The map elegantly displays 31 freeways, 75 interchanges, and more than 850 exits on one poster.
Dunn has worked nights and weekends on the map since January, fitting it in around his full-time job as an urban planner. “If I’d known ahead of time the real size of the freeway system in L.A., I would have picked something different,” he says. “It’s a tedious hobby. It’s like knitting.”
It’s also a sort of fantasy map for transit geeks — this is what Los Angeles’ public transit might look like if the city had a healthy system of subways, or rapid-transit bus lanes, or trolleys. We know it’s not going to happen, but we can’t help but keep California dreaming about jumping on the Hollywood Red Line from Silver Lake to downtown L.A.
Here is some major justification for parents who think sending their kids out to play in the dirt will make them hardier: Scientists have discovered a microorganism in the mud of the California coast that might be able to help fight anthrax and antibiotic-resistant staph infections.
The BBC reports that from the microorganism, scientists extracted “a completely new and unusual antibiotic compound.” Its structure is “unlike any previously reported natural antibiotic.” Which is a pretty big deal:
Leader of the team of researchers, William Fenical, commented: “The real importance of this work is that anthracimycin has a new and unique chemical structure. The discovery of truly new chemical compounds is quite rare.”
It’s not totally clear that this compound can save us from ourselves and the drug bacteria we’ve created … but it could. Initial testing has shown that these new anthracimycin are just raring to beat up anthrax bacteria. So, there you have it: Playing in the mud will save us all.
Down's syndrome happens when a human being ends up with an extra copy of chromosome 21 — three copies, instead of the normal two. But scientists say they might have found a way to make that extra chromosome functionally irrelevant. If they're right, it could lead to treatments that could someday reduce the symptoms of Down's. The trick is connected to another extra chromosome that the human body "turns off" all the time — the X. Women have two X chromosomes, of course, but only one ever gets to express itself. Scientists put the same mechanism to use on chromosome 21 in petri dish experiments.
If you look at the last 13 decades, the past three have been the warmest — and increasingly so. But those are just words. Check out this graph unearthed by Ezra Klein on the Washington Post:
Pretty hard to argue with that, right? Mostly because that’s a graph and graphs don’t talk. But yeah, the data are pretty compelling too. As Klein points out, 2012 was the ninth-warmest year ever recorded — but that could always be a fluke, since average temperature tends to fluctuate year by year. Once you collect the temperature data into decade-long chunks, though, it’s clear that these record-setting years aren’t outliers but indicators of a stark overall trend.
The graph is from a recent report by the World Meteorological Association, which notes:
The period 2000-2010 was the warmest decade on record since modern meteorological records began around 1850.
Blah blah normal fluctuations, you say your coworker Perry says?
The Earth’s climate fluctuates over seasons, decades and centuries in response to both natural and human variables…
The rapid changes that have occurred since the middle of the past century, however, have been caused largely by humanity’s emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Other human activities also affect the climate system, including emissions of pollutants and other aerosols, and changes to the land surface, such as urbanization and deforestation.
Industry groups are suing the U.S. government because they don’t want to have to tell you the origins of your meat.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture implemented new rules in May that require packages of meat to be sold with labels that identify the country in which the animal was born, raised, and slaughtered. The rules also outlaw the mixing of cuts of meat from different countries in the same package. That pleased food-safety advocates, environmentalists, and some farmers.
But it angered large meat importers and producers and grocery chains. On Tuesday, some of those groups announced they were suing to have the rules overturned. From the AP:
The American Meat Institute, a trade group for packers, processors, and suppliers, and seven other groups said segregating the meat is not part of the law Congress passed and the USDA is overstepping its authority. They also claim the rule will be costly to implement and that it offers no food safety or public health benefit.
“Segregating and tracking animals according to the countries where production steps occurred and detailing that information on a label may be a bureaucrat’s paperwork fantasy, but the labels that result will serve only to confuse consumers, raise the prices they pay, and put some producers and meat and poultry companies out of business in the process,” Mark Dopp, an AMI executive, said in a statement.
