The greatest technological challenge of the 20th Century was not the moon landing; it was how to get fresh, delicious beer from a brewery into a customer's belly. Prior to the 1930s if you wanted beer, you and a guy named Amos rolled a barrel from the brewery back to your village, tapped it, and distributed it into jugs. (One benefit of this method was that in a financial pinch, the barrel could be worn in lieu of clothing, but it was otherwise inconvenient.)
Glass-bottled beer also existed, but you try transporting a crate of it over a bumpy wagon trail without breaking any of the bottles, especially while you're drinking from one.
In the 1930s manufacturing technology made a huge leap forward: It become possible to seal beer inside of steel cans.
Cans were easier to stack, ship and carry, weighed less than glass bottles and were less prone to breakage. One drawback was that you could not break a can over a counter and brandish it during a saloon brawl, but this was offset by the fact that you could crush one against your forehead, which never failed to impress the ladies and establish you as "a real character."
But they key problem with cans was how to get the beer out of them. The tops of these cans were flat...
...so either you or Amos had to make sure you had one of these on hand at all times:
That "church key," as it's called, was used to lever two triangular piercings into a can, one for your mouth, the other for airflow.
Seeking a better way, innovative package designers of the time then developed the cone-top can in 1935:
If you ask me, this is kind of a lateral move. You still needed to carry an implement around, in this case a bottle opener rather than a church key. But one benefit was that you gained a bottlecap with each can. (During the Great Depression, bottlecaps were basically your kids' Xbox.)
Both the flat-top can and the cone-top persisted into the 1950s and '60s. But in 1959 an engineer named Ermal Fraze was on a family picnic and forgot to bring a church key. Fraze was forced to open his beer cans using his car bumper, like some kind of alcoholic MacGyver. He subsequently invented the pull-tab:
Fraze patented it in the 1960s and sold the rights to Alcoa, and it became the standard can aperture.
As convenient as the pull-tab was, it became a bit of a public nuisance and a hazard. Some folks ripped the tab off and threw it on the ground, creating litter; others simply dropped the tab inside the can, betting that it wouldn't work its way back out. As you can imagine, emergency rooms started seeing people who had accidentally swallowed these tabs.
Seeking a way to not have a loose tab, in the 1970s Coors experimented with this cockamamie "push tab" can:
The smaller hole was for drainage, the larger hole was for drinking out of. But the problem with this design is that folks would often cut their fingers on the sharp edges of the apertures while trying to open them. Coors doesn't taste great to begin with and it tastes even worse when mixed with blood.
Finally, in 1975 inventor Daniel F. Cudzik created the pop-top can we all know today:
This "Sta-tab," as it was originally called, created no waste. But again there was, of course, a downside. (For chrissakes why is drinking beer so hard?!? It's like the gods are against us.) The aperture was relatively small…
…and with no means of airflow, pouring the stuff into your mouth can be turbulent. While it creates an amusing glug-glug-glug noise, that loses its charm pretty quickly.
In the 1990s can manufacturers finally began widening the mouth…
…which ameliorates, but does not completely solve, the glugging issue. In my own experience I've found that it's very difficult not to spill beer on your shirt after having just ten or eleven of these.
In more recent years we've seen a newer method: The full aperture end. Companies like Australia's BentSpoke Brewing Co. are using these huge pull-tab lids:
I like the look of these, and I'm assuming the can's lip is far back enough from the edge that you won't cut your lips on the sharp edges. But Australian beer judge Chris Shanahan isn't a fan, calling the cans "a retrograde step in my opinion, reminiscent of the first detachable rip-tops [which led to] discarded tabs from beer and soft drinks [littering] the ground everywhere."
I suppose that disposing of a wide lid, especially on a camping trip, is a bit more of a hassle than storing bottlecaps, since the lids are larger and sharper. What do you think a good design solution would be? Perhaps create some way that the lid can somehow be shoved into a cavity in the bottom of the can?
I invite Core77 readers to come down to our offices, with a six-pack under each arm, and we can throw some of these back and brainstorm a bit. Also bring some chips, maybe some dip, and I wouldn't say no to cold cuts either.
This is not a social justice argument. I'm not writing this post to shame you into taking some altruistic action for the greater good. What I'm going to present here is pure dollars and cents.
Consider the two following investment options for your personal portfolio:
Option A: Invest in a handful of very large entities. Each comes with a lot of hype yet has a track record of under performing, even dramatically losing money. A look at peer entities shows a consistent track record of failure and decline over time.
Option B: Investment in an expansive portfolio of hundreds to thousands of small to mid-sized entities. None of these have much hype or prestige associated with them. While collectively they have a consistent track record of success, individual entities within the portfolio may be a spectacular boom or a total failure.
A few prestige companies with a long track record of failure or a large number of small companies, each with boom or bust potential but with a general upward trajectory?
It's clear that the preferred option is B. Spreading your money out over many small different investments gives you a large hedge against risk (i.e. don't put all your eggs in one basket). While each small investment could be a bust, it could also boom; broad diversification evens out the risk. In general, the gains over time are positive, although not flashy. There is significant upside potential with little downside risk, the perfect portfolio mix for the prudent investor. And you're a prudent investor, not some Wolf of Wall Street something-for-nothing.
Yesterday I wrote about Lafayette, Louisiana, a perfectly normal American city that shares the basic development pattern most of you have in the places you live. I included a map that shows parts of the city that were profitable -- where the city collects more revenue than is spends -- and parts of the city that were being operated at a loss, where the long term expenditures are greater than the revenue stream.
I've (rather crudely -- I'm not a graphics pro) updated that map to show the parts of town generally full of residences occupied by poor people and parts of town with residences occupied by those that are more affluent. I used the terms "poor" and "affluent" rather loosely. There is no study that breaks this down and we don't have underlying data. That being said, when we were looking for an AirBnB to stay in, we were told to stay away from the neighborhoods marked as "poor" as they are dangerous. When we spoke to law enforcement as part of our study, we received similar insights. A look at Zillow, backed up with an eye test, also suggests that the areas marked poor are indeed occupied by people that are, on average, significantly poorer than those people living in the areas marked affluent.
What is obvious here is that the poor neighborhoods are profitable while the affluent neighborhoods are not. Throughout the poor neighborhoods, the city is -- TODAY -- bringing in more revenue than they will spend to maintain the neighborhood, and that's assuming they actually invest the money to maintain the neighborhood (which they have not been). If they fail to maintain the neighborhood, the profit margins will be even higher.
This might strike some of you as surprising, yet it is important to understand that it is a consistent feature we see revealed in city after city after city all over North America. Poor neighborhoods subsidize the affluent; it is a ubiquitous condition of the American development pattern.
As an example, consider what is probably our most famous case study here at Strong Towns, the Taco John's in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, as described in "The Cost of Auto Orientation." The block on the left has been labeled as blight. It's run down and neglected. The block on the right -- same size, same amount of public infrastructure, just a different development approach -- looks shiny and new. Poor versus affluent. The cost to the city is the same but the poor block is worth 78% more, and pays 78% more taxes, than the affluent block.
Total value: $1.1 million
Total value: $618,000
We see this trend everywhere we've done a model. On a per acre basis, neighborhoods that tend to be poor also tend to pay more taxes and cost less to provide services to than their more affluent counterparts.
How is this possible? Some of my planner colleagues will say it is density, but I've long rejected that simplistic explanation. There is a lot more to it than a simple division problem. For example, in Lafayette those poor neighborhoods tend to have narrower streets, which cost less. The houses tend to be older and so they also tend to occupy the high ground, which was the cheapest place to build way back then (free, natural drainage). The high ground also makes sewer service more affordable; no expensive pumps to operate and maintain. I could go on, but you get the point. The original builders of Lafayette were poor themselves and, even where they weren't, they were culturally pretty frugal. Their building tradition, developed over thousands of years, built as much wealth as possible at the lowest cost with the least long term risk.
So why does this make poor neighborhoods the best investment today? There are three reasons.
First, in comparison, the other investment opportunities are terrible. That map of Lafayette tells a compelling story about the financial failure of all those residential subdivisions with the wide lots, curvy streets and cul-de-sacs. They are financial losers right now and, understanding modern zoning as well as the expectations of the people who have bought there, there is little hope of turning that around. These places are built all at once to a finished state. Today is peak wealth; it's all downhill from here, regardless of how much public investment is made.
Second, it won't take much to see consistently large returns. In these poor neighborhoods, we're not talking about taking $50,000 homes and making them into $250,000 homes. Those kind of projects are hit-and-miss risky and not really scalable anyway. What we're really talking about is taking a neighborhood of $50,000 homes and making them $55,000 homes. That's a solid 10% increase in the tax base. It's wealth that is shared throughout the neighborhood. It's a real gain -- not an illusion -- that is more likely to persist than some kind of one-off project. And it's repeatable. We can nurture 3-5% annual returns out of these depressed neighborhoods for a long, long time. (And, by the way, one quick diversion from dollars and cents....this is also how you avoid displacement and ensure that the gains in wealth actually go to the poor who are responsible for it.)
Finally, the type of investments that these neighborhoods need in order to experience consistent 3-5% returns over time are very small and low risk. We're talking about things like putting in street trees, painting crosswalks, patching sidewalks, and making changes to zoning regulations to provide more flexibility for neighborhood businesses, accessory apartments and parking. If we try some things and they don't work, we don't lose much because they don't cost much. We learn from our small failures and try something else. This is the approach we described in our Neighborhoods First report, a way of building we've now seen repeated in cities like Austin, Memphis and Pittsburgh. We also shared some other ideas last week in Five Low Cost Ideas to Make Your City Wealthier.
American cities can make low risk, high returning investments while improving the quality of life for people, particularly those who have not benefited from the current approach. That is the essence of a prudent, Strong Towns approach. It's critical we get started now because we need strong cities if we are to have a truly strong America.
Looking back on 2016, there was one low-key but significant political event — in a year packed with political events — that deserves more attention: the effort in the city of Olympia to enact a local income tax.
As the state population grows and public officials seek new sources of revenue, there has been a continuing debate about whether Washington should join the ranks of states that impose a tax on personal incomes. Currently, 41 states have an income tax. The idea was first floated in Washington in 1932, when an income tax passed by popular initiative. But that tax was later struck down as unconstitutional by the state courts.
Various state income tax proposals have been put to a vote nine times since then, and have come up short each time. The last statewide effort was Initiative 1098, which qualified for the ballot in July 2010 and, to the disappointment of supporters, went down to defeat later that year by 64 percent of the vote.
The latest chapter in this decades-long conversation was not a statewide measure, but a local one in Olympia, a city of about 50,000 people, many of whom are government employees. Backers successfully placed Measure 1 on the 2016 ballot as the state’s first local — and, in fact, only —income tax, proposing a yearly levy of 1.5 percent on household incomes over $200,000.
