moore, the NFL’s Executive Vice President of Communications and Public Affairs. “The social justice issues that Colin and other professional athletes have raised deserve our attention and action.”

And hey, while you’re here, below is a list of work my colleagues have done about Colin Kaepernick that is worthy of your time to read or re-read.

Recently Tyler Tynes has written about Kaepernick’s collusion lawsuit against the NFL:

• Colin Kaepernick’s everlasting message transcends any legal victory
• What happens next in Colin Kaepernick’s case against the NFL? A lawyer explains

And it’s been two years since Kaepernick first started to protest during the national anthem in 2016. A lot has happened since then, but it’s important to look back for a full picture:

• A timeline of Colin Kaepernick’s journey from football stardom to exile
• The truth behind why NFL players are protesting
• Colin Kaepernick’s film shows there’s no football reason for him to be unemployed

On Wednesday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel thought it’d be funny to give Colton Underwood, the 26-year-old former football player, recently appointed Bachelor and infamous virgin, a sex talk. This is to be expected, as Underwood’s only discernible personality trait is his virginity, but man is this…

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Farmer’s Fridge, the Chicago-based startup that sells salads and other meals from vending machines, plans to double its operation next year after recently closing a $30 million financing round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s venture capital fund.

Launched in 2013, Farmer’s Fridge has grown...

As possible jurors for the murder trial of Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke walked into the courthouse Wednesday morning, roughly 100 protesters gathered nearby calling for the officer's conviction.

On the first day of the jury selection process for the high-profile case, protesters assembled...

When police found Steven Clayton dead in his South Carolina home last month, his wife told them he'd come down with a bad case of vertigo and taken a fatal dive down a set of stairs, a story the cops apparently bought for weeks. But now investigators say she poisoned her husband to death—a bizarre murder she allegedly pulled off with eye drops.

Last week, Lana Clayton allegedly confessed to killing her husband by spiking his food and water with the stuff for three days straight, the local Herald reports. Turns out that if you ingest enough tetrahydrozoline, a chemical usually found in eye drops and nasal sprays, over-the-counter products like Visine can cause seizures, stop your breathing, leave you in a coma, or in Steven Clayton's case, kill. According to the autopsy, a coroner found "poisonous levels" of the chemical in his body.

Police haven't concluded what might have motivated Lana Clayton, but she complained of her husband's allegedly abusive "mood swings" after another bizarre incident in 2016. That year, police responded to their home after Lana "accidentally" shot her sleeping husband in the head with a crossbow that was, for some reason, in their bedroom, the Herald reports. Back then, Steven told cops he "did not believe his wife was trying to kill him,” but now that she's admitted to the poisoning, they're taking another look at the case.

Now Clayton, who's been charged with murder and malicious tampering of food, is facing 30 years to life in prison, and possibly the death penalty all because she got her hands on some over-the-counter medication that's somehow safe for your eyeballs, but fatal to ingest. If nothing else, the case serves as a warning to the rest of us: Keep that shit out of the kitchen, and be extra careful not to accidentally squirt some in your mouth.

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The boyfriend of a woman captured on night-vision video ringing a doorbell in the middle of the night while partially-clothed and wearing broken wrist restrains has been found dead, according to police. Mr Spencer said the man had made suicidal comments in a call to the sheriff’s office and had died of a gunshot wound. Investigators determined that his girlfriend was the barefoot young woman seen in a nearby resident’s security video ringing the doorbell early on Friday while wearing a T-shirt and wrist restraints.

With the help of Parkland survivor David Hogg, activists in Texas managed to raise almost $10,000 to place an anti-Ted Cruz billboard in the state featuring President Donald Trump’s own words. The GoFundMe campaign organized by USA Latinx, a political group, raised far more than the $6,000 goal in less than 24 hours.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s Tuesday announcement that he won’t seek a third term throws a big unknown into the city’s efforts to score Amazon’s second headquarters, which would be the crowning achievement in a line of corporate wins under his leadership.

The city is one of 20 locations in the...

Struggling to survive in the age of Uber and Lyft, the Chicago taxi industry’s hopes may be riding on a legislative long shot.

