you really really really really really really really need to read this whole thing and then immediately read it a second time
John Leavitt's previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Everyone has that one friend, the one you meet in college before you’re better at choosing friends. The one friend who’s simultaneously fun and exciting and overwhelming and unreliable. Jen is my flaky friend.
We met freshman year in a class about museum history. I wanted to talk to her after class about her comments on the design changes caused by the 1954 American Museum heist. We hit it off right away. When she suggested we should get a drink and keep talking, I admitted I didn’t have a fake ID yet. She opened her bag and confessed her diet soda bottle was full of rum and coke. We settled onto the quad with paper water fountain cups and talked for hours. I thought she was the coolest person ever.
My friends were sweater-bound English majors and STEM lifers, strictly indoor children. Jen was bright and outdoorsy, everyone’s friend. You felt like you could tell her anything. Plus, she was a rock climber! She studied art history! She jogged at midnight! She was on a gymnastics scholarship! Jen wore black McQueen heels while I was still being weaned off Crocs. She started a game called “Bet You I Can’t” where we’d walk around campus and I'd bet she couldn’t scale certain trees or get to second-story ledges in those pumps. Jen never lost a bet and never got caught.
Lady Gaga brought out her pipes for a stunning cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” at the Baku 2015 European Games Opening Ceremony held in Baku, Azerbaijan last Friday.
Stephen Hawking fears that “the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” Elon Musk and Bill Gates offer similar warnings. Many researchers in artificial intelligence are less concerned primarily because they think that the technology is not advancing as quickly as doom scenarios imagine, as Ramez Naam discussed. I have a different objection.
Why should we be worried about the end of the human race? Oh sure, there are some Terminator like scenarios in which many future-people die in horrible ways and I’d feel good if we avoided those scenarios. The more likely scenario, however, is a glide path to extinction in which most people adopt a variety of bionic and germ-line modifications that over-time evolve them into post-human cyborgs. A few holdouts to the old ways would remain but birth rates would be low and the non-adapted would be regarded as quaint, as we regard the Amish today. Eventually the last humans would go extinct and 46andMe customers would kid each other over how much of their DNA was of the primitive kind while holo-commercials advertised products “so easy a homo sapiens could do it”. I see nothing objectionable in this scenario.
Aside from greater plausibility, a glide path means that dealing with the Terminator scenario is easier. In the Terminator scenario, humans must continually be on guard. In the glide path scenario we only have to avoid the Terminator until we become them and then the problem is resolved with little fuss. No human race but no mass murder either.
More generally, what’s so great about the human race? I agree, there are lots of great things to point to such as the works of Shakespeare, Mozart, and Grothendieck. We should revere the greatness of the works, however, not the substrate on which the works were created. If what is great about humanity is the great things that we have done then the future may hold greater things yet. If we work to pass on our best values and aspirations to our technological progeny then we can be proud of future generations even if they differ from us in some ways. I delight to think of the marvels that future generations may produce. But I see no reason to hope that such marvels will be produced by beings indistinguishable from myself, indeed that would seem rather disappointing.
A great way to impress a dinner guest—or treat the dad in your life for Father’s Day!—is with a perfectly cooked steak. Still, a high quality steak can be expensive to purchase, so the last thing you’ll want to do is mess it up during the cooking process. But don’t worry: I’ll teach you how to cook the perfect steak! I’ll go over the best cuts to buy and the foolproof cooking methods you’ll need to know to sear your beef the right way. Ready to tackle the perfect steak?
Show Notes & Links for Episode 9:
What We Ate:
We just spent a week in Maui, and savored tons of tasty bites while chilling out on vacation. Our family heads to Maui about once a year ’cause we were suckered into buying a timeshare many moons ago, when my resolve was weakened by an mind-altering affliction called pregnancy. (But to be honest, we haven’t regretted it!)
As usual, we visited our favorite restaurants and hunted for new culinary finds while we were on the island, but my favorite bite of the week was on our final morning on Maui, when we cut up a sweet, aromatic, shockingly yellow organic pineapple that I’d plucked straight from the fields at Kumu Farms the day before.
On this episode of our podcast, Henry and I chat about our Maui eats, and share details about our fantastic farm-to-face dinner at The Mill House, a new restaurant located right in the middle of the same plantation where I harvested my ripe, sunshine-yellow pineapple.
