IKEA Monkey

WASHINGTON—Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in an ongoing affirmative action lawsuit Monday, the impatient American public reportedly demanded that the nation’s highest court stop jerking around with all these other cases and ju...

More

(Photo via)

The world is a busy place. And, according to the latest UN projections, it's only going to get busier. The world population is set to hit 7.2 billion by next month and estimated to reach nearly 11 billion by 2100, which will clearly put a strain on the already limited amount of natural resources the planet has left. That, increased pollution, more intense global warming, and the fact that there will be more people around getting up in your personal space means the future doesn't look very bright.         

However, regardless of the risks it presents, overpopulation is a tricky one to deal with. The phrase "population control" instantly brings up thoughts of autocratic regimes disregarding their people's basic human right to procreate. Which isn't a very good look, even for an autocratic regime. But as possibly the only animals on the planet who can make a conscious decision whether to have busloads of children (and understand the potential ramifications of doing so), is it time to look at options that will help curb population growth to protect the environment and the human species as a whole?   

I spoke to Michael E. Arth, an urban designer, environmental activist, and ex-politician who has written on the subject of overpopulation and the options we have.

Michael E. Arth shaking hands with supporters while running for governor of Florida in 2010. (Photo via)

VICE: What do you think of the projections? Are we looking at a grim future?
Michael E. Arth: The projections don’t mention two things. Firstly, they leave out the horrendous effect population growth is having on the environment. Secondly, they don't take into account the probability of radical life extension.

You mean research into making people live longer?
Yes. Many researchers, including Aubrey de Grey at SENS, are studying how to extend life indefinitely. Probably within the next several decades we’ll figure out how to solve the related problems of ageing and dying. But the problem is that it will be even harder to stop population growth.

So if people live longer and longer, how do you deal with overpopulation?
That’s why we have to get started now. Waiting just compounds the problem. World population increases by 220,000 every day, after accounting for the 155,000 who die. It's truly a hydra-headed problem, because for every person that is cut down by death, more than two are born. This is like adding the combined populations of England, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand to the world every year. Politicians don't address overpopulation because they focus on issues that will get them re-elected in the short term, while the business interests that influence them want to see more and more consumers.

A sign in Nanchang, China, that reads, "Please for the sake of your country, use birth control." (Photo via) 

They don't address it unless they're China.
China would have two billion people today if not for their population policies. Nevertheless, China still added 350 million more Chinese since they implemented strict family planning measures in 1978, because of what's called population momentum. Because of the burst in population growth under Chairman Mao, the average age of the population had dropped. Until these excess young people had their own children, the population increased faster than if you had an evenly distributed demographic. So even limiting families to one child per couple was not low enough to stop population growth.

Now, thanks to the one-child policy – to which there are many exceptions, by the way – China’s ageing population will probably not grow much more from now on, as long as they don't remove the restrictions.

China, and the rest of the world, would be better served by a choice-based marketable birth license plan, or "birth credits," that could stop or reverse population growth on a dime. Birth credits allow people to have as many children as they desire and can manage and reward people who are willing to give up that right.

Financially?
Yes. The market would determine the price of a birth credit. In all cases, the cost of the birth credit would be a tiny fraction of the real cost of raising a child. The birth credits would work very well because it’s a very small price to pay for solving the problem, and it leaves choice firmly in place. Each person would be issued half of a birth credit, which he or she can combine with a partner to have one child, or a person can sell his or her (half) credit at the going market rate. Each additional child costs one more credit. Noncompliance would bring a fine greater than the cost of the credit, and there would be sanctions for non-compliant countries (such as migration restrictions).

Historically, in the US, we have policies that encourage larger families, even with people who can’t afford it or who often don't even care about children. To get more welfare, all you have to do is have more children, and that encourages overbreeding.

Mathematician Bertrand Russell, writing about overpopulation at a time when the world’s population was half of what it is now, said, “Mankind would rather commit suicide than learn arithmetic." Humans have evolved to pay attention to local disasters, like tornadoes or earthquakes, but a slow-moving, global disaster like overpopulation gets overlooked. We're beginning to talk about the consequences of overpopulation—global warming, pollution, depletion of resources, wars and immigration—but we need to address the root cause. 