Nearly half of the city’s 6,999 licensed cabs are in foreclosure or idled, leading to an increasingly desperate call for regulatory intervention — including a newly floated...

You could say we all saw it coming. And yet, it’s such an offensively boring pick, color me surprised by the predictability—Colton Underwood, a real person (seen above) and not the love interest of a YA novel set in some future dystopia—is your next Bachelor.

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In a few weeks, the Senate will likely confirm Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, where he will serve a lifetime appointment. A few years after he joins the bench—or as early as next June—Kavanaugh will cast the decisive vote in a 5–4 decision that will eviscerate Roe v. Wade. Within hours, days, and weeks of that ruling, a slew of states will outlaw or severely limit abortion; others will resume enforcing abortion bans that remain on the books. None of this is hypothetical or seriously debatable. The American conservative movement has spent decades waiting for this exact moment. Now that it has arrived, they are determined not to miss their opportunity—and by all indications, they will not. Republicans are on the brink of achieving their long sought-after goal of abolishing the constitutional right to abortion access.

A semi-trailer truck carrying a shipment of Axe Body Spray caught fire near Interstate 35 in Belton, Texas on Friday morning, resulting in cans of the deodorant exploding and spraying across the street.

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In the 50s and 60s during tests of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, thousands of British soldiers were deliberately exposed to the blasts “to prepare them for nuclear war”. Motherboard recently traveled to a reunion of atomic veterans to talk to them about their experiences. This is a powerful video — the men shared what the blasts felt like and how it affected the rest of their lives: medical problems, not being able to have children, etc.

I gasped when several of the men talked about how the blasts gave them temporary x-ray vision; the radiation from the nuclear reactions allowed them to see the bones of their hands and arms right through the skin. One recalled, “When the flash hit, you could see the x-rays of your hands through your closed eyes.” And another veteran said, “If I was looking at you now, I would see all your bones. You would see all the blood vessels and everything, the bones, the lot.” I’d never heard this before…what a marvelous and horrifying thing.

Have you ever felt betrayed?

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The Internet loves a viral story about a dog who didn’t make it through government or police training programs, because it means the dog refused to become a total narc. This actually isn’t a rare problem; lots of dogs aren’t suited to service. They still need homes.

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On Tuesday, a swarm of 20,000 or so honeybees descended on Times Square, terrorizing tourists and costumed performers alike before settling on top of a hot dog vendor’s umbrella. Reuters began streaming the incident as the bees swarmed the large blue-and-yellow umbrella. In total, the livestream lasted 40 minutes. I watched every minute, rapt. It wasn’t just a livestream of bees; it may as well have been an avant-garde art film about the state of New York—and even the world—in 2018.

On Tuesday, President Trump shared his opinion of Google:

The reunion/revival circuit is getting out of hand, dogs. BBMak, a British pop group from the 2000s that definitely existed and definitely had a few minor hits—you most likely only know “Back Here” (see below)—have announced that they’re getting the band back together after 15 years.

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On Tuesday, a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that nearly 2.3 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea, and chlamydia were diagnosed in 2017—the highest number ever reported in the United States. Since 2013, diagnoses of gonorrhea, syphilis, and chlamydia are up 67 percent, 76 percent, and 21 percent, respectively. Chlamydia, the most common of the three diseases, saw 1.7 million cases last year.

There’s a breadth of factors at play in rising rates of sexually transmitted diseases. More babies are being born with STDs, since their mothers are more likely to be infected. And chlamydia detection could be getting better for women, who may be undergoing increased screening. But one of the main drivers is the massive budget cuts public-health centers and STD programs have seen over the past few years. When underfunded, these initiatives decrease their hours and staff, and sometimes close altogether, making STD detection and treatment more difficult.

The CDC acknowledges that budget cuts are posing an increasing challenge at battling the spread of STDs. Since 2003, the CDC’s STD-prevention budget has decreased by 40 percent. A 2012 article in Harvard Public Health noted that only 3 percent of government health spending went to public-health programs, and 52 percent of state and local STD programs experienced budget cuts; ultimately, the CDC estimates that 21 local health departments across the country closed as a result. These cuts have come from multiple administrations, and the Trump administration recently proposed a 17 percent cut to the 2019 STD-prevention budget, which could only make the STD problem worse.

