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Lost in time: the El Cortez hotel and casino

On a sticky afternoon in June of 2015 I, with friend and photographer, Matilda Temperley, drove through downtown Las Vegas and into the driveway of the El Cortez Hotel and Casino. The midday sun exposed some rust on the hotel’s neon signage as well as a missing light bulb on the giant red, rotating high healed shoe, which framed an advertisement for $10.95 Prime Rib at the hotel’s diner.

Downtown Las Vegas, situated about five miles from the tourist-driven spectacle of the Las Vegas Strip, had for about a half-century remained the forgotten Vegas of the 1950s. Now many of these iconic downtown sites–the Neon Sign Grave Yard, the decrepit old casinos, and the streets that Frank Sinatra loved and then left–have been embraced by hipster rejuvenation. Downtown Las Vegas, like so many once down and out, now hipster-ed, American neighborhoods, currently enjoys craft beer, carefully-curated cocktail menus, and is likely the only place one can purchase kale in all of Nevada. At the top of the main drag, seemingly unaffected by the neighborhood’s various incarnations sits the El Cortez. Opening in 1941, the El Cortez bills itself as “the longest continuously-running hotel and casino in Vegas,” and it attributes its longevity to “that classic Vegas vibe you just can’t get anywhere else.”

Katie Epstein (left) and Alex Epstein at the El Cortez Hotel.

Matilda and I had been travelling to Las Vegas to work on our book over the past five years. In that time, we’ve spent nights on and off the strip, in over a dozen hotels, but never had I really stayed in Las Vegas until staying at the El Cortez. It is a place where one can feel lost (or in our case, locked) in time. But the El Cortez– much like the Burlesque Hall of Fame, which we were documenting during our time there–also continues to live, a good half century past it’s supposed prime.

As we walked into hotel’s lobby, we were greeted by Director of Guest Relations, Katie Epstein, and Executive Manager, Alex Epstein. Casino born and bred sisters, who are second generation to the establishment. Though one might think Alex and Katie, two well-dressed and accessorized twenty-somethings, would be more aligned with the changes in the rest of the neighborhood (luring in a younger, ever hipper crowds) they have a dedication to what the family business.

The sisters walked us over the bold floral patterned carpet, past the endless ring of slots, the glow of the video poker machines and around the entirety of the casino floor. As they did this, I stopped and asked patrons if they would mind if Matilda photographed them. In doing so, I would often pause and talk to them for a while. I was surprised to note that unlike the vacationer hotspots on the strip, almost everyone I spoke with was a regular and I was struck by the concept that someone’s primary leisure time, and presumably disposable income, could be spent here. “The Colonel,” a retired marine, sits with men from his former regiment, with whom he plays Kino, four times a week. One woman, Judy Perlberg, who emigrated to Las Vegas from Israel in the 1970s, has played the slots at the El Cortez twice a week for the past thirty years. She mentioned Jackie Gaughan, who took over the hotel in 1963 and lived in the upstairs suite until his death in 2014.

Each door to Jackie’s suite had oversized gold handles forming Jackie’s initials. And, at sisters’ suggestion, we soon found ourselves prying open the large “J” and “G” to reveal the incredible time capsule. The carpets, the wallpaper, and the champagne flute shaped light fixtures were all in the same hue of, now faded, powder pink. The bathtub, bidet and toilet were entirely pink marble, and the mirrors had cut outs of bubbles and champagne coupes. The bar was gold and looked as if it had been pulled off a sound stage of a Sean Connery-era Bond film, and the three balconies on each side of the flat collectively gave a view of the entirety of the city. I also noted that there were too many doors in the suite, although I didn’t give considerable attention to this until the following afternoon.

“The Colonel” at the El Cortez.

Matilda requested permission to shoot Jackie’s suite the next day. This would be the first time a camera had seen the inside of it in decades. She also asked if we could take a model in with us in order to bring some life back to the uninhabited and empty apartment.  When we returned, we moved towards the elevator through the smoky casino floor, a stark contrast to the maximalist decor of the penthouse some 16 floors above. Alex joined us again as did vintage pin-up model, Lou Lou D’vil.

Matilda, Alex and I sat on the faded pink carpets of the suite’s main room and waited while Lou Lou changed. She walked out in gold lingerie holding a black sequined gown, asking what type of costume we were looking for. At which point the door behind her slammed shut locking her clothing in one section of the flat, and us in the main party room, with no access out.

Alex grabbed for her phone and proceeded to call various members of El Cortez management, only to find that no one had access to the internal doors, nor did they know that they even existed. And so, we all sat on the floor of the empty, bubble gum apartment awaiting a locksmith to free us. The vintage underwear-clad Lou Lou stated that the multiple doors were likely to enable mob activities during busy parties. Though my initial reaction was to dismiss this as Vegas folklore, Alex did not deny Lou Lou’s suggestion.

When freedom finally arrived, in the form of a serviceman–who seemed suitably surprised to find this strange assortment of women on the floor of an abandoned penthouse suite–Matilda took a few snaps of Lou Lou. And as dusk rolled in, and with it, more favorable lighting for both the hotel’s neon façade and the patrons within it, Matilda and I set off for another round of photographing and speaking with people at the casino.

