Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 126

Is it possible to live off-grid?

(Credit: SunshineVector via Shutterstock)

As interest grows in self-sufficient, sustainable communities, and fears over Europe’s reliance on gas imports increase, more and more people are considering moving “off-grid”.

Pioneering companies are already building radical high-tech eco-villages, with waiting lists for these homes numbering in the thousands. Technology is smarter, more efficient and cheaper than ever before, which makes these eco-homes a reality for those who can afford them. But has the technology become mainstream enough to be realistic for the rest of us?

Our gas and electricity supply infrastructures, called grids, are centralised systems that distribute energy to where it is needed. Supply and demand are carefully matched and with the grid often buys excess renewable energy from consumers to keep it fully fed during energy lulls.

Detaching from this grid means losing that safety net — and this has long been the problem for those with off-grid aspirations. Until recently an off-grid life meant severely limiting energy use when the sun wasn’t shining or the wind wasn’t blowing. Now, energy storage technology is becoming so advanced that we can store excess rays and gusts for the darker and calmer hours, rather than sell the extra energy back to the grid. But given that the storage problem is being solved, the question of whether we can produce enough energy remains.

The key to producing enough energy to live off-grid is to use a range of solutions. The average family’s energy consumption varies depending on where they live. On the US mainland, for example, it is around 30 kilowatt hours a day but in Hawaii it is just half of this. In colder countries such as the UK, where the average family uses around 125 kilowatt hours a day, heating homes requires a lot of energy.

But there are many options out there to keep us warm, the simplest of which is burning biomass (wood and other organic matter). Solar thermal collectors and ground source heat pumps allow us to extract natural heat from our surroundings to heat water systems. These can be quite expensive to buy, costing several thousands of pounds but are efficient and, as a longer-term investment, will pay for themselves after several years. It’s also possible turn waste cooking oils into environmentally friendly biodiesel to be used as heating oil or vehicle fuel.

Going off-grid for our gas can even help us solve two problems at once. From dog poo to a famous London fatberg, businesses are making good use of our waste — and so can you. A home-ready anaerobic digester will turn your food waste, waste-water and sewage into enough gas to cook your meals. At around £700, any saving from the gas produced would not come close to breaking even for decades, but it is a great way to produce biogas and fertiliser while dealing with waste.

Satisfying the electricity needs of our modern lifestyles, wherever we live, is more tricky. Solar is currently the most popular choice — a typical system to power the average UK family home would cost around £8,000. Taking into account maintenance costs, you could break even within about eight years. Wind makes less sense for the individual household. A roof-mounted turbine provides less than a quarter of the roughly 45,000 kilowatt hours UK households use in a year, while if you’re fortunate enough to have the space for a full-size 6kW turbine, it’ll set you back at least £20,000 and could take the whole lifespan of the turbine to cover its costs.

So is going off grid affordable? Once off the grid it’s possible to use a mix of storage solutions and technology. For most of us, the cost of moving off-grid and setting up this freedom is still too big a barrier. The best solution would be a partial move away from dependence on the grid. If you have between £5,000-£8,000 to spend solar PV technology makes the most sense with the fastest payback and supplemented energy from wood-burning, especially if you can get a good deal on the panels and wood.

One way of cutting our grid-dependence that we can all afford is to simply use less energy. Our current energy use is highly wasteful — and there are a number of habits we can change here and now to make off grid living more viable and reduce our energy bill — regardless of whether we’re on or off the grid.

Changing habits

Turn down the heat. Heating water is one of the most intensive uses of energy in our homes. Just turning down the heating by a degree can shave around 10% off your heating bill.

Reduce energy used by lighting. Lighting accounts for around 15% of household electricity. Consider switching to LED lights — up to 90% more efficient than incandescent bulbs, their extra cost can be recouped in just a few months.

There are big gains to be made by changing the way you wash and dry your clothes. Switching to cold water can save up to 90% of the energy used in clothes washing (most washing powders are now designed to work at low temperatures), and drying clothes naturally wherever possible will help save almost as much energy as it took to wash them, and will reduce the need for energy-intensive ironing.

Capture the heat you use and create. Dealing with draughts and fitting loft insulation can prevent up to a quarter of the heat in your home escaping through the loft. Better still, insulate yourself. We heat our homes to more than four degrees warmer than we did 50 years ago. Reaching for an extra clothing layer instead.

So, living off-grid is possible but not as affordable as you might think. We can use solar, wind, biomass and even biogas technologies. But cutting down what energy you do use and on waste will allow you to go further. Given that battery storage and other technologies are in an exciting era and as living off-grid becomes more socially desirable, it probably won’t be long until more people will be able to do it for less money.

Sharon George, Lecturer in Environmental Science, Keele University

Like ancient snowball Earth, frozen planets may still be habitable

In this June 15, 2014 photo, a polar bear dries off after taking a swim in the Chukchi Sea in Alaska. (Credit: AP Photo/U.S. Geological Survey, Brian Battaile)

Roughly 650 million years ago vast sheets of glaciers stretched from the poles to the tropics, entombing Earth within a frozen skin that lingered for millions of years. And this had happened before: Our “pale blue dot” has transformed into a pearly-white “snowball Earth” at least three times in our planet’s history. But these deep freezes present a conundrum: They should have been deadly and yet life clearly survived. There is both geologic evidence our earliest microscopic ancestors did not freeze to death and genetic indications the lineages of a range of single-celled organisms extend beyond snowball Earth. The question is how.

A new study published to the preprint server arXiv and submitted to Earth and Planetary Science Letters might provide a resolution. Adiv Paradise, an astronomy graduate student at the University of Toronto (U.T.), and his colleagues modeled a variety of possible snowball worlds — varying the numbers of volcanoes they host and the amount of stellar light they receive — only to find many of these worlds would never escape snowball status. Those that had little volcanic activity would never emit enough carbon dioxide to spark the runaway global warming needed to wake them from their cryogenic slumber (as likely happened on Earth). Yet surprisingly, many of these worlds could also support large unfrozen pockets of land. Some of those areas remain dry, like the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica, but others develop local hydrological cycles, allowing liquid water to pool and flow across their surfaces.

Such oases are one explanation for how snowball worlds might remain habitable — a result that could describe not just Earth but many of the planets astronomers are discovering across the galaxy. “Before we might have brushed a snowball off as not being habitable, and we would have missed that there could be pockets of life,” says co-author Diana Valencia, an astrophysicist at U.T.