“It’s not a coincidence STDs are skyrocketing—state and local STD programs are working with effectively half the budget they had in the early 2000s,” David Harvey, the executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors, says in a press release. “Right now, our STD-prevention engine is running on fumes.”

Heidi Swygard, the epidemiologist for the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services HIV/STD Prevention and Care branch, noted the peril of the plummeting budgets. “We have a public-health workforce that is being asked to do at least as much as they were in 2003, if not maybe a little bit more, with fewer resources,” she says. “There just aren’t the boots on the ground. And if you can’t treat, then you have ongoing transmission in the community.”

STD-ridden New Yorkers aren’t using condoms.

Planned Parenthood, which in 2017 facilitated 4.4 million STD tests, addressed the crushing effect of budget cuts on providing people access to treatment. “Improving people’s access to health care and preventing public-health crises like rising STD rates require that policy makers invest in making STD testing and treatment more accessible, not less,” says Gillian Dean, the senior director of medical services at Planned Parenthood. Sex education in school, which is when many young people learn not only about pregnancy prevention but STD prevention, has seen recent cuts as well.

Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, points out that these rising STD rates particularly affect two populations: women and gay men. Women who catch STDs at a young age, she says, can contract pelvic inflammatory disease as a result, which can then lead to ectopic pregnancies, infertility, and congenital STDs. Gay and bisexual men, who already receive poorer care due to stigma and lack of provider awareness, make up nearly 70 percent of the most infectious stages of syphilis where the gender of the sex partner was known.

Beyond budget cuts, additional factors such as dating apps and decreasing condom use appear to be affecting STD rates among gay men, Swygard says. Dating apps “make it hard for us to track the sexual contacts of infected individuals, so that we can get those folks screened and treated as well … The reality is that we have a population that’s sort of living in the virtual world,” she says.

Further, she notes, when men who have sex with men rely primarily on pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP)—a medication that can protect against HIV infection—their rate of condom usage might go down, making them more susceptible to STDs PrEP doesn’t protect against.

Many women may not realize they have an STD, Swygard says, since “by virtue of our anatomy” these diseases aren’t always immediately symptomatic. And not getting screened regularly is dangerous, she says. “We have seen almost a 40 percent increase in congenital syphilis, because mom was not screened, or mom was screened and then not rescreened and got infected during pregnancy.”

Bolan points out that the reasons behind this STD outbreak are complex, and that no single solution will stop the problem. “Many communities and medical providers are not aware of the problem,” she says. “The most important thing we do is outreach and educate the communities and the medical sector.”

Johnny Depp has several problems of many varieties, but he celebrated a victory in court today, where he continued to duke it out with his former entertainment lawyer, Jacob Bloom, in a $30 million lawsuit.

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A Texas man who allegedly shot and injured several women drivers has been accused of targeting them because he believes only men should be allowed to get behind the wheel.

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“I know how ridiculous it sounds,” Mikhaila Peterson told me recently by phone, after a whirlwind of attention gathered around the 26-year-old, who is now offering dietary advice to people suffering with conditions like hers. Or not so much dietary advice as guiding people in eating only beef.

At first glance, Peterson, who is based in Toronto, could seem to be one of the many emerging semi-celebrities with a miraculous story of self-healing—who show off postpartum weight loss in bikini Instagrams and sell one thing or another, a supplement or tonic or book or compression garment. (Not incidentally, she is the daughter of the famous and controversial pop psychologist Jordan Peterson. More on that later.) But Peterson is taking the trend in extra-professional health advice to an extreme conclusion: She is not doing sponsored posts for health products, but actively selling one-on-one counseling ($75 for a half hour) for people who want to stop eating almost everything.

Peterson seems to be reaching suffering people despite a lack of training or credentials in nutrition or medicine, and perhaps because of that distinction. Her Instagram bio: “For info on treating weight loss, depression, and autoimmune disorders with diet, check out my blog or fb page!” The blog says at the top that “many (if not most) health problems are treatable with diet alone.” This is true, if at odds with the disclaimer at the bottom of the page that her words are “not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.”

