Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 799

The cereal box is lying to you — and so is every other label: Why you can’t trust that “nutrition” information

There’s something comforting about the “Nutrition Facts” panels on food packaging. Neatly confined within boxes, printed in Franklin Gothic Heavy or Helvetica Black, these “facts” provide the nutritionally minded among us with a reassuring sense of control. This yogurt has 120 calories per serving. That cereal contains 100 percent of our daily requirements for 13 vitamins and minerals. Nutrition Facts (and their companions, Supplement Facts) enable us to evaluate the nutritional adequacy of our diets and offer a quantified path toward health.

Or at least that’s what we like to think.

In reality, the “facts” of Nutrition and Supplement Facts are far less certain than their name makes them seem. And this uncertainty should make us question many of our assumptions about nutrition.

Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels were mandated by the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act but, contrary to what many of us believe, their information isn’t necessarily based on an analysis of the food that’s actually on our plate. To begin with, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not specify where the data behind these measurements (like, say, the number of calories or amount of a particular vitamin a serving contains) should come from. Sometimes companies do their own analyses; sometimes they use proprietary databases; and sometimes they simply add up what their suppliers have reported in the raw ingredients.

One of the most reputable sources is the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Data Laboratory and contains detailed nutritional information for more than 8,000 foods. But even the National Nutrient Database cannot reveal the nutritional content of your particular slice of pizza. Its values, like those of many databases, are often based on averages calculated from several different varieties or brands.

Most people also don’t realize that Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t reviewed by the FDA before being published or that the labeling rules themselves allow a surprising amount of wiggle room. Calories are officially allowed to be present at up to 120 percent of whatever number is on the label, for example, meaning that your 240-calorie candy bar could actually have 288 with no penalty, and even the most conscientious counter could be consuming 20 percent more calories than he thinks each day. Carbohydrates and protein, among other nutrients, must simply be present at least 80 percent of the amount on the label. There’s no upper limit. And if serving sizes seem outrageously small, it’s in part because many are based on surveys that were done in 1977-78, when researchers’ understanding of how much people actually eat in one sitting was less accurate than it is today.

The Percent Daily Value column (%DV) is one of the most confusing parts of the panel, and should be taken with several huge grains of salt. Its values, which are calculated based on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, are supposed to tell you what percentage of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for a given nutrient a serving of the food contains—for example, that a serving of orange juice provides 100 percent of the RDA for Vitamin C.

Many of us interpret this as meaning that a serving of that orange juice would satisfy 100 percent of our own personal requirement for Vitamin C. But that interpretation assumes both that everyone’s nutritional needs are the same and that scientists have figured out exactly how much of every nutrient we should be consuming each day. Neither of those assumptions is correct.

First of all, RDAs aren’t personalized. They can’t be: Every person has slightly different nutritional needs, depending on factors that include health status and lifestyle, gender, age, and activity levels on that particular day. If you’re a small, sedentary woman, you’ll need fewer than 2,000 calories a day. If you’re over 50, you may need more vitamin B12 than someone who’s younger. If you smoke, you may need more vitamin C and folic acid than nonsmokers. Et cetera. At the moment, there’s no way to tell precisely where on the spectrum you personally fall. As a result, the FNB points out, “It is almost impossible to know the true requirement of any one individual.”

Second, the RDAs are deliberately designed to be higher than most people’s actual requirements. An RDA represents the amount of a nutrient that’s thought to meet the needs of between 97 to 98 percent of the healthy adult population over time. Translation: most of us can (and perhaps should) get by on less. You can think of this in terms of clothing: if you were trying to design a sweater big enough to fit 97 to 98 percent of Americans, the result would be a pretty big sweater. Nearly everyone would be able to fit into it, but most of us would be just fine (if not better) with a smaller size.

Third, no one needs to consume 100 percent of their personal requirements (let alone the RDAs) every day. The body maintains stores of most nutrients, which means that what’s important is your average consumption over time. But that’s not clear from the label. Instead, it’s easy to conclude that we should be trying to consume at least 100 percent of our RDAs each day to achieve a perfect nutritional score.

And fourth (and most importantly), we don’t even know if the RDAs are correct. Take the very concept of adequacy – a term that, as the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) pointed out in a 2003 report, prompts an often overlooked question: “’Adequate for what?’” Scientists still don’t fully understand all the nuances of what nutrients like vitamins actually do once they’re in our bodies, which means we also don’t know the precise role each nutrient might play in the prevention or development of degenerative diseases like type 2 diabetes, age-related macular problems, cardiovascular or neurodegenerative diseases, or cancer.

This means that the RDAs are—and will likely always be—works in progress. As the FNB’s report explains, “[s]cientific data have not identified an optimum level for any nutrient for any life stage or gender group,” and “a continuum of benefits may be ascribed to various levels of intake of the same nutrient.”

To top it off, the %DVs on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t based on the most up-to-date recommendations. Instead, they’re mostly based on the version of the Recommended Dietary Allowances from 1968. This means that if your breakfast cereal or multivitamin claims to provide 100 percent of your RDA for a set of vitamins or minerals, those claims are mostly derived from recommendations that are nearly a half a century old.

This is not an inconsequential anachronism. The 1968 recommendations were developed before prevention of chronic disease was even being taken into account. (That didn’t happen till the 70s and 80s. While we still don’t know exactly how much of each nutrient is ideal for chronic disease prevention, at least we’re trying!) And there have been some dramatic changes to the RDAs in the past half-century. The recommendation for vitamin E has dropped by a quarter. Those for vitamins C, D and K have increased by 50 percent. The RDA for biotin is a tenth of what it was in 1968.

What’s more, the current and 1968 versions of the dietary recommendations don’t even use the same measurements. For example, food and supplement labels still list vitamins A, D and E in international units (IU) (a confusing unit of measurement whose definition varies by nutrient), while the current RDAs list them by weight, making it difficult for even the most detail-oriented consumer to calculate what percentage of the current recommendations a particular food provides. The differences between the two sets of recommendations are substantial enough to make the percentages listed on today’s food and supplement labels misleading at best and, in the cases of nutrients like biotin whose recommendations have changed dramatically, nearly meaningless.

The reason that the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels use recommendations that are so out-of-date is that the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of regulating food and supplement labels, and the FDA’s rules have not kept up with the Food and Nutrition Board’s updates. This is partially the result of the slowness of the FDA’s required rule-making process, which takes years. But it’s also because of several laws passed in the 1990s that prohibited the FDA from updating its requirements (which at that point were still mostly based on the 1968 versions) before Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels first became mandatory.

Put this all together, and the detail-oriented among us are left with a mess. Say your yogurt claims to contain 50 percent of your daily value of a particular nutrient. It’s not clear what desired health effect that 50 percent is based on, or whether the RDA it’s based on (which is most likely out of date) reflects your personal nutritional needs. Like much in nutrition, what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t.

In terms of labels, change may be coming -- but slowly. In 2014 and 2015, the FDA published a set of proposed new rules for Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels that would update which set of recommendations are used for food and supplement labels, among many other proposed changes (including updated serving sizes and a “refreshed design”). It could take several more years for the agency to publish its final version of the rules, especially given that the nutrition and supplement facts part alone garnered nearly 300,000 public comments, all of which the FDA is required to review before publishing final rules. After that, it will likely be at least two years before the changes are implemented and we consumers see these changes on our food labels and supplement bottles. And by then, who knows what other updates the Food and Nutrition Board may have made to its version of the recommendations? It’s possible that the values used for the new labels could also be out of date by the time the new labeling rules are finally enacted.

All of this is not to say that we should ignore the information on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels, which can be extremely useful in helping us to compare the relative nutritional values of foods. But even if the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels are redesigned and their underlying values updated, their “facts” will still come with caveats. From our individual requirements to the effect that various nutrients have on our long-term health, there is a whole lot about nutrition that we still don’t — and may never — understand.

 



There’s something comforting about the “Nutrition Facts” panels on food packaging. Neatly confined within boxes, printed in Franklin Gothic Heavy or Helvetica Black, these “facts” provide the nutritionally minded among us with a reassuring sense of control. This yogurt has 120 calories per serving. That cereal contains 100 percent of our daily requirements for 13 vitamins and minerals. Nutrition Facts (and their companions, Supplement Facts) enable us to evaluate the nutritional adequacy of our diets and offer a quantified path toward health.

Or at least that’s what we like to think.

In reality, the “facts” of Nutrition and Supplement Facts are far less certain than their name makes them seem. And this uncertainty should make us question many of our assumptions about nutrition.

Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels were mandated by the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act but, contrary to what many of us believe, their information isn’t necessarily based on an analysis of the food that’s actually on our plate. To begin with, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not specify where the data behind these measurements (like, say, the number of calories or amount of a particular vitamin a serving contains) should come from. Sometimes companies do their own analyses; sometimes they use proprietary databases; and sometimes they simply add up what their suppliers have reported in the raw ingredients.

One of the most reputable sources is the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Data Laboratory and contains detailed nutritional information for more than 8,000 foods. But even the National Nutrient Database cannot reveal the nutritional content of your particular slice of pizza. Its values, like those of many databases, are often based on averages calculated from several different varieties or brands.

Most people also don’t realize that Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t reviewed by the FDA before being published or that the labeling rules themselves allow a surprising amount of wiggle room. Calories are officially allowed to be present at up to 120 percent of whatever number is on the label, for example, meaning that your 240-calorie candy bar could actually have 288 with no penalty, and even the most conscientious counter could be consuming 20 percent more calories than he thinks each day. Carbohydrates and protein, among other nutrients, must simply be present at least 80 percent of the amount on the label. There’s no upper limit. And if serving sizes seem outrageously small, it’s in part because many are based on surveys that were done in 1977-78, when researchers’ understanding of how much people actually eat in one sitting was less accurate than it is today.

The Percent Daily Value column (%DV) is one of the most confusing parts of the panel, and should be taken with several huge grains of salt. Its values, which are calculated based on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, are supposed to tell you what percentage of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for a given nutrient a serving of the food contains—for example, that a serving of orange juice provides 100 percent of the RDA for Vitamin C.

Many of us interpret this as meaning that a serving of that orange juice would satisfy 100 percent of our own personal requirement for Vitamin C. But that interpretation assumes both that everyone’s nutritional needs are the same and that scientists have figured out exactly how much of every nutrient we should be consuming each day. Neither of those assumptions is correct.

First of all, RDAs aren’t personalized. They can’t be: Every person has slightly different nutritional needs, depending on factors that include health status and lifestyle, gender, age, and activity levels on that particular day. If you’re a small, sedentary woman, you’ll need fewer than 2,000 calories a day. If you’re over 50, you may need more vitamin B12 than someone who’s younger. If you smoke, you may need more vitamin C and folic acid than nonsmokers. Et cetera. At the moment, there’s no way to tell precisely where on the spectrum you personally fall. As a result, the FNB points out, “It is almost impossible to know the true requirement of any one individual.”

Second, the RDAs are deliberately designed to be higher than most people’s actual requirements. An RDA represents the amount of a nutrient that’s thought to meet the needs of between 97 to 98 percent of the healthy adult population over time. Translation: most of us can (and perhaps should) get by on less. You can think of this in terms of clothing: if you were trying to design a sweater big enough to fit 97 to 98 percent of Americans, the result would be a pretty big sweater. Nearly everyone would be able to fit into it, but most of us would be just fine (if not better) with a smaller size.

Third, no one needs to consume 100 percent of their personal requirements (let alone the RDAs) every day. The body maintains stores of most nutrients, which means that what’s important is your average consumption over time. But that’s not clear from the label. Instead, it’s easy to conclude that we should be trying to consume at least 100 percent of our RDAs each day to achieve a perfect nutritional score.

And fourth (and most importantly), we don’t even know if the RDAs are correct. Take the very concept of adequacy – a term that, as the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) pointed out in a 2003 report, prompts an often overlooked question: “’Adequate for what?’” Scientists still don’t fully understand all the nuances of what nutrients like vitamins actually do once they’re in our bodies, which means we also don’t know the precise role each nutrient might play in the prevention or development of degenerative diseases like type 2 diabetes, age-related macular problems, cardiovascular or neurodegenerative diseases, or cancer.

This means that the RDAs are—and will likely always be—works in progress. As the FNB’s report explains, “[s]cientific data have not identified an optimum level for any nutrient for any life stage or gender group,” and “a continuum of benefits may be ascribed to various levels of intake of the same nutrient.”

To top it off, the %DVs on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t based on the most up-to-date recommendations. Instead, they’re mostly based on the version of the Recommended Dietary Allowances from 1968. This means that if your breakfast cereal or multivitamin claims to provide 100 percent of your RDA for a set of vitamins or minerals, those claims are mostly derived from recommendations that are nearly a half a century old.

This is not an inconsequential anachronism. The 1968 recommendations were developed before prevention of chronic disease was even being taken into account. (That didn’t happen till the 70s and 80s. While we still don’t know exactly how much of each nutrient is ideal for chronic disease prevention, at least we’re trying!) And there have been some dramatic changes to the RDAs in the past half-century. The recommendation for vitamin E has dropped by a quarter. Those for vitamins C, D and K have increased by 50 percent. The RDA for biotin is a tenth of what it was in 1968.

What’s more, the current and 1968 versions of the dietary recommendations don’t even use the same measurements. For example, food and supplement labels still list vitamins A, D and E in international units (IU) (a confusing unit of measurement whose definition varies by nutrient), while the current RDAs list them by weight, making it difficult for even the most detail-oriented consumer to calculate what percentage of the current recommendations a particular food provides. The differences between the two sets of recommendations are substantial enough to make the percentages listed on today’s food and supplement labels misleading at best and, in the cases of nutrients like biotin whose recommendations have changed dramatically, nearly meaningless.

The reason that the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels use recommendations that are so out-of-date is that the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of regulating food and supplement labels, and the FDA’s rules have not kept up with the Food and Nutrition Board’s updates. This is partially the result of the slowness of the FDA’s required rule-making process, which takes years. But it’s also because of several laws passed in the 1990s that prohibited the FDA from updating its requirements (which at that point were still mostly based on the 1968 versions) before Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels first became mandatory.

Put this all together, and the detail-oriented among us are left with a mess. Say your yogurt claims to contain 50 percent of your daily value of a particular nutrient. It’s not clear what desired health effect that 50 percent is based on, or whether the RDA it’s based on (which is most likely out of date) reflects your personal nutritional needs. Like much in nutrition, what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t.

In terms of labels, change may be coming -- but slowly. In 2014 and 2015, the FDA published a set of proposed new rules for Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels that would update which set of recommendations are used for food and supplement labels, among many other proposed changes (including updated serving sizes and a “refreshed design”). It could take several more years for the agency to publish its final version of the rules, especially given that the nutrition and supplement facts part alone garnered nearly 300,000 public comments, all of which the FDA is required to review before publishing final rules. After that, it will likely be at least two years before the changes are implemented and we consumers see these changes on our food labels and supplement bottles. And by then, who knows what other updates the Food and Nutrition Board may have made to its version of the recommendations? It’s possible that the values used for the new labels could also be out of date by the time the new labeling rules are finally enacted.

All of this is not to say that we should ignore the information on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels, which can be extremely useful in helping us to compare the relative nutritional values of foods. But even if the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels are redesigned and their underlying values updated, their “facts” will still come with caveats. From our individual requirements to the effect that various nutrients have on our long-term health, there is a whole lot about nutrition that we still don’t — and may never — understand.

 



There’s something comforting about the “Nutrition Facts” panels on food packaging. Neatly confined within boxes, printed in Franklin Gothic Heavy or Helvetica Black, these “facts” provide the nutritionally minded among us with a reassuring sense of control. This yogurt has 120 calories per serving. That cereal contains 100 percent of our daily requirements for 13 vitamins and minerals. Nutrition Facts (and their companions, Supplement Facts) enable us to evaluate the nutritional adequacy of our diets and offer a quantified path toward health.

Or at least that’s what we like to think.

In reality, the “facts” of Nutrition and Supplement Facts are far less certain than their name makes them seem. And this uncertainty should make us question many of our assumptions about nutrition.

Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels were mandated by the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act but, contrary to what many of us believe, their information isn’t necessarily based on an analysis of the food that’s actually on our plate. To begin with, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not specify where the data behind these measurements (like, say, the number of calories or amount of a particular vitamin a serving contains) should come from. Sometimes companies do their own analyses; sometimes they use proprietary databases; and sometimes they simply add up what their suppliers have reported in the raw ingredients.