Indeed, the study aligns with previous work on the most recent freezing episode in Earth’s history. In 2015 Douglas Benn, a glaciologist at the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland, published a study that shows Earth’s climate was sensitive to variations in our planet’s orbit around the sun, resulting in cycles of ice sheet advance and retreat. The latter allowed lakes to pool, rivers to flow and simple microbial life to flourish — even during a snowball event. Benn and his colleagues saw such cycles in computer models they created of Earth’s climate and they also found sedimentary deposits in the Arctic Ocean islands of Svalbard that preserve evidence for the advance and retreat of the ice sheets. The findings imply the last snowball Earth would not have been a total “deep freeze” — that ice-free pockets of land existed where water could flow — thus sustaining a crucial refuge where life could persist until more favorable conditions returned.

But ice-free zones are not the only mechanism proposed to explain how life survived on snowball Earth. Since 1992 researchers have hypothesized an array of ideas, and every scientist appears to favor a different one, says James Kasting, a geologist at The Pennsylvania State University. He has argued life might endure below a thin layer of ice. In Antarctica lakes freeze so slowly that they do not include air bubbles and thus remain transparent to sunlight — allowing photosynthetic life to thrive beneath several meters of ice. And Paul Hoffman, a retired geologist from Harvard University, argues dust might provide the most likely reprieve for life. As snow collects dust it can more readily absorb sunlight, causing ponds of meltwater to form on the ice. Such ponds are well known in polar environments today to host thriving ecosystems of algae and cyanobacteria (although Benn notes scientists have no direct geologic evidence of these ponds at the time of snowball Earth). Finally, no geologist argues against hydrothermal vents, where volcanically active areas spew water at superhot temperatures. Hot springs in Antarctica and Iceland, after all, create warm oases that ooze with life today.

Ultimately, the jury is still out on which mechanism helped life pull through snowball Earth. Although Kasting notes that the ice-free zones hypothesized by both Paradise and Benn provide one potential solution, there are several caveats to the latest model. Both he and Hoffman would like to see Paradise’s team include sea glacier flow, for example, because it is possible that ice could flow from the poles to the equator, covering the nonglaciated areas they propose. And Paradise himself lists an array of caveats for his model: it is low in resolution, took a few computing shortcuts and does not include certain processes like the effects of atmospheric dust.

At the end of the day, there might be yet another survival mechanism that no one has thought of yet, Kasting says. Or it could also be several mechanisms worked together to help life endure here on Earth. Benn argues life likely did not survive in one major environment, but multiple environments. As such, snowballs might remain habitable with the help of ice-free zones, thin ice sheets, ponds of meltwater and hydrothermal vents. Indeed, Joseph Kirschvink, a geobiologist at the California Institute of Technology who coined the phrase “snowball Earth,” has always been surprised that so many people expected life to vanish within the deep freeze. “Life is hard to extinguish — even on a snowball,” he says.

I tell men “no” for a living: What a dominatrix knows about #MeToo

(Credit: Shutterstock/Salon)

A man takes a seat next to me at the Mandrake’s long bar. It’s a low-ceilinged local haunt, frequented by artists and designers leaving work at galleries along La Cienega Boulevard, stalling their long eastward commutes toward the gentrifying East LA neighborhoods they call home. He asks the bartender for a whiskey and slides an unmarked envelope toward me. It touches the base of my sweating highball glass, condensation blooming onto the otherwise crisp, white envelope. I pick it up and make eye contact while working my finger into the crease, discreetly counting the cash before stuffing it into my purse.

The man wraps his thick, hairy knuckles around his bourbon, tips the beard behind the bar, and sets his eyes on me, initiating the role play: “Come here often?”

“Is that all you got?” I bait him. He fumbles. He’s reciting a script we all know well, and he’s not adept at improvisation.

“Come here often?” After a moment, he says it again. It is all he’s got. I smile, conceding. “I do. I come often.”

A sly smirk pulls at his mouth. “I would love to see you come,” he says, and takes a sip of his drink. He stares straight ahead, surprised at his own audacity.

A moment passes. I straighten my dress, feigning shock, and yell loudly enough for the entire bar to turn, “I wouldn’t have sex with you if you were the last man on earth!”

I stand to go, watching his cheeks flush hot with shame, the feeling for which he has paid me. I consider pouring my drink on his crotch like they do in the movies, but I don’t want to make a mess for the bartender, who didn’t agree to participate in this humiliation scene in the first place.

“Wait, I’m sorry, I —”

With a firm “no,” I raise my hand to his mouth to prevent him from protesting, storm out of the bar and into the unseasonably warm night. I count again — three hundred dollars — on the walk to my car. In traffic on my own commute home, I think of a conversation with a friend the week prior, in another dim-lit LA bar. She recounted the frustration of dating straight men from Tinder, the hours she’d spent that weekend, locked in tedious conversation with an unkempt man who looked nothing like his profile photo. I ask why she didn’t just get up and leave. “I couldn’t,” she says. “I was afraid.” I sit in traffic, feeling like I’ve gotten away with something. It isn’t just the money. It is that I am able to say “no.”

The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She is primary, dark, primal. She says the words that other women wish they could say, but often find themselves frozen. “No” is principal among them.

In a recent Atlantic essay on #MeToo, Aziz Ansari and “the paradox of no,” Megan Garber claims that women today still face the demands that have always been placed on femininity: that women be nice, pleasing and compliant. “No” is the utterance that disrupts these demands. It is the failure of femininity. To interrupt male desire with the word “no” is to disrupt femininity itself. The dominatrix, then, is a paradox: both feminine and dominant, she is a woman paid to refuse men.

In the wake of Louis C.K.’s confession last fall to masturbating in front of coerced, non-consenting women, fans and critics took to Twitter to decry his actions. They considered the comedian’s predilection for public masturbation evidence of a fetish or perversion — necessitating the services of a sex worker — rather than an act of power and assault. Following these allegations of abuse, a Self article by Alana Massey, herself a former sex worker, demanded that we stop thinking of sex work as a “life hack” for “helping” sexual predators. Like Massey, I too have had my boundaries pushed by men who have paid me to watch them masturbate, have paid me to punish them for masturbating and who often pay me to tell them “no,” to stop masturbating, a practice that BDSM insiders call “tease and denial.”