(Photo via)

But is it not unethical to dictate how many children people can have?
The limit to individual freedom is where the exercise of an individual right begins to infringe on the rights we hold in common. One aspect of the tragedy of the commons is the belief that people should be able to breed without any regard for others. For 99.9 percent of human history, family planning was unnecessary. Most children died in childbirth and nature cruelly culled the herd through disease, famine, and war. Now that we're extending the quality and length of our lives, we have to respect the changing realities. Implementation of birth credits is the best compromise to the individual rights versus collective rights dilemma, because choice is preserved and the commons has a vastly greater chance of being saved.

And you mentioned immigration. What role does that have to play in this?
The solution to immigration pressure isn't securing the borders, it's addressing overpopulation in developing countries where economic and environmental problems are causing people to migrate. Low-consuming people who move to rich countries not only begin consuming at a much higher rate, they also tend to bring their high birth-rate patterns with them.

I see.
Educating women, raising the standard of living, and providing contraception all contribute to lowering the birth rate. Implementing birth credits would help provide those improvements. If we had addressed these issues in 1985, two billion people in the world now living on less than two dollars a day would never have been born.

Is there an optimum amount of population growth? This all sounds a little fascistic.
We exceeded seven billion in 2012, adding two billion people since 1987. Zero population growth is the minimum we should aim for, but negative population growth would help prepare for the time in the near future when people will live indefinitely long. We shouldn't take chances with the only habitable planet we know of, especially when the solution is simple and doesn't require any new technology.

Do you think there's a chance that, if these policies aren't implemented, famine and war will increase, curbing the population in much more aggressive ways?
We already see the effects of overpopulation in poverty, war, pestilence, the strain on resources and mass starvation. In the 2010 Haiti earthquake, 220,000 people died, mostly because of conditions set up by overpopulation. Overpopulation deforested and laid waste to a country once known as "The Pearl of the Antilles." Those 220,000 people were replaced the same day by new births in the world. Counting on disasters caused by overpopulation to cure overpopulation is cruel and stupid. At some point we have to wise up.

If we have compassion for one another, and we want a certain quality of life for everyone, then we need to ground ourselves in reality and get to work.

Thanks, Michael.

Follow Joseph on Twitter: @josephfcox

More stuff about the future of our world:

Woohoo, It's the Future of War!  

Future Dude 

Stoya on Gender Roles and the Future of Monogamy  

From Serious Eats: New York

VIEW SLIDESHOW: Steakcraft: BLT Steak's Strip and American Wagyu Top Cap

[Photographs: Nick Solares]

When I asked BLT Steak's chef de cusine Bradon Reardon to pick out his two favorite steaks, he chose the bone-in New York strip and the American Wagyu top cap. The strip is available on virtually every steakhouse menu, but BLT Steak serves a USDA Prime 28-day dry-aged Black Angus strip from Creekstone Farms in a 20 oz. portion for $57. Reardon likes the flavor of the cut, and he serves it bone-in, as he feels it picks up extra "funk" from the bone.

The American Wagyu "top cap" is a lot more rare; I don't know of another steakhouse in the city that has it as a permanent menu item. It comes from Snakeriver Farms and is served in a 10 oz. portion for $81.

It's worth mentioning that "American Wagyu" is somewhat of a controversial term, because the there is no standard for the breed. The cattle are not pure Wagyu, which would not do well in America's harsher climate; rather they're a cross between Wagyu and Angus or Longhorn cattle. The result is not the same as pure Japanese Wagyu beef (and one cannot discount the elaborate feeding process employed in Japan), but the beef is still delicious.

The top cap is technically called the spinalis dorsi, the muscle that "caps" the eye of the rib steak—it is my favorite thing to eat on a steer. The muscle is fibrous, tender and incredibly flavorful. While I would prefer the cut to be dry-aged, doing so would add to its expense considerably, and Snakeriver farms meat has a unique flavor all its own.

In both cases, the steaks are first seared on a grill to add hatch marks and smoky flavor. Then the meat is finished in a Southbend broiler. Take a look through the slideshow to see chef Reardon prepares them.