One of the most reputable sources is the National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, which is maintained by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Data Laboratory and contains detailed nutritional information for more than 8,000 foods. But even the National Nutrient Database cannot reveal the nutritional content of your particular slice of pizza. Its values, like those of many databases, are often based on averages calculated from several different varieties or brands.

Most people also don’t realize that Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t reviewed by the FDA before being published or that the labeling rules themselves allow a surprising amount of wiggle room. Calories are officially allowed to be present at up to 120 percent of whatever number is on the label, for example, meaning that your 240-calorie candy bar could actually have 288 with no penalty, and even the most conscientious counter could be consuming 20 percent more calories than he thinks each day. Carbohydrates and protein, among other nutrients, must simply be present at least 80 percent of the amount on the label. There’s no upper limit. And if serving sizes seem outrageously small, it’s in part because many are based on surveys that were done in 1977-78, when researchers’ understanding of how much people actually eat in one sitting was less accurate than it is today.

The Percent Daily Value column (%DV) is one of the most confusing parts of the panel, and should be taken with several huge grains of salt. Its values, which are calculated based on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, are supposed to tell you what percentage of the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for a given nutrient a serving of the food contains—for example, that a serving of orange juice provides 100 percent of the RDA for Vitamin C.

Many of us interpret this as meaning that a serving of that orange juice would satisfy 100 percent of our own personal requirement for Vitamin C. But that interpretation assumes both that everyone’s nutritional needs are the same and that scientists have figured out exactly how much of every nutrient we should be consuming each day. Neither of those assumptions is correct.

First of all, RDAs aren’t personalized. They can’t be: Every person has slightly different nutritional needs, depending on factors that include health status and lifestyle, gender, age, and activity levels on that particular day. If you’re a small, sedentary woman, you’ll need fewer than 2,000 calories a day. If you’re over 50, you may need more vitamin B12 than someone who’s younger. If you smoke, you may need more vitamin C and folic acid than nonsmokers. Et cetera. At the moment, there’s no way to tell precisely where on the spectrum you personally fall. As a result, the FNB points out, “It is almost impossible to know the true requirement of any one individual.”

Second, the RDAs are deliberately designed to be higher than most people’s actual requirements. An RDA represents the amount of a nutrient that’s thought to meet the needs of between 97 to 98 percent of the healthy adult population over time. Translation: most of us can (and perhaps should) get by on less. You can think of this in terms of clothing: if you were trying to design a sweater big enough to fit 97 to 98 percent of Americans, the result would be a pretty big sweater. Nearly everyone would be able to fit into it, but most of us would be just fine (if not better) with a smaller size.

Third, no one needs to consume 100 percent of their personal requirements (let alone the RDAs) every day. The body maintains stores of most nutrients, which means that what’s important is your average consumption over time. But that’s not clear from the label. Instead, it’s easy to conclude that we should be trying to consume at least 100 percent of our RDAs each day to achieve a perfect nutritional score.

And fourth (and most importantly), we don’t even know if the RDAs are correct. Take the very concept of adequacy – a term that, as the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) pointed out in a 2003 report, prompts an often overlooked question: “’Adequate for what?’” Scientists still don’t fully understand all the nuances of what nutrients like vitamins actually do once they’re in our bodies, which means we also don’t know the precise role each nutrient might play in the prevention or development of degenerative diseases like type 2 diabetes, age-related macular problems, cardiovascular or neurodegenerative diseases, or cancer.

This means that the RDAs are—and will likely always be—works in progress. As the FNB’s report explains, “[s]cientific data have not identified an optimum level for any nutrient for any life stage or gender group,” and “a continuum of benefits may be ascribed to various levels of intake of the same nutrient.”

To top it off, the %DVs on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels aren’t based on the most up-to-date recommendations. Instead, they’re mostly based on the version of the Recommended Dietary Allowances from 1968. This means that if your breakfast cereal or multivitamin claims to provide 100 percent of your RDA for a set of vitamins or minerals, those claims are mostly derived from recommendations that are nearly a half a century old.

This is not an inconsequential anachronism. The 1968 recommendations were developed before prevention of chronic disease was even being taken into account. (That didn’t happen till the 70s and 80s. While we still don’t know exactly how much of each nutrient is ideal for chronic disease prevention, at least we’re trying!) And there have been some dramatic changes to the RDAs in the past half-century. The recommendation for vitamin E has dropped by a quarter. Those for vitamins C, D and K have increased by 50 percent. The RDA for biotin is a tenth of what it was in 1968.

What’s more, the current and 1968 versions of the dietary recommendations don’t even use the same measurements. For example, food and supplement labels still list vitamins A, D and E in international units (IU) (a confusing unit of measurement whose definition varies by nutrient), while the current RDAs list them by weight, making it difficult for even the most detail-oriented consumer to calculate what percentage of the current recommendations a particular food provides. The differences between the two sets of recommendations are substantial enough to make the percentages listed on today’s food and supplement labels misleading at best and, in the cases of nutrients like biotin whose recommendations have changed dramatically, nearly meaningless.

The reason that the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels use recommendations that are so out-of-date is that the Food and Drug Administration is in charge of regulating food and supplement labels, and the FDA’s rules have not kept up with the Food and Nutrition Board’s updates. This is partially the result of the slowness of the FDA’s required rule-making process, which takes years. But it’s also because of several laws passed in the 1990s that prohibited the FDA from updating its requirements (which at that point were still mostly based on the 1968 versions) before Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels first became mandatory.

Put this all together, and the detail-oriented among us are left with a mess. Say your yogurt claims to contain 50 percent of your daily value of a particular nutrient. It’s not clear what desired health effect that 50 percent is based on, or whether the RDA it’s based on (which is most likely out of date) reflects your personal nutritional needs. Like much in nutrition, what we know is dwarfed by what we don’t.

In terms of labels, change may be coming -- but slowly. In 2014 and 2015, the FDA published a set of proposed new rules for Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels that would update which set of recommendations are used for food and supplement labels, among many other proposed changes (including updated serving sizes and a “refreshed design”). It could take several more years for the agency to publish its final version of the rules, especially given that the nutrition and supplement facts part alone garnered nearly 300,000 public comments, all of which the FDA is required to review before publishing final rules. After that, it will likely be at least two years before the changes are implemented and we consumers see these changes on our food labels and supplement bottles. And by then, who knows what other updates the Food and Nutrition Board may have made to its version of the recommendations? It’s possible that the values used for the new labels could also be out of date by the time the new labeling rules are finally enacted.

All of this is not to say that we should ignore the information on Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels, which can be extremely useful in helping us to compare the relative nutritional values of foods. But even if the Nutrition and Supplement Facts panels are redesigned and their underlying values updated, their “facts” will still come with caveats. From our individual requirements to the effect that various nutrients have on our long-term health, there is a whole lot about nutrition that we still don’t — and may never — understand.

 

Continue Reading...

Sex in the sea: What we can learn from underwater orgies, beach sand bondage and kinky lobster courtship

Sometimes, successful sex requires shaking things up a bit. Under the sea, it is no different — except of course that the techniques there have been perfected over millennia. Sex was invented in the ocean — that’s where Nature’s been practicing her sexual prowess the longest.

Here are a few salty tales and tips from our watery cousins on the tried and tested dating and mating games that drive diversity and abundance in the largest habitat on the planet. Take (and leave) what you will.

Throw a full moon sex party    

Long before Roman emperors satiated their wanton desires via elaborate sex fests, marine species had mastered the art of the orgy. And no wonder. Group sex confers all kinds of benefits—coordinating orgasms among partners is one of them.

Such sexual synchrony is key in the ocean, where often sex is an out-of-body experience. Similar to trees casting pollen to the wind, many ocean animals release their reproductive goods directly into the sea. Such external fertilization—where sperm and eggs mix and mingle in the salty brine—presents a significant challenge:

How do tiny eggs and miniscule sperm find one another across all that open space?

Enter the orgy.

When many individuals get together for some sexy businesses, they can better coordinate their spawning through sultry dance moves, flashing colors, or other forms of wooing. The result is millions and even billions of sperm and eggs released all at once in a relatively small area of ocean. This increases the odds that the little wigglers will find eggs before either are swept off by currents (or chowed upon by predators).

To make it work, tens of thousands of individuals, many traveling for days, must all descend upon one chosen location, at the exact same time, and then jettison their wares within moments of one another. It is no easy feat. Just consider the last time you and your one partner managed synchronized bliss — and we’re talking thousands of individuals.

To orchestrate this impeccable timing, many species rely on the light of the full moon to signal that it’s time to get the party started. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, the moon pulls on more than just the tides of the sea—she governs the sex drive of countless species from fish to coral. Under her influence, oceanic orgy lovers have gathered for millennia in bouts of group sex that boost reproductive success.

Get your Barry White on

Want to lure in the ladies (or intimidate the competition)? Nothing says “I’m a sex machine” like a deep, booming baritone. Take it from the largest guys on earth: the male blue whales. Since the 1960s, these behemoths have increasingly embraced their inner Barry White, and that's likely a sign that seduction is on the rise in this highly endangered species.

Nearly hunted to extinction in the mid 20th century, blue whales looking for a date had to search entire ocean basins for mates that were few and far between. Back then, a male was concerned with simply finding a female, forget about seducing her. He just sang as loudly as possible. But the moratorium on hunting whales has reversed declines in the population and as their numbers have climbed, the males’ songs have dropped—by over 30 percent in pitch the past four decades.

With more blue whales around, the distance between males and females, and between males, is shorter. Now, rather than singing simply to advertise their existence, males are likely singing to show off their wares.

A lot can be said with a song. Across the animal kingdom, bigger males are able to sing louder and lower than smaller males. It’s just physics. And in the wild, bigger is often better when it comes to selecting a male, so females tend to go for the males who can hit that lower register.

Deeper is sexier when it comes to a male’s voice—be it a koala, human, or blue whale.

Try a change in atmosphere

Get out of a sexual rut with a little S & M. This could be the motto of grunion, slender silver fish that flap ashore the beaches of southern California every spring for some rather risqué sex on the beach.

Leaving the sea on the high tides of the full and new moons, female grunion burrow up to their heads in the moist sand. Bound and prostrate, their glistening bodies lure in half a dozen or more male lovers, who arrive on the following waves. They wrap themselves around the female’s protruding torso and use her side as a slippery slide for their pleasure. Fish out of water, the participants must perform the entire sexual act while holding their breath. It’s a love affair replete with beach sand bondage and a bit of asphyxiation.

Once released of their reproductive burden, the males quickly relinquish their hold and flop back to the sea. Chivalry long gone, the female must dig herself free and make it back to the water before passing out.

The rather racy soiree has its purpose: several inches below the sand, in a pit dug out by the female’s tail, sperm and eggs swirl together. Two weeks later, the return of the highest tide washes free the fertilized eggs to return to the sea.

Look out for fatherhood phonies

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

That’s the approach of the peacock wrasse, a cigar-shaped Caribbean reef fish that has no scruples when it comes to seduction.

Females in this species cruise the reef looking for males with a suitable crib in which to lay their eggs. What defines the best nests? Eggs, of course. The presence of other eggs signals to a female that: 1) another female found this nest worthy; 2) the male is less like to ditch the nest as he has a big investment already; and 3) the male can successfully guard eggs from predators.

But not all males take the time and effort to build their own nests. Instead, some big thug males choose to chase out smaller, scrawnier males from their well-kept nests and pretend that this fancy, full-of-eggs nest is their own. The ruse often works, with approaching females happily adding their eggs to the mix, which the thief male then fertilizes.

But these bully males take the faking fatherhood scam even one step further. Having filled the nest, these con artists then ditch out to go take over another one. They abandon their own eggs without fear because they know, waiting in the wings, is the original dad—the true owner of the nest. With no way to tell the difference among eggs, the dutiful dad returns, and rears ’em all to hatching.

Beware the love potion

In the world of lobster sex, nothing says “let’s get it on” like peeing in your lover’s face.

For Maine lobsters, sex is a tender affair that follows about two weeks of rather kinky foreplay. A female will subdue an otherwise bullish male by visiting his den each day and dosing him with a healthy spray of her best urine. After a few days of this, the normally aggressive male transforms into a gentle lover, welcoming this seductress female into his den. There, for the next several days, they will cohabitate. There’s lots of heavy petting with antennae, continued mutual golden showers, and touching one another with their spindly legs. And since lobsters have the equivalent of taste buds along their legs, they are basically licking each other with their feet. It’s kinky stuff.

Eventually, the female feels her molt coming on. This is the time where she slips out of her tattered old shell and slips into (grows) a shiny new one. And it is the ideal time for two lobsters to get it on. When the female ditches her old shell, she also tosses any stored up sperm from previous matings. Thus, a freshly molted female appears as a virgin again, empty pouch ready—and needing—to be filled by her next lover.

But sex with a big strapping male is a dangerous prospect for a recently molted female. When she crawls out of her old shell, she is a soft-bodied animal; it is several days before her new armor hardens into place. During this time she is extremely vulnerable, at the mercy of the male—a large-clawed, brutish individual with a tendency to beat up any other lobsters he sees.

And that is where her pee potion comes into play. Nearly two weeks of daily dosing puts a spell on the male that keeps him infatuated with her. After she molts, he stands guard over her, gently strokes her and eventually cradles her soft body in the hammock of his walking legs. The act itself is tender and swift. And afterwards, he will remain in the shelter alongside her until she is strong once again. With new shell solid and her sperm pouch full, she will then leave his abode…and another female will begin the golden showers anew. Maine lobsters are serial monogamists. Sometimes, successful sex requires shaking things up a bit. Under the sea, it is no different — except of course that the techniques there have been perfected over millennia. Sex was invented in the ocean — that’s where Nature’s been practicing her sexual prowess the longest.

Here are a few salty tales and tips from our watery cousins on the tried and tested dating and mating games that drive diversity and abundance in the largest habitat on the planet. Take (and leave) what you will.

Throw a full moon sex party    

Long before Roman emperors satiated their wanton desires via elaborate sex fests, marine species had mastered the art of the orgy. And no wonder. Group sex confers all kinds of benefits—coordinating orgasms among partners is one of them.

Such sexual synchrony is key in the ocean, where often sex is an out-of-body experience. Similar to trees casting pollen to the wind, many ocean animals release their reproductive goods directly into the sea. Such external fertilization—where sperm and eggs mix and mingle in the salty brine—presents a significant challenge:

How do tiny eggs and miniscule sperm find one another across all that open space?

Enter the orgy.

When many individuals get together for some sexy businesses, they can better coordinate their spawning through sultry dance moves, flashing colors, or other forms of wooing. The result is millions and even billions of sperm and eggs released all at once in a relatively small area of ocean. This increases the odds that the little wigglers will find eggs before either are swept off by currents (or chowed upon by predators).

To make it work, tens of thousands of individuals, many traveling for days, must all descend upon one chosen location, at the exact same time, and then jettison their wares within moments of one another. It is no easy feat. Just consider the last time you and your one partner managed synchronized bliss — and we’re talking thousands of individuals.

To orchestrate this impeccable timing, many species rely on the light of the full moon to signal that it’s time to get the party started. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, the moon pulls on more than just the tides of the sea—she governs the sex drive of countless species from fish to coral. Under her influence, oceanic orgy lovers have gathered for millennia in bouts of group sex that boost reproductive success.

Get your Barry White on

Want to lure in the ladies (or intimidate the competition)? Nothing says “I’m a sex machine” like a deep, booming baritone. Take it from the largest guys on earth: the male blue whales. Since the 1960s, these behemoths have increasingly embraced their inner Barry White, and that's likely a sign that seduction is on the rise in this highly endangered species.

Nearly hunted to extinction in the mid 20th century, blue whales looking for a date had to search entire ocean basins for mates that were few and far between. Back then, a male was concerned with simply finding a female, forget about seducing her. He just sang as loudly as possible. But the moratorium on hunting whales has reversed declines in the population and as their numbers have climbed, the males’ songs have dropped—by over 30 percent in pitch the past four decades.

With more blue whales around, the distance between males and females, and between males, is shorter. Now, rather than singing simply to advertise their existence, males are likely singing to show off their wares.