Every “no” I speak is not uttered in public, at happy hour, with a bar full of hipsters watching, where I feel relatively safe from any potential backlash. Most of the time, when I refuse male advances, we are alone, in private dungeons or hotel rooms, and the men who hear “no” follow it up with protests: “Please, Mistress, please . . .” They beg, make promises and often refuse. Sometimes these refusals are pre-negotiated, part of the fantasy; often they are not. Before #MeToo revealed the frequency at which professional relationships between men and women have been marked by the breach of consent, I thought these clients simply considered my refusals part of a kinky game: rules that were made to be broken because they were made in a dungeon. Now I see these men differently. I imagine them hearing “no” at work, pushing their female co-workers toward the “yes” they are confident that can receive if they persist. I imagine them boasting to friends: “At first she was reluctant, but then I convinced her.” Often, they tell me stories of refusing to take no for an answer, how it’s a skill that has helped them succeed in business. I wonder how often it’s helped them succeed in sex.

Before training as a BDSM professional in 2012, I had little intimate contact with men. Lesbian-identified since junior year of high school, I hadn’t even seen a naked man since the fumbling sexual explorations of teenage romance. I embarked on my side hustle of bondage and discipline with a clean slate in regards to heterosexual intimacy. While the vast majority of my professional explorations of kink, gender deviance and sexuality with my (mostly) male clientele are rewarding, safe, and even inspiring, I quickly realized that while I was playing the role of the woman who says “no,” like every other woman, I was very much expected to eventually say “yes.”

Clients tell sex workers their deepest fantasies, which most would never reveal to their wives and girlfriends. I have helped countless men who have been shamed for their feminine sides to embrace them, dressing them in lace and introducing them to the tender caresses they believe only women can request of their lovers. For others, I provide the pain that they crave, when their partners see them too clearly as husbands and fathers, making it unbearable to watch them bleed. Most of the time I welcome this, and consider vulnerability an alleviation of the pressures of masculinity, pressures that often lead to its toxicity. Sexual aggressiveness, domination of others and misogyny — these qualities coagulate into a strain of masculinity that is unable to form connections with others, especially women, ultimately hurting the men who engage in this toxic form of masculinity. So when I encounter men with deep-seated kinks and fantasies that complicate the dictates of toxic masculinity, I encourage them, hoping that access to submissiveness in their fantasy lives might positively influence their day-to-day.

And yet, vulnerability implies a close relationship to the truth, and the truth is that men often violate women. The same culture that produces men ashamed of their desires to put on a dress and feel pretty for the evening also produces the man who excitedly recalls spending weekends traveling to far-flung queer bars, waiting in parking lots and drinking vodka in his car until he sees some lesbians emerge, calling them “dykes,” “man-haters” — hoping one would be offended enough to assault him. Now, he calls me — a self-identified lesbian dominatrix — and pays me to kick him in the balls. Am I the safety valve our culture requires, protecting other women from his homophobic attacks? The emotional toll the word “dyke” takes on me is no different that the toll it takes on other queer women who have also been on the receiving end of the insult since adolescence. I no longer feel the hurt bubbling into my throat when I hear the word today, but on the lips of a straight man, it still ignites something deep in me, and I channel the sting of it toward the task at hand. I count my money and weigh the consequences.

Over dinner, a client tells me the story of his most memorable sexual adventure: when he walked down the Vegas strip in thigh high boots and a trench coat, opening it to reveal his erect penis to a mother and daughter. The shock on their faces, and the way the mother covered her daughter’s eyes, is still the material to which he masturbates, years later. He presents the qualification that the daughter looked of age, as if that exonerates him. I listen to his story and say nothing. I tell myself that he is baiting me, waiting for a reaction that I refuse to provide. But the truth is I can’t afford to lose him as a client. I’m no one’s safety valve.

Sex workers are not immune to the (often violent) persistence of male desire, and yet we are on the front lines of the battle against toxic masculinity. Chicago Dominatrix Mistress Velvet demands that white male clients read classics of black feminism — Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins — in order to remain on her client list. Others, like myself, try simply to engage in clear negotiations, modeling the acquisition of active and ongoing consent that we hope teaches these men how to behave beyond the dungeon. And yet, as much as the so-called “vanilla” world stands to learn from BDSM models of consent, we are also marked by cultures of abuse. I’ve heard numerous stories about pro-dommes pushing client boundaries, from the unwanted slap in the face to full blown sexual assault. Some of these clients have specifically turned to me — a lesbian dominatrix — because they consider it a safer alternative: no sex to get in the way, as if sexual violence were about sex and not power.

Despite my due diligence in screening clients — requiring references and refusing to schedule anyone who seems erratic or disrespectful — and despite the stereotype that submissive men are safe, a client has reached around my waist, pulled my panties to the side and shoved his fingers inside me. These are not the roles we agreed to play. I said nothing in the wake of this assault, freezing in his presence and then for years in its aftermath, silently blaming myself. While sex workers are too often seen as immoral repositories for normalized male violence, criminalization and stigma make it difficult for us to pursue justice in cases of assault. Other women who have been assaulted at work face demotion, escalation and the accusation of false testimony; sex workers face all of this, as well as the threat of arrest: as far as law enforcement is concerned, we could face criminal charges ourselves if we name the men who assault us.

But prior to this litany of indignities, there is the freeze. The room spins and your mind snaps shut. Your limbs grow heavy. He insisted that I follow him into the bathroom. He asked if he could masturbate, and before the question registered, the act was underway. He put his hand inside me, and I didn’t move. This is not the script that any of us agreed upon. Whether in the office, the lecture hall, or the dungeon, we know when the script is being flipped. Sometimes we freeze, and always we must forgive ourselves.

Sex workers, like all women, are fighting the battle against toxic masculinity. As I was writing this essay, a man approached me in a coffee shop, said “hello” and proceeded to stare at the side of my head, waiting for me to stop writing and turn my attention to him. I tried to channel the strength of the archetypical dominatrix, to ignore him and keep writing. I am a woman who dominates men in a professional setting, but this was not a role-play scenario, and we were not in a dungeon. I was just another woman, expected to affirm a man in a public place. He must have heard my implicit “no” as I sat and wrote, refusing to answer his greeting or meet his gaze. Yet he persisted. And like women are expected to do, I gave in. When it became clear that he would not relent, I paid him the attention he was seeking: I turned to him and politely let him know that I was working and not interested in conversation. He moved a foot closer, close enough so that I could smell the stale white wine on his breath.

“I didn’t want to talk to you anyway, bitch.”

In the wake of #MeToo, it is depressingly clear that a woman’s freedom to say “no” exists in the realm of fantasy. In our culture of normalized sexual violence, those fantasies — quite like the fantasy of female domination — seem futile. But still, we work and we hope. Like the journalists, actresses, lawyers, baristas and all other women who have had the courage to stand up and say, “me too,” sex workers are on the front lines of this fight.

