Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 839

“Sure, the climate is changing, but it always has been”: Rubio wriggles like a hooked worm on the question of man-made climate change

Given that Thursday night's debate is in Florida -- the state that all climate models agree will be the second one to disappear into the ocean after Louisiana if major changes to environmental policy aren't embraced -- it's not surprising that CNN's Jake Tapper asked the Republican hopefuls about their position on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. The GOP candidates, of course, wriggled like hooked worms against the inevitable, beginning with Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator should be more concerned than most. "Sure, the climate is changing," he said, "and one of the reasons the climate changes is because the climate has always been changing." Which is, of course, true -- systems in flux seek equilibrium, etc., but that has no bearing on whether human activity has upset that equilibrium, or whether changes in human behavior can render parts of the planet that will soon be uninhabitable, re-habitable. Rubio did, however, have a clever -- albeit empty -- retort: "As far as law in Washington go, we can pass [them] to change the weather, [but] there's no such thing."Given that Thursday night's debate is in Florida -- the state that all climate models agree will be the second one to disappear into the ocean after Louisiana if major changes to environmental policy aren't embraced -- it's not surprising that CNN's Jake Tapper asked the Republican hopefuls about their position on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. The GOP candidates, of course, wriggled like hooked worms against the inevitable, beginning with Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator should be more concerned than most. "Sure, the climate is changing," he said, "and one of the reasons the climate changes is because the climate has always been changing." Which is, of course, true -- systems in flux seek equilibrium, etc., but that has no bearing on whether human activity has upset that equilibrium, or whether changes in human behavior can render parts of the planet that will soon be uninhabitable, re-habitable. Rubio did, however, have a clever -- albeit empty -- retort: "As far as law in Washington go, we can pass [them] to change the weather, [but] there's no such thing."Given that Thursday night's debate is in Florida -- the state that all climate models agree will be the second one to disappear into the ocean after Louisiana if major changes to environmental policy aren't embraced -- it's not surprising that CNN's Jake Tapper asked the Republican hopefuls about their position on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. The GOP candidates, of course, wriggled like hooked worms against the inevitable, beginning with Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator should be more concerned than most. "Sure, the climate is changing," he said, "and one of the reasons the climate changes is because the climate has always been changing." Which is, of course, true -- systems in flux seek equilibrium, etc., but that has no bearing on whether human activity has upset that equilibrium, or whether changes in human behavior can render parts of the planet that will soon be uninhabitable, re-habitable. Rubio did, however, have a clever -- albeit empty -- retort: "As far as law in Washington go, we can pass [them] to change the weather, [but] there's no such thing."Given that Thursday night's debate is in Florida -- the state that all climate models agree will be the second one to disappear into the ocean after Louisiana if major changes to environmental policy aren't embraced -- it's not surprising that CNN's Jake Tapper asked the Republican hopefuls about their position on the anthropogenic nature of climate change. The GOP candidates, of course, wriggled like hooked worms against the inevitable, beginning with Marco Rubio, who as a Florida senator should be more concerned than most. "Sure, the climate is changing," he said, "and one of the reasons the climate changes is because the climate has always been changing." Which is, of course, true -- systems in flux seek equilibrium, etc., but that has no bearing on whether human activity has upset that equilibrium, or whether changes in human behavior can render parts of the planet that will soon be uninhabitable, re-habitable. Rubio did, however, have a clever -- albeit empty -- retort: "As far as law in Washington go, we can pass [them] to change the weather, [but] there's no such thing."

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Marco Rubio accuses Trump of ruining America for American Muslims: It’s not about being politically correct, it’s about “being correct”

During Thursday night's debate, CNN's Jake Tapper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump whether he means that all Muslims hate America when he says that "Islam hates us." Trump replied, "I mean a lot of them!" He noted that a there's a "tremendous hatred, [and there is] something going on that maybe you don't know about there," though he didn't specify where "there" was. Florida Senator Marco Rubio saw an opening and darted into it, saying that "presidents can't just say anything they want," and that Trump is creating a very hostile environment for American Muslims, even though there are many headstones in military cemeteries that bear a crescent instead of a Star of David or cross. "You can be politically correct if you'd like," Trump replied, "but I don't want to be so politically correct." Rubio paused for a beat, and said that refusing to insult Islam isn't about political correctness, but merely about "being correct."During Thursday night's debate, CNN's Jake Tapper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump whether he means that all Muslims hate America when he says that "Islam hates us." Trump replied, "I mean a lot of them!" He noted that a there's a "tremendous hatred, [and there is] something going on that maybe you don't know about there," though he didn't specify where "there" was. Florida Senator Marco Rubio saw an opening and darted into it, saying that "presidents can't just say anything they want," and that Trump is creating a very hostile environment for American Muslims, even though there are many headstones in military cemeteries that bear a crescent instead of a Star of David or cross. "You can be politically correct if you'd like," Trump replied, "but I don't want to be so politically correct." Rubio paused for a beat, and said that refusing to insult Islam isn't about political correctness, but merely about "being correct."During Thursday night's debate, CNN's Jake Tapper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump whether he means that all Muslims hate America when he says that "Islam hates us." Trump replied, "I mean a lot of them!" He noted that a there's a "tremendous hatred, [and there is] something going on that maybe you don't know about there," though he didn't specify where "there" was. Florida Senator Marco Rubio saw an opening and darted into it, saying that "presidents can't just say anything they want," and that Trump is creating a very hostile environment for American Muslims, even though there are many headstones in military cemeteries that bear a crescent instead of a Star of David or cross. "You can be politically correct if you'd like," Trump replied, "but I don't want to be so politically correct." Rubio paused for a beat, and said that refusing to insult Islam isn't about political correctness, but merely about "being correct."During Thursday night's debate, CNN's Jake Tapper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump whether he means that all Muslims hate America when he says that "Islam hates us." Trump replied, "I mean a lot of them!" He noted that a there's a "tremendous hatred, [and there is] something going on that maybe you don't know about there," though he didn't specify where "there" was. Florida Senator Marco Rubio saw an opening and darted into it, saying that "presidents can't just say anything they want," and that Trump is creating a very hostile environment for American Muslims, even though there are many headstones in military cemeteries that bear a crescent instead of a Star of David or cross. "You can be politically correct if you'd like," Trump replied, "but I don't want to be so politically correct." Rubio paused for a beat, and said that refusing to insult Islam isn't about political correctness, but merely about "being correct."During Thursday night's debate, CNN's Jake Tapper asked GOP front-runner Donald Trump whether he means that all Muslims hate America when he says that "Islam hates us." Trump replied, "I mean a lot of them!" He noted that a there's a "tremendous hatred, [and there is] something going on that maybe you don't know about there," though he didn't specify where "there" was. Florida Senator Marco Rubio saw an opening and darted into it, saying that "presidents can't just say anything they want," and that Trump is creating a very hostile environment for American Muslims, even though there are many headstones in military cemeteries that bear a crescent instead of a Star of David or cross. "You can be politically correct if you'd like," Trump replied, "but I don't want to be so politically correct." Rubio paused for a beat, and said that refusing to insult Islam isn't about political correctness, but merely about "being correct."

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Are you bored by tonight’s Republican debate? Maybe Patton Oswalt can help

For the umpteenth Republican debate running, being able to follow comedian Patton Oswalt's play-by-play is the only real reason to watch it. So while the GOP hopefuls attempt to have a serious policy debate -- involving non-specific plans that somehow still provide entitlements to members of the Republican base -- let's keep in mind what time it is:

"Llllllllets get ready to bear witness to the end of the American century!" #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

  And how these candidates are earning their endorsements, current, future, and otherwise:

"Trump has cut off Christie's feet and sliced out his tongue. He's tied up in a huge burlap bag backstage. Dear God." -- Kasich #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"I offer my resig -- oops, that's tomorrow. Let's move forward into the 21st century!" -- Rubio #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"[emits 2 gallons of cooking oil from mouth]" -- Cruz #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

Trump's just gonna lay back. He has nothing to lose at this point. And he knows it. Bye bye, GOP. Bye bye forever. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"Look, committing adultery hurt my spouses emotionally but hey it made me cum so what am I gonna do, you know?" -- Trump #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

This debate might've broken me. They're calm in their archaic beliefs, which is scarier then when they're yelling. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For some, this is the end:

Oh Marco. Oh dude. It's gone, isn't it? It's all gone. Holy shit. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For Trump, it's not the end of his hypocrisy:

Trump said his use of guest worker program was bad for America, but good for his business so he used it.