The USDA says the country of original labeling, known as COOL, will help consumers make informed decisions about the food they buy. …
Other advocates of the new rule say segregating meat will help if a food safety issue develops.
So enjoy knowing where your grocery-story beef comes from, while you can. It might soon return to being mystery meat.
This is so interesting!!! I love when my love of psychology and gaming combine!
Ramin Shokrizade's "Top F2P Monetization Tricks" shows how the free-to-play world deploys practical behavioral economics to convince players to spend more than they intend to, adapting to players to hook them and then pry open their wallets wider and wider. I was very interested to learn that some games look for behaviors that mark out "spenders" and convert themselves from "skill games" (win by being good at them) to "money games" (win only by spending):
A game of skill is one where your ability to make sound decisions primarily determines your success. A money game is one where your ability to spend money is the primary determinant of your success. Consumers far prefer skill games to money games, for obvious reasons. A key skill in deploying a coercive monetization model is to disguise your money game as a skill game.
King.com's Candy Crush Saga is designed masterfully in this regard. Early game play maps can be completed by almost anyone without spending money, and they slowly increase in difficulty. This presents a challenge to the skills of the player, making them feel good when they advance due to their abilities. Once the consumer has been marked as a spender (more on this later) the game difficulty ramps up massively, shifting the game from a skill game to a money game as progression becomes more dependent on the use of premium boosts than on player skills.
If the shift from skill game to money game is done in a subtle enough manner, the brain of the consumer has a hard time realizing that the rules of the game have changed. If done artfully, the consumer will increasingly spend under the assumption that they are still playing a skill game and “just need a bit of help”. This ends up also being a form of discriminatory pricing as the costs just keep going up until the consumer realizes they are playing a money game.
NPR’s Science Friday hosted a discussion last week with Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center, about how cities can adapt to hotter temperatures and other climate impacts like floods and rising sea levels. Here’s Arroyo:
… the thing to keep in mind is that this infrastructure is built for the past conditions in our local area. So, it’s not to say that we can’t change our infrastructure with climate change in mind, whether it be climate change impacts along the coast, like storm surge or sea level rise, but it’s obviously going to take time and it’s going to take money.
Arroyo and host Ira Flatow talked about some of the solutions cities are considering or already implementing to make their systems more resilient. The simplest and most obvious one: locating backup generators above ground level so flooding won’t render them useless. (Arroyo also points out the irony that backup generators are powered by fossil fuels.) Utilities have started to build power lines with shorter, squatter telephone poles less likely to be felled in a windstorm; D.C. is even beginning a project to bury its power lines underground, although that approach doesn’t make as much sense for flood-prone areas. A caller named Jim from St. George, Utah, talks about how reflective building materials enhance the urban heat island effect. D.C. is also helping property owners install green roofs with the revenue from a plastic-bag fee.
In terms of preventing the kind of massive system failure that, after Hurricane Sandy, stranded folks in high-rise apartment buildings without heat or electricity for over a week, Arroyo points to distributed power and smart grids as a solution, and also notes that having a fleet of vehicles not powered by oil comes in handy in a disaster situation:
Smart Grid, which we often think about [as necessary] for distributed generation and renewable power to come online, can also be an important solution when it comes to some of these extreme weather events because you can actually cut off the power of the system that’s down and you can reroute power, especially to the places like hospitals and schools that you need to [restore power to] right away. And we also saw after Superstorm Sandy that some of the clean fuel vehicles — the natural-gas trucks in Long Island, for example — were able to remove debris when everybody recalls there were those long lines for weeks at a time for regular gasoline and diesel.