Think Facebook can manipulate you? Look out for virtual reality

FILE - In this Wed., Sept. 3, 2014 file photo, British television presenter Rachel Riley shows a virtual-reality headset called Gear VR during an unpacked event of Samsung ahead of the consumer electronic fair IFA in Berlin. Oculus, the virtual reality company acquired by Facebook earlier this year for $2 billion, is holding its first-ever developers conference and is expected to discuss the much-anticipated release of its VR headset for consumers. The two-day Oculus Connect conference begins Friday, Sept. 19, 2014. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, file) (Credit: AP)

As Facebook users around the world are coming to understand, some of their favorite technologies can be used against them. It’s not just the scandal over psychological profiling firm Cambridge Analytica getting access to data from tens of millions of Facebook profiles. People’s filter bubbles are filled with carefully tailored information — and misinformation — altering their behavior and thinking, and even their votes.

People, both individually and as a society at large, are wrestling to understand how their newsfeeds turned against them. They are coming to realize exactly how carefully controlled Facebook feeds are, with highly tailored ads. That set of problems, though, pales in comparison to those posed by the next technological revolution, which is already underway: virtual reality.

On one hand, virtual worlds hold almost limitless potential. VR games can treat drug addiction and maybe help solve the opioid epidemic. Prison inmates can use VR simulations to prepare for life after their release. People are racing to enter these immersive experiences, which have the potential to be more psychologically powerful than any other technology to date: The first modern equipment offering the opportunity sold out in 14 minutes.

In these new worlds, every leaf, every stone on the virtual ground and every conversation is carefully constructed. In our research into the emerging definition of ethics in virtual reality, my colleagues and I interviewed the developers and early users of virtual reality to understand what risks are coming and how we can reduce them.

Intensity is going to level up

“VR is a very personal, intimate situation. When you wear a VR headset . . . you really believe it, it’s really immersive,” says one of the developers with whom we spoke. If someone harms you in VR, you’re going to feel it, and if someone manipulates you into believing something, it’s going to stick.

This immersion is what users want: “VR is really about being immersed . . . As opposed to a TV where I can constantly be distracted,” one user told us. That immersiveness is what gives VR unprecedented power: “really, what VR is trying to do here is duplicate reality where it tricks your mind.”

These tricks can be enjoyable — allowing people to fly helicopters or journey back to ancient Egypt. They can be helpful, offering pain management or treatment for psychological conditions.

But they can also be malicious. Even a common prank that friends play on each other online — logging in and posting as each other — can take on a whole new dimension. One VR user explains, “Someone can put on a VR head unit and go into a virtual world assuming your identity. I think that identity theft, if VR becomes mainstream, will become rampant.”

Data will be even more personal

VR will be able to collect data on a whole new level. Seemingly innocuous infrared sensors designed to help with motion sickness and alignment can capture near-perfect representations of users’ real-world surroundings.

Further, the data and interactions that give VR the power to treat and diagnose physical and mental health conditions can be used to hyper-personalize experiences and information to the precise vulnerabilities of individual users.

Combined, the intensity of virtual reality experiences and the even more personal data they collect present the specter of fake news that’s much more powerful than text articles and memes. Rather, immersive, personalized experiences may thoroughly convince people of entirely alternate realities, to which they are perfectly susceptible. Such immersive VR advertisements are on the horizon as early as this year.

Building a virtual future

A person who uses virtual reality is, often willingly, being controlled to far greater extents than were ever possible before. Everything a person sees and hears — and perhaps even feels or smells — is totally created by another person. That surrender brings both promise and peril. Perhaps in carefully constructed virtual worlds, people can solve problems that have eluded us in reality. But these virtual worlds will be built inside a real world that can’t be ignored.

While technologists and users are cleaning up the malicious, manipulative past, they’ll need to go far beyond making social media healthier. As carefully as developers are building virtual worlds themselves, society as a whole must intentionally and painstakingly construct the culture in which these technologies exist.

In many cases, developers are the first allies in this fight. Our research found that VR developers were more concerned about their users’ well-being than the users themselves. Yet, one developer admits that “the fact of the matter is . . . I can count on my fingers the number of experienced developers I’ve actually met.” Even experts have only begun to explore ethics, security and privacy in virtual reality scenarios.

The developers we spoke with expressed a desire for guidelines on where to draw the boundaries, and how to prevent dangerous misuses of their platforms. As an initial step, we invited VR developers and users from nine online communities to work with us to create a set of guidelines for VR ethics. They made suggestions about inclusivity, protecting users from manipulative attackers and limits on data collection.

As the debacle with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica shows, though, people don’t always follow guidelines, or even platforms’ rules and policies — and the effects could be all the worse in this new VR world. But, our initial success reaching agreement on VR guidelines serves as a reminder that people can go beyond reckoning with the technologies others create: We can work together to create beneficial technologies we want.

Elissa Redmiles, Ph.D. Student in Computer Science, University of Maryland

Naomi Wadler: I’m here to represent African-American girls whose stories aren’t told

It’s not just teens who are advocating against gun violence and having important discussions in the fight for stricter gun control laws. On March 24, at March For Our Lives, 11-year-old Naomi Wadler delivered a powerful and moving speech.

“Me and my friend Carter led a walkout at our elementary school on the 14th,” she said, referring to the National School Walkout that took place on March 14. ”We walked out for 18 minutes, adding a minute to honor Courtlin Arrington, an African-American girl who was the victim of gun violence at her school in Alabama after the Parkland shooting.”

“I am here today to represent Courtlin Arrington. I am here today to represent Hadiya Pendleton. I am here today to represent Taiyana Thompson, who at just 16 was shot dead in her home here in Washington D.C.,” Wadler said.

“I am here to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news. I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential,”she told the crowd. “For far too long, these black girls and women have been just numbers. I am here to say never again for those girls too. I am here to say everyone should value those girls too.”

Wadler continued: “I might still be 11 and we might still be in elementary school but we know, we know that there is an equal for everyone and we know right from wrong.”

People on Twitter are calling it the most inspiring speech of the day–and of the year.

Here is the entire video of Naomi Wadler's speech at the #MarchForOurLives rally in DC. This is as great a speech as you'll see this year. #enough https://t.co/A8PEpk3AHb

— Rick Klau (@rklau) March 24, 2018

Her name is Naomi Wadler. She is eleven years old. By my count, she can run for President in 2044. #MarchForOurLives

— Franklin Leonard (@franklinleonard) March 24, 2018

The inspiring preteen raised awareness that all voices must be heard, and all lives must be honored, in the fight to end gun violence– a movement that has been re-energized since the tragic Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people on February 14. Michael McBride, director of the advocacy campaign Live Free, recently wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post, saying “The ears of our nation have still not been trained to hear the prophetic voices of poor youths of color.”