Lou Lou D’vil in Jackie Gaughan’s Suite.

Cameras are typically forbidden on the casino floors of Las Vegas, as people often wish to remain anonymous while gambling. However, similar to the day before, most of the patrons wanted to speak about the El Cortez as if it were their private club, of which they were very proud to belong. We spoke with a couple who had spent every wedding anniversary at the El Cortez since 1968. We talked to the security guards who stand by the advertisement for the prime rib special every evening because when people enter a casino “they’re somebody, and as they leave they are somebody else”. And, as we turned down yet another row of slot machines, one woman, a diamond member (awarded for the regularity with which she played the slots), reached out a tired and weathered hand for Alex and said: “thank you”. To this, Alex replied, “here is my number. If you ever want to talk or anything…, I’m here.”

The El Cortez sits as a parallel story to Las Vegas as a whole. It is the juxtaposition of the Colonel playing Kino or Judy Perlberg slipping her week’s wages into the slot machines, to the grandeur of Jackie’s suite perched just floors above. It is the locking doors facilitating mob activities, looking down the security guards on the street  below. But it is also Alex Epstein giving her number to a weary El Cortez regular. Las Vegas is a city which pushes many of the nation’s most contested issues into the foreground and to the extreme–wealth inequality, addiction, crime, sex work. Our book, The League of Exotic Dancers, and the El Cortez are just small microcosms exemplifying such extremes, but they are good examples. If you are visiting Sin City, go to downtown Las Vegas, drink a craft beer on Fremont Street, and walk through the casino floor of the El Cortez. Ask for Alex, see if she’ll let you see Jackie’s flat, and most of all, meet the people who live and continue to gamble there. For whether you see the El Cortez casino as forlorn rows of depletion, exploitation and addiction or serving a social function, as a communal club, a place for people to go, you will have seen Vegas for what it is, the lived in Las Vegas, and you can decide for yourself.

The images included in this post were shot by Matilda Temperley, produced by Claire Wigglesworth and originally published in Vegas Rated in March of 2016. Not to be re-used without permission. 

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Prime numbers and how to find them

Prime numbers have now become a crucial part of modern life, but they have been fascinating mathematicians for thousands of years.

A prime number is always bigger than 1 and can only be divided by itself and 1 – no other number will divide in to it. So the number 2 is the first prime number, then 3, 5, 7, and so on. Non-prime numbers are defined as composite numbers (they are composed of other smaller numbers).

Prime numbers are so tantalizing because they seem to be in never ending supply, and are distributed somewhat randomly throughout all the other numbers. Also, no-one has (yet) found a simple and quick way to find a specific (new) prime number.

Because of this, very large prime numbers are used every day when encrypting data to make the online world a safer place to communicate, move money, and control our households. But could we ever run out of prime numbers? How can we find new, incredibly large prime numbers? Below is a brief explanation about how we can do this:

This got us interested in learning more about primes, so we’ve collected together some facts about these elusive numbers:

A simple way to find prime numbers is to write out a list of all numbers and then cross off the composite numbers as you find them – this is called the Sieve of Eratosthenes. However, this can take a long time!
In 2002 a quicker way to test whether a number is prime was discovered – an algorithm called the ‘AKS primality test’, published by Manindra Agrawal, Neeraj Kayal, and Nitin Saxena.


Euclid of Megara’ by Justus van Gent. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.


Even though prime numbers seem to be randomly distributed, there are fewer large primes than smaller ones. This is logical, as there are more ways for large numbers to not be prime, but mathematicians ask: how much rarer are larger primes?
In 2001 a group of computer scientists from IBM and Stanford University showed that a quantum computer could be programmed to find the prime factors of numbers.
The RSA enciphering process, published in 1978 by Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman, is used to hide plaintext messages using prime numbers. In this process every person has a private key which is made up of three numbers, two of which are very large prime numbers.
At any moment in time, the largest known prime number is also usually the largest known Mersenne prime.

Featured image credit: numbers by morebyless. CC-BY-2.0 via Flickr .

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Did you know these 10 fascinating facts about museums?

Collections of art, scientific instruments, historical relics, and peculiarities have attracted the curiosity and imaginations of people around the world since ancient times. The museum as an institution developed in antiquity and evolved over the years to encompass and celebrate all aspects of human society, science, art, and history. Museums are vital to the study of the past, how the natural world works, and how cultures have grown and interacted with each other. Museums educate and they inspire.

To celebrate the importance of museums to the preservation of human civilization, we’ve gathered some historical facts about these great institutions:

1. The word museum comes from the Greek “mouseion,” the temples dedicated to the Muses and the arts they inspired. Around the 4th century BC, Aristotle founded a mouseion at his Lyceum school for the collection of specimens for his zoological studies.

2. The Museum of Alexandria, erected by Ptolemy I Soter around 300 BC, was the most famous museum of the ancient world. It was distinct from the great Library of Alexandria, but just as vital to the protection and spread of knowledge in the ancient world.