But as Arroyo noted above, the problem with such large-scale solutions is — you guessed it — money. Government at every level, reluctant to push for any project that would incur more debt, is holding off on crucial infrastructure upgrades. But as a New York Times guest columnist points out, the future cost of not making these improvements is far greater:
A prudent investment is one whose future returns exceed its costs — including interest cost if the money is borrowed. Opportunities meeting that standard abound in the infrastructure domain. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the nation has a backlog of some $3.6 trillion in overdue infrastructure maintenance. …
Austerity advocates object that more deficit spending now will burden our grandchildren with crushing debt. That might be true if the proposal were to build bigger houses and stage more lavish parties with borrowed money — as Americans, in fact, were doing in the first half of the last decade. But the objection makes no sense when applied to long-overdue infrastructure repairs. A failure to undertake that spending will gratuitously burden our grandchildren. …
Now austerity backers urge — preposterously — that infrastructure repairs be postponed until government budgets are in balance. But would they also tell an indebted family to postpone fixing a leaky roof until it paid off all its debts? Not only would the repair grow more costly with the delay, but the water damage would mount in the interim. Families should pay off debts, yes, but not in ways that actually increase their indebtedness in the longer term. The logic is the same for infrastructure.
While we’re waiting for lawmakers to figure out that infrastructure improvements — which also create jobs, by the way — are a worthy investment, here’s a sobering reminder from Arroyo of just how crucial an organized government response is in a disaster situation:
I mean, how many of us have provisions if we have an extreme storm event that puts out power for a few days to be able to, you know, have the food and the water that we need, to be able to have a backup if, you know, we’re only on cell phones and those go down. How do we communicate with people? I mean, people really do need to make plans for this at every level of government in our society.
The greatest increase occurs between eight and nine in the morning, when [New York City]’s output swells from 70 million to 150 million gallons per day. This is known as the big flush. Now it was eleven A.M., and in a few hours the circadian flow of biology en masse would begin to diminish, eventually bottoming out around four in the morning, at 68 million gallons per day. The rhythm is as steady as the tides. “The Super Bowl halftime surge is a myth,” said Askew.
Normally, all this happens in secret. But, in a bid to help educate citizens about the resources they use, the city of Oberlin, Ohio, is showing and telling, with a dashboard that shows outputs of infrastructure like the city’s freshwater treatment plant and power plant. And, yes, the big flush. PRI’s Living on Earth reports:
Clicking over to the water dashboard, the site presents information about water use, waste water processing and even the storage level of a local reservoir.
“If you look at that in the morning, you’re going to see high use because people are taking showers. There are times of day when our little bit of light industry within Oberlin is going to be using more water,” [project developer Jon] Petersen said.
It’s all pretty mesmerizing. Especially how the accompanying animated fish gets ever more pathetic the more water the city uses. It’s enough to have the city’s entire population of children — the tool’s been popular with kids — chastising their parents for their too-long morning showers and advocating a household-wide “if it’s yellow, let it mellow” policy. Then again, it’s Oberlin, so the kids were probably doing that already.
“In Japan, Twitter users are snapping photos of cats spotted in and around convenience stores. It’s more common than you’d think. And surprisingly, these kitties are mostly left to their own devices. The takeaway? There’s just something about … convenience stores.”
Well, this isn’t convenient, at all.
“…Or maybe Japanese cats are lurking around trying to snag a good deal.” -Mashable
Space shuttle Atlantis launches for the STS-135 mission to the International Space Station in the final mission of the Space Shuttle Program at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Liftoff was at 11:29 a.m. (EDT) on July 8, 2011. Onboard were NASA astronauts Chris Ferguson, STS-135 commander; Doug Hurley, pilot; Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim, both mission specialists. Photo credit: NASA Photo/Houston Chronicle, Smiley N. Pool
Space fans around the world today mark a bittersweet milestone: two years since the final Space Shuttle launch, STS-135, on July 8, 2011.
I was there watching Miles O'Brien and the SpaceFlight Now live webcast crew do their thing. Like everyone who was fortunate enough to be there that day, I'll never forget it. Even the snapshots I Flickr'd that day make me tear up. The rocket boosters' red glare, the sonic booms bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our space program was still there. Of course, America still has a space program, but things have changed.
But it's sad to think back on those glorious shuttle launches and know they'll never happen again. For so many people, they were like seasons with which to mark the unfolding of one's own life.