— Auntie Goldie (@goldietaylor) March 11, 2016

Not that Oswalt is alone in landing some punches on these very, very canny responses:

I'm a businessman keep Muslims out punch a peaceful protester suits made in China big Mexican walls#GOPDebate

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) March 11, 2016

For the umpteenth Republican debate running, being able to follow comedian Patton Oswalt's play-by-play is the only real reason to watch it. So while the GOP hopefuls attempt to have a serious policy debate -- involving non-specific plans that somehow still provide entitlements to members of the Republican base -- let's keep in mind what time it is:

"Llllllllets get ready to bear witness to the end of the American century!" #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

  And how these candidates are earning their endorsements, current, future, and otherwise:

"Trump has cut off Christie's feet and sliced out his tongue. He's tied up in a huge burlap bag backstage. Dear God." -- Kasich #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"I offer my resig -- oops, that's tomorrow. Let's move forward into the 21st century!" -- Rubio #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"[emits 2 gallons of cooking oil from mouth]" -- Cruz #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

Trump's just gonna lay back. He has nothing to lose at this point. And he knows it. Bye bye, GOP. Bye bye forever. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"Look, committing adultery hurt my spouses emotionally but hey it made me cum so what am I gonna do, you know?" -- Trump #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

This debate might've broken me. They're calm in their archaic beliefs, which is scarier then when they're yelling. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For some, this is the end:

Oh Marco. Oh dude. It's gone, isn't it? It's all gone. Holy shit. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For Trump, it's not the end of his hypocrisy:

Trump said his use of guest worker program was bad for America, but good for his business so he used it.

— Auntie Goldie (@goldietaylor) March 11, 2016

Not that Oswalt is alone in landing some punches on these very, very canny responses:

I'm a businessman keep Muslims out punch a peaceful protester suits made in China big Mexican walls#GOPDebate

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) March 11, 2016

For the umpteenth Republican debate running, being able to follow comedian Patton Oswalt's play-by-play is the only real reason to watch it. So while the GOP hopefuls attempt to have a serious policy debate -- involving non-specific plans that somehow still provide entitlements to members of the Republican base -- let's keep in mind what time it is:

"Llllllllets get ready to bear witness to the end of the American century!" #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

  And how these candidates are earning their endorsements, current, future, and otherwise:

"Trump has cut off Christie's feet and sliced out his tongue. He's tied up in a huge burlap bag backstage. Dear God." -- Kasich #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"I offer my resig -- oops, that's tomorrow. Let's move forward into the 21st century!" -- Rubio #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"[emits 2 gallons of cooking oil from mouth]" -- Cruz #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

Trump's just gonna lay back. He has nothing to lose at this point. And he knows it. Bye bye, GOP. Bye bye forever. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"Look, committing adultery hurt my spouses emotionally but hey it made me cum so what am I gonna do, you know?" -- Trump #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

This debate might've broken me. They're calm in their archaic beliefs, which is scarier then when they're yelling. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For some, this is the end:

Oh Marco. Oh dude. It's gone, isn't it? It's all gone. Holy shit. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For Trump, it's not the end of his hypocrisy:

Trump said his use of guest worker program was bad for America, but good for his business so he used it.

— Auntie Goldie (@goldietaylor) March 11, 2016

Not that Oswalt is alone in landing some punches on these very, very canny responses:

I'm a businessman keep Muslims out punch a peaceful protester suits made in China big Mexican walls#GOPDebate

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) March 11, 2016

For the umpteenth Republican debate running, being able to follow comedian Patton Oswalt's play-by-play is the only real reason to watch it. So while the GOP hopefuls attempt to have a serious policy debate -- involving non-specific plans that somehow still provide entitlements to members of the Republican base -- let's keep in mind what time it is:

"Llllllllets get ready to bear witness to the end of the American century!" #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

  And how these candidates are earning their endorsements, current, future, and otherwise:

"Trump has cut off Christie's feet and sliced out his tongue. He's tied up in a huge burlap bag backstage. Dear God." -- Kasich #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"I offer my resig -- oops, that's tomorrow. Let's move forward into the 21st century!" -- Rubio #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"[emits 2 gallons of cooking oil from mouth]" -- Cruz #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

Trump's just gonna lay back. He has nothing to lose at this point. And he knows it. Bye bye, GOP. Bye bye forever. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

"Look, committing adultery hurt my spouses emotionally but hey it made me cum so what am I gonna do, you know?" -- Trump #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

This debate might've broken me. They're calm in their archaic beliefs, which is scarier then when they're yelling. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For some, this is the end:

Oh Marco. Oh dude. It's gone, isn't it? It's all gone. Holy shit. #GOPDebate

— Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) March 11, 2016

For Trump, it's not the end of his hypocrisy:

Trump said his use of guest worker program was bad for America, but good for his business so he used it.

— Auntie Goldie (@goldietaylor) March 11, 2016

Not that Oswalt is alone in landing some punches on these very, very canny responses:

I'm a businessman keep Muslims out punch a peaceful protester suits made in China big Mexican walls#GOPDebate

— Sarah Silverman (@SarahKSilverman) March 11, 2016

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Alan Rickman and Helen Mirren wage the drone war — but the intriguing thriller “Eye in the Sky” doesn’t go far enough