Supporters drafted the proposal so that the estimated revenue raised, some $3 million a year, would go to paying tuition at public four-year colleges and local community colleges. The measure was backed strongly by Democratic state Rep. Sam Hunt of Olympia. He acknowledged the idea was controversial, but noted that the advantage of Measure 1 was that “it put the spotlight on education” and represented “one step forward in finding a better solution.”
Raising money for higher education was the policy goal, but given the history of rulings that an income tax is unconstitutional, the stakes were far higher than whether a few wealthy families in one city would have to pay a new tax.
When the state Supreme Court struck down the 1932 initiative, the justices ruled an income tax violated the constitutional provision that taxes must be uniform and applied equitably to an identified tax base. Further, the Legislature passed a law in 1984 barring counties and cities from imposing their own income taxes.
Measure 1, if passed, would have faced an instant legal challenge, so from the beginning advocates on both sides knew that passage would herald a larger, and much longer, legal battle.
Proponents were well aware of the legal objections. Their idea was to create a test case that would overturn decades of case law supporting the state constitution’s tax-equity clause. Income tax supporters had every hope of scoring a knockout with a case out of Olympia — a well-founded assumption given the inclination of our current state Supreme Court, which leans to the left. Proponents suspected today’s court would fix the obstacle posed by the equity clause by re-interpreting a progressive income tax as an excise tax, and thus allowed by law, even if it is not applied to state residents equally.
The outcome of such a case will remain unknown, at least for now. Olympia voters rejected Measure 1 by 52 percent.
Measure 1’s loss is all the more remarkable because the phrase “income tax” did not actually appear in the ballot title. Tax proponents argued the description would prejudice voters against the proposal. Thurston County Judge Anne Hirsch, to the shock of opponents, agreed, and she struck the offending phrase from the published title. Meanwhile, terms like “funding a college grant program” appeared prominently in the ballot language.
Measure 1’s failure is all the more notable given the political leanings of the area. Thurston County voted 53 percent for Hillary Clinton, 54 percent for Gov. Inslee’s re-election, and nearly 60 percent for Senator Patty Murray’s re-election. Voter ticket-splitting between Democratic candidates and an income tax has happened before. In 2010, a number of Democratic candidates prevailed, but Thurston County voters rejected Initiative 1098 by 61 percent, only slightly less than the percentage of “no” vote statewide.
The technical objections to a progressive income tax in Washington might be overcome and, given the right test case, today’s more pliable state Supreme Court might even get around the constitution’s equity rule. The primary obstacle remains political. The idea of an income tax, whether statewide or just on people living in Olympia, is simply not popular with voters.
Despite setbacks, however, proponents vow to keep trying. An income tax bill will almost certainly be introduced when the Legislature convenes next week, and another try might be made at the local level. Maybe that’ll be in Seattle, maybe elsewhere. But given the persistence of this idea, don’t expect our long-standing tradition of debating the merits of a state income tax to end anytime soon.
So... Hollywood actor James Woods continues to make it clear that he's a complete and total asshole. As you may or may not recall, last year, Woods sued an anonymous Twitter user who went by the name Abe List, for mocking Woods on twitter. Specifically, List called Woods "clownboy" and later tweeted: "cocaine addict James Woods still sniffing and spouting." Woods sued Abe List claiming that the "cocaine addict" statement was defamatory, and (the important part) demanding the name and identity of Abe List. The fact that Woods, himself, has a long (long, long, long) history of spouting off similarly incendiary claims to people on Twitter apparently wasn't important. Here is an example of a Woods tweet that seems quite similar to the one he, himself, claimed was defamatory:
Ken "Popehat" White agreed to defend Abe List, along with lawyer Lisa Bloom. And while the judge initially (and, in our opinion, correctly) found Woods' lawsuit to be nothing more than a SLAPP suit, the judge eventually changed his mind. The case was moving along... and then something bizarre happened. Abe List (whoever that is) died (unexpectedly, apparently). Woods then took to Twitter to obnoxiously gloat about "winning" the case, leaving out the fact that the case was ending due to the death of the defendant. After people pointed out to Woods how ridiculous it was that he was gloating over a "victory" when someone had died, the ever classy Woods, gloated some more, first saying he hoped that List died "screaming my name. in agony" and then later saying: "Learn this. Libel me, I'll sue you. If you die, I'll follow you to the bowels of Hell. Get it?"
Woods later deleted those tweets, but as I said at the time, the whole thing is sickening. Even if Abe List was trolling Woods, happily celebrating someone's death because they once made fun of you on Twitter seems to suggest you deserve to be made fun of on Twitter. Constantly.
To then add insult to death, Woods and his lawyers continued to push forward with the lawsuit, demanding to still uncover the name of Abe List. Woods' lawyers basically tried to argue that because they didn't know Abe List's identity, it was possible that Ken White was lying that List had died. They argued that they needed White to disclose Abe List's real name to prove that List was really dead:
Critically, although White claims that AL is deceased, he has refused to provide any evidence whatsoever substantiating this claim. Moreover, when Woods' counsel reasonably requested that White at least provide the identity of his now-purportedly-deceased client -- a fact which would be necessary in order to confirm AL is actually deceased -- White refused.
Emphasis in the original. And, of course White refused. The whole point of the lawsuit appeared to be to reveal Abe List's real identity, which he has every right to protect under the First Amendment. White was hired to protect that identity, so for Woods' lawyer to pretend that it's so horrific that White would refuse to reveal the name is ridiculous -- but apparently par for the course for Woods and his "to the bowels of hell" ethos. Even more ridiculous, Woods and his lawyers demanded White be sanctioned for refusing to give up the name.
White responded by highlighting how ridiculous all this is, and how it's pretty clear that Woods is just looking to harass and intimidate his critics. In his reply, White even included screenshots of the Tweets above, showing how Woods is gloating about all of this.
When defendant (Abe Doe)... died and his personal representative dismissed his appeal of this Court's denial of his anti-SLAPP motion, Plaintiff James Woods gloated and celebrated his death, expressing his hope that Mr. Doe died "screaming [Woods' name."
Now, Mr. Woods seeks to compel Mr. Doe's attorney, non-party Kenneth P. White ("Mr. White"), to disclose Mr. Doe's identity, and to sanction Mr. White almost $10,000 for asserting the attorney-client privilege in response to his questions.... Mr. Woods asserts that his purpose is legitimate and that he does not seek to harass or abuse Mr. Doe's survivors. But Mr. Woods' own public statements give the lie to that assertion. Mr. Woods wants to do just what he said he wants to do: publicly harass and vilify a dead man and his family.
The Motion is meritless, and is a transparent attempt to abuse the discovery process to exact twisted revenge by harassing Mr. Doe's family. First, contrary to Mr. Woods' arguments, Mr. White expressly premised his refusals to answer questions on one ground -- the attorney-client privilege. That assertion was correct. Because the entire purpose of Mr. White's representation of Mr. Doe was to protect Mr. Doe's identity, and because Mr. White only learned Mr. Doe's identity through confidential communications, Mr. Woods cannot force Mr. White to disclose it.
Unfortunately (and... ridiculously), the court has now ruled that White needs to turn over List's real name (along with the details of where he died and the name of his heirs) within 10 days. The court rejected the request for sanctions against White, and also some other information that White insisted was also protected information (such as whether or not List had other Twitter accounts as well).
This is unfortunate, and a travesty. In response, White provided the following statement:
Sometimes in litigation the bad guys win. This was such a day. I remain very proud to have fought for Abe Doe, and proud to have opposed this vexatious case by James Woods, a petulant bully whose Twitter conduct shows he can dish it out but can’t take it. I’m pleased that the court rejected his demand to compel me to answer several other questions, and that it also rejected his frivolous demand for sanctions.
Woods' lawyer, Michael Weinsten, on the other hand, made the following absolutely ridiculous statement:
This is a significant step forward in our ability to recover the millions in damages caused by John Doe's cowardly Tweet. It also sends a message to others who believe they can hide behind the anonymity of online social media to falsely accuse public figures of heinous behavior without recourse to themselves.
First of all, the idea that List's tweet caused "millions in damages" is so laughable as to make you wonder if Weinsten is also on drugs (note: that's a joke and rhetorical hyperbole...). First off, List's original tweet was a reply to someone else's tweet, meaning that only very, very, very few people saw it, because only those who followed both Abe and Woods would have seen it. Second, it would suggest that such a tweet actually hurt Woods' reputation. And I'd posit that it seems a hell of a lot more likely that Woods' own actions, such as gloating over List's death, did significantly more to harm his own reputation than any silly hyperbolic tweet from an anonymous Twitter user. Finally, List didn't "accuse" Woods of "heinous behavior." He did what people -- including Woods -- regularly do on Twitter, which is make fun of other people. To argue that Woods needs special protection from a Twitter troll makes you wonder what kind of special snowflake Woods thinks he is, that no one should ever be able to mock him on Twitter, while he is apparently free to mock anyone he likes.
And, of course, on Tuesday evening, Woods took to Twitter once again to gloat over the fact that he, that special snowflake whose itty bitty feelings were hurt by someone mocking him on Twitter, is able to stomp on the grave of a dead man. He tweeted a bunch of headlines, declaring "victory" despite the fact his victory spits on the First Amendment, and then made this idiotic analogy:
Huh? I recognize that he's trying to argue that you go after "the big dog" so that others won't pester you, or whatever, but he literally went after a no name internet troll -- for doing nearly identical things to things that Woods himself had done. He also tries to defend the "damages" claim by saying that to be a "lead" in a film you have to be insured, and claims of being a drug addict can make you uninsurable. And, sure... but what fucking insurance company uses anonymous trolls tweeting obvious jokes on Twitter to determine if lead actors are drug addicts? The answer? NONE. Woods is full of shit (again: rhetorical hyperbole, James).
This case is an unfortunate travesty of justice. List was, undoubtedly, something of an internet troll himself, regularly pushing many people's buttons (in fact, when List died, White posted about how List regularly attacked White's political beliefs as well). But I don't care how annoyed a troll might make you feel, or how hurt your special feelings are, someone like Woods (who regularly mocks people he calls "snowflakes" online -- a term often used to mock those who can't take any criticism) shouldn't get to stomp all over the grave of someone just because they made him feel bad.
While states like Hawaii and California have enacted bans on plastic bags, Michigan is going the exact opposite route, passing a law that bans local governments from banning plastic bags or putting fees on disposable containers.
Lt. Gov. Brian Calley signed the bill into law on Wednesday, acting in place of Gov. Rick Snyder who is out of state spending time with his family, MLive.com reports.
The bill passed the House 62-46 and the Senate by 25-12, despite opposition from lawmakers like Rep. Jeff Irwin of Ann Arbor.
“This is a bill that attacks local control,” Irwin said in arguments on the House floor.
Right off the bat, the law will affect Washtenaw County — home to Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and the University of Michigan — which planned to start enforcing a $0.10 charge on paper and plastic grocery bags in 2017.