Chef Jeff Scheer makes it a point to source virtually all of his ingredients straight from the organic farms on-site.
Henry’s favorite dish of the night was the umami-packed Dashi Cioppino, and I can’t forget the Lilokoi Posset, a chilled dessert made with thickened cream flavored with tangy passionfruit, or the grilled Mahi Mahi with corn puree, blue oyster mushrooms, and piperade. (Okay, okay—calm down. Corn may not be Paleo, but I will always make an exception for organic local corn grown just a few feet from the kitchen.)
To peek at some of my Maui eats, check out my Instagram feed and the hashtag I used to organize my island photos, #NomNomMaui. Want to check out the neon yellow pineapple that I picked myself? Check out this pic—and this one, too.
If you happen to find yourself on Maui, get yourself over to Maui Tropical Plantation so you can visit Kumu Farms, fly across a zipline, and dine at The Mill House. (Preferably in that order.) The official Grand Opening of the restaurant is July 3, 2015, but Chef Jeff Scheer and his team already have their ducks in a row, and are serving diners now, during The Mill House’s soft launch. By the way, not only is Jeff the Chef (I’m a poet and didn’t even know it!) Maui’s Chef of the Year for 2015, I think he also looks strikingly like Bradley Cooper.
And for those of you clucking with disapproval because you spy some beans or corn in my photos from Maui, listen up: when I’m on vacation, I don’t eat 100% Paleo. You can learn more about how I travel while Paleo in Episode 7 of our podcast, but in short, it’s not much of a vacation if I’m freaking out over everything I’m eating. After all, stress management is an important part of health and happiness, too—right?
Main Course:
In this episode, Henry and I focus on how to select and cook the perfect steak. This premium cut isn’t an everyday food; steak is an indulgence both because of the expense and the sheer primal joy that we derive from enjoying a seared, juicy cut of properly aged meat. The animal sacrificed its life so we could thrive, so it’s important that we take the care to cook it the right way. Unlike other cheaper cuts of meat (like brisket, short ribs, or oxtail) that are super forgiving with low and slow cooking methods, a premium steak really needs to be cooked properly to be delicious. We discuss the importance of sourcing 100% grass fed beef, where to buy it, and how to cook it—no matter if your method of choice is grilling, pan-searing, oven-roasting, or sous vide cooking.
My favorite cut of steak is rib eye and my go-to cooking method is written up with step-by-step pictures in a blog post entitled, How To Make The Perfect Steak. (Really imaginative title, am I right?)
Speaking of sous vide, I don’t use my Sous Vide Supreme very much anymore, but I still think it’s a great way to cook meat perfectly. Some next-generation sous vide immersion circulators include the Anova Precision Cooker, Nomiku, and Sansaire. I might just buy one because they’re cheaper, smaller, and more effective.
By the way, the myth that grass fed steaks doesn’t taste as good as grain-fed steaks has been debunked. Don’t believe me? Check out these blind taste test results from America’s Test Kitchen and The Great Steak Debate.
My best farmer friend, Diana Rodgers, points out that pound-for pound, grass fed beef is cheaper and far more nutrient dense than a Snickers bar in this enlightening post.
Crush of the Week:
The kids talk about how Snuba, a hybrid of scuba and snorkeling, trumps eating shave ice and watching television.
By strapping on some Snuba gear and exploring the reef just off the beach near our place on Maui, the four of us were able to get up close and personal with sea turtles, eels, and tons of exotic fish. The boys have already requested another Snuba session on our next visit to the island.
Question of the Week:
Sarah, one of our listeners, asked me this question via email:
I’m new to Paleo and the Whole30 (1 week)…so far so good. Since we cook with so much raw meat, I would appreciate if you would do a refresher course on food handling safety (for my husband because he does most of the cooking.)
In my opinion, the only thing worse than overcooking an expensive piece of meat is to get sick from it.
When it comes to handling raw meat, keep these basic food safety tips in mind:
Avoid cross contamination! Use a special cutting board and knife for your raw meat, and don’t use those same tools to cut veggies for a raw salad. I set aside a small ramekin to hold salt and pepper that I use to season my raw meat, ’cause if you just pour salt out of a container, your meat-juice-covered hands will muck up the box and spread the stuff around. Although many old cookbooks recommend rinsing raw meat, it’s a bad practice that spreads bacteria all over the sink and kitchen. Also, don’t place your cooked steak back on the same plate you used to marinated raw meat, and don’t reuse the marinade if you just soaked some uncooked meat in it. If you want to reserve some marinade, do so BEFORE you put raw meat in it.