3. The modern museum began to take shape during the Renaissance, as a renewed interest in classical art and architecture drove wealthy merchant and banking families to form collections of art as status symbols.

Marie-Lan Nguyen, September 2009. CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.

4. The first pope to establish a collection of art at the Vatican was Julius II, whose reign began in 1503. His own collection, which included an excavated marble statue of Apollo (now known as the Apollo Belvedere and thought to be a Roman copy of a lost Greek bronze), was brought to the Vatican where it became a pillar of the Belvedere Sculpture Gardens.

5. The first public museum in England was the Ashmolean Museum, named after the antiquary Elias Ashmole. The remains of a dodo, which later inspired Lewis Carroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was one of the oddities included in this collection.

6. The British Museum, established by an Act of Parliament in 1753, was originally housed in a large mansion in Bloomsbury, and for nearly half a century, it required a formal application for admission.

7. Originally housed in existing buildings such as palaces or monasteries, the museum building emerged as its own distinct type of building in the 18th century. Today, museum buildings are considered works of art in their own right, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City or Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

8. Museology is the term that describes the wide-ranging and fascinating study of collection curation (the care and management of objects in museum collections) and the presentation of museums’ collections to the public for educational and research purposes.

9. By nature of their offices, the Vice President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States serve as two of the 14 trustees that govern the Smithsonian Institution. This includes the National Air and Space Museum, which is one of the most visited museums in the world.

10. The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was signed in May 1954, the first of multiple international conventions and agreements to protect art and monuments during times of war.

Featured image credit: “Façade of the British Museum” by Ham, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.  

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Adult ADHD: myths and reality

One out of every 5-10 adult psychotherapy clients probably has attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Key studies and writings emerged in 1995 supporting the idea of adult ADHD, but it took many years of reading and research to confidently recognize and appropriately treat adult ADHD. It continues to be underrecognized by mental health clinicians, even when clients with ADHD are already in treatment for other mental illnesses, and considerable misinformation is circulated. In the edited excerpt below, Jan Willer, author of Could it be Adult ADHD?, explores the myths about Adult ADHD and the facts that disprove them.

Myth: Adult ADHD is a controversial and trendy diagnosis. It does not really exist.

Facts: False. The existence of adult ADHD is strongly supported through multiple converging lines of evidence, including genetics, symptomatology, impairment, neuropsychological testing results, and differences in brain structure and functioning. ADHD is highly heritable and about as heritable as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, which were previously considered to be the two most heritable mental illnesses.

Myth: Everyone is distractible sometimes. Those people are just making excuses for being lazy and unmotivated.

Facts: Like most other mental disorders, symptoms of ADHD are on a continuum, and the people whom we diagnose with ADHD are in the extreme tail of that distribution. The continuum of ADHD may partially explain the difficulty that doubters have with understanding that ADHD is a true disorder. Of course, everyone is occasionally distractible and disorganized. So it’s easy for some to say, “she’s not sick; she just needs to try harder” or that ADHD is “an excuse.” This attitude is both uninformed and emotionally damaging to individuals with ADHD.

Myth: ADHD is a result of our modern technological lifestyle.

Facts: False. Technology may certainly contribute to distractibility in all adults, including those with ADHD. However, individuals of all ages, including those who grew up with technology and those who did not, have problems with ADHD. Instead, in the past, ADHD was conceptualized differently as a character flaw: “lazy” or “unmotivated.

Myth: ADHD is caused by bad parenting, too much TV, and so on.

“ADHD is highly heritable and about as heritable as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia”

Facts: False. ADHD is primarily a genetically inherited neurological difference. However, childhood stress can increase the likelihood that ADHD develops in a person who is genetically at risk.

Myth: A good diet can cure ADHD.

Facts: In general, no. However, there are a few caveats to this: (a) in a recent meta-analysis, about 30% of children with ADHD were found to improve on a diet free of food additives; (b) there is preliminary evidence that environmental toxins, such as lead and pesticides, may increase ADHD symptoms in children; and (c) the addition of omega-3 fatty acids does help cognition in children with ADHD, although not nearly as much as stimulant medication, so it is not recommended as a primary treatment. Not much is known about diet and adults with ADHD.

Myth: ADHD is a socially constructed disorder.

Facts: Every disorder is a socially constructed way of cutting reality into categories. ADHD is no different from anxiety, depression, or any other mental illness in this regard.

Myth: ADHD is a culture-bound syndrome in the United States.

Facts: False. Multiple international studies of ADHD have documented the presence of this disorder in countries across the globe, including but not limited to Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Korea.

Myth: Most children outgrow ADHD by adulthood, so there is a low prevalence of adults with ADHD relative to children with ADHD.

Facts: False. Over two-thirds of adults who had ADHD as children still have significant functional impairment as adults.

Myth: Most adults with ADHD are diagnosed as children.

Facts: False. Many individuals with ADHD—especially those who are women, did not have childhood behavior problems, had inattentive type ADHD, are in disadvantaged groups, or are now age 40 and above—were never recognized to have ADHD as children.

Myth: Adults with ADHD are rare.

