Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1017

The education fad that’s hurting our kids: What you need to know about “Growth Mindset” theory — and the harmful lessons it imparts

One of the most popular ideas in education these days can be summarized in a single sentence (a fact that may help to account for its popularity). Here's the sentence: Kids tend to fare better when they regard intelligence and other abilities not as fixed traits that they either have or lack, but as attributes that can be improved through effort. In a series of monographs over many years and in a book published in 2000, psychologist Carol Dweck used the label "incremental theory" to describe the self-fulfilling belief that one can become smarter. Rebranding it more catchily as the "growth mindset" allowed her to recycle the idea a few years later in a best-selling book for general readers. By now, the growth mindset has approached the status of a cultural meme. The premise is repeated with uncritical enthusiasm by educators and a growing number of parents, managers, and journalists -- to the point that one half expects supporters to start referring to their smartphones as “effortphones.” But, like the buzz over the related concept known as "grit" (a form of self-discipline involving long-term persistence), there's something disconcerting about how the idea has been used -- and about the broader assumption that what students most need is a "mindset" adjustment. Unlike grit -- which, as I've argued elsewhere, is driven more by conservative ideology than by solid research -- Dweck's basic thesis is supported by decades' worth of good data. It's not just the habit of attributing your failure to being stupid that holds you back, but also the habit of attributing your success to being smart. Regardless of their track record, kids tend to do better in the future if they believe that how well they did in the past was primarily a result of effort. But "how well they did" at what? The problem with sweeping, generic claims about the power of attitudes or beliefs isn't just a risk of overstating the benefits but also a tendency to divert attention from the nature of the tasks themselves: How valuable are they, and who gets to decide whether they must be done? Dweck is a research psychologist, not an educator, so her inattention to the particulars of classroom assignments is understandable. Unfortunately, even some people who are educators would rather convince students they need to adopt a more positive attitude than address the quality of the curriculum (what the students are being taught) or the pedagogy (how they're being taught it). An awful lot of schooling still consists of making kids cram forgettable facts into short-term memory. And the kids themselves are seldom consulted about what they're doing, even though genuine excitement about (and proficiency at) learning rises when they're brought into the process, invited to search for answers to their own questions and to engage in extended projects. Outstanding classrooms and schools -- with a rich documentary record of their successes -- show that the quality of education itself can be improved. But books, articles, TED talks, and teacher-training sessions devoted to the wonders of adopting a growth mindset rarely bother to ask whether the curriculum is meaningful, whether the pedagogy is thoughtful, or whether the assessment of students' learning is authentic (as opposed to defining success merely as higher scores on dreadful standardized tests). Small wonder that this idea goes down so easily. All we have to do is get kids to adopt the right attitude, to think optimistically about their ability to handle whatever they've been given to do. Even if, quite frankly, it's not worth doing.

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The most common bit of concrete advice offered by Dweck and others enamored of the growth mindset is to praise kids for their effort ("You tried really hard") rather than for their ability ("You're really smart") in order to get them to persevere. (Google the words "praise" and "effort" together: more than 70 million hits.) But the first problem with this seductively simple script change is that praising children for their effort carries problems of its own, as several studies have confirmed: It can communicate that they’re really not very capable and therefore unlikely to succeed at future tasks. ("If you’re complimenting me just for trying hard, I must really be a loser.") The more serious concern, however, is that what's really problematic is praise itself. It's a verbal reward, an extrinsic inducement, and, like other rewards, is often construed by the recipient as manipulation. A substantial research literature has shown that the kids typically end up less interested in whatever they were rewarded or praised for doing, because now their goal is just to get the reward or praise. As I've explained in books and articles, the most salient feature of a positive judgment is not that it’s positive but that it’s a judgment; it's more about controlling than encouraging. Moreover, praise communicates that our acceptance of a child comes with strings attached: Our approval is conditional on the child’s continuing to impress us or do what we say. What kids actually need from us, along with nonjudgmental feedback and guidance, is unconditional support -- the antithesis of a patronizing pat on the head for having jumped through our hoops. The solution, therefore, goes well beyond a focus on what's being praised -- that is, merely switching from commending ability to commending effort. Praise for the latter is likely to be experienced as every bit as controlling and conditional as praise for the former. Tellingly, the series of Dweck's studies on which she still relies to support the idea of praising effort, which she conducted with Claudia Mueller in the 1990s, included no condition in which students received nonevaluative feedback. Other researchers have found that just such a response -- information about how they've done without a judgment attached -- is preferable to any sort of praise. Thus, the challenge for a teacher, parent, or manager is to consider a moratorium on offering verbal doggie biscuits, period. We need to attend to deeper differences: between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, and between "doing to" and "working with" strategies. Unfortunately, we're discouraged from thinking about these more meaningful distinctions -- and from questioning the whole carrot-and-stick model (of which praise is an example) -- when we're assured that it's sufficient just to offer a different kind of carrot.

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Here's another part of the bigger picture that's eclipsed when we get too caught up in the "growth vs. fixed" (or "incremental vs. entity") dichotomy: If students are preoccupied with how well they're doing in school, then their interest in what they're doing may suffer. A 2010 study found that when students whose self-worth hinges on their performance face the prospect of failure, it doesn't help for them to adopt a growth mindset. In fact, those who did so were even more likely to give themselves an excuse for screwing up -- a strategy known as "self-handicapping" -- as compared to those with the dreaded fixed mindset. Even when a growth mindset doesn't make things worse, it can help only so much if students have been led -- by things like grades, tests, and, worst of all, competition -- to become more focused on achievement than on the learning itself. Training them to think about effort more than ability does nothing to address the fact, confirmed by several educational psychologists, that too much emphasis on performance undermines intellectual engagement. Just as with praise, betting everything on a shift from ability to effort may miss what matters most. And this brings us to the biggest blind spot of all -- the whole idea of focusing on the mindsets of individuals. Dweck's work nestles comfortably in a long self-help tradition, the American can-do, just-adopt-a-positive-attitude spirit.("I think I can, I think I can...") The message of that tradition has always been to adjust yourself to conditions as you find them because those conditions are immutable; all you can do is decide on the spirit in which to approach them. Ironically, the more we occupy ourselves with getting kids to attribute outcomes to their own effort, the more we communicate that the conditions they face are, well, fixed. Social psychologists use the term "fundamental attribution error" to mean paying so much attention to personality and attitudes that we overlook how profoundly the social environment affects what we do and who we are.  Their point is that it's simply inaccurate to make too much of a fuss about things like mindsets, but there are also political implications to doing so. Why, for example, do relatively few young women choose to study or work in the fields of math and science? Is it because of entrenched sexism and "the way the science career structure works"?  Well, to someone sold on Dweck's formula, the answer is no: It's "all a matter of mindset." We need only "shift widespread perceptions over to the 'growth mindset'” -- that is, to the perceptions of girls and women who are just trapped by their own faulty thinking. This is similar to the perspective that encourages us to blame a "culture of poverty" in the inner city rather than examine economic and political barriers -- a very appealing explanation to those who benefit from those barriers and would rather fault their victims for failing to pull themselves up by their mindset.

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Having spent a few decades watching one idea after another light up the night sky and then flame out -- in the field of education and in the culture at large -- I realize this pattern often has less to do with the original (promising) idea than with the way it has been oversimplified and poorly implemented. Thus, I initially thought it was unfair to blame Dweck for wince-worthy attempts to sell her growth mindset as a panacea and to give it a conservative spin. Perhaps her message had been distorted by the sort of people who love to complain about grade inflation, trophies for showing up, and the inflated self-esteem of "these kids today." In the late 1990s, for example, right-wing media personality John Stossel snapped up a paper of Dweck's about praise, portraying it as an overdue endorsement of the value of old-fashioned toil -- just what was needed in an era of "protecting kids from failure." Their scores stink but they feel good about themselves anyway -- and here's a study that proves "excellence comes from effort"! This sort of attack on spoiled kids and permissive (or excessive) parenting is nothing new -- and most of its claims dissolve on close inspection. Alas, Dweck not only has failed to speak out against, or distance herself from, this tendentious use of her ideas but has put a similar spin on them herself. She has allied herself with gritmeister Angela Duckworth and made Stossel-like pronouncements about the underappreciated value of hard work and the perils of making things too easy for kids, pronouncements that wouldn't be out of place at the Republican National Convention or in a small-town Sunday sermon. Indeed, Dweck has endorsed a larger conservative narrative, claiming that "the self-esteem movement led parents to think they could hand their children self-esteem on a silver platter by telling them how smart and talented they are." (Of course, most purveyors of that narrative would be just as contemptuous of praising kids for how hard they'd tried, which is what Dweck recommends.) Moreover, as far as I can tell, she has never criticized a fix-the-kid, ignore-the-structure mentality or raised concerns about the "bunch o' facts" traditionalism in schools. Along with many other education critics, I'd argue that the appropriate student response to much of what's assigned isn't "By golly, with enough effort, I can do this!" but "Why the hell should anyone have to do this?" Dweck, like Duckworth, is conspicuously absent from the ranks of those critics. It isn't entirely coincidental that someone who is basically telling us that attitudes matter more than structures, or that persistence is a good in itself, has also bought into a conservative social critique. But why have so many educators who don't share that sensibility endorsed a focus on mindset (or grit) whose premises and implications they'd likely find troubling on reflection? I'm not suggesting we go back to promoting an innate, fixed, "entity" theory of intelligence and talent, which, as Dweck points out, can leave people feeling helpless and inclined to give up. But the real alternative to that isn't a different attitude about oneself; it's a willingness to go beyond individual attitudes, to realize that no mindset is a magic elixir that can dissolve the toxicity of structural arrangements. Until those arrangements have been changed, mindset will get you only so far. And too much focus on mindset discourages us from making such changes. Alfie Kohn is the author of 14 books on education, parenting, and human behavior, including, most recently, "The Myth of the Spoiled Child" (Da Capo Press) and "Schooling Beyond Measure" (Heinemann). He can be reached at www.alfiekohn.org and followed on Twitter at @alfiekohn.

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3 surprisingly sane books on abortion: When absolutely no women’s lives are ruined by one procedure

In July, "Strange Animals" author Chad Kultgen made headlines when he used a website he created, prolifeantiwoman.com, as a way to promote his novel by pretending to be his protagonist: a woman demanding $100 million in donations, who will have the child if she receives the money, and have an abortion if she doesn’t. On the site, as in the book, the woman was pulling this stunt as part of her dissertation. Needless to say, her take on abortion is extreme, calculated and highly unrealistic. There’s a glibness to Kultgen’s treatment of abortion that doesn’t abate even when the character in question starts to reconsider her adamant stance. While I don’t expect fiction to hold up an exact mirror to real life, this treatment of abortion felt hollow to me as a reader, and made me want to find more nuanced, relatable outlooks. This is especially relevant in light of the recent attacks on Planned Parenthood, which are intent on making it seem like an amoral abortion mill rather than a women’s health service provider. Just as "Obvious Child" was an important representation on film of a woman having an abortion and not having it ruin her life, we need similar stories in our fiction and nonfiction, and we are starting to get them. So where can readers turn for protagonists who face unintended pregnancies, have abortions, and go on to live productive, happy, healthy lives? Three books from the last few years -- romance "The Girlfriend" by Abigail Barnette, "’89 Walls" by Katie Pierson and new graphic novel "Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard" by Leah Hayes -- all offer important takes on the procedure. The women aren’t caricatures hell-bent on having an abortion because they “want” to, but women who are clear on why they need to, who ask for help with the process and who allow themselves a range of emotions, even though they never waver in what their choice will be. None of these authors talk down to their heroines, infantilize them or put someone else in control of their decision. The first two are fiction, while the latter, billed as nonfiction, uses the story of two characters having different types of abortions to offer practical advice for women about how to handle the process safely and know what to expect. What impressed me about all three is that none of these author flinches from describing the procedure itself, walking readers through the clinic experience alongside these characters. In the case of "The Girlfriend" and "’89 Walls," their partners join them, and we get to see how going through an abortion impacts their relationship, as well as their relationship with others close to them. While their abortions do change the heroines’ lives, we don’t see them spending the rest of the book lamenting or agonizing over their choice, though it does come up several times in the course of each plot. Both are novels where abortions happen, but neither could truly be called “abortion novels,” although abortion laws being discussed in the news are used in "’89 Walls" as a plot point. "Not Funny Ha-Ha" has more of a serious message, and while we don’t get to know as much about the emotional lives of its characters, its tone is upfront, conversational and helpful, breaking down medical terminology into easy to absorb language; the graphic novel format lends itself to the comforting tone of the book. These aren’t, of course, the only books to deal with the subject, but they are worthy additions to the bookshelves of readers who want to see abortion portrayed as a normal act that’s not overdramatized. Rather than abortion as a political issue, abortion is simply a fact of life, worthy of examination as part of a larger story. No, they aren’t a substitute for honest, first-person accounts, but rather, a useful supplement to them. While I can’t do justice to the full complexity of these stories with a single scene alone, here I wanted to highlight how each book handles the actual description of abortion, because it’s something we don’t see as often on the page as we should. But the true value in each of these books is that abortion is treated as something that does not hinder these women’s and girls’ lives, but advances them. They have feelings about it, both before and afterward, and those feelings are treated as valid and worthy. They decide who they want to tell, and who they don’t. None of these authors treat abortion lightly or facetiously; instead, all present it as the right option for these characters at this time in their lives, sans judgment. "The Girlfriend" by Abigail Barnette Barnette is the pen name for author and blogger Jenny Trout. This is the second in "The Boss" series, which finds 24-year-old protagonist Sophie Scaife pregnant and estranged from her billionaire boyfriend, Neil, who’s twice her age (yes, he’s a billionaire; no, he’s not as robotic as Christian Grey). At the end of the previous novel, "The Boss," Sophie makes it clear that she doesn’t want to be pregnant, and adoption isn’t right for her. "The Girlfriend" opens with Sophie having already scheduled her abortion appointment on her own. When she does tell Neil, even though he isn’t as resolute in wanting to end the pregnancy, he is fully supportive, joining her at her appointment and supporting her every step of the way. This is how Sophie’s abortion is described:

I stared up at the ceiling, my eyes drifting closed under the effect of the sedative. Every minute seemed drawn out, but the initial confusion and panic had given way to an odd feeling of blankness. I was my own calm little center of the universe. “Okay, you’re going to feel a pinch,” the doctor warned. My fingers crushed Neil’s, and I practically jumped off the table. Little pinch my ass! After that, I couldn’t feel anything. I gripped Neil’s hand super hard, and heard myself saying things like, “ow,” but if anything hurt, it was news to me. I heard comforting words from Neil, and Julie and Dr. Jacobson telling me I was doing a good job and it was nearly finished, but mostly I just drifted in a weird pink sedative haze. Everything was happening over there, and everyone was making far too big a deal about it. But it did seem to take a long time. “All right,” I heard Dr. Jacobson say cheerfully. “You’re all finished, Sophie. Julie is going to help you to recovery.”