Perhaps no one feels that loss as closely as the space laborers Miles O'Brien lovingly referred to as "The Shuttle Shokunin."
Above: Miles O'Brien covered more than 40 space shuttle launches. He led CNN's coverage of the loss of space shuttle, Columbia, and co-anchored astronaut John Glenn's return-to-space mission with television news legend Walter Cronkite. Just before the final liftoff, he reported to PBS NewsHour on "Shuttle ennui." I remember the day we shot this, in the back yard of the Inn at Cocoa Beach, which is near Cape Canaveral. It's one of many Florida towns where the local economy was wrecked after the shuttle program ended.
Below, Miles on what the end of the shuttle program meant for Florida and where the program fell short.
Video from cameras mounted on the two solid rocket boosters that helped propel space shuttle Atlantis into orbit on July 8, the last shuttle mission in US space history. Video shows launch from Kennedy Space Center, and the rocket boosters' subsequent water landing downrange in the Atlantic Ocean.
As we head into this year's mid-season All-Star Game break, the Pittsburgh Pirates, formerly the perennial worst team in baseball, have the best record in the game (well, they're tied with their division rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals). So after their 20th consecutive losing season last year—a record for the most consecutive losing seasons in any of the four pro sports—how did the Pirates manage to become the best team in baseball? By getting creative with the money they made through revenue-sharing.
The Pirates' transformation began in 2010; back then, they were terrible, even by their own standards. The team finished 57-105, 34 games behind the division-winning Cincinnati Reds. In 2011 and 2012,the Pirates extended their own record for futility—their 72-90 mark last year made for 20 straight seasons in the tank. If postseason play is the measure of a team's success or failure, the Pirates have been a disaster since 1992, the last time they were in the playoffs. And if you go by world championships, it's even worse: The last ring winner was Willie Stargell's 1979 "We Are Family" team.
2010 was also the year that documents were leaked revealing that three major-league franchises—the Pirates, the Florida Marlins, and the Tampa Bay Rays—actually made money and in fact made substantial profits from losing. Under the MLB revenue-sharing plan, small-market, lower-revenue teams get a kickback from the richer teams' local TV profits. In theory, this wealth-redistributing dose of socialism should give the poorer teams a chance at parity. But what the leaked documents seemed to indicate was that the Pirates, Marlins, and Rays weren't putting those funds toward competing for free agents but instead pocketing the revenue-sharing checks.
In reality, that's what the Marlins and Rays were doing. But though the press came down particularly hard on the Pirates ("MLB Should Dump the Pittsburgh Pirates From Revenue Sharing," a headline on Bleacher Report read), what the press didn't understand was that at the time, the Pirates were in the midst of a radical overhaul from the bottom up. Between 2008 and 2011, owner Robert Nutting and general manager Neal Huntington spent nearly $50 million—more than any other team in baseball—on scouting and signing young talent in the amateur draft. They poured millions more into stocking their farm system with the new prospects—unlike other owners and managers who prioritized their teams' main rosters.
The results of Nutting and Huntington's unorthodox approach have been dramatic. Now that the Pirates are tied for first place, a black baseball cap with a bright yellow script "P" is suddenly baseball chic for the first time in nearly two decades. The Pirates are selling out at home, moving merchandise hand-over-fist, and even becoming a road attraction.
Between 2008 and 2011, the Pirates spent more than any other team in baseball on scouting and signing young talent in the amateur draft. This season, they will face the rest of the schedule with the best array of young talent on any major-league roster.
One-half of a baseball season doesn't make a pennant winner, of course, but thanks to their shrewd tactics in scouting and signing promising amateur players, the Pirates will face the rest of the schedule with the best array of young talent on any major-league roster. After 87 games, Pittsburgh leads the majors in overall ERA, 3.14. Starters Jeff Locke (age 25), Francisco Liriano (29), Jeanmar Gomez (25), and Gerrit Cole (22) have won a remarkable 22 of 26 decisions. Their relief corps has kept pace with the starting pitching, too, holding hitters to the lowest batting average of any bullpen in the National League.What the Pirates aim for is to be ahead after six innings when they hand the ball to "hold" guy Justin Wilson (ERA 2.06),set-up man Mark Melancon (ERA 0.87), and, finally, sure-to-be-All-Star closer Jason Grilli (2.15 ERA, with 28 saves).