A lot can be said with a song. Across the animal kingdom, bigger males are able to sing louder and lower than smaller males. It’s just physics. And in the wild, bigger is often better when it comes to selecting a male, so females tend to go for the males who can hit that lower register.

Deeper is sexier when it comes to a male’s voice—be it a koala, human, or blue whale.

Try a change in atmosphere

Get out of a sexual rut with a little S & M. This could be the motto of grunion, slender silver fish that flap ashore the beaches of southern California every spring for some rather risqué sex on the beach.

Leaving the sea on the high tides of the full and new moons, female grunion burrow up to their heads in the moist sand. Bound and prostrate, their glistening bodies lure in half a dozen or more male lovers, who arrive on the following waves. They wrap themselves around the female’s protruding torso and use her side as a slippery slide for their pleasure. Fish out of water, the participants must perform the entire sexual act while holding their breath. It’s a love affair replete with beach sand bondage and a bit of asphyxiation.

Once released of their reproductive burden, the males quickly relinquish their hold and flop back to the sea. Chivalry long gone, the female must dig herself free and make it back to the water before passing out.

The rather racy soiree has its purpose: several inches below the sand, in a pit dug out by the female’s tail, sperm and eggs swirl together. Two weeks later, the return of the highest tide washes free the fertilized eggs to return to the sea.

Look out for fatherhood phonies

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

That’s the approach of the peacock wrasse, a cigar-shaped Caribbean reef fish that has no scruples when it comes to seduction.

Females in this species cruise the reef looking for males with a suitable crib in which to lay their eggs. What defines the best nests? Eggs, of course. The presence of other eggs signals to a female that: 1) another female found this nest worthy; 2) the male is less like to ditch the nest as he has a big investment already; and 3) the male can successfully guard eggs from predators.

But not all males take the time and effort to build their own nests. Instead, some big thug males choose to chase out smaller, scrawnier males from their well-kept nests and pretend that this fancy, full-of-eggs nest is their own. The ruse often works, with approaching females happily adding their eggs to the mix, which the thief male then fertilizes.

But these bully males take the faking fatherhood scam even one step further. Having filled the nest, these con artists then ditch out to go take over another one. They abandon their own eggs without fear because they know, waiting in the wings, is the original dad—the true owner of the nest. With no way to tell the difference among eggs, the dutiful dad returns, and rears ’em all to hatching.

Beware the love potion

In the world of lobster sex, nothing says “let’s get it on” like peeing in your lover’s face.

For Maine lobsters, sex is a tender affair that follows about two weeks of rather kinky foreplay. A female will subdue an otherwise bullish male by visiting his den each day and dosing him with a healthy spray of her best urine. After a few days of this, the normally aggressive male transforms into a gentle lover, welcoming this seductress female into his den. There, for the next several days, they will cohabitate. There’s lots of heavy petting with antennae, continued mutual golden showers, and touching one another with their spindly legs. And since lobsters have the equivalent of taste buds along their legs, they are basically licking each other with their feet. It’s kinky stuff.

Eventually, the female feels her molt coming on. This is the time where she slips out of her tattered old shell and slips into (grows) a shiny new one. And it is the ideal time for two lobsters to get it on. When the female ditches her old shell, she also tosses any stored up sperm from previous matings. Thus, a freshly molted female appears as a virgin again, empty pouch ready—and needing—to be filled by her next lover.

But sex with a big strapping male is a dangerous prospect for a recently molted female. When she crawls out of her old shell, she is a soft-bodied animal; it is several days before her new armor hardens into place. During this time she is extremely vulnerable, at the mercy of the male—a large-clawed, brutish individual with a tendency to beat up any other lobsters he sees.

And that is where her pee potion comes into play. Nearly two weeks of daily dosing puts a spell on the male that keeps him infatuated with her. After she molts, he stands guard over her, gently strokes her and eventually cradles her soft body in the hammock of his walking legs. The act itself is tender and swift. And afterwards, he will remain in the shelter alongside her until she is strong once again. With new shell solid and her sperm pouch full, she will then leave his abode…and another female will begin the golden showers anew. Maine lobsters are serial monogamists. Sometimes, successful sex requires shaking things up a bit. Under the sea, it is no different — except of course that the techniques there have been perfected over millennia. Sex was invented in the ocean — that’s where Nature’s been practicing her sexual prowess the longest.

Here are a few salty tales and tips from our watery cousins on the tried and tested dating and mating games that drive diversity and abundance in the largest habitat on the planet. Take (and leave) what you will.

Throw a full moon sex party    

Long before Roman emperors satiated their wanton desires via elaborate sex fests, marine species had mastered the art of the orgy. And no wonder. Group sex confers all kinds of benefits—coordinating orgasms among partners is one of them.

Such sexual synchrony is key in the ocean, where often sex is an out-of-body experience. Similar to trees casting pollen to the wind, many ocean animals release their reproductive goods directly into the sea. Such external fertilization—where sperm and eggs mix and mingle in the salty brine—presents a significant challenge:

How do tiny eggs and miniscule sperm find one another across all that open space?

Enter the orgy.

When many individuals get together for some sexy businesses, they can better coordinate their spawning through sultry dance moves, flashing colors, or other forms of wooing. The result is millions and even billions of sperm and eggs released all at once in a relatively small area of ocean. This increases the odds that the little wigglers will find eggs before either are swept off by currents (or chowed upon by predators).

To make it work, tens of thousands of individuals, many traveling for days, must all descend upon one chosen location, at the exact same time, and then jettison their wares within moments of one another. It is no easy feat. Just consider the last time you and your one partner managed synchronized bliss — and we’re talking thousands of individuals.

To orchestrate this impeccable timing, many species rely on the light of the full moon to signal that it’s time to get the party started. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, the moon pulls on more than just the tides of the sea—she governs the sex drive of countless species from fish to coral. Under her influence, oceanic orgy lovers have gathered for millennia in bouts of group sex that boost reproductive success.

Get your Barry White on

Want to lure in the ladies (or intimidate the competition)? Nothing says “I’m a sex machine” like a deep, booming baritone. Take it from the largest guys on earth: the male blue whales. Since the 1960s, these behemoths have increasingly embraced their inner Barry White, and that's likely a sign that seduction is on the rise in this highly endangered species.

Nearly hunted to extinction in the mid 20th century, blue whales looking for a date had to search entire ocean basins for mates that were few and far between. Back then, a male was concerned with simply finding a female, forget about seducing her. He just sang as loudly as possible. But the moratorium on hunting whales has reversed declines in the population and as their numbers have climbed, the males’ songs have dropped—by over 30 percent in pitch the past four decades.

With more blue whales around, the distance between males and females, and between males, is shorter. Now, rather than singing simply to advertise their existence, males are likely singing to show off their wares.

A lot can be said with a song. Across the animal kingdom, bigger males are able to sing louder and lower than smaller males. It’s just physics. And in the wild, bigger is often better when it comes to selecting a male, so females tend to go for the males who can hit that lower register.

Deeper is sexier when it comes to a male’s voice—be it a koala, human, or blue whale.

Try a change in atmosphere

Get out of a sexual rut with a little S & M. This could be the motto of grunion, slender silver fish that flap ashore the beaches of southern California every spring for some rather risqué sex on the beach.

Leaving the sea on the high tides of the full and new moons, female grunion burrow up to their heads in the moist sand. Bound and prostrate, their glistening bodies lure in half a dozen or more male lovers, who arrive on the following waves. They wrap themselves around the female’s protruding torso and use her side as a slippery slide for their pleasure. Fish out of water, the participants must perform the entire sexual act while holding their breath. It’s a love affair replete with beach sand bondage and a bit of asphyxiation.

Once released of their reproductive burden, the males quickly relinquish their hold and flop back to the sea. Chivalry long gone, the female must dig herself free and make it back to the water before passing out.

The rather racy soiree has its purpose: several inches below the sand, in a pit dug out by the female’s tail, sperm and eggs swirl together. Two weeks later, the return of the highest tide washes free the fertilized eggs to return to the sea.

Look out for fatherhood phonies

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

That’s the approach of the peacock wrasse, a cigar-shaped Caribbean reef fish that has no scruples when it comes to seduction.

Females in this species cruise the reef looking for males with a suitable crib in which to lay their eggs. What defines the best nests? Eggs, of course. The presence of other eggs signals to a female that: 1) another female found this nest worthy; 2) the male is less like to ditch the nest as he has a big investment already; and 3) the male can successfully guard eggs from predators.

But not all males take the time and effort to build their own nests. Instead, some big thug males choose to chase out smaller, scrawnier males from their well-kept nests and pretend that this fancy, full-of-eggs nest is their own. The ruse often works, with approaching females happily adding their eggs to the mix, which the thief male then fertilizes.

But these bully males take the faking fatherhood scam even one step further. Having filled the nest, these con artists then ditch out to go take over another one. They abandon their own eggs without fear because they know, waiting in the wings, is the original dad—the true owner of the nest. With no way to tell the difference among eggs, the dutiful dad returns, and rears ’em all to hatching.

Beware the love potion

In the world of lobster sex, nothing says “let’s get it on” like peeing in your lover’s face.

For Maine lobsters, sex is a tender affair that follows about two weeks of rather kinky foreplay. A female will subdue an otherwise bullish male by visiting his den each day and dosing him with a healthy spray of her best urine. After a few days of this, the normally aggressive male transforms into a gentle lover, welcoming this seductress female into his den. There, for the next several days, they will cohabitate. There’s lots of heavy petting with antennae, continued mutual golden showers, and touching one another with their spindly legs. And since lobsters have the equivalent of taste buds along their legs, they are basically licking each other with their feet. It’s kinky stuff.

Eventually, the female feels her molt coming on. This is the time where she slips out of her tattered old shell and slips into (grows) a shiny new one. And it is the ideal time for two lobsters to get it on. When the female ditches her old shell, she also tosses any stored up sperm from previous matings. Thus, a freshly molted female appears as a virgin again, empty pouch ready—and needing—to be filled by her next lover.

But sex with a big strapping male is a dangerous prospect for a recently molted female. When she crawls out of her old shell, she is a soft-bodied animal; it is several days before her new armor hardens into place. During this time she is extremely vulnerable, at the mercy of the male—a large-clawed, brutish individual with a tendency to beat up any other lobsters he sees.

And that is where her pee potion comes into play. Nearly two weeks of daily dosing puts a spell on the male that keeps him infatuated with her. After she molts, he stands guard over her, gently strokes her and eventually cradles her soft body in the hammock of his walking legs. The act itself is tender and swift. And afterwards, he will remain in the shelter alongside her until she is strong once again. With new shell solid and her sperm pouch full, she will then leave his abode…and another female will begin the golden showers anew. Maine lobsters are serial monogamists. Sometimes, successful sex requires shaking things up a bit. Under the sea, it is no different — except of course that the techniques there have been perfected over millennia. Sex was invented in the ocean — that’s where Nature’s been practicing her sexual prowess the longest.

Here are a few salty tales and tips from our watery cousins on the tried and tested dating and mating games that drive diversity and abundance in the largest habitat on the planet. Take (and leave) what you will.

Throw a full moon sex party    

Long before Roman emperors satiated their wanton desires via elaborate sex fests, marine species had mastered the art of the orgy. And no wonder. Group sex confers all kinds of benefits—coordinating orgasms among partners is one of them.

Such sexual synchrony is key in the ocean, where often sex is an out-of-body experience. Similar to trees casting pollen to the wind, many ocean animals release their reproductive goods directly into the sea. Such external fertilization—where sperm and eggs mix and mingle in the salty brine—presents a significant challenge:

How do tiny eggs and miniscule sperm find one another across all that open space?

Enter the orgy.

When many individuals get together for some sexy businesses, they can better coordinate their spawning through sultry dance moves, flashing colors, or other forms of wooing. The result is millions and even billions of sperm and eggs released all at once in a relatively small area of ocean. This increases the odds that the little wigglers will find eggs before either are swept off by currents (or chowed upon by predators).

To make it work, tens of thousands of individuals, many traveling for days, must all descend upon one chosen location, at the exact same time, and then jettison their wares within moments of one another. It is no easy feat. Just consider the last time you and your one partner managed synchronized bliss — and we’re talking thousands of individuals.

To orchestrate this impeccable timing, many species rely on the light of the full moon to signal that it’s time to get the party started. Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall, the moon pulls on more than just the tides of the sea—she governs the sex drive of countless species from fish to coral. Under her influence, oceanic orgy lovers have gathered for millennia in bouts of group sex that boost reproductive success.

Get your Barry White on

Want to lure in the ladies (or intimidate the competition)? Nothing says “I’m a sex machine” like a deep, booming baritone. Take it from the largest guys on earth: the male blue whales. Since the 1960s, these behemoths have increasingly embraced their inner Barry White, and that's likely a sign that seduction is on the rise in this highly endangered species.

Nearly hunted to extinction in the mid 20th century, blue whales looking for a date had to search entire ocean basins for mates that were few and far between. Back then, a male was concerned with simply finding a female, forget about seducing her. He just sang as loudly as possible. But the moratorium on hunting whales has reversed declines in the population and as their numbers have climbed, the males’ songs have dropped—by over 30 percent in pitch the past four decades.

With more blue whales around, the distance between males and females, and between males, is shorter. Now, rather than singing simply to advertise their existence, males are likely singing to show off their wares.

A lot can be said with a song. Across the animal kingdom, bigger males are able to sing louder and lower than smaller males. It’s just physics. And in the wild, bigger is often better when it comes to selecting a male, so females tend to go for the males who can hit that lower register.

Deeper is sexier when it comes to a male’s voice—be it a koala, human, or blue whale.

Try a change in atmosphere

Get out of a sexual rut with a little S & M. This could be the motto of grunion, slender silver fish that flap ashore the beaches of southern California every spring for some rather risqué sex on the beach.

Leaving the sea on the high tides of the full and new moons, female grunion burrow up to their heads in the moist sand. Bound and prostrate, their glistening bodies lure in half a dozen or more male lovers, who arrive on the following waves. They wrap themselves around the female’s protruding torso and use her side as a slippery slide for their pleasure. Fish out of water, the participants must perform the entire sexual act while holding their breath. It’s a love affair replete with beach sand bondage and a bit of asphyxiation.

Once released of their reproductive burden, the males quickly relinquish their hold and flop back to the sea. Chivalry long gone, the female must dig herself free and make it back to the water before passing out.

The rather racy soiree has its purpose: several inches below the sand, in a pit dug out by the female’s tail, sperm and eggs swirl together. Two weeks later, the return of the highest tide washes free the fertilized eggs to return to the sea.

Look out for fatherhood phonies

Sometimes, you just have to fake it.

That’s the approach of the peacock wrasse, a cigar-shaped Caribbean reef fish that has no scruples when it comes to seduction.

Females in this species cruise the reef looking for males with a suitable crib in which to lay their eggs. What defines the best nests? Eggs, of course. The presence of other eggs signals to a female that: 1) another female found this nest worthy; 2) the male is less like to ditch the nest as he has a big investment already; and 3) the male can successfully guard eggs from predators.

But not all males take the time and effort to build their own nests. Instead, some big thug males choose to chase out smaller, scrawnier males from their well-kept nests and pretend that this fancy, full-of-eggs nest is their own. The ruse often works, with approaching females happily adding their eggs to the mix, which the thief male then fertilizes.

But these bully males take the faking fatherhood scam even one step further. Having filled the nest, these con artists then ditch out to go take over another one. They abandon their own eggs without fear because they know, waiting in the wings, is the original dad—the true owner of the nest. With no way to tell the difference among eggs, the dutiful dad returns, and rears ’em all to hatching.

Beware the love potion

In the world of lobster sex, nothing says “let’s get it on” like peeing in your lover’s face.

For Maine lobsters, sex is a tender affair that follows about two weeks of rather kinky foreplay. A female will subdue an otherwise bullish male by visiting his den each day and dosing him with a healthy spray of her best urine. After a few days of this, the normally aggressive male transforms into a gentle lover, welcoming this seductress female into his den. There, for the next several days, they will cohabitate. There’s lots of heavy petting with antennae, continued mutual golden showers, and touching one another with their spindly legs. And since lobsters have the equivalent of taste buds along their legs, they are basically licking each other with their feet. It’s kinky stuff.

Eventually, the female feels her molt coming on. This is the time where she slips out of her tattered old shell and slips into (grows) a shiny new one. And it is the ideal time for two lobsters to get it on. When the female ditches her old shell, she also tosses any stored up sperm from previous matings. Thus, a freshly molted female appears as a virgin again, empty pouch ready—and needing—to be filled by her next lover.