Know where your meat comes from and the likelihood that safe handling practices were used in raising the meat.
It goes without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: after handling raw meat, wash your hands with soap and water, people. Don’t just wipe your grody paws on a kitchen rag like they do on TV. Also, wash all the stuff that touches raw meat with hot, soapy water.
Now if I haven’t completely grossed you out: go forth and make a steak!
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....this is just Interstellar. Right? I'm not crazy? They just gave it a different name and made the white parts of Interstellar red?
Yesterday, we told you about the first promo for Ridley Scott's upcoming sci-fi thriller that stars Matt Damon as a botanist turned astronaut on a mission to Mars along with crewmates Jessica Chastain, Sebastian Stan, Michael Pena, Kate Mara, and Aleksel Hennie. The Martian, based on the book by Andy Weir, follows Damon's attempt to stay alive on the red planet after he gets left behind during an emergency evacuation.
The new trailer is filled with plenty of cheesy lines like, “I’m going to have to science the sh*t out of this”, which Damon says to no one in particular when he realizes he's been left for dead on Mars, and “In your face, Neil Armstrong”, said during a more celebratory moment.
Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Sean Bean and Jeff Daniels also star in the film, which hits theaters around Thanksgiving.
“I did a party recently, all the mums in the kitchen smoking. I’m standing with the kids in the front room and I say: ‘Who’s the birthday boy?’ and they say: ‘He’s not here, he is upstairs on his computer.’ I go up to his room and say: ‘Come down, we are going to have a great time!’ I’m in full clown outfit, but he doesn’t look up. And I try again. And he looks at me and says, ‘Why don’t you just fuck off!’ He was six that day.”
—It’s a tough time to be a clown.
Tony Zhou of Every Frame a Painting looks at the use of production design in movies. Specifically chairs. Chairs can tell you something about the world the film is set in, the characters who use them, or a specific situation.
This is a bucket of chum. Chum is decomposing fish matter that elicits a purely neurological brain stem response in its target consumer: larger fish, like sharks. It signals that they should let go, deploy their nictitating membranes, and chomp down blindly on a morsel of fragrant, life-giving sustenance. Perhaps in a frenzied manner.
This is a chumbox. It is a variation on the banner ad which takes the form of a grid of advertisements that sits at the bottom of a web page underneath the main content. It can be found on the sites of many leading publishers, including nymag.com, dailymail.co.uk, usatoday.com, and theawl.com (where it was “an experiment that has since ended.”)
The chumboxes were placed there by one of several chumvendors—Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Adblade, and my favorite, Content.ad—who design them to seamlessly slip into a particular design convention established early within the publishing web, a grid of links to appealing, perhaps-related content at the bottom of the content you intentionally came to consume. In return, publishers who deploy chumboxes receive money, traffic, or both. Typically, these publishers collect a percentage of the rates that the chumvendors charge advertisers to be placed inside the grids. These gains can be pocketed, or re-invested into purchasing the publisher’s own placements in similar grids on thousands of other sites amongst the chummy sea, reaping bulk traffic straight from the reeking depths of chumville.
Like everything else on the internet, traffic flowing through chumboxes must be tracked in order for everyone to be paid. Each box in the grid’s performance can be tracked both individually and in context of its neighbors. This allows them to be highly optimized; some chum is clearly better than others. As a byproduct of this optimization, an aesthetic has arisen. An effective chumbox clearly plays on reflex and the subconscious. The chumbox aesthetic broadcasts our most basic, libidinal, electrical desires back at us. And gets us to click.
Clicking on a chumlink—even one on the site of a relatively high-class chummer, like nymag.com—is a guaranteed way to find more, weirder, grosser chum. The boxes are daisy-chained together in an increasingly cynical, gross funnel; quickly, the open ocean becomes a sewer of chum.
Let’s look again at our first chumbox. It represents several powerfully recurrant chumbox aesthetic subsets.
Top left: Sexy Thing and Localized Rule. We won’t dwell on the efficacy of a Sexy Thing in advertising. But do note this Sexy Thing, enhanced with a chummy sprinkle of sinister context (crime? Young women in handcuffs?). Here the Sexy Thing is combined with a more digital-age enhancement, the Localized Rule. Scouring a visitor’s IP for its geographic location, anxiety can be created by informing you of a brand new reason to find yourself handcuffed in the back of a squad car in your neighborhood.