At bat, they're not nearly so potent, ranking just 12th out of 15 teams in runs scored. But in All-Star center fielder Andrew McCutchen, third baseman Pedro Alvarez, and left fielder Starling Marte, they have three young hitters who all rank in the top 25 among the league's batters in combined On-Base Average and Slugging.
While most of the Pirates' talent is homegrown, the front office has also made judicious use of the free-agent market.Catcher Russell Martin, a former free agent who signed a two-year contract with the Pirates in the off-season, has batted near a respectable .250 mark all season with excellent power (he's hit nine home runs as of today). He is also a superb defensive catcher, an excellent handler of pitchers who has thrown outa career-high 49 percent of would-be base stealers so far this season.
There's a delicious irony to how the Pirates got Martin that points to an oddity that keeps big-market teams from dominating the game. Last season,Martin was the regular catcher for the New York Yankees; it is widely rumored that the Steinbrenner family has been cutting the Yanks'payroll, the highest in baseball, to make the franchise more attractive to prospective buyers. Whatever the reason, the Yankees let Martin, whomade $7.5 million last season—not a particularly high sum for an experienced catcher who can hit with power—go to the Pirates, who signed him for a bargain $6.5 million. (Next year,he'll make $8.5 million.) Simply put, the Yankees, in an attempt to cut their payroll, practically handed the small-market Pirates one of their most valuable players.
The Yankees' 2013 payroll is estimated to be nearly three times the Pirates'. Yet Pittsburgh's win-loss percentage is more than 60 points higher than New York's. Whether the Steinbrenners decide to sell or not, they could benefit from a look at the Pirates' business model.
The original Ronald McDonald was pure nightmare fuel (click through for video of him in action). Fun fact: he was played by Willard Scott, who went on to be the weatherman on the Today Show.
A post on reddit recently asked people to tell their favorite intellectual joke. The response was huge, and you should read the whole thing when you have time. Business Insider selected the best fifteen jokes to republish. They are:
A photon is going through airport security. The TSA agent asks if he has any luggage. The photon says, "No, I'm traveling light."
Pretentious? Moi?
A logician's wife is having a baby. The doctor immediately hands the newborn to the dad. The wife says, "Is it a boy or a girl?" The logician says, "Yes."
How can you tell the difference between a chemist and a plumber? Ask them to pronounce "unionized."
Heard about that new band called 1023 MB? They haven't had any gigs yet.
Heisenberg was speeding down the highway. A cop pulls him over and says "Do you have any idea how fast you were going back there?" Heisenberg says, "No, but I knew where I was."
C, Eb, and G walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Sorry, no minors."
First Law of Thermodynamics: You can't win. Second Law of Thermodynamics: You can't break even. Third Law of Thermodynamics: You can't stop playing.
A linguistics professor says during a lecture that, "In English, a double negative forms a positive. But in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, in no language in the world can a double positive form a negative." But then a voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A fish.
The biggest standalone brewery in the nation just trashed its landfill. Translation: 99.7 percent of residual refuse at the Golden, Colo., MillerCoors facility is now being recycled or reused (for instance, it’s feeding used grain to cows). The remaining 0.3 percent is shipped to Oklahoma and burned as fuel. The plant churns out 1,620 tons of waste annually, so that’s about 3 million pounds of refuse it’s keeping out of the landfill.
The nation’s leader in schwaggy beer aims to squash landfills at the rest of its plants across the U.S. by 2016. And MillerCoors is hardly alone in trying to go garbage-free. Missouri brewery Boulevard Brewery did so in 2011; Colorado’s Odell Brewing is on track for 2014.
