Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 1019

Al Gore needs to run for president: Why the future depends on a climate commander-in-chief

It probably won't happen but, frankly, it really, really needs to happen. This week, Buzzfeed reported that advisers close to former Vice President Al Gore are "figuring out a path" for him to enter the race for the Democratic nomination. A "senior Democrat" revealed that the Gore camp is "getting the old gang together" and that "they’re figuring out if there’s a path financially and politically. It feels more real than it has in the past months." A second source said, "This is people talking to people, some of whom may or may not have talked to him." On Friday, however, Gore adviser Betsy McManus dispelled the rumors, telling Politico, "There’s no truth to it. He's laser-focused on solving the climate crisis." Sure, but what better way to help solve the climate crisis than by ascending to the presidency next year. We'll circle back to this point. It goes without saying a Gore candidacy would absolutely upend the nature of the Democratic race, and it's difficult to see Gore failing to present a serious challenge to the Clinton campaign, especially given what occurred 15 years ago and the subsequent feelings of lingering rage and injustice that went along with the recount and, ultimately, the Bush v Gore decision. Five hundred votes changed history, and it's heartbreaking to imagine how the 2000s would've played out had the recount continued, culminating in an inevitable Gore victory.   If Gore had been the president we desperately needed during that decade, it likely would have meant prioritizing the climate crisis in a way that no other American political leader ever has -- even Obama, whose record on this issue has been solid, but not solid enough. That's not to say a future President Gore would necessarily have the political strength to win over skeptics and deniers enough to support serious legislative remedies in the Republican-controlled Congress. That'll never happen. Not even when rising sea levels overtake Washington and West Virginia properties enjoy an ocean view. But what Gore will surely accomplish is to put the issue front and center where it needs to be. The problems we face are legion, but it's difficult to conjure an issue that's more consequential than, you know, the survival of humanity in the face of an increasingly toxic climate. This isn't to say that the other candidates don't bring with them important priorities. Voting rights are crucial. Strengthening the middle class is a top shelf issue, too. So is education, health care, civil liberties, reproductive rights and overturning Citizens United. But we won't be able to do any of those things if we're fighting wars over shrinking water supplies or spending billions to hold back rising tides and mitigating damage from droughts and worsening hurricanes. We're on a path to inevitable and stupendous obliteration and it's already happening. Yet our very serious political leaders are debating fraudulent sting videos about Planned Parenthood; we're screeching about whether Mexicans are rapists; and our news media won't cover the climate crisis because it's not sexy enough. Something is horribly, horribly wrong, and we need real leadership in order to re-prioritize. Along those lines, it's highly unlikely that Gore would abandon his passion for this issue upon entering the race, nor would he pivot entirely to another list of priorities after he's inaugurated. Odds are, as president, he'd use the bully pulpit to become not only a national leader on the issue, but a lion on the world's stage. Again, this certainly won't endear him to the congressional Republicans, but screw them. History will judge the deniers accordingly. (By the way, history will also judge anyone of any party who delayed when action could've been taken.) But given the accomplishments of the Obama administration via legislation and executive orders, Gore would easily build upon previous moves while publicly emphasizing the scale of the crisis. That last point is critical. Until Obama, no president has ever mentioned the climate crisis in either an inaugural address or a state of the union. Not one. Not even Clinton. But even Obama has been sidetracked by other issues -- again, important ones, but at the expense of the most important one. It's easy to predict that Gore would push the urgency of crisis in a way that'd be not only persuasive to voters on the fence about it, but also in a way that embeds the appropriate degree of urgency in the minds of Americans bothering to pay attention. Realistically, this election might be the last opportunity to elect a climate president — a true leader on this issue, a leader with heft. Eight or twelve years from now might be too late. Indeed, 2016 might be too late. We need President Gore, and it's almost mandatory. History and our future as a species could depend upon it. And while it's true that his work as a private citizen has been invaluable, and will continue to be, it also desperately needs to be refueled and reignited, and the presidency can do that.It probably won't happen but, frankly, it really, really needs to happen. This week, Buzzfeed reported that advisers close to former Vice President Al Gore are "figuring out a path" for him to enter the race for the Democratic nomination. A "senior Democrat" revealed that the Gore camp is "getting the old gang together" and that "they’re figuring out if there’s a path financially and politically. It feels more real than it has in the past months." A second source said, "This is people talking to people, some of whom may or may not have talked to him." On Friday, however, Gore adviser Betsy McManus dispelled the rumors, telling Politico, "There’s no truth to it. He's laser-focused on solving the climate crisis." Sure, but what better way to help solve the climate crisis than by ascending to the presidency next year. We'll circle back to this point. It goes without saying a Gore candidacy would absolutely upend the nature of the Democratic race, and it's difficult to see Gore failing to present a serious challenge to the Clinton campaign, especially given what occurred 15 years ago and the subsequent feelings of lingering rage and injustice that went along with the recount and, ultimately, the Bush v Gore decision. Five hundred votes changed history, and it's heartbreaking to imagine how the 2000s would've played out had the recount continued, culminating in an inevitable Gore victory.   If Gore had been the president we desperately needed during that decade, it likely would have meant prioritizing the climate crisis in a way that no other American political leader ever has -- even Obama, whose record on this issue has been solid, but not solid enough. That's not to say a future President Gore would necessarily have the political strength to win over skeptics and deniers enough to support serious legislative remedies in the Republican-controlled Congress. That'll never happen. Not even when rising sea levels overtake Washington and West Virginia properties enjoy an ocean view. But what Gore will surely accomplish is to put the issue front and center where it needs to be. The problems we face are legion, but it's difficult to conjure an issue that's more consequential than, you know, the survival of humanity in the face of an increasingly toxic climate. This isn't to say that the other candidates don't bring with them important priorities. Voting rights are crucial. Strengthening the middle class is a top shelf issue, too. So is education, health care, civil liberties, reproductive rights and overturning Citizens United. But we won't be able to do any of those things if we're fighting wars over shrinking water supplies or spending billions to hold back rising tides and mitigating damage from droughts and worsening hurricanes. We're on a path to inevitable and stupendous obliteration and it's already happening. Yet our very serious political leaders are debating fraudulent sting videos about Planned Parenthood; we're screeching about whether Mexicans are rapists; and our news media won't cover the climate crisis because it's not sexy enough. Something is horribly, horribly wrong, and we need real leadership in order to re-prioritize. Along those lines, it's highly unlikely that Gore would abandon his passion for this issue upon entering the race, nor would he pivot entirely to another list of priorities after he's inaugurated. Odds are, as president, he'd use the bully pulpit to become not only a national leader on the issue, but a lion on the world's stage. Again, this certainly won't endear him to the congressional Republicans, but screw them. History will judge the deniers accordingly. (By the way, history will also judge anyone of any party who delayed when action could've been taken.) But given the accomplishments of the Obama administration via legislation and executive orders, Gore would easily build upon previous moves while publicly emphasizing the scale of the crisis. That last point is critical. Until Obama, no president has ever mentioned the climate crisis in either an inaugural address or a state of the union. Not one. Not even Clinton. But even Obama has been sidetracked by other issues -- again, important ones, but at the expense of the most important one. It's easy to predict that Gore would push the urgency of crisis in a way that'd be not only persuasive to voters on the fence about it, but also in a way that embeds the appropriate degree of urgency in the minds of Americans bothering to pay attention. Realistically, this election might be the last opportunity to elect a climate president — a true leader on this issue, a leader with heft. Eight or twelve years from now might be too late. Indeed, 2016 might be too late. We need President Gore, and it's almost mandatory. History and our future as a species could depend upon it. And while it's true that his work as a private citizen has been invaluable, and will continue to be, it also desperately needs to be refueled and reignited, and the presidency can do that.

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Fox News has completely lost its mind: It’s August 14 and Elizabeth Hasselbeck is freaking out about the “War on Christmas”

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A moderately forceful high-five for Obama’s summer music and reading choices