I told her I’m surprised people need further counseling, in that an all-beef diet is very straightforward.

“They mostly want to see that I’m not dead,” she said. “What I basically do is say, ‘Hey, look at all the things that happened to me and brought me to where I am now. Isn’t it weird?’ And then let people draw their own conclusions.”

Peterson described an adolescence that involved multiple debilitating medical diagnoses, beginning with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis. Some unknown process had triggered her body’s immune system to attack her joints. “I was unable to hold a pencil, could barely walk, and was in constant pain,” she writes on her blog, which is called “Don’t Eat That.” The joint problems culminated in hip and ankle replacements in her teens, coupled with “extreme fatigue, depression and anxiety, brain fog, and sleep problems.” In fifth grade she was diagnosed with depression, and then later something called idiopathic hypersomnia (which translates to English as “sleeping too much, of unclear cause”—which translates further to sorry we really don’t know what’s going on).

Everything the doctors tried failed, and she did everything they told her, she recounted to me. She fully bought into the system, taking large doses of strong immune-suppressing drugs like methotrexate, prednisone, leflunomide, and humira. “Despite being on multiple heavy-hitting meds, I was still struggling with basic day-to-day tasks,” she writes on her blog.

Her story took a dramatic turn in 2015, when the underdog protagonist, nearly at the end of her rope, figured out the truth for herself. It was all about food.

Peterson adopted a common approach to dieting: elimination. She started cutting out foods from her diet, and feeling better each time. She began with gluten, and she kept going, casting out more and more—not just gluten or dairy or soy or lectins or artificial sweeteners or non-artificial sweeteners, but everything. Until, by December 2017, all that was left was “beef and salt and water,” and, she told me, “all my symptoms went into remission.”

“And you quit taking all your medications?”

“Everything.”

There is so much evidence—abundant, copious evidence acquired over decades of work from scientists around the world—that most people benefit from eating fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and seeds. This appears to be largely because fiber in plants is important to the flourishing of the gut microbiome. I ran this by some experts, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything that might suggest a beef-salt diet is potentially something other than a bad idea. I learned that it was worse than I thought.

“Physiologically, it would just be an immensely bad idea,” Jack Gilbert, the faculty director at the University of Chicago’s Microbiome Center and a professor of surgery, told me during a recent visit to his lab. “A terribly, terribly bad idea.”

Gilbert has done extensive research on how the trillions of microbes in our guts digest food, and the look on his face when I told him about the all-beef diet was unamused. He began rattling off the expected ramifications: “Your body would start to have severe dysregulation, within six months, of the majority of the processes that deal with metabolism; you would have no short-chain fatty acids in your cells; most of the by-products of gastrointestinal polysaccharide fermentation would shut down, so you wouldn’t be able to regulate your hormone levels; you’d enter into cardiac issues due to alterations in cell receptors; your microbiota would just be devastated.”

While much of the internet has been following this story in a somewhat snide way, Gilbert appeared genuinely concerned and saddened: “If she does not die of colon cancer or some other severe cardiometabolic disease, the life—I can’t imagine.”

There are few accounts of people having tried all-beef diets, though all-meat—known as carnivory—is slightly more common. Earlier this month, inspired by the media conversation about the Peterson approach, Alan Levinovitz, the author of The Gluten Lie, tried carnivory, eating only meat for two weeks. He did lose seven pounds, which he attributes to eating fewer calories overall, because he eventually got tired of eating only meat. He missed snacking at coffee shops and browsing the local farmer’s market and trying out new restaurants around town, cooking with his family, and just generally enjoying food.

“I was psychologically exhausted,” Levinovitz told me. When he returned to omnivory, he regained the lost weight in four days.

Peterson told me it took several weeks for her to get used to the beef-only approach, and that the relief of her medical symptoms overpowers any sense of missing food. If even a tiny amount of anything else finds its way into her mouth, she will be ill, she says. This happened when she tried to eat an organic olive, and again recently when she was at a restaurant that put pepper on her steak.