MillerCoors production specialist Kelly Harris spearheaded the no-landfill project, with the goal of making it simple, because “Nobody likes change,” as he told NBC:
The system he implemented revolves around the use of color-coded bins. Yellow is for aluminum, for example. True trash goes into the red bins, a color meant to make people think twice before throwing anything into it. The company spent about $1 million on new bins and paint to get the job done.
What would happen if the gang from Parks and Rec were actually the stars of famous children's books? Flavorwire has a good idea, and the results are pretty hilarious.
Kids might not dig these versions as much as they like the classics, but fans of the show, including me, would buy the whole collection!
It all started when Kitty #1 decided he was going to sneak into his owner's suitcase to go on a trip. Kitty #2 wanted to go with him, but when he said "no," #2 decided that if only one could go, then neither could go!
Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's is riding around the country in a rainbow colored van, stamping $1 bills with messages like "not to be used for bribing politicians," as a way of raising consciousness about the impact of money in politics in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court verdict, which opened the doors to infinite campaign financing by special interests.
He's seeking a constitutional amendment that overturns the verdict, and he's got 15 states onboard. You can sign a petition, buy a stamp and stamp your own money, and hold stamping parties with your friends. The full list of stamp messages is:
"Not to Be Used for Bribing Politicians". "Stamp Money Out of Politics" "Corporations are Not People" “Not To Be Used for Buying Elections”
I read this atlantic article and its pretty much garbage. I get it, I get what he is saying but how goes about it is all wrong.
Kevin N. MurphyFood Fight
Picking a fight has always been a surefire way of getting attention. Whether it’s on a schoolyard, or in the national media, conflict changes the center of gravity and attracts a circle of onlookers. For journalists, this incentive to be pugnacious is powerful — but sometimes the urge to scrap overwhelms substance and fairness.
That’s what happens in David H. Freedman’s 10,000 word cover story for this month’s Atlantic: How Junk Food Can End Obesity.
Freedman’s story has one good argument. The bulk of the media conversation about nutrition has been about how to help the privileged healthy be healthier. Freedman argues (persuasively, I think) that we need to focus more on fighting obesity where it strikes hardest: among the poor. So, he says, let’s do some jujitsu with the food-processing and mind-control tricks that Big Food uses to get us to eat more, and instead use those tricks to get people to eat less.
That point alone is enough for a provocative article of, maybe, 4000 words. In fact, I recommend that you do what Freedman’s editor should have done — trim his piece down and just read its third section: The Food Revolution We Need.
The rest of the piece — well, it just gets weird. Freedman uses his remaining 6000 words to build some very tortured logic accusing “the Pollanites” — meaning those influenced by Michael Pollan to seek out “wholesome” food — of thwarting this healthier junk food revolution by failing to eat their share of Big Macs and McMuffins.
This would make a great satire. It doesn’t work so well as a straight argument.
A quick disclaimer here, because I have connections on both sides: I’m a Pollanite (or PollaNate, if you like). I studied with Pollan and I think of him as a mentor. I also know Freedman. I’ve been impressed with things he’s written in the past and I let him know it.
When I told Freedman that he hadn’t convinced me that I and my fellow Pollanites were responsible for McDonalds’ failure to make healthy food, he conceded that this was the weakest part of his argument.
Here’s how that argument plays out:
Step one: We’ve attacked the fast food industry until it’s begun to motivate change, which is good. Fast food restaurants are trimming 100 calories here, 50 calories there, and that could make a big difference in the long run.
Step two: But now, activism against fast food has become too successful, causing health-conscious folks to abandon junk food completely.
Step three: Without the health-conscious middle class buying fast food, McDonalds will have no incentive to make its fare healthier.
Step four: Therefore, if you care about the poor, buy a Big Mac!
And it’s not enough to buy fast food, we need to praise it too. Freedman correctly points out that we Pollanites tend to ridicule attempts at healthy fast food, like the McLean, because we don’t trust that the junk-food industry really can produce something salutary. Even if I accept the contention, that fast food can be healthy in some limited way, I’d still object to the characterization of the industry that’s implied. Freedman would have us believe that the fast food industry is like a delicate orchid, that needs to be prodded and coddled in just the right way in order to provide this flowering of healthy processed food.