Top Middle: Old Person’s Face, Skin Thing, and Miracle Cure Thing. Often expressed individually, here we see Old Person’s Face and Skin Thing combined.
Top Right: Miracle Cure Thing. Also self-evident. But do note the subtle tactile neuron firings the image of the pile of salt on the hand elicits—the familiar signature of a Skin Thing.
Bottom Left: Deeply Psychological Body Thing: While on the surface this may scan as a Skin Thing, the regular pattern of indentations made in this woman’s legs by what appear to be frozen peas or stones are in fact designed to trigger feelings of mild discomfort/anxiety amongst sufferers of Trypophobia, a common sensitivity to regularly occurring patterns of holes in surfaces—a discomfort that perversely elicits curiosity, playing on our fixation with the frailties of our bodies and our ultimate fear of death.
Bottom Center: Celeb Thing: Enhanced by potential outing.
Bottom Right: Weird Tattoo (Fresher the Better) and Implied Vaginal or Other Bodily Opening: That the tattoo, another object of chumbox fascination, is placed in an area of extreme nerve sensitivity (the underarm) I can only assume is not at all coincidental.
Top and Bottom Left: Skin Thing/Miracle Cure Thing
Top and Bottom Middle: Disgusting Invertebrates or Globular Masses Presented as Weird Food: Extremely common trope. Very often deployed along with headlines mentioning Diabetes or Testosterone, as seen here.
Top Right: A Pill. Pill imagery is a frequent recurring theme, befitting the chumbox’s tabloidish miracle cure leanings.
Bottom Right: Weight Loss Thing/Extreme Body. Yes, of course.
Top Left: Deeply Psychological Body Thing. Summoning Freudian dreams of teeth turning to mush in your mouth, with a dash of the same phobic neuron tingle as frozen-pea-leg-indentation-lady. Again probably not coincidentally, both this and the frozen pea images can be found together on a BuzzFeed post on Trypophobia from 2013.
Middle Left: Despite its outwardly benign appearance, this is a clear Skin Thing.
Middle Right: Extreme Body. Both human and not.
Bottom Row: Note the links to the publisher’s own related content—an early chumbox selling point to sites too busted to drive their own coveted “recirculation” traffic. This is rarely seen in the chumboxes of today.
Upper left: Unfortunately I will file this under Sexy Thing. The sub-standard photo quality indicating a private smartphone shot taken by a public figure, display copy alluding to an investigation—when looking at chum, assume the basest human instincts are in play. It’s a scary place.
Upper Middle: Oozing Food/Egg. A trend without an immediately recognizable psychological precedent? Oozing eggs are extremely common, and are possibly deployed under similar principles as Disgusting Invertebrates or Globular Masses Presented as Weird Food. Or perhaps the resemblance to an oozing pustular sore brings us back into the familiar realm of the Skin Thing?
Bottom Middle: Sexy Thing (upskirt). See note on upper left.
Upper Right/Left: It’s the Oozing Food/Egg, now in duplicate.
Lower Right: Implied Vaginal or Other Bodily Opening? My mind is going.
As a final exercise, follow me into the deepest depths. I don’t remember how many chumclicks it took to end up on slide number one of “30 Walmart Shoppers That Are Beyond Messed Up!” but this is what I found there:
Many sites at the end of the chain are composed of little more than chum. Here the traditional 2×3 or 3×3 grid gives way to something far more intensified. On a page like this, the conventions of the Chum Aesthetic are crystallized. I’ve gone ahead and assembled an ultimate chumbox from the choice pickings here.
Top Left and Middle: Two Oozing Foods/Eggs (???)
Top Right: Skin Thing, reinforced with the ultimate Freudian male nightmare, the shriveled dick.
Bottom Left: A subtly brilliant mix of an Old Person’s Face and a Money Thing in the display copy, contextualized with a secret of the Bible.
Bottom Middle: A Disgusting Invertebrate or Globular Mass Presented as Weird Food that I’ve actually never seen before.
Bottom Right: A combo Skin Thing and Deeply Psychological Body Thing (woman flayed alive).