“Eye in the Sky” is a nifty British procedural in the tick-tock “Homeland” vein — you know, “10:20 AM, Jomo Kenyatta Airport, Nairobi, Kenya,” followed by “4:22 AM, Surrey, England” — that aspires to be the “Zero Dark Thirty” of the drone war. I’m sorry to dredge up that sore subject again, so let’s just say that I mean that as a mixed review but definitely not an insult. If the problem with “ZDT” (which I still think is a terrific film) was that its portrayal of Bush-era torture policy was so open-ended and ambiguous that it invited multiple interpretations, then “Eye in the Sky” is almost too neatly packaged. From its first scene, when director Gavin Hood shows us an adorable Somali immigrant girl playing with a hula-hoop in a Nairobi slum, you can hear the machinery of doom clanking ominously forward. Still, Hood and veteran screenwriter Guy Hibbert deserve credit for facing some of the uglier moral contradictions of the drone war, in which people in dark rooms thousands of miles away can watch little girls playing in dirt backyards, or Islamic militants loading vests with explosives, and then dispatch them to the hereafter by pushing a button. It’s also noteworthy that the fictional drone strike at the heart of “Eye in the Sky” takes place in Kenya, a “friendly” country and a perceived ally in the “war on terror,” rather than in one of the six more disordered nations where the United States and its allies are known to have launched drone attacks. (Those would be Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia and Yemen.) As far as I can tell from a few minutes of digging around, there have been no known drone attacks by the Western powers inside Kenya. But it’s reasonable to assume that even activists who have devoted themselves to the issue don’t know the full extent of the drone war, and quite likely never will. There are quite a few strands connecting the scenario of “Eye in the Sky” to real-world people and events. The proposed target in this story is a Nairobi compound hosting a meeting of leaders from al-Shabab, a Somali militant group affiliated with al-Qaida that has conducted numerous violent attacks in East Africa. Among those people are two British subjects, one of them a white female convert, and an American citizen. The fictional British woman is clearly modeled on the notorious Samantha Lewthwaite, an Islamic convert from Northern Ireland known to the London tabloids as the White Widow. Her first husband blew himself up in the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, and although Lewthwaite claimed to have been uninvolved in that attack she later moved to Africa under a false identity and reportedly married an al-Shabab leader. She avoided capture in Kenya numerous times and may now be in Syria training ISIS fighters. Her Wikipedia page describes her as “one of the Western world’s most wanted terrorism suspects,” which makes you wonder whether she wrote it herself. The American likely refers to Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, a former al-Shabab commander who was born in Alabama (of all unlikely places) and was apparently killed in 2013, not in a drone strike but during an internal power struggle that involved dueling YouTube videos and accusations about a “narcissistic pursuit of fame.” (As you can tell, researching this stuff is addictive.) Hood, a South African whose previous films include “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” and the capable terror-war thriller “Rendition,” does a nice job threading together the immense web of political, legal and military decision-making behind the drone war. Helen Mirren and the late Alan Rickman (in his last major role) are the principals here, as a pair of senior British Army officers who’ve been tracking the al-Shabab team (and its British members in particular) for years. But they’re never in the same room: Mirren plays a colonel at a command center outside London, in direct control of the capture-or-kill mission, while Rickman, in full Severus Snape mode, is a silver-tongued general who’s holed up with senior British government officials in Whitehall, a few miles away. Meanwhile, the “pilots” who actually control the unmanned aircraft that sits 2,000 meters above Nairobi are seven or eight time zones to the west, at a U.S. Air Force base in the Nevada desert. (Although it’s not customary for a British officer to have direct command over American service personnel, or vice versa, it can definitely happen.) Then there are the surveillance and intelligence experts at the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, who are tasked with making positive identifications of the people inside that suburban Nairobi house. Several of those people, including the Lewthwaite-cognate, are believed to be on “kill lists” personally approved by both the British prime minister and the president of the United States. At least in theory, you’re supposed to avoid mistakes about these things. All the political and interpersonal dynamics that inform the decision about whether to blow up this house and everybody in it, along with an unknown number of civilians who happen to be strolling past or selling goat meat and plastic buckets in the street, are rendered in dense, captivating and sometimes comical detail. At one point the British foreign secretary has to answer the phone while sitting on the toilet in Indonesia (he shouldn’t have eaten the prawns), while the American secretary of state is interrupted during a ping-pong tournament in Beijing. (His reaction is pretty much "Quit bothering me and start killing people.") Nobody in this story is rendered as a heartless monster, or is untroubled by the possible death of hula-hoop girl and others like her. Honestly, I’m not sure I believe that the people who launch drone strikes think about collateral damage this hard, or with this degree of moral intensity; there are simply too many of them. I hope I’m wrong, of course. For the hardheaded military officers played by Mirren and Rickman, it’s an easy call. Mirren’s character has beloved doggies at home in the English countryside, and Rickman arrives at the meeting with his granddaughter’s birthday present in a shopping bag. (That’s admittedly a little much.) But the people in that Nairobi house are high-value targets with all kinds of impressive hardware on the premises, and bad things happen in war. If al-Shabab has another shopping-mall attack in mind, like the one that killed 67 people at Kenya’s Westgate mall in 2013, then hula-hoop girl can be viewed as expendable. What’s missing, of course, is the larger context. I shouldn’t say “of course,” because almost nothing is obvious about a war we can’t see, and whose details are deliberately kept secret. From a tactical and military point of view, drone warfare has obvious advantages: There is little or no risk to the attacking forces and, at least in principle, civilian casualties are likely to be lower than in a conventional bombing campaign or ground-level warfare. But as the New York Times reported last year, the Obama administration has cloaked the drone campaign in ever more secrecy, despite repeated promises of greater openness. How many drone strikes have been launched by America and its allies against purported terrorist targets? And how many uninvolved civilians have been killed? The only possible answer to either question is that nobody knows; a low-end estimate would be 500 or so drone strikes and something like 1,000 civilian casualties. Those numbers don’t sound alarming, as war statistics go. But beneath them lie a variety of deeper and unseen issues. The conscientious precision and painstaking identification in “Eye in the Sky” is presented as morally murky; Mirren’s character leans hard on a subordinate to give her an acceptable estimate of collateral damage, so the politicians will say yes. Even so it may be an overly reassuring picture. According to that Times story from last May, and a similar Guardian investigation a few months earlier, drone attacks overwhelmingly kill people who are not their intended targets, but who can plausibly be considered “militants” and hence are not regarded as collateral damage. Micah Zemko, a scholar at the Council of Foreign Relations, told the Times, “Most individuals killed [by drones] are not on a kill list, and the government does not know their names.” All that is before we even consider what historical and political currents produced an outbreak of Islamic terrorism and anti-Western fervor in numerous different places, and whether a secret and sinister air war out of a Philip K. Dick novel is likely to improve matters. Do the CIA and MI6 and whoever the hell else really have little robotic beetles that can fly into your house and deliver high-def images to spy chieftains and government officials and bored Air Force officers riding a Red Bull high halfway around the world? I’m not sure I needed to know that. Hibbert and Hood and the team behind “Eye in the Sky” clearly feel what most of us feel about that stuff, which is that it's both alluring and dangerous. That’s a lot better than cheerleading, but it’s not quite enough to prevent their movie from sliding down the ideological slope toward inadvertent propaganda.

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“An outburst of emotions black America can relate to”: Kendrick Lamar’s newest release feels like the back story to his masterpiece, “To Pimp a Butterfly”