Though Sophie has come across as incredibly strong in her conviction that she’s done the right thing for herself, we see that she’s been harboring a fear that catches up with her. Moments later, she asks Neil, “Do you hate me?” He replies, “No, no. Never. I don’t want you to ever think that.” Since this happens very early on in the book, we get to see Sophie and Neil deal with the immediate physical aftermath, discuss what birth control methods they will use, find out how the abortion affects their sex life, and, later, see Sophie deciding whether to share this news. The abortion is a catalyst to bring them closer together, but, while not forgotten, does not remain the focal point of the entire novel. "’89 Walls" by Katie Pierson Set in 1989, this teen romance finds protagonist Quinn discovering she’s pregnant about halfway through the book, despite having used condoms with her ex-boyfriend, Jason. She’s also already started dating a new guy, Seth, whom she does tell, along with her best friend and her mother, who’s disappointed but firmly supportive; she opts to not tell her father. Her mother drives her to the clinic, where Seth helps them navigate the protesters trying to block their way. Quinn meets with an abortion counselor who prescribes her the pill, even though having sex again is the last thing on Quinn’s mind. Here’s how Quinn’s abortion is described:

It took four minutes. It hurt, but no worse than her monthly cramps. The friendly nurse told Quinn to breathe with her. She did, and it helped. The worst part was the horrible slurping sound, like a straw on the bottom of a milk shake. Then it was over. The doctor, a beefy guy with a gray beard, patted her trembling knee as he rose from his rolling stool. “You take care,” he said. “You too,” Quinn whispered.

Pierson gives us a heroine who doesn’t berate herself for having gotten pregnant, comes to terms with having judged other girls for doing so, and lets the burgeoning sexual tension between Quinn and Seth unfold at a slower pace than it would have otherwise, since Quinn is understandably hesitant about having sex again. While her abortion certainly affects her, especially her political views, which contrast with her father’s around the issue, aside from her holding off on sex with Seth, she quickly becomes swept up in other dramas that are far more pressing. Pierson has said that her depiction of abortion as an everyday event that impacts, but does not in any way derail, Quinn’s life, was quite deliberate. She told Cosmopolitan:

I just wanted to be one of the voices out there that shows that this is actually quite normal…. I took care to detail what an abortion clinic is like, what a boring doctor's office it really is. It's not this clandestine, creepy place. I tried to be detailed about what the procedure itself is like. I think maybe an older audience doesn't need to have that explained. I tried to put in as much detail as I could and try to normalize it to make it what it is: a very safe, standard procedure that is safer than carrying a baby to term, especially when you are a teenager.

"Not Funny Ha-Ha" by Leah Hayes  "Not Funny Ha-Ha" uses the graphic novel format to share the stories of two fictional characters, Lisa and Mary, each facing an unwanted pregnancy, and opting for, respectively, surgical and medical abortions, terms that are detailed in the book. Billed as nonfiction, "Not Funny" offers the two women’s stories, interspersed with advice from Hayes about how and when to go about getting an abortion and what factors to consider when doing so. Unlike the novels above, she does not get into how or why the women got pregnant, only that they have made the decision to have an abortion. After going over the two abortion options and why some women prefer one or the other, we see each women choose one of them. In Lisa’s case, she decides on a surgical abortion. We see her lying down, her eyes closed, with this description:

Lisa felt like she was at a visit to the gynecologist at first. Everything happened pretty fast. But things seemed different when the nurse gave her the local anesthesia. Suddenly she could not feel anything between her legs. She looked at the ceiling and waited for the procedure to start. There was a lot of cramping...kind of like getting a pap smear, but at times, more intense. She tried to be very brave every time it hurt. The procedure takes a very short amount of time. She could hear the humming of the instruments.

After about 15 minutes, the doctor told her she was “all set,” and helped Lisa sit up. The nurse walked her to another waiting room-like placed called the “recovery room.” In Mary’s case, she gets the necessarily pills for a medical abortion at the clinic, takes one there, and the rest at home. She has bad cramps, throws up, sleeps and then:

At one point, the bleeding got very heavy all at once. She knew that this meant that the abortion had happened. It was intense and made her a little sad. She didn’t know why.

Hayes then lets the reader know that larger blood clots are perfectly normal at this point. While we don’t get to know Lisa and Mary’s interior lives very well, as "Not Funny Ha-Ha" is not a character-heavy book, but an information-rich one, the tone of her text and drawings is straightforward and comforting, with repeated reminders to consult a medical professional, not friends or Hayes, if you actually are in need of an abortion. Hayes told Salon about her reasons for creating the book: “I wanted to write about abortion because I felt like I had something that I could add to the conversation, expression-wise. I've always been influenced by graphic novels that try to tackle complicated issues, and I noticed that there was a bit of a void of visual 'commentary' on this topic. It's an experience that so many girls, women (and their families and partners) go through all around us, all the time, yet it can feel scary and lonely at times. I wanted to offer my interpretation of the procedures and the feelings that surround them. I wanted to make it feel like an open, warm conversation about something potentially hard and scary.”

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My body will never be “beach-ready”