The Michigan Restaurant Association is pleased as punch, as the bill prevents chain restaurants and other retailers from having to comply with various local container laws, the group’s Vice President of Government Affairs, Robert O’Meara, said.
“With many of our members owning and operating locations across the state, preventing a patchwork approach of additional regulations is imperative to avoid added complexities as it related to day-to-day business operations,” he said in a statement [PDF].
Compared to 75 years ago, Americans spend less on reading, alcohol, tobacco, clothing, and food. They spend more on education, entertainment, and transportation, but the real bank-breaker is how much more Americans spend on housing, even adjusted for inflation. (more…)
When a raving 27-year-old man was committed to Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane in April of 1887, no one thought much of it.
But 12 days later, another man arrived at the door in much the same incoherent condition. When the men regained awareness and could be interrogated, it turned out that they worked in the same nearby rubber factory.
That summer, a third man was brought to the hospital, where he was described as “in a condition of great mental excitement, disturbing the neighborhood by loud noises and violent praying.” He, too, turned out to be a co-worker.
The chief of the Nervous Department at New York’s College of Physicians and Surgeons at the time was Frederick Peterson. He knew these three cases couldn’t be a coincidence, so he set out interrogating the workers on the nature of their jobs. As he suspected, the men had all inhaled a chemical in the factory’s air: carbon disulfide.
Peterson had heard of carbon-disulfide insanity in Europe, so he alerted his colleagues in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (now known as The New England Journal of Medicine) that the problem had come to America. In England, the new term “gassed” had arisen, defined in the Liverpool Daily Post as “the term used in the India rubber business, and it meant dazed.” The British physician Thomas Oliver had recalled watching as people working in rubber factories left after their shifts and “simply staggered home,” apart from themselves. The effect could be deadly. “Some of them have become the victims of acute insanity,” Oliver wrote, “and in their frenzy have precipitated themselves from the top rooms of the factory to the ground.”
* * *
Rubber as it naturally occurs is a mess. In hot weather, it melts. In cold, it cracks and shatters. It was almost useless to people until 1845, when chemists invented a way to make natural rubber into tires, called vulcanization.
In the ensuing years, a fierce competition to perfect the process erupted. The initial solution involved a mix of heating the natural rubber and adding sulfur. The product was pliable but durable, able to withstand most any weather. Vulcanization could be done in massive factories, like that of Goodyear. Shortly after, the British chemist Alexander Parkes figured out a way to forego the intensive heating and produce a superior rubber. Cold vulcanization instead used a solvent to treat the natural rubber: carbon disulfide.
It’s impossible to say how many people today have benefited from this discovery—billions of users of rubber products, from shoe soles to hoses to tires—while a lower but not insignificant number suffer because of it.
“Carbon disulfide is a very unique toxin—in its manifestations, truly protean,” the physician Paul Blanc told me. “And some of them are quite startling, most especially its capacity to cause insanity. But also atherosclerosis in the heart and the brain, as well as Parkinsonism.”
The CDC adds to that list birth defects and menstrual disturbances. But before you panic and starts discarding your tires, know that tires don’t contain carbon disulfide. Exposure to carbon disulfide comes in other ways, which Blanc has been at the forefront of elucidating. At the University of California San Francisco, he chairs the department of occupational and environmental medicine—a specialty largely concerned with tracing chemical exposures and relating them to human health. He spent the last eight years tracing carbon disulfide, including the stories above, and recently published his findings in an intensive history titled Fake Silk.
Apart from the mysterious effects of the molecule on human nerves and vessels, Blanc said, “the thing that sustained my interest was how everywhere I looked, the trail seemed to go out and intersect and combine in ways that fascinated me.”
Chinese firemen decontaminate the area around a truck leaking carbon disulfide.
(Reuters)
The trail began with the explosion of vulcanization in France. Carbon disulfide is a colorless liquid that evaporates rapidly at room temperature. As of 1849, Blanc could only find the compound mentioned in a footnote of the reigning 600-page tome on applied industrial chemistry. By 1851, the updated edition of the book mentioned carbon disulfide on its title page. The author, a chemist of note named Anselme Payen, warned that cold vulcanization can be dangerous to workers on account of the vapors.
Two years later, Payen’s warnings were corroborated by physician Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne (for whom a major form of muscular dystrophy is named). Duchenne published the first known report of the damage carbon disulfide can do to the nervous system. In a presentation to the Medical-Surgical Society of Paris, Duchenne said that carbon disulfide exposure among vulcanization workers seemed to cause disease “resembling general paresis of the insane,” or syphilis of the brain.
Evidence piled on in 1856, when a professor of medicine at the University of Paris named Auguste Delpech reported several cases of carbon disulfide poisoning to the French Academy of Medicine. The symptoms ranged from disturbing dreams to compromised memory to mania. The cases were so fascinating that he turned the focus of his career to carbon disulfide. In a medical newspaper, he told of a 27-year-old who, after just three months of working with carbon disulfide in the rubber industry, appeared prematurely aged and whose “sexual desire and erections were abolished.”
By 1863, Delpech had accrued enough case studies to write a 100-plus-page paper on the dangers of carbon disulfide, particularly among workers in balloon and condom factories. He observed two distinct phases of intoxication: a period of mental disturbance followed by disruptions of the distal nerves, causing weakness and numbness in the extremities. Hypersexuality gave way to impotence, bypassing the middle ground. Chronicling these effects put Delpech at the front of the emerging discipline of the science of the mind.
When he died in 1880, Delpech’s mantle was taken up by the famous French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. He popularized the notion that “hysteria” was a medical condition that combined physical complaints (sometimes as extreme as paralysis) with patterns of weakness that didn’t follow any known anatomic logic. It was Charcot’s influence in the late 19th century that made hysteria a firm medical fact in allopathic medicine—both among female and male patients.
* * *
The historian Mark Micale calls the final decades of the 19th century “the Belle Époque of hysteria.” The term had been recorded in text dating back to Plato and Hippocrates, and it was common in the Victorian era as a vague dismissal of most any symptom experienced by women, but its modern canonized form as a “scientific” entity happened in Paris. Diagnosing men with hysteria came into style, led by Charcot. And it was an equal-opportunity malady; during the 1880s, Charcot published more than 60 case histories of male “hysterics.”
It wasn’t that the behavior he described didn’t exist prior to the 1880s, Micale has explained. “It did exist. It was rampant. Men were as prone to nervous breakdown as women were. It was not diagnosed for social and political reasons. Men were believed to be more sane, more motivated by reason, more in control of themselves emotionally. If you were to diagnose it honestly, that would have pretty quickly called into the question the difference between the sexes and the idea that men were more self-possessed than their fragile, dependent female counterparts. Ultimately it came down to patriarchy and power.”
As the diagnosis came into use by doctors across Europe, the constellation of symptoms that had been for centuries attributed to an “inactive or ungratified uterus” now demanded plausible physiological explanations. Among doctors in the 19th century—all males at the time—the idea that men are too powerful to be overcome by flights of emotion did not sit well. Doctors sought a cause for the condition. This pointed some to carbon disulfide.
In one lecture in Paris, Charcot described a classic patient. The man had always been “sober and tranquil of manner.” He had worked in the rubber industry for 17 years, but only recently began manually cleaning the vulcanization vats that contained carbon disulfide. In the process, the man experienced an acute burning sensation in his scrotum—and then collapsed on the job, fully anesthetized. He was unconscious for half an hour and bedridden for two days, which were filled with nightmares and hallucinations of “terrible animals.” He did not recover fully, but remained weak and given to twitching. Charcot diagnosed the man with “toxic hysteria” secondary to carbon disulfide poisoning.
As the term hysteria faded from clinical relevance, the dangers of carbon disulfide did not. People exposed to carbon disulfide today are still at risk of disease. A 2014 study of an unnamed “rubber and plastic manufacturing plant” in New York found that workers exposed to carbon disulfide had more than twice the rate of fatal heart disease as did other workers at the plant.
Carbon disulfide is not limited to the rubber industry. It’s integral to the manufacturing of cellophane and rayon—the “fake silk” that gives name to Blanc’s book. These products are made of regenerated cellulose, which is synthesized using carbon disulfide. Rayon was a critical strategic material during WWII, and some of the most dramatic documentation of severe carbon-disulfide poisoning in workers was among slave laborers who manufactured rayon for the third reich. In one factory in Poland, a number were hospitalized as mental patients and then never heard from again.
Like handling vulcanized rubber, using cellophane or wearing rayon isn’t dangerous; the material is free of carbon disulfide by the time it hits shelves. The family of materials are called regenerated cellulose. Once you regenerate the cellulose, the carbon disulfide is gone. Cellophane involves the identical manufacturing process to rayon, except for the very last step, which yields a film instead of a thread. (Yet the cultural symbolism of cellophane has been entirely the opposite of rayon—modern and silly as opposed to cheap and tawdry. It always was. In the 1930s, a famous German novel called The Artificial Silk Girl told the story of a young woman who moved to Berlin and slept around, all the while loving nothing more than to wear rayon.)
“The current marketing avoids the term rayon,” Blanc explained. “They now go with viscose. People buy something that’s ‘30 percent viscose’ and they have no idea that it's the same thing as rayon.”
A model in a rayon blouse at a 2005 fashion show in New York
(John Smock / AP)
In agriculture over the years, carbon disulfide has been widely used to kill gophers and fumigate grains. No rayon is made in the U.S. currently, but cellophane (based in Tecumseh, Kansas, owned by Innovia), sponges, and sausage casings are. “Skinless” weenies are made by pushing meat into a tube of viscose rayon and then, after it hardens, peeling back the rayon.
Whether rayon or viscose, cellophane or sponges, products made with carbon disulfide can be an example of what health advocates call greenwashing. Cellulose is indeed a renewable and non-toxic material, and cellulose products are often positioned as green alternatives to petroleum-based or nylon products. “That's fairly disingenuous, to put it mildly—if a product was made using toxic chemicals,” said Blanc. “That makes the final product safe, but it doesn't mean it’s green.”
The process poses more than a threat to factory workers, but more subtly as an element of air pollution. A 2016 EPA report said that carbon disulfide levels in the air are 50 percent higher in urban areas than rural areas.The United States’ federal standards for carbon disulfide are “among the worst in the world—the most non-protective,” said Blanc. “Worse than China and Europe, comparable to India.”
States do have the authority to implement tougher standards, but only one routinely has: California. It follows the recommendations of the CDC; Blanc estimates these to be 20 times more protective than the federal standard (which chemical industry lobbyists have fought to maintain).
After unearthing and pouring through all these lessons from history, Blanc is more than uneasy (if not hysterical) about the prospects for carbon disulfide poisoning—both acute and low-level chronic exposures—under the Trump administration.
“Consumers shouldn’t just be worried about the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” he added, “but about what will happen to the Consumer Product Safety Commission—which is the main agency dealing with post-marketing control of hazardous materials.” For example, the commission dealt with the importation of lead toys from China, and the exploding of smartphones. Some members have expressed concern that Trump and other Republicans will be in a position to “strangle the agency with inadequate funding, or tie the agency up in knots so it cannot adequately function.”