But sex with a big strapping male is a dangerous prospect for a recently molted female. When she crawls out of her old shell, she is a soft-bodied animal; it is several days before her new armor hardens into place. During this time she is extremely vulnerable, at the mercy of the male—a large-clawed, brutish individual with a tendency to beat up any other lobsters he sees.

And that is where her pee potion comes into play. Nearly two weeks of daily dosing puts a spell on the male that keeps him infatuated with her. After she molts, he stands guard over her, gently strokes her and eventually cradles her soft body in the hammock of his walking legs. The act itself is tender and swift. And afterwards, he will remain in the shelter alongside her until she is strong once again. With new shell solid and her sperm pouch full, she will then leave his abode…and another female will begin the golden showers anew. Maine lobsters are serial monogamists. 

Continue Reading...

Utah and the war on porn: Our long national history of condemning “obscenity” as public enemy #1

The state of Utah officially declared pornography a public health crisis this week, with Governor Gary Herbert explaining, “there are real health risks that are associated with viewing pornography” (Herbert had signed the declaration once last month, but did it again in April for good measure). Listed by the legislature are everything from “risky sexual behavior” to young children using hardcore porn at “an alarming rate.” Naturally, commentary erupted from the usual corners, with celebration by the Utah Coalition Against Pornography and anti-porn feminist Gail Dines, who seemed blithely unconcerned about aligning herself with a Republican coalition that might not be coming at this from a very feminist angle, and critique from both liberals and libertarians.

Now, I’m an historian, not a social scientist, though I will say, in my many years of reading both historical and social-scientific scholarship on pornography, I’ve come to believe that the single most deleterious activity porn causes politicians to do with their hands is wringing them. The evidence for porn’s imagined harms is simply unconvincing; a recent piece by sex therapist Marty Klein elaborates why in more detail. But while Utah has received extensive press coverage for the novelty of its public-health framing, what I see is just the latest iteration of a 150-year cycle that began with Anthony Comstock in the 1870s.

Pornography has always been medicalized; the term was first defined in an 1857 medical dictionary, after all. And the very metaphor of the body-politic has perpetually lent itself to imagery of moral disease and rot, as historian Carolyn Dean pointed out in her study of interwar France, "The Frail Social Body." In the U.S., where anxieties over sexuality are arguably a fundamental structuring force of this body-politic, pornography first became a public-health concern during the tumultuous decades after the Civil War, when urbanization, immigration, economic insecurity and more helped spawn the reign of the iconic smutbuster Comstock.

Indeed, the very man who pioneered American anti-porn activism also helped set the rhetorical template for Utah’s excursion into faux-medicalized moral panic. Anthony Comstock is best known for lending his name to the Comstock Act, the 1873 federal obscenity law that still makes obscenity a criminal act, unprotected to this day by the First Amendment. His moral crusading remains notorious, as he prosecuted everyone from anti-religion freethinker D. M .Bennett to Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger (information related to abortion and contraception were both included in the Comstock Act). Ironically, Comstock persecuted actual doctors, such as E. B. Foote, whose "Words in Pearl for Married People Only" explained contraception. Another sex-reformer, Ida Craddock, whose pamphlets "The Wedding Night" and "Right Marital Living" emphasized women’s sexual pleasure, killed herself in 1902 after repeated obscenity charges, blaming Comstock for her death in a searing public suicide note that blamed censorship, not obscene materials, for “hoodwinking the public into believing that sexual information in printed books must be kept away from them, so as to protect the morals of innocent youth.”

Yet for Comstock, it was smut above all else that threatened the nation. His 1883 book "Traps for the Young" is an overheated masterpiece of florid anti-porn mania, couched in a rhetoric that wrapped up tropes of sin and damnation in the emerging modern medical discourse. Thus his chapter on smut (“Death Traps by Mail”) begins with Satan but quickly moves into phrasing that could come from a contemporary Utah Republican. “Like a cancer, it fastens itself upon the imagination, and sends down into the future life thousands of roots, poisoning the nature, enervating the system, destroying self-respect, fettering the will-power, defiling the mind, corrupting the thoughts, leading to secret practices of most foul and revolting character, until the victim tires of life, and existence is scarcely endurable,” he writes—and that’s at his more restrained. Lust is also “a frightful monster,” which “stands peering over the sleeping child,” casting smutty shadows.

Comstock gives us “disease, wounds, and putrefying sores,” debaucheries, suicides, murders, even acne and “tainted breath.” His tales of youth led astray and destroyed by smut are as visceral and exciting as the very dime novels by such authors as George Thompson that Comstock often burned. That was, of course, part of the reason the discourse worked so well; as French theorist Michel Foucault later noted, regulating and repressing sexuality can itself provide a perverse pleasure.

Until his dying day in 1915, Comstock intransigently insisted on the veracity of his analysis—even as a highly sexualized consumer culture sprouted around him, a testament to his failure. Comstockism would wax and wane, falling to the background during the 1920s Jazz Age or the wartime social dislocations of the 1940s, but it never vanished. During the Cold War heyday of the 1950s, in particular, it surged back into public consciousness, with a widespread anti-porn fervor tied to the domestic politics of the era, which sought to discipline and contain sexuality within the heterosexual nuclear family.

National leaders from Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver to FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover constantly linked smut to juvenile delinquency, sexual perversion and more. No group better embodied this resurgent anti-porn sentiment than Citizens for Decent Literature, founded by lawyer Charles Keating in late-1950s Cincinnati. CDL quickly built a national base, and its widely-seen 1963 propaganda film "Perversion for Profit" again employed a public-health lens toward smut. In it, narrator George Putnam held up posterboards showing the effects of pornography: increased VD rates, illegitimate births, juvenile delinquency and, worst of all in the Lavender Scare Fifties, such “sex deviations” as homosexuality or lesbianism! (It’s impossible to avoid exclamation marks in recounting this.) The evidence for all of this? Well, in one rare moment of candor a few years later, Charles Keating admitted he simply made it all up—which hindered CDL none, as it became the preeminent anti-porn group of the 1960s and ’70s, influencing everything from Supreme Court nominations to legal obscenity doctrine.

I found myself so captivated by "Perversion for Profit" that I named my first book after it, and in researching local CDL units I wound up at the Utah State Historical Society in Salt Lake City, examining the records of the Youth Protection Committee, a Salt Lake City organization established in 1958, which frequently worked with CDL. The language of social hygiene, precursor to public health, permeates its archive; in its 1958 bylaws folder, the committee lists “facts concerning the menace of obscenity and pornography,” including a 110 percent increase in rape cases since 1937 and a 25 percent increase in venereal disease. This logic animated the committee, as did concern that exposure to smut might corrupt children into homosexuality. Police chief W. Cleon Skousen, author of the paranoid tract "The Naked Communist," visited in June 1958 to inform the committee that “wherever you find a sex deviate, you find pornographic literature.” A few years later, another police captain reassured them of homosexuality that “in this vicinity it is not as serious as in some other areas of the country,” though he nonetheless had “a list of 30 names of young girls in this community who are involved”—“your daughter, lured into lesbianism,” as Putnam warned in "Perversion." In 1965 the group contacted a local health study asking about the relationship between porn and VD, and asserted a “real correlation.”

This analysis had material consequences, and when nearby Provo passed an anti-obscenity ordinance in 1966, only the phrasing, not the substance, departed from the 2016 resolution. While Provo expressed concern about inciting “sexual promiscuity or extra-marital or abnormal sex relations . . . on the part of young persons,” Utah today bemoans “problematic sexual activity at younger ages” and the “lessening desire in young men to marry, dissatisfaction in marriage, and infidelity.” Twenty-first century “public health” entails precisely the harnessing and disciplining of “normal” heterosexuality as the Cold War era witnessed.

In the half-century interim, this rhetoric recurred incessantly, coming mostly from the political right but also the left, as in the case of the feminist anti-pornography movement. When the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, appointed mostly by Lyndon Johnson and undertaking three years of social-science research, released its monumental report in 1970 calling for the decriminalization of adult obscenity, it found sexual ignorance and mystification more harmful than smut. President Richard Nixon responded by denouncing its “morally bankrupt conclusions,” using pollution as his metaphor of choice: “the pollution of our civilization with smut and filth is as serious a situation for the American people as the pollution of our once-pure air and water,” he said. Congress agreed, rejecting the report in an overwhelming, bipartisan consensus.

Meanwhile, as anti-porn feminist leaders Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon theorized pornography as a form of sex discrimination rather than speech in the 1980s (thus making it an action rather than mere expression, and subject to civil rights law rather than the First Amendment), one of the proposed laws inspired by their work, a 1992 Massachusetts measure, framed pornography as a “practice of sex discrimination which exists in the commonwealth and threatens the health, safety, peace, welfare and equality of its citizens.” While it failed to pass, once more the resemblance to Utah’s latest is striking.

So, the Utah resolution breaks less new ground than it purports. In its specific invocation of public health it mimics recent efforts by such groups as the American Public Health Association and Doctors for America to declare gun violence a public health crisis, and it also reflects the sophisticated institutionalization of conservative doctrine as purported science on issues ranging from climate change to evolution, which has evolved in the past few decades into a particularly effective strategy. Of course, many of the harms Utah lists are genuine social problems: treating women as “objects and commodities,” risky sexual behavior, hypersexualized youth, violence and abuse -- these are real and troubling things. But they are results of our toxic combination of still-prevalent patriarchal sexual values, poor sex education that still fails to affirm sexuality through the promotion of consent and desire as bedrock values, and, one might add, both the culture industry that has hypersexualized youth dating back to Shirley Temple’s Baby Burlesks era and the capitalism that commodifies all of our bodies as a basic operational principle.

Porn has always been an easy soapbox from which to proclaim one’s own moral virtues. In "Perversion for Profit," I argue that the modern right has always been more interested in damning the imagined “floodtide of filth” than actually damming it, and sanctimonious Utah bears this out, allotting precisely zero dollars to, well, doing anything about this public health crisis that poses such ostensible social threat. By this point in American history, the camps in this debate are probably too siloed to establish enough common ground for real dialogue. But at the very least, let’s not pretend this is an innovation. Utah’s new resolution is the rehashed ghost of Anthony Comstock calling, warning us about all that grim Satanic lust while doing nothing to address the conditions that perpetuate inequality, violence and sexual abuse.

Continue Reading...

We’re not the “good guys”: American drone warfare is terrorizing the Middle East

In a trio of recent action-packed movies, good guys watch terrorists mingling with innocent women and children via real-time video feeds from halfway across the world. A clock ticks and we, the audience, are let in on the secret that mayhem is going to break loose. After much agonized soul-searching about possible collateral damage, the good guys call in a missile strike from a U.S. drone to try to save the day by taking out a set of terrorists.

Such is the premise of Gavin Hood’s Eye in the Sky , Andrew Niccol’s Good Kill , and Rick Rosenthal’s Drones . In reality, in Washington’s drone wars neither the “good guys” nor the helpless, endangered villagers under those robotic aircraft actually survive the not-so secret drone war that the Obama administration has been waging relentlessly across the Greater Middle East -- not, at least, without some kind of collateral damage.  In addition to those they kill, Washington’s drones turn out to wound (in ways both physical and psychological) their own operators and the populations who live under their constant surveillance. They leave behind very real victims with all-too-real damage, often in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder on opposite sides of the globe.

“Sometimes I am so sad that my heart wants to explode,” an Afghan man says, speaking directly into the camera. “When your body is intact, your mind is different. You are content. But the moment you are wounded, your soul gets damaged. When your leg is torn off and your gait slows, it also burdens your spirit.” The speaker is an unnamed victim of a February 2010 drone strike in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, but he could just as easily be an Iraqi, a Pakistani, a Somali, or a Yemeni. He appears in National Bird , a haunting new documentary film by Sonia Kennebeck about the unexpected and largely unrecorded devastation Washington’s drone wars leave in their wake.  In it, the audience hears directly from both drone personnel and their victims.

“I Was Under the Impression That America Was Saving the World”

“When we are in our darkest places and we have a lot to worry about and we feel guilty about our past actions, it’s really tough to describe what that feeling is like,” says Daniel, a whistleblower who took part in drone operations and whose last name is not revealed in National Bird. Speaking of the suicidal feelings that sometimes plagued him while he was involved in killing halfway across the planet, he adds, “Having the image in your head of taking your own life is not a good feeling.”

National Bird is not the first muckraking documentary on Washington’s drone wars. Robert Greenwald’s Unmanned , Tonje Schei’s Drone , and Madiha Tahrir’s Wounds of Waziristan have already shone much-needed light on how drone warfare really works. But as Kennebeck told me, when she set out to make a film about the wages of the newest form of war known to humanity, she wanted those doing the targeting, as well as those they were targeting, to speak for themselves.  She wanted them to reveal the psychological impact of sending robot assassins, often operated by “pilots” halfway around the world, into the Greater Middle East to fight Washington’s war on terror. In her film, there’s no narrator, nor experts in suits working for think tanks in Washington, nor retired generals debating the value of drone strikes when it comes to defeating terrorism.

Instead, what you see is far less commonplace: low-level recruits in President Obama’s never-ending drone wars, those Air Force personnel who remotely direct the robotic vehicles to their targets, analyze the information they send back, and relay that information to the pilots who unleash Hellfire missiles that will devastate distant villages. If recent history is any guide, these drones do not just kill terrorists; in their target areas, they also create anxiety, upset, and a desire for revenge in a larger population and so have proven a powerful weapon in spreading terror movements across the Greater Middle East.

These previously faceless but distinctly non-robotic Air Force recruits are the cannon fodder of America’s drone wars.  You meet two twenty-somethings: Daniel, a self-described down-and-out homeless kid, every male member of whose family has been in jail on petty charges of one kind or another, and Heather, a small town high school graduate trying to escape rural Pennsylvania. You also meet Lisa, a former Army nurse from California, who initially saw the military as a path to a more meaningful life.

The three of them worked on Air Force bases scattered around the country from California to Virginia. The equipment they handled hovered above war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as Pakistan and Yemen (where the U.S. Air Force was supporting assassination missions on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency).

“That is so cool, unmanned aircraft. That’s really bad-ass.” So Heather thought when she first saw recruitment posters for the drone program. “I was under the impression,” she told Kennebeck, “that America was saving the world, like that we were Big Brother and we were helping everyone out.”

Initially, Lisa felt similarly: “When I first got into the military, I mean I was thinking it was a win-win. It was a force for good in the world. I thought I was going to be on the right side of history.”

And that was hardly surprising.  After all, you’re talking about the “perfect weapon,” the totally high-tech, “precise” and “surgical,” no-(American)-casualties, sci-fi version of war that Washington has been promoting for years as its answer to al-Qaeda and other terror outfits.  President Obama who has personally overseen the drone campaigns -- with a “kill list” and “terror Tuesday” meetings at the White House -- vividly described his version of such a modern war in a 2013 speech at the National Defense University:

“This is a just war -- a war waged proportionally, in last resort, and in self-defense. We were attacked on 9/11. Under domestic law, and international law, the United States is at war with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their associated forces… America does not take strikes to punish individuals; we act against terrorists who pose a continuing and imminent threat to the American people. And before any strike is taken, there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured -- the highest standard we can set.”

That distinctly Hollywood vision of America’s drone wars (with a Terminator edge) was the one that had filtered down to the level of Kennebeck’s three drone-team interviewees when they signed on.  It looked to them then like a war worth fighting and a life worth leading.  Today, as they speak out, their version of such warfare looks nothing like what either Hollywood or Washington might imagine.

“Excuse Me, Sir, Can I Have Your Driver’s License?”

National Bird does more than look at the devastation caused by drones in far away lands and the overwhelming anxiety it produces among those who live under the distant buzzing and constant threat of those robotic aircraft on an almost daily basis. Kennebeck also turns her camera on the men and women who helped make the strikes possible, trying to assess what the impact of their war has been on them. Their raw and unfiltered responses should deeply trouble us all.

Kennebeck’s interviewees are among at least a dozen whistleblowers who have stepped forward, or are preparing to do so, in order to denounce Washington’s drone wars as morally unjustified, as in fact nightmares both for those who fight them and those living in the lands that are on the receiving end. The realities of the day-in, day-out war they fought for years were, as they tell it, deeply destructive and filled with collateral damage of every sort.  Worse yet, drone operators turn out to have little real idea about, and almost no confirmation of, whom exactly they’ve blown away.