To people who dislike him, he’s a socialist Muslim from Kenya who faked his birth certificate. Even to many of those who like him, he’s almost a cipher, a guy so guarded and studiously moderate that you need to penetrate numerous layers to see how he really feels about something. Which is why – even though it’s all surely been vetted (and perhaps created) by a team of handlers – we’re happy to see President Obama’s playlist and summer reading list. There’s nothing shocking here – someone could easily make fun of it for being a rollcall of acknowledged greats, new and old – but it shows sober good sense and some intellectual and musical curiosity. If he’s really listening to and reading this stuff, a moderately forceful high-five is in order. The books selected by Obama include “The Lowland” – a novel by the well-liked Jhumpa Lahiri set largely in ‘60s Calcutta – and Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” last year’s bestseller and Pulitzer winner, set in World War II France. It’s easy to imagine Obama reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”; the Atlantic writer’s sort-of letter to his son, inspired by James Baldwin’s work and Coates’ meeting with the president, is one of the books that Obama voters are wrestling with this year. Besides “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s look at the damage human beings have done to the planet’s other species, this is the choice most likely to unleash shouting from the far right. Coates is as sharp a commentator as we have on race in this country, but he’s also a few clicks to the left of the president politically. And unlike Obama, he doesn’t hesitate to get angry about the treatment of black men and boys. Overall, it’s a list likely to draw approval from clerks at independent bookstores and people who run book groups. That’s not a diss, by the way. The musical list – two Spotify playlists, one for the summer night, one for the day – includes 40 songs and ranges pretty widely, including a few surprises. Mostly, it’s as tasteful and reasonably safe as his list of books. It’s hard to object to anyone selecting a Van Morrison song, for instance – but couldn’t he have picked something less obvious than “Moondance”? (Okay, it’s still a great song.) The president's Otis Redding choice – “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” – is a little more imaginative. (We’re just hoping the prez did not select it because it had “dream” in the title.) Beyoncé with Frank Ocean (“Superpower”), Joni Mitchell (“Help Me”), and Ray Charles (“You Don’t Know Me”) are also included. For years, jazz fans have expressed disappointment about Obama for not getting behind jazz more fully. Why should a guy from the jazz capital of Chicago – and an American man, like jazz itself, with both white and black ancestry -- fall behind Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter in spreading the word about this American art form? The White House jazz summit that music critic Howard Reich called for would have meant a lot. Barring that, songs by John Coltrane (“My Favorite Things”), Miles Davis (“Flamenco Sketches”), and Billie Holiday (“The Very Thought of You”) are at least tips of the cap. These three are hardly unknowns, but listeners can follow them in some pretty profound directions. And “Until,” from Cassandra Wilson’s “New Moon Daughter” album, is a good choice by a great singer. In the jazz-adjacent category: It’s nice to see Nina Simone on the list, with “Feeling Good” – tellingly, not one of her explicitly political numbers. (It’s probably not realistic to imagine Obama kicking back on a summer night with “Mississippi Goddam.”) If you were expecting a kind of bird-flipping list – the cultural-taste version of his provocative interview with Marc Maron, say – this isn’t it. If you were hoping to see a tribute to the “Straight Outta Compton” movie with some N.W.A. or Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” you’ll be disappointed. But Obama doesn’t overlook hip hop entirely – Mos Def and Talib Kweli are on here. And if you were hoping to see Obama stretching out from the cultural mainstream – digging into Flying Lotus or the recent set of lost Pavement songs, or a novel that had not already drawn heavy acclaim in the New York Times – this won’t make you happy. (He’s got songs by Okkervil River and Florence + the Machine listed, at least.) This isn’t quite JFK-style cultural evangelism. And it doesn’t show a reader or listener with particularly intense passions in any particular direction. But it shows someone (or a team of handlers) devoted to a pretty wide range of good work, from Howlin’ Wolf to James Salter. If we’re trying to decode the complexities of an elusive man, that’s as close as we’re gonna get for now.To people who dislike him, he’s a socialist Muslim from Kenya who faked his birth certificate. Even to many of those who like him, he’s almost a cipher, a guy so guarded and studiously moderate that you need to penetrate numerous layers to see how he really feels about something. Which is why – even though it’s all surely been vetted (and perhaps created) by a team of handlers – we’re happy to see President Obama’s playlist and summer reading list. There’s nothing shocking here – someone could easily make fun of it for being a rollcall of acknowledged greats, new and old – but it shows sober good sense and some intellectual and musical curiosity. If he’s really listening to and reading this stuff, a moderately forceful high-five is in order. The books selected by Obama include “The Lowland” – a novel by the well-liked Jhumpa Lahiri set largely in ‘60s Calcutta – and Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” last year’s bestseller and Pulitzer winner, set in World War II France. It’s easy to imagine Obama reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”; the Atlantic writer’s sort-of letter to his son, inspired by James Baldwin’s work and Coates’ meeting with the president, is one of the books that Obama voters are wrestling with this year. Besides “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s look at the damage human beings have done to the planet’s other species, this is the choice most likely to unleash shouting from the far right. Coates is as sharp a commentator as we have on race in this country, but he’s also a few clicks to the left of the president politically. And unlike Obama, he doesn’t hesitate to get angry about the treatment of black men and boys. Overall, it’s a list likely to draw approval from clerks at independent bookstores and people who run book groups. That’s not a diss, by the way. The musical list – two Spotify playlists, one for the summer night, one for the day – includes 40 songs and ranges pretty widely, including a few surprises. Mostly, it’s as tasteful and reasonably safe as his list of books. It’s hard to object to anyone selecting a Van Morrison song, for instance – but couldn’t he have picked something less obvious than “Moondance”? (Okay, it’s still a great song.) The president's Otis Redding choice – “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” – is a little more imaginative. (We’re just hoping the prez did not select it because it had “dream” in the title.) Beyoncé with Frank Ocean (“Superpower”), Joni Mitchell (“Help Me”), and Ray Charles (“You Don’t Know Me”) are also included. For years, jazz fans have expressed disappointment about Obama for not getting behind jazz more fully. Why should a guy from the jazz capital of Chicago – and an American man, like jazz itself, with both white and black ancestry -- fall behind Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter in spreading the word about this American art form? The White House jazz summit that music critic Howard Reich called for would have meant a lot. Barring that, songs by John Coltrane (“My Favorite Things”), Miles Davis (“Flamenco Sketches”), and Billie Holiday (“The Very Thought of You”) are at least tips of the cap. These three are hardly unknowns, but listeners can follow them in some pretty profound directions. And “Until,” from Cassandra Wilson’s “New Moon Daughter” album, is a good choice by a great singer. In the jazz-adjacent category: It’s nice to see Nina Simone on the list, with “Feeling Good” – tellingly, not one of her explicitly political numbers. (It’s probably not realistic to imagine Obama kicking back on a summer night with “Mississippi Goddam.”) If you were expecting a kind of bird-flipping list – the cultural-taste version of his provocative interview with Marc Maron, say – this isn’t it. If you were hoping to see a tribute to the “Straight Outta Compton” movie with some N.W.A. or Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” you’ll be disappointed. But Obama doesn’t overlook hip hop entirely – Mos Def and Talib Kweli are on here. And if you were hoping to see Obama stretching out from the cultural mainstream – digging into Flying Lotus or the recent set of lost Pavement songs, or a novel that had not already drawn heavy acclaim in the New York Times – this won’t make you happy. (He’s got songs by Okkervil River and Florence + the Machine listed, at least.) This isn’t quite JFK-style cultural evangelism. And it doesn’t show a reader or listener with particularly intense passions in any particular direction. But it shows someone (or a team of handlers) devoted to a pretty wide range of good work, from Howlin’ Wolf to James Salter. If we’re trying to decode the complexities of an elusive man, that’s as close as we’re gonna get for now.To people who dislike him, he’s a socialist Muslim from Kenya who faked his birth certificate. Even to many of those who like him, he’s almost a cipher, a guy so guarded and studiously moderate that you need to penetrate numerous layers to see how he really feels about something. Which is why – even though it’s all surely been vetted (and perhaps created) by a team of handlers – we’re happy to see President Obama’s playlist and summer reading list. There’s nothing shocking here – someone could easily make fun of it for being a rollcall of acknowledged greats, new and old – but it shows sober good sense and some intellectual and musical curiosity. If he’s really listening to and reading this stuff, a moderately forceful high-five is in order. The books selected by Obama include “The Lowland” – a novel by the well-liked Jhumpa Lahiri set largely in ‘60s Calcutta – and Anthony Doerr’s “All the Light We Cannot See,” last year’s bestseller and Pulitzer winner, set in World War II France. It’s easy to imagine Obama reading Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me”; the Atlantic writer’s sort-of letter to his son, inspired by James Baldwin’s work and Coates’ meeting with the president, is one of the books that Obama voters are wrestling with this year. Besides “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s look at the damage human beings have done to the planet’s other species, this is the choice most likely to unleash shouting from the far right. Coates is as sharp a commentator as we have on race in this country, but he’s also a few clicks to the left of the president politically. And unlike Obama, he doesn’t hesitate to get angry about the treatment of black men and boys. Overall, it’s a list likely to draw approval from clerks at independent bookstores and people who run book groups. That’s not a diss, by the way. The musical list – two Spotify playlists, one for the summer night, one for the day – includes 40 songs and ranges pretty widely, including a few surprises. Mostly, it’s as tasteful and reasonably safe as his list of books. It’s hard to object to anyone selecting a Van Morrison song, for instance – but couldn’t he have picked something less obvious than “Moondance”? (Okay, it’s still a great song.) The president's Otis Redding choice – “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” – is a little more imaginative. (We’re just hoping the prez did not select it because it had “dream” in the title.) Beyoncé with Frank Ocean (“Superpower”), Joni Mitchell (“Help Me”), and Ray Charles (“You Don’t Know Me”) are also included. For years, jazz fans have expressed disappointment about Obama for not getting behind jazz more fully. Why should a guy from the jazz capital of Chicago – and an American man, like jazz itself, with both white and black ancestry -- fall behind Bill Clinton and even Jimmy Carter in spreading the word about this American art form? The White House jazz summit that music critic Howard Reich called for would have meant a lot. Barring that, songs by John Coltrane (“My Favorite Things”), Miles Davis (“Flamenco Sketches”), and Billie Holiday (“The Very Thought of You”) are at least tips of the cap. These three are hardly unknowns, but listeners can follow them in some pretty profound directions. And “Until,” from Cassandra Wilson’s “New Moon Daughter” album, is a good choice by a great singer. In the jazz-adjacent category: It’s nice to see Nina Simone on the list, with “Feeling Good” – tellingly, not one of her explicitly political numbers. (It’s probably not realistic to imagine Obama kicking back on a summer night with “Mississippi Goddam.”) If you were expecting a kind of bird-flipping list – the cultural-taste version of his provocative interview with Marc Maron, say – this isn’t it. If you were hoping to see a tribute to the “Straight Outta Compton” movie with some N.W.A. or Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic,” you’ll be disappointed. But Obama doesn’t overlook hip hop entirely – Mos Def and Talib Kweli are on here. And if you were hoping to see Obama stretching out from the cultural mainstream – digging into Flying Lotus or the recent set of lost Pavement songs, or a novel that had not already drawn heavy acclaim in the New York Times – this won’t make you happy. (He’s got songs by Okkervil River and Florence + the Machine listed, at least.) This isn’t quite JFK-style cultural evangelism. And it doesn’t show a reader or listener with particularly intense passions in any particular direction. But it shows someone (or a team of handlers) devoted to a pretty wide range of good work, from Howlin’ Wolf to James Salter. If we’re trying to decode the complexities of an elusive man, that’s as close as we’re gonna get for now.

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The Megafauna Massacre: Humans responsible for the extinction of ancient species

Beginning 80,00 years ago, many of prehistory's most famous large animals, including mammoths, wooly rhinos and sabertooth tigers, began to vanish from the Earth. We've never been able to say why -- until now. That's the claim of a new study published this week in the journal Ecography by researchers from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge, who have used innovative statistical analysis to identify the real culprit. Bad news: Humans did it. The study's authors say that they have decisively settled a long-running debate about whether these extinctions were caused by humans or climate change, or even some combination of the two. They ran thousands of scenarios that showed that, even accounting for changes in climate, none of the megafauna went extinct until humans showed up. "As far as we are concerned, this research is the nail in the coffin of this 50-year debate - humans were the dominant cause of the extinction of megafauna," Lewis Bartlett, the study's lead author, told Phys.org. "What we don't know is what it was about these early settlers that caused this demise. Were they killing them for food, was it early use of fire or were they driven out of their habitats? Our analysis doesn't differentiate, but we can say that it was caused by human activity more than by climate change. It debunks the myth of early humans living in harmony with nature." Such myths have never been very strong. Since the 18th century, when explorers and scientists began discovering the bones of these animals and realizing what they were, the popular imagination has pictured our ancestors cowering before strange and terrible beasts, only overcoming them through desperate struggle or cunning. It is only in recent decades that have we come to realize that the slaughter of the megafauna never ended, and we're still driving lions, rhinos, bears and whales to extinction. Now we seek to protect these animals and many feel outrage when they are killed. Even more radically, some of these long-dead animals may be brought back to life by efforts such as the Long Now Foundation and Pleistocene Park. One day we might again see Wooly Mammoths roaming the steppes of Siberia. Many extinct megafauna are well known, but many remain totally mysterious. Little is known beyond legend of Sylviornis, a kind of giant chicken that once lived on New Caledonia. Some are almost theoretical, such as the Giant Polar Bear, known only from a single bone found under a bridge in London. Here are some of the fascinating megafauna that we probably once hunted to extinction. The Glyptodon

Glyptodon, by Heinrich Harder 1916. Public domain.

