Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 857
February 21, 2016
This “smart” vibrator wants to tell you about your orgasm
Imagine a future where you’re driving home from work. It’s a pretty easy ride because cars are now “smart” and things like parking and steering are no longer the responsibilities of the driver. You look down at your smartwatch and realize Mom’s calling. You speak into your wrist for a bit and arrive home, which is good because she’s a talker and you’re tired. You say your goodbyes, walk in the door and tell Alexa to play something sexy. Then you head for the bedroom and look around for the only piece of smart technology that can help educate you about something you’ve been itching to get out all day. It’s your vibrator, and it wants to tell you about your orgasm. That’s the kind of future Liz Klinger has in mind. Last week, Klinger launched an Indigogo campaign for the Lioness, a vibrator designed to help women learn about their body’s sexual responses. The toy is loaded with advanced sensors so it can measure indicators of arousal and orgasm like vaginal contractions, temperature and movement. The information can then be accessed through an app on your smartphone. It’s a way to chart your sexuality; to visualize how you get off, how long it takes and other interesting patterns your orgasm may present. “Having the sensors there and having the feedback makes you think differently about masturbation,” Klinger told AlterNet. “The vibrator allows you to try out a bunch of different things, whatever you’re curious about.” The vibrator can make suggestions based on the data it collects; it can even estimate the amount of foreplay you typically need to get off. The company reached its $50,000 goal just four days after the launch. The sex tech industry has embraced a number of innovations (if you don’t believe me just check out the status of the sex bot), but certain trends seem to have claimed the spotlight. “If you look at the industry and what has been introduced, it’s generally the more couple-oriented vibrators where you can control it from a long distance or with wi-fi or things like that,” Klinger says. Her aim was to redirect the focus back to the individual. She liked the idea of pairing a means of achieving orgasm with a better understanding of what happens to your body when you have one. “Sex is a very natural, human thing. But we don’t treat it that way when we talk about it. That bothers me,” says Klinger, who grew up in a fairly conservative Midwestern environment. So far, the reception has been pretty positive. “The fact is, female pleasure has been far more elusive than male pleasure. This product could provide a service to women by addressing a large gap in the knowledge and practice of female sexuality,” says Sarah Merrill, a sex researcher at Cornell University. “You can use the information to talk about things with your partner. Talk about your preferences,” Klinger says. The information could also help improve solo sexual encounters. But designing a sex toy isn’t easy. It’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all endeavor. As sexpert Carol Queen writes, “The most important characteristic to think about when selecting your dildo is probably size. If it’s too small, it might not give you the zing of pleasure that your ‘just right’ size would. If it’s too big, you won’t be able to use it comfortably.” Klinger had to work with the knowledge that the majority of women (around 70%) rely on clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm. But because she and her team needed a way to measure the vaginal contractions that accompany orgasm, it was important to include a bit that can rest internally. There’s also a vibrating arm that falls comfortably on the clitoris. Of course, not everyone wants to go down the “smart,” sexy path. There are plenty of people out there emphasizing the importance of unplugging from our devices—especially in the bedroom. Those in that camp may not see the perks of merging that level of technology with sex. Others just don't see the point. “Sometimes you just want to get off for the sake of getting off. You don’t need all the bells and whistles,” one sex toy enthusiast says. And nobody wants to see the day data takes precedence over experience in the arena of masturbation. If the FitBit has taught us anything, it’s that information-collecting technologies can get a little addictive, not to mention pricy. The Lioness retails at $230, a steep pricetag for a sex toy. Still, there is something to be said about Klinger’s individualistic approach to sex toy design. It’s hard to gauge the many nuances of female sexual pleasure. It’s even harder when you take certain things like menstrual cycle, stress and anxiety into account. And it’s rare to see sex integrated into general conversations about health and wellness. “We talk about sleeping, eating and exercising in terms of being happy and healthy, but sex isn’t usually brought into that conversation,” Klinger says. The Lioness is slated for release August 2016.