“I was like, whatever, it’s just pepper,” she told me. Then she had a reaction that lasted three weeks and included joint pain, acne, and anxiety.

Apart from having to exist in a world where the possibility of pepper exposure looms, the only other social downside she notices is that she hates asking people to accommodate her diet. So she will usually eat before she goes to a dinner party, she told me, “but then I’ll go drink and enjoy the party.”

“Drink, as in, water?”

“I can also, strangely enough, tolerate vodka and bourbon.”

The idea that alcohol, one of the most well-documented toxic substances, is among the few things that Peterson’s body will tolerate may be illuminating. It implies that when it comes to dieting, the inherent properties of the substances ingested can be less important than the eater’s conceptualizations of them—as either tolerable or intolerable, good or bad. What’s actually therapeutic may be the act of elimination itself.

For centuries, ascetics have found enlightenment through acts of deprivation. As Levinovitz, who is an associate professor of religion at James Madison University, explained to me, the Daoist text the Zhuangzi describes “a spirit man” who lives in the mountains and rides dragons and subsists only on air and dew. “There’s an anti-authoritarian bent to pop-culture wisdom, and a part of that is dealing with food taboos, which are handed down by authorities,” Levinovitz said. “Those are government now, instead of religious. And because they are wrong so often—or, at least, apparently wrong—that’s a good place to go when carving out your own area of authority. If you just eat the ‘wrong’ foods and don’t die, that’s a ritual way to prove that you go against conventional wisdom.”

Peterson’s narrative fits a classic archetype of an outsider who beat the game and healed thyself despite the odds and against the recommendations of the establishment. Her story is her truth, and it can’t be explained; you have to believe. And unlike the many studies that have been done to understand the diets of the longest-lived, healthiest people in history, or the randomized trials that are used to determine which health interventions are safe and effective for whom, her story is clear and dramatic. It’s right there in her photos; it has a face and a name to prove that no odds are too long for one determined person to overcome.

The beneficial effects of a compelling personal narrative that helps explain and give order to the world can be absolutely physiologically real. It is well documented that the immune system (and, so, autoimmune diseases) are modulated by our lifestyles—from how much we sleep and move to how well we eat and how much we drink. Most importantly, the immune system is also modulated by stress, which tends to be a by-product of a perceived lack of control or order.

If strict dietary rules provide a sense of control and order, then Peterson’s approach is emblematic of the trend in elimination dieting taken to an extreme: Avoid basically everything. This verges into the realm of an eating disorder. The National Eating Disorder Association lists among common symptoms “refusal to eat certain foods, progressing to restrictions against whole categories of food.” In the early phases of disordered eating, as with bipolar disorder or alcoholism, a person may look and feel great. They may thrive for months or even years. But this fades. What’s more, the temporary relief from anxiety may mean that the source of the anxiety goes unsought and unaddressed.

I asked Peterson about the possibility that she may be enabling people with eating disorders. She said she would draw a line if a client were underweight or inducing vomiting. Otherwise, “it’s extremely disrespectful to people with health issues caused by food to be lumped into the same category as people with eating disorders. More of the same ‘blame the patient’ stuff that doctors and health professionals already do.”

The popularity of Peterson’s narrative is explained by more than its timeless tropes; it has also been amplified by the fact that her father has occasionally cast his spotlight onto her story. Jordan Peterson’s recent book, Twelve Rules for Life, includes the story of his daughter’s health trials. The elder Peterson, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, could at first seem an unlikely face for acceptance of personal, subjective truth, as he regularly professes the importance of acting as purely as possible according to rigorous analysis of data. He argued in a recent video that American universities are the home to “ideologues who claim that all truth is subjective, that all sex differences are socially constructed, and that Western imperialism is the sole source of all Third World problems.” In his book, he writes that academic institutions are teaching children to be “brainwashed victims,” and that “the rigorous critical theoretician is morally obligated to set them straight.”