AS PRETEENS on family holidays in Cyprus, my cousin and I used to stage photo shoots on the beach. These weren’t professional photo shoots, but we acted as though they were, pulling poses we borrowed from magazines and music videos. We stuck our hands on our hips, flared our arms out, jutted our legs back, held our chests forward, and stuck our heads up in the air, proud. Sometimes, we’d try more ambitious poses, balancing on slippery rocks or playfully running along the shore, dipping our feet in the Mediterranean with our sarongs flying in the breeze behind us, as the camera shutter blinked. This was around the time Destiny’s Child was still a girl group, Beyoncé and Jay-Z did “Bonnie and Clyde,” and Jay-Z still used a hyphen in his name. This was also around the time I last felt good in a bikini. Looking back at old photos of my cousin and I, everything about our shoots was ridiculous, from the exaggerated poses to the wide-eyed, pouty-lipped facial expressions we thought made us look cool, but neither of us cared how we looked then – even if our little bellies stuck out above our bikini bottoms, or our thighs rubbed together; we were having fun. And then we grew up. I started looking at my body differently when I was 14. It seemed to have suddenly changed; I’d started my period and with it came larger breasts and wider hips. I began weighing myself regularly, and paid closer attention to the clothes I wore, and how I carried myself. I heard women who I admired and, I thought, looked gorgeous call themselves “fat,” and noticed how men paid more attention to thinner women. I saw that the women who appeared wearing few clothes on the covers of magazines and had the leading roles in films were all pretty and thin. I began getting undressed behind a towel in the PE changing rooms at school so the other girls wouldn’t see me naked, and pulled in my stomach as best I could during swimming classes. At 16, I played Adelaide in a youth theatre production of “Guys and Dolls.” In one scene, I had to strip down to a leotard, suspenders, and stockings under the glare of a spotlight. Each night, I worried about what the audience thought about my body, and compared my shapely figure to those of the other girls on stage. The adrenaline of performing helped take some of that fear away, but that scene still made me more nervous than any other. Throughout my teens, and now into my 20s, I’ve become increasingly obsessed with body image, concerned with certain “problem areas” I hadn’t really looked at before. By “problem areas” – a silly term I picked up from a glossy magazine to describe body parts that ought to be whittled down until they’re no longer visible – I mean my upper arms, lower stomach, wide hips, and thighs. In an effort to get rid of these, over the last few years, I have: paid for expensive gym memberships; applied overpriced firming and anti-cellulite lotions; joined a slimming club; committed to a demanding diet that made me feel faint, and once almost pass out at work; and cut carbs from dinners. I’ve spent a lot of money and time – more than I’d care to admit – on my appearance. Recently, my friend and I spent a day on the beach in Connecticut. We didn’t stage a fake photo shoot (that seemed like a better idea in the early 2000s), but we sunbathed, talked for hours, and sipped cold beer in the sea. Still, I wasn’t comfortable in my body, or in my bikini – a red, white, and blue print ensemble that I bought last summer when I was a few pounds heavier. Next to my friend’s lithe, tanned body, I felt frumpy and unattractive. Moving around on the beach, I was acutely aware of all the areas on my body I’ve come to think of as problems, worried about the slightest jiggle or wobble of flesh, and how the pouch of fat on my stomach and the patterns of cellulite on my inner thighs looked. I know it’s vain, and I was annoyed with myself for fretting about these things that don’t really matter, but I couldn’t stop thinking about them – despite the fact that it was just me, my friend and her husband, and one of their neighbours’ dogs on our stretch of the beach. But I swear that dog was judging me. * * * Of course, I’m not alone in feeling insecure about my body. A 2004 study, commissioned by the beauty brand Dove, asked 3,200 women between the ages of 18 and 64 and across 10 countries to choose a word to describe their appearance. Just 2% of the respondents considered themselves “beautiful.” It’s worth mentioning that more women chose the words “attractive” (9%), “feminine” (8%), “good-looking” (7%), and “cute” (7%), but these still constituted a mere 33% of the results. The fact remains: most women aren’t confident in their appearance. It doesn’t help, then, that there are advertisements like the recent one for Protein World’s Weight Loss Collection – which consists of Slender Blend (a “low calorie, high protein meal replacement shake”), Slender Blend Capsules, and Multi Vitamin Capsules – designed to make women feel ashamed of their bodies. You’ve probably seen the poster, of a very slim blonde woman (model Renee Somerfield) wearing a very tiny yellow bikini next to the words: “Are you beach body ready?” Notice that she is not smiling. Probably because all she’s been eating are protein tablets. (As I write this, I would like to point out that I’m eating a very delicious chocolate chip cookie.) In April, two brilliant women in London, Fiona Longmuir and Tara Costello, responded to the advert by tweeting a photo of themselves standing in their bikinis in front of the poster on the platform of a London Underground station. “You’re goddamn right we’re beach body ready. Exactly as we are.” See! These women have bodies, and here they are in bikinis, ready for the beach. Voila: beach bodies. The photo went viral, and following its success a “beach party” was held in Hyde Park, where Londoners came together to show off their beach bodies – which we all have, simply by virtue of having bodies – in British weather. Some plus-size fashion retailers got in on the cause, too, launching campaigns with a similar aesthetic to the Protein World ad, but encouraging a healthier attitude toward and acceptance of women’s bodies. Swimwear brand Swimsuitsforall reacted with a poster of plus-size model Ashley Graham in a black bikini against a yellow background, and put forth the question, “Are you ready for this beach body?” (It reminds me a bit of the line, “I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly,” in Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”; the world was ready for big booties then, so why not fuller-figured women now?) Then Simply Be released its #SimplyBeKini campaign, starring plus model Jocelyn Corona posing in another black bikini on another yellow background next to the slogan: “Every body is beach ready.” Around this time, yet another image surfaced online of three average-sized women wearing bikinis, marked with the Dove logo in the bottom right-hand corner. “Yes. We are beach body ready,” it reads. While Dove has said publicly that it wasn’t responsible for the image (and though it agrees with the message that all bodies are beach-ready), the image’s anonymous designer clearly wanted Dove’s name on it. Perhaps the beauty brand’s name is appropriated here as an act of admiration, or maybe it was intended to highlight the importance of responsible advertising in the beauty industry; where Protein World’s message is lose weight to be desirable, Dove’s advertisements celebrate the beauty and diversity of women’s bodies regardless of their shape and size. Whatever the designer’s motive, the image ties together ideas about body image, the beauty industry, and standards of advertising that are worth thinking about. Simply Be’s creative director Ed Watson talked about some of these issues in a statement. “We have a responsibility as retailers to be representative in our advertising and that means using an array of body ideals that are achievable,” Watson said. “While the Protein World model, Renee, is undeniably beautiful and I’m sure very healthy, it is irresponsible to project something that is largely unachievable as the ideal.” As big-name brands wrangled with the Protein World ad, commuters on the London Underground took to posting stickers over the ad with empowering words like, “FUCK YOUR SEXIST SHIT;” over 70,000 people signed a change.org petition to remove the poster; and 378 people formally complained to the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency, calling out the advert for being “socially irresponsible” and promoting a culture of body-shaming. The ASA investigated the matter and, for a time, mandated that “the ad could not appear again in its current form.” Yet, as of a ruling dated July 1, the agency decided not to uphold the issue. From its ruling: “Although we understood the claim ‘Are you beach body ready?’ invited readers to think about their figures, we did not consider the image of the model would shame women who had different body shapes into believing they needed to take a slimming supplement to feel confident wearing swimwear in public. For that reason, we concluded the ad was not irresponsible.” * * * I had seen the Protein World poster online and read about the growing campaign against it in the UK, but given the backlash there, I didn’t expect to see it on billboards and in subway cars in New York City. When I did see it on the subway, I felt betrayed – by Renee Somerfield, the bikini-clad model who had been paid to make women feel bad about their bodies; by Protein World, whose products exist to make women smaller; and by the MTA for putting up the ad in the first place. And then, admittedly, I felt jealous. For the duration of the ride, I thought about my own problem areas, how I’ll never look like the Protein World model, and how I’d kill for abs like that. I’m aware that Protein World wants me to feel this way so that I’ll buy its products (I won’t), that this of kind of thinking is incredibly shallow – I know there’s more to life than a flat stomach and toned arms – and that this entire campaign is designed to make women doubt their bodies. And yet, here I am doubting mine. The reaction to the Protein World advert hasn’t been as loud here as it was in the UK. Though some feminist groups like National Women’s Liberation and Redstockings have been putting stickers printed with “This Oppresses Women” on the poster, along with other body-shaming ads to make a public statement about how certain companies are grossly shaming women into buying their products to “correct” their bodies. Other New Yorkers have scrawled body-positive responses like “ALL BODIES ARE BEACH BODIES!” over the ad. Such doodles and stickers effectively rewrite the campaign’s message by using its eyeball-drawing power to go against the very idea it peddles: that women’s bodies need to look a certain way in order to be “ready” for the beach, and perhaps for the world. * * * Unfortunately, Protein World’s isn’t the only asinine advertisement that exists to make women feel inadequate. Also on the subway, you might see a breast enhancement ad with a woman holding fruit to her chest to show her transformation from sad oranges to happy melons. There’s an ad for butt enlargement surgery with a tiny-waisted woman wearing tight jeans and nothing else, arching her back to flaunt a Kardashian-sized rear – the ad doesn’t bother showing the rest of her. And earlier this year, there was another breast surgery ad that zoomed in on a gigantic pair of breasts in a bikini top, strands of peroxide blonde hair framing the cleavage, while the rest of the woman was inexplicably cut out of the picture. The message in these last two advertisements is clear: the rest of her isn’t important. Ad campaigns like these sometimes amuse me because they’re so ridiculous, but most of the time, I find them seriously disturbing and degrading – especially the images of women’s isolated body parts. These ads are the most problematic, because they not only make it look as though a woman’s breasts or butt or whatever isn’t attached to her (and this, weirdly, is meant to maximize a body part’s appeal); they also physically take women’s bodies away from them. By isolating one body part, these bodies are no longer the property of the women pictured, but rather become ours to look at and judge as we please. While I don’t think that people absorb images like sponges, but rather filter them and choose what to pay attention to, I do think there’s power in repetition: seeing the same kinds of images over and over again can make the culture they promote seem acceptable. In their multitude, ads targeting women’s bodies in a negative way pose an unhealthy way of thinking about physical appearance – instead of embracing a variety of body types, these advertisements portray women’s figures as commodities made up of different parts that can be customized and tweaked to create a sexually desirable, impossible whole. Tina Fey perfectly exemplifies this dilemma in her manifesto of badassery, Bossypants, where she writes: “Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes full Spanish lips a classic button nose hairless Asian skin with a California tan a Jamaican dance hall ass long Swedish legs small Japanese feet the abs of a lesbian gym owner the hips of a nine-year-old boy the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits.” Debora L. Spar expounds upon this idea in her book, Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection. “Again and again, women are being told – promised, really – that their bodies are mutable, that they can be bent and molded into different, better, shapes,” she writes. “Like accessories, bodies are things we tinker with, things we buy according to fashion and discard when they no longer please us.” Advertisements for plastic surgery procedures and dietary supplements often make similar promises to women; they tell them they can be beautiful if they make a change, a sacrifice. Amy Schumer parodied this reality perfectly in her “Swanks” skit, a commercial for a kind of butt enhancement surgery that squashes women’s breasts down and around into their bottoms, “causing minor internal bleeding and major external hotness.” Schumer’s bloody butt-boosting method demonstrates how shifting beauty standards dictate the ways in which many women nip and tuck their bodies, even when the cost of such surgery is potentially fatal. Women will literally kill for a hot body. To be clear, I’m not arguing that plastic surgery or going on a diet is wrong, or that any person who chooses to change their body should feel guilty or ashamed for doing so. However, body-altering measures – whether it’s going under the knife or on the latest juice cleanse – are increasingly beginning to feel less like personal choices and more like requirements to feel accepted and attractive. “If we could only lose five pounds, women tend to think, or have larger eyes / rounder breasts / silkier hair, life itself would change,” Spar writes. “Better body, we repeat and pray, better me.” It’s this kind of thinking the Protein World advert elicits and perpetuates, that makes some women not want to wear a bikini in public, and sells protein tablets. While I’m guilty of sometimes buying into this kind of thinking, I’m also aware that it’s complete bullshit. And I think most people are smart enough to realize that ads like Protein World’s promote an unrealistic body type and lifestyle. But I do think the fashion and beauty industries need to take more responsibility for the messages they’re sending to women about their bodies, and that they should be more honest in the ways they depict them. * * * Everyone seems to have an opinion about women’s bodies, and they’re often not afraid to share them. The first time someone commented on my weight I was 10 years old. I was in Cyprus again, this time at the home of a distant relative, where a distant relative told me cheerfully that I was getting “a big belly.” I was outraged and embarrassed, totally shocked that she had said this to me at all, let alone in front of so many people. On the drive back, and later in front of a mirror, I examined my stomach and wondered if maybe she was right. My mother assured me that I wasn’t getting a big belly and explained that unfortunately this is what Greek relatives do, and I shouldn’t take it personally. As angry as I was, this seemed like a reasonable explanation at the time, plus I was young and had more pressing things to worry about, like which member of the Backstreet Boys would I marry, and so I got over it. But a similar situation now, in my 20s, wouldn’t be so easy to overcome. Recently, a drunk man stumbled into the laundromat where I was waiting for some clothes to dry. He was clutching greasy takeout food, and began talking to another guy there about the baseball on the TV screen, and then, after noticing me sitting nearby, about my “thick thighs” and “big tits.” He came up to me and started talking to me, took my hand without my permission and wouldn’t let me have it back as he tried to sweet-talk me. “Why are you being like that? I’m not gonna hurt you,” he said, when I continued doing my best to ignore him. He asked if I was married, and I lied and said yes so he wouldn’t bother me. I hate that he seemed to think, if I wasn’t married, that I should be interested in him, that my body’s there for him to talk about in public, loudly, and for him to look at and touch as he pleases. I hate that I couldn’t just sit there and do my laundry, that not one of the other three people – all men – in the laundromat did anything, and that I had to call my boyfriend and ask him to meet me and sit with me so I didn’t feel afraid. * * * Am I beach body ready? By Protein World’s standards, definitely not. Of course, by real life standards, I am beach body ready whenever I take my body to the beach. I still question my figure whenever I look at myself naked in the mirror, or step on the scales, or wear a bikini in public. But I’m slowly beginning to feel more comfortable in my skin. I try to remember how I felt when I was younger, when I didn’t think of my body as a collection of problem areas and instead thought about all the things I could do with it – like run around on the beach with my cousin, and climb rocks to make silly poses on them, and dance to Destiny’s Child songs. Our photos were never perfect, but in them we were always happy.

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I am a souvenir hoarder: I’m the guy who can’t throw café napkins and hotel stationery away

One of the features of summer vacations used to involve bearing back mementoes and knickknacks to sentimentally clutter up shelf space at home. But in Istanbul, where my girlfriend and I keep an apartment, mustached vendors now hawk selfie sticks where roving souvenir sellers once plied their trade. My heart twinges every time I come across the sight. These Instagram days, does any sunburned visitor to Barcelona or Capri or Cape Cod still browse a postcard rack or a newsstand? Well, I do, and then some. As the boyfriend and plus-one of a globe-trotting food writer, I live a nomadic life for a good part of the year. And I come home with souvenir booty: color-saturated postcards from Marrakech, Paris, Granada, Sorrento; and touristic calendars from Rome (the pope, the Trevi Fountain), Venice (gondoliers under the Rialto Bridge), and Moscow (the monumental Stalinist metro stations). I come home too with café napkins, such as from Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires where Borges liked to loll; and hotel stationery from the rambling homey Richard Löwenherz in the Wachau, Austria, or the sleek Island Shangri-La in Hong Kong. The counters and shelves of my small apartment in Queens are awash in all this handleable non-digital ephemera — not to mention the museum brochures and pamphlets, the foldable city maps (mobile apps hold no magic for me). “You’re the only man I know who brings back hotel shopping bags!” exclaims my girlfriend, who doesn’t share my affection for such objects of memory. In response I quote to her Susan Pearce, an eminent English academic theorist on collecting who characterized souvenirs as “intimate and bittersweet, with roots in nostalgic longing for a past which is seen as better and fuller than the difficult present.” Doubly so when the mode of souvenir is becoming nostalgic itself. What the cultural critic (and postcard collector) Walter Benjamin famously wrote in 1936 about the diminished aura of a “mechanical reproduction” (e.g., a postcard), compared to the unique authenticity of a work of art, requires a rewrite, I think, for the post-analog age. Postcards and their calendar cousins possess a certain authentic glow now as tangible, discrete, physical things, compared to the never-ending streams of disembodied cyber images on social networks. These small, sunny, printed mementos that used to represent the commoditization of travel have turned artisanal and “slow.” Poignant in their anachronism. But I’m not a serious postcard collector. I’m no deltiologist, as such folk are formally called (postcards apparently still remain the third most popular collectible overall, after stamps and coins, despite the calamitous drop in their vacation mailings). I don’t aspire to be Benjamin or Walker Evans, the great photographer whose postcard collecting, begun in boyhood, ran to some 9,000 pieces, sorted into categories. I don’t do categories or keep count. I don’t troll flea markets or shops for hidden gems. I pick up my postcards and souvenirs — carefully — as I go along, as suggestive agents and operatives of what I call “colorized” memory. Call me a sentimentalist, a nostalgiaist — call me a tat-based daydreamer. Call me selfish. I don’t send postcards from abroad (I use email and now Instagram too). I’m not interested in any found poetry of what people wrote on the back. I avoid used cards. Walker Evans prized a “documentary” quality in his mainly black-and-white postcards, of street scenes particularly. I go for fanciful Ektachrome of faraway places. For me, these bits and pieces I bring home, no matter how humble — nothing over $25 — are emblems and trophies I can use to intimately imagine life — happily, wistfully, deludedly — as a never-ending Grand Tour. The sight of one of my souvenirs as it lies in the clutter of my dim apartment in Queens will rouse a bright exotic recollection, set off a selective Proustian flare. Would I lose the precious cheering fragments of memories if I lost the actual physical object? Well, I’d lose the mnemonic pushbutton, the madeleine. Because whenever my eye happens to fall on, say, that blue business card I magpied from “Sombreros Antonio Garcia,” with its brown silhouette of a flat-hatted horseman, then the shop and the street in Seville where I took it blooms in my mind, and then a walk in an Andalusian garden thick with purple flowers, and the three comidas (lunches) in one afternoon we endured on one of my girlfriend’s assignments — all of  which may or may not have been the same day, but blend into a fumy evocation of my times in Seville. A smartphone photo doesn’t work that way. Pixeled images lack the suggestive power of physical relics. Of lots of physical relics. The writer Dominique Browning recently wrote a defense of clutter, of the pleasures of owning many objects. But she felt compelled to note, triumphantly — she’s a former editor of House and Garden — that a “stained and rickety table” of  hers was actually “a Chinese altarpiece from the Ming dynasty with rolled bamboo marble top.” But I don’t claim “value.” My clutter is, again, papery slush mostly — gatherings of ephemera, and old at that; see my calendars. But I bet Hemingway could relate. That great he-man of adventure turns out to have been a paper packrat, a sentimentalist who hung onto old Christmas cards, receipts and hunting licenses. No doubt Marie Kondo, the princess of tidiness, would set her decluttering juggernaut against us both. She particularly doesn’t care for paper. But then again, her organizing credo is that possessions should “spark joy.” And don’t my souvenirs and knickknacks bring me that? But I embrace a very non-Kondo disarray. I do not organize what I have; I like to leave things dotted around in a larger, general sprawl, with occasional clusters. So I can wander my apartment like a daytripper — like a flâneur, that poetic stroller of 19th-century Paris streets dear to Benjamin’s heart. So I can be happily surprised by serendipity as I suddenly notice again a souvenir while I’m perhaps trying to locate something else more mundane, like a utility bill. In his essay on clutter, the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips observed how “if you lose something [in the clutter] you may find something else in the process of looking for it.” I admit that having all these travel souvenirs around can produce overstimulation, a memory overload. So I keep many of my postcards inside their purchase packets, to be dipped into occasionally like boxed chocolates for a nibble. I admit further that my cluttered, keepsake ways became for a while part of the “more difficult present” that Susan Pearce cited. Particularly when I started hanging onto large amounts of non-travel items like liquor-store cardboard boxes and plastic grocery bags. I had to undertake a major decluttering project, which proved a struggle; but it turned out well, I’m happy to say. I wrote a book about the whole business. I retained all my souvenirs, though, of course, still dotted about. But over at my girlfriend’s place, where I spend my nights, she keeps a tight rein on my sprawling inclinations. Her own travel mementos are shipshape and of a highish order: a display plate, say, from the Stalin museum in his Georgia hometown of Gori. Showing how Russia’s and Georgia’s collective nostalgia for a terrible past finds an uneasy expression in gift-shop knickknacks. Finally, I admit that Susan Pearce does assert, somewhat harshly, that “no one is interested in other people’s souvenirs.” Meaning, I suppose, the intimate wonderfulness of the memories and visions evoked are solely in the eye of the beholder. The same for the souvenir itself. Which really is fine by me — the more to savor all for myself, here in my private memory-and-mood theater. Where I can switch gears from my cards and calendars (if I care to) and  browse some of the pics on my new smartphone. From just this summer’s travels, I seem to have some 4,000 of them.  