“It’s so primitive, raw, stripped-down death. This is real. It’s not a joke,” says Heather, an imagery analyst whose job was to look at the streaming video coming in from drones over war zones and interpret the grainy images for senior commanders in the kill chain. “You see someone die because you said it was okay to kill them. I was always shaking. Sometimes I would just go to the bathroom and just sit on the toilet. I mean just sit there in my uniform and just cry.”

Advocates of drone war believe, as do many of its critics, that it minimizes casualties. These Air Force veterans have, however, stepped forward to tell us that such claims simply aren’t true. In a study of what can be known about drone killings, the human rights group Reprieve has confirmed this reality vividly, finding that, in Pakistan, in attempts to take out 41 men, American drones actually killed an estimated 1,147 people (while not all of the 41 targeted figures even died). In other words, this hasn’t proved to be a war on terror, but a war of terror, a reality the drone whistleblowers confirm.

Heather is blunt in her criticism. “Hearing politicians speak about drones being precision weapons [makes it seem like they’re] able to make surgical strikes. To me it’s completely ridiculous, completely ludicrous to make these statements.”

The three whistleblowers point, for instance, to the complete absence of any post-strike verification of who exactly has died. “There’s a bomb. They drop it. It explodes,” Lisa says. “Then what? Does somebody go down and ask for somebody’s driver’s license? Excuse me, sir, can I have your driver’s license, see who you are? Does that happen? I mean, how do we know? How is it possible to know who ends up living or dying?”

After three years as an imagery analyst, after regularly watching unknown people die thousands of miles away on a grainy screen, Heather was diagnosed as suicidal. She estimates -- and the experiences of other drone whistleblowers back her up -- that alcoholics accounted for a significant percentage of her unit, and that many of her co-workers had similarly suicidal thoughts. Two actually did kill themselves.

As Heather’s grandfather points out, “She had trouble getting the treatment she needed. She had trouble finding a doctor because they didn’t have the right security clearance [and] she could be in violation of the law and could even go to prison for even talking to the wrong therapist about what was bothering her.”

In desperation Heather turned to her mother. "She’d call me up and she’d cry and she’d be upset, but then she couldn’t talk about it," her mother says. "When you hear your daughter talking to you on the phone, you can that tell she is in trouble just by the emotion and inflection and the stress that you can hear in her voice. When you ask her, did you talk to anyone else about it? She’d say no, we’re not allowed to talk to anybody. I have a feeling that if someone wasn’t there for her, she wouldn’t be here right now."

Like Heather, Daniel has so far survived his own drone-war-induced mental health issues, but in his post-drone life he’s run into a formidable enemy: the U.S. government. On August 8, 2014, he estimates that as many as 50 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents raided his house, seizing documents and his electronics.

“The government suspects that he is a source of information about the [drone] program that the government doesn’t want out there,” says Jesselyn Radack, his lawyer and herself a former Department of Justice whistleblower. “To me, that’s simply an attempt to silence whistleblowers, and it doesn’t surprise me that that happens to the very few people who have been brave enough to speak out against the drone program.”

If that was the intention, however, the raid -- and the threat it carries for other whistleblowers -- seems not to have had the desired effect. Instead, the number of what might be thought of as defectors from the drone program only seems to be growing. The first to come out was Brandon Bryant, a former camera operator in October 2013. He was followed by Cian Westmoreland, a former radio technician, in November 2014. Last November, Michael Haas and Stephen Lewis, two imagery analysts, joined Westmoreland and Bryant by speaking out at the launch of Tonje Schei’s film Drone . All four of them also published an open letter to President Obama warning him that the drone war was escalating terrorism, not containing it.

And just last month, Chris Aaron, a former counterterrorism analyst for the CIA’s drone program, spoke out on a panel at the University of Nevada Law School. In the relatively near future, Radack recently told Rolling Stone, four more individuals involved in America’s drone wars are planning to offer their insights into how the program works.

Like Heather and Daniel, many of the former drone operators who have gone public are struggling with mental health problems. Some of them are also dealing with substance abuse issues that began as a way to counteract or dull the horrors of the war they were waging and witnessing. "We used to call alcohol drone fuel because it kept the program going. Everyone drank. There was a lot of coke, speed, and that sort of thing," imagery analyst Haas toldRolling Stone. "If the higher ups knew, then they didn't say anything, but I'm pretty sure they must have known. It was everywhere.”

“Imagine If This Was Happening to Us”

In recent months, something has changed for the whistleblowers. There is a new sense of camaraderie among them, as well as with the lawyers defending them and a growing group of activist supporters. Most unexpectedly, they are hearing from the families of victims of drone strikes, thanks to the work of groups like Reprieve in Great Britain.

In mid-April, for instance, when Cian Westmoreland was visiting London, he met with Malik Jalal, a Pakistani tribal leader who claims that he has been targeted by U.S. drones on multiple occasions. Clive Lewis, a member of Parliament and military veteran, released a photo on Facebook of the meeting. “It's possible that one of the two men I'm [standing] between in this picture, Cian Westmoreland, was trying to kill the man on my right, Malik Jalal -- at some stage in the past seven years,” Lewis wrote. “Their story is both amazing and terrifying. At once it shows the growing menace and destructive capability of unchecked political and military power juxtaposed with the power of the human spirit and human solidarity."

As that sense of solidarity strengthens and as the distance between the former hunters and the hunted begins to narrow, the whistleblowers are beginning to confront some distinctly uncomfortable questions. “We often hear that drones can see everything by day and by night,” a different drone victim of the February 2010 strike in Uruzgan told filmmaker Kennebeck. “You can see the difference between a needle and an ant but not people? We were sitting in the pickup truck, some even on the bed. Did you not see that there were travelers, women and children?”

When the president and his key officials look at the drone program, they undoubtedly don’t “see” women and children. Instead, they are caught up in a Hollywood-style vision of imminent danger from terrorists and of the kind of salvation that a missile launched from thousands of miles away provides. It is undoubtedly thanks to just this thought process, already deeply embedded in the American way of war, that not a single candidate for president in 2016 has rejected the drone program.

That is exactly what the whistleblowers feel needs to change. “I just want people to know that not everybody is a freaking terrorist and we need to just get out of that mindset. And we just need to see these people as people -- families, communities, brothers, mothers, and sisters, because that’s who they are,” says Lisa. “Imagine if this was happening to us. Imagine if our children were walking outside of the door and it was a sunny day and they were afraid because they didn’t know if today was the day that something would fall out of the sky and kill someone close to them. How would we feel?”

Continue Reading...

Who gets to borrow white privilege? This is what happens when an Asian-American cop kills an unarmed African-American

In November 2014, Peter Liang, a New York City police officer, discharged his weapon in a dark stairwell. The bullet ricocheted off of a wall before it hit Akai Gurley in his chest.

Peter Liang is Chinese-American. Akai Gurley is African-American.

As Gurley lay on the ground bleeding to death, Peter Liang, panic stricken, was texting his union representative for guidance about how to proceed after the shooting.

Liang did not render any aid to Gurley.

Two years later, Liang would be convicted of manslaughter. In response, several thousand protesters, most of them Asian-American, gathered at a park near the Brooklyn courthouse. They were upset that Liang was being punished for killing Akai Gurley. Many of them carried signs that read “No Selective Justice” and “One Tragedy, Two Victims.”

A common sentiment uniting Peter Liang’s supporters was that he, an Asian-American, was being “unfairly” punished for killing a black man, when so many white officers had done so without suffering any negative consequences. In essence, this was a demand that justice for Liang required that a perverse and very powerful type of white privilege be fully extended to Asian-Americans as well.

As one person made the case to the New York Times:

“All the policemen have no punishment for all they did,” said Tommy Shi, 30, who lives in Manhattan and works in a restaurant. “Peter Liang is a scapegoat for all this.” He added: “That’s why we stand for Peter Liang.”

Tommy Shi’s wish was granted on April 19, 2016. Peter Liang would receive no prison time for the killing of Akai Gurley. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson requested a more lenient sentence. In response, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun decided to be merciful.

Once again, a black man has been killed by America’s out-of-control police. The black necropolis in the Age of Obama has one more body to add to its catacombs. Legal murder by an agent of the State will go (relatively) unpunished. This is but one more confirmation of how black life is cheap in America, and why the slogan “black lives matter” is both a demand on justice and power, as well as a much-needed personal and communal affirmation.

Multiple narratives about race and the color line in post-civil-rights-era America intersected in that tragic moment, when in a dark stairwell of a New York City housing project, an Asian-American cop shot to death an innocent and unarmed black man. Race is a biological fiction. It is given meaning and power by society. As such, individuals, elites and communities create “race.” Race is made by a myriad of factors and agents such as the law, politics, economics, popular culture, schools, religion, the news media and the arts. In the United States and the West, race has historically functioned as a convenient way of organizing society by assigning rights and privileges to some groups and individuals while simultaneously denying them to others. And even in an era of supposed “color blindness,” “equality” and “post-racial” politics, race and racism are a type of societal constant that positions those arbitrarily deemed “white” at the top of the socioeconomic and political hierarchy and those marked as “non-white” at various levels below them.

The social and political life of the United States has been oriented around what historians, social scientists and other scholars have described as “the black-white binary.” Whites were/are dominant and privileged; black people, first as human property, and then as “free” people, were/are positioned as subordinate and lacking the same privileges as whites. Other racial groups—Hispanics, Latinos, First Nations and Asians—are positioned relative to these two extremes. If whiteness is a type of privilege and power, and by comparison “blackness” has historically been a source of stigma and oppression, Asians and other non-whites have had to situate themselves between those two poles.

The interactions between black Americans and other people of color have created exciting, productive, rich and powerful moments of exchange and alliances. Hip-hop culture was born from these forces. The “Black and Brown Power” movements of the 1960s were a result of the political synergy created by African-Americans, Latinos, First Nations and other marginalized groups fighting for their full human rights.

These moments of contact between black Americans and East Asians, in particular, have also come with challenges, conflict, and human loss. For example, the “Mississippi Chinese” were laborers and entrepreneurs who often formed families and created a community with African-Americans under the regime of Jim and Jane Crow during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Chinese occupied a liminal space in the Southern racial order and consequently were allowed a marginal degree of upward mobility within America’s Apartheid system. White Southern elites would eventually put an end to this arrangement. Through threats of violence and economic retaliation, many Mississippi Chinese would be forced to abandon their black children, partners, families, friends and colleagues.

During the urban uprisings in the aftermath of the Rodney King decision in 1992, Asian stores and businesses were supposedly targeted by black and brown rioters for looting and destruction. In the same era, New York City and other major American cities would also experience incidents of tension and protest between East and South Asian shopkeepers and black inner-city residents.

In total, these are conflicts between people of color about resources, jobs and political power. These are also the powerful forces that helped to create Peter Liang and Akai Gurley’s fatal encounter, and the largely divergent responses by the Asian-American and black communities to it.

Historically, becoming a police officer is one of the primary ways through which white, male ethnics have found upward class mobility in America. Being a police officer was and is secure work with great benefits. This is why the “wages of whiteness” that came with such jobs are so highly prized and protected to this day.

Police work is also one of the few jobs in America where a person without a college degree can be given a uniform, a gun and the power to commit legal murder. Policing is also political work. In the United States, America’s modern police can trace their origins to the slave patrollers of the antebellum South. The police also represent and enforce the interests of the rich and the powerful over the poor and the working classes. The law is not neutral; by implication, neither are its foot soldiers.

Thus, Peter Liang, a Chinese-American, a man who just wanted a good and secure job as a police officer, joined an organization that is part of a system--what Michelle Alexander has termed the “New Jim Crow”--which systematically discriminates against, harasses and kills black and brown people.

The relative lack of punishment for Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley is not an aberration. It is a feature of a racist and classist law enforcement system that is working exactly as intended.

More than one hundred unarmed black people were killed by America’s police in 2015.

As reported by the Mapping Police Violence project, 37 percent of unarmed people killed by police in 2015 were black, despite black people being only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Unarmed black people were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.

The Washington Post has compiled data which demonstrates that black men are seven times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. Subsequent research has also concluded that:

“The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.” In the study, researchers wrote that their analysis of the 990 fatal shootings in 2015 “suggests the police exhibit shooter bias by falsely perceiving blacks to be a greater threat than non-blacks to their safety.”

Black individuals shot and killed by police were less likely to have been attacking police officers than the white individuals fatally shot by police, the study found. “This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on,” Nix said. “Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.”

Psychologists have conducted experiments that repeatedly demonstrate how police officers are more likely to shoot unarmed black men than they are whites.

America’s police departments do not keep accurate records on how many people their officers kill. who have killed people.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not have an accurate accounting of the number of people killed by America’s police.

Investigations have revealed how police in major cities such as Chicago and New York routinely violate the rights of blacks and Latinos. Example: A recent report on the civil rights violations committed by the Chicago police determined that the latter’s "own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color."

Ultimately, the tragic death of Akai Gurley at the hands of Peter Liang is a story about how the color blue that is often worn by police officers trumps the human rights of black and brown Americans. Thus, Liang benefited from a type of honorary (however not full) whiteness that comes when people of color don a police uniform.

As reported by the New York Post, Judge Chun explained Liang’s reduced sentence in the following way:

There is no evidence, either direct or circumstantial, that the defendant was aware of Akai Gurley’s presence and therefore disregarded any risk [to him]…

The New York Post continued:

The judge said he agreed with Thompson’s no-jail recommendation because “as I watched the video of the defendant entering the lobby of the Pink Houses, I couldn’t help but feel he was entering with the serious mind of protecting the people."

“Shooting somebody never entered his mind,’’ Chun said. “I find incarceration to be unnecessary.”

This is a corrupt system protecting its own members and agents.

The outcome in the Peter Liang case also leads to a natural counterfactual and thought experiment.

What if Akai Gurley or another resident of The Pink Houses project, in fear of crime and scared to walk in a dark stairwell, pulled out a pistol, and upon being startled by the sound of a door slamming shut, accidentally discharged a weapon. The bullet then ricocheted off a wall and hit a New York City police officer, killing him. Assuming this person survived said encounter with the New York police, it is highly unlikely, if not wholly impossible, that a prosecutor or judge would have shown him or her the same mercy and leniency extended to Peter Liang.

It is true that Peter Liang may have been punished more severely than a white cop for killing Akai Gurley. However, Liang will not go to prison; his punishment was light; he will continue onward with his life, and Akai Gurley is still dead.

Police violence against black Americans is one of the remaining hangovers from a country founded on slavery, and where Jim and Jane Crow Apartheid was the rule of the land until the 1960s.

This is a moral abomination.

While the enforcers of this history and a system of white supremacy that lingers into the present may be more “racially diverse,” their murderous and other illegal deeds--and the protection offered for them--are no less racist and wrong.In November 2014, Peter Liang, a New York City police officer, discharged his weapon in a dark stairwell. The bullet ricocheted off of a wall before it hit Akai Gurley in his chest.

Peter Liang is Chinese-American. Akai Gurley is African-American.

As Gurley lay on the ground bleeding to death, Peter Liang, panic stricken, was texting his union representative for guidance about how to proceed after the shooting.

Liang did not render any aid to Gurley.

Two years later, Liang would be convicted of manslaughter. In response, several thousand protesters, most of them Asian-American, gathered at a park near the Brooklyn courthouse. They were upset that Liang was being punished for killing Akai Gurley. Many of them carried signs that read “No Selective Justice” and “One Tragedy, Two Victims.”

A common sentiment uniting Peter Liang’s supporters was that he, an Asian-American, was being “unfairly” punished for killing a black man, when so many white officers had done so without suffering any negative consequences. In essence, this was a demand that justice for Liang required that a perverse and very powerful type of white privilege be fully extended to Asian-Americans as well.

As one person made the case to the New York Times:

“All the policemen have no punishment for all they did,” said Tommy Shi, 30, who lives in Manhattan and works in a restaurant. “Peter Liang is a scapegoat for all this.” He added: “That’s why we stand for Peter Liang.”

Tommy Shi’s wish was granted on April 19, 2016. Peter Liang would receive no prison time for the killing of Akai Gurley. Brooklyn District Attorney Ken Thompson requested a more lenient sentence. In response, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun decided to be merciful.