It is on grounds of his interpretation of income data, for example, that he has spoken out against the idea of a wage gap between men and women being unfair, as it can be explained away by biological factors associated with certain personality traits that are more valuable in the capitalist marketplace. From arguments from social-science evidence, he has expressed uncertainty that lesbian couples can raise children without a male father figure. And it is academic evidence that leads him to write in his book that “the so-called patriarchy” is “an arbitrary cultural artifact.”

Yet in a July appearance on the comedian Joe Rogan’s podcast, Jordan Peterson explained how Mikhaila’s experience had convinced him to eliminate everything but meat and leafy greens from his diet, and that in the last two months he had gone full meat and eliminated vegetables. Since he changed his diet, his laundry list of maladies has disappeared, he told Rogan. His lifelong depression, anxiety, gastric reflux (and associated snoring), inability to wake up in the mornings, psoriasis, gingivitis, floaters in his right eye, numbness on the sides of his legs, problems with mood regulation—all of it is gone, and he attributes it to the diet.

“I’m certainly intellectually at my best,” he said. “I’m stronger, I can swim better, and my gum disease is gone. It’s like, what the hell?”

“Do you take any vitamins?” asked Rogan.

“No. No, I eat beef and salt and water. That’s it. And I never cheat. Ever. Not even a little bit.”

“No soda, no wine?”

“I drink club soda.”

“Well, that’s still water.”

“Well, when you’re down to that level, no, it’s not, Joe. There’s club soda, which is really bubbly. There’s Perrier, which is sort of bubbly. There’s flat water, and there’s hot water. Those distinctions start to become important.”

Peterson reiterated several times that he is not giving dietary advice, but said that many attendees of his recent speaking tour have come up to him and said the diet is working for them. The takeaway for listeners is that it worked for Peterson, and so it may work for them. Rogan also clarified that though he is also not an expert, he is fascinated by the fact that he hasn’t heard any negative stories about people who have started the all-meat diet.

“Well, I have a negative story,” said Peterson. “Both Mikhaila and I noticed that when we restricted our diet and then ate something we weren’t supposed to, the reaction was absolutely catastrophic.” He gives the example of having had some apple cider and subsequently being incapacitated for a month by what he believes was an inflammatory response.

“You were done for a month?”

“Oh yeah, it took me out for a month. It was awful ...”

“Apple cider? What was it doing to you?”

“It produced an overwhelming sense of impending doom. I seriously mean overwhelming. There’s no way I could’ve lived like that. But see, Mikhaila knew by then that it would probably only last a month.”

“A month? From fucking cider?”

“I didn’t sleep that month for 25 days. I didn’t sleep at all for 25 days.”

“What? How is that possible?”

“I’ll tell you how it’s possible: You lay in bed frozen in something approximating terror for eight hours. And then you get up.”

The longest recorded stretch of sleeplessness in a human is 11 days, witnessed by a Stanford research team.

While there is debate in the scientific community over just how much meat belongs in a human diet, it is impossible for all or even most humans to eat primarily meat. Beef production at the scale required to feed billions of humans even at current levels of consumption is environmentally unsustainable. It is not even healthy from a theoretical evolutionary viewpoint, the microbiome expert Gilbert explained to me. Carnivores need to eat meat or else they die; humans do not. “The carnivore gastrointestinal tract is completely different from the human gastrointestinal tract, which is made up of a system designed to consume large quantities of complex fibers.”

What the Petersons are selling is rather a sense of order and control. Science is about questions, and self-help is about answers. A recurring idea in Jordan Peterson’s book is that humans need rules—its subtitle is “an antidote to chaos”—even if only for the sake of rules. Peterson discovered this through his own suffering, as when he was searching the world for the best surgeon to give his young daughter a new hip. In explaining how he dealt with Mikhaila’s illness, he writes that “existence and limitation are inextricably linked.” He quotes Laozi:

It is not the clay the potter throws,

Which gives the pot its usefulness,

But the space within the shape,

From which the pot is made

Dietary rules offer limits, good or bad, that help people define the self. This is an attractive prospect, and anyone willing to decree such rules—dietary or otherwise—is bound to attract attention. Fox News recently declared Peterson “the left’s public enemy number one” in a segment where he discussed with Tucker Carlson “why the left wants to silence conservative thought.” Though to have lived through the last year is to have lived in a world where Peterson and his ideas have enjoyed near-constant amplification.