This large, heavily armored relative of the armadillo once roamed the lowlands of South America and reached as far as modern-day Guatemala. Lumbering and herbivorous, it had little defense against the early human settlers, who may have used its thick, domed shell for shelter. Glyptodon was an early megafauna celebrity, discovered by pioneering English biologist Richard Owen, the man who coined the name "Dinosaur". The London Literary Gazette reported its discovery in breathless wonder,

A still more interesting discovery is that of the apparently complete remains of another monstrous fossil animal, completely unknown to us, of which I annex a sketch reduced by Mr. Clift... The monster it refers to, possessing the characteristic armour of the armadillo tribe, was found in the bank of a rivulet near the Rio Matanza.

The Glyptodon quickly became a standard feature in the work of early paleoartists, delighting the Victorian and Georgian public before Owen's Dinosaurs conclusively seized the spotlight. The Giant Ground Sloths

Megatherium, by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins 1871. Public domain.

Now only represented by sleepy-looking tree dwellers, the sloth family once included among its number some of the largest land animals ever to live. Some were as big as an elephant. They ranged all across South America. They used their great height and long claws to reach branches high in trees, and along with the elephant-like Gomophotheres they likely played an essential role in forest ecology. Large, pendulous fruits such as papaya and avocado probably evolved to attract megafauna like the giant sloths, who then distributed the seeds in their dung. The avocado's large, bitter pit is a holdover from this time. After the extinction of the sloth, such fruits probably only survived thanks to "pulp thieves" such as rodents, who dragged the seeds away from their mother trees. Later, a far superior pulp thief arrived. From The Ghosts of Evolution: nonsensical fruit, missing partners, and other ecological anachronisms:

Nor was [the avocado] shaped by the food preferences of bipedal apes, who invaded avocado territory just before the gomphotheres and ground sloths disappeared. Those apes are now doing a better job dispersing one species of the genus than any animal has done before... and its range now wraps around the world.

So perhaps we can take some slim comfort that at least one species isn't suffering from our slaughter of the ground sloth. Haast's Eagle

Giant Haast's eagle attacking New Zealand Moa by John Megahan. PLoS Biol. Licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons

When the ancestors of the Maori first arrived on the islands now known as New Zealand around 1300 CE, they discovered an ecosystem teaming with enormous birds, which they quickly began to hunt to extinction. The first to go were the Moa, some species of which could be 11 feet tall. Not far behind, however, was Haast's Eagle, previously the Moa's only natural predator. Weighing as much as 30 pounds and with a wingspan of 9 feet, it was the largest flying bird ever to exist. It was so large that until relatively recently it was thought that it may have been flightless or gradually evolving to be flightless. It's now known to have been a powerful predator, with 60mm talons capable of killing even the largest adult Moa. From The Lost World of the Moa: Prehistoric Life in New Zealand:

The spectacular fossil evidence shows that the eagle used its great claws to grasp the hindquarters of the Moa and to kill by crushing the bone and causing massive bleeding. Over a dozen Moa pelves are known that bear severe damage from eagle claws... The marks range from pinpricks to crushing indentations, punctures and rents up to 75mm long and 10mm wide.

The Haast's Eagle could easily have killed a human, and they survive in Maori legend as the Poukai, an enormous bird that eats people. Beginning from an estimated population of about 15,000, the eagle was extinct by 1400, only about 100 years after the arrival of humans. A popular figure in cryptozoology, persistent rumors suggest that it survives in isolated, mountainous regions. Julius von Haast, the German geologist who described the eagle in 1872 and gave it its name, believed that he was attacked by one when it blundered into his tent, attracted by a campfire. The Irish Elk

Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus), skeleton, by Franco Atirador. CC-BY-SA-3.0 or CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Towering above the height of a human and with antlers that could be a dozen feet across, the Irish Elk was neither an elk (it was a deer) nor Irish (it ranged across all of Eurasia.) This animal and its distinctive antlers appears in many neolithic cave paintings, sometimes in hunting scenes. It get its common name from the well-preserved specimens that began to be pulled from Irish peat bogs in the 17th century, causing sensation and controversy and spurring the development of the theory of evolution. In those pre-Darwinian times, many couldn't believe that God would create any animal only to allow them to become extinct. Thomas Molyneux, who first described the Irish Elk, thought they were probably related to the Moose. George Cuvier later studied the Elk and demonstrated conclusively that it was in fact an animal that no longer existed in any form, the first "proof" of extinction. In the late 19th century, the Elk became the prime example for a theory called orthogenesis, which asserted that evolution wasn't down to natural selection but linear development. The Elk's antlers kept getting bigger and bigger until they got tangled in trees or couldn't hold up their heads, and this accounted for their extinction. It wasn't until 1974 that Stephen Jay Gould's famous study of the Irish Elk conclusively showed that even apparently pointless characteristics such as enormous antlers have an evolutionary benefit. An important animal for science, but tragically only because it had once been an important animal for early human hunters. These are just a few of the many extinct megafauna. Let us know about your favorites in the comments.

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Sharon Stone poses nude and opens up about brain aneurysm in Harper’s Bazaar: “It’s like, I have brain damage; you’ll just have to deal with it”

Sharon Stone posed naked in the most recent issue of Harper’s Bazaar, and she looks goddamn flaw-less, despite her protestations that her bum looks like a “bag of flapjacks” (who puts flapjacks in a bag though, honestly?) "I'm aware that my ass looks like a bag of flapjacks but I'm not trying to be the best-looking broad in the world,” said the aforementioned radiant, glowing, almost spookily blemish-free 57-year-old. "At a certain point you start asking yourself, 'What really is sexy?' It's not just the elevation of your boobs. It's being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that’s with you. If I believed that sexy was trying to be who I was when I did 'Basic Instinct,’ then we'd all be having a hard day today.” Stone also opened up about the aneurysm and cerebral hemorrhage that she suffered back in 2001, which she has only recently begun discussing openly. After feeling ill for three days, Stone went to the emergency room, where she was told she had had suffered from a stroke. Soon after, she lost consciousness. "When I came to, the doctor was leaning over me. I said, 'Am I dying?' And he said, 'You're bleeding into your brain,' " Stone recalls. "I said, 'I should call my mom,' and he said, 'You're right. You could lose the ability to speak soon.’” Stone was eventually diagnosed with a ruptured vertebral artery, which it took surgeons 22 platinum coils to repair. The actress says that the stroke and the events that followed have changed her life irreparably. "It took two years for my body just to absorb all the internal bleeding I had," she explains. "It almost feels like my entire DNA changed. My brain isn't sitting where it used to, my body type changed, and even my food allergies are different.” Despite long-lasting side symptoms including a stutter, compromised vision and the absence of feeling in her left leg, Stone says there have been some silver linings: "I became more emotionally intelligent. I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I'm stronger. And I can be abrasively direct. That scares people, but I think that's not my problem. It's like, I have brain damage; you'll just have to deal with it.” Talking about her 2010 guest spot on “Law and Order: SVU” back in 2010, Stone recalls being humiliated by the role and the fact that she kept forgetting lines. Yet she forced herself to persevere. "I thought, 'You know what? I got thrown off the bullet train, and now I'm going to have to crawl up a hill of broken glass, get back on the train that's going a million miles an hour, and work my way from the cattle car up. That's just the way it is, so I'd better get humble and shut the fuck up and do the job. Because if I can't do this job, I'm certainly not going to be able to do anything else,’” Stone says. This fall, Stone will executive produce and play the vice president on “Agent X,” a new TNT show. Read the rest of the profile — which includes details about Stone’s Buddhism, her songwriting and her love life (“I never get asked out,” she laments) — and of course, check out that photoshoot over at Harper’s Bazaar.  Sharon Stone posed naked in the most recent issue of Harper’s Bazaar, and she looks goddamn flaw-less, despite her protestations that her bum looks like a “bag of flapjacks” (who puts flapjacks in a bag though, honestly?) "I'm aware that my ass looks like a bag of flapjacks but I'm not trying to be the best-looking broad in the world,” said the aforementioned radiant, glowing, almost spookily blemish-free 57-year-old. "At a certain point you start asking yourself, 'What really is sexy?' It's not just the elevation of your boobs. It's being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that’s with you. If I believed that sexy was trying to be who I was when I did 'Basic Instinct,’ then we'd all be having a hard day today.” Stone also opened up about the aneurysm and cerebral hemorrhage that she suffered back in 2001, which she has only recently begun discussing openly. After feeling ill for three days, Stone went to the emergency room, where she was told she had had suffered from a stroke. Soon after, she lost consciousness. "When I came to, the doctor was leaning over me. I said, 'Am I dying?' And he said, 'You're bleeding into your brain,' " Stone recalls. "I said, 'I should call my mom,' and he said, 'You're right. You could lose the ability to speak soon.’” Stone was eventually diagnosed with a ruptured vertebral artery, which it took surgeons 22 platinum coils to repair. The actress says that the stroke and the events that followed have changed her life irreparably. "It took two years for my body just to absorb all the internal bleeding I had," she explains. "It almost feels like my entire DNA changed. My brain isn't sitting where it used to, my body type changed, and even my food allergies are different.” Despite long-lasting side symptoms including a stutter, compromised vision and the absence of feeling in her left leg, Stone says there have been some silver linings: "I became more emotionally intelligent. I chose to work very hard to open up other parts of my mind. Now I'm stronger. And I can be abrasively direct. That scares people, but I think that's not my problem. It's like, I have brain damage; you'll just have to deal with it.” Talking about her 2010 guest spot on “Law and Order: SVU” back in 2010, Stone recalls being humiliated by the role and the fact that she kept forgetting lines. Yet she forced herself to persevere. "I thought, 'You know what? I got thrown off the bullet train, and now I'm going to have to crawl up a hill of broken glass, get back on the train that's going a million miles an hour, and work my way from the cattle car up. That's just the way it is, so I'd better get humble and shut the fuck up and do the job. Because if I can't do this job, I'm certainly not going to be able to do anything else,’” Stone says. This fall, Stone will executive produce and play the vice president on “Agent X,” a new TNT show. Read the rest of the profile — which includes details about Stone’s Buddhism, her songwriting and her love life (“I never get asked out,” she laments) — and of course, check out that photoshoot over at Harper’s Bazaar.  