That’s probably enough for one sitting. But ask yourself—when was the last time a piece of internet content asked you, “how well do you understand your subconscious mind” and truly meant it? In what other cultural medium can you find the deepest libidinal channels of the brain truly laid bare, with the quarterly pay-per-click revenue report to back them up? Have you lately exercised your deep-seated impulse to view an image of a weeping soft-cooked egg sitting on top of the pimple-encrusted face of Uma Thurman? What are you waiting for? Into the chumpools. The fetid ball of soggy electric fat at the other end of your clicking finger will thank you for the workout.
“Quitting smoking is the khakis of existence. Quitting smoking is the Chipotle on St. Marks Place. I am totally not cool. I may as well be someone’s stupid Brooklyn dad. My hair is its natural color. Most days I’m just wearing whatever. I do yoga endlessly. What am I now?” —You ever notice how people who quit smoking think it’s the most fascinating thing in the world?
Mike: This was especially annoying in college, when you’d go out, and someone would be like, “oh just give me cash,” and then charge the bill to the CC their parents gave them, and you know for a fact that they are just going to take your cash and buy weed, and that their parents paid for the bill.
It was like the best rich-kid college ponzi scheme of all time—all for buffalo wings. I cancelled a lot of friendships over situations like this.
OH MY GOD
Friends season two, episode five, “The One With Five Steaks and an Eggplant,” aired in 1995. This is the one, I’m almost ashamed to recall so readily, where Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel can’t afford to go see Hootie & The Blowfish for Ross’s birthday. They’re always splitting the check at “some place nice” with the richer half of their group of friends and no one talks about it or takes their income disparity into consideration. An awkward confrontation ensues, is mishandled to comedic effect, and only half of the group gets to see Hootie—a true ’90s tragedy if there ever was one!
I spent my formative years of class awareness binge-watching the DVD sets with college roommates. I like to think it inspired our demands for our better off friend to charge all of our takeout to her parents’ credit card, but who can really say? I still find myself paying $33 for cold cucumber mush while a rich friend orders the cajun catfish (modern-day: kale salad; pork belly), except now friends will ask, “Is anyone getting screwed here?” and we all say, “No it’s fine. It’s fine!” Is it though?
I interviewed a handful of lowercase-f friends, acquaintances, former coworkers, and internet strangers about how they experience money issues in friendships. Is income disparity a dealbreaker, or no big deal? Is it more awkward to be the rich friend or the broke friend? Are we still, occasionally, all these 20 years later, just not “in a Hootie mood”?
On talking about money with friends:
Mike (Not Dang): It’s so unspoken. I know some of my friends definitely make more money than me, but I don’t know how much, and in general, we can all go out and eat at the same places fairly comfortably, without anxiety.
Charlotte Shane: I love talking about money. I’m always dying to know what other people make. And I don’t mind sharing what I pay for rent or have saved or anything like that. But there has to be a context to it and some mutuality. It can’t be one-sided. So I think the conversation has to evolve organically, or I have to offer up some information first to signal I want us to speak they candidly, and they can seize the offer or not.
Logan Sachon: My friends all know about my shitty financial situation, that I have a lot of credit card debt and am slowly paying it back. Everyone knows how much I make and I make people tell me what they make. I make the least amount of everyone, and everyone knows that.
Manjula Martin: I honestly never have a problem just saying, “I can’t afford it.” If you have to hide who you are from your friends, they might not be the greatest friends. And if a friend tells me they can’t afford something I want to do, I either pony up and help out, or choose a different thing to do. Because what a dick move it would be not to!
Cassie Marketos: Saying “Can’t, I’m broke” in my peer group comes with a whole new set of manners and weirdness and subtle social navigations. I actually try to avoid talking to my friends about it. It automatically makes people feel so guilty and weird, then you end up in the position of reassuring them that everything is OK, which is funny because you’re the one that is sort of in trouble.
Lauren O’Connell: I am very open with how much I make, when I’m broke, and when I get a raise. I feel like our generation is more open with talking about salaries as a way of informing each other about what we could be making. Though I suspect that since I don’t make a huge salary it is (maybe ironically!) easier for me to talk about.
Emily Gould: I’ve been so open about money in my writing that I sometimes feel like my tax returns are emblazoned on my T-shirt—I mean, I’ve had strangers come up to me at parties and ask about my credit card debt. So it’s hard for me to be “private” about money if it comes up. And I don’t think it serves anyone’s interests to be private about it, anyway. Well, it serves extremely rich people’s interests if everyone is going around feeling like they are the only person struggling to make ends meet and keep up appearances, of course.