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This is the laziest rhyme in all of songwriting history — and great artists use it all the time

I should probably start this by saying that I am not and have never been a songwriter. Or a singer. Or talented. Years ago, I wrote a few records for my then gal’s punk rock band but they were of the variety of: “Let’s go down to St. Marks place/punch somebody in the face.” For 17 years, since the winter of 1997, I have been surrounded by actual musicians. I’ve been in studios and on buses and in dressing rooms, and I’ve watched them struggle to create great songs. I’ve also seen them take the path of least resistance and settle for merely finished songs. Since I’m more of a profiler and an essayist when it comes to my place in the ecosystem of rock journalists, I have never really had cause to criticize, but I happened to be watching an old episode of “The West Wing” late one night. “The West Wing” has become a form of meditation for me. It’s always on — a soothing loop — and I don’t like to unplug from it, especially after a day of writing.  It was the “King Corn” episode, if you’re familiar with the show, and in it, the long unfolding romance between Josh and his assistant Donna finally seems to be coming into flower once she left the Wing and went on the road campaigning for the vice president, “Bingo Bob.” The music they chose to underscore the tension in a key scene in "King Corn" just happens to be an old Ryan Adams song from his 2002 “Demolition” album. Now, let me say that I think Ryan Adams, whom I used to know in my professional capacity as a rock writer and whom I have not seen in over a decade, is a true artist. Some of his songs are among my favorites (“Cold Roses,” most of “Heartbreaker,” less of “Gold” but still quite a bit of it, you get the idea). Anyway, Josh, weary from trying to elevate Matt Santos, is going to bed alone even though he wants Donna there in those clean hotel sheets, and Donna is likely thinking the same and over it all, and the sad hum of the generic hotel by night, one of hundreds they’ve checked into, we must hear Ryan sing these lines: “What is this fire? Burning slowly. My one and only. Desire.” Well, it took me right out of my great Sorkin “om” and back into the cold, oppressive city and a long, lonely night of my own. Of course, to Adams “fire” and “desire” may be the perfect rhyme. Most musicians, I’ve learned, write the lyrics last, and he might have just been feeling the music early and felt like “desire” was meant to be exactly where it was. Yes, maybe he liked the way fire and desire sounded in his mouth and looked on a page or a studio chalkboard, the way they generally fit like a pair of lovebirds on a perch. Fire and desire. Especially when punctuated by a mournful harmonica, which is definitely not a cliché in a Ryan Adams song (definitely). Or maybe he wanted to get wasted or laid and did not give a shit. I can’t really tell. I’m split. My cynical side, well you know what it says, but the mystery, the voodoo, the alchemy of the art of songwriting prevents me from determining one way or another. You’d have to ask him and hope he’d be honest. Which he probably wouldn’t. The next day I reached out to a mentor of mine, a slightly older rock critic (and one of my old bosses). I asked him what was up with the whole “fire and desire thing,” and let him know that I would be writing about it. Fire. Desire. When did they first do their dance? Was it in classical poetry? Did it crawl up into a blues song from a Delta murk? I even emailed the great Greil Marcus — the great Greil never replied, but my ex-EIC and mentor seized on the question. It seemed to trigger something in him as well. We agreed that there are some songs where “fire” could only ever be the key rhyme. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s “Fire,” for example. Jimi seems to sell it by sheer style points alone and it’s hard to deny his “itchin’ desire” and its need to be scratched fast.  Maybe Jimi is singing to a man, but most likely it’s a woman in crushed velvet flares who smells like musk or hash or cloves. But what is a woman’s "fire"? Don’t we all come with the same internal temperature? Hey, 98.6 — it’s good to have you back again. Is it the fire in the belly? The reproductive organs? Is it the body temperature that rises up during sex and makes us sweat?   If so, don’t men have internal fires as well? Doesn’t everyone? And therefore how can singing of this be special? Or even interesting? It’s like singing about having a pee. Malign the Doors all you want — and for some reason people who were never teenage boys often do — but the fuckers wrote a seven minute and six second song about “fire” that never once used the word “desire.” Bob Marley and the Wailers did the same, also with a song with “fire” in the title off an album with "fire" in the title. My mentor and I tried to determine without the help of the Internet whether the Beatles ever resorted to what we can call the “easy rhyme” — the “moon, June, spoon” of sex lyrics — a notch above “maybe” and “baby.” We couldn’t find any Beatles lyrics of the kind, but did turn up several Bob Dylan lyrics where the great man went there — "Caribbean Wind,” “Lord Protect My Child,” “I Feel a Change Comin’ On” — and again, I wondered if Bob examined all the possible words at his disposal, many thousands in various languages, as well as nonsense words or scat, and chose “fire” or “desire” because it fit (he even named an album "Desire," so perhaps so). Brian Wilson was convinced his “fire” song could start actual fires like Drew Barrymore. My point is that better men than myself and even Ryan Adams went there and emerged with their careers and legacies unsullied. The great Rick James created one of the best slow jams ever with a song that didn’t even try to bury the linguistic marriage. The actual title, a duet with Teena Marie, his insanely gifted protégé, is actually called “Fire and Desire.” Bruce Springsteen too is like the fucking poet laureate of the fire and its best friend desire. In song, The Boss can sell it like nobody else. “'I'm On Fire' by Springsteen?” recalls Gideon Yago fondly. “I was 7, a denizen of the NY tri-state area, meaning it was all over the radio that summer.  And also terrifying when you're 7 and don't understand metaphors of sexual tension.  You think ... jesus ... this guy is *on fire?’  Holy shit!" And that was after "Rosalita" (his “stone desire”) and the ballad “Fire,” which fell back on “desire” after soaring with “Sampson and Delilah.” It was a sexy soul jam for the Pointer Sisters but is probably best known for inspiring the late, great Robin Williams to sing it in the voice of Elmer Fudd. (RIP, man. Still.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUGxY... “Bruce’s ‘Fire’ is enormous,” says singer songwriter Lloyd Cole via email (we were also discussing the Pointer Sisters' perfect cover at the time). Cole is no slouch as a lyricist. The dude once rhymed “Norman Mailer” with “get a new tailor.” Normally, according to Cole, “You avoid it if I weren’t writing a song addressing fire and desire if you were a proper writer.” Cole is also partial to the old Shocking Blue song “Venus” (“Terrible and irresistible”). They go there, and so does Bananarama decades later. “English as a second language is always an advantage,” Cole adds and it’s true, the Shocking Blue version is much more charming than the Hi NRG "ramas." I was hooked now, and reached out to other singer/songwriters, wondering if my displeasure (and the thorough ruining of “King Corn”) was justified, or if I was overreacting. Most people, after all, barely notice lyrics, as I’ve heard so many rock stars lament to me over the years. “I don’t think I’ve ever rhymed anything with fire, alas,” wrote Moby, “but I like Billy Joel’s rhyming ‘fire’ with ‘turning’.” I don’t know what meditation Mobes was deep into at the time, but I reminded him that Saint Billy rhymed “burning” with “turning,” not “fire.” “A lot of people think that songwriters start with something to say and then look for the right words to say it,” writes Adam Schlesinger, backing up my earlier theory. “It's usually the opposite. They just start singing stuff that sounds cool and then they start rhyming to it, and then they try to make sense of it all afterwards. Fire is one of the greatest words to sing when you're just vocalizing gibberish. Morrison obviously hit upon the phrase light my fire first, then tried to rhyme fire with a bunch of different stuff, like mire and pyre and liar, but in the chorus he just said fuck it and rhymed light my fire with try to set the night on fire because fire sounded so awesome he wanted to sing it again. Maybe he didn't even notice it was the same word because he was high(er).” Oddly, I don’t mind rhyming “fire” with “fire,” if that even qualifies as a rhyme. But fire and desire will always, always  take me out of a song and and nix any chance of me making it one of my favorites, even if it comes from one of my favorite bands (say, U2’s “Desire”). Why couldn’t Bono make the extra effort? Johnny Cash did. He fell into a burning ring of fire and went down down down but he found no “desire” in his abyss, did he? The place where the quality control might be most stringent is in the world of hip-hop lyrics. You simply can’t get away with something that rote. Take this quote from a furious and young Eminem, talking to London’s N.M.E. about 15 years ago, on the cusp of the release of his now classic "Marshall Mathers LP." Boy bands and Britney ruled and fires and desire were all about, as if an asteroid of slack had just hit. “You can only rhyme fuckin’ ‘fire’ and ‘desire’ and ‘heart’ and ‘fall apart’ so many times, and I’m sick of hearin’ it. And if I lose my fans ‘cause they find out Eminem doesn’t like ‘N Sync, I don’t give a fuck, fuck ‘N Sync, fuck Backstreet Boys, fuck Britney Spears, fuck Christina Aquilera, fuck all that bullshit.” A decade and a half before that, a pair of MCs from Queens declared, “I’m the kind of rock, there is none higher, Sucker MCs should call me sire.   To burn my kingdom, you must use fire. I won’t stop rocking till I retire.” They didn’t need it to take over literally everything and announce a permanent shift in popular culture, did they? Maybe it’s time for us to finally retire it? But then again, I’m not a songwriter. "I'm absolutely guilty of this rhyme crime,” admits Catherine Pierce, another singer songwriter pal of mine and one-half of the great country rock duo the Pierces. “But I stand by it wholeheartedly. Desire burns, for god's sake, so of course you are going to partner it with fire. It's a rhyme that's just too satisfying to ignore. I'm more offended by the pairing of ‘love and above,’ but sometimes that can pass too.”