“And of course if you’re a factory in the United States that makes viscose products, you can stop worrying about your air pollution,” said Blanc. “In all likelihood.”
My friend and frequent Gweek podcast guest Josh Glenn put together a terrific list of Golden Age science fiction novels (which he classifies as 1934–1963). It includes YA sci-fi, comic books, science fantasy, Beckett, Borges, Vian, Pynchon, and "other science fiction-adjacent writing that typically doesn’t get included on such lists." Josh told me, "I had fun re-reading, or in some cases reading for the first time, a lot of terrific sci-fi yarns. I hope others enjoy it, too."
This is one heck of a great reading list, and Josh's commentary is great. I also like it that Josh hunted down the early cover art for each book, because it is so much better than the garbage cover art on recent editions.
Bookmark this page for a lifetime of reading.
50. Philip K. Dick’s The Cosmic Puppets (1956–1957). On a visit, with his wife, to his hometown — sleepy, isolated Millgate, Virginia — Ted Barton discovers that you can’t go home again. (Because your hometown is different in important particulars than you remember — shops, parks, even people no longer exist — and apparently, it always already was different. Also, a child with your name died in that town, years ago.) What’s going on? Has the town been caught up in an illusion — or are Ted’s memories false ones? Why does the town drunk remember the town the way Ted does? Who are the incorporeal Wanderers haunting the town? And why can’t Ted escape from Millgate? Although he struggles to make sense of these eerie incongruities, before long Ted finds himself in the midst of a cosmic struggle stretching far beyond Virginia or even Earth. SPOILER: The Zoroastrian demigods Ohrmuzd and Ahriman might have something to do with all this. Is Ted… a messiah figure? Stranger things, indeed. Fun fact: The novel is a revision of Dick’s 1956 story “A Glass of Darkness,” which appeared in Satellite Science Fiction. The title refers to a Bible passage (First Corinthians 13:12) which the author would deploy again, for perhaps his best novel: A Scanner Darkly.
60. Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960). In the novel’s first section, set in the 26th century, the monks of a Catholic monastery founded in the name of Leibowitz — a Jewish-born engineer and booklegger who’d attempted to preserve humankind’s scientific and technical knowledge during a violent backlash against modern civilization — faithfully, lovingly copy and illuminate documents they cannot understand. The head of the monastery, located somewhere in the post-apocalyptic desert of Arizona, is so consumed with Leibowitz’s canonization that he’s dismayed when Brother Francis, a simple-minded monk, finds a trove of Leibowitz’s lost documents. In the second section, set in 3174, a new Renaissance is beginning: the abbey has developed a treadmill-powered electrical generator, a secular scholar affords the reader insight into what a treasure trove of documents the Order has preserved; and local tribes battle. In the final section, set in 3781, the Leibowitzan Order’s mission has expanded to the preservation of all knowledge — and not a moment too soon, because nuclear apocalypse once again threatens life on Earth. Fun fact: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Miller’s only novel, won the 1961 Hugo Award. The novel’s three sections (“Fiat Homo”, “Fiat Lux”, “Fiat Voluntas Tua”) were first published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. One of my favorite science fiction novels of all time.
Carrie Fisher was the rarest kind of Hollywood icon: someone who radiated incredible onscreen presence at every moment while remaining completely self-aware. The actress, writer, and comedian was a pioneer in every respect. A lasting symbol of female heroism in cinema, Fisher was also unafraid to discuss her own fragility and struggles with addiction and mental illness. Cast, at the age of 19, as Princess Leia in the Star Warsfranchise, she could have been swallowed whole by a role that has endured in the public imagination like few others.
But Fisher—who died December 27 at age 60 after complications from cardiac arrest—was beloved for much more. For the brutal, hilarious honesty of her writing, much of it fictional and some of it decidedly not. For the glee she took in pulling apart Hollywood’s self-importance and the sexism she encountered, over and over, through her storied career. For her incredible gift for humor, whether she was discussing a costume fitting for Star Wars or her bipolar disorder. In recent years, she had resurrected Leia for a new series of Star Wars films without skipping a beat, while throwing herself into its publicity tour with typically acidic humor.
Fisher was born into a showbiz family, the daughter of the Singin’ in the Rain star Debbie Reynolds and the ’50s pop-music icon Eddie Fisher, who divorced when she was two. After a debut performance in Hal Ashby’s satiric comedy Shampoo, she was cast in George Lucas’s Star Wars, perceived by the industry at the time as a silly piece of genre filmmaking out of step with the gritty realism of 1970s Hollywood. It was, upon its 1977 release, the most successful film ever released; Fisher and her co-stars were catapulted to global fame, and her work as the steely, defiant, and frequently droll rebel Princess Leia belied skill and experience beyond her years. Fisher reprised the role for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983) before returning to it, many years later, in The Force Awakens (2015).
Fisher’s relationship with her most famous role was complicated. She frequently wrote about the surrealism of making the films and the pressures they put on her own self-image, as well as the general mania of having stardom thrust on her at such a young age. She mocked the famed metal bikini she sported in Return of the Jedi, once calling it “what supermodels will eventually wear in the seventh ring of hell.” But she understood the power of Leia as an icon, especially as a female hero in a male-dominated genre. “I think it’s used me and I’ve used it. It’s stupid or foolhardy to not like it and resist it,” she said of the franchise toRolling Stone. “On a certain level I don’t understand what makes it not a movie, but this experience, this family member. It’s cherished…I respect it. I respect what it is to people because it’s just mindboggling.”
As the original Star Wars trilogy wound down, Fisher appeared in films like John Landis’s The Blues Brothers, Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, but privately wrestled with drug addiction and a brief marriage to the singer Paul Simon. In 1987, she published her first novel Postcards from the Edge, a roman a clef essaying her personal issues and her complicated relationship with her mother; three years later, she adapted it for the screen, at which point she became one of Hollywood’s most in-demand script doctors. She did uncredited punch-up work on innumerable projects through the ’90s, blessing films like Sister Act, Hook, The Wedding Singer, Last Action Hero, The River Wild, and others with her caustic, knowing wit.
She was a novelist whose work often swerved into semi-autobiographical territory. Her later memoirs Wishful Drinking and The Princess Diarist took a humorous look at her youth, her time making Star Wars, her substance abuse, and her bipolar diagnosis. She turned the former into a one-woman show that ran on Broadway and was eventually adapted for television. Fisher was staunchly candid about her mental illness in a star-driven Hollywood culture that still tried to ignore such things; she gave speeches and wrote advice columns that shed crucial light on a still-stigmatized disease. “I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital,” she told Diane Sawyer in 1995. “I am mentally ill. I can say that. I am not ashamed of that. I survived that, I’m still surviving it, but bring it on.”
There’s so much to celebrate in Fisher’s work and in what she brought to the world. As an older, wiser Leia in The Force Awakens, she was as indomitable as the young Princess who marveled at the foolishness of her rescuers in 1977’s Star Wars, barking “Somebody has to save our skins—into the garbage chute, flyboy!” as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker looked on incredulously. At the same time, she understood the ridiculousness of the systems around her, be they imaginary sci-fi worlds or the sexist machinery of Hollywood. Writing in Wishful Drinking, she recalled Lucas approaching her on her first day of filming as Leia and telling her she couldn’t wear a bra under her dress, because “there’s no underwear in space”:
“He says it with such conviction too! Like he had been to space and looked around and he didn’t see any bras or panties anywhere. He explained. ‘You go into space and you become weightless. Then your body expands but your bra doesn’t, so you get strangled by your own underwear.’ I think that this would make for a fantastic obituary. I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
In 2012, the former Pittsburg Steelers lineman Ralph Wenzel died from early-onset dementia. It was brought on by his severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a progressive brain disease triggered by repeated concussions. Earlier this year, the former NFL fullback Kevin Turner was diagnosed with CTE, too, after dying from the disease at age 46. Doctors thought Turner had ALS until they performed the autopsy.
In a 2015 study, researchers with the Department of Veterans Affairs and Boston University examined the brains of 91 former NFL players. They found 96 percent showed signs of CTE. Many players suffering the debilitating mental effects of CTE have committed suicide—Steelers offensive lineman Terry Long, Chargers safety Paul Oliver, and Eagles safety Andre Waters, to name a few.
Some former NFL players, like Eugene Monroe, argue that marijuana could combat the debilitating long-term health effects of repeated concussions. But while NFL team owners are beginning to talk about the need to reform their policy, smoking weed continues to be a punishable offense.
Now, a team of researchers at the University of Miami may be on to a less contentious solution—a treatment with the medicinal benefits of marijuana but none of the psychoactive kick.
The researchers recently began a five-year study aimed at creating a pill that athletes could take after a concussion to avert brain damage. They plan to develop this pill using cannabidiol and dexanabinol. Cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is one of the-113 plus chemical compounds found in cannabis known as cannabinoids. Dexanabinol is a synthetic cannabinoid. Current evidence suggests these two particular cannabinoids have the capability to disrupt the series of chemical reactions that follow a concussion and lead to brain-cell death. CBD activates receptors that trigger a cellular repair mechanism in the brain, while dexanabinol prevents calcium from accumulating in the cells and draining their energy.
“What that pill would do is stabilize the brain, so that when you get a head injury, there may only be a few brain cells that are injured to the point of no return,” says Michael Hoffer, a professor of otolaryngology at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who will conduct trials for the study. “There are a lot of brain cells at risk right around those cells. If we can stabilize those, we can prevent the dominos from falling.”
There is some evidence that this effect could be achieved simply by smoking marijuana, but the major benefit to working with isolated cannabinoids is that researchers can choose which compounds to use and which to exclude. With the cannabinoid THC absent, the concussion pill, which could be taken up to 24 hours after an injury, won’t get anyone high and presumably won’t inspire the institutional backlash of its leafy progenitor.
Stripped down to its cannabinoid components, marijuana has already made a powerful foray into the mainstream medical world. “We’re starting to learn more and more [about marijuana],” says Gillian Hotz, another researcher at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine who is working on the study. “It’s not [just] the guy who sits in the basement smoking a joint and playing video games anymore. We’re way past that.” Research suggests CBD may be effective for treating epilepsy and cancer. A few cannabinoid-based drugs, including nabilone and dronabinol, are commercially available for treating cancer side effects.
If the Miami team’s pill succeeds, the compound could become a neurological game changer. The Centers for Disease Control reports that about 1.28 million people suffer a concussion or other form of mild traumatic brain injury each year. And while professional football has grown notorious for its high concussion risk, the epidemic isn’t limited to the pros. From 2001 to 2005, 135,000 children ages 5 to 18 reported to the emergency room for concussions sustained while playing sports. While they are prevalent in football and boxing, concussions are common in sports ranging from basketball to hockey, with research suggesting female athletes actually experience them at a higher rate than males. Concussions are also widespread in the military, with 300,000 service members diagnosed between 2000 and 2015.