BLT Steak

106 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022 (map)
212-752-7470
e2hospitality.com/blt-steak-new-york

Funny people Kristen Wiig, Steve Carrell and Chris O'Dowd recently sat down on BBC One's "The Graham Norton Show," where they were joined by an unexpected guest: a massive fly.

Carrell, who apparently is well versed in the art of fly-catching, shared a strategy for its quick capture. "That fly has no idea the danger it's in right now," joked Norton.

"Oh, I so hope he comes back," said Carrell.

Well, the fly did come back, but its capture didn't go according to Carrell's plan:

Continue Reading...

Marvel at the world's biggest planes.

If you discovered water that could be millions or billions of years old, would you taste it?

On a sunny Monday morning, over the open fields of Baylands Park in Sunnyvale, California, an unmanned aerial vehicle was turning heads -- and it came with a cargo of carne asada.

From Sweets

[Photograph: Carrie Vasios]

We live in a world where secrets are becoming few and far between—the world of the over-share. A friend recently made their gmail status a bold statement: "I like the smell of my feet in the rain!"* And unfortunately secrets are something you can't unlearn.

*dear friend, if you're reading this, I'm sorry.

And yet when it comes to recipes, I've found people are guarding their secrets more than ever. "This is great," I'll say at a dinner party, "where'd you get the recipe?" And despite the fact that I saw the latest issue of Bon Appetit carefully stacked behind the toilet, they refuse to acknowledge their pork ribs didn't spring fully formed from their oven.

That's obviously the benefit of Serious Eats: we share recipes. I know I personally have no secrets, and the rest of the staff seems to feels the same. Prime example? This recipe for Drinks editor Maggie's favorite oatmeal cookies. They're great: chewy, oaty, well-spiced. The kind of cookie you want five of. Five, or a giant cookie pie.

I adapted the recipe to fit a pie pan (or, for ease, a springform pan) and I also fiddled with the spices. The secret to Maggie's recipe is cocoa powder, but this recipe omits that. This cookie pie is just a giant, straight up, old school oatmeal raisin cookie, with a fat stripe of icing for good measure.

Get the Recipe

Iced Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Pie »

About the author: Carrie Vasios is the editor of Serious Eats: Sweets. She likes to peruse her large collection of cookbooks while eating jam from the jar. You can follow her on Twitter @carrievasios

Get the Recipe!

Jezebel The Most Amazing Wedding Text Message Fight of Our Time | Gizmodo The Xbox One Just Got Way Worse, And It's Our Fault | Gawker Wu-Tang Clan Had an ASL Interpreter at Bonnaroo and She Stole The Show | io9 The Most Important Scenes from Man of Steel (As I Remember Them)

Read more...

We love a lot more than sandwiches alone at Serious Eats, so in the spirit of A Sandwich a Day, here's Eat This Now, a quick look at what we're eating and want to talk about. —The Mgmt.

[Photograph: Nick Kindelsperger]

To be honest, you can order anything on Birrieria Zaragoza's condensed menu and leave in a stunned stupor. But on a recent visit with Joe, I was introduced to an item not currently listed on the menu: Birria en Barro. What was Zaragoza holding back from me?

I should point out that Birrieria Zaragoza specializes in Birria Tatemada, which owner Juan Zaragoza told me is his spin on the dish. It's basically traditional birria served like carnitas, so that the goat meat is served on a plate with a little consommé poured on top. And he's proud of it too, since he claims it better highlights the roasted meat.

En Barro skips the subtlety and submerges the meat in liquid, which is actually how most places serve it around town. It's good in a hearty, dead-of-winter kind of way, and absolutely ideal for those who also wanted more of the consommé devour. Still, there's no doubt that the meat looses its crispness and some of its personality along the way.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, Zaragoza also noted that you can get this huge bowl of the consommé with the meat on the side, thus preserving the integrity of the meat while also allowing you to slurp away with abandon. In other words, the best of both worlds.