Facts: False. At least 4% to 5% of the US adult population has ADHD, and this is probably an underestimate.

Myth: Only a trained neuropsychologist can diagnose ADHD in adults.

Facts: Not necessarily. A well-trained mental health practitioner can, in most cases, diagnose ADHD from a careful clinical interview. In other cases, a well-educated psychologist can clarify the clinical picture by administering appropriate ADHD rating scales, conducting a careful developmental interview, and obtaining observer ratings, if necessary. Nonetheless, neuropsychologists are the one group of mental health practitioners who are well trained to recognize ADHD in adults. Be aware that about 60% of adults with ADHD have normal neuropsychological test results of executive functioning, probably because life is more complicated than neuropsychological tests. So neuropsychologists often diagnose ADHD from history, symptoms and behavior during testing rather than test results. Also, neuropsychological testing can be helpful in very complex cases with multiple comorbidities, especially those with learning disabilities.

Featured image credit: Office by FirmBee. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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David Hume: friendships, feuds, and faith

Who exactly was David Hume? He was a Scottish historian and philosopher (best known today for his radical empiricism), who prided himself on his reputation as a man of the utmost moral character. Indeed, Hume’s own ethical works regarded traits of character (rather than acts or their consequences) as the main factors of moral evaluation. Born on 7 May 1711, Hume’s life was a testament to his philosophical and academic principles — he pursued his studies with the utmost passion, regarding “every object as contemptible, except the improvements of my talents in literature” and resolutely defended himself against frequent accusations of atheism and heresy. These indictments led to Hume missing out on several academic positions (including as Professor of Ethics at Edinburgh University), but he met such disappointments with characteristic “command of temper.”

Despite this, Hume’s “chearfulness and good humour” (as described by Adam Smith) were tested when his friendship with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the great French author and political philosopher) turned into a sour feud. The dispute tested the very foundations on which the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters was built, Hume’s reputation, and even Rousseau’s sanity…

As the son of a Scottish advocate, Hume was encouraged to study law from a young age. He enrolled at Edinburgh University at 12 years old (young even for eighteenth-century standards), but found an immediate aversion to both the subject and his professors. Hume did not graduate, but instead discovered a lifelong love for the humanities:

I found an unsurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general learning; and while they fancyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.

As a young man with a modest income, Hume had to find means of employment. At 25 he became a merchant’s assistant, enabling him to travel to Bristol, and then on to France. Here, Hume found his “plan of life” in scholarly discourse with the Jesuits at the College of La Fleche:

In 1734, I went to Bristol with some recommendations to eminent merchants; but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me. I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steddily and successfully pursued.

Despite Hume’s renewed focus on academia (by the age of 28 he had completed A Treatise on Human Nature, and 6 years later had also written Essays Moral and Political), he was viewed with suspicion due to his unorthodox religious beliefs. Hume applied for the Chair of Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, but was unsuccessful after ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint him, on account of “heresy, deism, scepticism, atheism &c &c &c.”

Image Credit: ‘Portrait of David Hume, by Allan Ramsay (1754)’ from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

These accusations dogged Hume for much of his life. He later applied for the Chair of Philosophy at Glasgow University, but was unsuccessful again. An outraged Hume reported one critic going even further in their reprisal:

[I should be…] lock’d up for five years in a dungeon, then to be hangd, and my carcass to be thrown out of Scotland.

After these setbacks, Hume turned further afield. He became Secretary to the British Embassy in Paris, where he met Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was in trouble with the French authorities due to his religious and political beliefs, and Hume offered him sanctuary in England. Despite this, Rousseau quickly believed that all was not as it seemed (he is widely thought to have suffered from paranoia at the time), and Hume’s true purpose was to dishonour his French rival:

You brought me to England, apparently to provide refuge, but in reality to dishonor me. You applied yourself to this noble work with a zeal worthy of your heart, and with a success worthy of your talents. [translated from the original French]

Hume was mortified at the affront to his reputation, and fought bitterly to contradict Rousseau. In December 1766, after penning his own version of events, Hume wrote of his ordeal:

Thanks to God, my affair with Rousseau is now finally and totally at an end […] many people would have condemned me as a calumniator, and as a treacherous and false friend.

Hume died on 25 August 1766 at the age of 65, likely from some form of abdominal cancer. His good friend Adam Smith described the scene, with Hume facing death, as he faced life:

Poor David Hume is dying very fast, but with great chearfulness and good humour and with more real resignation to the necessary course of things, than any whining Christian ever dyed with pretended resignation to the will of God.

 Featured Image Credit: ‘David Hume’ by Bandan, CC by –SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons .  

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What kind of encore do you want?

My husband Dick Shore spent a quarter of a century at the Department of Labor in Washington, DC and a short stent at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations before he declared he was ready to opt out of paid work altogether. We talked about what he would do. He didn’t play golf or bridge, wasn’t interested in a new hobby, and didn’t want another job. He coveted time to read and the flexibility to travel with me on business trips and vacations. But he also recognized he needed something to structure and occupy his time, a way to feel useful and to “give back.”