K. Dot’s surprise "Untitled Unmastered" project is a series of incomplete sketches that serve as preparation for his Grammy-winning "To Pimp a Butterfly." The Compton MC raps, yells, whispers and chants his way through the eight demo tracks. It’s an outburst of emotions that much of black America can relate to. We’re not just the audience, we play somewhat of a therapist role while listening. The tracks were presumably recorded between 2013 and 2016, marking a pivotal time in Kendrick’s career. Back in 2013, he was just beginning to fully emerge from the underground hip-hop scene with the platinum success of his "good kid, m.A.A.d city," the precursor to his 2015 masterpiece, "To Pimp a Butterfly." With his success at being an unapologetically black rapper, he gives us what feels like a back story to it all. His series of incomplete thoughts reveals his creative process, as well as the mental and emotional impact that comes along with it. This becomes a seemingly courageous act, as not many black artists, let alone black people, unearth this part of themselves. Discussing mental health within the African-American community is a dangerously taboo topic. This is problematic. While Kendrick’s career has encouraged us to throw off any ounce of anti-blackness, this project admonishes us to think about our mental health, and the importance of discussing it. Historically, slavery, sharecropping and race-based exclusion from health, educational, social and economic resources have caused an onslaught of mental health problems within the African-American community. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to begin to address them. Kendrick is using his voice to encourage the activation of this critical mental health dialogue. Though the project is a collection of his thoughts on political activism, religion and the struggle to understand the balkanization of his blackness, it’s also his raw notes on the state of his own mental health. The project opens with “untitled 01 08.19.2014,” where he equates the government to his view of God. It’s meek. Kendrick uses strong biblical metaphors as he pushes his bombastic lyricism. He compares his view of God to his cynicism toward government institutions, the justice system and Christianity. He shows us the destructive nature of our ways, and admonishes us to consider what we may be sheepishly worshiping. He uses the line “running in place trying to make it to church,” to explain that we aren’t really getting anywhere with our glorified view of the government, as though it were a deity. He continues to call attention to government corruption in track “06 06.30.2014.” He brings to light the fact that the justice system doesn’t do what it was established to do, rehabilitate. Instead, all it does is create new slaves. Historically, the justice system has failed African-Americans; stats suggest that one in three black men will go to jail in their lifetime. Despite his success, he feels as though he’s not exempt from these institutions. He takes things a step further in track “08 09.06.2014” and calls attention to the financial issues common to black Americans, from credit card scams to college debt. He juxtaposes these examples with his own wealth, achieved despite the shackles that could have held him back. He wants us to understand that although whiteness is both power and property, he has fought his way through it. Once he voices all of his frustrations with the American government he then takes it down to a personal level. He’s trying to figure out what self-government looks like apart from the ruling power of white supremacy. He wants to make sure we haven’t forgotten where he is from and his concern for his brothers and sisters back home who are being incarcerated and killed. We are reminded of the fluidity of his blackness. He’s woke, but most important, he understands that there’s a level of privilege that comes with being able to revel in and fight for the idea that black lives matter. He doesn’t take this lightly. He grapples with how to reach back to make sure those who he grew up in his Compton hood understand that they aren’t forgotten—amid all of his fame. His ultramodern, P-Funk-inspired songs “untitled 02,” “untitled 06” and the jazzy “untitled 05” reveal his roots. These tracks give us a perspective on the internal conflict between enjoying his fame, and recognizing the very real issues going on back home in Compton: violence, drugs, etc. He unveils his trouble understanding the duality of his fame and responsibility to his own community. While he has escaped his Compton hood he finds himself distracted by the fruits of his labor: the women, money and fame. He realizes the only way he can find a balance between the industry and the Compton hood he’s left behind is through Top Dawg Entertainment, the label he’s signed to. For K. Dot his fame is solace and apart from it he’d just be a disappointing statistic. He’s avoided becoming institutionalized and the all too common jail time narrative for those in his community. His fame has provided not just material wealth, but the space and time to observe the injustices being committed against his community. Though he acknowledges the existence of the injustices taking place, he’s very clear that he doesn’t want to be a part of it. Throughout track “untitled 03 05.28.2013” he seeks advice from allies (Asians, Indians and blacks) on how to remain authentic, while presenting his historical self. He finds himself battling against the white supremacy that takes “a piece” of Kendrick— to devalue and capitalize off his talents. Likewise “a piece of mines” talks about the “white man” taking a piece of you to become a famous artist. This is proverbial to his "To Pimp a Butterfly." Despite Kendrick’s overwhelming success, he goes out of his way to show us his vulnerability as an artist in his new project. As Kendrick is honest with himself, it would behoove us to begin thinking of ways to come to terms with our healing process, by creating the space to discuss our own mental health in the African-American community. It is through this that we’ll be able to develop a clear vision for our roles within the movement for black lives.K. Dot’s surprise "Untitled Unmastered" project is a series of incomplete sketches that serve as preparation for his Grammy-winning "To Pimp a Butterfly." The Compton MC raps, yells, whispers and chants his way through the eight demo tracks. It’s an outburst of emotions that much of black America can relate to. We’re not just the audience, we play somewhat of a therapist role while listening. The tracks were presumably recorded between 2013 and 2016, marking a pivotal time in Kendrick’s career. Back in 2013, he was just beginning to fully emerge from the underground hip-hop scene with the platinum success of his "good kid, m.A.A.d city," the precursor to his 2015 masterpiece, "To Pimp a Butterfly." With his success at being an unapologetically black rapper, he gives us what feels like a back story to it all. His series of incomplete thoughts reveals his creative process, as well as the mental and emotional impact that comes along with it. This becomes a seemingly courageous act, as not many black artists, let alone black people, unearth this part of themselves. Discussing mental health within the African-American community is a dangerously taboo topic. This is problematic. While Kendrick’s career has encouraged us to throw off any ounce of anti-blackness, this project admonishes us to think about our mental health, and the importance of discussing it. Historically, slavery, sharecropping and race-based exclusion from health, educational, social and economic resources have caused an onslaught of mental health problems within the African-American community. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to begin to address them. Kendrick is using his voice to encourage the activation of this critical mental health dialogue. Though the project is a collection of his thoughts on political activism, religion and the struggle to understand the balkanization of his blackness, it’s also his raw notes on the state of his own mental health. The project opens with “untitled 01 08.19.2014,” where he equates the government to his view of God. It’s meek. Kendrick uses strong biblical metaphors as he pushes his bombastic lyricism. He compares his view of God to his cynicism toward government institutions, the justice system and Christianity. He shows us the destructive nature of our ways, and admonishes us to consider what we may be sheepishly worshiping. He uses the line “running in place trying to make it to church,” to explain that we aren’t really getting anywhere with our glorified view of the government, as though it were a deity. He continues to call attention to government corruption in track “06 06.30.2014.” He brings to light the fact that the justice system doesn’t do what it was established to do, rehabilitate. Instead, all it does is create new slaves. Historically, the justice system has failed African-Americans; stats suggest that one in three black men will go to jail in their lifetime. Despite his success, he feels as though he’s not exempt from these institutions. He takes things a step further in track “08 09.06.2014” and calls attention to the financial issues common to black Americans, from credit card scams to college debt. He juxtaposes these examples with his own wealth, achieved despite the shackles that could have held him back. He wants us to understand that although whiteness is both power and property, he has fought his way through it. Once he voices all of his frustrations with the American government he then takes it down to a personal level. He’s trying to figure out what self-government looks like apart from the ruling power of white supremacy. He wants to make sure we haven’t forgotten where he is from and his concern for his brothers and sisters back home who are being incarcerated and killed. We are reminded of the fluidity of his blackness. He’s woke, but most important, he understands that there’s a level of privilege that comes with being able to revel in and fight for the idea that black lives matter. He doesn’t take this lightly. He grapples with how to reach back to make sure those who he grew up in his Compton hood understand that they aren’t forgotten—amid all of his fame. His ultramodern, P-Funk-inspired songs “untitled 02,” “untitled 06” and the jazzy “untitled 05” reveal his roots. These tracks give us a perspective on the internal conflict between enjoying his fame, and recognizing the very real issues going on back home in Compton: violence, drugs, etc. He unveils his trouble understanding the duality of his fame and responsibility to his own community. While he has escaped his Compton hood he finds himself distracted by the fruits of his labor: the women, money and fame. He realizes the only way he can find a balance between the industry and the Compton hood he’s left behind is through Top Dawg Entertainment, the label he’s signed to. For K. Dot his fame is solace and apart from it he’d just be a disappointing statistic. He’s avoided becoming institutionalized and the all too common jail time narrative for those in his community. His fame has provided not just material wealth, but the space and time to observe the injustices being committed against his community. Though he acknowledges the existence of the injustices taking place, he’s very clear that he doesn’t want to be a part of it. Throughout track “untitled 03 05.28.2013” he seeks advice from allies (Asians, Indians and blacks) on how to remain authentic, while presenting his historical self. He finds himself battling against the white supremacy that takes “a piece” of Kendrick— to devalue and capitalize off his talents. Likewise “a piece of mines” talks about the “white man” taking a piece of you to become a famous artist. This is proverbial to his "To Pimp a Butterfly." Despite Kendrick’s overwhelming success, he goes out of his way to show us his vulnerability as an artist in his new project. As Kendrick is honest with himself, it would behoove us to begin thinking of ways to come to terms with our healing process, by creating the space to discuss our own mental health in the African-American community. It is through this that we’ll be able to develop a clear vision for our roles within the movement for black lives.

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The unexplained death of “fracking king” Aubrey McClendon and a writer’s peculiar bereavement

Last week, on a highway in downtown Oklahoma City, a man drove into a bridge support at high speed. A photo of his flaming SUV appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The driver, Aubrey McClendon, was killed on the spot. 

If that name means nothing to you, it’s safe to say that you don’t trade gas and oil futures for a living, or read the kind of magazine that publishes annual lists of men so wealthy they pay other people to read magazines for them. I don’t do those things either, but after spending five years writing a novel about a town transformed by gas drilling, I know more about Aubrey McClendon than I do about my own relatives.

McClendon was the founder and longtime CEO of Chesapeake Energy, a company that more than any other has been synonymous with America’s gas and oil boom. A man described, invariably, as larger than life – dynamic, charismatic, audacious; a born wildcatter, constitutionally suited to the volatile industry he dominated. The press referred to him by his first name – Aubrey – because of course there was only one. The trajectory of his career, plotted on a graph, is full of sharp rises and spectacular falls, with virtually no recovery time in between.  In 2012, his personal net worth was $1.2 billion. Then gas prices tanked, and McClendon’s board of directors kicked him to the curb. Losing the company he’d spent a lifetime building must have been a devastating blow, but publicly, anyway, he barely flinched. Before the industry could catch its breath he started a new company, American Energy Partners. Aubrey was back in the game.

Rise and fall, rise and fall. The day before his death, a federal grand jury indicted him for anti-trust violations, collusion to fix prices on oil leases in the Bakken Shale. A day later he was dead, leading to speculation that he cracked up his car on purpose. It’s a question that will likely never be answered. What was in his mind that Wednesday morning, driving too fast and wearing no seatbelt, is impossible to say.

I didn’t know Aubrey McClendon, and he didn’t know me – and yet the news of his death shook me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. On March 2, I was serving on a jury in Boston, my cellphone turned off and stowed. When I turned it on at the end of the day, I found an email from a friend, linked to a news story about McClendon’s death.

The subject line of the email was Kip.

My new novel, "Heat and Light," is set in Bakerton – a community inspired by my hometown in western Pennsylvania, a former coal town that sits smack on top of the Marcellus Shale. The novel explores what happens when the local farmers lease their mineral rights to Dark Elephant Energy, a Texas gas-and-oil company run by a flamboyant CEO known as Kip the Whip.  Kip isn’t Aubrey McClendon, and yet any reader who knows the gas industry will be struck by the resemblance.