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Being Blunt: When the News Becomes the News: A Playbook for Recovering

Journalists aren’t the people they used to be. With greater frequency they are the focus of reporting as much as they are doing the reporting. “It’s a disturbing trend,” says John Goodman, a former publicist for ABC’s World News Tonight and current owner of John Goodman Public Relations based in New York. “News reporters and anchors are supposed to present the news, not become it.” In February, NBC suspended anchor Brian Williams for claiming falsely that he had been in a helicopter that had been fired on during a 2003 Iraq assignment. CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan took a leave of absence for filing an erroneous report on the attack on an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. ESPN and Colin Cowherd parted ways after the blowhard radio personality made disparaging remarks about Dominican baseball players. The Starz Network comedy Blunt Talk amps up the theme of famed journalist as flawed individuals – albeit more for off-screen than on-camera misjudgments. Patrick Stewart plays Walter Blunt, an opinionated news show host who snorts cocaine and gets caught drunk driving when he’s not driving ratings. Blunt’s loyal team, including network producers and his trusty manservant Harry, rally around him with an absurdist sense of mission, defending, readying and even spooning the human wrecking ball. Blunt’s antics may make audiences alternatively laugh or cringe, but as is the case with all skillful humor, the show touches a broad nerve – in this case about celebrity-driven culture. What is an organization willing to do to keep a star, ahem, high in the media sky? Clearly, a fair amount. Williams and Logan have returned. Cowherd was just hired by ESPN rival Fox Sports to weigh in on stories much as he’d done before. The media celebrities’ ranks are filled with other comeback stories. But what does this entail? Experts say redemption requires an acknowledgement of past sins but ability to move beyond them. It means employing the right resources and patience, both by company and star. Perhaps most of all it means the ability to smile at a situation, to smile at oneself. Consider Goodman’s steps below as a healing remedy from all manner of misbehavior. Look Into It If you’re star makes headlines for the wrong reason, don’t be passive. Create your own Investigation. NBC examined how and why Williams made the false statements. That should be policy in every crisis situation, Goodman says. But such investigations have to exhibit a willingness to address uncomfortable truths. Williams showed a tendency to paint the truth. “There isn’t a boilerplate way to handle a crisis,” he says. “You have to understand the full breadth of the problem before you can address a solution.” Be Honest, Say You’re Sorry If there was wrongdoing, admit it, and don’t be shy about offering it publicly,Goodman says. “The worst thing you can do is sit quietly,” he says. “You have to be upfront about the problem.” However, ensure your mea culpas are genuine. When Williams apologized, he seemed less than contrite. Statements like, “I made a mistake in recalling the events 12 years ago,” made it seem as though he was making light of the situation. Explain What You’ll Do How will you keep this mistake from repeating? When crisis hits, you have to reassure the public that this kind of issue won’t happen again. Explain what changes you plan to make, including punishment. Williams was suspended and then demoted to MSNBC breaking news anchor, a supporting role. He is no longer the face of the NBC evening news program. Prepare For Fallout From lost ratings to public backlash, be ready to address unpleasant consequences for months – or more. NBC has remained a centerpiece of discussion about deteriorating standards in network journalism. The once widely respected Williams continues to be a late night comedy show punch-line. Rebuild Your Reputation With the scandal in the rear view mirror, it’s time to look ahead. “Williams will need to get up every morning and make a commitment to be honest in every detail of every story he tells from this point forward,” Goodman says. If a scandal-stricken celebrity can “keep their nose clean” they may earn forgiveness and rebuild their reputation, Goodman says. Learn From The Scandal Use the scandal to become a better person. Some media experts that Williams could could become involved in a veterans’ cause. However, you don’t want to turn a kind gesture into a media circus, Goodman says. Parading news crews out to cover Williams helping an injured solider would probably be considered tone deaf. Giving back is about finding forgiveness, not reclaiming ratings. Be Patient Handling a public relations nightmare requires patience. Work through the problem on a daily basis, stay calm, and the situation is likely to improve, Goodman says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZJournalists aren’t the people they used to be. With greater frequency they are the focus of reporting as much as they are doing the reporting. “It’s a disturbing trend,” says John Goodman, a former publicist for ABC’s World News Tonight and current owner of John Goodman Public Relations based in New York. “News reporters and anchors are supposed to present the news, not become it.” In February, NBC suspended anchor Brian Williams for claiming falsely that he had been in a helicopter that had been fired on during a 2003 Iraq assignment. CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan took a leave of absence for filing an erroneous report on the attack on an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. ESPN and Colin Cowherd parted ways after the blowhard radio personality made disparaging remarks about Dominican baseball players. The Starz Network comedy Blunt Talk amps up the theme of famed journalist as flawed individuals – albeit more for off-screen than on-camera misjudgments. Patrick Stewart plays Walter Blunt, an opinionated news show host who snorts cocaine and gets caught drunk driving when he’s not driving ratings. Blunt’s loyal team, including network producers and his trusty manservant Harry, rally around him with an absurdist sense of mission, defending, readying and even spooning the human wrecking ball. Blunt’s antics may make audiences alternatively laugh or cringe, but as is the case with all skillful humor, the show touches a broad nerve – in this case about celebrity-driven culture. What is an organization willing to do to keep a star, ahem, high in the media sky? Clearly, a fair amount. Williams and Logan have returned. Cowherd was just hired by ESPN rival Fox Sports to weigh in on stories much as he’d done before. The media celebrities’ ranks are filled with other comeback stories. But what does this entail? Experts say redemption requires an acknowledgement of past sins but ability to move beyond them. It means employing the right resources and patience, both by company and star. Perhaps most of all it means the ability to smile at a situation, to smile at oneself. Consider Goodman’s steps below as a healing remedy from all manner of misbehavior. Look Into It If you’re star makes headlines for the wrong reason, don’t be passive. Create your own Investigation. NBC examined how and why Williams made the false statements. That should be policy in every crisis situation, Goodman says. But such investigations have to exhibit a willingness to address uncomfortable truths. Williams showed a tendency to paint the truth. “There isn’t a boilerplate way to handle a crisis,” he says. “You have to understand the full breadth of the problem before you can address a solution.” Be Honest, Say You’re Sorry If there was wrongdoing, admit it, and don’t be shy about offering it publicly,Goodman says. “The worst thing you can do is sit quietly,” he says. “You have to be upfront about the problem.” However, ensure your mea culpas are genuine. When Williams apologized, he seemed less than contrite. Statements like, “I made a mistake in recalling the events 12 years ago,” made it seem as though he was making light of the situation. Explain What You’ll Do How will you keep this mistake from repeating? When crisis hits, you have to reassure the public that this kind of issue won’t happen again. Explain what changes you plan to make, including punishment. Williams was suspended and then demoted to MSNBC breaking news anchor, a supporting role. He is no longer the face of the NBC evening news program. Prepare For Fallout From lost ratings to public backlash, be ready to address unpleasant consequences for months – or more. NBC has remained a centerpiece of discussion about deteriorating standards in network journalism. The once widely respected Williams continues to be a late night comedy show punch-line. Rebuild Your Reputation With the scandal in the rear view mirror, it’s time to look ahead. “Williams will need to get up every morning and make a commitment to be honest in every detail of every story he tells from this point forward,” Goodman says. If a scandal-stricken celebrity can “keep their nose clean” they may earn forgiveness and rebuild their reputation, Goodman says. Learn From The Scandal Use the scandal to become a better person. Some media experts that Williams could could become involved in a veterans’ cause. However, you don’t want to turn a kind gesture into a media circus, Goodman says. Parading news crews out to cover Williams helping an injured solider would probably be considered tone deaf. Giving back is about finding forgiveness, not reclaiming ratings. Be Patient Handling a public relations nightmare requires patience. Work through the problem on a daily basis, stay calm, and the situation is likely to improve, Goodman says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZJournalists aren’t the people they used to be. With greater frequency they are the focus of reporting as much as they are doing the reporting. “It’s a disturbing trend,” says John Goodman, a former publicist for ABC’s World News Tonight and current owner of John Goodman Public Relations based in New York. “News reporters and anchors are supposed to present the news, not become it.” In February, NBC suspended anchor Brian Williams for claiming falsely that he had been in a helicopter that had been fired on during a 2003 Iraq assignment. CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Lara Logan took a leave of absence for filing an erroneous report on the attack on an American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. ESPN and Colin Cowherd parted ways after the blowhard radio personality made disparaging remarks about Dominican baseball players. The Starz Network comedy Blunt Talk amps up the theme of famed journalist as flawed individuals – albeit more for off-screen than on-camera misjudgments. Patrick Stewart plays Walter Blunt, an opinionated news show host who snorts cocaine and gets caught drunk driving when he’s not driving ratings. Blunt’s loyal team, including network producers and his trusty manservant Harry, rally around him with an absurdist sense of mission, defending, readying and even spooning the human wrecking ball. Blunt’s antics may make audiences alternatively laugh or cringe, but as is the case with all skillful humor, the show touches a broad nerve – in this case about celebrity-driven culture. What is an organization willing to do to keep a star, ahem, high in the media sky? Clearly, a fair amount. Williams and Logan have returned. Cowherd was just hired by ESPN rival Fox Sports to weigh in on stories much as he’d done before. The media celebrities’ ranks are filled with other comeback stories. But what does this entail? Experts say redemption requires an acknowledgement of past sins but ability to move beyond them. It means employing the right resources and patience, both by company and star. Perhaps most of all it means the ability to smile at a situation, to smile at oneself. Consider Goodman’s steps below as a healing remedy from all manner of misbehavior. Look Into It If you’re star makes headlines for the wrong reason, don’t be passive. Create your own Investigation. NBC examined how and why Williams made the false statements. That should be policy in every crisis situation, Goodman says. But such investigations have to exhibit a willingness to address uncomfortable truths. Williams showed a tendency to paint the truth. “There isn’t a boilerplate way to handle a crisis,” he says. “You have to understand the full breadth of the problem before you can address a solution.” Be Honest, Say You’re Sorry If there was wrongdoing, admit it, and don’t be shy about offering it publicly,Goodman says. “The worst thing you can do is sit quietly,” he says. “You have to be upfront about the problem.” However, ensure your mea culpas are genuine. When Williams apologized, he seemed less than contrite. Statements like, “I made a mistake in recalling the events 12 years ago,” made it seem as though he was making light of the situation. Explain What You’ll Do How will you keep this mistake from repeating? When crisis hits, you have to reassure the public that this kind of issue won’t happen again. Explain what changes you plan to make, including punishment. Williams was suspended and then demoted to MSNBC breaking news anchor, a supporting role. He is no longer the face of the NBC evening news program. Prepare For Fallout From lost ratings to public backlash, be ready to address unpleasant consequences for months – or more. NBC has remained a centerpiece of discussion about deteriorating standards in network journalism. The once widely respected Williams continues to be a late night comedy show punch-line. Rebuild Your Reputation With the scandal in the rear view mirror, it’s time to look ahead. “Williams will need to get up every morning and make a commitment to be honest in every detail of every story he tells from this point forward,” Goodman says. If a scandal-stricken celebrity can “keep their nose clean” they may earn forgiveness and rebuild their reputation, Goodman says. Learn From The Scandal Use the scandal to become a better person. Some media experts that Williams could could become involved in a veterans’ cause. However, you don’t want to turn a kind gesture into a media circus, Goodman says. Parading news crews out to cover Williams helping an injured solider would probably be considered tone deaf. Giving back is about finding forgiveness, not reclaiming ratings. Be Patient Handling a public relations nightmare requires patience. Work through the problem on a daily basis, stay calm, and the situation is likely to improve, Goodman says. The new STARZ Original Series “Blunt Talk,” created by Jonathan Ames and Executive Produced by Seth McFarlane, stars Patrick Stewart as a British import intent on conquering the world of American cable news. Don’t miss the premiere of the half-hour scripted comedy, Saturday, August 22 at 9P only on STARZ