It’s time to end Antonin Scalia’s prison state: How the next SCOTUS justice could help end mass incarceration
It’s hard to believe that the United States’ vast prison archipelago, holding roughly 2.2 million human beings in cages, somehow squares with the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” To many eyes, it is both of those things: The system is fueled by statutes prescribing long sentences that are both extreme and by comparison odd for crimes both minor and major. But narrow majorities on the Supreme Court led by recently-deceased Justice Antonin Scalia haven’t seen it that way. Scalia, reaching back to the 18th century as he liked to do, pushed the Court to adopt a maximally restrictive view of what kind of punishment could be so grossly disproportionate so as to run afoul of the Constitution. In practice, he found nothing that would qualify. Replacing Scalia with a more humane, less hidebound justice could allow the Court to take a more expansive look at the Eighth Amendment and, in doing so, do something quite radical: help end mass incarceration. In could also end the death penalty, something that Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have strongly suggested they are ready to do. “Scalia was perhaps the strongest opponent of proportionality analysis of any kind under the Amendment,” emails Jonathan Simon, a University of California Berkeley law professor and faculty director of its Center for the Study of Law and Society. “A more robust proportionality rule would go a long way to eliminating some outsized determinate sentences that drive a big part of mass incarceration.” It was in 2003 that the Court finally shut the door on judicially limiting disproportionately harsh sentences. The case was Ewing v. California, and the matter at hand concerned Gary Ewing, a drug addict and habitual offender with full-blown AIDS sentenced to 25-years-to-life under California’s “Three Strikes” law for stealing three gulf clubs. The Court upheld the conviction but without a majority opinion. In 1983’s Solem v. Helm, the Court had approached the proportionality of sentences with a slightly more open mind, reversing a life sentence handed down to a recidivist offender for passing a $100 bad check. Justice Lewis Powell, writing for the majority, found that “that his sentence is significantly disproportionate to his crime, and is therefore prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.” But by 1991, the Court put an end to their flirtation with checking excessive punishment, voting in Harmelin v. Michigan to uphold Ronald Harmelin’s state mandatory life without parole sentence for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. Scalia, writing for himself and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, found that “the Eighth Amendment contains no proportionality guarantee” because while “disproportionate punishment can perhaps always be considered ‘cruel,’ but it will not always be (as the text also requires) ‘unusual.’” In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall went farther than his fellow dissenters, arguing that the Eighth Amendment barred not only disproportionate prison sentences but also the death penalty, finding that “a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole does share one important characteristic of a death sentence: The offender will never regain his freedom. Because such a sentence does not even purport to serve a rehabilitative function, the sentence must rest on a rational determination that the punished” conduct is so horrible that the interest in deterrence and retribution outweigh any possibility of reform and rehabilitation. Breyer and Ginsburg, who dissented in Ewing, are on the court today, and Sotomayor and Kagan could very well join them in finding excess sentences to be unconstitutional. Critically, Justice Anthony Kennedy has come along as well—to a point. Most importantly, Kennedy has joined the Court’s liberals in majority opinions finding that the death penalty is unconstitutional for crimes committed by minors and (along with Chief Justice John Roberts) that mandatory life without parole for minors was as well. The Court has also found the death penalty for rape unconstitutional. The big question is whether justices would be willing to take the huge and complicated step of determining that excessive sentences for adults and non-death sentences are wrong as well. Right now, the death penalty and juvenile offenders have been carved out as narrow exceptions. “The areas in which we might see the greatest effect are in the context of life without parole and the constitutionality of the death penalty itself and the procedures used to carry it out,” emails Meghan J. Ryan, Associate Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University. “With respect to life without parole, it is possible that the Court could strike down the imposition of the sentence for certain classes of non-homicide offenders—such as those who are intellectually disabled or suffering from mental illness—or for all non-homicide offenders.” Simon, however, isn’t optimistic that the Court would embrace a proportionality doctrine to the extent necessary to have a major impact on mass incarceration. But he does believe that other rulings grounded in the Eighth Amendment could. Simon believes that, for example, the Court could overrule the 1981 decision in Rhodes v. Chapman finding double celling unconstitutional, which “would have stopped mass incarceration” from taking off. That year, Justice Marshall lodged the sole dissenting vote. “With the rising crime rates of recent years, there has been an alarming tendency toward a simplistic penological philosophy that if we lock the prison doors and throw away the keys, our streets will somehow be safe,” wrote Marshall. “In the current climate, it is unrealistic to expect legislators to care whether the prisons are overcrowded or harmful to inmate health. It is at that point - when conditions are deplorable and the political process offers no redress - that the federal courts are required by the Constitution to play a role.” Simon points to the 2011 decision Brown v. Plata, where the Court ruled that California’s overcrowded prisons were unconstitutional, pushing a recalcitrant state toward some measure of decarceration. Predictably, Scalia called the ruling “outrageous” in his dissent. By contrast, Justice Kennedy’s majority decision indicated the Court’s growing willingness to consider even those duly convicted of a crime to nonetheless remain human beings. “Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons,” Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. “Respect for that dignity animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” An additional justice who understands