There is no prescription for concussions; the standard treatment is simply to rest until the symptoms fade. But the unseen damage from repeated concussions doesn’t really fade—and it can change the brain in ways that may take years to surface. For those unlucky enough to develop CTE, the brain gradually descends into a state of progressive degeneration associated with memory loss, impaired judgment, loss of impulse control, aggression, depression, suicidal thoughts, and—ultimately—dementia.
Despite the apparent need for research like theirs, the Miami research team has a challenging road ahead—starting with the legal hoops they must jump through to get the compounds they need. Marijuana, a schedule 1 drug, is notoriously difficult for researchers to obtain, and CBD is no easier. “As far as the DEA is concerned, they’re the same,” says Hoffer. “While almost all doctors have class 2 through 5 licenses, getting a class 1 addition to your license requires a lot of paperwork.”
When they begin clinical trials in about a year, the team will be stepping into relatively uncharted territory. Not only will this be the first large-scale study in the U.S. to look at cannabinoids as a treatment for concussions, it will be one of just a handful of concussion treatment studies currently underway.
“Designing treatments has not really taken off because, despite the fact that millions and millions of people are having concussions every year, we’ve just been behind the game,” says David Wright, a neurologist at the Emory University School of Medicine. Wright also studies traumatic brain injuries, although his work focuses on moderate to severe head trauma rather than concussions. In 2014, he led a study investigating the hormone progesterone’s effect on traumatic brain injuries. It proved unsuccessful despite promising preclinical trials.
“Right now, we’re all trying to better define the disease and figure out what in the world is going on,” he says.
One reason concussions are tricky to study is that they are difficult to define. There is no one characteristic doctors can use to diagnose a concussion beyond doubt. “It’s a clinical system, almost like a psychiatric disorder,” says Wright. “So there’s not currently a good marker.”
To deal with this, the Hoffer and his colleagues at the University of Miami will use I-Portal goggles, a device that measures eye movements to diagnose concussions with 95 percent specificity. The team tested the device with a 2014 grant from the NFL. Hoffer also says that each individual patient’s criteria will be clearly recorded, so that later on the researchers can see if all the patients with headaches, for example, respond differently from those with dizziness.
Another challenge will be figuring out how to measure whether patients’ brains are truly healing. “We don’t know what’s going on microscopically within their brain, but at least functionally their memory and things like that return back to normal [without treatment],” says Wright. The team plans to draw from peer-reviewed research to find measures that have proven successful in other studies.
Whatever the end result, Hotz believes the team’s quest for a concussion pill will be a meaningful step in traumatic brain-injury research, not to mention an imperative plunge into the medicinal components of one of the most hotly debated drugs in America. “Because cannabinoids and marijuana are getting such big press and usage now, I think somebody has to step out and start really doing the hard work, to really start looking at therapeutic windows, dosing, safety, and timing to make sure this is efficacious,” she says.
Prior to January 22, 1987, Associated Press photographers were given a choice of shooting B&W or color film on photo assignments. But on that day, something happened that caused AP photographers to switch to shooting every assignment in color: it was the suicide of American politician R. Budd Dwyer.
Warning: This post contains depictions and descriptions of graphic content.
Back on January 22, 1987, AP photographer Paul Vathis was assigned to cover a news conference held by R. Budd Dwyer at the Pennsylvania state capital, one day before Dwyer was scheduled to be sentenced for charges of bribery. During the middle of the conference, with photo and news cameras being pointed at him, Dwyer pulled out a .357 Magnum revolver, pointed it at the roof of his mouth, and killed himself.
A famous sequence of photos showing the suicide of R. Budd Dwyer, captured by AP photographer Paul Vathis.
Vathis and all the other news photographers in attendance had thought they were covering a routine news conference, so they had their cameras loaded with black-and-white film. Even though they had color film in their bags, the AP was instructing them at the time to save it for important assignments that could make the front page of a newspaper in color.
“[Vathis’s] choice of BW coverage was well justified,” Gardiner writes. “The rules were B&W for the ordinary assignment, like this news conference, and color for more important assignments that might play on a front page. Color for front pages. Black & white for inside pages.”
When it was discovered that day that Vathis only had B&W shots, the Associated Press immediately changed its policies. January 22, 1987, was the “last day that AP photographers were given the choice of shooting B&W or color film on an assignment,” Gardiner says. “The next day everyone shot color film, for everything.”
It can take years, even decades, for student loan borrowers to repay their debts. To that end, a new report has found that tens of thousands of older adults – including senior citizens – continue to be saddled with mountains of student debt later in life, often having their government benefits cut to repay the costs.
A new report [PDF] from the Government Accountability Office found that tens of thousands of senior Americans currently have their Social Security benefits garnished hundreds of dollars each month by the government in order to repay long-held, defaulted federal student loans.
Under current law, borrowers ages 50 years and older who have defaulted on their student loans are required to repay the debt with a portion of their Social Security benefits.
According to the report, in most cases this translates to about $140, or 15%, of their benefit payment being withheld for each garnishment.
As a result, in 2015 the Department of Education collected $4.5 billion on defaulted student loans, of which $171 million — or about 10% — was collected through Social Security garnishments, also known as offsets.
To make matters worse, the report found that for each time a borrower’s Social Security was offset, they were charged an offset fee of $15. Over the course of a year, borrowers paid $180 in fees.
Additionally, about 71% of the funds collected through offsets were applied to the fees and interest of the loan debt, while just 28% went to the loan balance. As a result, many debtors actually saw their loan balance increase rather than decrease over time.
Because most borrowers remained in default for more than five years after first having their benefits offset and with most borrowers living on a fixed income dependent on their benefits, the report found that after the garnishments thousands of older student debt holders are now living under the poverty level.
In fact, because the Social Security offset threshold has not been adjusted for increases in cost of living, the number of older American who have their benefits offset leading them to live below the poverty level has grown significantly in the last decade.
In 2004, about 8,300 borrowers 50 years or older received benefits below the poverty level. That figure increased to 67,300 in 2015.
While the report found that most borrowers have their benefits garnished for five years, it also notes that some debtors are able to have their debts forgiven because they are severely disabled.
According to the report, one-third of older borrowers were able to pay off their loans or cancel their debt by obtaining relief through a process known as a total and permanent disability (TPD) discharge, which is available to borrowers with a disability that is not expected to improve.
Despite this option, the GAO found that many borrowers are unable to receive discharges because requirements to do so — including the need for annual documentation — are not clearly and prominently stated. If annual documentation to verify income is not submitted, a loan initially approved for a TPD discharge can be reinstated and offsets resume.
As a result of the report, the GAO outlined several recommendations, including eliminating Social Security benefits garnishment to below the federal poverty line, as well as simplifying the paperwork for disabled Americans to discharge their student loan debt.
The GAO report was sent to the Senate Special Committee on Aging as a response to concerns over older borrower garnishments.
“This report shows us that seniors clearly aren’t immune to the student loan crisis — they’re deeply impacted by this issue to the point that it’s leaving many of them in a dire financial situation,” Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill — who serves on the Committee — said in a statement.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA) echoed McCaskill’s concerns, calling the offsets “predatory and counterproductive.”
This isn’t the first time that older Americans’ student loan debts have garnered concerns.
Last month, Pennsylvania legislators wrapped up a little gift for the state's law enforcement agencies: a bill that would have allowed agencies to withhold the names of officers involved in deployments of deadly force for at least 30 days. This was just the mandatory withholding window. The bill never stipulated a release date past that point, meaning "never" was also an acceptable time frame.
The normal concerns for "officer safety" were given as the reason for the new opacity. Rather than see disclosure as an essential part of maintaining healthy relationships with the communities they served, law enforcement agencies saw disclosure as just another way to hurt already very well-protected officers.
The DOJ itself -- often a defender of entrenched police culture -- recommended a 72-hour window for release of this information. State legislators, pushed by local police unions, felt constituents would be better served by being kept in the dark. Given the back-and-forth nature of public sentiment, it was unclear how Governor Tom Wolf would react to the passed proposal.
Fortunately, Governor Wolf has seen the bill for what it is: something that further distances police officers from the people they serve. In a letter [PDF] announcing his veto of the bill, Wolf points out the law would have done far more harm than good. (via PINAC)
Government works best when trust and openness exist between citizens and their government. I cannot agree to sign this bill, because it will enshrine into law a policy to withhold important information from the public.
The legislation as drafted would prevent the disclosure of a police officer's name in a situation where an officer takes the life of an unarmed person. These situations in particular -- when law enforcement uses deadly force -- demand utmost transparency, otherwise a harmful mistrust will grow between police officers and the communities they protect and serve. Transparency and accountability are required of all public employees, but this bill ignores the reality that a police officer is a public employee.
Wolf also points out that law enforcement agencies aren't being served by this bill either. The bill would make it illegal to release officers' names before thirty days have elapsed, even if individual agencies feel an earlier release would defuse tensions and/or protect uninvolved officers from being subjected to unfocused criticism or abuse.
The proponents of the bill have little concern for community relationships nor the well being of uninvolved officers. All they want to do is add more opacity to law enforcement and erect a stronger shield over some of the government's most problematic employees. Fortunately, the state's governor saw the damage the bill would create and refused to become part of the problem.
In most discussions around parking, it seems as if we are only given two options - we either provide parking on the street or provide ample parking on the destination's property. But, both can be impractical.
Parking is just transportation infrastructure. It is infrastructure because it provides two services: a parking space provides storage for our shiny metal transportation boxes, and a parking space is a point at which we switch modes - from driving to walking and vice versa (any driving trip is technically multi-modal if it starts and finishes with you walking to and from your car.) Parking is infrastructure just as much as traffic lights, bus stops, and train stations are.
On-street parking can be okay, especially on wide streets with too much space to know what to do with. On narrower streets, on street parking can get kind of crammed and I recommend against it, this is despite my affection for narrow streets (which I love.) I am also highly skeptical that on-street parking actually provides many parking spaces. In a fine-grained urban area, where businesses are perhaps 20 feet wide, you are looking at about 1 space per business.
Because of its low capacity but extreme convenience of being able to pull up right in front of a door, I would prefer if we treated all on-street parking spaces as loading bays - a spot for quickly running in to drop something off, or a spot for a van on moving day while you are actively loading things into it, rather than as a place to park a car while it sits there unused for several hours.
Cars lined up in front of stores in Hoboken, NJ. You can fit in perhaps one parking space per store. Ample room if treated as a loading bay, but certainly not enough to fill your business with visitors.
A townhome in Hoboken, NJ. Its character would be completely different if the ground level were a garage door.