According to a report published in 2017 in the American Academy of Pediatrics, African American children have the highest rates of firearm mortality. The report explained: “From 2012 to 2014, the annual firearm homicide rate for African American children (3.5 per 100000) was nearly twice as high as the rate for American Indian children (2.2 per 100000), 4 times higher than the rate for Hispanic children (0.8 per 100000), and ∼10 times higher than the rate for white children and Asian American children (each 0.4 per 100000).”

Watch Wadler’s amazing speech here:

Forget tech’s “Brotopia”: Emily Chang explains how women can save Silicon Valley

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang (Credit: David Paul Morris/Penguin Random House)

Silicon Valley has a reputation for being male-dominated, even hostile to women. Yet one wonders if the industry would be where it is today — wounded by sexist reckonings and privacy breaches — if women had been at the helm of the big tech companies instead of men. I’m not the only one asking these questions: Emily Chang, anchor and executive producer for Bloomberg Technology, grabbed my attention with an unsettling article in Vanity Fair, titled “’Oh my god, this is so f–ed up': Inside Silicon Valley’s secretive, orgiastic dark side.” (That article was itself adapted from her book “Brotopia,” published in February.) In it, Chang describes regularly scheduled drug-fueled sex parties for the Valley’s elite, parties in which women often serve as window dressing.

Indeed, this is partly what Chang’s book is about: imbalance of power, how much harder it is for female entrepreneurs to succeed, and why the future of the Valley depends on the industry’s willingness to unabashedly let women lead. It’s also less about the why, and more about the how; it turns out that Silicon Valley’s male-dominated state originated long before the Web 2.0 days.

In our interview, Chang talked about #MeToo, Peter Thiel, and what happens when good intentions to “change the world” aren’t good enough.

In “Brotopia,” you explain how women were pushed out of the tech industry from its early days. Though we can’t go back in time, have you ever wondered how the tech industry might be different today if that weren’t the case?

I think it is fascinating to think about how the world would be different if women had been present at the founding of so many of these companies or had gotten a chance to start the next Facebook or Google or Apple. I think because the companies that exist today have created such incredible wealth, and incredible innovation, that we just assume that this is the best way it could possibly be, and it’s hard to imagine how the world might be different.

I interviewed people like Ev Williams, who is a co-founder of Twitter, who told me he thinks if women had been on the founding team of Twitter, that maybe online harassment and trolling wouldn’t be such a problem. Maybe video games wouldn’t be so violent. Maybe porn wouldn’t be so ubiquitous. There are so many ways that the world could be different if women had been there from the beginning. It’s certainly impossible to prove “what if” — we’ll never definitively know, but I think about all the women who never got a chance to start the next Facebook or the next Google, or the next Apple, simply because they didn’t look the part.

When people think of tech entrepreneurs, people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates might spring to mind. Who are some women in the industry who you believe have been underrepresented in the industry, but are just as important to the tech world?

There are so many women who haven’t gotten the respect and recognition that they deserve. Since you mentioned Steve Jobs, I think of Susan Kare, who designed all of the graphical interfaces on the Macintosh and was a key player in making the Mac accessible and interesting to a wider group of users. She’s the reason that [people] like my mom bought Apple computers in the ‘80s. It opened up a whole new market for Apple and the technology industry, all because she made computers accessible and understandable to real people.

Another woman I think about is Margaret Hamilton, who is a computer scientist who worked at NASA, and was really important in building the software that brought Apollo to the moon.

Another woman I think about is Diane Greene, who was the founder of VMware, which is an enterprise company that is worth tens of billions of dollars today. She’s now running Google Cloud, but she doesn’t seek the spotlight. She has an incredible story to tell, but unfortunately it just hasn’t been told enough.

In your book, you talk about Peter Thiel and how his focus on meritocracy during the early PayPal days likely influenced Silicon Valley’s culture today. It’s interesting because I think meritocracy is what draws a lot of talent to Silicon Valley. It creates a foundation where people don’t have to play by the traditional rules, an easier route to success, which has been an appeal for many to startup tech jobs. What, in your opinion, happens when that’s stripped away from the Valley’s culture?

Silicon Valley loves to trumpet the idea that it’s a meritocracy where anyone with a good idea can succeed, but the reality is meritocracy is impossible to achieve because we all come to the plate with our own privileges and backgrounds, and at no stage of the game is everyone on a level playing field. The escalator to success is far faster for some than it is for others. I think when you strip away the fantasy that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, you realize that it in fact has rewarded a lot of people who look the same, and a lot of men who fit the preconceived idea of what a computer programmer or an entrepreneur is supposed to look like.

Investors are looking for people who look like Steve Jobs, or Mark Zuckerberg, or Bill Gates. That shuts out 50 percent of the population if not more. I talked to so many women who were going to pitch meetings, wearing black and gray, with their hair in a ponytail, they don’t wear jewelry, and they don’t get their nails done.

Qualities that are seen as positive in men are seen as negative in women. So if a man is young, he’s considered high potential, if a woman is young she is considered inexperienced. If a man is cautious, that’s considered a good thing. If a woman is cautious it’s considered a red flag.

Since we were on the topic of Peter Thiel, I’m curious what your thoughts are about him leaving the Valley ?

I think Peter Thiel made a lot of enemies in Silicon Valley when he supported Donald Trump within a week of the Access Hollywood tape being released of the president bragging about groping women without permission. This is a very fact-clinging community. It sounds like Peter has sounded increasingly inhospitable to his more contrarian ideals. Peter Thiel has made some incredible contributions to technology, and he is always pushing the boundaries. However, I don’t think that he’s done nearly enough to address the issues of women and underrepresented minorities in tech.

How has Silicon Valley dealt with the #MeToo movement? Has it affected how tech companies handle sexual harassment and assault?

So, my biggest fear of that is this isn’t a movement but a moment and that people, you know, ultimately will just go back to average and tolerate some of the behavior that we’ve been seeing. But my biggest hope is that this really is a movement and I do see some people really working hard to change the status quo.

Do you think the way Silicon Valley “thinks differently” has resulted in lesser consequences for those who have been accused of sexual harassment and assault in the wake of the #MeToo movement (compared to, say, Hollywood)?

It happened in a very short period of time, and so I think that could come without the same sort of social evasion that would happen over the course of a long career. It could lead to arrogance and quite frankly, hypocrisy. There are so many people who truly believe that they are changing the world. It’s been used as a sort of justification or cover for a lot of that behavior to be overlooked, and some people who work here have had a hard time admitting that the industry has really failed women.