In the years I spent writing "Heat and Light," I thought of McClendon daily. Without him there would be no Kip the Whip; I could conceive of such a character only because Aubrey McClendon walked the earth. This relationship between living person and fictional character is an ineffable thing. To me, a character is like a familiar stranger who appears in my dreams, who is and isn’t my third grade teacher, my ex-husband’s mother, that Swedish guy I met on a plane to Paris in 1988 at the start of my junior year abroad. The face may be borrowed from life, but the character is a product of my subconscious, a series of autonomic associations and inventions that remain mysterious even to me. I knew McClendon in the way we know strangers in the age of Google and YouTube. Kip’s sense of destiny is pure Aubrey; so are his nerve and resilience, his unshakeable optimism, his gambler’s heart. Other aspects of Kip -- his youthful fascination with EST, his frequent, contentious and expensive divorces -- are my own invention. Unlike Kip, McClendon married his college sweetheart, once and forever. He and Katie raised three children, adults now, a family grappling with a loss that makes my own sadness at his passing seem foolish and small.

Sorrow at a stranger’s death is not, itself, unusual. In the age of social media, keening over dead celebrities is a communal activity open to all. I’ve always been skeptical of such displays, which seem an affront to anyone who has experienced real loss. I learned the difference 13 years ago, when I lost my own father. On the day he died, I was holed up at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire, doing final edits on "Baker Towers" -- a novel also set in Bakerton, during its heyday in the 1940s and '50s. Everything I know about life in that time and place, I learned from Dad. That book was his great gift to me, one among many. That he didn’t live to read it is a secondary sorrow I still carry, entirely separate from the greater pain of losing him. It’s a grief peculiar to writers, a very specific type of bereavement, a sorrow charged with regret.

My dad would have loved "Baker Towers." I know that now. And yet, I never even considered showing him an earlier draft of the book -- something I might easily have done, if we’d been different people. Dad was a stern man, judicious in all things. In particular, he was a discerning and critical reader, openly dismissive of female writers, a conviction he expressed without apology, a man of his time. It’s entirely possible that this led me to become a writer. Having spent my childhood chasing his approval -- I would have walked on my hands to impress him – I took it upon myself to prove him wrong. Of course I couldn’t show him my manuscript until every sentence was perfect. So I waited, and as a result he never saw it at all.

My sadness at Aubrey McClendon’s death is tinged with a similar regret. He may never have had the slightest inclination to read "Heat and Light," but until March 2, 2016, I could pretend that he might. McClendon sincerely believed that the industry that made him rich was also good for America, for communities and for the world. Some might dismiss this as solipsism. Others call it vision. I think it was both.  Like most visionaries, McClendon focused on the big picture and didn’t waste time studying the pixels – the collateral damage the gas boom has inflicted on communities, the individual lives forever transformed. "Heat and Light" tells that story, and I will always wonder what McClendon would have made of it. More than anything, I wanted to make him see the pixels – and, maybe, to prove him wrong.

Last week, on a highway in downtown Oklahoma City, a man drove into a bridge support at high speed. A photo of his flaming SUV appeared in the Wall Street Journal. The driver, Aubrey McClendon, was killed on the spot. 

If that name means nothing to you, it’s safe to say that you don’t trade gas and oil futures for a living, or read the kind of magazine that publishes annual lists of men so wealthy they pay other people to read magazines for them. I don’t do those things either, but after spending five years writing a novel about a town transformed by gas drilling, I know more about Aubrey McClendon than I do about my own relatives.

McClendon was the founder and longtime CEO of Chesapeake Energy, a company that more than any other has been synonymous with America’s gas and oil boom. A man described, invariably, as larger than life – dynamic, charismatic, audacious; a born wildcatter, constitutionally suited to the volatile industry he dominated. The press referred to him by his first name – Aubrey – because of course there was only one. The trajectory of his career, plotted on a graph, is full of sharp rises and spectacular falls, with virtually no recovery time in between.  In 2012, his personal net worth was $1.2 billion. Then gas prices tanked, and McClendon’s board of directors kicked him to the curb. Losing the company he’d spent a lifetime building must have been a devastating blow, but publicly, anyway, he barely flinched. Before the industry could catch its breath he started a new company, American Energy Partners. Aubrey was back in the game.

Rise and fall, rise and fall. The day before his death, a federal grand jury indicted him for anti-trust violations, collusion to fix prices on oil leases in the Bakken Shale. A day later he was dead, leading to speculation that he cracked up his car on purpose. It’s a question that will likely never be answered. What was in his mind that Wednesday morning, driving too fast and wearing no seatbelt, is impossible to say.

I didn’t know Aubrey McClendon, and he didn’t know me – and yet the news of his death shook me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. On March 2, I was serving on a jury in Boston, my cellphone turned off and stowed. When I turned it on at the end of the day, I found an email from a friend, linked to a news story about McClendon’s death.

The subject line of the email was Kip.

My new novel, "Heat and Light," is set in Bakerton – a community inspired by my hometown in western Pennsylvania, a former coal town that sits smack on top of the Marcellus Shale. The novel explores what happens when the local farmers lease their mineral rights to Dark Elephant Energy, a Texas gas-and-oil company run by a flamboyant CEO known as Kip the Whip.  Kip isn’t Aubrey McClendon, and yet any reader who knows the gas industry will be struck by the resemblance.

In the years I spent writing "Heat and Light," I thought of McClendon daily. Without him there would be no Kip the Whip; I could conceive of such a character only because Aubrey McClendon walked the earth. This relationship between living person and fictional character is an ineffable thing. To me, a character is like a familiar stranger who appears in my dreams, who is and isn’t my third grade teacher, my ex-husband’s mother, that Swedish guy I met on a plane to Paris in 1988 at the start of my junior year abroad. The face may be borrowed from life, but the character is a product of my subconscious, a series of autonomic associations and inventions that remain mysterious even to me. I knew McClendon in the way we know strangers in the age of Google and YouTube. Kip’s sense of destiny is pure Aubrey; so are his nerve and resilience, his unshakeable optimism, his gambler’s heart. Other aspects of Kip -- his youthful fascination with EST, his frequent, contentious and expensive divorces -- are my own invention. Unlike Kip, McClendon married his college sweetheart, once and forever. He and Katie raised three children, adults now, a family grappling with a loss that makes my own sadness at his passing seem foolish and small.

Sorrow at a stranger’s death is not, itself, unusual. In the age of social media, keening over dead celebrities is a communal activity open to all. I’ve always been skeptical of such displays, which seem an affront to anyone who has experienced real loss. I learned the difference 13 years ago, when I lost my own father. On the day he died, I was holed up at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire, doing final edits on "Baker Towers" -- a novel also set in Bakerton, during its heyday in the 1940s and '50s. Everything I know about life in that time and place, I learned from Dad. That book was his great gift to me, one among many. That he didn’t live to read it is a secondary sorrow I still carry, entirely separate from the greater pain of losing him. It’s a grief peculiar to writers, a very specific type of bereavement, a sorrow charged with regret.

My dad would have loved "Baker Towers." I know that now. And yet, I never even considered showing him an earlier draft of the book -- something I might easily have done, if we’d been different people. Dad was a stern man, judicious in all things. In particular, he was a discerning and critical reader, openly dismissive of female writers, a conviction he expressed without apology, a man of his time. It’s entirely possible that this led me to become a writer. Having spent my childhood chasing his approval -- I would have walked on my hands to impress him – I took it upon myself to prove him wrong. Of course I couldn’t show him my manuscript until every sentence was perfect. So I waited, and as a result he never saw it at all.

My sadness at Aubrey McClendon’s death is tinged with a similar regret. He may never have had the slightest inclination to read "Heat and Light," but until March 2, 2016, I could pretend that he might. McClendon sincerely believed that the industry that made him rich was also good for America, for communities and for the world. Some might dismiss this as solipsism. Others call it vision. I think it was both.  Like most visionaries, McClendon focused on the big picture and didn’t waste time studying the pixels – the collateral damage the gas boom has inflicted on communities, the individual lives forever transformed. "Heat and Light" tells that story, and I will always wonder what McClendon would have made of it. More than anything, I wanted to make him see the pixels – and, maybe, to prove him wrong.

Continue Reading...