After considering various options, Dick reinvented himself as a volunteer, focusing on helping the next generation by teaching first-graders to read five mornings a week at a grade school down the street. Everyone was happy. One young girl called him “the most perfect person in the world,” and other children would shout “Hi, Dick!” as we walked in downtown Ithaca. Dick felt a real sense of purpose, saying this was “his best job ever.” When I accepted a position at the University of Minnesota, he quickly found a similar spot in Minneapolis’ Inter-district Downtown School, this time helping fifth-graders with math.

Dick’s encore portfolio—first to a new, different, and challenging part-time job at Cornell and then as a volunteer—are emblematic of what I see as a promising new life stage, coming after career-and family-building, but before the frailties we associate with old age.

After years of research at Cornell University and the University of Minnesota, I have come to see this as a new “encore” to conventional adulthood, a time of personal and social renewal. It is distinct from both full-time career employment and full-time retirement leisure, often encompassing several reinventions over time.

The bonus years of extended life expectancy are not coming at the end of life, adding to years of disability and decline, but rather, in the expanding period of health and vitality around the 60s and 70s, but coming earlier or later for some. The new longevity is advantageous to individuals, but costly to society. Though some envision the solution as moving back the retirement clock — forcing the delay of career exits by even further postponing the age of Social Security eligibility — I, like Marc Freedman, founder of encore.org, see this new life stage as a potential windfall for individuals and for society.

The new longevity is advantageous to individuals, but costly to society.

Despite the uncertainties and ambiguities of this new encore adult stage, many Boomers—the largest, most educated cohort in history until their children, the Millennials, came along—feel on the edge of conventional adult roles but are not yet done. People in this new stage are not young, but they are not old either, as the infirmities associated with being “elderly” are postponed. Growing numbers of Boomers are indeed resetting their lives and their identities, making them up as they go. However, others are not so fortunate, lacking the opportunities, networks, and resources to customize the encores they may want.

To date, encore adulthood is mostly an individual project. There are no blueprints, no guideposts. Most government programs and organizational practices continue to operate under a very outdated linear lockstep template of first learning, then working for advancement or at least security, then retiring once, all at once. Consider universities — focusing almost exclusively on 18-22 year-olds. Or phrases like “prime age” workers, effectively cutting off a growing group of Boomers who may want to leave their career jobs but not for a rocking chair.

What many want, but can’t always find, are chances to reset the time clocks of their lives, often in the form of different combinations of flexible, frequently less-than-full-time work, volunteering, learning, caring, and leisure, including more healthy lifestyles.

Policy developments that enable such time shifts, like making it easier to cut back working hours, creating more flexible, meaningful part-time, part-year jobs, making true life-long learning the center of higher education, and fashioning public and social sector opportunities to help others and promote the greater good, could open up new and satisfying life pathways. Many Boomers — the oldest turning 71 this year — don’t want to lean into their current jobs or step into the sidelines of society. Rather, they want to explore new ways of engaging with the world and making a difference.

Featured image credit: people sitting resting waiting by Skitterphoto. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Banning the Beatles: “A Day in the Life” at the BBC

On Friday, 19 May 1967, British newspapers carried the announcement that the British Broadcasting Corporation had chosen the Beatles to represent the UK in the first global television broadcast. A spokesperson, explaining the BBC’s choice for the Our World telecast, commented that the band members represented “the best of their kind” and that the Corporation saw them as “particularly British.” However, at the release party for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band that same Friday night as the announcement, the Beatles learned that the BBC had banned one of the tracks on the album.

An internal memo reveals the Corporation had decided not to broadcast “A Day in the Life” because it believed the song “could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking.” They offered no specifics, but did distribute that language to the press. Paul McCartney—guessing at what had triggered the action—protested that the middle of the song concerned smoking a cigarette, nothing more. A week later, Lennon sarcastically noted the multiple possible interpretations of the phrase “turn you on” and insinuated that the BBC had been looking for a problem. Political and social forces at play that year contributed to the showdown between Britain’s most-celebrated musicians and the national radio network.

Associate Director of Sound Broadcasting Richard Marriott had been advocating for an increase in recorded music programming over live orchestral music (earning the wrath of the Musicians’ Union). Aware of the gains that the pirate radio stations had made in drawing listeners away from the BBC’s programming, he sought to counterbalance that success. His generation of broadcasters may have had little love for pop music, but they recognized and feared the infringements on their monopoly. Nevertheless, they had their standards.

A few weeks earlier, a station manager in Los Angeles believed he had heard a heroin reference in the song, around the same time that in Britain Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Robert Fraser were arraigned in court on charges of drug possession. As for the Beatles, the condemnation by American Christian fundamentalists of John Lennon’s comments about Jesus and the failure of the band’s last single (“Strawberry Fields Forever” and “Penny Lane”) to top British charts suggested to some individuals that the fab four had lost their popular protection. With recent electoral wins by Conservatives and the near collapse of the British economy the previous year, columnists opined that the Labour Party’s program of liberalization was in jeopardy. The BBC would have wanted to be on the right side of the trend.