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Ben Carson just made life very hard for the GOP: Why his fetal tissue research matters

Well, the simmering scandal over the Planned Parenthood undercover sting videos has finally succeeded in tripping up a 2016 candidate. Retired neurosurgeon and sayer of crazy things Ben Carson has, like most Republicans and conservatives, been harshly critical of Planned Parenthood for its controversial (and perfectly legal) practice of donating tissues from aborted fetuses to medical research groups. But, as Buzzfeed reported yesterday, Carson himself has done research on fetal brain tissue. That in itself is not a controversial development – doctors and scientists have been using fetal tissue for decades to develop treatments and cures for terrible diseases. But with the conservative movement up in arms over the Planned Parenthood videos, it poses something of a political dilemma for Carson, who is stridently in opposition to abortion rights. The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel asked Carson about the fetal tissue research he’s conducted and Carson, to his credit, stood by the work he’s done. But his attempt at distancing himself from the broader issue of fetal tissue donation was technical and confusing:

There was no contradiction between this science and Carson's pro-life views, he said. "My primary responsibility in that research was when I operated on people and obtained the tissue," said Carson, who noted that he has not used fetal tissue samples since then. "This has everything to do with how it’s required. If you’re killing babies and taking the tissue, that’s a very different thing than taking a dead specimen and keeping a record of it."

I’ve read through Carson’s statement several times and I’m still not entirely sure what he is trying to say. Thankfully, I don’t seem to be the only person who is baffled by his attempt at explaining this. The Post’s Amber Phillips writes that Carson seems to be alleging that Planned Parenthood is performing abortions specifically so that fetal tissue will be available for medical research, but that’s an allegation that “Planned Parenthood has flatly rejected and isn't proven by the videos.” At the very least, Carson is trapped in an inconsistency and he’s having a great deal of difficulty explaining it. And while that doesn’t make Carson look particularly good, his involvement with fetal tissue research and his tortured defense of it   also cause problems for the other candidates and conservatives who are trying to demagogue the issue. Carson's fellow presidential hopefuls are all trying to outdo each other by taking increasingly hardline stances on Planned Parenthood. Ted Cruz just released an ad promising he’ll prosecute the organization and put an end to the “harvest” of “organs from unborn children,” which he says is contrary to American “values.” Mike Huckabee is also calling for Planned Parenthood to be prosecuted for “for violating federal law and selling body parts.” It’s tough to make the political case that the donation of fetal tissue for medical research is un-American and potentially criminal when celebrated physician and conservative hero Ben Carson is complicit in the act. To that point, Carson’s defense of his involvement with that research ended up turning into a broader defense of fetal tissue research and the role it has played in advancing medical science. “When we obtain tissue like that, we want to know what the origin of that tissue is developmentally,” he told the Post. “Knowing that helps us determine which patients are likely to develop a problem. It’s one of the reasons why at the turn of the last century, the average age of death was 47. Now, the average age of death is 80. Using the information that you have is a smart thing, not a dumb thing." This is a compelling moral case for fetal tissue research, and it’s coming from a Republican presidential candidate. This is not the conversation Republicans and conservatives want to have when it comes to the Planned Parenthood videos. They’d much rather maintain focus on the gory details of abortion procedures and the unsubstantiated allegation that Planned Parenthood is profiting from all this. When you start talking about the scientific progress made possible by Planned Parenthood’s tissue donations and the amazing medical advancements that have already taken place, you enter into complex moral gray areas that erode the absolutist anti-abortion arguments that increasingly dominate conservative discourse and Republican politics. The politics of the Planned Parenthood fight were already dicey for Republicans, given that hardline anti-abortion conservatives are pushing GOP leaders in Congress to take extreme measures – like shutting down the government – to cut off the organization’s federal funding. They're presenting this as a black-and-white issue with Planned Parenthood playing the role of an intolerable villain. News about Ben Carson’s own involvement with fetal tissue research and his broader defense of its merits add unwanted complexity and nuance to the fight.

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The Hillary Clinton double standard in a nutshell: Why aren’t we talking about Jeb’s email scandal too?

Earlier this week the inspector general for the intelligence community announced that Hillary Clinton's private "homebrew" email server allegedly contained at least two emails featuring top secret information, though they weren’t necessarily marked as such. If true, this of course would represent a harrowing gap in the flow of highly classified information -- a gap which could be exploited by any number of bad actors as the documents passed through the digital pipeline between Clinton and several of her top aides whose emails are also being scrutinized by government investigators. That said, since the content of the email is publicly unknown, there's no way of knowing how potentially revealing or damaging the classified information was. Clinton, meanwhile, had previously denied that she used her private email to send or receive classified intelligence. More breaking news: even though it’s an important story, it’s simply not resonating with the same ferocity Clinton-haters are wishing for. Does it matter that Clinton used a personal email server? Of course it does, and she ought to face scrutiny for it -- only insofar as every high ranking official who uses a private email account ought to be scrutinized. So far, it's really only Clinton who's being hectored about using her own server. The fact that she's running for president is a fairly decent excuse for doing so, but if that's the case, why isn't Jeb Bush being just as heavily flogged about it? Back in March, The Washington Post published an article detailing how Bush used his private email account and its accompanying personal email server to send and receive what seems on the surface to be sensitive messages relating to National Guard troop deployments and post-9/11 security concerns. His email was sent and received via a private "homebrew" email server based inside his Tallahassee office. Bush "took it with him when he left office in 2007." Bush's aides said the information was "mostly" public knowledge at the time the emails were sent. Regardless, the article reported that the emails contained discussions of "troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants." Not unserious issues, to be sure.

In one e-mail sent four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the top general for the Florida Air National Guard told Bush that “we are actively planning sequences in preparation for mobilization orders should they come.” [...] In November 2001, Bush and an aide to then-Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan exchanged messages about the deployment of National Guard troops to a nuclear power plant in Crystal River, Fla. The aide wrote Bush that a state lawmaker had called to say she thought “it is imperative that the Crystal River nuclear facility have National Guard security.” Bush wrote back: “Florida power does not want it. We are reducing or getting rid of guard protection in the other plants.”

That last line, to me, is the real bombshell -- that within two months of 9/11, Bush ordered the National Guard to pull its troops from protecting nuclear power plants in Florida, simply because the private corporations that operated the plants didn't want the protection. I wonder if the people who lived near the plants wanted the protection. Combine this news with the fact that Colin Powell also used a private email server at a time when the internet was far less secure than it is now, and we can only conclude: 1) For a good long time, it appears mostly commonplace for public officials to use a personal email address, and 2) They probably shouldn't have due to security and transparency concerns. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a D-list level scandal -- water under the bridge. What's crucial now is that everyone running for president is held to the same standard, and that both state and federal governments take action to make sure the system is as transparent as possible. I also think it's curious how the news media treated the Clinton email story, when it broke back in March, as if the existence of her email was previously unknown. Most of the press seemed to have forgotten about a 2013 bombshell article by The Smoking Gun that first reported the existence of Clinton's email account. While it’s true that new details have come to light since 2013, such as the existence of the homebrew server, it’s been treated in its entirety as a brand new story, and none of the reporting since March has acknowledged that her private email account was exposed two years ago. This story is, yes, still developing, but it is also two years old. In March of 2013, The Smoking Gun broke the story of the infamous "Guccifer" hacker who acquired personal emails from former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. Inside Blumenthal's inbox were numerous emails received from Clinton using her "hdr22@clintonemail.com" address. Gawker reported at the time:

And why was Clinton apparently receiving emails at a non-governmental email account? The address Blumenthal was writing to was hosted at the domain "clintonemail.com" (we're not going to publish everybody's email address!), which is privately registered via Network Solutions. It is most certainly not a governmental account. Staffers in the Bush White House famously used private email accounts to conduct government business as a way to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all official communications be archived.

But the year now is 2015, and the story is amplified by the desire to politically hobble Clinton. And voters know it. Ultimately, however, no one cares because it's an old-school scandal, with hints of partisan right-wing horseshit stirred into the mix. Our 2015 scandals involve fetuses, controversial tweets and Mexican rapists. Things everyone can understand. The Clinton story involves IT jargon and inside-the-beltway bureaucratic argle-bargle. Additionally, the public is at least savvy enough to understand how the press despises the Clintons. Concurrently, the public also understands that the Clintons are a known commodity. We know what we're getting, and in spite of the roster of Clinton scandals, they're proven competent leaders; one of whom presided over significant prosperity in the middle-to-late 1990s. A story about Clinton's email account isn't nearly enough to stir up alarm among average voters, and certainly not enough to crush Hillary's chances in the election, which, by the way, is still 14 months away.Earlier this week the inspector general for the intelligence community announced that Hillary Clinton's private "homebrew" email server allegedly contained at least two emails featuring top secret information, though they weren’t necessarily marked as such. If true, this of course would represent a harrowing gap in the flow of highly classified information -- a gap which could be exploited by any number of bad actors as the documents passed through the digital pipeline between Clinton and several of her top aides whose emails are also being scrutinized by government investigators. That said, since the content of the email is publicly unknown, there's no way of knowing how potentially revealing or damaging the classified information was. Clinton, meanwhile, had previously denied that she used her private email to send or receive classified intelligence. More breaking news: even though it’s an important story, it’s simply not resonating with the same ferocity Clinton-haters are wishing for. Does it matter that Clinton used a personal email server? Of course it does, and she ought to face scrutiny for it -- only insofar as every high ranking official who uses a private email account ought to be scrutinized. So far, it's really only Clinton who's being hectored about using her own server. The fact that she's running for president is a fairly decent excuse for doing so, but if that's the case, why isn't Jeb Bush being just as heavily flogged about it? Back in March, The Washington Post published an article detailing how Bush used his private email account and its accompanying personal email server to send and receive what seems on the surface to be sensitive messages relating to National Guard troop deployments and post-9/11 security concerns. His email was sent and received via a private "homebrew" email server based inside his Tallahassee office. Bush "took it with him when he left office in 2007." Bush's aides said the information was "mostly" public knowledge at the time the emails were sent. Regardless, the article reported that the emails contained discussions of "troop deployments to the Middle East and the protection of nuclear plants." Not unserious issues, to be sure.

In one e-mail sent four days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the top general for the Florida Air National Guard told Bush that “we are actively planning sequences in preparation for mobilization orders should they come.” [...] In November 2001, Bush and an aide to then-Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan exchanged messages about the deployment of National Guard troops to a nuclear power plant in Crystal River, Fla. The aide wrote Bush that a state lawmaker had called to say she thought “it is imperative that the Crystal River nuclear facility have National Guard security.” Bush wrote back: “Florida power does not want it. We are reducing or getting rid of guard protection in the other plants.”