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The military governs your diet: From pizza to burritos to new plastic pouches, the Pentagon wields shocking power in grocery aisle

59,422 breakfast sausage patties 98,220 eggs 21,082 packages sliced American cheese 2,451 containers frozen apple juice 13,500 packages julienned French fries 24,159 corn dogs 8,682 frozen burritos To say the U.S. military buys in bulk is an understatement—the above shopping list is from a single prime vendor contract for facilities near Seattle, Washington, and Hermiston, Oregon, in 2002. The weekly grocery needs of the entire armed forces could pick clean whole regions of their number one agricultural products, leave bare-shelved commissaries across the country, and tie up battalions of baked‐goods manufacturers for months. It’s essentially one giant mouth munching the American landscape, and, despite commanding deep discounts on its purchases, with $3.8 billion in annual spending in 2011 alone, it is far and away the nation’s leading institutional grocery buyer. (In the private sector, the annual expenditures of behemoth food distributor Sysco and monster restaurateur McDonald’s exceed those of the Department of Defense.) These dollars, managed by the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), the military’s purchasing agency, affect the American food industry as might those of any big spender: red carpets and gold‐plated customer care, which means conversations between the agency and industry that probably go something like this: “Hello, Commander, any new contracts on the horizon? The crust was a little pale on the breakfast pastry? We’ll be right on that, sir. You’d like to add some functional ingredients to the processed cheese spread; what would that entail? You were approached by a tofu factory in Oregon about making a soy ginger noodle entrée? Very exciting, but wouldn’t it be easier for you if we just added a soy entrée to our regular line?” These accommodations may orient commercial production to mess halls and combat rations, but it’s not the military’s prodigious purchasing power that’s turned the food industry into G.I. Joe’s brainchild. No, that happens at the Natick Center, which, in pursuing its mission to “actively leverage leading edge technologies to ensure the warfighter is provided the decisive edge in all aspects of combat feeding,” has infiltrated practically every packaged food in the land. Of course, many, if not most, of the lab’s daily tasks are humdrum—approving new items for the Meal, Ready-to-Eat (MRE) ration, arranging for a small run of prototype plastic pouches with tear notches, and evaluating stainless steel serving pans for the navy are all par for the course. But there’s a whole other category of activity—identifying basic and applied science needs, finding and working with partners for these projects, and disseminating the interim and final results—that exerts a disproportionately large influence on the U.S. food system. This exaggerated power comes not from the size of Natick’s research budget, which is relatively small, but from the simple fact of having an overarching goal, a long-term plan and relentless focus—which, come to think of it, may be the three traits in life most important to making things happen. The first step is a whole lot of listening. During the year, the Combat Feeding Program talks with “warfighters,” the official armed forces term for soldiers, about their wants and needs—more sandwiches, pizza, bagels, and wraps; fewer traditional meat and potatoes-type meals. It gets requests from the various services and agencies. For example, the army might complain: Our guys are sweating off fifteen pounds or getting heatstroke in the field kitchens. How about lowering the temps to below inferno level? The navy might implore: Can’t you find a way for us to get equipment onto a submarine other than sawing it up deckside? And it gets general direction from the secretary of defense—decrease the soldier’s physical and cognitive burden, reduce the logistics environmental footprint, enhance operational efficiency—who, in turn, gets his or her marching orders from the Defense Science Board, the military’s quadrennial plans, and presidential science and technology policies. “The Army solicits the entire community in terms of what needs improvement in combat feeding,” explains Gerard “Gerry” Darsch, who was director of the DOD Combat Feeding Directorate from 1994 to 2013. “It could be something very simple. It could be something very complex. And it could be something that requires a lot of high-risk, high-pay-off investment. And not only do we solicit those joint statement of need proposals from each service, Natick’s team also generates potential joint statements of need in terms of where we think an investment in science and technology can bring new capability to the battlefield. You really have to have a vision in terms of looking over that fifth ridge, if you will, in terms of a potential solution that would impact the shelf life, the quality, minimize logistics, make it more lightweight, cost-effective, and also include the nutrition warfighters need—even the food-service equipment because that’s a major part of the program as well.” All of this information is presented twice a year for approval to the Department of Defense Combat Feeding Research and Engineering Board (DOD CFREB), an internal group composed of brass from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and DLA, and chaired by an official from the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. At each of these meetings, small adjustments are made. “In some cases, we recommend that programs be terminated; in others, that things be accelerated; and in still others, that dollars be shifted,” says Darsch. “What we do better than anybody else is we develop a ten-year program that specifically maps out the amount of time, what the end state of each research category needs to be, and a specific transition from basic research into technology demonstration and then through what we refer to as the ‘valley of death’— moving to commercialization.” At the end of the process, the Combat Feeding Program spits out a detailed set of research and development plans, complete with objectives, tasks, and timetables, for the year. These projects generally fall into three categories, each of which corresponds to a number in that most shock‐and‐awe‐inspiring of documents, the Defense Budget Justification, the annual tome put together by the armed forces to persuade Congress to continue to fork out its more than half-trillion-dollar allowance. There is 6.1, basic scientific research, which is largely undertaken at universities and in DOD laboratories, of which there are eighty across the country. There is 6.2, applied research, or getting that science to actually do something useful; this happens at universities, DOD labs, nonprofits, and industry partners. And then there is 6.3, figuring out how that something useful can be manufactured; this part of the technology transition process is almost always parceled off to industry. (The Defense Department actually has four more categories, 6.4–6.7, which correspond to manufacturing the item and getting it into the field; these are the favored feeding ground of mammoth military contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.) To carry out all these different kinds of research projects, the army has at its disposal an alphabet soup of joint ventures, some of which receive government funding, and therefore must abide by reporting requirements, and many of which do not—although they receive a host of other supports—and therefore occupy a vast, mysterious landscape about which little is known. These collaborative undertakings are one of the most important mechanisms through which the Natick Center influences the food industry. In fiscal year (FY) 2007, the earliest year for which I was allowed information, there were 275 such partnerships. There are the Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs), in which institutions and firms compete for basic research and development projects closely defined by the Combat Feeding Program; their benefit to the contractor is primarily financial. There are Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards, which fund businesses with fewer than five hundred employees to seek the answer to technological problems in the hope that this will spur the development of new products. In FY 2007, the Combat Feeding Program had eleven SBIR awards. Many of these were for the development of competing versions of solar-powered refrigerated containers, waste-to-energy converters, and individual beverage chillers; although spending on them was low, these projects may very well impact the consumer market of the future. Such straight-up contracts are cursed, however, by the need to comply with government purchasing rules, the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FARs), which require reports on everything from annual revenues and taxes to executive compensation, all laid out in a breezy 1,887‐page document. So there are looser arrangements: Dual Use Science & Technology (DUST) partnerships in which both parties contribute funds and share the right to use the end product. For example, as Charles Patrick “Pat” Dunne, a retired Natick senior scientist, explains, “Microwave sterilization was really spearheaded by Natick through a dual use science and technology program we initiated with industry and academia. . . . Down the road we’re going to produce that in the military, and it’s going to become big in the commercial sector, too.” And the crown jewels of the Defense Department research program, Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) and Other Transactions (OTs). All those complaints businesses have about working with the government—burdensome and intrusive administrative regulations, book‐length proposals, demanding socioeconomic requirements, and heavy-handed managerial oversight? Gone. And the rewards? Staff time, services, laboratory facilities, equipment, and materials are theirs for the taking. Still, that doesn’t explain why major food conglomerates such as Campbell Soup Company, ConAgra, Dr Pepper, Snapple Group, Frito‐Lay/PepsiCo, General Mills, Graphic Packaging, Hormel Foods, Kraft Foods Group, Mars Inc., Michael Foods, Procter & Gamble, Rexam PLC, SoPakCo, and Unilever are lining up to enter into cooperative agreements with the Combat Feeding Program. In FY 2007, Natick’s food division was involved in eighteen separate CRADAs, amounting to a finger in every promising new technology from mini vacuum cleaners for pathogens and membrane-based juice concentrators to high‐pressure processing for produce and nutrient‐fortified candy and bakery items; they even had an agreement—resulting in a lawsuit—to commercialize the army’s HooAH! energy bar. Big corporations get involved in CRADAs because they expect something in return: a piece of the vision Natick has for the future of food. As Kathy-Lynn Evangelos, second in charge at the Combat Feeding Directorate, points out, industry research tends to be at science’s margins and focused on consumer appeal rather than at the forefront of innovation. When companies work with the army’s subsistence department, whether they receive an exclusive patent or a head start on a breakthrough processing or packaging technology, they get the chance to dominate the market when new products based on it come shooting out of the pipeline. * According to lawmakers, making sure government‐funded research and development gets used in new commercial products is exactly what federal agencies should be doing. It’s called technology transfer and when it happens, it’s like a Disney movie for grown-ups: businesses pop up like flowers, employees break into song at their desks, bankers drape rainbows across the sky, and tax collectors tap-dance down the street. The policy dates back to just after World War II, when the head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Vannevar Bush, persuaded the government to invest in public science, primarily through universities, to maintain U.S. technological superiority for military readiness and as a deterrent to enemy hostilities. These activities were managed by civilian‐controlled laboratories working in close cooperation with the armed forces, and later other branches of the government. The U.S. Army Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center is one of these laboratories. (There are about seven hundred more, some big, some small, and each with a different focus.) The federal government finances about one-third of all science and 
technology research and development in the United States, which in FY 2007 was about $370 billion (an investment two to three times that of our closest competitor, China). Of that, although expenditures are broken down about evenly among the three categories—basic, applied, and development—it is by far the most important sponsor of basic research at 59 percent, and relatively less important for development at 18 percent. In our sample year, defense spending on research and development was $82 billion, 60 percent of the federal total. The truth is that within the rarified sphere of science and technology, the U.S. economy has a lot more in common with the socialism of the People’s Republic of China than it does with free-market economics. The fact that the government (and, within it, the Defense Department) is pretty much the only game in town—especially when it comes to basic science—means that research projects are put together with it in mind. You can study anything you want, but if you want to make a living at it—and most academics do—then it needs to be something that attracts funding. And that often means working on one of the many areas deemed essential to the armed forces. Then there’s the overwhelming strength of DOD’s own planning apparatus. The yearly priorities set by trade and professional associations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the National Environmental Health Association have about as much teeth as that annual rite of self-flagellation, the New Year’s resolution, when compared with the regular bottom‐up and top‐down information gathering, concerted analysis, extremely long time frames (five, ten, twenty-five years), global perspective, and deep pockets (so forgiving when you make a mistake) of the strategy and goal setting of the U.S. military. From this come the precepts that are used to define a welter of specific science and technology projects, which are dispersed each year into the eagerly waving hands of academia, industry, nonprofits, and other government entities like strings of beads at a Mardi Gras parade. The net effect of all this is that the Defense Department has a disproportionate influence on the direction of many industries, even if basic and applied science is only about a quarter of its research budget. As noted in a 2012 report by the House Committee on Armed Services, “Basic research is especially important in this process of innovation, as it often leads to new areas of knowledge, such as new materials, sensors, nanotechnology, and data extraction, etc., that in turn lead to new areas for development and commercial opportunity. . . . The predominance of basic research for DOD is carried out by the universities.” DOD’s grip on the business sector is just as tight. “Sustaining Critical Sectors of the U.S. Defense Industrial Base,” a 2011 think tank report, poses the question, “Does the DIB [defense industrial base] function like a normal free market in which the forces of supply and demand dictate efficiency, innovation, and pricing?” and answers with a resounding no. The Defense Department sees absolutely nothing wrong with this. Close ties and careful guidance are needed to ensure that it has contractors in the areas it needs, when it needs them. In fact, the goal for the twenty‐first century is to strengthen its puppet master role. According to the House Committee on Armed Services, “[One of the] challenges to ensuring that the industrial base is positioned to support the needs of the nation in the 21st century . . . [is] the lack of a comprehensive DOD strategy for managing and maintaining an industrial base.” So what? you might ask. Who cares as long as the end result is a wellspring of nifty gadgets and cool new products for us consumers? There’s the rub. A now‐venerable 1986 UN report observes: “The development of military technologies has an effect on the direction of technological change that goes beyond the simple diversion of resources from civilian innovation. A set of factors—basic principles, technological preferences, performance requirements, nature of the demand—have a strong effect on the kind of technologies developed by the military, in ways that have reduced efficiency, slowed down civilian applications and distorted the overall direction of technical change.” We do have a national industrial policy, one that has run roughshod over the free market of ideas, force‐feeding federal—largely DOD—research goals into the hungry craws of craven scientists. This model does not let the best science and technology appear and grow organically in response to a multitude of societal factors—in the case of food, the concerns of farmers, consumers, public health officials, and even the food industry itself—but rather they are chosen and directed along a preordained agenda set to achieve military dominance on the world stage. Adapted from "Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shaped the Way You Eat" by Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, in agreement with Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, 2015. All rights reserved.