On keeping your friends in your income bracket:
Emily: I do think in general I gravitate to people who are about where I’m at, just because you get to avoid a lot of awkwardness. When I was younger and more wildly optimistic about my future finances, I had friends who had a lot more money than I did and it wasn’t ever weird—but that was because I was spending a lot of money I didn’t have whenever we hung out. Those friendships fell away for all kinds of reasons, but that was definitely one of the reasons.
Manjula: Basically, my rule is, I just try to hang out with people who share my values. That usually means they share my income bracket too, with a few exceptions. Most of my friends are do-gooders and artists—writers, organizers, teachers. We’re all broke as fuck and we all love each other and help each other out when we can.
Logan: I actually think that friends tend to sort of self-select along class lines, even if it’s unintentional. I went to a private school with some really rich kids, but all my friends ended up being in pretty much the same class as my family. I’ve found that to be pretty true of my friends throughout my life.
Rachel (pseudonym!): Income disparities amongst friends also seem particularly pertinent at this age, because people are either in transition career-wise, or starting to hit their strides. The whole thing feels fraught. When I go out with a friend of mine who is a consultant and wants to order wine that isn’t the cheapest bottle on the menu, I resent that and wish they would pay for it; when I go out with a friend who makes less than I do, I feel like I’m being lavish if I want to take a cab home.
Emily: It’s the outer ring of valued but less-close friends who are sometimes a trouble spot. I am often conscious that it’s hard to really socialize with them in a way that would allow us to GET close, because probably a lot of the stuff they do is just way out of my league and they know that so they don’t invite me because they know they’d be putting us both in an awkward position: me of potentially having to spend more than I’m comfortable with, them of possibly having to pick up the check.
On having friends with more money than you:
Manjula: If a friend makes three times as much as me, when I ask her if she thinks I should rent an apartment in a neighborhood where a lot of robberies happen, her perspective is going to be questionably applicable to my situation. We have different options available to us. And different comfort levels around class-based life issues.
Cooper: Most of my friends make more money than I do now, and they’re working more as well. Hanging out suddenly becomes an unspoken debate between two views on economic activity. We could go out and get a falafel sandwich, because to me this represents freedom. To my friend it represents trying to unload the trauma of a 40-hour workweek onto a soggy pita lacking in catharsis.
Emily: Some people just pick up the check, subtly and gracefully and without any expectation of reciprocity—which is wonderful. I like them more for it. But that can also become its own fraught thing. I try to reciprocate by having richer friends over for dinner, bringing a very thoughtful gift if I am invited to a vacation place for a weekend, that kind of thing. But there is a feeling sometimes of being Lily Bart.
Logan: I had some friends who were about five years older and all pretty successful at their careers, making like $80K when I was making like, $20K. Day-to-day hangs were totally fine. They bought a lot of my drinks. I also was using credit cards then, so I think I was pretending I had more money than I did. I went to a lot of dinners I couldn’t afford but threw down my card anyway.
They took a few trips a year that I was invited to but like, nope. “We’re planning this thing, I wish you could go.” It was so out of my range though it wasn’t even an option. I think them being older made it easier—”one day that’ll be me.” HA HA HA. (It’s not.)
On being the friend with money:
Mike: I’m more than willing to pick up the check on pretty much any occasion—especially if it’s just two of us. I don’t think about it too much, but I actually think my nonchalantness actually makes others feel uncomfortable, like I’m babying them.
Charlotte: Sometimes it is explicitly acknowledged, like if someone is excited about what they made, or telling a story about not getting paid what they were owed, and they interrupt themselves with a comment about how it’s not like what I make or something along those lines. (Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re not.)
Rachel: A friend of mine just came to visit me a few weeks ago, and while I make basically an entry-level tech salary, it’s more than he makes (he’s a grad student). I felt like I should be picking up the tab, but I resented that because a) I work at a job that isn’t my passion and while it does pay well, I’m trying to save up and lead a life that feels different than the one I had when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck, and b) he comes from money and his parents supported him for years after college. I feel this way hanging out with other friends who have chosen less lucrative industries, too; it’s not that big a deal for me to pay for drinks, but should I?