That last line, to me, is the real bombshell -- that within two months of 9/11, Bush ordered the National Guard to pull its troops from protecting nuclear power plants in Florida, simply because the private corporations that operated the plants didn't want the protection. I wonder if the people who lived near the plants wanted the protection. Combine this news with the fact that Colin Powell also used a private email server at a time when the internet was far less secure than it is now, and we can only conclude: 1) For a good long time, it appears mostly commonplace for public officials to use a personal email address, and 2) They probably shouldn't have due to security and transparency concerns. But in the grand scheme of things, it's a D-list level scandal -- water under the bridge. What's crucial now is that everyone running for president is held to the same standard, and that both state and federal governments take action to make sure the system is as transparent as possible. I also think it's curious how the news media treated the Clinton email story, when it broke back in March, as if the existence of her email was previously unknown. Most of the press seemed to have forgotten about a 2013 bombshell article by The Smoking Gun that first reported the existence of Clinton's email account. While it’s true that new details have come to light since 2013, such as the existence of the homebrew server, it’s been treated in its entirety as a brand new story, and none of the reporting since March has acknowledged that her private email account was exposed two years ago. This story is, yes, still developing, but it is also two years old. In March of 2013, The Smoking Gun broke the story of the infamous "Guccifer" hacker who acquired personal emails from former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. Inside Blumenthal's inbox were numerous emails received from Clinton using her "hdr22@clintonemail.com" address. Gawker reported at the time:

And why was Clinton apparently receiving emails at a non-governmental email account? The address Blumenthal was writing to was hosted at the domain "clintonemail.com" (we're not going to publish everybody's email address!), which is privately registered via Network Solutions. It is most certainly not a governmental account. Staffers in the Bush White House famously used private email accounts to conduct government business as a way to circumvent the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all official communications be archived.

But the year now is 2015, and the story is amplified by the desire to politically hobble Clinton. And voters know it. Ultimately, however, no one cares because it's an old-school scandal, with hints of partisan right-wing horseshit stirred into the mix. Our 2015 scandals involve fetuses, controversial tweets and Mexican rapists. Things everyone can understand. The Clinton story involves IT jargon and inside-the-beltway bureaucratic argle-bargle. Additionally, the public is at least savvy enough to understand how the press despises the Clintons. Concurrently, the public also understands that the Clintons are a known commodity. We know what we're getting, and in spite of the roster of Clinton scandals, they're proven competent leaders; one of whom presided over significant prosperity in the middle-to-late 1990s. A story about Clinton's email account isn't nearly enough to stir up alarm among average voters, and certainly not enough to crush Hillary's chances in the election, which, by the way, is still 14 months away.

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A cyclist abroad: Why European bike culture far outpaces America’s

My week and a half in Europe passed in a heady blur of parks and sidewalk cafes and long days exploring the unfamiliar streets of cities in the peak of summertime gaiety. Traveling with my younger brother through Iceland, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, we knew everyday life in these far-off lands couldn't be as good as it seemed. But it sure looked enticing. We saw free-roaming sheep scattered precariously across steep mountainsides. We saw couples our parents' age splitting joints in coffee shops, kayaked past an old man feeding ducks and herons from the back door of his houseboat. I ate a hot Belgain waffle covered in Nutella. I swear, it never got hot, and it almost never rained. And nearly everywhere we went, we went via bike, as if it were the fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of getting from point A to B. Because it was. Yes, if you haven't figured it out already, this is going to be one of those articles where the author goes to Europe and waxes poetic on just how much better they do things over there. But indulge me, if you will -- if not on the lax open container laws and generous parental leave policies, then at least on bike culture. Because if you haven't seen what a real bike city looks like, you don't know what you're missing. I didn't intentionally set out to visit the world's No. 1 and 2 best bike cities, although cycling was certainly on the agenda when I booked my tickets. And I had no way of anticipating what it would look like when an entire city is designed to prioritize two-wheeled transportation. I had thought that I'd lived in bike cities before. I spent a year in D.C., where I zipped past cars and around traffic circles to arrive at work each morning. Or rather, as I now realize, where I squeezed myself past and around bumper-to-bumper traffic and narrowly avoided death on a daily basis, helmet tightly fastened, entire body on alert to oncoming hazards, trips torturously rerouted to include, for as much of them as possible, the semblance of a bike lane. Back in New York, I gave up the commute, clinging instead to the strip of paths that will get me around Central Park or up and down the waterfront on the Brooklyn and Manhattan sides of the East River, but rarely to practical destinations like a supermarket, or my midtown office. "In America, you're seen as somewhat weird if you ride a bike," commented a friend who'd grown up in Copenhagen and recently spent time living in New York -- his exposure to America so skewed left that he asked me, with honest perplexity, how anyone in the U.S. could support Donald Trump. In Copenhagen, where 45 percent of residents arrive at work or school via bike, there's nothing "alternative" about it. There's nothing dangerous, or adventurous or even sexy about it. The rental I procured was similar to what I saw most residents riding: a clunky frame with upright handlebars, an oversize basket in front and back-pedal brakes. Riders didn't weave; they kept to the right, keeping pace in orderly lines and passing one another, when needed, with a courteous ring of their bell. They never ran lights. Mothers balanced babies in rear-mounted seats, and pushed children piled into the fronts of cargo bikes. No one wore helmets. Bikes were given their own, generous share of the road, their own traffic signals. We had to get used to looking twice before crossing the street: once for oncoming vehicles, and again for oncoming bikes. Mesmerized, I took this video from the sidewalk -- it's slightly misrepresentative, as the road was being paved and so was closed to traffic, but the stream of bikes making use of the raised bike lane was typical. Picture the occasional car passing through the center lane, and you'll get the idea: Amsterdam was similar, if busier: There were many more tourists struggling to get their bearings, and road space was shared not just by bikes and pedestrians, but also trams, leaving even less space for cars. The city boasts four times as many bikes as automobiles. It has more bikes, even, than people. It’s impossible not to fall slightly, and blindly, in love with a country when you're not trying to actively live there. In Iceland, a country powered by renewables, I found myself wishing that the entire world had such ready access to geothermal energy -- until my guide started pointing out the sites of the country's past volcanic disasters, and I remembered that there's a considerable downside to Iceland's unique geological makeup. Likewise, the first question I got when I called home to enthuse about bike culture in Denmark and Holland was, "What happens when it rains?" "The Dutch all bike in the rain," an Amsterdam local assured me as we dined side by side at a neighborhood Moroccan restaurant. "They bike in snowstorms. It's just our culture: it's easy, it's affordable, it's healthy." I didn't quite believe that last part, given the tendency I'd observed for the Dutch to steer their bikes with one hand while holding lit cigarettes in the other. But some quick Googling confirmed that the Dutch and the Danish aren't intimidated by the elements. And my new friend's explanation for why this was so left me at once envious, and dismayed. Because if what it takes to get people out on bikes is some deep, engrained attitude that it's just what you do, then I couldn't imagine bicycling ever truly taking off the U.S. the way it has there. But to suggest that some cultures are just naturally more drawn to biking to skip over one very important fact: if biking is so easy and cost-effective in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, it's because those cities have invested an enormous amount of money and planning into making it so. All cities, before cars took over, were bike cities; it took action, on the part of activists and politicians, for these two to remain that way. In the 1950s and '60s, writes Renate van der Zee in the Guardian, Amsterdam very nearly succumbed to the influx of cars, until the high number of traffic casualties, many involving children, lead to the creation of a pro-bike movement. The Netherlands' already strong cycling tradition helped this movement gain traction, but it was only one factor; urban planning that prioritized bike transport was what kept the public pedaling. Copenhagen, too, made a concerted effort to embrace bikes during this time period. And its success as a bike hub depends on continued investment in infrastructure. Here's Austin Troy, writing in Slate in 2012, about what that looks like:

Biking in Copenhagen is easy and fast partly because of the city’s amazing investment in bicycle infrastructure. With more than $10 million in annual investments (20 to 25 percent of the road budget), the results are stunning. In addition to 397 kilometers of combined cycle tracks, lanes, and greenways and almost 35,000 bike parking spaces on roads as of 2008, the city has implemented some innovations for bikes, such as the so-called “green wave,” in which traffic lights on several main arteries into the city center are synchronized during rush hours for the benefit of bikes. This means that bikers can maintain a comfortable 20-km-per-hour cruising speed without putting a foot down to stop for a light for up to 6 kilometers. And on one of the busiest of those routes, they’ve closed down the road to car traffic. ...No matter how safe, fast, convenient, and inexpensive bike commuting can be made, however, it won’t be adopted if it can’t at least partially out-compete cars. So, beyond the “carrot” of incentivizing bicycle commuting, Copenhagen (and many other European cycling cities) also employs the “stick” of policies designed to discourage car use. Some of these policies are actually national—for instance, Denmark imposes a tax of 180 percent on car sales (which is not as bad as it sounds, given the $20-per-hour minimum wage), and gas costs almost $10 per gallon. Every year 2 to 3 percent of parking spaces are removed to gradually wean residents from auto-dependency. In addition to being scarce, parking is expensive—about $5 an hour in the city center. And as the inconvenience and cost of parking increase, so, too, does the rate of bicycling.

To the carrot and the stick, Grist's Greg Hanscom, who like me fell head-over-heels for Copenhagen's bike culture back in 2013, adds the "tambourine":

On Queen Louise’s Bridge, the city has installed a bike counter that ticks off the number of cyclists that have passed each day, giving riders a sense that they’re part of a movement, not just lost in the crowd. At many intersections, the city has installed footrests for cyclists waiting at red lights emblazoned with friendly messages like, “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here … and thank you for cycling in the city.” But the most innovative of all is the “bike butler” program: brightly clad city workers who tidy up the bike parking areas, and will even do minor repairs while the owners of said bikes are away.