The alternative to on-street parking is off-street parking. One version of this is to require every property owner to provide their own parking. Requiring land owners to provide parking is bad because we place the burden on property owners to provide enough parking spaces for a theoretical peak load - which is one of the least productive things you can do with urban land (both expensive and artificially spaces things out) and simply a waste of redundant space, and it massively affects the urban character - as every building would have a parking lot, ramp, garage door, or alley entrance somewhere along the street. All of this comes together and works against producing lovable, fine-grained urbanism.
If parking is simply transportation infrastructure, we should not expect there to be parking on-site at every property, just as we do not expect a bus stop in front of every property along every street, or a subway station under every block. I think we should think of parking in the same way we think of transit stations - simply points where we transfer between a vehicle and foot. When thinking of parking as communal infrastructure and not private property, it makes sense to think of each parking space as adding to the pool of parking in the area, rather than tied to a particular property. We can think of each of these “stations of parking” (be it a parking lot or a multistory parking garage) to have a walk shed similar to a transit station.
If it is too soon for your community to eliminate parking minimums, allowing the parking requirement to be satisfied within a walk shed (say 400 feet of the property) rather than onsite is an incremental change that would enable you to transition to communal parking, and allow infill development.
Woodstock, NY with parking pooled behind the main street. (Map)
I could imagine in a large urban area under optimal conditions - where on-street parking was treated as a loading bay (so there is always a spot for the delivery van, without letting people leave their car there for an hour), and property owners weren’t required to provide onsite parking - that we would have our “parking stations” distributed somewhat uniformly around so that there was a parking garage within the walk shed of any property - similar to the placement of transit stations.
Union City, NJ and West New York, NJ with possible “parking stations” (in red) and their walk sheds (in yellow), so that no point is more than 400 feet away from one. (Map)
I see advantages to this arrangement - not only does it relieve the burden of providing parking from each individual property owner, but it also relieves the burden on motorists from having to circle around looking for parking. Instead of circling around looking for a place to park, you would head straight to the nearest garage. (The best parking garages even allocate you a parking space when you enter, so you know exactly where to go.) In an ideal world, we would integrate the location of these parking garages into our GPS software - such as Google Maps (and perhaps the GPS software is even aware of the vacancy rate of the garages), so that when we request driving directions to a place it will give us directions to the nearest garage, with up to the last 400 feet done on foot.
Parking garages often get a bad reputation for being anti-urban, and that tends to be correct. The most important aspect of a building is how it interacts at street level - and many single-purpose parking garages interact very badly - blank walls, few entrances, not adding any destinations along the street - and this kills street life around them. It’s important to remember that parking is a non-place (infrastructure dedicated to ‘getting there’ rather than the stuff that is ‘there’ that people want to go.)
A bad parking garage in Hoboken, NJ that is one long blank wall.
But, I have seen many good examples of parking garages. Simply require the first level to add destinations to the street and the intrusion to the street be as minimal as possible. It’s not hard - make the first level into retail space, and make the ramp in and out of the garage be as small as possible. I have faith that it would be possible to retrofit the ground level of existing parking garages with a little creativity. Or, we could build garages today that can be retrofitted to other uses as mode shares and technology changes.
A parking garage in Adelaide with a department store on the first few levels.
By creating parking stations that are close to businesses and residences and reserving on-street parking as loading zones, we could eliminate the need for minimum parking requirements and make our towns stronger in the process.
A proposed design in Cambridge. Image: Kittelson and Associates via Boston Cyclists Union.
Michael Andersen blogs for The Green Lane Project, a PeopleForBikes program that helps U.S. cities build better bike lanes to create low-stress streets.
Wickedly good biking ideas continue to pop up in Massachusetts.
On Tuesday, the Boston Cyclists Union shared the inspiring back story behind a new concept for the long, complex seven-way intersection created by the acute crossing of Cambridge and Hampshire streets. Like a lot of good ideas in modern American bicycling history, it involves Anne Lusk, a Harvard public health professor who’s been a major brain behind the spread of protected bike lanes in the United States. Last summer she connected BCU with engineering firm Kittelson and Associates, and dominoes started falling:
In mid-September, Bike Union executive director Becca Wolfson and representatives of Kittelson met with City of Cambridge staff to present our findings regarding the feasibility of the peanut design and the conceptual rendering for it. The City had considered and rejected as infeasible a roundabout solution for Inman, but had not considered a peanut-style mini-roundabout. The staff were favorably impressed and have since indicated an interest in including this roundabout approach alongside the “Bends” solutions as the pubic process moves forward.
In his post, BCU writer Steven Bercu lists the various advantages of this design for people walking, biking and driving. Here are the benefits for bicycle travel:
Bicycles can move through the Square with minimal or no stopping and minimized deflection.
By elevating the cycle tracks and using European-style protected crossings, those traveling by bicycle will be much more visible to drivers; oblique or unexpected crossing angles are completely eliminated.
It gives Cambridge the chance to be a leader and innovator by installing a first-in-the-nation roundabout with protected bike lanes — something we have yet to see implemented in the U.S.!
That’s true: though the country has a handful of protected intersections, all use the right-angle design, usually with a stoplight, that’s standard in the U.S. (That’s likely to change soon with or without Cambridge, though — keep your eyes on Carmel, Indiana.)
Whether or not the “peanutabout” turns out to be right for this particular intersection, diagonal streets are common in U.S. cities. This looks like a tool that deserves to be on the country’s belt.
Tomi Lahren, the 24-year-old host of Tomi on the conservative cable network TheBlaze, feels like a pundit created by a computer algorithm, someone who primarily exists to say something provocative enough to jump to the top of a Facebook feed. She’s called the Black Lives Matter movement “the new KKK,” partly blamed the 2015 Chattanooga shootings on President Obama’s “Muslim sensitivity,” and declared Colin Kaepernick a “whiny, indulgent, attention-seeking cry-baby.” At a time when such charged political rhetoric feels increasingly like the norm, Lahren stands at one end of a widening gulf—which made her appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Wednesday night all the more fascinating.
In his first year at The Daily Show, Noah has struggled to distinguish himself in an outrage-driven late-night universe. He has sometimes seemed too flip about the failures of the country’s news media, something his predecessor Jon Stewart made a perennial target. Noah’s 26-minute conversation with Lahren, though, posted in its entirety online, set the kind of tone that Stewart frequently called for throughout his tenure. The segment never turned into a screaming match, but it also avoided platitudes and small-talk. Lahren was unapologetic about her online bombast and leaned into arguments that drew gasps and boos from Noah’s audience, but the host remained steadfastly evenhanded throughout. If Noah was looking for a specific episodethat would help him break out in his crowded field, he may have finally found it.
Lahren first made a name for herself in 2015 with her commentary on the Chattanooga shootings for the network OAN. At the age of 22, she seemed poised to become a star who could appeal to young conservatives online, the kind of firebrand who could stick out in a social-media feed. “I care that our commander-in-chief is more concerned with Muslim sensitivity than the honor and sacrifice made by these Marines,” she said. In the same segment, she also somehow implicated President Obama’s actions on issues like climate change and universal healthcare in an act committed by a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder who was seemingly radicalized by online propaganda.
“Why are you so angry?” Noah asked Lahren as she sat down, referring to the biting tone she often uses in her broadcast. He seemed to be getting at other questions, too:Does anger like Lahren’s, delivered in bite-size, shareable video clips eagerly devoured by a certain segment of the population, exist only to grab their attention? Is it a more extreme example of the “Samantha Bee problem” that Ross Douthat claimed hurt the Clinton campaign—that overt activism was getting injected into previously mainstream areas of the media like late-night comedy? Noah has largely steered clear of giving lectures straight to the camera, perhaps because hosts like Seth Meyers and John Oliver have staked out that territory so well. In talking with Lahren, he seemed interested in going a more conciliatory, diplomatic route.
Still, Noah wasn’t afraid to challenge his guest, including on her widely criticized comment that the Black Lives Matter movement was the “next KKK” because of some violent anti-police rhetoric from isolated members of the movement. “Just because you say the thing doesn’t mean that’s what it stands for,” Noah said exasperatedly. “You’ve argued on your show, just because Donald Trump has KKK supporters doesn’t mean he’s in the KKK.” Indeed, minutes later she angrily refuted the idea that she or Trump belonged to the white supremacist alt-right, just because that group supported him.
“Surely you understand the incendiary feeling of your comments, surely?” Noah pleaded. “It’s controversial, but I think there are some things that need to be said,” Lahren countered. Her point, it seems, is the foundation for so much in the factionalized world of social media-driven news. If something is controversial, is it defensible simply because it “needed” to be said? Her argument is rooted in the First Amendment, which Lahren kept referencing, but Noah remarked on some inconsistencies in her views on free speech. Lahren has criticized the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his kneeling protest during the national anthem—but Noah noted the parallels between Lahren’s professed right to criticize Kaepernick and Kaepernick’s right to not kneel.
Toward the end, Noah crystallized his point without having to yell it at the audience like some of his late-night peers: He tried to get a genuine answer from Lahren on a much more nuanced query relating to Kaepernick’s protest. “Here’s a black man who says, ‘I don’t know how to get this message across. If I march in the streets people say I’m a thug. If I go out and protest, people say it’s a riot. If I go down on one knee, it’s wrong,’” Noah said. “What is the right way, I’ve always wanted to know, what is the right way for a black person to get attention in America?” Lahren didn’t give a full answer, but Noah kept coming around to the same idea, trying to untangle the baffling contradictions he’s noticed in the country’s political discourse.
The interview was frustrating in that it produced few answers to the questions Noah and Lahren lobbed at each other. Every topic of conversation, from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform, ended with the pair politely agreeing to disagree. But in the wake of the 2016 election, even that bare minimum of respectful discourse stands out—as Lahren later said on Twitter, neither side resorted to name-calling, but on social media afterward, the personal insults began flying between each of their supporters. Noah’s approach was memorable both for how measured it felt and for how quickly it moved to more complicated topics. Even if the interview didn’t find much common ground, it was an encouraging, intelligent step forward for Noah as he charts a course for his show in the coming year.
Finding Jesus can feel a lot like falling in love, winning an award or getting high because all of these events activate the same reward circuits in the brain, according to a new study from the University of Utah. Researchers studied fMRI scans of 19...
Want to make a crosswalk that’s incredibly clear to drivers without the use distracting, flashing lights? Walk on over to Eerbeek in the Netherlands, which claims to have rolled out the first crosswalk in the world that glows like the keys to a giant piano.
The six-striped pathway, located on a village street in a shopping district, relies on energy-efficient LEDs to brightly illuminate a pedestrian crossing. It was gifted to the village by Lighted Zebra Crossing B.V., a Netherlands-based tech company. The fiery crosswalk is meant to alert drivers to its presence, as well as illuminate walkers who might otherwise be obscured by darkness. (A nice but not-mentioned benefit: Giving cyclists with poor/nonexistent lights advance warning of the crossing.)
The municipality of Brummen explained its thinking in a press release (via a slightly edited Google translation):
Director Henk Peters says: “The idea behind this lighted crosswalk was born from our mission that pedestrians should be able to safely make it across crosswalks. Because of the poor visibility of pedestrians on traditional zebra crossings (in darkness or bad weather situations) accidents take place daily, globally, unfortunately often with fatal consequences....