I’d like to offer a humble alternative:
Step one: We’ve attacked the fast food industry until it’s begun to motivate change, which is good.
Step two: As health-conscious folks abandon junk food completely, it just ups the pressure.
Step three: McDonalds realizes it is on the wrong side of history, and tries to make healthier food to avoid complete demonization.
Step four: Therefore, if you care about the poor, don’t buy a Big Mac.
I don’t know, that seems simpler to me.
Too often, Freedman argues with crude misrepresentations of Pollan’s positions. For instance, he says that wholesome-food devotees are sometimes fooling themselves, making whole foods unhealthy by piling bacon, butter, and clotted cream atop our chard, and that some have an unscientific fear of chemicals in food.
Both are true, but it’s unfair to tar all Pollanites with this brush.
The real Pollan has, indeed, made broad statements urging people to, for example, “eat food,” as opposed to highly processed “edible food-like substances.” But he hasn’t ever said that all processed food is evil, or that we only have processed food to blame for our nutrition problems.
Move past all the straw-man-handling and just one question remains: Is avoiding processed food a sound health strategy?
Pollan says yes. Freedman says no. Or wait, Freedman’s “no” is contingent on our ability to find processed food that’s actually healthy:
To be sure, many of Big Food’s most popular products are loaded with appalling amounts of fat and sugar and other problem carbs (as well as salt), and the plentitude of these ingredients, exacerbated by large portion sizes, has clearly helped foment the obesity crisis. It’s hard to find anyone anywhere who disagrees.
Pollan, on the other hand, is explicit: He counsels against eating processed foods because they tend to be stripped of fiber and packed with fat, sugar, and salt. Warning people away from highly processed food is reasonable as long as the bulk of highly processed foods continue to be unhealthy.
Food processing, at its most basic level, increases the bioavailability of nutrients. Processing food (cooking it, chopping it up, grinding it to mush) allows our bodies to absorb more calories from every bite. Among women eating a totally raw diet in one study, half lost so much weight that they stopped menstruating. Food companies add salt, fat, and sugar to their products because all act as preservatives at high levels, and all help food that’s lost its freshness taste better. The result is a frequently unhealthy mix of ingredients that shoot into the bloodstream as if injected.
I’m all for experimenting with fast food to make it healthier. But there’s a real chance it won’t work. Other efforts to engineer healthier food have failed (trans-fat margarine, anyone?). Nutrition science is bogglingly complex, and in many ways, we really don’t know what we are doing.
If you want a truly great read, skip Freedman’s piece and check out this inquiry into the cause of the obesity epidemic. The writer, David Berreby, points out that it’s not just humans who have been getting fat:
over the past 20 years or more, as the American people were getting fatter, so were America’s marmosets. As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas. In fact, the researchers examined records on those eight species and found that average weight for every one had increased. The marmosets gained an average of nine per cent per decade. Lab mice gained about 11 per cent per decade. Chimps, for some reason, are doing especially badly: their average body weight had risen 35 per cent per decade.
We don’t know what’s going on here. When dealing with the mysteries of nutrition, we have to act with humility. And attacking Pollanites for views that Pollan himself doesn’t hold—while it may draw a crowd—is anything but humble.
Knock knock. 
Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's is riding around the country in a rainbow colored van, stamping $1 bills with messages like "not to be used for bribing politicians," as a way of raising consciousness about the impact of money in politics in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court verdict, which opened the doors to infinite campaign financing by special interests. 
Freedman’s story has one good argument. The bulk of the media conversation about nutrition has been about how to help the privileged healthy be healthier. Freedman argues (persuasively, I think) that we need to focus more on fighting obesity where it strikes hardest: among the poor. So, he says, let’s do some jujitsu with the food-processing and mind-control tricks that Big Food uses to get us to eat more, and instead use those tricks to get people to eat less.