The allure of a strict code for eating—a way to divide the world into good foods and bad foods, angels and demons—may be especially strong at a time when order feels in short supply. Indeed there is at least some benefit to be had from any and all dietary advice, or rules for life, so long as a person believes in them, and so long as they provide a code that allows a person to feel good for having stuck with it and a cohort of like-minded adherents. The challenge is to find a code that accords as best as possible with scientific evidence about what is good and bad, and with what is best for the world.

In a piece called The Algorithmic Trap, David Perell writes about the difficulty of finding serendipity, diversity, and “real” experiences while traveling. In short, Google, Yelp, Instagram, and the like have made travel destinations and experiences increasingly predictable and homogeneous.

Call me old-fashioned, but the more I travel, the less I depend on algorithms. In a world obsessed with efficiency, I find myself adding friction to my travel experience. I’ve shifted away from digital recommendations, and towards human ones.

For all the buzz about landmarks and sightseeing, I find that immersive, local experiences reveal the surprising, culturally-specific ways of living and thinking that make travel educational. We over-rate the importance of visiting the best-places and under-rate the importance of connecting with the best people. If you want to learn about a culture, nothing beats personalized time with a passionate local who can share the magic of their culture with you.

There’s one problem with this strategy: this kind of travel doesn’t scale. It’s in efficiency and doesn’t conform to the 80/20 rule. It’s unpredictable and things could go wrong.

Travel — when done right — is challenging. Like all face-to-face interaction, it’s inefficient. The fact that an experience can’t be found in a guidebook is precisely what makes it so special. Sure, a little tip helps — go here, go there; eat here, eat there; stay here, stay there — but at the end of the day, the great pleasures of travel are precisely what you can’t find on Yelp.

Algorithms are great at giving you something you like, but terrible at giving you something you love. Worse, by promoting familiarity, algorithms punish culture.

While reading parts of this, I was reminded of both premium mediocre and the randomness of this approach to travel.

I took the photo above in the Beartooth Mountains on my recent roadtrip. This was one of the surprise highlights of my trip…I wouldn’t have known to take the road through those mountains had it not been recommended to me by some enthusiastic locals.

This article originally appeared on VICE Canada.

In this season’s “Rose Colored Glasses” episode of the painstakingly millennial curated show The Bold Type, a pitch meeting for an upcoming issue of Scarlet Magazine—the workplace of the show’s protagonists—turns to men and #MeToo.

“There is something we need to talk about,” editor Jacqueline Carlyle (Melora Hardin) starts off by saying. “Our allies. The guys who do show up at women’s rallies and who speak up when others are silent. I want to do a roundup of honorable men.”

In a room full of women no one thought to point out that men who come to rallies are not deserving of applause, let alone a fashion spread. “#TheyAreNotAllBad,” Carlyle suggested to Scarlet social media director Kat (Aisha Dee), a hashtag she probably hoped would trend resulting in a worldwide acknowledgment of good men. Matt Damon would be positively thrilled.

In keeping up with the accountability politics of the current zeitgeist, the series writers presented an episode that attempted to address the #MeToo movement while also making sure to note that not all men are bad, and it is these good men that we should applaud lest they forget they still have fans. That is a nightmare. In the same breath that Carlyle asked to honor the honorable, she pitied the young women who are currently trying to find love. “I do not envy any of you all dating in this climate.” It’s almost as if the writers were stuck between a rock and an #AllMenAreTrash conundrum. How do we acknowledge rampant, pervasive and systemic sexual violence without putting #AllMen in a collective heap even though #AllMen collectively benefit from the social structures that have made sexual assault a constant part of women’s lives? Well, I know putting men on a pedestal for performing basic decency is definitely not the way forward.