Once again, a black man has been killed by America’s out-of-control police. The black necropolis in the Age of Obama has one more body to add to its catacombs. Legal murder by an agent of the State will go (relatively) unpunished. This is but one more confirmation of how black life is cheap in America, and why the slogan “black lives matter” is both a demand on justice and power, as well as a much-needed personal and communal affirmation.

Multiple narratives about race and the color line in post-civil-rights-era America intersected in that tragic moment, when in a dark stairwell of a New York City housing project, an Asian-American cop shot to death an innocent and unarmed black man. Race is a biological fiction. It is given meaning and power by society. As such, individuals, elites and communities create “race.” Race is made by a myriad of factors and agents such as the law, politics, economics, popular culture, schools, religion, the news media and the arts. In the United States and the West, race has historically functioned as a convenient way of organizing society by assigning rights and privileges to some groups and individuals while simultaneously denying them to others. And even in an era of supposed “color blindness,” “equality” and “post-racial” politics, race and racism are a type of societal constant that positions those arbitrarily deemed “white” at the top of the socioeconomic and political hierarchy and those marked as “non-white” at various levels below them.

The social and political life of the United States has been oriented around what historians, social scientists and other scholars have described as “the black-white binary.” Whites were/are dominant and privileged; black people, first as human property, and then as “free” people, were/are positioned as subordinate and lacking the same privileges as whites. Other racial groups—Hispanics, Latinos, First Nations and Asians—are positioned relative to these two extremes. If whiteness is a type of privilege and power, and by comparison “blackness” has historically been a source of stigma and oppression, Asians and other non-whites have had to situate themselves between those two poles.

The interactions between black Americans and other people of color have created exciting, productive, rich and powerful moments of exchange and alliances. Hip-hop culture was born from these forces. The “Black and Brown Power” movements of the 1960s were a result of the political synergy created by African-Americans, Latinos, First Nations and other marginalized groups fighting for their full human rights.

These moments of contact between black Americans and East Asians, in particular, have also come with challenges, conflict, and human loss. For example, the “Mississippi Chinese” were laborers and entrepreneurs who often formed families and created a community with African-Americans under the regime of Jim and Jane Crow during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The Chinese occupied a liminal space in the Southern racial order and consequently were allowed a marginal degree of upward mobility within America’s Apartheid system. White Southern elites would eventually put an end to this arrangement. Through threats of violence and economic retaliation, many Mississippi Chinese would be forced to abandon their black children, partners, families, friends and colleagues.

During the urban uprisings in the aftermath of the Rodney King decision in 1992, Asian stores and businesses were supposedly targeted by black and brown rioters for looting and destruction. In the same era, New York City and other major American cities would also experience incidents of tension and protest between East and South Asian shopkeepers and black inner-city residents.

In total, these are conflicts between people of color about resources, jobs and political power. These are also the powerful forces that helped to create Peter Liang and Akai Gurley’s fatal encounter, and the largely divergent responses by the Asian-American and black communities to it.

Historically, becoming a police officer is one of the primary ways through which white, male ethnics have found upward class mobility in America. Being a police officer was and is secure work with great benefits. This is why the “wages of whiteness” that came with such jobs are so highly prized and protected to this day.

Police work is also one of the few jobs in America where a person without a college degree can be given a uniform, a gun and the power to commit legal murder. Policing is also political work. In the United States, America’s modern police can trace their origins to the slave patrollers of the antebellum South. The police also represent and enforce the interests of the rich and the powerful over the poor and the working classes. The law is not neutral; by implication, neither are its foot soldiers.

Thus, Peter Liang, a Chinese-American, a man who just wanted a good and secure job as a police officer, joined an organization that is part of a system--what Michelle Alexander has termed the “New Jim Crow”--which systematically discriminates against, harasses and kills black and brown people.

The relative lack of punishment for Peter Liang’s killing of Akai Gurley is not an aberration. It is a feature of a racist and classist law enforcement system that is working exactly as intended.

More than one hundred unarmed black people were killed by America’s police in 2015.

As reported by the Mapping Police Violence project, 37 percent of unarmed people killed by police in 2015 were black, despite black people being only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Unarmed black people were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites in 2015.

The Washington Post has compiled data which demonstrates that black men are seven times more likely to be killed by police than are whites. Subsequent research has also concluded that:

“The only thing that was significant in predicting whether someone shot and killed by police was unarmed was whether or not they were black,” said Justin Nix, a criminal justice researcher at the University of Louisville and one of the report’s authors. “Crime variables did not matter in terms of predicting whether the person killed was unarmed.” In the study, researchers wrote that their analysis of the 990 fatal shootings in 2015 “suggests the police exhibit shooter bias by falsely perceiving blacks to be a greater threat than non-blacks to their safety.”

Black individuals shot and killed by police were less likely to have been attacking police officers than the white individuals fatally shot by police, the study found. “This just bolsters our confidence that there is some sort of implicit bias going on,” Nix said. “Officers are perceiving a greater threat when encountered by unarmed black citizens.”

Psychologists have conducted experiments that repeatedly demonstrate how police officers are more likely to shoot unarmed black men than they are whites.

America’s police departments do not keep accurate records on how many people their officers kill. who have killed people.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not have an accurate accounting of the number of people killed by America’s police.

Investigations have revealed how police in major cities such as Chicago and New York routinely violate the rights of blacks and Latinos. Example: A recent report on the civil rights violations committed by the Chicago police determined that the latter’s "own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color."

Ultimately, the tragic death of Akai Gurley at the hands of Peter Liang is a story about how the color blue that is often worn by police officers trumps the human rights of black and brown Americans. Thus, Liang benefited from a type of honorary (however not full) whiteness that comes when people of color don a police uniform.

As reported by the New York Post, Judge Chun explained Liang’s reduced sentence in the following way:

There is no evidence, either direct or circumstantial, that the defendant was aware of Akai Gurley’s presence and therefore disregarded any risk [to him]…

The New York Post continued:

The judge said he agreed with Thompson’s no-jail recommendation because “as I watched the video of the defendant entering the lobby of the Pink Houses, I couldn’t help but feel he was entering with the serious mind of protecting the people."

“Shooting somebody never entered his mind,’’ Chun said. “I find incarceration to be unnecessary.”

This is a corrupt system protecting its own members and agents.

The outcome in the Peter Liang case also leads to a natural counterfactual and thought experiment.

What if Akai Gurley or another resident of The Pink Houses project, in fear of crime and scared to walk in a dark stairwell, pulled out a pistol, and upon being startled by the sound of a door slamming shut, accidentally discharged a weapon. The bullet then ricocheted off a wall and hit a New York City police officer, killing him. Assuming this person survived said encounter with the New York police, it is highly unlikely, if not wholly impossible, that a prosecutor or judge would have shown him or her the same mercy and leniency extended to Peter Liang.

It is true that Peter Liang may have been punished more severely than a white cop for killing Akai Gurley. However, Liang will not go to prison; his punishment was light; he will continue onward with his life, and Akai Gurley is still dead.

Police violence against black Americans is one of the remaining hangovers from a country founded on slavery, and where Jim and Jane Crow Apartheid was the rule of the land until the 1960s.

This is a moral abomination.

While the enforcers of this history and a system of white supremacy that lingers into the present may be more “racially diverse,” their murderous and other illegal deeds--and the protection offered for them--are no less racist and wrong.

Continue Reading...

The night Mark Twain brought Huck Finn alive

Livy had some choice advice for her husband, Mark Twain: Make it less funny. Give the audience a chance to catch its breath.

Never a champion of his vaudeville tendencies, she now wanted him to show off his narrative talents. Lesser men could tell that christening joke; she suggested that he insert at least one long, moving emotional story into his program, maybe Huck Finn and runaway slave Jim on the raft floating down the Mississippi. He could build to the key scene when the poor undereducated white boy, the hooligan son of the town drunk, agonizes over whether to do what everyone in Hannibal tells him is the right thing to do, that is, to hand over his best friend, Jim, to the slave catchers. Huck, in that moment, must decide whether to ignore his heart and obey the community “conscience” and the laws of the slave state of Missouri. It is immensely powerful in the midst of a novel, but would it work as a twenty-minute monologue?

Twain was skeptical, but he took her advice in Minneapolis, the sixth stop of the tour, and that Huck-and-Jim story would prove far and away the most popular of his round-the-world repertoire, singled out by critics and audiences from North America to New Zealand to India.

But before he could deliver in Minneapolis, he had to weather the fifth stop, Duluth, which had played out like a comedy of errors. The gargantuan steamship SS Northwest had hit a traffic jam of 600 boats waiting at the locks connecting the unequal water levels of Lake Huron and Lake Superior, and that delay had caused 1,250 paying customers to wait an hour in 100-degree heat in the unventilated First Methodist Church. Major Pond had shouted at the dock to the panicked church organizer:

“Don’t worry, we’ll have ’em convulsed in ten minutes.” When Susy later heard about Pond’s slick promise, she wondered how “poor little modest mama” was able “to put up with such splurge.”

After some mix-ups in baggage transfers and unbooked sleeping cars, the Clemens entourage arrived, exhausted, in Minneapolis on the morning of Tuesday, July 23. Pond checked them into the city’s finest, the eight-story West Hotel, so luxurious that it charged $5 a night per person, while other excellent places in town charged $2. (It’s a tad ironic that Twain, trying to escape bankruptcy, almost always stayed in each city’s best hotel; he seemed determined never to lower his heiress wife’s standard of living.)

Minneapolis in 1895 was a fast-expanding commercial metropolis of 200,000 “including many Scandinavians,” parked on the Mississippi River, harnessing “the power of 120,000 horses” at St. Anthony Falls to run flour and textile mills. Pillsbury produced more fine-grade flour than any other mill in the world, with quality equal to the “best Hungarian fancy brands,” according to the Baedeker guide. Lumber mills north of the city band-sawed 400 million board feet of pine and hardwood logs a year. Prosperity attracted investment from East Coast enterprises, such as New York Life Insurance, whose building featured a famous French-inspired double-spiral staircase.

Major Pond had also booked Twain to have lunch with the mayor and other prominent citizens at the Commercial Club. A newspaper reporter claimed he overheard at least fifty people inform the author that "Innocents Abroad" was the first book they had ever read. In every city, celebrities attracted invitations. The author endured the glad-handing, but he admitted in his notebooks that he often found small talk very small, and preferred an audience of one thousand strangers to an audience of one stranger.

Twain was fagged out after the night train and chitchat, and his thigh was hurting. He begged off for an afternoon nap. Major Pond woke him to talk to six reporters. He refused to get out of bed, so the reporters interviewed him there, still under the covers.

He liked self-promotion but hated interviews; he even crafted a comedy segment—that he performed about a dozen times—on how to baffle interviewers with mounds of contradictory answers. He would cite three birthplaces; he would claim he was a twin and that he wasn’t certain whether he or his brother had drowned. He’d say a birthmark might prove it, but he wasn’t sure which twin had the birthmark. “There it is on my hand,” he would say, confessing that he must have been the twin that drowned.

Being a former newspaperman, he expected to be misquoted. He also hated giving away material for free and loathed how reporters summarized and bollixed his stories. He would attend a banquet, make some remarks, and then read his quotes in the next day’s paper. “You do not recognize the corpse, you wonder is this really that gay and handsome creature of the evening before.”

But when those six reporters entered Room 204 of West Hotel, Twain charmed them. He explained about the carbuncle forcing him to stay in bed; he discussed some of his favorite living authors (William Dean Howells and Rudyard Kipling); he told a cute family story about how his then nine-year-old daughter Jean had once tried to jump into an adult conversation. “I know who wrote Tom Sawyer,” Jean chimed in. All the dinner guests stared at the little girl. “Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe did!”

And the author waved the American flag, saying he was ending his four years of living in Europe. “I am going to settle down in my Hartford home and enjoy life in a quiet way.”

As always, Twain addressed the reporters, as he spoke to friends, in a s-l-o-w manner with his mesmerizing voice with a hint of a twang, similar to his stage performance.

His talk—I encountered him several times in London and New York—was delightfully whimsical and individual. The only drawback was that his natural drawl—freely punctuated, moreover, by his perpetual cigar being constantly put into and taken out of his mouth—made his utterance terribly slow. While waiting in a faithful and always justified hope that the point would come, you were reduced to admiring his magnificent head, leonine, with a snow-white mane.

So wrote Anthony Hope (1863–1933), English author of the huge 1894 bestseller "The Prisoner of Zenda."

At the agreed cut-off time, Major Pond burst into the room. A scribe was just asking Twain if he had ever visited the city, and he replied that he had, eleven years earlier. Pond chirped: “Why, I was in Minneapolis when there were no saloons here.”

Twain drawled: “Well, you didn’t stay long.” The newspapermen “laughed at the major’s expense.”

Twain rested and continued to memorize the new material.

Around 7:30 p.m., he and Pond took the short walk to the Metropolitan Opera House along sidewalks paved with thick cedar slabs. The ornate opera house was packed from the orchestra seats to the top gallery, with captains of industry and children, college students and mill workers. Twain attracted a diverse crowd. The Minneapolis Times, in its scene setter, estimated that no living American had made more people laugh than Mark Twain, especially in the wake of “the untimely death of Artemus Ward.”

As he had put in his first flyer: “The trouble begins at eight.” At the stroke of the hour, he strode out in the “swallow-tail [jacket] and immaculate shirt-bosom of fin-de-siecle society.” One reviewer marveled at his transformation from the rough miner and suntanned riverboat pilot of the 1860s. The Times entitled its piece “Twice Told Tales” because for the most part Twain was telling his greatest hits.

Twain waited for the applause to die down, then said simply: “Ladies and gentlemen, with your permission, I will dispense with an introduction.” More applause greeted him. (He was casting off that rambling “Morals” speech.)

He stood there, bushy brows, mustache and thick wavy hair—a caricaturist’s delight—with the merest, faintest rumor of a hint of mischief in the eyes. He spoke slowly, not loudly, but his rich voice carried in an intimate way. He never smiled, seemed startled that anyone would laugh. Many claimed that hearing him topped reading him, a high bar indeed. (No recordings exist of Twain’s performance or even of his voice; he feared he’d miss out on a payday if someone started making copies on Edison wax cylinders and selling them.)

He launched right into his first story. (The Minneapolis Times noted pauses and laughter.)

A man ought to know himself early—the earlier the better. He ought to find out . . . how far he can go and how much bravery there is in him and when to stop—not overstrain. I had the good fortune to learn the limit of my personal courage when I was only thirteen. My father at that time was a magistrate in Hannibal, Missouri.

Twain explained that his father was also the town coroner and that he kept a little bird-coop-sized office with a sofa.

Often when I was on my way to school I would notice that [the sky] was threatening; that it was not good weather for school (laughter) and very likely to get wet and I better go—fishing (laughter), so I went fishing. It was wrong—yes, it was wrong. That is why I did it. Forbidden fruit was just as satisfactory to me as it was to Adam. If he had been there he would have gone a-fishing.

I always had more confidence in my own judgment than I did in anybody else’s. And now when I returned from those unorthodox excursions it was not safe for me to go home, for I would be confronted with all sorts of ignorant prejudice. (laughter)

And so I used to spend the night in that little office and let the atmosphere clear it (laughter).

Twain recounted that one day in Hannibal, while he was off fishing, a street fight had broken out. A man had been stabbed in the chest with a Bowie knife and killed, and his corpse—stripped to the waist—had been dragged to his father’s office for an inquest the following morning.

Well, I arrived about midnight (laughter) and I didn’t know anything about that (laughter), and I slipped in the back way and groped around until I found that [sofa], and laid down on it, and I was just dropping off into that sweetest of all slumbers, which is procured by honest endeavor. (laughter) When my eyes became a little more accustomed to the gloom it seemed to me that I could make out the vague, dim outline of a shapeless mass stretched there on the floor, and it made me uncomfortable. My first thought was to go and feel of it—and then I thought I wouldn’t. (laughter) Well, my attention was carried away from my sleep. I was just beyond that thing.

Twain decided to wait till the moonlight through the window revealed the object.

But it got to be so dreary and so uncanny and sort of ghastly— waiting on that creeping moonlight, and that mystery grew and grew and grew in size and importance all the time and it got so that it didn’t seem to me that I could endure it. And then I had an idea. I would turn over with my face to the wall and count a thousand (laughter) and give the moonlight a chance (laughter).