“My pace was not sustainable”: Why millennial women are burning out on the job

Professional burnout is a topic on which self-help books abound (two of the most popular being the catchily titled "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferris or the "One Minute Manager" series by Ken Blanchard). New to this conversation is how burnout is affecting women in an age where the clock on their careers is less and less tied to their biological clocks. In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-shared piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in The Atlantic, she explained why the pull of being at home with her kids in New Jersey drew her away from her successful government job in D.C. But what’s interesting is that this phenomenon isn’t about motherhood; it’s that the millennial propensity to overachieve and seek approval—in some cases mixing with the frustrations of glass ceilings and sexism in the office—is taking a toll on young childless women. Capable women are leaving the workforce in droves for disappointing reasons. To those who can’t shake the notion that motherhood is to blame for women dropping like flies from their promising careers, Harvard Business Review answers with the kicker:

It simply isn’t true that a large proportion of [the studied sample of Harvard Business School] HBS alumnae have ‘opted out’ to care for children. When we asked Gen X and Baby Boom women (who are most likely to have children under 18 living with them today) about their current status, we learned … Only 11 percent are out of the workforce to care for children full-time. The figure is even lower (7 percent) for women of color.

On Tuesday, Fast Company came out with a groundbreaking article incorporating interviews with millennial women (although more accurately the upper end of this age group is through to the younger end of Generation Y) who are burning out and a McKinsey study on how widespread it is. Jenny Blake, one of the women Fast Company interviewed, worked full-time at Google while juggling writing a book in her free time. “My pace was not sustainable, and I only realized it after I crashed — just weeks before my book was set to launch,” she said. Sustainability isn’t just a term that needs to be considered in regard to environmental issues; it’s also important to keep in mind for personal work-life balance so that women can achieve all they can, not just in the present, but for years to come. In order to combat professional burnout, women need at minimum a doting parent (or concerned friend, significant other or therapist) urging them to avoid putting too much on their plates too fast. But for those who aren’t so lucky, we’ll play the part with a few solutions that have worked for successful men and women who are still in grinds without burning out. Jenny Blake described the importance of learning to “create boundaries,” but acknowledged, “For younger women in particular, it can be hard to say no, especially in competitive jobs or industries where there would be a (perceived) line out the door for their replacement.” If you’re worried about how trying out any of these solutions might affect your job security, one way to ease in is to inform your boss explicitly that you’re testing out a new practice before beginning it. Smart managers will recognize your self-awareness and interest in improving your efficiency for what it is; after all, “work smarter, not harder” isn’t a phrase we throw around for nothing these days. Come up with a deal that if your productivity doesn’t improve after a set time period, you’ll abandon your plan — that way you’ll be motivated and not fear for job security before embarking to level that work-life balance see-saw. Writing in Forbes, Mattan Griffel noted his practice of only having meetings on Wednesdays. At first this seems unrealistic for most office environments — particularly those where women don’t feel in charge of their schedules — but coming from Griffel, one of Forbes’ "30 Under 30," it’s certainly worth trying. He tells of friends who adopted Wednesday meetings, calling the practice a “game changer” that “will probably make me hundreds of thousands of dollars more productive over the course of my life.” With many small offices going low to no meetings, you may want to take control of your own meeting schedule in a fresh way or recommend suggestions to someone who can change up the meeting schedule. They’ll thank you if it works out. In her conversation-changing book "Lean In," Sheryl Sandberg discusses the importance of leaving the office on time to have dinner with her family, even if she feared judgment from child-free colleagues. See the trend? Setting boundaries is something in popular news and books because the most successful professionals (Sandberg, Griffel) are doing it. There’s proof it works. U.S. News & World Report has some great tips in “How to Set Boundaries (So You Can Have a Life)." In particular they emphasize “leaving on time whenever possible” at a new job, dropping hints about your family or workout habits (depending on the culture, savvy workplaces will see outside hobbies as helpful to your productivity, within reason), and being transparent when you’ve been on the job a while and want to change your boundaries. Most ambitious professionals want to give 100 percent at work and outside of it, but it’s important to take the long view. It’s certainly a jarring concept to think that the female equivalent of midlife crisis (buying that Porsche) could mean a quarter-life crisis where all of the professional accomplishments that were top priority for the last five to 10 years are abandoned. You owe it to your future self to make sure all your hard work isn’t going to be for nothing if you burn out. And when we inevitably hit our midlife crisis instead of our quarter-life one, let us all say suck it, cheesy rom-coms (I’m looking at you, SJP in "I Don’t Know How She Does It"). Maybe I can’t have it all, but I can buy that Porsche just as well as any other man my age. Jenny Pierson is AlterNet's assistant managing editor. Professional burnout is a topic on which self-help books abound (two of the most popular being the catchily titled "The 4-Hour Workweek" by Tim Ferris or the "One Minute Manager" series by Ken Blanchard). New to this conversation is how burnout is affecting women in an age where the clock on their careers is less and less tied to their biological clocks. In Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much-shared piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” in The Atlantic, she explained why the pull of being at home with her kids in New Jersey drew her away from her successful government job in D.C. But what’s interesting is that this phenomenon isn’t about motherhood; it’s that the millennial propensity to overachieve and seek approval—in some cases mixing with the frustrations of glass ceilings and sexism in the office—is taking a toll on young childless women. Capable women are leaving the workforce in droves for disappointing reasons. To those who can’t shake the notion that motherhood is to blame for women dropping like flies from their promising careers, Harvard Business Review answers with the kicker:

It simply isn’t true that a large proportion of [the studied sample of Harvard Business School] HBS alumnae have ‘opted out’ to care for children. When we asked Gen X and Baby Boom women (who are most likely to have children under 18 living with them today) about their current status, we learned … Only 11 percent are out of the workforce to care for children full-time. The figure is even lower (7 percent) for women of color.

On Tuesday, Fast Company came out with a groundbreaking article incorporating interviews with millennial women (although more accurately the upper end of this age group is through to the younger end of Generation Y) who are burning out and a McKinsey study on how widespread it is. Jenny Blake, one of the women Fast Company interviewed, worked full-time at Google while juggling writing a book in her free time. “My pace was not sustainable, and I only realized it after I crashed — just weeks before my book was set to launch,” she said. Sustainability isn’t just a term that needs to be considered in regard to environmental issues; it’s also important to keep in mind for personal work-life balance so that women can achieve all they can, not just in the present, but for years to come. In order to combat professional burnout, women need at minimum a doting parent (or concerned friend, significant other or therapist) urging them to avoid putting too much on their plates too fast. But for those who aren’t so lucky, we’ll play the part with a few solutions that have worked for successful men and women who are still in grinds without burning out. Jenny Blake described the importance of learning to “create boundaries,” but acknowledged, “For younger women in particular, it can be hard to say no, especially in competitive jobs or industries where there would be a (perceived) line out the door for their replacement.” If you’re worried about how trying out any of these solutions might affect your job security, one way to ease in is to inform your boss explicitly that you’re testing out a new practice before beginning it. Smart managers will recognize your self-awareness and interest in improving your efficiency for what it is; after all, “work smarter, not harder” isn’t a phrase we throw around for nothing these days. Come up with a deal that if your productivity doesn’t improve after a set time period, you’ll abandon your plan — that way you’ll be motivated and not fear for job security before embarking to level that work-life balance see-saw. Writing in Forbes, Mattan Griffel noted his practice of only having meetings on Wednesdays. At first this seems unrealistic for most office environments — particularly those where women don’t feel in charge of their schedules — but coming from Griffel, one of Forbes’ "30 Under 30," it’s certainly worth trying. He tells of friends who adopted Wednesday meetings, calling the practice a “game changer” that “will probably make me hundreds of thousands of dollars more productive over the course of my life.” With many small offices going low to no meetings, you may want to take control of your own meeting schedule in a fresh way or recommend suggestions to someone who can change up the meeting schedule. They’ll thank you if it works out. In her conversation-changing book "Lean In," Sheryl Sandberg discusses the importance of leaving the office on time to have dinner with her family, even if she feared judgment from child-free colleagues. See the trend? Setting boundaries is something in popular news and books because the most successful professionals (Sandberg, Griffel) are doing it. There’s proof it works. U.S. News & World Report has some great tips in “How to Set Boundaries (So You Can Have a Life)." In particular they emphasize “leaving on time whenever possible” at a new job, dropping hints about your family or workout habits (depending on the culture, savvy workplaces will see outside hobbies as helpful to your productivity, within reason), and being transparent when you’ve been on the job a while and want to change your boundaries. Most ambitious professionals want to give 100 percent at work and outside of it, but it’s important to take the long view. It’s certainly a jarring concept to think that the female equivalent of midlife crisis (buying that Porsche) could mean a quarter-life crisis where all of the professional accomplishments that were top priority for the last five to 10 years are abandoned. You owe it to your future self to make sure all your hard work isn’t going to be for nothing if you burn out. And when we inevitably hit our midlife crisis instead of our quarter-life one, let us all say suck it, cheesy rom-coms (I’m looking at you, SJP in "I Don’t Know How She Does It"). Maybe I can’t have it all, but I can buy that Porsche just as well as any other man my age. Jenny Pierson is AlterNet's assistant managing editor.