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This is how your kid learns: The amazing new neuroscience of “brain plasticity” — and how to make your child smarter

What happens to our child’s brain when we parent? The discovery of the nature and extent of brain plasticity has led to a tremendous advance in our understanding of what happens to the brain during the learning process—and to an explosion of products claiming to trigger and enhance brain plasticity in developing children. Many products tout harnessing brain plasticity as a key benefit, and the notion that parents can build a designer brain smarter than anyone else’s by using these products is certainly appealing. But what is “plasticity” and what should parents actually do to harness this aspect of brain development in their children? Plasticity is the brain’s lifelong capacity to form new synapses, connections between nerve cells, and even new neural pathways, making and strengthening connections so that learning accelerates and the ability to access and apply what has been learned becomes more and more efficient. Developmental studies of plasticity trace the modification of brain architecture and brain wiring when it is exposed to novel situations. In this case, brain “wiring” means axon connections among brain regions and the activities those brain regions carry out. Rather like an architect drawing a wiring diagram for your home, indicating where the wires will go for the stove, refrigerator, air-conditioning, and so on, researchers have been drawing a wiring diagram for the brain. In the process they have established that the brain cortex is not a fixed entity but is being continuously modified by learning. It turns out that the “wires” in the cortex are constantly reconnecting and will continue to do so based on input from the outside world. Let’s take a look at what happens with brain plasticity when a child first learns to read. Initially, no part of the brain is wired specifically for reading. As the child learns to read, more and more brain cells and nerve circuits are recruited to the task as the child becomes a more proficient reader. The brain uses plasticity when a child begins to recognize words and comprehend what he is reading. The spoken word “ball,” which the child already comprehends, now becomes associated with the letters B‑A‑L‑L.  In this way, learning to read is a form of neural plasticity. The discovery that a developing brain can be wired to recognize letters and other amazing discoveries about neural plasticity are often translated into commercial products touting enhanced “brain fitness” as a benefit. But just because a scientific experiment shows that a particular activity triggers brain plasticity doesn’t mean that this particular activity—such as seeing letters on a computer screen—is required to achieve the effect, nor does it mean that the activity is the only means of generating plasticity. Computer-based letter recognition drills do indeed activate and train symbol recognition centers in the visual cortex using brain plasticity. But so does sitting down and reading a book with your child. This parent-child interactive approach is called “dialogic reading.” But computer screens and apps only train the brain to recognize the letters (not to understand the meaning of words the letters represent). In contrast, dialogic reading—intuitive and interactive—naturally harnesses neural plasticity to make axon connections between the letter recognition centers to the language and thinking centers in the brain. Professor Paul Yoder at Vanderbilt University and I described how children learn to understand spoken language in a paper published in the International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience. We showed that typically developing children learn to discriminate speech sounds quite efficiently with or without the benefit of exposure to special speech discrimination exercises or computer games. These speech discrimination games are marketed as specially engaging neural plasticity and were developed by leading neuroscientists. In fact, children whose brains were never exposed to speech discrimination drills or computer games end up with a perfectly organized—and facile—auditory cortex arising from natural speech input from their parents and others. And these children learn to talk, to read, and to think very well indeed. We also argued that unnatural auditory input—in this case, isolated auditory signals—would not result in the proper wiring or integration of that input with other brain regions, such as the language centers, that are necessary to distinguish—and use—speech in the real world. Never forget that the brain will learn what it is taught . Brain science over the past decade has yielded a profound insight into neural plasticity: A developing brain will learn what it is taught. If computer software trains the brain to discriminate between little bits of sound, exactly that skill—recognizing bits of sound—is what the brain will learn and become wired to do. But this training will not generalize to the brain’s ability to understand what someone else is saying—or to learn to read, because discriminating sounds is only a small fragment of what the brain has to do to comprehend spoken language—and to read. If you want the brain to become wired for spoken language and for reading, then the input has to be real, functional, spoken language and dialogic reading. Breaking the speech signal into its component parts and teaching these via computer simply will not do the trick. And if you want the spoken language to serve as a tool for social communication with other human beings, the input has to occur in the context of human social interaction, which involves even more areas of the brain than the area dedicated to speech discrimination. When a child reaches for a hat lying on the floor, and her dad says “hat,” this parent-child interaction triggers neural plasticity in the baby’s brain. The child’s brain is not only processing the phonic components of the word “hat,” (h-a-t) it is processing the visual image of the hat, the social context (playing with her dad), and the actual meaning of the word—a real hat. When dad intuitively puts the hat first on his head and then on her head, the speech sounds in the word “hat” are then associated (“paired”) with the perceptual properties of the hat as well as its function (covering the head). Later on, the child and her dad may read a book together and see a photograph of a bat (in this case, the flying mammal). Now the child hears her dad say “bat,” which of course is phonetically different than “hat.” But she is perceiving not only a difference in the speech sounds “h” and “b” but also the perceptual features of a bat and a hat, the social context in which the objects are encountered, and the functions of the objects. It is not surprising that simply teaching discrimination between “h” and “b” using flashcards or a computer program cannot possibly convey the information the child will need to comprehend the difference between “hat” and “bat” in the real world. Intuitive parenting automatically teaches all these elements simultaneously; it is automatically a multisensory approach. Touching, seeing, speaking, and listening are all providing context—in a safe, nurturing environment—and multiple brain areas are activated and integrated via neural plasticity. Adapted from "The Intuitive Parent: Why the Best Thing for Your Child Is You" by Stephen Camarata, PhD with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Stephen Camarata, 2015.  What happens to our child’s brain when we parent? The discovery of the nature and extent of brain plasticity has led to a tremendous advance in our understanding of what happens to the brain during the learning process—and to an explosion of products claiming to trigger and enhance brain plasticity in developing children. Many products tout harnessing brain plasticity as a key benefit, and the notion that parents can build a designer brain smarter than anyone else’s by using these products is certainly appealing. But what is “plasticity” and what should parents actually do to harness this aspect of brain development in their children? Plasticity is the brain’s lifelong capacity to form new synapses, connections between nerve cells, and even new neural pathways, making and strengthening connections so that learning accelerates and the ability to access and apply what has been learned becomes more and more efficient. Developmental studies of plasticity trace the modification of brain architecture and brain wiring when it is exposed to novel situations. In this case, brain “wiring” means axon connections among brain regions and the activities those brain regions carry out. Rather like an architect drawing a wiring diagram for your home, indicating where the wires will go for the stove, refrigerator, air-conditioning, and so on, researchers have been drawing a wiring diagram for the brain. In the process they have established that the brain cortex is not a fixed entity but is being continuously modified by learning. It turns out that the “wires” in the cortex are constantly reconnecting and will continue to do so based on input from the outside world. Let’s take a look at what happens with brain plasticity when a child first learns to read. Initially, no part of the brain is wired specifically for reading. As the child learns to read, more and more brain cells and nerve circuits are recruited to the task as the child becomes a more proficient reader. The brain uses plasticity when a child begins to recognize words and comprehend what he is reading. The spoken word “ball,” which the child already comprehends, now becomes associated with the letters B‑A‑L‑L.  In this way, learning to read is a form of neural plasticity. The discovery that a developing brain can be wired to recognize letters and other amazing discoveries about neural plasticity are often translated into commercial products touting enhanced “brain fitness” as a benefit. But just because a scientific experiment shows that a particular activity triggers brain plasticity doesn’t mean that this particular activity—such as seeing letters on a computer screen—is required to achieve the effect, nor does it mean that the activity is the only means of generating plasticity. Computer-based letter recognition drills do indeed activate and train symbol recognition centers in the visual cortex using brain plasticity. But so does sitting down and reading a book with your child. This parent-child interactive approach is called “dialogic reading.” But computer screens and apps only train the brain to recognize the letters (not to understand the meaning of words the letters represent). In contrast, dialogic reading—intuitive and interactive—naturally harnesses neural plasticity to make axon connections between the letter recognition centers to the language and thinking centers in the brain. Professor Paul Yoder at Vanderbilt University and I described how children learn to understand spoken language in a paper published in the International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience. We showed that typically developing children learn to discriminate speech sounds quite efficiently with or without the benefit of exposure to special speech discrimination exercises or computer games. These speech discrimination games are marketed as specially engaging neural plasticity and were developed by leading neuroscientists. In fact, children whose brains were never exposed to speech discrimination drills or computer games end up with a perfectly organized—and facile—auditory cortex arising from natural speech input from their parents and others. And these children learn to talk, to read, and to think very well indeed. We also argued that unnatural auditory input—in this case, isolated auditory signals—would not result in the proper wiring or integration of that input with other brain regions, such as the language centers, that are necessary to distinguish—and use—speech in the real world. Never forget that the brain will learn what it is taught . Brain science over the past decade has yielded a profound insight into neural plasticity: A developing brain will learn what it is taught. If computer software trains the brain to discriminate between little bits of sound, exactly that skill—recognizing bits of sound—is what the brain will learn and become wired to do. But this training will not generalize to the brain’s ability to understand what someone else is saying—or to learn to read, because discriminating sounds is only a small fragment of what the brain has to do to comprehend spoken language—and to read. If you want the brain to become wired for spoken language and for reading, then the input has to be real, functional, spoken language and dialogic reading. Breaking the speech signal into its component parts and teaching these via computer simply will not do the trick. And if you want the spoken language to serve as a tool for social communication with other human beings, the input has to occur in the context of human social interaction, which involves even more areas of the brain than the area dedicated to speech discrimination. When a child reaches for a hat lying on the floor, and her dad says “hat,” this parent-child interaction triggers neural plasticity in the baby’s brain. The child’s brain is not only processing the phonic components of the word “hat,” (h-a-t) it is processing the visual image of the hat, the social context (playing with her dad), and the actual meaning of the word—a real hat. When dad intuitively puts the hat first on his head and then on her head, the speech sounds in the word “hat” are then associated (“paired”) with the perceptual properties of the hat as well as its function (covering the head). Later on, the child and her dad may read a book together and see a photograph of a bat (in this case, the flying mammal). Now the child hears her dad say “bat,” which of course is phonetically different than “hat.” But she is perceiving not only a difference in the speech sounds “h” and “b” but also the perceptual features of a bat and a hat, the social context in which the objects are encountered, and the functions of the objects. It is not surprising that simply teaching discrimination between “h” and “b” using flashcards or a computer program cannot possibly convey the information the child will need to comprehend the difference between “hat” and “bat” in the real world. Intuitive parenting automatically teaches all these elements simultaneously; it is automatically a multisensory approach. Touching, seeing, speaking, and listening are all providing context—in a safe, nurturing environment—and multiple brain areas are activated and integrated via neural plasticity. Adapted from "The Intuitive Parent: Why the Best Thing for Your Child Is You" by Stephen Camarata, PhD with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Stephen Camarata, 2015.  What happens to our child’s brain when we parent? The discovery of the nature and extent of brain plasticity has led to a tremendous advance in our understanding of what happens to the brain during the learning process—and to an explosion of products claiming to trigger and enhance brain plasticity in developing children. Many products tout harnessing brain plasticity as a key benefit, and the notion that parents can build a designer brain smarter than anyone else’s by using these products is certainly appealing. But what is “plasticity” and what should parents actually do to harness this aspect of brain development in their children? Plasticity is the brain’s lifelong capacity to form new synapses, connections between nerve cells, and even new neural pathways, making and strengthening connections so that learning accelerates and the ability to access and apply what has been learned becomes more and more efficient. Developmental studies of plasticity trace the modification of brain architecture and brain wiring when it is exposed to novel situations. In this case, brain “wiring” means axon connections among brain regions and the activities those brain regions carry out. Rather like an architect drawing a wiring diagram for your home, indicating where the wires will go for the stove, refrigerator, air-conditioning, and so on, researchers have been drawing a wiring diagram for the brain. In the process they have established that the brain cortex is not a fixed entity but is being continuously modified by learning. It turns out that the “wires” in the cortex are constantly reconnecting and will continue to do so based on input from the outside world. Let’s take a look at what happens with brain plasticity when a child first learns to read. Initially, no part of the brain is wired specifically for reading. As the child learns to read, more and more brain cells and nerve circuits are recruited to the task as the child becomes a more proficient reader. The brain uses plasticity when a child begins to recognize words and comprehend what he is reading. The spoken word “ball,” which the child already comprehends, now becomes associated with the letters B‑A‑L‑L.  In this way, learning to read is a form of neural plasticity. The discovery that a developing brain can be wired to recognize letters and other amazing discoveries about neural plasticity are often translated into commercial products touting enhanced “brain fitness” as a benefit. But just because a scientific experiment shows that a particular activity triggers brain plasticity doesn’t mean that this particular activity—such as seeing letters on a computer screen—is required to achieve the effect, nor does it mean that the activity is the only means of generating plasticity. Computer-based letter recognition drills do indeed activate and train symbol recognition centers in the visual cortex using brain plasticity. But so does sitting down and reading a book with your child. This parent-child interactive approach is called “dialogic reading.” But computer screens and apps only train the brain to recognize the letters (not to understand the meaning of words the letters represent). In contrast, dialogic reading—intuitive and interactive—naturally harnesses neural plasticity to make axon connections between the letter recognition centers to the language and thinking centers in the brain. Professor Paul Yoder at Vanderbilt University and I described how children learn to understand spoken language in a paper published in the International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience. We showed that typically developing children learn to discriminate speech sounds quite efficiently with or without the benefit of exposure to special speech discrimination exercises or computer games. These speech discrimination games are marketed as specially engaging neural plasticity and were developed by leading neuroscientists. In fact, children whose brains were never exposed to speech discrimination drills or computer games end up with a perfectly organized—and facile—auditory cortex arising from natural speech input from their parents and others. And these children learn to talk, to read, and to think very well indeed. We also argued that unnatural auditory input—in this case, isolated auditory signals—would not result in the proper wiring or integration of that input with other brain regions, such as the language centers, that are necessary to distinguish—and use—speech in the real world. Never forget that the brain will learn what it is taught . Brain science over the past decade has yielded a profound insight into neural plasticity: A developing brain will learn what it is taught. If computer software trains the brain to discriminate between little bits of sound, exactly that skill—recognizing bits of sound—is what the brain will learn and become wired to do. But this training will not generalize to the brain’s ability to understand what someone else is saying—or to learn to read, because discriminating sounds is only a small fragment of what the brain has to do to comprehend spoken language—and to read. If you want the brain to become wired for spoken language and for reading, then the input has to be real, functional, spoken language and dialogic reading. Breaking the speech signal into its component parts and teaching these via computer simply will not do the trick. And if you want the spoken language to serve as a tool for social communication with other human beings, the input has to occur in the context of human social interaction, which involves even more areas of the brain than the area dedicated to speech discrimination. When a child reaches for a hat lying on the floor, and her dad says “hat,” this parent-child interaction triggers neural plasticity in the baby’s brain. The child’s brain is not only processing the phonic components of the word “hat,” (h-a-t) it is processing the visual image of the hat, the social context (playing with her dad), and the actual meaning of the word—a real hat. When dad intuitively puts the hat first on his head and then on her head, the speech sounds in the word “hat” are then associated (“paired”) with the perceptual properties of the hat as well as its function (covering the head). Later on, the child and her dad may read a book together and see a photograph of a bat (in this case, the flying mammal). Now the child hears her dad say “bat,” which of course is phonetically different than “hat.” But she is perceiving not only a difference in the speech sounds “h” and “b” but also the perceptual features of a bat and a hat, the social context in which the objects are encountered, and the functions of the objects. It is not surprising that simply teaching discrimination between “h” and “b” using flashcards or a computer program cannot possibly convey the information the child will need to comprehend the difference between “hat” and “bat” in the real world. Intuitive parenting automatically teaches all these elements simultaneously; it is automatically a multisensory approach. Touching, seeing, speaking, and listening are all providing context—in a safe, nurturing environment—and multiple brain areas are activated and integrated via neural plasticity. Adapted from "The Intuitive Parent: Why the Best Thing for Your Child Is You" by Stephen Camarata, PhD with permission of Current, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © Stephen Camarata, 2015.  