For their part, the Beatles had increasingly been making clandestine references to sex and drugs in their songs, hiding the meanings in plain sight behind words that bureaucrats had yet to understand. However, Lennon had begun “A Day in the Life” as an elegy on the death of their friend Tara Browne, reflecting on a newspaper article he had read about the accident that had killed the twenty-one-year-old Guinness heir. The style of writing that he had adopted in response to Bob Dylan’s lyrics had come to rely on wordplay and obscure metaphors, an aesthetic decision that encouraged listeners to project their own meanings.

In the case of “A Day in the Life,” BBC bureaucrats reached their own interpretations and, after a flurry of self-congratulatory internal memos about timing and moral correctness, Director of Sound Broadcasting Frank Gillard informed record companies of the BBC’s intention to be more vigilant in these matters. Today, we may believe the decision to ban the recording represents an example of misguided paternalism, but in an era when the press finds itself under attack, “A Day in the Life” should remind us of the inclination of some to censure art.

Featured image: “Street sign for Abbey Road, in Westminster, London, England” by Liftarn, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Does foreign meddling in elections matter?

Ever since the exposure of the covert Russian intervention in the 2016 US election, questions have arisen about the effects that foreign meddling of this type may have. Before these events transpired, I had begun studying the wider question, investigating whether partisan electoral interventions by the US and USSR/Russia usually effect the election results.

Although they usually get far less international attention and media coverage then various violent forms of meddling, partisan electoral interventions, or attempts by foreign powers to intervene in elections in other countries in order to help or hinder one of the candidates or parties, are actually quite common. In a dataset I constructed (called PEIG) the US and the USSR/Russia have intervened in this manner 117 times between 1946 and 2000–or, put another way, in about one of every nine competitive national level executive elections during this period. Both countries used a variety of methods for this purpose, including public threats or promises, the secret provision of money to the preferred party or candidate’s campaign, “dirty tricks” such as the release of true (or false) damaging information about the undesired side, or either an increase in foreign aid or other assistance before election day or a withdrawal this kind of aid. With this dataset in hand I can use statistical analysis in order to examine the usual effects of such interventions on the results of the affected elections.

© Dov H. Levin (2016). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Yes, they (usually) matter

I have produced two main conclusions about the effects of electoral interventions. First, I found that electoral interventions in general can have a significant effect on election results, increasing the vote share of the assisted candidate or party by about 3% on average. Second, I found that public or overt electoral interventions are significantly more effective than covert interventions are in helping the preferred side. When I estimated the effects of electoral interventions in regard to ‘real life’ cases in PEIG, I found that, in many such cases, these effects were large enough to swing the election towards the preferred side.

For example, in the 2000 Yugoslav election, the US intervened for the main opposition presidential candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, against the incumbent, then-Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. The US government utilized various methods for this purpose, such as publicly promising, a few days before the elections, to remove US sanctions on Yugoslavia if Milosevic lost power. I estimate that without the effect of this electoral intervention Milosevic would have probably have run neck-and-neck with Kostunica in the first round of the elections ( estimated at 43.4% to 46.5%). If the first round of the Yugoslav elections had concluded in this inconclusive manner rather than in an outright Kostunica victory (51.7%), Milosevic quite probably would have been able, as he had in the past, to “steal” the elections without bringing about the massive wave of demonstrations which eventually forced him to acknowledge his defeat and resign from the presidency. Many contemporaries would agree with this finding. For example, one of the main figures in the Kostunica campaign admitted in an interview shortly afterwards that, “The foreign support [to the campaign] was critical” to its electoral success.

Of course, given the average effects that have come from my research, electoral interventions will not always assure victory for the intervener’s preferred side. Likewise the actual effects of such meddling may vary in their magnitude from case to case. Nevertheless it’s clear that partisan electoral interventions are an important phenomenon which can frequently ‘matter.’ With competitive elections now a significant feature of domestic politics in more than half of the world’s states, interventions of the kind seen in the 2016 US elections are likely to become an even more common occurrence.

Featured image credit: United Nations Office at Geneva by  Falcon® Photography. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr .

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At bay: where is that bay?

To keep somebody or something at bay means “to keep a dangerous opponent at a distance; to hold off, ward off a disaster, etc.” The very first interpreters of this idiom guessed its origin correctly. They stated that bay here means “to bark” and that at bay refers to hunting. Many phrases in our language are ossified hunting metaphors. Perhaps the best-known among them is to beat about the bush (that is, to run around the bush, in order to flush the birds and shoot them on the wing; hence the figurative meaning “to run in circles, thereby avoiding the issue”).

At bay is perhaps less transparent, because nowadays bay is a rare synonym for bark. But, as noted, no one has ever doubted what situation it describes. A cornered animal, most typically a stag (but also a fox or a hare), is too tired to keep running (you will agree that not everybody can run with the hare and hunt with the hounds), faces its pursuers, and dares them attack it. The dogs stay away from the antlers or teeth of their prey and wait for the hunter to shoot it. In the meantime, they bark and are kept literally “at bay.” Bay is here a noun, even though it is used without a or the. In the fifteenth century, people said to bring, turn, etc. at a bay, but the correct reading may be at abay, for Old French had abay and aboy (Modern French aboi)—so at least in the phrase to bring to bay. Hold at bay seems to represent or correspond to Old French tenir a bay and Italian tenere a bada “hold in suspense or expectation,” literally “on the gape”: Old French bay and Italian bada mean “suspense.” If this etymology is correct, the phrases with bay have a double origin.