He made it as high as forty-five, drifted off a few times, whirled a few times, and then the next time, he saw a “pallid hand” in a square of moonlight.

I sat right up and began to stare at that dead hand and began to try—to say to myself “Be quiet, be calm, don’t lose your nerve” (laughter). So I did the best I could and watched that moonlight creep, creep, creep up that white, dead arm, and it was the miserable, miserable . . . —I never was so embarrassed in my life (laughter). It crept, crept, crept until it exposed the whole arm and the white shoulder and a projecting lock of hair—it got so unendurable that I thought I must begin to do somethin’ some time or other, some how or other.—I closed my eyes, put my hands on my eyes and held them as long as I could stand it, and then opened them. And then I got just one glimpse, just one glimpse and there was that drawn white face, white as wax in the moonlight, and staring glassy eyes, the mangled body. . . . Just that one swift glimpse and then, well, I went away from there (laughter).

I did not go in what you might call a hurry—I just went (laughter) that is all. I went out the window (laughter). Took the [curtain] sash with me (renewed laughter). I didn’t need the sash but it was handier to take it than it was to leave it (laughter) so I took it.

Ten minutes in and Twain was off to a very good start. He now made no pretense of using “Morals” to bind the stories together. He simply said, with absolutely no basis for saying it: “Now that brings me by a natural and easy transition to Simon Wheeler.” He then told “Jumping Frog,” which he had whittled down to thirteen minutes, and then “Grandfather’s Old Ram,” drawn from Roughing It. The brilliant punch line is that there is no punch line; the meandering storyteller veers off again and again. “My grandfather was stooping down in the level meadow, with his hands on his knees, hunting for a dime that he had lost in the grass and that ram was back yonder in the meadow when he sees him in that attitude he took him for a target . . . and came bearing down at twenty miles an hour.” The story hinged on the teller always getting sidetracked and never revealing whatever happened to the old man and the ram. By the end, he had some audience members gasping for air.

Now Twain followed Livy’s advice. Even though his comedy was flourishing, he sought the downbeat and told Tom and Huck. He needed an adept introduction to place listeners who hadn’t read the book smack in the middle of the drama.

And that brings me by the same process which I am following right along, regular sequence morally, and to an incident which made a great deal of stir at the time when I was a boy down there in [Hannibal], a sort of thing which you cannot very well understand now; that was the loyalty of everybody, rich and poor, down there in the South to the institution of slavery, and I remember Huck Finn, a boy who I knew very well, a common drunkard’s son, absolutely without education but with plenty of liberty, more liberty than we had, didn’t have to go to school or Sunday school, or change his clothes during the life of the clothes, and we preferred to associate with him because we envied him. Even Huck Finn recognized and subscribed to the common feeling of that community; that it was a shame, that it was a humiliation, that it was a dishonor, for any man when a negro was escaping from slavery—it was his duty to go and give up that negro. It shows what you can do with a conscience. You can train it in any direction you want to. I have written about that in a story where Huck Finn runs away from his brutal father and at the same time the slave Jim runs away from his mistress [i.e., owner], because he finds she is going to sell him down the river, and they meet by accident on a wooded island and they catch a piece of raft that is adrift and they travel on that at night, hiding in the daytime and they float down the Mississippi.

Now Twain needed to act out the scenes on the raft. He had marked up his own copy of Huck Finn, crossing out words, adding underlines for emphasis, and colloquial bridges. He even marked when to “blubber” or “bellow.”

So, he described how Huck and Jim were approaching the “free” town of Cairo, Ohio, but Huck’s conscience was troubling him.

That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, “What had poor Miss Watson done to you that you could see her nigger go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to learn you to be a Christian. She tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.” I got to feeling so mean and treacherous, and miserable I most wished I was dead.

Then Twain described how Jim made Huck feel even worse because he told him that when he was free, that if he couldn’t buy his children, he’d get an abolitionist to go steal them.

It most froze me to hear such talk. It was awful to hear it. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—The children didn’t belong to him at all. (Laughter.) The children belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

Huck is torn and goes off in a canoe, maybe to tell on Jim, but as he’s paddling away, he hears the runaway slave yell:

“Dah you goes, dar you goes, de ole true Huck; de on’y white genlman dat ever kep’ his promise to ole Jim.” Oh, when he said that, it kind o’ broke me all up.

Then Huck runs into a boat full of slave catchers. And one asks him:

“What’s that yonder?”
“A piece of a raft,” I says.
“Do you belong on it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Any men on it?”
“Only one, sir.”
“Well, there’s five niggers run off to-night up yonder, above the head of the bend. Is your man white or black?”

I tried to say he was black but the words wouldn’t come. They hung fire and I seemed to hear that voice. I did not hear it at all, but it seemed just as natural as anything in the world, that voice a-saying “You true Huck. you only fren’ left Jim now.”

There was my conscience tugging after me all the time. It kept saying that anybody that does wrong, goes to the bad place [i.e., Hell]. It made me shiver and then I says “I don’t care anything about it. I will go to the bad place. I will take my chances. I ain’t going to give Jim up. And then I says, “The man on the raft is white.”

And then he says, “It took you a good while to make up your mind what his color is. I reckon we’ll go and see what his color is.”

Twain has been acting out the voices: the boy, the slave, the men. The Minneapolis auditorium was dead silent, waiting. He slips back into Huck’s voice.

Well, I was up a stump, I got to lie . . . Just in ordinary circumstances truth is all right but when you get in a close place you can’t depend on it at all. So I had an idea and I says: “It’s pap and he
is sick, and so is Mary Jane and the baby and pap will be powerful thankful for you will help me tow the raft ashore. I have told everybody before and they have just gone away and left us,” and he says, “That’s mighty mean!” And the other says, “Mighty bad, too.”

“What is the matter with your father?” “He is all right; it ain’t catching.”

“Set her back, John. Keep away, boy, keep to leeward. Confound I just expect the wind has blowed it to us. Your pap’s got the smallpox and you know it precious well. Why didn’t you come out and say so? Do you want to spread it all over? Good-bye, boy. You put twenty miles between us just as quick as you can. You will find a town down the river—tell them the family have got the chills and fever. Everybody got that down there. Don’t you tell them, they have the small-pox. Good-bye, boy.”

“Good-bye, sir,” says I. “I won’t let no runaway niggers get by me if I can help it.”

The audience applauded, and over time as Twain realized the power of the story he expanded it and acted out Huck blubbering, begging the men to come help his sick family, all to make the lie more convincing.

And he would also work on sharing the moral while trying not to sound preachy. He would refine the introduction to include this pithy phrase: “In a crucial moral emergency a sound heart is a safer guide than an ill-trained conscience.” Reread that line. Somehow, this concept seems to go to the essence of all Mark Twain’s writings and beliefs. Forget the conventional wisdom, the current laws or religious teachings, try to follow the “sound heart” of a boy or youngster.

The message resonated. Audiences in Timaru, New Zealand, and Rawalpindi, India, applauded long and loud, and in the mill town of Minneapolis, Minnesota. “I am getting into good platform condition at last,” he wrote to H.H. the next morning. “It went well, went to suit me here last night.”

Twain told a few more stories, even gave a brief encore anecdote; then he bowed, soaked up the applause, and remained standing there center-stage for a long time as the house emptied. It was as though, at least in that triumphant moment, the financial woes and horrible stress of relearning his craft were finally melting away.

Major Pond wrote in his diary:

It was about as big a night as Mark ever had, to my knowledge. He had a new entertainment blending pathos with humor, with unusual continuity. This was at Mrs. Clemens’ suggestion . . . the show is a triumph.

Twain now began filling his notebooks with speech ideas and travel observations. His leg healed. As he fine-tuned his delivery over the next few cities, he began to receive louder, longer ovations and even more effusive daily tributes in the newspapers. Editorials were sympathetic. He might have dreaded the platform, but he didn’t dread the praise. As he once wrote to his youngest daughter: “I can stand considerable petting. Born so, Jean.”

Excerpted from "CHASING THE LAST LAUGH" by Richard Zacks. Copyright © 2016 by Richard Zacks. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House. All rights reserved.

Continue Reading...

It’s so much worse than just Paul Ryan vs Nancy Pelosi: This is why Congress is a disaster

Congress can’t be anything we want it to be. It is a constitutionally engineered institution, programmed to have certain features and behave in certain ways within the larger separation-of-powers system. Since the founding, the nation has been stuck with this increasingly archaic creation. To be sure, Congress has changed over the last two hundred years. It is no longer the dominion of party machines and spoils but a realm of entrepreneurial politicians with their own campaign organizations, their own support coalitions, their own sources of money. The fundamentals, however, have not changed. They are still there, ingrained in Congress’s institutional genetics—and creating profound problems for the rest of American government.

These genetics are too often overlooked. Outside of academia, almost everyone who pays attention to Congress, and indeed to politics generally, tends to focus on the people involved—on John Boehner squaring off against Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz squaring off against everyone else. However natural this focus on newsworthy personalities may be, it is way off the mark. And misleading. The fact is, the specific people who make up Congress really don’t matter all that much in the grand scheme of things. Get rid of the current crew of personalities and bring back that titan of the House, Tip O’Neill. Or another, Sam Rayburn. Or Wilbur Mills. Anybody you like. Or replace every single legislator with someone new. They will all be members of Congress, and they will all have their incentives and behavior shaped in very distinctive, common ways by the constitutionally prescribed nature of the institution (and its semi-prescribed electoral system). The people that make up Congress are easily observed. The structure that shapes their behavior is not. Yet it is precisely this structure that is fundamental.

A key to understanding Congress lies in recognizing that there are certain structural commonalities that explain why members do what they do, and thus what we can expect from them. Needless to say, these commonalities will not explain 100 percent of each member’s behavior 100 percent of the time, but they do capture central tendencies—and those tendencies explain a lot of what happens in Congress. They get to the behavioral core of the institution. Three themes stand out.

Members of Congress are parochial. We’ve said it many times before, and we’ll keep saying it. Congress is filled with political entrepreneurs, and they are constantly concerned about their own political welfare—which is rooted in the special interests, constituencies, and ideological support bases within their districts and states that make their reelections possible. It is no accident that Congress is awash in interest groups. All districts and states are inevitably made up of countless special interests; some, like banking or soybeans or automaking, vary enormously across districts while others, like senior citizens or veterans, are more evenly distributed—and members of Congress are wholly open to their lobbying activities and (selectively) responsive to their concerns and demands. The electoral connection is a two-way street: special interests seek influence while members of Congress seek popularity by being of service. It is also no accident that Congress is awash in money. This has always been true, but it is now true in the extreme thanks to recent Supreme Court decisions that have eviscerated campaign finance regulations. Members run their own campaigns and have an insatiable need for ever-greater sums to fill their electoral war chests, and the contributors are often key players who want special access in return. Again, it’s a two-way street. For the most part, this is not a matter of corruption per se. The United States arguably has one of the cleanest political systems in the world (as political systems go). Such relationships are better understood in terms of mutuality of interest: a mutuality that favors rampant special-interest politics.

To say that members of Congress are parochial is not to say that they are a bunch of country bumpkins. On the contrary, members of Congress tend to be quite cosmopolitan and well educated—many have given up prestigious, lucrative jobs as lawyers, doctors, and businesspeople in order to serve—and they are highly adept at doing what needs to be done to bolster and secure their local support. Theirs is an extraordinarily sophisticated parochialism. In office, they run complex media-relations operations that communicate with the press about pending legislation and advertise their achievements back home. With permanent support staff in both DC and their home districts, they shuttle back and forth for visits with key constituencies, interest groups, lobbying organizations, and fellow politicians. They work doggedly to secure set-asides of one kind or another—disaster relief, special contracts, earmarks, and other distributive outlays—for key companies and industries back home. They navigate a complex committee system that allows them to channel their professional ambitions by focusing on the bills that matter most to their constituents. Their résumés are impressive, their schedules are packed, and their operations are professional. They are high-performing reelection machines.

Members of Congress can be parochial, moreover, and still be ideological and have genuine interest in national and international issues. Their electoral fortunes may be tied, in part, to national economic trends, the president who sits in office, and national media. Crises, particularly wars, may increase the salience of national considerations. In certain policy domains, notably those that are not especially salient for their constituents, members may have greater discretion in how they vote. And to fund their campaigns, members may call upon national interest groups and the goodwill of their fellow congressmen.

Members are not exclusively parochial. But they are strongly influenced by parochial concerns. Nationalizing events and forces constitute deviations from a baseline that anchors them in localistic calculations and constraints. Their ideologies—which may seem to reflect broad political worldviews—must be in tune with their home-base ideological support constituencies, either because they are chosen on that basis or because they make ideological adjustments to bring themselves into local alignment. At every turn, they evaluate policy according to its local implications. They distribute their time and resources according to the demands of powerful interests from their districts and states. And nearly every word they say in every speech they give is drafted with an eye toward how it will play back home.

It is of no small relevance that, despite all the nationalizing forces of modern politics, members of Congress have increased the percentages of their own staff members working in their local offices rather than on Capitol Hill. In the Senate, the percentage of the senators’ personal staff working in local offices rose from 25 percent in 1980 to 41 percent in 2010. In the House, the comparable figures were 34 percent and 49 percent. As these measures clearly suggest, members have hardly moved to distance themselves from parochial concerns over recent decades. They are tied to their states and districts. These are their political lifelines—and they invest their resources accordingly.

Members of Congress are myopic. In addition to being parochial, legislators approach policy issues in shortsighted ways rather than being centrally concerned about the long-term consequences—or genuine effectiveness. House members are constantly running for reelection and are thus worried about the immediate impact of their decisions on constituents and interest groups. Senators have somewhat longer terms in office, but much the same is true for them. Among other things, members of Congress have strong incentives to fashion policies that provide current supporters with valuable up-front benefits, and they have strong incentives to push costs off into the future. This is why budget deficits, borrowing, and debt are so politically attractive—and such problems for the nation. It is also why Social Security and Medicare, the nation’s two most expensive policy programs, are financial train wrecks waiting to happen: Congress is great at doling out benefits but terrible at requiring people to pay for them. These and other myopic pathologies are reinforced by the fact that, with 535 voting members in two chambers, individual legislators are not held responsible for the effectiveness of public policies, and there are no political consequences for them if policies turn out to be ineffective ten or twenty or thirty years down the road. Indeed, the incentives for members of Congress can actually work the other way around: if a policy turns out to be ineffective or even harmful, constituents can complain to their legislators, and legislators can get credit for riding to the rescue. As Morris Fiorina argued in his classic work Congress: The Keystone of the Washington Establishment, members of Congress can actually benefit when policies don’t work.

Members of Congress think about the pieces, not the whole. This is an implication of their parochialism and myopia, really, but it’s so important that it deserves separate emphasis. Members of Congress approach their policy decisions in a piecemeal fashion, focusing on just the policy in question—and the interest groups and constituents that want it—and not on how it fits into the nation’s larger framework of policies, agencies, and governance. That is why, for example, a 2009 GAO report found that the government had forty-seven different worker-training programs run by nine different federal agencies. Or why another study uncovered 82 programs to improve teacher quality, 160 to support housing, and 53 to promote entrepreneurship. Congress has devised no overarching, coherent national policy on worker training, teacher quality, housing, or entrepreneurship. Instead, it has produced a confusing, uncoordinated array of different programs adopted at different times for different reasons in response to different groups. Policies—and government—are constructed piecemeal, without any regard for crafting a well-functioning, rationally put-together whole. The same is true when Congress creates government agencies, assigns them missions, and locates them somewhere in the scheme of government. Upon its creation in 1964, for example, the food stamp program was handed over to the Department of Agriculture rather than the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (now Health and Human Services)—where almost all the nation’s other social welfare programs were housed—because of a logroll aimed at getting the support of farm interests and Republicans. It has stayed there ever since, in odd and alien bureaucratic territory. There is no intellectual rhyme or reason to this sort of thing, no concern for building a coherent structure of government. The overall result is a governmental system characterized by duplication, overlap, and mismatch. It is an absolute mess—thanks, primarily, to the way members of Congress are wired to approach their jobs.

Excerpted from "Relic: How Our Constitution Undermines Effective Government--and Why We Need a More Powerful Presidency" by William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe. Published by Basic Books. Copyright © 2016 by William G. Howell and Terry M. Moe. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

Continue Reading...