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Geoengineering won’t save us: Why it can’t halt the effects of climate change by itself

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Britain’s Bernie moment: Is an unlikely left-wing hero about to conquer the Labour Party?

Britain’s Labour Party is going through its own Bernie Sanders moment – except that it’s more like a Bernie Sanders moment on steroids and set to warp drive. Try to imagine this: We’re days away from the Democratic convention and Sanders has somehow accumulated nearly enough delegates to win the nomination, while Hillary Clinton and the party leadership desperately try to stop him through coercion or unscrupulous personal attacks or last-minute rule changes. If that sounds like a wildly implausible scenario or, more precisely, like the kind of insurrection that modern party politics is designed to prevent, so does what’s happening in Britain right now. If we could go backwards in time a mere three months, to the immediate aftermath of Labour’s disheartening defeat in the May general election, and tell the British media and political elite that they were about to get sandbagged by a populist uprising that seemed to come out of nowhere, I suspect the response would involve widespread hilarity along with the phrase “daft bloody Yanks.” Yet instead of veering back toward the blithe neoliberal centrism of the Tony Blair era, as conventional wisdom dictated, the Labour Party is on the verge of being overrun by a left-wing insurgency led by Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old socialist who could teach Bernie Sanders what that word actually means. Michael Meacher, a former government minister and one of the few Labour insiders to embrace the Corbyn insurrection, has called it “the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order in modern British politics.” If there are obvious parallels between Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, the former is actually more of a political outsider, whereas Sanders is widely liked and respected by his peers in the Senate. A longtime member of Parliament from North London who appears not to own a tie, Corbyn has spent his entire political career as a rebellious Labour “backbencher” – that is, he has never been part of the party leadership, nor held a government post when Labour had a majority. Until a few weeks ago, Corbyn was widely viewed as a hopeless anachronism within post-Thatcher British politics, a ‘60s throwback with bad clothes, dubious party loyalty and more than a tinge of Cold War red. (Actually, compared to the fashion-hopeless Sanders, Corbyn cuts quite a stylish figure in a distinctively English ascetic mode.) Now, he may be within days of becoming Labour’s parliamentary leader, and its prospective candidate for prime minister in the 2020 national election. Like Sanders, Corbyn has long advocated for a rejection of austerity politics and a return to seemingly outmoded policies of ambitious social spending, government activism and higher taxes on big business and the rich. He has proposed universal childcare and free higher education for all, wants to renationalize Britain’s railroads and utilities, and believes the country should withdraw from NATO, scrap its nuclear missiles and invest most of its military budget in job programs. Hilarious, right? Political suicide! Talk about being out of touch with reality! Well, nobody’s laughing at the old-time lefty crackpot now. What few saw coming – and this happened with Sanders too – is that those old-school social-democratic ideas only sound outmoded to those who have been around long enough to be relentlessly indoctrinated with the Reagan-Thatcher ideology that the era of Big Government was a dreadful failure and that the true path to prosperity involves endless rounds of tax-cutting and “belt-tightening.” To younger generations raised amid the depressing, pseudo-Calvinist piety of permanent austerity and downward mobility, the revolutionary notion that the government might actually help you get an education, find a job, afford a decent place to live and raise your family -- instead of just standing there and scolding -- doesn’t sound old or tired in the slightest. When Corbyn announced his intention to run for the party leadership position as an anti-austerity candidate, Labour’s establishment could quite likely have shot him down. In the British system, internal party elections are private affairs; the parties set their own rules about who gets to run and who gets to vote. Corbyn’s candidacy was approved by a bare minimum of his parliamentary colleagues, more or less as a symbolic gesture to the old-line Labour left. (He needed 35 votes and got 36; you have to wonder how many of them would take back that vote if they could.) From reading the British press, you get the impression that Labor’s phalanxes of pollsters and consultants and strategists were taken totally by surprise when Corbyn’s campaign immediately captured a wave of popular support, and still can’t quite believe it’s happening. Corbyn has faced overwhelming opposition from prominent Labour elected officials and party apparatchiks, along with increasingly critical coverage from the Guardian, which has endorsed Yvette Cooper, one of his moderate opponents. If anything, that has only fueled his momentum. Over the past week or so, the tone of anti-Corbyn intra-Labour hate has grown increasingly strident and hysterical. He has been accused, almost literally, of palling around with terrorists -- of being overly amenable to negotiations with Hezbollah and Hamas, and of vague associations with Holocaust deniers and 9/11 truthers. (Much of that came in the form of an especially disgraceful Guardian article by centrist Labour blogger James Bloodworth, who has embraced the role of party establishment hitman.) Some Labour officials have actually proposed postponing the leadership election (which is conducted by mail, and will be completed on Sept. 12), presumably to find some pretext to kick Corbyn off the ballot or purge his supporters from the rolls. In the last days of the campaign, Corbyn’s three rivals for the Labour leadership position have formed a united opposition front, even declining to offer the customary assurances that they will support him if he wins. The most right-wing candidate, Liz Kendall, who has trailed badly in the polls, says that choosing Corbyn would amount to “submitting our resignation letter to the British people as a serious party of government.” Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won three elections with his rebranded “New Labour,” recently waded into the fray, warning that the party could face “annihilation” under Corbyn, who needed to be stopped with a "rugby tackle." (Which is pretty tough talk from the guy who spent the Iraq war polishing George W. Bush’s boots.) If no one finds Corbyn’s politics so amusing anymore, there is an element of comedy in the Armageddon that Labour’s centrist establishment may have called down upon itself. In the interest of greater transparency and democracy, the party opened this year’s leadership election to anyone who registered online as a party supporter and pay a minimal fee – and the apparent result is a whole lot more democracy than they wanted. Ballots started going out this weekend to 610,000 or so Labour members and supporters – more than half of whom signed up during the current campaign and are highly likely to be Corbyn voters. Labour’s leadership underestimated the public appetite for candidates and ideas that lie outside the safe zone of neoliberal consensus politics, and is now likely to reap the whirlwind. It’s a lesson that will not be lost on political leadership castes around the world. It’s quite possible that Tony Blair and the other mainstream critics are correct that old-school socialists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are too easily demonized by the right, and are not “electable” in conventional political terms. (Opinion polling suggests that Corbyn may now be the most popular politician in Britain, but such things are transitory.) But their emergence testifies to the failures of conventional politics, and whether they can win elections is less important than the worldwide hunger for change they have momentarily captured. Neither of them offers anything close to a political panacea, in my view, but they represent a rising tide of resistance against the global cult of fiscal austerity and corporate capitalism, as do Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and other emerging left-populist movements. (Donald Trump does not belong in that group, but he represents a bizarro-world inversion of the same phenomenon.) Even if the Labour Party establishment can find a way to stop the Corbyn surge – and it’s definitely trying to, by fair means or foul – it runs the risk of burning down Britain’s venerable working-class party in order to save it, or making it look hopelessly out of touch with its own core supporters. Win or lose, the Corbyn rebellion has launched a political chain reaction whose destabilizing effects will extend well beyond Britain. From this side of the Atlantic, Hillary Clinton’s inner circle of advisers and strategists are watching with increasingly green expressions, telling themselves over and over: It can’t happen here. Britain’s Labour Party is going through its own Bernie Sanders moment – except that it’s more like a Bernie Sanders moment on steroids and set to warp drive. Try to imagine this: We’re days away from the Democratic convention and Sanders has somehow accumulated nearly enough delegates to win the nomination, while Hillary Clinton and the party leadership desperately try to stop him through coercion or unscrupulous personal attacks or last-minute rule changes. If that sounds like a wildly implausible scenario or, more precisely, like the kind of insurrection that modern party politics is designed to prevent, so does what’s happening in Britain right now. If we could go backwards in time a mere three months, to the immediate aftermath of Labour’s disheartening defeat in the May general election, and tell the British media and political elite that they were about to get sandbagged by a populist uprising that seemed to come out of nowhere, I suspect the response would involve widespread hilarity along with the phrase “daft bloody Yanks.” Yet instead of veering back toward the blithe neoliberal centrism of the Tony Blair era, as conventional wisdom dictated, the Labour Party is on the verge of being overrun by a left-wing insurgency led by Jeremy Corbyn, a 66-year-old socialist who could teach Bernie Sanders what that word actually means. Michael Meacher, a former government minister and one of the few Labour insiders to embrace the Corbyn insurrection, has called it “the biggest non-revolutionary upturning of the social order in modern British politics.” If there are obvious parallels between Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, the former is actually more of a political outsider, whereas Sanders is widely liked and respected by his peers in the Senate. A longtime member of Parliament from North London who appears not to own a tie, Corbyn has spent his entire political career as a rebellious Labour “backbencher” – that is, he has never been part of the party leadership, nor held a government post when Labour had a majority. Until a few weeks ago, Corbyn was widely viewed as a hopeless anachronism within post-Thatcher British politics, a ‘60s throwback with bad clothes, dubious party loyalty and more than a tinge of Cold War red. (Actually, compared to the fashion-hopeless Sanders, Corbyn cuts quite a stylish figure in a distinctively English ascetic mode.) Now, he may be within days of becoming Labour’s parliamentary leader, and its prospective candidate for prime minister in the 2020 national election. Like Sanders, Corbyn has long advocated for a rejection of austerity politics and a return to seemingly outmoded policies of ambitious social spending, government activism and higher taxes on big business and the rich. He has proposed universal childcare and free higher education for all, wants to renationalize Britain’s railroads and utilities, and believes the country should withdraw from NATO, scrap its nuclear missiles and invest most of its military budget in job programs. Hilarious, right? Political suicide! Talk about being out of touch with reality! Well, nobody’s laughing at the old-time lefty crackpot now. What few saw coming – and this happened with Sanders too – is that those old-school social-democratic ideas only sound outmoded to those who have been around long enough to be relentlessly indoctrinated with the Reagan-Thatcher ideology that the era of Big Government was a dreadful failure and that the true path to prosperity involves endless rounds of tax-cutting and “belt-tightening.” To younger generations raised amid the depressing, pseudo-Calvinist piety of permanent austerity and downward mobility, the revolutionary notion that the government might actually help you get an education, find a job, afford a decent place to live and raise your family -- instead of just standing there and scolding -- doesn’t sound old or tired in the slightest. When Corbyn announced his intention to run for the party leadership position as an anti-austerity candidate, Labour’s establishment could quite likely have shot him down. In the British system, internal party elections are private affairs; the parties set their own rules about who gets to run and who gets to vote. Corbyn’s candidacy was approved by a bare minimum of his parliamentary colleagues, more or less as a symbolic gesture to the old-line Labour left. (He needed 35 votes and got 36; you have to wonder how many of them would take back that vote if they could.) From reading the British press, you get the impression that Labor’s phalanxes of pollsters and consultants and strategists were taken totally by surprise when Corbyn’s campaign immediately captured a wave of popular support, and still can’t quite believe it’s happening. Corbyn has faced overwhelming opposition from prominent Labour elected officials and party apparatchiks, along with increasingly critical coverage from the Guardian, which has endorsed Yvette Cooper, one of his moderate opponents. If anything, that has only fueled his momentum. Over the past week or so, the tone of anti-Corbyn intra-Labour hate has grown increasingly strident and hysterical. He has been accused, almost literally, of palling around with terrorists -- of being overly amenable to negotiations with Hezbollah and Hamas, and of vague associations with Holocaust deniers and 9/11 truthers. (Much of that came in the form of an especially disgraceful Guardian article by centrist Labour blogger James Bloodworth, who has embraced the role of party establishment hitman.) Some Labour officials have actually proposed postponing the leadership election (which is conducted by mail, and will be completed on Sept. 12), presumably to find some pretext to kick Corbyn off the ballot or purge his supporters from the rolls. In the last days of the campaign, Corbyn’s three rivals for the Labour leadership position have formed a united opposition front, even declining to offer the customary assurances that they will support him if he wins. The most right-wing candidate, Liz Kendall, who has trailed badly in the polls, says that choosing Corbyn would amount to “submitting our resignation letter to the British people as a serious party of government.” Former Prime Minister Tony Blair, who won three elections with his rebranded “New Labour,” recently waded into the fray, warning that the party could face “annihilation” under Corbyn, who needed to be stopped with a "rugby tackle." (Which is pretty tough talk from the guy who spent the Iraq war polishing George W. Bush’s boots.) If no one finds Corbyn’s politics so amusing anymore, there is an element of comedy in the Armageddon that Labour’s centrist establishment may have called down upon itself. In the interest of greater transparency and democracy, the party opened this year’s leadership election to anyone who registered online as a party supporter and pay a minimal fee – and the apparent result is a whole lot more democracy than they wanted. Ballots started going out this weekend to 610,000 or so Labour members and supporters – more than half of whom signed up during the current campaign and are highly likely to be Corbyn voters. Labour’s leadership underestimated the public appetite for candidates and ideas that lie outside the safe zone of neoliberal consensus politics, and is now likely to reap the whirlwind. It’s a lesson that will not be lost on political leadership castes around the world. It’s quite possible that Tony Blair and the other mainstream critics are correct that old-school socialists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are too easily demonized by the right, and are not “electable” in conventional political terms. (Opinion polling suggests that Corbyn may now be the most popular politician in Britain, but such things are transitory.) But their emergence testifies to the failures of conventional politics, and whether they can win elections is less important than the worldwide hunger for change they have momentarily captured. Neither of them offers anything close to a political panacea, in my view, but they represent a rising tide of resistance against the global cult of fiscal austerity and corporate capitalism, as do Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain and other emerging left-populist movements. (Donald Trump does not belong in that group, but he represents a bizarro-world inversion of the same phenomenon.) Even if the Labour Party establishment can find a way to stop the Corbyn surge – and it’s definitely trying to, by fair means or foul – it runs the risk of burning down Britain’s venerable working-class party in order to save it, or making it look hopelessly out of touch with its own core supporters. Win or lose, the Corbyn rebellion has launched a political chain reaction whose destabilizing effects will extend well beyond Britain. From this side of the Atlantic, Hillary Clinton’s inner circle of advisers and strategists are watching with increasingly green expressions, telling themselves over and over: It can’t happen here.