“We are therefore extremely proud that we bring the lighted crosswalk to the market after a long and intensive period of product development and field testing.” An illuminated pedestrian crossing is applicable everywhere, but certainly in risk areas such as near schools, shops, or residential centers for the elderly this application offers users a high degree of safety.
Because all infrastructure nowadays must be smart, the crosswalk also includes sensors for registering the number of passing vehicles and pedestrians, as well as vehicle speed and load. Here’s another view:
Q. Are solar panels better or worse for the environment when I live in a state with utilities that already come mostly from renewables? I understand there are lots of rare metals in them and I just got done reading How Bad Are Bananas, which seemed to indicate it’s a bad choice due to their total carbon footprint.
Christy C. Vashon, WA
A. Dearest Christy,
My apologies to the Bard, but your question has me pacing the floor and muttering soliloquies: “To go solar or not to go solar? Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to capture one’s own sunlight or to tap one’s utility’s renewable power sources …” I’ve half a mind to spend my free time this winter writing up a modern theatrical adaptation in which Hamlet agonizes over an electricity upgrade to the Danish castle.
All this drama comes, as you note, from the fact that solar panels, for all their sustainability cred, do have their own environmental impact. But then again, so does hydropower — another clean energy source, and a large chunk of Washington state’s power mix. Both have a big edge over fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas. But which wins in a head-to-head smackdown?
First, let’s take a closer look at the options. Solar panels, once installed, happily churn out carbon-free electricity. But it’s true that building them involves potentially problematic mining for silicon, then the use of toxic chemicals, energy, and water. On the plus side, some panels are greener than others: Models built in Europe have half the carbon footprint of their Chinese counterparts. And they’re very long-lasting (25 years or more), which helps spread that impact thin over the life of the system.
Then we have hydropower, also in the carbon-free club when up and running. But we shouldn’t forget that building dams has a big effect on the surrounding area, from flooding habitat (for people and wildlife) to changing the health of the river’s ecosystem to the carbon emissions from constructing the thing in the first place. On the plus side, some number crunchers give hydro the edge in total life cycle emissions. According to a 2014 IPCC report, median lifetime emissions for hydro are 24 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour of power, while rooftop solar panels’ are 41 (to compare, coal gets a big, nasty 820).
So which is the best way to keep those lights turned on, Christy? In environmental matters like this — unlike in wrestling matches or The Voice sing-offs — there’s not always a clear-cut winner. But I took your question to several experts, and while the general response was a bit murky, it leans toward Team Solar.
For one thing, even though Washington is a big hydropower state, it still relies on some fossil fuels (as does every other state). By going your own sunny way, you can be sure the power you’re using is clean. What’s more, you might be greening up the entire region’s power supply by spinning sunlight into power at home.
“[If you install solar panels], there’s the possibility that that hydropower would be exported to another state and reduce use of a coal plant,” notes Sarah Kurtz, a principal scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. That’s because using your own solar power would reduce the demand on the energy grid, freeing up those electrons to serve elsewhere.
“There’s still a lot of room to reduce emissions from a regional perspective, even if you’re in a hydro-dominated utility yourself,” agrees Cameron Yourkowski, senior policy manager at the nonprofit Renewable Northwest. Because hydropower is very likely to be cheaper than dirty energy, it will displace another utility’s fossil fuel sources when it enters the open market, he says. Not only that, but generating your own juice close to home eliminates the energy losses that inevitably come from transmitting power long distances.
Patrick Nugent, coordinator for the nonprofit (and decidedly pro-solar) Solar Washington, added one more perk: “The sun will stick around predictably for over the next thousands (or millions) of years. Not only is there collateral damage with hydro (i.e., affected salmon runs), but it might be harder for utilities to predict snowpack and rainfall amounts given the unpredictability of climate change.”
Let me pipe in with a few more Yay! Solar points: Rooftop panels can make you money through net metering, in which you can sell your excess power back to your utility (thereby cleaning up the overall energy mix for everyone, by the way). And they boost the value of your home, to the tune of $15,000 or more. There is an upfront cost to installing a system, but these bonuses, plus any tax credits you may qualify for, help ease the sting until your panels pay themselves off.
It’s true — your home base puts you in a good place for energy. But let this be a reminder to us all that we can always do better. And on that note, there’s a script I really should be working on …
“The opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself,” wrote the celebrated Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu. As Americans go to the polls today, what does it say about Donald Trump that the country’s greatest enemies—including the Islamic State, Iran, Russia, and North Korea—have all endorsed him?
In his three decades as Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has never said anything positive about an American politician. Yet in a recent speech commemorating the anniversary of the taking of the U.S. embassy hostage in 1979, in which he called Americans “liars, deceitful, untrustworthy and back-stabbing,” Khamenei defended Trump against charges of populism, lauding him for being open and candid about America’s rampant poverty, racism, and moral depravity.
Khamenei has said for decades that Americans live in a rigged political system “under Zionist custody”; not only does Donald Trump regularly corroborate Khamenei’s conspiratorial worldview, his most vociferous supporters share Khamenei’s anti-Semitism. “When you say, “Death to America,” Khamenei assuredly concluded to his audience, “I agree with this and I do not have any objections to it.”
While Trump lacks bipartisan support at home, he has not only the support of the Shia Iran but the Sunni ISIS. In August, an article in Foreign Affairs noted that an ISIS spokesman wrote on an ISIS social media channel, “I ask Allah to deliver America to Trump.” ISIS’s logic is simple: It believes that Trump’s erratic leadership will weaken America, and his abrasive style will alienate the Muslim world, in turn bolstering its efforts to recruit jihadists worldwide. In the words of a recent ISIS defector, “We were happy when Trump said bad things about Muslims because he makes it very clear that there are two teams in this battle: The Islamic team and the anti-Islamic team.”
Trump’s most well-documented foreign enthusiast is Vladimir Putin, whom he has implied is a stronger leader than Obama. Putin has reciprocated, calling Trump “lively” and “talented” and “the absolute leader in the presidential race.” Former CIA chief Mike Morell called Trump an “unwitting agent” of Putin, and 17 U.S. intelligence agencies believe that Russian cyber hackers have attempted to tilt the election in Trump’s direction. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Americans hoped Russia could emerge as an economically prosperous, socially tolerant democracy. Putin not only helped thwart attempts to make Russia more like America, but he found in Trump an opportunity to make America more like Russia.
Further east, Trump’s criticism of long-time allies such as South Korea as “free-riders” and his laissez-faire approach toward nuclear weapons have also won him praise in Pyongyang. In response to Trump’s threats to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, DPRK Today, an official North Korean news outlet, deemed Trump “wise” and “far-sighted” (in contrast to “thick-headed Hillary” Clinton).
The list of authoritarians hoping for a Trump victory goes far beyond Russia, Iran, ISIS, and North Korea. Budding authoritarians in Europe have commended his opposition to Muslim immigration, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who calls migrants “poison” and Trump “valiant.” Prominent China scholars believe Beijing prefers Trump, given his authoritarian tendencies—reminiscent of Mao Zedong—and lack of interest in human rights.
Yet one of paradoxes of the 2016 elections is that while foreign despots are most keen to see Trump elected, among those most intent on stopping him are U.S. immigrants who’ve lived under authoritarian rule. For those who’ve witnessed dictators using intimidation, misogyny, racism, and religious bigotry to divide and rule, the freedoms provided in America are not merely abstract slogans.
Most notable has been Khizr Khan, the Pakistani immigrant, Gold Star-father of the late Captain Humayan Khan, who carries a pocket constitution with him and frequently gifts them to visitors at his home. A former Army ROTC commander who knows Khan well said he was “the most patriotic person I’ve ever met,” given his “complete understanding of what liberty and democracy mean.” As Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban immigrants and himself a Trump supporter, put it, “We focus so much on how immigrants can change America that we forget that America has always changed immigrants even more.”
Those who’ve come to America from nations sometimes thought culturally or religiously incompatible with democracy have thrived in America’s democracy. Iranians who fled their country’s 1979 Islamist revolution have become the second-most successful immigrant group in the United States, based on income and education. One Iranian friend whose family escaped execution in Iran for belonging to the Baha’i faith put it simply: “America treated us so much better than our own country treated us.”
This engenders a deep, loyal appreciation to the country that embraced them. In the words of Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who became one of the great philanthropists in American history, “There is no class so intensely patriotic, so wildly devoted to the Republic as the naturalized citizen and his child, for little does the native-born citizen know of the value of rights which have never been denied.”
It is often said that one way to measure a nation is by looking at how many people want in, and how many people want out. While foreign autocrats have enjoyed watching the most sordid presidential election in America’s contemporary history, they must also know that, if given the chance, many of their best minds would eagerly trade their own passport for an American one. For centuries, this simple truth has allowed America to constantly advance its leading educational, cultural, medical, technological, and commercial institutions, and continuously rejuvenate it democratic project.
The 14th-century North African philosopher Ibn Khaldun famously observed that empires are built and destroyed over the course of three generations. The first-generation founders are hungry, determined, and vigilant. The second generation inherits and manages what they witnessed the first generation build. By the third generation, the ruling elite are self-entitled, palace-reared elites who had no reason to develop the grit necessary to maintain what their grandparents built.
Donald Trump is a third-generation American who never experienced life without freedom and privilege, running on a campaign projecting power rather than principles. Despite the best intentions of his authoritarian supporters overseas, his path to power will be thwarted in no small part by deeply patriotic new Americans determined to protect the values that brought them to this country.
In an advisory vote Tuesday, the people of Washington, D.C. will decide whether to drop the name New Columbia from their statehood push. Their new idea, as proposed by the Washington, DC council: to name themselves the State of Washington, DC.
Two Washington states! The other Washington is trying to rob us of our name, some say. Evan Bush writing in the Seattle Times said “you can’t steal our statehood name, add a few letters and expect us to just sit back and enjoy the sea breeze while sipping on lattes and wearing flannel.”
I say, let them have it. We can do better.
First, from the very beginning, Congress has made a hash of avoiding confusion between the two entities. That mess still exists more than 160 years later.
The people of what became Washington state wanted to name their new territory Columbia. That was meant to distinguish us from Oregon and to honor the great river that made our economy and defined a border—and, indirectly, it honored the guy credited with “discovering America.” Folks in D.C. objected. They believed that if they named the new territory Columbia, people would confuse it with the nation’s seat of government, the District of Columbia, that odd chunk of federal swampland that was neither state nor territory.
Wanting to honor the nation’s first president, Washington was proposed by a slave-owning, border-state Congressman (and later Confederate leader). This would avoid confusion with Washington, DC it was argued. Thus, Columbia was stricken from the territorial act. In the Senate, Stephen A. Douglas tried to soften the name by proposing Washingtonia, but that failed. Washington it was, and it remains. But it has proven ever since to be confusing. People here simply refer to DC as “the other Washington.”