Donald Trump feels your anger and anxiety: How neuroscience helps explain Trump’s triumphs

Despite desperate opposition from the Republican establishment, Trump has dominated the primary process, most recently with his decisive victory in New York. Mainstream politicians and commentators who use traditional frameworks to analyze the situation struggle to explain Trump’s success with voters. Turning to neuroscience helps provide a more accurate explanation, by revealing that Trump’s popularity stems from his masterful ability to resonate with the emotions of many Americans.

For example, consider his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” This phrase appeals to the anxiety of many voters still suffering from the consequences of the 2008 economic downturn. They experienced their own lives growing worse and want their situation to be “great again,” believing that Trump, as a business manager, can make that happen.

These voters also feel anger toward the political establishment, which they blame for not fixing the economy. Trump does a marvelous job of presenting himself as an anti-establishment candidate by playing up his business background and by sparring with the Republican Party bigwigs.

Proposing “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” taps into anxieties about Muslims, whom many Americans consider highly likely to engage in terrorism. Thus, Trump gains significant support by positioning himself as the most powerful defender of everyday Americans against such perceived threats.

Trump also issues provocative statements tapping into such anger and anxiety in an off-the-cuff manner. Such statements cause these voters to feel that Trump is authentic in his sentiments, developing their trust in him. Moreover, hearing a major political figure express views that these voters previously shared only in private company helps people feel emotionally validated.

Trump’s actions take advantage of how our brains are wired. Intuitively, we feel our mind to be a cohesive whole and perceive ourselves as intentional and rational thinkers. Yet cognitive science research shows that intentional thinking is only a small component of our mind, with most of our mental processes dominated by emotions and intuitions.

These emotions and intuitions make snap decisions that usually feel “true,” and are correct much of the time. Yet they sometimes steer us wrong in systematic and predictable ways. While we can use the rational part of our mind to catch these predictable errors with sufficient training and time, many people currently lack the skills to do so.

Trump has excellent charisma and emotional intelligence. These qualities make him capable of speaking effectively to the most powerful part of our brain, the emotional one. His actions exploit -- intentionally or not -- the systematic errors in our thinking to get what he wants.

By contrast, many prominent Republican politicians do not give our emotional system of thinking due attention. For instance, Mitt Romney condemned Trump as a “phony” and “fraud” shortly before the March 15 primaries. This type of attack only strengthens the emotional desire to vote for Trump among anti-establishment voters by triggering a thinking error called the backfire effect -- a tendency for our beliefs to grow stronger when they are challenged by contradictory evidence.

We can see the results of Romney’s attack by Trump’s decisive victories in the primaries on March 15. Likewise, the barrage of negative advertisements and more recent condemnations by mainstream Republicans did not stop Trump from winning over 60 percent of voters in New York, 35 percent more than his closest rival.

By contrast, Trump has lost a number of states in between March 15 and April 19, which mostly make decisions via caucuses of committed party activists, as opposed to primaries. This is because the delegates at caucuses are less motivated by primal emotions of fear and anger, and instead are more strategic in their political engagement, seeking out the best candidate to win the presidential race. To avoid the backfire effect among primary voters, establishment Republicans would be much better off spending less time bashing Trump and instead focusing on praising his rivals.

Trump also receives heavy criticism for not laying out specific policy proposals. Yet this line of attack is ineffective for voters motivated by anger and fear, because the large majority of Trump’s voters trust him emotionally. Consequently, Trump has been able to avoid laying out major policy proposals. As a result, his supporters see whatever they wish to see in him. Yet they may be relying on wishful thinking, another error that involves forming beliefs based on what is pleasant to imagine rather than actual evidence.

While Trump is a master at exploiting the emotional part of our brain, he is not the only candidate doing so. Whatever candidate you are considering, my fellow Americans, I hope you deploy intentional thinking and avoid the predictable errors in making your political decisions.

Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, is the president of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit that empowers people to improve their thinking and reach their goals, and serves as a tenure-track professor at the Ohio State University.Despite desperate opposition from the Republican establishment, Trump has dominated the primary process, most recently with his decisive victory in New York. Mainstream politicians and commentators who use traditional frameworks to analyze the situation struggle to explain Trump’s success with voters. Turning to neuroscience helps provide a more accurate explanation, by revealing that Trump’s popularity stems from his masterful ability to resonate with the emotions of many Americans.

For example, consider his slogan, “Make America Great Again.” This phrase appeals to the anxiety of many voters still suffering from the consequences of the 2008 economic downturn. They experienced their own lives growing worse and want their situation to be “great again,” believing that Trump, as a business manager, can make that happen.

These voters also feel anger toward the political establishment, which they blame for not fixing the economy. Trump does a marvelous job of presenting himself as an anti-establishment candidate by playing up his business background and by sparring with the Republican Party bigwigs.

Proposing “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” taps into anxieties about Muslims, whom many Americans consider highly likely to engage in terrorism. Thus, Trump gains significant support by positioning himself as the most powerful defender of everyday Americans against such perceived threats.

Trump also issues provocative statements tapping into such anger and anxiety in an off-the-cuff manner. Such statements cause these voters to feel that Trump is authentic in his sentiments, developing their trust in him. Moreover, hearing a major political figure express views that these voters previously shared only in private company helps people feel emotionally validated.

Trump’s actions take advantage of how our brains are wired. Intuitively, we feel our mind to be a cohesive whole and perceive ourselves as intentional and rational thinkers. Yet cognitive science research shows that intentional thinking is only a small component of our mind, with most of our mental processes dominated by emotions and intuitions.

These emotions and intuitions make snap decisions that usually feel “true,” and are correct much of the time. Yet they sometimes steer us wrong in systematic and predictable ways. While we can use the rational part of our mind to catch these predictable errors with sufficient training and time, many people currently lack the skills to do so.

Trump has excellent charisma and emotional intelligence. These qualities make him capable of speaking effectively to the most powerful part of our brain, the emotional one. His actions exploit -- intentionally or not -- the systematic errors in our thinking to get what he wants.

By contrast, many prominent Republican politicians do not give our emotional system of thinking due attention. For instance, Mitt Romney condemned Trump as a “phony” and “fraud” shortly before the March 15 primaries. This type of attack only strengthens the emotional desire to vote for Trump among anti-establishment voters by triggering a thinking error called the backfire effect -- a tendency for our beliefs to grow stronger when they are challenged by contradictory evidence.

We can see the results of Romney’s attack by Trump’s decisive victories in the primaries on March 15. Likewise, the barrage of negative advertisements and more recent condemnations by mainstream Republicans did not stop Trump from winning over 60 percent of voters in New York, 35 percent more than his closest rival.

By contrast, Trump has lost a number of states in between March 15 and April 19, which mostly make decisions via caucuses of committed party activists, as opposed to primaries. This is because the delegates at caucuses are less motivated by primal emotions of fear and anger, and instead are more strategic in their political engagement, seeking out the best candidate to win the presidential race. To avoid the backfire effect among primary voters, establishment Republicans would be much better off spending less time bashing Trump and instead focusing on praising his rivals.

Trump also receives heavy criticism for not laying out specific policy proposals. Yet this line of attack is ineffective for voters motivated by anger and fear, because the large majority of Trump’s voters trust him emotionally. Consequently, Trump has been able to avoid laying out major policy proposals. As a result, his supporters see whatever they wish to see in him. Yet they may be relying on wishful thinking, another error that involves forming beliefs based on what is pleasant to imagine rather than actual evidence.

While Trump is a master at exploiting the emotional part of our brain, he is not the only candidate doing so. Whatever candidate you are considering, my fellow Americans, I hope you deploy intentional thinking and avoid the predictable errors in making your political decisions.

Gleb Tsipursky, PhD, is the president of Intentional Insights, a nonprofit that empowers people to improve their thinking and reach their goals, and serves as a tenure-track professor at the Ohio State University.

Continue Reading...

Our voices are not all equal: Inequality, your vote — and some surprising common ground between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders supporters

This noisy and confusing election season has demonstrated that many Americans feel that their voices are not being heard in politics.  In fact, as long as we have had the tools to measure it, American democracy has been characterized by unequal political voice.  Is there anything that can be done about the fact that, when it comes to politics, some people -- in particular, the well-educated and affluent and, therefore, non-Latino whites -- have a megaphone and others speak in a whisper?

The last decade has witnessed contradictory changes with regard to equalizing political voice.  Many states have quietly sought to lower barriers to turnout.  A majority of states have adopted measures like early voting that make voting more convenient.  Nearly three-quarters of the states now facilitate voter registration by providing for election-day or online registration.  A few pre-register high school students so that they are all set to vote when they turn 18.  Alas, once registered, such efforts to get young voters to the polls yield modest results.  What is more, even reforms like election-day registration that unambiguously raise turnout do not necessarily decrease inequalities in turnout.  Even when more voters show up at the polls, the effect may be only an increase in the kinds of voters who are already casting ballots rather than an electorate more representative of those eligible.

In an era when the parties are evenly matched electorally and far apart ideologically, savvy politicians know that electoral gains may be realized by making it harder to vote.  Since 2000, a majority of states have raised barriers to voting by enacting or strengthening the requirements for showing identification in order to cast a ballot.  Although voter ID laws are generally popular with the public, the politics of the enactment of voter ID laws have become extremely partisan.  Since many of the laws do not kick in until this year, we do not yet know whether voter ID laws will dampen turnout and, if so, whether they will have a disproportionate impact on the less well-educated and persons of color.

Moreover, in Shelby v. Holder (2013) the Supreme Court held unconstitutional both the requirement in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination must submit proposed changes in voting procedures for federal “preclearance” and the formula that determines such jurisdictions.  At this point Congress has declined to update the VRA to bring it into compliance with Shelby.  Once again, it is too soon to know what the effect will be at the polls.

A series of judicial decisions, of which the best known is Citizens United (2010), have defined campaign contributions as a form of constitutionally protected speech.  The consequences of these decisions for equal voice are now becoming obvious.  Not only have the sums skyrocketed, but campaign giving has become more and more concentrated: increasingly large shares of the total arise from a minuscule fraction of the public.  Last week, The Washington Post reported that a mere 50 donors were responsible for nearly half, 41 percent, of the more than $600 million collected so far by Super PACs in this election season.  In short, the campaign finance environment is changing dramatically in ways that, if anything, allow the very affluent to speak even more loudly in politics.

Can we do anything to ameliorate these inequalities of political voice?  Unfortunately, it seems that anything that would make much difference is currently either politically infeasible or constitutionally proscribed.  That said, neither the current poisonous partisan environment, which is hostile to equalizing steps, nor current constitutional interpretation, which rules out many kinds of reform, is necessarily permanent.

In fact, who would have thought that this year's presidential race would feature robust attacks on the center of each party by candidates who criticized Wall Street, free trade and the political gridlock?  Although Sanders and Trump differ in many ways and on many issues, their appeal is based on an economic populism rooted in concerns about economic inequality and the political power of the establishment.  Will this year’s surprising developments prod political leaders in both parties to start thinking more seriously about ways to ameliorate economic and political inequality?  Will they consider reducing the role of money in politics through public financing of elections or facilitating voting through same-day registration in every state?  It seems less far-fetched today than it might have a year ago.This noisy and confusing election season has demonstrated that many Americans feel that their voices are not being heard in politics.  In fact, as long as we have had the tools to measure it, American democracy has been characterized by unequal political voice.  Is there anything that can be done about the fact that, when it comes to politics, some people -- in particular, the well-educated and affluent and, therefore, non-Latino whites -- have a megaphone and others speak in a whisper?

The last decade has witnessed contradictory changes with regard to equalizing political voice.  Many states have quietly sought to lower barriers to turnout.  A majority of states have adopted measures like early voting that make voting more convenient.  Nearly three-quarters of the states now facilitate voter registration by providing for election-day or online registration.  A few pre-register high school students so that they are all set to vote when they turn 18.  Alas, once registered, such efforts to get young voters to the polls yield modest results.  What is more, even reforms like election-day registration that unambiguously raise turnout do not necessarily decrease inequalities in turnout.  Even when more voters show up at the polls, the effect may be only an increase in the kinds of voters who are already casting ballots rather than an electorate more representative of those eligible.

In an era when the parties are evenly matched electorally and far apart ideologically, savvy politicians know that electoral gains may be realized by making it harder to vote.  Since 2000, a majority of states have raised barriers to voting by enacting or strengthening the requirements for showing identification in order to cast a ballot.  Although voter ID laws are generally popular with the public, the politics of the enactment of voter ID laws have become extremely partisan.  Since many of the laws do not kick in until this year, we do not yet know whether voter ID laws will dampen turnout and, if so, whether they will have a disproportionate impact on the less well-educated and persons of color.

Moreover, in Shelby v. Holder (2013) the Supreme Court held unconstitutional both the requirement in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination must submit proposed changes in voting procedures for federal “preclearance” and the formula that determines such jurisdictions.  At this point Congress has declined to update the VRA to bring it into compliance with Shelby.  Once again, it is too soon to know what the effect will be at the polls.

A series of judicial decisions, of which the best known is Citizens United (2010), have defined campaign contributions as a form of constitutionally protected speech.  The consequences of these decisions for equal voice are now becoming obvious.  Not only have the sums skyrocketed, but campaign giving has become more and more concentrated: increasingly large shares of the total arise from a minuscule fraction of the public.  Last week, The Washington Post reported that a mere 50 donors were responsible for nearly half, 41 percent, of the more than $600 million collected so far by Super PACs in this election season.  In short, the campaign finance environment is changing dramatically in ways that, if anything, allow the very affluent to speak even more loudly in politics.

Can we do anything to ameliorate these inequalities of political voice?  Unfortunately, it seems that anything that would make much difference is currently either politically infeasible or constitutionally proscribed.  That said, neither the current poisonous partisan environment, which is hostile to equalizing steps, nor current constitutional interpretation, which rules out many kinds of reform, is necessarily permanent.

In fact, who would have thought that this year's presidential race would feature robust attacks on the center of each party by candidates who criticized Wall Street, free trade and the political gridlock?  Although Sanders and Trump differ in many ways and on many issues, their appeal is based on an economic populism rooted in concerns about economic inequality and the political power of the establishment.  Will this year’s surprising developments prod political leaders in both parties to start thinking more seriously about ways to ameliorate economic and political inequality?  Will they consider reducing the role of money in politics through public financing of elections or facilitating voting through same-day registration in every state?  It seems less far-fetched today than it might have a year ago.

Continue Reading...

“You can teach a chimp to ride a tricycle — for a little while”: Bill Maher is not buying Trump’s “presidential” act

During his monologue Friday night, "Real Time" host Bill Maher trashed Donald Trump's supposedly cleaned-up act.

Following his double-digit victory in New York, Trump called Ted Cruz "Senator Cruz" instead of "Lyin' Ted." And his new team of advisors, headed by Paul Manafort, is now trying to market Trump as a well-intentioned performance artists.

"So let me get this straight: the last 30 years as the world's biggest douchebag," Maher said, "that was just to get us ready?"

"This idea that this guy could ever change his stripes, that he could be presidential ... because ... for three minutes he went on stage and he did act like a normal human being and he didn't urinate on the whole audience," he continued. "It lasted three minutes."

"You could make a chimp ride a tricycle -- for a little while," he added. "It's like the way Keanu Reeves can do a British accent -- for a little while."

Watch the full video below:

https://twitter.com/RealTimers/status... his monologue Friday night, "Real Time" host Bill Maher trashed Donald Trump's supposedly cleaned-up act.

Following his double-digit victory in New York, Trump called Ted Cruz "Senator Cruz" instead of "Lyin' Ted." And his new team of advisors, headed by Paul Manafort, is now trying to market Trump as a well-intentioned performance artists.

"So let me get this straight: the last 30 years as the world's biggest douchebag," Maher said, "that was just to get us ready?"

"This idea that this guy could ever change his stripes, that he could be presidential ... because ... for three minutes he went on stage and he did act like a normal human being and he didn't urinate on the whole audience," he continued. "It lasted three minutes."

"You could make a chimp ride a tricycle -- for a little while," he added. "It's like the way Keanu Reeves can do a British accent -- for a little while."

Watch the full video below:

https://twitter.com/RealTimers/status...

Continue Reading...