Cassie: I did have a friend, once, who was also literally broke and didn’t have a really employable background. Instead of inviting her to go out to dinner, I’d just cook and invite her over. Then I’d let her do something small for me, in return, like help cook or the dishes, or something or anything that silently made her feel like she had ‘earned’ the gesture, because I knew that was important to her. Not to feel like she was taking handouts.
Rachel: I also have an unnamed friend who loves to eat at expensive restaurants and while I can afford it, I guess, I always resent it because WHY! The food is not that good! And part of me wants to be like, “You make a publishing salary—you can’t afford this! I don’t want to pay for it! What are we doing? Let’s go home and make a salad!” but this is antisocial behavior.
On the universal horror of splitting the check:
Manjula: It has gotten to the point where I literally have an anxiety attack if I’m out at a restaurant with a large group and the bill ends up in front of me, and I have to be the person to do the math and collect the money.
Lauren: No one ever wants to be that awkward person who orders way less or comes to dinner just to have a drink because they can’t afford the food: “Um, they promised all they wanted was my company and to not worry about money but oh god, here comes the bill, nerves hit, I am feeling hot, oh boy, please someone speak up for me… ”
Mike: This was especially annoying in college, when you’d go out, and someone would be like, “oh just give me cash,” and then charge the bill to the CC their parents gave them, and you know for a fact that they are just going to take your cash and buy weed, and that their parents paid for the bill.
It was like the best rich-kid college ponzi scheme of all time—all for buffalo wings. I cancelled a lot of friendships over situations like this.
Meaghan O’Connell is a writer in Portland, Oregon and a former editor at this website.
According to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index daily poll of the US population, taller people live better lives, at least on average. They evaluate their lives more favorably, and they are more likely to report a range of positive emotions such as enjoyment and happiness. They are also less likely to report a range of negative experiences, like sadness, and physical pain, though they are more likely to experience stress and anger, and if they are women, to worry. These findings cannot be attributed to different demographic or ethnic characteristics of taller people, but are almost entirely explained by the positive association between height and both income and education, both of which are positively linked to better lives.
For decades, social scientists have studied what is referred to as the “height premium” — the increased earnings that, on average, taller people receive.
A 2001 study by Nicola Persico, Andrew Postlewaite and Dan Silverman of the University of Pennsylvania, found that it’s the height a person had as a teenager that matters when it comes to bringing home the bacon as an adult.
“Two adults of the same age and height who were different heights at age 16 are treated differently on the labor market,” Persico, Postlewaite and Silverman concluded. “The person who was taller as a teen earns more.”
“Those who were relatively short when young,” they continued, “were less likely to participate in social activities associated with the accumulation of productive skills and attributes, and report lower self-esteem.”
What, you mean like sports? That would make a certain amount of sense, I suppose. If taller teenagers play sports and so develop better self-esteem, perhaps that makes them more self-assured and competitive and more likely to go into Business School?
Here’s the nitty gritty:
A 2004 study by psychologist Timothy A. Judge, Ph.D., of the University of Florida, and researcher Daniel M. Cable, Ph.D., of the University of North Carolina, found that every inch of height amounts to a salary increase of about $789 per year (the study controlled for gender, weight and age).
By this calculation, someone who is 6 feet tall earns $5,525 more annually than someone who is 5 feet, 6 inches. Over the course of a career, of course, those numbers can really add up.
Yes, rather.
I wonder whether this has changed in the past ten years, though, with the startling rise of Silicon Valley as a money-making force. After all, coders and software engineers aren’t known for being giants; Mark Zuckerberg is only around 5’8″ or 5’9″, as is his FB co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. Sergey Brin is 5’8″, Larry Page is 5’11”, and Bill Gates is only 5’10”. All of those heights are within the realm of average.
There are plenty of billionaires and CEOs who tower over the rest of us, of course: Larry Ellison, is 6’3″, as is eccentric Google exec Eric Schmidt. Likewise, female CEOs — like Indra Nooyi and Marissa Mayer, both 5’9″ — tend to be significantly taller than average for women. There’s some evolutionary biology stuff at play here: tall people stand out; we literally look up to them. They can appear more confident, smarter, and so we are likely to have faith in their abilities. That is why, pundits speculate, we Americans so often elect the taller of the candidates running for President.
But what we might really be reacting to and investing in is the fact that tall people are the products of a) good genes, and b) a careful upbringing by affluent parents.