(I made use of some of those footrests; but, unused to getting treated well as a cyclist and unable to read the language, I was convinced they must have been put there for some other purpose.) This investment pays off: By factoring in the health benefits of cycling and the societal ills caused by cars, a recent analysis of Copenhagen's approach to transportation found that every kilometer traveled by car costs society .15 euros, while society earns .16 euros for every kilometer traveled by bike. "If we want people to cycle, then we have to change our approach towards urban infrastructure," the author of that paper, Stefan Gössling, told Fast Company. "Cyclists will only cycle [in large numbers] when they feel physically safe and when it's fast, which means they need to be physically separated from cars." They also need to be able to maintain that feeling of speed and security for the entirety of one's trip. In Copenhagen, we never had to second-guess whether our bikes would be able to take us where we wanted to go; we even rode 45 minutes north of the city to a forest, following wide, clearly marked bike lanes the entire way. Conditioned as I've been by Dupont Circle, I worried, for most of the trip, about a traffic circle the map warned we'd encounter -- but that, too, included space for us, and we were through it and our way as if it were nothing. Compare that to these clever, disjointed maps drawn by Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post, depicting the D.C. city grid from a cyclist's perspective: unless you're prepared to leapfrog through traffic as you move from one stretch of bike lane to another, the city can hardly be considered accessible. I don't really have a desire to move abroad, though I know that means I may never get to experience life as a permanent member of a real bike city. But tough as it is to adjust to life post-vacation, I'm holding out hope that the U.S. may one day evolve past its current, car-centric culture. While nowhere near the levels of the cities I visited, bike commuting in this country is on the rise, having grown 60 percent between 2000 and 2012; in Portland, where investment in bike infrastructure is a priority, the commute rate jumped from just 1.8 to 6.1 percent in that time. Small and midsize cities, already safer due to their lower levels of automobile traffic, are seeing strong bike growth as well. And with millennials getting behind the wheel at significantly lower rates than generations past, this may finally be the time for America to come into a bike culture of its own. To be on our way, we're just going to need a bigger push.My week and a half in Europe passed in a heady blur of parks and sidewalk cafes and long days exploring the unfamiliar streets of cities in the peak of summertime gaiety. Traveling with my younger brother through Iceland, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, we knew everyday life in these far-off lands couldn't be as good as it seemed. But it sure looked enticing. We saw free-roaming sheep scattered precariously across steep mountainsides. We saw couples our parents' age splitting joints in coffee shops, kayaked past an old man feeding ducks and herons from the back door of his houseboat. I ate a hot Belgain waffle covered in Nutella. I swear, it never got hot, and it almost never rained. And nearly everywhere we went, we went via bike, as if it were the fastest, cheapest and most efficient way of getting from point A to B. Because it was. Yes, if you haven't figured it out already, this is going to be one of those articles where the author goes to Europe and waxes poetic on just how much better they do things over there. But indulge me, if you will -- if not on the lax open container laws and generous parental leave policies, then at least on bike culture. Because if you haven't seen what a real bike city looks like, you don't know what you're missing. I didn't intentionally set out to visit the world's No. 1 and 2 best bike cities, although cycling was certainly on the agenda when I booked my tickets. And I had no way of anticipating what it would look like when an entire city is designed to prioritize two-wheeled transportation. I had thought that I'd lived in bike cities before. I spent a year in D.C., where I zipped past cars and around traffic circles to arrive at work each morning. Or rather, as I now realize, where I squeezed myself past and around bumper-to-bumper traffic and narrowly avoided death on a daily basis, helmet tightly fastened, entire body on alert to oncoming hazards, trips torturously rerouted to include, for as much of them as possible, the semblance of a bike lane. Back in New York, I gave up the commute, clinging instead to the strip of paths that will get me around Central Park or up and down the waterfront on the Brooklyn and Manhattan sides of the East River, but rarely to practical destinations like a supermarket, or my midtown office. "In America, you're seen as somewhat weird if you ride a bike," commented a friend who'd grown up in Copenhagen and recently spent time living in New York -- his exposure to America so skewed left that he asked me, with honest perplexity, how anyone in the U.S. could support Donald Trump. In Copenhagen, where 45 percent of residents arrive at work or school via bike, there's nothing "alternative" about it. There's nothing dangerous, or adventurous or even sexy about it. The rental I procured was similar to what I saw most residents riding: a clunky frame with upright handlebars, an oversize basket in front and back-pedal brakes. Riders didn't weave; they kept to the right, keeping pace in orderly lines and passing one another, when needed, with a courteous ring of their bell. They never ran lights. Mothers balanced babies in rear-mounted seats, and pushed children piled into the fronts of cargo bikes. No one wore helmets. Bikes were given their own, generous share of the road, their own traffic signals. We had to get used to looking twice before crossing the street: once for oncoming vehicles, and again for oncoming bikes. Mesmerized, I took this video from the sidewalk -- it's slightly misrepresentative, as the road was being paved and so was closed to traffic, but the stream of bikes making use of the raised bike lane was typical. Picture the occasional car passing through the center lane, and you'll get the idea: Amsterdam was similar, if busier: There were many more tourists struggling to get their bearings, and road space was shared not just by bikes and pedestrians, but also trams, leaving even less space for cars. The city boasts four times as many bikes as automobiles. It has more bikes, even, than people. It’s impossible not to fall slightly, and blindly, in love with a country when you're not trying to actively live there. In Iceland, a country powered by renewables, I found myself wishing that the entire world had such ready access to geothermal energy -- until my guide started pointing out the sites of the country's past volcanic disasters, and I remembered that there's a considerable downside to Iceland's unique geological makeup. Likewise, the first question I got when I called home to enthuse about bike culture in Denmark and Holland was, "What happens when it rains?" "The Dutch all bike in the rain," an Amsterdam local assured me as we dined side by side at a neighborhood Moroccan restaurant. "They bike in snowstorms. It's just our culture: it's easy, it's affordable, it's healthy." I didn't quite believe that last part, given the tendency I'd observed for the Dutch to steer their bikes with one hand while holding lit cigarettes in the other. But some quick Googling confirmed that the Dutch and the Danish aren't intimidated by the elements. And my new friend's explanation for why this was so left me at once envious, and dismayed. Because if what it takes to get people out on bikes is some deep, engrained attitude that it's just what you do, then I couldn't imagine bicycling ever truly taking off the U.S. the way it has there. But to suggest that some cultures are just naturally more drawn to biking to skip over one very important fact: if biking is so easy and cost-effective in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, it's because those cities have invested an enormous amount of money and planning into making it so. All cities, before cars took over, were bike cities; it took action, on the part of activists and politicians, for these two to remain that way. In the 1950s and '60s, writes Renate van der Zee in the Guardian, Amsterdam very nearly succumbed to the influx of cars, until the high number of traffic casualties, many involving children, lead to the creation of a pro-bike movement. The Netherlands' already strong cycling tradition helped this movement gain traction, but it was only one factor; urban planning that prioritized bike transport was what kept the public pedaling. Copenhagen, too, made a concerted effort to embrace bikes during this time period. And its success as a bike hub depends on continued investment in infrastructure. Here's Austin Troy, writing in Slate in 2012, about what that looks like:

Biking in Copenhagen is easy and fast partly because of the city’s amazing investment in bicycle infrastructure. With more than $10 million in annual investments (20 to 25 percent of the road budget), the results are stunning. In addition to 397 kilometers of combined cycle tracks, lanes, and greenways and almost 35,000 bike parking spaces on roads as of 2008, the city has implemented some innovations for bikes, such as the so-called “green wave,” in which traffic lights on several main arteries into the city center are synchronized during rush hours for the benefit of bikes. This means that bikers can maintain a comfortable 20-km-per-hour cruising speed without putting a foot down to stop for a light for up to 6 kilometers. And on one of the busiest of those routes, they’ve closed down the road to car traffic. ...No matter how safe, fast, convenient, and inexpensive bike commuting can be made, however, it won’t be adopted if it can’t at least partially out-compete cars. So, beyond the “carrot” of incentivizing bicycle commuting, Copenhagen (and many other European cycling cities) also employs the “stick” of policies designed to discourage car use. Some of these policies are actually national—for instance, Denmark imposes a tax of 180 percent on car sales (which is not as bad as it sounds, given the $20-per-hour minimum wage), and gas costs almost $10 per gallon. Every year 2 to 3 percent of parking spaces are removed to gradually wean residents from auto-dependency. In addition to being scarce, parking is expensive—about $5 an hour in the city center. And as the inconvenience and cost of parking increase, so, too, does the rate of bicycling.

To the carrot and the stick, Grist's Greg Hanscom, who like me fell head-over-heels for Copenhagen's bike culture back in 2013, adds the "tambourine":

On Queen Louise’s Bridge, the city has installed a bike counter that ticks off the number of cyclists that have passed each day, giving riders a sense that they’re part of a movement, not just lost in the crowd. At many intersections, the city has installed footrests for cyclists waiting at red lights emblazoned with friendly messages like, “Hi, cyclist! Rest your foot here … and thank you for cycling in the city.” But the most innovative of all is the “bike butler” program: brightly clad city workers who tidy up the bike parking areas, and will even do minor repairs while the owners of said bikes are away.

(I made use of some of those footrests; but, unused to getting treated well as a cyclist and unable to read the language, I was convinced they must have been put there for some other purpose.) This investment pays off: By factoring in the health benefits of cycling and the societal ills caused by cars, a recent analysis of Copenhagen's approach to transportation found that every kilometer traveled by car costs society .15 euros, while society earns .16 euros for every kilometer traveled by bike. "If we want people to cycle, then we have to change our approach towards urban infrastructure," the author of that paper, Stefan Gössling, told Fast Company. "Cyclists will only cycle [in large numbers] when they feel physically safe and when it's fast, which means they need to be physically separated from cars." They also need to be able to maintain that feeling of speed and security for the entirety of one's trip. In Copenhagen, we never had to second-guess whether our bikes would be able to take us where we wanted to go; we even rode 45 minutes north of the city to a forest, following wide, clearly marked bike lanes the entire way. Conditioned as I've been by Dupont Circle, I worried, for most of the trip, about a traffic circle the map warned we'd encounter -- but that, too, included space for us, and we were through it and our way as if it were nothing. Compare that to these clever, disjointed maps drawn by Emily Badger and Christopher Ingraham at the Washington Post, depicting the D.C. city grid from a cyclist's perspective: unless you're prepared to leapfrog through traffic as you move from one stretch of bike lane to another, the city can hardly be considered accessible. I don't really have a desire to move abroad, though I know that means I may never get to experience life as a permanent member of a real bike city. But tough as it is to adjust to life post-vacation, I'm holding out hope that the U.S. may one day evolve past its current, car-centric culture. While nowhere near the levels of the cities I visited, bike commuting in this country is on the rise, having grown 60 percent between 2000 and 2012; in Portland, where investment in bike infrastructure is a priority, the commute rate jumped from just 1.8 to 6.1 percent in that time. Small and midsize cities, already safer due to their lower levels of automobile traffic, are seeing strong bike growth as well. And with millennials getting behind the wheel at significantly lower rates than generations past, this may finally be the time for America to come into a bike culture of its own. To be on our way, we're just going to need a bigger push.