I’ve watched the #MeToo movement as most digitally plugged-in people have. I've watched its nascent growth from a singular innocuous hashtag to a rallying social media call to action. I even watched it when it was simply the call of black female activist Tarana Burke and in the story shared by actress Gabrielle Union on the sexual assault she suffered while in her teens, long before the hashtag found an audience via famous white women implicating powerful white men. In this particular moment that feels unlike any the world has ever seen in terms of illuminating a widespread problem, it is unnerving to see that women can never have a space where their trauma and the violent experiences of their day-to-day lives (some of which are so omnipresent they’ve become mundane) are the singular focus. We will always be required to fall back, pick up, reassure, and praise the good men who do not use their gender to oppress women.

In the first episode of The Bold Type’s second season, “Feminist Army,” a meeting occurred with the staff where a third-party talked about the revamped rules of workplace dating. These rules would ensure that a superior could date one of his employees so long as a document was signed that ensured the absence of secrecy while also guaranteeing consent.

As a show built around the journalism industry, The Bold Type had an opportunity to address the boy’s club of the media industry, its toxicity and claustrophobic closeness. Piss off one entitled male superior and your career will most likely be affected, not only at your current workplace but anywhere else he might have reach. So many young women journalists find themselves subscribing to a code of silence so they do not jeopardize their careers in an entire industry. A look at this reality could have led to a discussion on male coworkers who choose to be silent and simply take these experiences as an expected “boys will be boys” norm. Instead, the show treated #MeToo as a human resources and public relations issue, not as a reality dictated by access to power and privilege. It was such a surface retelling of an issue with deep and structural layers.

At the height of the Weinstein scandal, Matt Damon griped about the fact that good men were not receiving their deserved time in the sun and although his reasoning was found lacking and ill-advised, he is not alone in his desire to uplift men for doing the bare minimum of leaving women the fuck alone. Men are able to avoid accountability so easily, partly because women are always viewed with suspicion and also because power protects power. We see this regardless of whether it grabs feminism by the pussy, throws children in a cage, recites the gospel to defend Roy Moore’s sexual relations with a 14-year-old girl, or confesses to a good friend spitting in the face of a black woman.

The world has had to contend with the #MeToo movement but it is increasingly clear that whatever space is made available to emphasize the realities of living as a woman, room will always need to be made for the good guy who needs you to know he is here standing by the side. As television shows become not only reflective of the world but an extension of social politics so much more needs to be done in terms of how pop culture chooses to portray changing social norms.

There needs to be a genuine intention at not only addressing but calling to attention the imbalanced power dynamics that determine how people are able to co-exist. Tip-toeing around issues to avoid rocking the boat a little too much is not only irresponsible, it is dangerous. If you are going to do the work, do all of it.

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NPR does this thing called Tiny Desk Concerts where they bring musicians and bands into the office to play behind a desk. Recent guests have included T.I., Erykah Badu, Dave Matthews, and the legendary cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Ma played selections from Bach’s suites for cello, which he’s been playing for almost 60 years, and talked about the value of incremental learning.

Why did Laurence Olivier return so often to Shakespeare’s Othello? Why did Ansel Adams keep photographing the Grand Canyon? Obsessed or awestruck, artists revisit great inspirations because they believe there is yet another story to tell — about life, about themselves.

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma brought his great inspiration, and in turn part of his own life story, to an enthusiastic audience packed around the Tiny Desk on a hot summer day. Ma is returning, yet again, to the Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello by Johann Sebastian Bach, a Mount Everest for any cellist. He has just released his third studio recording of the complete set and is taking the music on a two-year, six-continent tour. Ma’s first recording of the Suites, released in 1983, earned him his first Grammy.

Amazingly, when Ma was only 7 years old, he played in a benefit concert for an audience that included President John F. Kennedy. Composer Leonard Bernstein introduced Ma, saying in part: “Now here’s a cultural image for you to ponder as you listen. A seven-year-old Chinese cellist playing old French music for his new American compatriots.”

Even though he’s only 62 years old, Ma is a great example of The Great Span in action, linking JFK and YouTube and Lil Buck together across seemingly disparate stretches of American history. When he plays a duet with the first virtuoso robotic cellist sometime in the next 20 years, Ma will have more than secured his spot in The Great Span Hall of Fame.