If Silicon Valley is really changing the world, they would be doing something about this, and I hope they do. There are some good people out there who are trying really hard and doing some really important work to change the ratio, but we need to see a lot more action and a lot less talk.

Will women finally be able to save the tech industry from suffering from another disastrous bubble burst?

I certainly think they can. I think it is a fascinating idea to look at the dot-com bust and consider what happened there. If women have had more decision-making roles, would that have happened?  I would argue it wouldn’t have happened. Men and women have completely different risk profiles, but in general, when you have people of all different backgrounds and all sort of personalities, that creates balance in an organization. I think having concerting and complementary points of view are really important when you’re building an executive team.

I think it would be a huge benefit to companies today to think about that when they’re building their leadership team. Like, if you look at Facebook, for example, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg have one of the strongest business partnerships in the world and he made as much space for her in that partnership as she did for him and she not only built an incredible business with Google, she turned Facebook into Google’s biggest competitor in the online ad business. And so, hiring women is not just a right thing to do; it’s the smart thing to do. There’s countless research that shows this but unfortunately some of the data has been overlooked.

Finally, let’s talk about sex and the Valley. Do you think the current climate in the Valley will shift the frivolity and novelty of the infamous tech sex parties you described in your book? Are they a symptom of the Valley or of the San Francisco Bay Area?

The Bay Area has long been a place of sort of sexual exploration and sexual liberation, and that’s been going on for decades, so I don’t think that is going to change. I don’t necessarily think it should. I think that what needs to be examined is how some of these events are just another way to prey on women.

I think too much business in Silicon Valley happens outside the office. Some of these events are much more about power than sex and that is what needs to change.

 

“Barry” allows Bill Hader’s dark side to shine

Bill Hader in "Barry" (Credit: HBO/John P. Johnson)

Watching Bill Hader’s post-“Saturday Night Live” career feels a little like witnessing a star circus seal released back into the ocean. Marvelous as he was as part of that sketch ensemble, he’s been even more versatile as a solo act, transforming his rubbery goofiness into a palpable fragility that serves him well in more dramatic pieces.

This brings us to “Barry,” Hader’s eight-episode series premiering Sunday at 10:30 p.m. on HBO. Created by Hader and “Silicon Valley” executive producer Alex Berg, this black comedy is a “both sides now” type of proposition for the actor, a work that’s comedic in all the right places with tense personal terror, melancholy and muddy tragedy binding it all together. “Barry” also feels awkward in its first few episodes, which may be intentional — as if to mirror the tortured evolution of Hader’s titular character, a  hitman who is incredibly effective at what he does but, like so many people, hates his job.

The brilliance of “Barry” lies in the story’s sneaky reliance on Henry Winkler’s charismatic drama teacher Gene Cousineau, and the oddball affability of Anthony Carrigan’s Chechen mobster.  But they are only two of several leavening agents drawing the comedic attention away from Hader, a necessary tactic to allow Hader’s Barry to strengthen a connection with the audience. It’s important to know this: Barry kills people, efficiently and without compunction.

Barry drags a gloom around with him. He behaves like a hollow man in part to sublimate lingering trauma stemming from his combat experiences in the Marine Corps, and in part the only way to do his job well is to feel nothing. As such he’s invisible, slipping into his jobs, completing his mission and retreating into his colorless, shabby hovel that passes for a life. Thus Barry has no connection, no personal passions, nothing he loves, and therefore, not much of a reason for being.

His handler Fuches (Stephen Root) doesn’t care, but in any case, he casually hands Barry off to the Los Angeles arm of the Chechen mob in Los Angeles to off a playboy actor who’s having an affair with the head mobster’s wife. What neither Fuches nor the mobsters account for are the one-two punch of Barry’s instant desire to win the affection of aspiring actress Sally (Sarah Goldberg), whom he meets when he follows his mark into an acting class, and the commanding magnetism of Cousineau, who styles himself as a modern version of method instructor Konstantin Stanislavski.

Goldberg’s Sally is as mercurial and fetching a character as she needs to be to make it worthwhile for Barry to endanger himself by staying with the group, and to expose his soul, a feat largely accomplished by Cousineau’s manipulative verbal lashings. The trick here is that we’ve seen versions of this dynamic before, and that would seem to be a strike against “Barry” in its first episodes. But the story and atmosphere morph quickly into a worth that balances sweetness, quirk and sinister anxiety.

It takes work to make a viewer feel for an unfeeling figure, but Hader achieves this from the opening moments of “Barry,” and of course part of this is due to our familiarity with the actor himself. Even so, the forlorn demeanor he evokes here pulls in the viewer with an unusual force. Because he leans so heavily on his dramatic side, Root’s forced cheerfulness creates a contrast that highlights the absurdity of the various debacles the pair tumbles into. He’s a delight even when he willfully throws Barry to the wolves, which happens frequently.

Winkler, though, is another source of elation entirely. Somehow he makes his character’s self-involved windbaggery the main reason to watch; his ego gorges on the worship of the starving would-be artists taking his class, and Winkler conveys this by infusing every declaration with the energy of absolute importance, from the feedback he lends to performances to menu suggestions.

Where “Barry” falls short, but only slightly, is with the characterizations of its mobsters. If you’ve seen any film or TV series featuring organized crime thugs, you’ll know what to expect here, at least at first. Carrigan eventually transforms his role from the standard omnipresent second-in-command to a personality quilt of odd graces that blossom, weirdly, in the back half of the season.

Truly,  however, “Barry” is just the right kind of bizarre from beginning to end, stepping up its shocks and gut-punches steadily and quietly as the series rolls along. And it’s fascinating to see Hader in a way that takes his chameleonic strengths and turns them on their ear, inviting us to cheer on an empty soul learning how to act like a feeling person, despite all the risk that comes as part of that package.

Belted out by my mom in a VW Beetle: a young boy’s perfect Joni Mitchell moment

(Credit: Getty/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon)

During her first marriage, my mother drove a navy blue, late 60s model VW Beetle with black and yellow California plates. I don’t remember much about it, aside from my view of the smog-smeared mid-70s Los Angeles cityscape from its passenger seat. I usually rode standing up, without a seatbelt, using insect carcasses on the windshield as laser gun sights. I was eventually forced to ride sitting not because I grew too big for standing (the dome-ceilinged car was sold long before I managed that), but because I had worn away the upholstery until the brown stuffing and black coils underneath poked through the vinyl. With my mom at the wheel, I observed countless thousands of miles between the Valley we lived in and the rest of that sprawling, mysterious, romantic, horrible, beautiful city. In the faded film print of my mind, the sky is always yellow, verging on sepia; the flowers are bloody, pomegranate red; the streets are choked with cars and people trying to sell fruit or flowers or maps; and the hot brown sun is always aimed directly into your eyes.