At bay.

In the entry at bay, some very old dictionaries, including Skinner (1671) and the earliest editions of Webster, cited Old Engl. bīdan “to wait” (extant in to bide one’s time). One should be especially cautious, while dealing with the sources that use the word undoubtedly (for instance, in the once immensely popular dictionary by Charles Richardson, bay is said to be undoubtedly the same word as bad and base). All those pseudo-cognates should be disregarded. At first sight, the idea that at bay has something to do with bīdan makes sense: “to wait” suggested “in suspense”; yet bīdan and bay have nothing in common. The OED also suggested a double origin. It began the entry with the words: “Two words seem here to be inextricably confused,” one designating “bark,” the other “suspense.”

And this is at the bay

The scholar who reconstructed the fusion or confusion of two words in the phrases to bay and at bay ~ at a bay was Hensleigh Wedgwood, the most authoritative English etymologist for nearly forty years before Skeat. He emphasized the role of sound imitation, which he tended to carry to great, sometimes absurd extremes. As early as 1845, he wrote: “So [French] abayer is rendered to listen to, to wait for with open mouth…. Hence our abeyance, a state of expectation or dependence upon anything…. Hence also our expression of standing at bay…, precisely equivalent to the Italian stare a bada, to stand at gaze, intently watching anything, completely taken up with it…. The Scotch abeigh represents the state of a person gazing at a distance on the object of his desire or attention.” The same explanation of at bay can be found in all three editions of his etymological dictionary. We can see that Wedgwood connected the sound imitative syllable ba not with barking but with an open mouth. And it is this detail (an open mouth or the sound of barking?) that years later became the center of a controversy on the origin of the phrase at bay.

The hidden traces of this controversy can perhaps be found even in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966). In it, bay4 is defined as “barking of dogs in company; chiefly (now only) in phr. (hold, keep) at bay….” (first recorded in the thirteenth century), from Old French bai…. Another bay, bay6 “bark with a deep voice,” from the imitative base bai, first recorded a century later, is said to have been influenced by bay4. Although the two words are given slightly different etymons, it remains unclear how one word for “bark” influenced another one having the same meaning. Wedgwood was more consistent: as we have seen, he traced at bay to gaping rather than to barking. In 1873, after reading a statement that ran counter to his view, he was “distressed at the heresy… with respect to ‘at bay’. The resemblance [of at bay] to aux abois is merely accidental… Aux abois is at the last extremities; at bay is when the weaker party faces his pursuers and keeps them off.”

This a bay window. It has nothing to do with our story. There are at least three equally irrelevant bay’s.

This could have been the end of it if at bay had not attracted the attention of the learned and formidable Frank Chance, an almost forgotten researcher and the object of my unflagging admiration. (I’ll keep repeating that Oxford University Press should bring out his complete works, one volume containing his short contributions mainly, almost exclusively, to Notes and Queries, in those days an important forum for well-read amateurs, antiquarians, and distinguished scholars). He insisted on the connection (“connexion”) of French aux abois and Engl. at bay and did without Wedgwood’s reference to gaping. Italian tenere a bada, he pointed out, has nothing to do with the dogs’ “beholding their prey within their grasp almost.” Moreover, as far as those phrases are concerned, “Italian never came into contact with English,” and the Italian phrases were never used of hunted animals; they never meant anything like “stand (or keep) at bay.” Rather, they meant “to divert the attention of the enemies.”

Agape but not at bay.

Frank Chance had the support of Friedrich Ch. Diez’s Romance etymological dictionary and of Skeat, who first shared Wedgwood’s view but later opposed it. When Chance attacked, very few people emerged unscathed. Wedgwood defended a minor point of his interpretation but admitted that Chance had hit the nail on the head (“as he commonly does”). Chance did not budge and wrote a long note defending his reconstruction and crushing all the arguments of his opponent. Wedgwood never responded. The exchange took place in 1881 and 1882. In 1882, the full volume of Skeat’s etymological dictionary came out (like all such works, it was being published in installments), a masterpiece still in need of improvement but making Wedgwood’s work obsolete. (Unfortunately, Wedgwood’s insights were buried together with his fanciful ideas.) 1884 saw the appearance of the first volume of the OED. Almost at a single stroke, all previous scholarship in the area of English etymology became rather uninspiring history.

With regard to the phrase at bay, I think Frank Chance showed the way, so that it is no longer necessary to speak of two words inextricably confused in its derivation: no gaping, just barking. And indeed, the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology makes no mention of Italian bada, even though not everything in its explanation of bay 4 and bay 6 is clear enough. In the OED online, in the entry at bay, the etymology has not yet been revised. I am sure all our readers will wait for the revision with bated breath. As things stand, all of us are kept at bay.