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A conservative love affair ends: Breitbart forced to get tough with Trump after campaign manager assaults female reporter

Donald Trump is juggling two brewing controversies not directly involving him, but his campaign today. The campaign was forced to release a terse four word statement on the arrest of a North Carolina supporter caught assaulting a protestor at a Fayetteville rally last night: "We are not involved." The Trump campaign's official response to allegations that a reporter from the right-wing website Breitbart News was forcibly prevented from doing her job by a top campaign official earlier this week took much longer to be released and contained a shocking shift in tone in its dealings with what is undoubtedly the most pro-Trump media outlet out there. "The accusation, which has only been made in the media and never addressed directly with the campaign, is entirely false," Trump campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks said in a statement Thursday, responding to Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields' accusation that she was shoved to the ground by Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski during Trump's election night victory speech in Florida on Tuesday. A Washington Post reporter originally identified Lewandowski as the man that who "grabbed [Field's] arm and yanked her out of the way" when she went to ask Trump a question. "Fields stumbled. Finger-shaped bruises formed on her arm," Ben Terris recounted. When the incident was first brought to Brietbart's attention late Tuesday evening, the outlet's longstanding ties to the Trump campaign were evidently still firmly intact, as evidenced by its weak-kneed response. “If that’s the case," Breitbart CEO Larry Solov conditioned in a statement, "Corey owes Michelle an immediate apology.” While most Breitbart reporters, known of late for their overly effusive Trump coverage and dogged criticism of all other Republican candidates, mostly stayed mum on the situation, Breitbart was forced to suspend one reporter on Thursday after he appeared to cast doubt on Fields' account in a series of Tweets that have since been deleted. https://twitter.com/Hadas_Gold/status... After Terris' story was released Thursday and media outlets and conservative anti-Trump figures alike questioned Breitbart's tepid condemnation of Lewandowski's manhandling of one of its reporters, the website published Fields' lengthy account of events, issued a much firmer call for an apology from the Trump campaign, and suspended reporter Patrick Howley. "Patrick Howley was speaking for himself and not for Breitbart News. Senior Management at Breitbart News believes his comments were inappropriate and has decided to suspended him indefinitely effective immediately. Breitbart continues to stand 100% with Michelle Fields and believes that Corey Lewandowski must accept responsibility for his actions and apologize," a Breitbart spokesperson said Thursday afternoon. But the Tump campaign is doubling down, defending Lewandowski against Breitbart, denying the assault of Fields ever took place and suggesting that Fields made up the entire account to "become part of the news story." Here is more from campaign spokesperson Hope Hicks:

As one of dozens of individuals present as Mr. Trump exited the press conference I did not witness any encounter. In addition to our staff, which had no knowledge of said situation, not a single camera or reporter of more than 100 in attendance captured the alleged incident. This individual has never met Corey, nor had the only reporter that supposedly identified him. There are often large crowds aggressively seeking access to Mr. Trump and our staff would never do anything to harm another individual, while at the same time understanding that Mr. Trump and his personal space should never be invaded. This person claims she does not want to be part of the news, and only report it, however if that was the case, any concerns, however unfounded they may be, should have been voiced directly first and not via twitter, especially since no other outlet or reporter witnessed or questioned anything that transpired that evening. We leave to others whether this part of a larger pattern of exaggerating incidents, but on multiple occasions she has become part of the news story as opposed to reporting it. Recall she also claimed to have been beaten by a New York City Police officer with a baton.

For his part, after remaining silent for the better part of Wednesday, Lewandowski took to Twitter to cast doubt on Fields account without any actual rebuttal Thursday afternoon: https://twitter.com/CLewandowski_/sta... https://twitter.com/CLewandowski_/sta... https://twitter.com/CLewandowski_/sta... To which, Fields and her boyfriend, Daily Caller Senior Editor Jamie Weinstein, replied: https://twitter.com/MichelleFields/st... https://twitter.com/Jamie_Weinstein/s... https://twitter.com/MichelleFields/st... The conservative crack-up over the skirmish goes further than just Trump and Breitbart. Anti-Trump, right-wing conservatives were up in arms on Thursday, indignant that one of their own was treated with the same contempt usually reserved for a member of the much-maligned librul media: https://twitter.com/DLoesch/status/70... Trump will undoubtedly be asked about the violence surrounding his campaign events at tonight's CNN debate (yes, there is another one) and he has suggested that he plans to get more "presidential" in coming days, but after suddenly ditching CPAC last week and a top campaign official assaulting a Breitbart reporter this week, it is clear that his painful break-up with the conservative movement has already begun.

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Juicing gets squeezed out: The latest health craze is here — and not a moment too soon