I don’t know what year this one specific event occurred, but it could’ve been any time between 1974 and 1979. My mother was driving a familiar route through the serpentine fistulas of Laurel Canyon on some errand or other. I often became carsick on these winding drives, and she always tried her best to distract me from nausea as best she could, which usually meant promising to buy me a soda when we got down to the Laurel Canyon Country Market (this meant we were past the worst of the curves), and listening to the car radio. One hot late afternoon, with the windows down, and the brown sunlight pushing through the sagging pine and eucalyptus branches, whichever song was on whatever station cross-faded into a pattern of gentle, insistent guitar strumming that made my mom gasp with delight, turn the volume up high, and start singing along with the high, dusty female voice that followed (after a quick, six-hit drum fill).

“Help me, I think I’m fallin’,” she sang, then paused briefly with the singer, then continued, “in love again…”

Though commonplace enough on its own, the memory has stayed with me through at least a couple of decades, because it was the first time I’d ever heard someone (and not just any someone) sing along with a song she knew on the radio. It just happened, as though the radio knew exactly what she wanted to hear and forked it over. And she rose to the occasion, singing unabashedly, with full-throated participation in one of the most genuinely life-affirming rituals invented by the twentieth century. I remember my surprise when it started, and I remember my attempt to sing along with her, though I didn’t know the words or the tune or anything, I wanted in. And when the song was over, I remember being disappointed that she didn’t sing along with whatever song came next. Or maybe it was a commercial. My memory is vague on this point. But I’ve been a devout singer-along ever since, much to the consternation of many driving companions–given that the world is obviously divided into two groups, and the ones who don’t can’t stand the ones who do.

Another first: noticing the way the song’s words led you to believe one thing was happening, only to turn left and surprise you, all within the space of a single line. “Help me, I think I’m falling…” not from a cliff, not off a building ledge, not even into a lava pit (all fates that had featured in my young nightmares), but “in love,” which, one assumes, is meant to be a good feeling. And that “again.” So much worldly information in so little space, and presented so naturally. The Beatles, whose records were the only things my parents ever let me touch and who therefore were the only band I really knew and loved, often played verbal tricks, but I hadn’t dug deep enough to appreciate their finer points. I mean, I understood that “I once had a girl / or should I say, she once had me” was a twist that probably meant something, but I had no idea what; I was still stuck on “the movement you need is on your shoulder.” (And anyway, Beatles lyrics aren’t so much good as they are perfect, but let’s not get anywhere near that discussion…) I had no idea then, but this chance encounter with Joni Mitchell had just provided me with the beginnings of what would become a lifelong thralldom to the expressive possibilities of pop songwriting.

And let’s not forget that this whole scenario was made possible by the radio–possibly AM, probably top-forty, definitely commercial. I knew that people sang along with records; I was just beginning to familiarize myself with the practice, But records required intention. You buy it, you learn it, you play it, you sing it–and if it has a lyric sheet, so much the better. The idea that the music could come to you was brand new, and thrilling. The next step was realizing that other people–friends, strangers, mothers, sons–were out there hearing it at the same time you were, and also singing along. The fact that it was a Joni Mitchell song and not one by, say, Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, the Bay City Rollers, or the Eagles, was incidental, but only at first. As years have gone by, I’ve conferred a great deal of meaning on the “Help Me” episode, not only for its small but significant expansion of my young pop consciousness, but because it opened a door into the work of one of my all-time favorite recording artists.

Joni Mitchell’s albums, particularly the ones she made between 1971 and 1975, have become essential components of my musical lexicon. The fact that “Help Me” is far from my favorite Joni Mitchell song (it’s not even my favorite on “Court and Spark”), matters less than the fact that it was my first Joni Mitchell song. And that only happened because it was catchy, clever, universal, and well constructed enough to become the biggest Joni Mitchell song, before or since, on the radio, reaching number seven on Billboard’s Pop Singles chart, and number one on its Adult Contemporary Singles chart. In the years that have elapsed since that Laurel Canyon afternoon, I’ve gone back and forth many times about the relative value of singles charts in determining a song’s worth. I intend to go back and forth many more times. One thing that can’t be argued, however, is the insufferably pompous entertainment industry maxim that a hit is a hit. (Some things are true even if music biz weasels say them.)

 

 

Excerpted from “Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark” by Sean Nelson (Continuum, 2006). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

 

 

I was a student of Stephen Hawking’s — here’s what he taught me

(Credit: AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

Like many students of my generation, Stephen Hawking had already had enormous influence on me long before we ever met. When I was hesitating about my A-level choices, it was his book A Brief History of Time that convinced me to continue with physical sciences. In 1994, Hawking and mathematical physicist Roger Penrose gave a series of inspiring lectures about cosmology in Cambridge. As a direct result, I chose courses on black holes and relativity for my fourth year of study at the University of Cambridge.

I first saw Hawking when I was an undergraduate. At that time he was living in an apartment building just behind my student house. He was already so famous that friends would come to my room just to watch him leaving and entering his apartment. But as an undergraduate I never tried to talk with him, feeling much too junior and intimidated.

After I finished my fourth year, I was invited in to talk to Hawking, who was already using a speech synthesizer, about options for my PhD. I was quite nervous when I first met him, but he jumped straight into physics and soon we were discussing black holes. I became a student at the time of the “Second String Theory Revolution” in theoretical physics. Hawking had not worked actively in string theory, but he was very keen to understand the new ideas.

Following that meeting, he sent me off to read all the papers that Edward Witten, a famous string theorist, had written that year. My task was to come back and summarise them for him — the student teaching the master. It’s difficult to describe how hard this task actually was: Hawking expected me to jump straight to the frontier of string theory as a starting graduate student. He also chose the title for my PhD thesis: “Problems in M-theory”, which I worked on from 1995 to 1998.

I can only hope that my explanations of string theory were helpful. Hawking went back and forth on his views on M-theory, but eventually ended up thinking that it may be our best bet for a theory of everything.

No hand-holding

PhD students were enormously important to Hawking. In the early phase of his illness, his students helped take care of him. By the time I became his student he needed round-the-clock nursing. At this point, his students were no longer involved in his physical care, but remained essential to his research. Theoretical physics begins with ideas and concepts, but these then evolve into explicit detailed calculations. Hawking had a remarkable ability to do complex calculations in his head, but he still relied on collaborators to develop and complete his research projects.