Image credits: (1) “Stag Hunt” by Paul de Vos, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) “Sunset Sundown Da Nang Bay” by PublicDomainPictures, Public Domain via Pixabay. (3) “Architecture Bay Window” by Markus Baumeler, Public Domain via Pixabay. (4) “Feline Animal Teeth Lion Wild Cat Mane Nature” Public Domain via Max Pixel. Featured image credit: “Fox Hunting” by Henry Thomas Alken, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Is child poverty in rich countries exacerbated by the economic crisis?

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the first contraction of the world economy in the post-war era. Amid falling wages and increasing unemployment, government capacity to address worsening social conditions was often constrained by mounting deficits, with social protection systems under threat when they were most needed. Children and young people, already at a greater risk of poverty than the population as a whole, were among the main victims of the crisis and ensuing austerity in advanced economies, and the countries most severely affected recorded some of the largest increases in child poverty.

In-depth analyses of the impact of the economic crisis and subsequent recession on children in eleven OECD countries allows some general lessons to be learned. Countries were very differently placed as the crisis struck, and the nature of the macroeconomic ‘shock’ itself differed greatly across countries, both in its initial impact and in the way it subsequently played out.

Poverty for children assessed against a household income threshold held fixed in purchasing power rose sharply in Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Spain, and especially Greece, and much more modestly in the UK, the USA, and Germany; it was little changed in Belgium and Japan, and actually fell in Sweden.

The macroeconomic response to the crisis has been hotly debated in terms of the ‘austerity’ measures imposed in many countries, in the form of public expenditure cuts and tax increases. It is clear from the country’s cases that these often played a major role in the impact on the living standards of families and children. The labour market was clearly also central, with increasing child poverty closely linked to an increase in the proportion of families with little or no employment.

The poverty rate for children in such households can be remarkably high: in Spain for example it reached 86% in the depths of the recession. In many countries the crisis disproportionately increased poverty among specific risk groups that already faced exceptionally high rates, including those with low levels of education, single parents, and a migrant background.

Measures directed at keeping workers in or attached to their jobs as the crisis hit were central to the strategy adopted in countries such as Germany and Belgium, and important lessons may be drawn from the way these were framed and implemented, and the institutional context that allowed this to be achieved. By contrast, some of the worst-affected countries such as Italy, Greece, and Spain introduced measures to reduce employment protection, increasing precariousness.

 A coherent strategy encompassing social protection, the labour market, education, and childcare is required to better protect children in future crises.

All the case studies bring out the central role that social transfers played in cushioning the immediate impact of the crisis on child poverty. However, the income protection system was clearly more robust and effective in some countries than others. A substantial initial cushioning effect is evident in countries generally regarded as having systems with broad coverage, such as Sweden, Belgium, Ireland and the UK, but was also seen to be considerable in the USA, Italy, and Hungary.

In Hungary the level of child poverty would have been more than twice as high without working-age cash social transfers, while in the USA more than one person in seven was benefiting from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (‘Food Stamps’) by 2011, and the extension of entitlement to unemployment benefit was also important. Japan, Greece, Italy, and Spain have less comprehensive, more fragmented social protection systems.

While the cushioning effect of social protection was key in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, the extent to which countries could maintain that buffer depended very much on the severity of the recession and fiscal pressures. The impact of the austerity measures imposed was most evident in Greece, Ireland, and Spain (where yawning public deficits necessitated external bailouts) as well as Hungary and Italy.

The UK saw major changes in strategy in the course of the recession, with severe cuts in social spending from 2010 and working-age transfers bearing the brunt. Hungary also saw a shift from family allowances to family tax benefits, as well as cuts to social assistance, so the poverty-reducing capacity of the social protection system decreased dramatically. In Italy, by contrast, there was some progress towards expanding coverage of income support in unemployment, and Japan saw major reform and expansion in universal child benefit though with a subsequent roll-back.

These experiences bring out the importance of building a coherent ‘social fabric’. In most cases, this implies increasing social transfers, while protecting work incentives. Child benefits/family allowances have an important role to play, and in the countries with neither a universal child benefit nor an effective and comprehensive income-based family payment, that is a significant gap to be addressed.

The poverty-reducing impact of current social protection and social spending could often be increased. Progressive taxation and a higher degree of efficiency can be achieved through better design of cash benefits and in-kind services, re-balanced towards the poor and vulnerable.

It is also essential for social spending to be appropriately aligned with labour market policy, in order to address the structural problems of low education and other factors that underpin low labour force participation (particularly among mothers) and household worklessness. The successful activation and integration of such households into the labour market—including, for example, lone parents and those from minority or migrant backgrounds—is key.

A coherent strategy encompassing social protection, the labour market, education, and childcare is required to better protect children in future crises. A final lesson though is that even the best-designed and resourced social support structures would struggle to cope with recession of the severity experienced by the worst-hit countries in the recent crisis; the depth and duration of the Greek crisis in particular would pose insurmountable challenges to even the most advanced welfare state.

Featured image credit: Black and white young child by Pexels. Public domain via Pixabay.

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