Whatever happened to chewing? Whether it’s cold-pressed, blended or boiled, slurping your supper has taken the health food scene by storm in recent years. Instead of eating it whole, juicing raw fruits and vegetables into a single drink has been praised by proponents as a quick, low-calorie blast of nutrients or even a detox for the body if taken as a multi-day cleanse. Formerly the domain of trendy New York City juice bars, you’ll now find bottled greens at your grocery store or local Starbucks. Although juicing may be on the wane (we’ll get to why later) its hip, fiber-packed cousin, “souping,” is climbing to the top of cleanse diet charts. Souping — which is exactly what it sounds like — “is the new juicing,” as the New York Times declared in February. So what’s the deal with the liquid food craze? Is it really worth paying upward of $10 a bottle for pulverized produce (or in the triple digits for multi-day cleanses)? And how does drinking meals for consecutive days affect human health, or even the health of the planet? Juice explosion According to Racked, juice cleanses hit the market in 2009 and jumpstarted the juice craze. The favored variety is cold-pressed juice, which gets its name from a machine that presses juice out of produce and leaves behind the pulp. The technique is favored over blending because some say the heat generated from the fast-spinning blades of a blender destroys the enzymes and nutrients of fruits and veggies. Health food bloggers like Food Babe Vani Hari even swore off coffee for juice, claiming its rich shot of enzymes, vitamins and minerals is like drinking a natural version of Red Bull. “When juice is separated from the fiber of fruits and vegetables, it is easier for your body to absorb all the nutrients, giving you an instant boost of energy,” she claims. While juicing has been part of holistic health routines for a long time — brought to the forefront in the 1970s with Jack Lalanne’s line of Power Juicers — juicing has exploded in recent years. Juice bars have popped up across the country, documentaries have been made and celebrities such as Blake Lively, Jennifer Aniston and Beyoncé have touted juice-only diets such as BluePrint, Organic Avenue and the Master Cleanse. The market research firm IBISWorld says the $2 billion juice and smoothie bar industry has grown steadily over the past five years, with the cold-pressed juice sector alone taking in $100 million annually. Bad mood food Marisa Moore, an Atlanta-based registered dietitian nutrionist, explains to AlterNet that on the one hand, juicing does indeed have positive health benefits. “You’re getting a concentrated source of nutrients and you’re getting them fresh, quickly and easily,” she says. “People who have a hard time eating vegetables are prime candidates for juicing because they can get vitamin C and some of the antioxidants without having to sit down and eat them.” On the other hand, juicing can be bad for human health, especially long-term regimented cleanses that claim to clear your body of “toxins.” Never mind that your body already does a great job at detoxing, Moore says that juicing for days on end means you’re not getting any protein and you’re zapped of energy. (And probably left very cranky.) Moore's biggest qualm about juicing is that it can be very expensive and that valuable parts of the plants, such as skins and fiber, are left behind when it’s pressed. Methane monster Let’s also consider the environmental impact of juicing; a lot of food goes into those little bottles. A 16-ounce bottle of juice can contain up to six pounds of fruits and vegetables, the Huffington Post found. Unless it’s composted or somehow consumed, leftover pulp is tossed into landfills where it emits “significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide,” personal trainer Johnny Adamic wrote in the Daily Beast. He also argues that juicing is “a privileged, wasteful form of food consumption that’s worse for you than cooking and bad for the environment.” Peak juice? As diet crazes go, it looks like juicing is being squeezed out. Case in point: former NYC juice giant and Aniston-beloved Organic Avenue shut all its stores this past October and Racked even pondered, “Have we reached peak juice?” Juicing operations can be prohibitively expensive; just consider the sheer volume of perishable fruits and vegetables a juice bar has to buy. Also, since cold-pressed juices are not pasteurized, they have a shorter shelf life. “The profits are just not there anymore because it's a margin-sensitive environment,” Edward Balassanian, the founder of Seattle’s currently struggling Vital Juice told Racked. “The days of making $5 profit off a juice are gone. Now you make a $16 juice and it actually costs you $16 to create." Let them eat soup Enter souping. Drinking endless bowls of warm soup doesn’t just sound like a cozy reprieve from cold weather; the soup diet craze actually solves a lot of problems critics have with juicing. Because it’s blended instead of pressed, the fiber is retained. Because it’s mostly vegetables, the sugar content is cut. And because soup can be plopped into a bowl and savored with a spoon, it actually feels like more of a meal. And certain plants, such as tomatoes, are said to be even healthier when they are cooked. As with any regimented cleanse, souping is only okay for short stints. Even if it sounds more satiating, souping might leave you still feeling hungry. Furthermore, the fitness chain Equinox notes that the average calories in a day on Soupure’s three-day cleanse is only 1,200, much less than an active person needs. Don’t forget to chew So how does one juice or soup responsibly? Moore advises that vegetables, not fruits, should be the main ingredients in either packaged or homemade juices. Sure, pure vegetable juice can taste and smell a lot like lawnmower clippings, but the problem with fruit juice is that it’s basically sugar water, which can cause weight gain or other health problems if consumed in mass quantities. To sweeten up your juice, throw in low-sugar items such as lemon, lime or green apple instead of fruits that are higher on the glycemic scale. Remember that a three-, five- or even seven-day cleanse can be a quick fix to drop pounds, but be warned about the potential of gaining back all the weight once you’re off the diet. “If you’re trying to lose weight, the recommendation is to have solids not liquids,” Moore says, adding that actually chewing your food can leave you less hungry because you feel like you’re getting more food. Juicing or souping may be the latest quick and easy diet craze, but Moore says the best way to stay fit and healthy is to have a balanced diet and get plenty of sleep and exercise. “Always take notice if anything claims that it will change your life,” she says. “There’s not a magic bullet for health.” Whatever happened to chewing? Whether it’s cold-pressed, blended or boiled, slurping your supper has taken the health food scene by storm in recent years. Instead of eating it whole, juicing raw fruits and vegetables into a single drink has been praised by proponents as a quick, low-calorie blast of nutrients or even a detox for the body if taken as a multi-day cleanse. Formerly the domain of trendy New York City juice bars, you’ll now find bottled greens at your grocery store or local Starbucks. Although juicing may be on the wane (we’ll get to why later) its hip, fiber-packed cousin, “souping,” is climbing to the top of cleanse diet charts. Souping — which is exactly what it sounds like — “is the new juicing,” as the New York Times declared in February. So what’s the deal with the liquid food craze? Is it really worth paying upward of $10 a bottle for pulverized produce (or in the triple digits for multi-day cleanses)? And how does drinking meals for consecutive days affect human health, or even the health of the planet? Juice explosion According to Racked, juice cleanses hit the market in 2009 and jumpstarted the juice craze. The favored variety is cold-pressed juice, which gets its name from a machine that presses juice out of produce and leaves behind the pulp. The technique is favored over blending because some say the heat generated from the fast-spinning blades of a blender destroys the enzymes and nutrients of fruits and veggies. Health food bloggers like Food Babe Vani Hari even swore off coffee for juice, claiming its rich shot of enzymes, vitamins and minerals is like drinking a natural version of Red Bull. “When juice is separated from the fiber of fruits and vegetables, it is easier for your body to absorb all the nutrients, giving you an instant boost of energy,” she claims. While juicing has been part of holistic health routines for a long time — brought to the forefront in the 1970s with Jack Lalanne’s line of Power Juicers — juicing has exploded in recent years. Juice bars have popped up across the country, documentaries have been made and celebrities such as Blake Lively, Jennifer Aniston and Beyoncé have touted juice-only diets such as BluePrint, Organic Avenue and the Master Cleanse. The market research firm IBISWorld says the $2 billion juice and smoothie bar industry has grown steadily over the past five years, with the cold-pressed juice sector alone taking in $100 million annually. Bad mood food Marisa Moore, an Atlanta-based registered dietitian nutrionist, explains to AlterNet that on the one hand, juicing does indeed have positive health benefits. “You’re getting a concentrated source of nutrients and you’re getting them fresh, quickly and easily,” she says. “People who have a hard time eating vegetables are prime candidates for juicing because they can get vitamin C and some of the antioxidants without having to sit down and eat them.” On the other hand, juicing can be bad for human health, especially long-term regimented cleanses that claim to clear your body of “toxins.” Never mind that your body already does a great job at detoxing, Moore says that juicing for days on end means you’re not getting any protein and you’re zapped of energy. (And probably left very cranky.) Moore's biggest qualm about juicing is that it can be very expensive and that valuable parts of the plants, such as skins and fiber, are left behind when it’s pressed. Methane monster Let’s also consider the environmental impact of juicing; a lot of food goes into those little bottles. A 16-ounce bottle of juice can contain up to six pounds of fruits and vegetables, the Huffington Post found. Unless it’s composted or somehow consumed, leftover pulp is tossed into landfills where it emits “significant amounts of methane, a greenhouse gas 21 times more potent than carbon dioxide,” personal trainer Johnny Adamic wrote in the Daily Beast. He also argues that juicing is “a privileged, wasteful form of food consumption that’s worse for you than cooking and bad for the environment.” Peak juice? As diet crazes go, it looks like juicing is being squeezed out. Case in point: former NYC juice giant and Aniston-beloved Organic Avenue shut all its stores this past October and Racked even pondered, “Have we reached peak juice?” Juicing operations can be prohibitively expensive; just consider the sheer volume of perishable fruits and vegetables a juice bar has to buy. Also, since cold-pressed juices are not pasteurized, they have a shorter shelf life. “The profits are just not there anymore because it's a margin-sensitive environment,” Edward Balassanian, the founder of Seattle’s currently struggling Vital Juice told Racked. “The days of making $5 profit off a juice are gone. Now you make a $16 juice and it actually costs you $16 to create." Let them eat soup Enter souping. Drinking endless bowls of warm soup doesn’t just sound like a cozy reprieve from cold weather; the soup diet craze actually solves a lot of problems critics have with juicing. Because it’s blended instead of pressed, the fiber is retained. Because it’s mostly vegetables, the sugar content is cut. And because soup can be plopped into a bowl and savored with a spoon, it actually feels like more of a meal. And certain plants, such as tomatoes, are said to be even healthier when they are cooked. As with any regimented cleanse, souping is only okay for short stints. Even if it sounds more satiating, souping might leave you still feeling hungry. Furthermore, the fitness chain Equinox notes that the average calories in a day on Soupure’s three-day cleanse is only 1,200, much less than an active person needs. Don’t forget to chew So how does one juice or soup responsibly? Moore advises that vegetables, not fruits, should be the main ingredients in either packaged or homemade juices. Sure, pure vegetable juice can taste and smell a lot like lawnmower clippings, but the problem with fruit juice is that it’s basically sugar water, which can cause weight gain or other health problems if consumed in mass quantities. To sweeten up your juice, throw in low-sugar items such as lemon, lime or green apple instead of fruits that are higher on the glycemic scale. Remember that a three-, five- or even seven-day cleanse can be a quick fix to drop pounds, but be warned about the potential of gaining back all the weight once you’re off the diet. “If you’re trying to lose weight, the recommendation is to have solids not liquids,” Moore says, adding that actually chewing your food can leave you less hungry because you feel like you’re getting more food. Juicing or souping may be the latest quick and easy diet craze, but Moore says the best way to stay fit and healthy is to have a balanced diet and get plenty of sleep and exercise. “Always take notice if anything claims that it will change your life,” she says. “There’s not a magic bullet for health.”

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Noam Chomsky: The world should be utterly terrified of a Trump presidency

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