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Get ready for Amy Schumer on HBO with these 7 great streaming stand-up specials

While we're all excited for Amy Schumer's upcoming HBO stand-up special, you don't have to wait until October to see great stand-up comedy from the comfort of your laptop. As we approach summer's end, here are seven great recent stand-up specials to tide you over through these last lazy summer days. 1. Jen Kirkman, "I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine),” Netflix In her first Netflix stand-up special, Jen Kirkman — who you might know from her lively online presence or her frequent appearances on "Drunk History" and "Chelsea Lately” — gives a refreshingly intimate, conversational and honest look at life as a woman at 40, from her divorce to her graying pubes to how society views childless women. "I know I could hit my head on the bathtub and no one will know and I'll die," she riffs at one point. "I'll bleed out and three days later a cat will eat my face — I don't have a cat, but when a single woman dies alone, a cat appears." 2. Louis C.K., “ Louis C.K. Live at Madison Square Garden ,” www.louisck.net C.K.’s new special, available on his website for the price of your choosing, comes from his recent string of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. While some of the jokes are slightly less ambitious and high-concept than his previous specials, C.K. displays his usual inventiveness -- not to mention plenty of sound effects -- while weaving through his pet topics like fatherhood, the gender divide and his encroaching mortality. 3. Trevor Noah, “Trevor Noah: African American,” Netflix As we prepare for Noah to take the reins of the “Daily Show,” his 2013 stand-up special gives a good sense of the sort of tone and content we can expect from our new host. In “African American,” Noah talks extensively about his experiences growing up mixed-race in Apartheid South Africa, as well as his culture shock as an outsider coming to terms with the complex lived experience of race in America. 4. Aziz Ansari, "Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden," Netflix Ansari’s comedy has evolved a lot in recent years, and his sold-out 2015 set at Madison Square Garden represents his most mature work yet, as a vulnerable Ansari speaks candidly about romance, dating and his upbringing in an immigrant family. Through well-paced storytelling and extensive imagined conversations, Ansari skillfully mines humor from the everyday triumphs and tragedies of modern romance. 5. Wyatt Cenac, " Brooklyn ," Netflix Filmed in the cozy space at Brooklyn’s Union Hall — a far cry from the echoing halls of MSG — Cenac’s intimate 2014 special uses Brooklyn as a springboard for all sorts of topics, from gentrification to racial differences, as well as a moving and personal segment on the death of his father, a New York cab driver who was shot while at work. While discussions of the differences between Crown Heights and Fort Greene or a riff about Prospect Heights’ beloved Empire Mayonnaise shop will hit especially close to home with residents of Kings County, the "Daily Show" alum's incisive, probing observations easily transcend the borough they emerged from. 6. Chelsea Peretti, "One of the Greats," Netflix Peretti probably had the buzziest stand-up special of last year, but if you missed it, it’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon. While comedy fans have long known her from her brilliant Twitter account, her role on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and her writing on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Kroll Show,” her special “One of the Greats” established Peretti as one of the most exciting innovators in the medium of stand-up today. The whole set is a meta riff on stand-up conventions, and her quirky, offbeat style mixes grandiose proclamations (“I guess you could say I’m a direct vessel of God”) and goofy voices with more grounded — but never predictable — riffs on sexism, technology and being a woman in the comedy world. 7. Hannibal Buress, "Live From Chicago," Amazon Instant Video While Buress may still be best-known in some circles for the Cosby joke heard 'round the world, his 2014 special demonstrates that Buress is much more than a Cosby scandal footnote. This 2014 set from his hometown of Chicago displays his gifts as a storyteller and a keen-eyed cultural critic who projects a natural ease and charisma onstage. While we're all excited for Amy Schumer's upcoming HBO stand-up special, you don't have to wait until October to see great stand-up comedy from the comfort of your laptop. As we approach summer's end, here are seven great recent stand-up specials to tide you over through these last lazy summer days. 1. Jen Kirkman, "I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine),” Netflix In her first Netflix stand-up special, Jen Kirkman — who you might know from her lively online presence or her frequent appearances on "Drunk History" and "Chelsea Lately” — gives a refreshingly intimate, conversational and honest look at life as a woman at 40, from her divorce to her graying pubes to how society views childless women. "I know I could hit my head on the bathtub and no one will know and I'll die," she riffs at one point. "I'll bleed out and three days later a cat will eat my face — I don't have a cat, but when a single woman dies alone, a cat appears." 2. Louis C.K., “ Louis C.K. Live at Madison Square Garden ,” www.louisck.net C.K.’s new special, available on his website for the price of your choosing, comes from his recent string of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. While some of the jokes are slightly less ambitious and high-concept than his previous specials, C.K. displays his usual inventiveness -- not to mention plenty of sound effects -- while weaving through his pet topics like fatherhood, the gender divide and his encroaching mortality. 3. Trevor Noah, “Trevor Noah: African American,” Netflix As we prepare for Noah to take the reins of the “Daily Show,” his 2013 stand-up special gives a good sense of the sort of tone and content we can expect from our new host. In “African American,” Noah talks extensively about his experiences growing up mixed-race in Apartheid South Africa, as well as his culture shock as an outsider coming to terms with the complex lived experience of race in America. 4. Aziz Ansari, "Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden," Netflix Ansari’s comedy has evolved a lot in recent years, and his sold-out 2015 set at Madison Square Garden represents his most mature work yet, as a vulnerable Ansari speaks candidly about romance, dating and his upbringing in an immigrant family. Through well-paced storytelling and extensive imagined conversations, Ansari skillfully mines humor from the everyday triumphs and tragedies of modern romance. 5. Wyatt Cenac, " Brooklyn ," Netflix Filmed in the cozy space at Brooklyn’s Union Hall — a far cry from the echoing halls of MSG — Cenac’s intimate 2014 special uses Brooklyn as a springboard for all sorts of topics, from gentrification to racial differences, as well as a moving and personal segment on the death of his father, a New York cab driver who was shot while at work. While discussions of the differences between Crown Heights and Fort Greene or a riff about Prospect Heights’ beloved Empire Mayonnaise shop will hit especially close to home with residents of Kings County, the "Daily Show" alum's incisive, probing observations easily transcend the borough they emerged from. 6. Chelsea Peretti, "One of the Greats," Netflix Peretti probably had the buzziest stand-up special of last year, but if you missed it, it’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon. While comedy fans have long known her from her brilliant Twitter account, her role on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and her writing on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Kroll Show,” her special “One of the Greats” established Peretti as one of the most exciting innovators in the medium of stand-up today. The whole set is a meta riff on stand-up conventions, and her quirky, offbeat style mixes grandiose proclamations (“I guess you could say I’m a direct vessel of God”) and goofy voices with more grounded — but never predictable — riffs on sexism, technology and being a woman in the comedy world. 7. Hannibal Buress, "Live From Chicago," Amazon Instant Video While Buress may still be best-known in some circles for the Cosby joke heard 'round the world, his 2014 special demonstrates that Buress is much more than a Cosby scandal footnote. This 2014 set from his hometown of Chicago displays his gifts as a storyteller and a keen-eyed cultural critic who projects a natural ease and charisma onstage. While we're all excited for Amy Schumer's upcoming HBO stand-up special, you don't have to wait until October to see great stand-up comedy from the comfort of your laptop. As we approach summer's end, here are seven great recent stand-up specials to tide you over through these last lazy summer days. 1. Jen Kirkman, "I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine),” Netflix In her first Netflix stand-up special, Jen Kirkman — who you might know from her lively online presence or her frequent appearances on "Drunk History" and "Chelsea Lately” — gives a refreshingly intimate, conversational and honest look at life as a woman at 40, from her divorce to her graying pubes to how society views childless women. "I know I could hit my head on the bathtub and no one will know and I'll die," she riffs at one point. "I'll bleed out and three days later a cat will eat my face — I don't have a cat, but when a single woman dies alone, a cat appears." 2. Louis C.K., “ Louis C.K. Live at Madison Square Garden ,” www.louisck.net C.K.’s new special, available on his website for the price of your choosing, comes from his recent string of sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. While some of the jokes are slightly less ambitious and high-concept than his previous specials, C.K. displays his usual inventiveness -- not to mention plenty of sound effects -- while weaving through his pet topics like fatherhood, the gender divide and his encroaching mortality. 3. Trevor Noah, “Trevor Noah: African American,” Netflix As we prepare for Noah to take the reins of the “Daily Show,” his 2013 stand-up special gives a good sense of the sort of tone and content we can expect from our new host. In “African American,” Noah talks extensively about his experiences growing up mixed-race in Apartheid South Africa, as well as his culture shock as an outsider coming to terms with the complex lived experience of race in America. 4. Aziz Ansari, "Aziz Ansari Live at Madison Square Garden," Netflix Ansari’s comedy has evolved a lot in recent years, and his sold-out 2015 set at Madison Square Garden represents his most mature work yet, as a vulnerable Ansari speaks candidly about romance, dating and his upbringing in an immigrant family. Through well-paced storytelling and extensive imagined conversations, Ansari skillfully mines humor from the everyday triumphs and tragedies of modern romance. 5. Wyatt Cenac, " Brooklyn ," Netflix Filmed in the cozy space at Brooklyn’s Union Hall — a far cry from the echoing halls of MSG — Cenac’s intimate 2014 special uses Brooklyn as a springboard for all sorts of topics, from gentrification to racial differences, as well as a moving and personal segment on the death of his father, a New York cab driver who was shot while at work. While discussions of the differences between Crown Heights and Fort Greene or a riff about Prospect Heights’ beloved Empire Mayonnaise shop will hit especially close to home with residents of Kings County, the "Daily Show" alum's incisive, probing observations easily transcend the borough they emerged from. 6. Chelsea Peretti, "One of the Greats," Netflix Peretti probably had the buzziest stand-up special of last year, but if you missed it, it’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon. While comedy fans have long known her from her brilliant Twitter account, her role on "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and her writing on “Parks and Recreation” and “The Kroll Show,” her special “One of the Greats” established Peretti as one of the most exciting innovators in the medium of stand-up today. The whole set is a meta riff on stand-up conventions, and her quirky, offbeat style mixes grandiose proclamations (“I guess you could say I’m a direct vessel of God”) and goofy voices with more grounded — but never predictable — riffs on sexism, technology and being a woman in the comedy world. 7. Hannibal Buress, "Live From Chicago," Amazon Instant Video While Buress may still be best-known in some circles for the Cosby joke heard 'round the world, his 2014 special demonstrates that Buress is much more than a Cosby scandal footnote. This 2014 set from his hometown of Chicago displays his gifts as a storyteller and a keen-eyed cultural critic who projects a natural ease and charisma onstage.

Continue Reading...