In the current flurry of renaming things, some have questioned whether naming things after George Washington is appropriate in general, due to his past as a slaveowner. Though if anywhere ought to be named Washington, the city that hosts the nation’s capitol seems most appropriate.
Interestingly, DC is wrestling with some of the same questions that were troublesome in the 1850s. Citizens there will be voting on a statehood measure and a draft state constitution for DC has been written. Up until October, the name of the proposed state was New Columbia—not particularly popular in DC, but a placeholder. It has been ditched, however.
On October 18, the council changed the designation of DC from District of Columbia to Douglass Commonwealth, named after the incomparable Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, social reformer, and DC resident. Thus, the new state’s official name would become “the State of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” Kind of a mouthful.
I think DC should be a state. I think the name Washington should be theirs — the city has had that name for over 200 years, long before Lewis & Clark ever got to the mouth of the Columbia. I don’t think sharing the name is a great idea: West Washington State and East Washington State — separated by thousands of miles, we’re not going to be like the Carolinas.
They were first, Congress made a mistake, let’s take the chance. I think we should seize the opportunity for re-branding.
We could do with a new flag, a new song, a new face even. Washington’s portrait on the seal is basically just what we see everyday on a dollar bill.
A few suggestions come immediately to mind, to start the conversation.
We could go back to Columbia, but since our major cities have been switching Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, the name carries a lot of baggage. It would also connect us to our northern neighbor: British Columbia. We lose the opportunity to be more original.
Cascadia is a name that reflects the bio-region and suggests the hint of possible secession as part of a new entity in the Pacific Northwest that could include other Northwestern states and provinces., It is also gives tribute to a defining feature of the state (and region, from BC to California), the Cascade range. Cascadia also already has a flag featuring blue, white and green with a Douglas fir in the middle. Nothing says independence like “Old Doug.”
Ecotopia might also be available. Washington state was once a part of the imaginary West Coast republic of eco-conscious utopians conceived by author Ernest Callenbach in the 1970s. Author Joel Garreau gave the Northwest lands adjoining the Pacific Coast that name in his book 1990s book, “Nine Nations of North America.” It’s a bit dated, but carries an aspirational flair.
There’s also the possibility of adapting the state’s moniker, “the Evergreen State,” and simply being the state of Evergreen. That presents some challenges, including confusing the state with our hippie college. And do you change the name of the University of Washington to the University of Evergreen? Confusion in academia would abound.
We could go back to earlier names for the general area. Sir Francis Drake visited the region in 1579 to help establish claims of the British Empire, then newly conceived by Queen Elizabeth I’s mage, John Dee. Nova or New Albion, he called the West Coast. That name is probably too “white,” literally. Still, it has a kind of mystical resonance that suggests a distant Camelot.
Given the growth in the Hispanic population in the state and national demographic shifts, another colonial name to kick around like New Albion would be Spain’s name for the Northwest: Nueva Galicia.
Another possibility suggested by a Twitter follower: Tahoma. This would solve a couple of problems. It would recognize the region’s indigenous peoples. It would resolve the occasional eruptions of more than a century over whether we should rename Mt. Rainier to Mt. Tahoma or Mt. Tacoma.
Rainier was named for an officer in the British navy who opposed the United States during the Revolutionary war. In other words, an enemy of George Washington. Tahoma, thought to be a native term for the mountain, also names the one distinctive landmark that can be observed from both sides of the state (that, by the way, is why it is featured on the license plates). If not Tahoma, I am sure the tribes could come up with a suitable Native American name.
Re-branding is always tricky (New Coke!), and this would come with a lot of public process and Congressional meddling. But we never really wanted our current name to begin with, accepting it because territorial status and later statehood were too important to derail over a name.
Today, stepping aside and helping DC forge a new identity would be a good thing. We can rise to the challenge of finding a fresh name that better reflects who we are today, not who a bunch of politicians wanted us to be more than a century ago.
In the last 10 days or so, James Comey sent two letters to Congress -- the first one notifying Congress of some new information in an "unrelated" investigation that may pertain to Hillary Clinton's emails. And then the one from yesterday admitting that there was nothing important in those emails. That was effectively all that Comey said officially. Yet, in between all of that a ton of information leaked from the FBI about the investigation. We learned what it pertained to (the Anthony Weiner investigation), heard estimates of the number of emails involved, heard that the FBI found them weeks ago but only told Comey right before he sent the letter, that the FBI didn't have a warrant to read the emails -- and then that it did, and that a whole bunch of people inside both the FBI and DOJ have opinions on both sides of this whole mess.
Basically, the FBI (and the DOJ) were leaking information like it was the last chance they'd ever have to leak information and their lives depended on who could leak the most.
And, remember, this is the same damn agency that is so insistent on forcing tech companies to put backdoors into any encryption to make sure the FBI can get into anything it wants. Yet, they can't keep the basic details of an investigation secret? And then they expect everyone to just accept it when they say that we can trust them to keep backdoors secret and to only use them appropriately? That seems like a huge leap of faith for a government bureau that has done almost nothing to deserve that kind of support.
The next time (and it's coming...) the FBI starts talking about "Going Dark" and how it needs to break basic technology tools, perhaps stand up and remind people that this is an organization that can't keep its own secrets very well. Perhaps we shouldn't trust it with all of our secrets as well.
In the past couple decades, scientists have been slowly moving toward developing birth control for men. A recent clinical trial of an injectable hormone contraceptive for men showed super promising results: It was 96 percent effective at preventing pregnancy, which it did by lowering sperm counts. Unfortunately, the trial was discontinued early by an independent committee, which determined that the side effects were such that “the risks to the study participants outweighed the potential benefits.”
The side effects in question? “Mood changes, depression, pain at the injection site, and increased libido.”
Hm. Hmmmmmmmm. Hm. Let’s review some of the possible side effects of currently available birth-control options for women, shall we? Here’s just a sampling.
Minastrin 24 FE, a low-hormone birth control pill: Headaches, nausea, menstrual cramps, yeast infections, breast tenderness, acne, mood swings, and weight gain.
NuvaRing, a hormonal vaginal ring: Vaginal-tissue irritation, headaches, mood changes, nausea and vomiting, weight gain, breast pain, painful menstruation, abdominal pain, acne, and decreased libido.
The Mirena Intrauterine Device: pelvic or abdominal pain, ovarian cysts, headaches and migraines, acne, depressed mood, “heavy or prolonged menstrual bleeding.”
IUDs can also cause sepsis or perforate the uterus. This is very rare, but still: perforate theuterus.
All of these are FDA-approved contraceptives that are currently on the market and in women’s bodies, and their side effects are just as bad as those that occurred with the injectable male birth control. Nobody halted them in their tracks, saying that perhaps the risks outweighed the benefits. (Women may well decide that for themselves, though; one study found that nearly 40 percent of women stop using the pill within a year of starting it.)
What’s more, we’re learning more about just how serious the side effects of hormonal birth control may be. A recent study of more than a million women published in JAMA Psychiatry found that women who used hormonal birth control were more likely to be prescribed antidepressants. The study’s design has received some criticism, but it nonetheless underscores that for some women, there are tradeoffs between their reproductive freedom and their mental and emotional health.
Not so for men. Though men have an equal responsibility to prevent unwanted pregnancies, they don’t share equally in the consequences, and never have. The burden of birth control has always fallen largely on women’s shoulders; it is their bodies that will bear the consequences if birth control fails. The only currently available birth-control method for men—short of a vasectomy—is a condom. So a man can either wrap it up, or let the lady handle it. And because condoms are significantly less effective than IUDs, implants, contraceptive pills, and rings, it stands to reason that many will choose the surer thing.
Early versions of the hormonal birth-control pill had tons of side effects, enough that, in a trial done in Puerto Rico in the 1950s, the doctor in charge of the trial recommended against its use. However, as Bethy Squires recently reported in a history of birth control side effects for Broadly, a U.S. pharmaceutical company released the same formulation anyway. (Current formulations use far less hormones, but as we’ve seen, still have side effects.) The Broadly piece also notes that the same group of doctors that studied the female pill originally considered one for men, but testicle shrinkage, among other side effects, led them to abandon it. “It was believed women would tolerate side effects better than men, who demanded a better quality of life,” Squires writes.
The crazy thing is that in this recent study, most men wanted to continue using the injectable birth control—more than 80 percent of them said they would choose to use it. So if men in the past demanded a side-effect-free life, it seems these days many are at least open to taking on the responsibility of birth control themselves. Perhaps the hurdle that remains is that male birth control is unlikely to substantially improve a man’s quality of life. He can already avoid unwanted pregnancies if his partner is on birth control; with his own he’d get the same advantages, except now he might have mood swings. But for women, birth control has been revolutionary. One-third of women’s wage gains since the 1960s can be attributed to the availability of oral contraceptives, according to a report by Planned Parenthood. College enrollment has historically been higher among women who have access to the pill, and “birth control has been estimated to account for more than 30 percent of the increase in the proportion of women in skilled careers from 1970 to 1990,” the report reads. Not to mention that 86 percent of the declining teen-pregnancy rate in the U.S. is thanks to contraception.
So it makes perfect sense that women would be willing to endure all kinds of side effects in exchange for, essentially, freedom. Being able to control whether and when they become pregnant has opened up so many opportunities for women, opportunities that men already had greater access to by virtue of being men. Men’s careers, men’s bodies, men’s control over their own lives, have never been at stake in the same way.
I wasn’t in the room when the independent panel decided to halt the recent male birth control trial. I don’t know what their decision-making process was like. Certainly, depression and mood changes aren’t things to be taken lightly, and of course it’s in everyone’s best interest to have new drugs be as safe as possible.
However. In the male birth control trial, 4.7 percent of men experienced mood swings, and 2.8 percent experienced depression. These were two of the side effects cited as reasons for ending the trial. On the other hand, let’s take Liletta, an IUD approved by the FDA in 2015—5.2 percent of its users experienced mood swings, and 5.4 percent experienced depression. A woman using Liletta has a higher chance of experiencing the same side effects than a man using the injectable birth control that was deemed too risky. The standards are different.
In 2007, the pharmaceutical company Bayer gave up on a male contraceptive “that involved an annual implant and a quarterly injection,” as my colleague Olga Khazan reported in 2015. The company, she wrote, “concluded that men would consider the regimen—in the words of a spokesperson—‘not as convenient as a woman taking a pill once a day.’”
Well, yes. That is far more convenient—for the men. Women will put up with it, of course, as they have for years, because the stakes are that high. And as research into male birth control accelerates, we are starting to see this hypocrisy more clearly—that the burdens women bear in exchange for their reproductive freedom are considered too much to expect men to deal with.
Finding Jesus can feel a lot like falling in love, winning an award or getting high because all of these events activate the same reward circuits in the brain, according to a new study from the University of Utah. Researchers studied fMRI scans of 19...