Theoretical physicists typically give early PhD students “safe” research projects, and guide them through the calculations required. As the students develop, the projects become more ambitious and risky and students are expected to work independently. However, PhD students working with Hawking did not have the luxury of this gentle introduction — he needed us to work on his own high-risk, high-gain projects.

Hawking’s communication via his speech synthesizer was necessarily concise and he simply could not provide detailed guidance about calculations, making it extremely challenging to work with him. But it was also stimulating, forcing students to be creative and independent. He did give praise when he thought it was due. He once sent me away with a very hard problem — finding exact rotating black hole solutions of Einstein’s equations with a cosmological constant — and was stunned when I came back a few days later with the solution. I can’t even remember exactly what he said but I will never forget his enormous smile.

Hawking was a determined and stubborn person. On many occasions he got through serious medical issues with sheer determination. This same determination could make him very difficult to work. But it could also push research projects forward: Hawking would refuse to give up on seemingly unsolvable problems.

In fact, never giving up is the main thing Hawking has taught me — to keep attacking problems from different directions, to reach for the hardest problems and find a way to solve them. It’s immensely important as a scientist, but also in other aspects of life.

Pithy one-liners

Hawking was devoted to his family. His eyes would light up when one of his children came to visit or when he proudly showed us pictures of his first grandchild. In many respects, Hawking treated his PhD students and collaborators as a second family. However busy he was, he always made time for us, often making dignitaries wait outside his office while he talked physics with a student. He would eat lunch with us several times per week, and funded a weekly lunch for the wider group to bring everyone together.

There were many occasions when physics discussions merged seamlessly into social activities: going to the pub, eating dinner at one of his favourite Cambridge restaurants, and so on. Hawking had a wonderful sense of humour. He turned his communication difficulties into an advantage, composing pithy one-liners. For instance when changing his mind about what happens to information in a black hole, he announced it in the pub by turning the volume up on his synthesizer, saying simply: “I’m coming out.” He would discuss anything and everything in a social setting: politics, movies, other branches of science, music.

As we worked in closely related fields, we saw each other regularly even after I finished my PhD. In 2017, I attended a conference in Cambridge celebrating his 75th birthday. The list of participants illustrates Hawking’s influence on academia and beyond. Many of his former students and collaborators have gone on to become leaders in research in cosmology, gravitational waves, black holes and string theory. Others have had huge impact outside academia, such as Nathan Myhrvold at Microsoft.

There is currently pressure on academics to demonstrate the immediate impact of their research on society. It is perhaps worth reflecting that impact is not easily measurable on short time scales. Hawking’s was truly blue-sky research — and yet it has fascinated millions, attracting many into scientific careers. His academic legacy is not just the remarkable science he produced, but the generations of minds he shaped.

There’s no doubt Hawking’s death is a huge loss to physics. But personally, what I will miss most is his humour and the general feeling of inspiration I got from being around him.

Marika Taylor, Professor in Theoretical Physics, University of Southampton

Why Americans are unhappier than ever — and how to fix it

(Credit: hikrcn/Shutterstock)

March 20 is International Day of Happiness and, as they’ve done every year, the United Nations has published the World Happiness Report. The U.S. ranks 18th among the world’s countries, with an average life satisfaction of around 6.88 on a scale of 10.

While that may be relatively near the top, America’s happiness figures have actually declined every year since the reports began in 2012, and this year’s are the lowest yet. The question, then, is whether the government has a role to play in improving the happiness of its citizens. And if so, how might policymakers go about it?

Fortunately, a growing body of work by economists and psychologists can give governments access to the kind of data that can inform the way they think about policy and happiness.

In our new book, “The Origins of Happiness: The Science of Well-Being Over the Life Course,” my colleagues and I provide a systematic account of what makes for a satisfying life.

The role of government

The idea that government ought to focus attention on the well-being of its citizens goes back centuries. Thomas Jefferson himself said, “The care of human life and happiness … is the only legitimate object of good government.”

Historically, this has meant increasing economic productivity and growth to increase personal happiness. But as the data suggest, and many countries are beginning to realize, this isn’t likely to be sufficient. As a result, many governments around the world are now taking steps to broaden their policy goals beyond GDP.

This is not just a question of leaders being benevolent. Electoral data suggests that governments of populations that are unhappy do not tend to stay in power very long.

But how can governments change the way their citizens feel? Ultimately, changes cannot be made without good data. If governments are going to use well-being as a serious measure of success and progress, they need solid evidence of what lies behind people’s happiness and misery.

To make rational decisions about where to spend finite public funds, they need to know how potential policy changes will affect people’s well-being — and at what cost. Without these numbers, governments risk looking for happiness in all the wrong places.

Causes of happiness and misery

For “The Origins of Happiness,” my colleagues and I analyzed a large amount of survey data from around the developed world in order to document what determines life satisfaction over the life course.

We found that income plays an important role in determining happiness — but it’s not as significant as people might think or expect. Highly important are social relationships, be they at home, in the workplace or in the community.

That suggests that, to boost happiness in America, policymakers should look to counter adverse trends in inequality, the erosion of social trust and increasing isolation.

Our research finds that mental illness explains more of the variation in happiness than physical illness. In the U.S., mental health problems, including depression and anxiety, are a major cause of suffering. Yet many can be treated, for example through evidence-based psychological therapy. Public health spending on mental illness is therefore not a luxury, but a necessity.

In fact, our calculations in the book suggest that mental health treatment usually turns out to be cost-neutral, given the large benefits that alleviating mental health problems brings in terms of lower physical healthcare costs, absenteeism and crime, as well as increased productivity.

Much of increasing happiness in adults begins with addressing the needs of children. We found that schools — and even individual teachers — have just as large an effect on the happiness of children as do their families. So schools and governments can and should do a great deal more to ensure that they teach the kind of key life skills and resilience that foster happiness, both in childhood and right through into adulthood.

Not surprisingly, the world of work has a huge influence on our happiness as adults, providing not only income but also important social interactions as well as routine and purpose. The leading drivers of a satisfying work life include job autonomy, work-life balance and the quality of social interactions with coworkers and managers.

Ultimately, a great deal more can be done to make work more satisfying and enjoyable. Again, the evidence suggests this is not a luxury, but can make for a more profitable business environment.

Policymakers now need a host of carefully controlled experimental trials of particular policies in order to obtain precise estimates of their effects on happiness — which can then be compared with their financial costs. And although a great deal remains to be done, the Enlightenment ideal of focusing government attention onto making life satisfying and enjoyable is slowly becoming an ever more viable reality.

George Ward, PhD Student, Massachusetts Institute of Technology