Birrieria Zaragoza

4852 S. Pulaski Rd., Chicago, IL 60632 (map)
773-523-3700
birrieriazaragoza.com

Spike Jonze’s Her—the previously reported, very Spike Jonze comedy where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with Siri, basically—recently received a release date of November 20. However, as anyone who uses iTunes will tell you, it’s never too soon for a sweeping update: Vulture has learned that, for the voice of the seductive operating system that seduces Phoenix, Jonze made a last-minute swap of Samantha Morton for Scarlett Johansson, a surprise first hinted at when Johansson suddenly appeared on the cast list alongside other stars Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, and Chris Pratt.  

Jonze himself later clarified the decision in an email to the site, saying, “It was only in post production, when we started editing, that we realized that what the character/movie needed was different from what Samantha and I had created together. So we recast and since then Scarlett has taken over that ...

Read more

The Miami Heat are your 2012-13 NBA Champions after defeating the San Antonio Spurs 95-88 in Game 7 of what will be remembered as one of the most exciting NBA Finals in recent memory. I’d polish it up with plenty more hyperbole, but this attention span generation can barely remember who won The Voice, so I’m sure that by next year’s Finals between the Heat and the Chris Paul/Dwight Howard/Dirk Nowitzki Dallas Mavericks we’ll all be talking about how that one’s the best.

Anyway, my pick for the MVP of the NBA Finals isn’t LeBron James, despite the fact that he put the Heat on his shoulders for 7 games to earn the honor. Nope, my MVP is the security guard in the above clip who basically told rapper Drake to go f*ck himself last night when he tried to get into the Heat locker room after the game.

“I am the media,” is what Drake actually said when the guard told him that only reporters were allowed in at that point. Couple that with Drake’s portion of this otherwise awesome Nike ad for LeBron James that was posted last night and I think Mickey Arison needs to give that guard a promotion and huge raise.

Seriously, he sounds like a guy calling in to a 3 am sports talk show to shout about haters.

(But don’t worry, Drake made it to the afterparty and posed like the rad dude that he is.)

From A Hamburger Today

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

It took the Shake Shack years before it introduced a second burger on its menu aside from its signature Shackburger. When it hit the boards, the Smoke Shack was a near instant hit (we sure loved it). It took the signature well-seared Shake Shack patty and paired it with crisp bacon and a sweet-hot pickled pepper relish.

It's a flavor combination worth repeating as often as possible, so I decided to take my own spin on it to the backyard burger.

The basic flavors are the same—burger, relish, bacon—but I found that a plain old cherry pepper relish with sliced bacon on top didn't quite match up to the more robust flavors of a thicker, grilled burger the way it did for the smaller griddled Shack burgers. To up the flavor, I instead used a bacon and cherry pepper relish I initially developed as a pizza topping. The smoky bacon flavor is built right into the relish, so it coats the burger more evenly.

Other than that, things are fairly standard here—crisp bacon slices (which I pre-cook in the oven—you can also use fatter slab bacon and slow-cook it on the grill before you start grilling your burgers), sliced American cheese (cheddar would also work here), and a fat slice of grilled onion, just to make the whole thing healthy.

Get The Recipe

Hot and Smoky Cheeseburgers with Bacon and Pickled Cherry Pepper Relish »

More Burger Toppings!

• Grilled Cuban Fritas (Spiced Burgers with Shoestring Fries)
• Burgers with Creamy Feta Sauce and Tomato-Cucumber Relish »
• Pepperoni Garlic Bread Burgers
• Poutine Burgers
• Muffuletta Burgers
• Barbecue Bacon Burgers
• Korean Barbecue Kim-Cheese Burgers
• Quadruple Chili Cheeseburgers
• Hot Hawaiian Burgers

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Love hamburgers? Then you'll Like AHT on Facebook! And go follow us on Twitter and Pinterest while you're at it!

Get the Recipe!

Midway through last night’s beautiful, despairing season finale of the unexpectedly fantastic Hannibal, one character says to another that contemplating murders—as all of the characters on this show and all of the viewers in the audience do—is worth pursuing because it makes the contemplation of life and its end more thorough. In the midst of life, we are in death, and in the show’s particularly gruesome and gory murder scenes, it finds a way to remind us of this eventuality. We almost certainly won’t die at the hands of serial killers—since we don’t exist in the Hannibal universe, after all—but death will come for us sooner or later, and more likely than not, it won’t be beautiful. It will be painful and protracted, and we will long for a release from it. These are the emotional contours of Hannibal, a series ...