What factors go into making a person tall as a toddler and then as a teenager? Mostly genetics with some environmental factors thrown in. WikiHow explains.
There might not be a lot you can do to increase your height, but you can take several steps to make sure your natural height isn’t shortened by environmental influences. Drugs and alcohol are both thought to contribute to stunted growth if they’re ingested while you’re young, and malnutrition can keep you from reaching your full height, as well.
Anabolic steroids inhibit bone growth in young children and teens, along with lowering sperm count, decreasing breast size, elevating blood pressure and putting you at higher risk of heart attack. Children and teens who suffer from asthma and use inhalers that dispense small doses of the steroid budesonide are, on average, half an inch shorter than those not treated with steroids.
Asthma, like malnutrition, is strongly correlated with poverty, since poorer neighborhoods are often afflicted with bad air and other environmental toxins. Similarly, less affluent people are more likely to smoke, so their children are more likely to be exposed to, and potentially harmed by their exposure to cigarettes.
In other words, then, to reach your full height potential, have good genes to start with and then be born to middle class or rich parents who will encourage you to sleep, feed you nutritious food, including high-quality protein and fresh, vitamin-rich fruits and vegetables, and who won’t smoke around you or expose you to regular doses of smog.
While about 80 percent of height is determined by genes, auxologists (those are height scientists) now believe that nutrition and sanitation determine much of the rest. …
“If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives.”
Your childhood environment can give you (or take away) three or four inches. A lack of nutrient-rich food and clean water explains why stunting is prevalent among children in developing countries. Studies of North Koreans found that those born after the country was divided in two were about two inches shorter than their counterparts in the South. …
When Barry Bogin, an anthropologist at Temple University, measured the heights of children from the Maya ethnic group, he found that Maya refugee children growing up in the United States were about four inches taller than Maya children who were still living in their native Guatemala. He chalked up the difference to America’s superior nutrition and healthcare.
Imagine how much taller they — and we — could be if America’s nutrition and healthcare were on par with Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Speaking at the 2015 National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee earlier this year, GOP Presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee said he wishes he could have pretended to be transgender in high school so he could have "showered with the girls" after PE, BuzzFeed reports. The comments came to light over the weekend when a video of Huckabee's speech was posted online by World Net Daily. In the speech Huckabee also sounds the dog whistle of religious liberty (yet again), and conflates providing civil rights to transgender persons with pedophilia and sexual impropriety.
Said Huckabee:
“For those who do not think that we are under threat, simply recognize that the fact that we are now in city after city watching ordinances say that your seven-year-old daughter, if she goes into the restroom cannot be offended and you can’t be offended if she’s greeted there by a 42-year-old man who feels more like a woman than he does a man.”
The former Arkansas Governor added:
“Now I wish that someone told me that when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in PE. I’m pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, ‘Coach, I think I’d rather shower with the girls today.’ You’re laughing because it sounds so ridiculous doesn’t it? And yet today we are the ones who are ridiculed and scorned because we point out the obvious. “That there is something inherently wrong about forcing little children to be a part of this social experiment. I’m not against anybody. I’d just like for somebody to bring their brain to work some day and not leave it on the bedstand when they show up to govern.”
It would also be nice if Huckabee would sometime bring his brain when he shows up to speak and realize that his comments about supposed sexual misconduct say more about him than they do the LGBT community.
Watch Huckabee's speech, which begins to address transgender rights at about the 8:10 mark, AFTER THE JUMP...
The whole "pretending to be trans" thing ONLY happens in the minds of right-wing conservatives like Mike Huckabee. http://t.co/BDvbYFWBJv
This is a bucket of chum. Chum is decomposing fish matter that elicits a purely neurological brain stem response in its target consumer: larger fish, like sharks. It signals that they should let go, deploy their nictitating membranes, and chomp down blindly on a morsel of fragrant, life-giving sustenance. Perhaps in a frenzied manner.
Captured in situ on NaturalON on February 6, 2015
Captured in situ: “When Did The Art World Get So Conservative?” on New York Mag’s Vulture Blog, March 9, 2015.
Captured in situ: “Britain’s Oldest Surviving Human Brain Was Preserved In Mud For 2,600 Years,” IFLScience, March 6, 2015.
Captured in situ: “We Bow Down Before This Bus-Riding Scepter-Wielding Superhero” Gothamist, April 1, 2015