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“Wellness” is making us sick: How corporate America’s favorite mantra leaves us all feeling inadequate

In big-picture terms, wellness sounds like a pretty good idea right about now. Around the world, obesity rates are climbing (astoundingly, the planet’s “1.6 billion overweight and obese now outnumber the malnourished by nearly 2-to-1”). Noncommunicable illnesses such as heart attack and diabetes have supplanted starvation and malnutrition as the world’s leading killers. Fast food proliferates globally, which is really not helping. Throw in the fact that our choices, as a species, are turning out to have some pretty nasty consequences — things like, oh, endless wars and our own extinction — and the desire to make this life as pleasure-driven and meaningful as possible seems fairly understandable. It makes sense, then, that wellness, with its focus on mind, body and spiritual self-care, has become a guiding life philosophy for many; a concept that promises to make us all healthy, wealthy and wise, not to mention that most elusive and sought-after of states, happy. So why is wellness making so many of us miserable instead? Partially, perhaps, it’s due to the sheer inescapability of the concept. Wellness seemingly grows in both ubiquity and profitability by the day, and has infiltrated nearly every sphere of Western culture. The wellness tourism market (think yoga and meditation retreats, spa stays, fitness outings and Eat, Pray, Love-style spiritual sojourns) raked in $494 billion in 2013, an increase of 12.7 percent over the year prior, making it the fastest growing travel sector. (Hilton Hotels, having clearly got the memo, recently issued a press release noting the expansion of amenities for “mindful guests.”) Carl Cederström and Andre Spicer, co-authors of the new book The Wellness Syndrome, cite numerous American colleges and universities, among them Duke, Clemson and Syracuse, which urge attendees to sign “wellness contracts,” pacts that generally compel students to live drug-free, conscientious lives. General Mills just announced a wellness-focused product line, which for good measure includes a couple of varieties of muesli, a Swiss-German cereal dish American marketers have successfully made synonymous with “healthy.” Corporations like Buick throw lavish, star-studded parties in the name of wellness awareness. And according to a 2014 Global Wellness Institute study, the industry overall is now valued at $3.4 trillion globally, “nearly three times larger than the $1 trillion worldwide pharmaceutical industry.” While wellness sounds great on paper — because really, who doesn’t want mental, spiritual and physical clarity? — the fine print makes it less satisfying in practice. Cederström and Spicer point out how the all-pervasive values and tenets of wellness have been elevated from feel-good lifestyle choice to all-consuming ideology. Taking care of ourselves, a component of which includes self-denial of societally condemned “bad things,” from fatty foods to hedonistic living, to achieve and reap the benefits of a body that shows off all that self-discipline, has become de rigueur. Seen through the wellness filter, every mundane act is now an expression of self-love and presence of mind. (“When we engage in boring activities, such as washing up at home, we should think of them as improving our mindfulness,” Cederström and Spicer write. “Even baking a loaf of bread is now recast as a way of nurturing our well-being.”) It is an endless exercise, literally and figuratively, in the pursuit of perfection and perfunctory joy, itself an oxymoronic idea. What’s more, the "wellness syndrome” firmly places the onus on each of us to create a life of pleasure and healthy moderation. Those who do not or cannot live up to its standards — the sick, the overweight, the depressed — are inherently defective failures who have no one but themselves to blame. In this way, wellness becomes, to quote Cederström and Spicer, a “moral imperative.” They cite Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič, who in her 2008 book The Odd One In coined the term “biomorality,” which Cederström and Spicer define as “the moral demand to be happy and healthy.” Zupančič suggests that through the prism of biomorality, lifestyle and emotional state become an indicator of intrinsic personal worth, or lack thereof. We are what we eat, what we do and how we feel. “[Biomorality] promotes the following fundamental axiom,” Zupančič writes. “[A] person who feels good (and is happy) is a good person; a person who feels bad is a bad person.” Through the lens of capitalism, wellness turns those who do not adhere to its tenets into liabilities of the free market. “Healthy bodies are productive bodies,” Cederström and Spicer note. “They are good for business.” They are what is often labeled, however vaguely, as contributing members of society. Citizens who do not measure up on this count, for whatever reason, are denigrated and maligned, a class of “other” whose values, if they exist at all, run counter to our cherished, middle-class own. Here, America’s deeply rooted puritanical beliefs add an extra layer of amorality, and even immorality, to those who exist outside of or beyond the needs of the capitalist state.

These people are demonized as lazy, feeble or weak willed. They are seen as obscene deviants, unlawfully and unabashedly enjoying what every sensible person should resist. When health becomes an ideology, the failure to conform becomes a stigma...This ideological shift is part of a larger transformation in contemporary culture where individual responsibility and self-expression are morphed with the mindset of a free-market economist. To stop smoking is not so much about cutting down on your immediate expenses, or even extending your life expectancy, as it is a necessary strategy to improve your personal market value...People who don't carefully cultivate their personal wellness are seen as a direct threat to contemporary society, a society in which illness, as David Harvey puts it, "is defined as the inability to work."

One need only look at the endless pathologizing of the poor, the frequent conjuring of the "welfare queen" boogeywoman, the constant decrying of “entitlement programs,” for proof. Wellness, in many ways, has become the latest supporting evidence for the “takers vs. makers” school of what passes for thought. Further evidence of this idea becomes apparent when looking at the number of companies that have adopted wellness policies, which are aimed at keeping employees physically fit, mentally sharp and relatively happy. Business does nothing out of the goodness of its heart, and this latest obsession with wellness is aimed at achieving two profit-driven goals: increasing production and reducing costs associated with employee health care. Forbes recently highlighted a study finding more than two-thirds of U.S. companies have wellness programs, and a 2012 Huffington Post article noted a survey indicating that “wellness programs are the fastest growing category of employee benefits.” Corporate culture’s embrace of wellness takes multiple and myriad forms. Mindfulness meditation practice has become a staple of business culture. On-site yoga instruction is an increasingly common workplace "perk," and naps are encouraged in a growing number of corporate spaces. Companies from Silicon Valley to Wall Street have attempted to turn their offices into virtual funhouses, where chill-out rooms and foosball tables break up the monotony of increasingly long and demanding work days. Job sites offer free “on-campus” healthy meals, mostly to ensure that employees eat the right things, but without all the dictatorial undertones. As the Nation notes, a number of corporate entities have also implemented wellness programs, many of them essentially mandated, which allow companies to monitor employee health via biometric testing of traits including “cholesterol, blood pressure, sugar levels, weight and body mass index.” Those who don’t go along with the program, or who don’t meet pre-established fitness benchmarks, often find themselves penalized with fines and/or higher insurance rates. As author Will Davies, cited by Cederström and Spicer, bluntly states in an article titled "The Political Economy of Unhappiness," "[W]ell-being provides the policy paradigm by which mind and body can be assessed as economic resources.” Under the guise of pushing staff healthiness, the wellness “benefits” model represents yet another excuse for companies to make workers responsible for health care costs once covered by employers. The unfit and rebellious pay a literal price, a sort of tax for not abiding by the rules of corporate wellness. As the Nationstates, “[t]his new, more individualized form of cost-shifting threatens to stigmatize and penalize the chronic health conditions of millions of workers, expose some to job discrimination and undermine labor solidarity in the process.” There’s also the issue of privacy, a right which is lost when your employer is permitted to ask about nearly every aspect of your personal life, using “surveys [which] probe off-duty behavior related to sex, drugs and alcohol.” What’s more, the oft-touted returns on investment that wellness programs promise have been vastly inflated and overestimated by companies. In a 2014 piece examining wellness and its purported enhancement of corporate bottom lines, Entrepreneur magazine notes that while companies reportedly spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $2 billion annually on these programs,studies indicate that the old idea of spending money to make money isn’t exactly paying off where corporate wellness is concerned:

[R]esearchers examined 51 research studies in nine industry types in 12 countries with more than 260,000 participants and concluded that in randomized control trials (considered the “gold standard” for research trials), the ROI of workplace wellness programs had an overall mean value of -.22. “This means that for every dollar invested in these programs, 78 cents was returned,” says Jon Robison of Salveo Partners, LLC, an organization that counsels companies on how to create thriving, healthy workplaces.

“The delivery of programs that pry, poke, prod and punish employees are not the key to a healthier workplace,” Robison continued. Instead, they place the blame for job dissatisfaction squarely on the shoulders of the workers themselves. Burnt out? Not hitting the gym as often as you should to comply with your company’s wellness ideals? Feeling unable to keep up with the pace of your inbox? Must be a problem with you, not the corporate culture that surrounds you. An even more insidious effect of the wellness syndrome may be the way it ignores factors outside of our personal control — the weight of history, the realities of structural socioeconomic inequality — in favor of the idea that if we all just took better care of ourselves and were a little more open to being happy, all would be right with the world. The "wellness syndrome,” though not always labeled as such, gives the powers that be an out in terms of working toward real social change to address inequality, and suggests that individuals just do it themselves, encouraging what Cederström and Spicer call an “infectious narcissism":

In place of politics, we are left with corporeal babble and increasingly invasive lifestyle tweaks. As a result, we abandon political demands. The just redistribution of material resources (through "social welfare"), the recognition of previously maligned identities (through "identity politics") and the representation of political voices (through "democratization") have now become replaced by a new ambition: personal rehabilitation. Here, the unemployed are not provided with an income; they get life coaching. Discriminated groups don't get opportunities to celebrate their identities; they get an exercise plan. Citizens don't get the opportunity to influence decisions that affect their lives; they get a mindfulness session. Meanwhile, inequality, discrimination and authoritarianism become seen as questions too grand to tackle head-on. Instead, political ambitions become myopically focused on boosting our well-being.

There has, of late, been pushback against the wellness mandate. Forbes cites the findings of Al Lewis and Vik Khanna, co-authors of the book Surviving Workplace Wellness…With Your Dignity, Finances, and (Major) Organs Intact,which indicate that wellness programs often have the opposite effect than intended, lowering employee morale. (“In addition to subjecting workers to incredibly invasive questioning," the article states, “[b]ad wellness programs send the message that your boss thinks you’re an idiot. This typically isn’t a good strategy for improving morale, though it does improve motivation to update your resume.”) The New York Times points to Penn State, which was forced to abandon plans for a wellness program that faculty characterized as “coercive and financially punitive." (Employees of the university would have been required to complete a questionnaire that posed incredibly personal questions about their “jobs, marital situation and finances,” including requiring women staffers to indicate whether they planned to get pregnant in the near future, or face a $100 “monthly noncompliance fee.”) And Chicago’s Inspector General Joe Ferguson has very recently gone public with criticisms of a wellness program for city workers, which he says is actually raising city expenditures — he cites a 43 percent rise in health care-related spending — without providing any monetary returns. No one’s arguing that wellness, in general, is a bad idea. Life is hard. Most of us could be a bit nicer to ourselves; smoking is indeed bad for us; and exercise — breaking news — does a body good. But the all-consuming wellness syndrome Cederström and Spicer identify isn’t about making us better versions of ourselves, it’s about achieving an ultimately unattainable perfect self that mostly serves to distract from widespread societal ills and further enrich our corporate overlords. Go for a run or a swim if you like (I probably will once I file this story), but do it because you want to, and because it makes your life richer and more enjoyable. In the end, that should be the only personal wellness mandate that matters.

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