Read more

To make your heart ache even more over the loss of James Gandolfini, you should know that he had a great fondness for rescue dogs — especially pit bulls! — and his final film will be a crime drama called Animal Rescue with a bully as a co-star.

Read more...

Dear Lifehacker,
I love my family and I love working from home, but these two things don’t always go well together. Now that school’s out and my wife and kids are home more often, I’m afraid the noise and interruptions while I’m trying to work might drive me insane. How can I limit disturbances so I can actually get work done?

Read more...

We've got the recipe for the fondue that Geja's has been serving for 48 years. [ more › ]

Why don’t you and this car insurance commercial just get MARRIED already?!

A 1-year-old boy who plummeted two stories from a fire escape in Brooklyn on Wednesday was saved when a quick-thinking passerby saw the child and caught him as he fell, according to police.

Exodus International, the "ex-gay" Christian group with a mission to minister to a "world impacted by homosexuality," has shut down after 37 years.

Following a Wednesday statement in which Exodus' president Alan Chambers apologized for "years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the Church as a whole,” Chambers announced the group would close its doors late Wednesday night.

“Exodus is an institution in the conservative Christian world, but we’ve ceased to be a living, breathing organism,” Chambers said. “For quite some time we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical":

Continue Reading...

The incident occurred around 12:30 a.m. Thursday. [ more › ]

   BEHOLD: CRANIAL THUNDER. Read More ...

The prevalence of cancer-causing strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) dropped by more than 50 percent among teenage girls in the last decade, results that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Thomas Frieden called "striking."

"This report shows that the HPV vaccine works well, and the report should be a wake-up call to our nation to protect the next generation by increasing HPV vaccination rates," Frieden said in a statement on Wednesday.

Rates of infection dropped 56 percent among girls ages 14 to 19, a response rate that exceeded researcher's expectations given relatively low inoculation rates in the United States.

That may be because the vaccine benefits people who haven't been vaccinated, as Reuters notes:

[Lead researcher Lauri] Markowitz said the higher than expected response rate could be the result of so-called "herd immunity," in which the vaccine is also reducing infections among those who are not vaccinated. Or it could mean that the vaccine was working even among women who had not received the full three doses, which included about 49 percent of women in the study.

Continue Reading...

Yesterday the question of what Dan Harmon thought of Community’s fourth season was answered in typically unfiltered, impolitic Dan Harmon fashion. No sir, he didn’t like it: He found it to be an “unflattering” impression of his style and supposed quirks. He compared it to “flipping through Instagrams watching your girlfriend just blow everyone” (the faux-grainy Instagram filter only adding to the affectations, we suppose). And in his version of putting a positive spin on things, he said that ultimately it was as relaxing as a day at the beach, one that involved “being held down and watching your family get raped.” It was a review as honest as it was hoooo boy, maybe let’s not make a rape joke, and as predictably harsh as it was predictably poorly received.

Now, as is the way of things, Harmon has issued an apology—first via tweets, then via ...

Read more

El-P and Killer Mike both stopped by Goose Island to help make a batch of their "Run The Jewels" beer, a 5.4-percent alcohol, dry-hopped Belgian wheat ale named after their forthcoming collaborative debut album which will debut exclusively at the Pitchfork Music Festival. A good time was had by all. [ more › ]

While Ridley Scott's Alien not-quite-prequel Prometheus was a box office success, many fans walked away disappointed with what they considered to be plot holes and unrealistic elements. Most of the blame was laid at the feet of screenwriter Damon Lindelof, as fans expected him to maintain the high standards of tight plotting and unflinching realism he brought to Cowboys & Aliens.

So now Lindelof has taken his ball and gone home, protesting that he's too busy working on the Star Trek franchise and Brad Bird's Tomorrowland—and anyway, it was all Scott's fault. Also, the finale of Lost was great, shut up.

Presumably after plans to clone Alien's late screenwriter Dan O'Bannon ended in failure, Scott has finally hired a new writer. Jack Paglen burst onto the scene last year with a screenplay called Transcendence, which made the infamous Black List of the year's ...

Read more