this, and maybe even a bit more expansively than Kennedy, could usher in a sea change in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence—one that could put a huge dent in mass incarceration. A fair look of the harsh sentences that hundreds of thousands of Americans currently serve makes it clear that the system is no doubt both cruel and unusual. To end mass incarceration, the Court needs another Justice Marhsall.It’s hard to believe that the United States’ vast prison archipelago, holding roughly 2.2 million human beings in cages, somehow squares with the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” To many eyes, it is both of those things: The system is fueled by statutes prescribing long sentences that are both extreme and by comparison odd for crimes both minor and major. But narrow majorities on the Supreme Court led by recently-deceased Justice Antonin Scalia haven’t seen it that way. Scalia, reaching back to the 18th century as he liked to do, pushed the Court to adopt a maximally restrictive view of what kind of punishment could be so grossly disproportionate so as to run afoul of the Constitution. In practice, he found nothing that would qualify. Replacing Scalia with a more humane, less hidebound justice could allow the Court to take a more expansive look at the Eighth Amendment and, in doing so, do something quite radical: help end mass incarceration. In could also end the death penalty, something that Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg have strongly suggested they are ready to do. “Scalia was perhaps the strongest opponent of proportionality analysis of any kind under the Amendment,” emails Jonathan Simon, a University of California Berkeley law professor and faculty director of its Center for the Study of Law and Society. “A more robust proportionality rule would go a long way to eliminating some outsized determinate sentences that drive a big part of mass incarceration.” It was in 2003 that the Court finally shut the door on judicially limiting disproportionately harsh sentences. The case was Ewing v. California, and the matter at hand concerned Gary Ewing, a drug addict and habitual offender with full-blown AIDS sentenced to 25-years-to-life under California’s “Three Strikes” law for stealing three gulf clubs. The Court upheld the conviction but without a majority opinion. In 1983’s Solem v. Helm, the Court had approached the proportionality of sentences with a slightly more open mind, reversing a life sentence handed down to a recidivist offender for passing a $100 bad check. Justice Lewis Powell, writing for the majority, found that “that his sentence is significantly disproportionate to his crime, and is therefore prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.” But by 1991, the Court put an end to their flirtation with checking excessive punishment, voting in Harmelin v. Michigan to uphold Ronald Harmelin’s state mandatory life without parole sentence for possessing 672 grams of cocaine. Scalia, writing for himself and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, found that “the Eighth Amendment contains no proportionality guarantee” because while “disproportionate punishment can perhaps always be considered ‘cruel,’ but it will not always be (as the text also requires) ‘unusual.’” In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall went farther than his fellow dissenters, arguing that the Eighth Amendment barred not only disproportionate prison sentences but also the death penalty, finding that “a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole does share one important characteristic of a death sentence: The offender will never regain his freedom. Because such a sentence does not even purport to serve a rehabilitative function, the sentence must rest on a rational determination that the punished” conduct is so horrible that the interest in deterrence and retribution outweigh any possibility of reform and rehabilitation. Breyer and Ginsburg, who dissented in Ewing, are on the court today, and Sotomayor and Kagan could very well join them in finding excess sentences to be unconstitutional. Critically, Justice Anthony Kennedy has come along as well—to a point. Most importantly, Kennedy has joined the Court’s liberals in majority opinions finding that the death penalty is unconstitutional for crimes committed by minors and (along with Chief Justice John Roberts) that mandatory life without parole for minors was as well. The Court has also found the death penalty for rape unconstitutional. The big question is whether justices would be willing to take the huge and complicated step of determining that excessive sentences for adults and non-death sentences are wrong as well. Right now, the death penalty and juvenile offenders have been carved out as narrow exceptions. “The areas in which we might see the greatest effect are in the context of life without parole and the constitutionality of the death penalty itself and the procedures used to carry it out,” emails Meghan J. Ryan, Associate Professor of Law at Southern Methodist University. “With respect to life without parole, it is possible that the Court could strike down the imposition of the sentence for certain classes of non-homicide offenders—such as those who are intellectually disabled or suffering from mental illness—or for all non-homicide offenders.” Simon, however, isn’t optimistic that the Court would embrace a proportionality doctrine to the extent necessary to have a major impact on mass incarceration. But he does believe that other rulings grounded in the Eighth Amendment could. Simon believes that, for example, the Court could overrule the 1981 decision in Rhodes v. Chapman finding double celling unconstitutional, which “would have stopped mass incarceration” from taking off. That year, Justice Marshall lodged the sole dissenting vote. “With the rising crime rates of recent years, there has been an alarming tendency toward a simplistic penological philosophy that if we lock the prison doors and throw away the keys, our streets will somehow be safe,” wrote Marshall. “In the current climate, it is unrealistic to expect legislators to care whether the prisons are overcrowded or harmful to inmate health. It is at that point - when conditions are deplorable and the political process offers no redress - that the federal courts are required by the Constitution to play a role.” Simon points to the 2011 decision Brown v. Plata, where the Court ruled that California’s overcrowded prisons were unconstitutional, pushing a recalcitrant state toward some measure of decarceration. Predictably, Scalia called the ruling “outrageous” in his dissent. By contrast, Justice Kennedy’s majority decision indicated the Court’s growing willingness to consider even those duly convicted of a crime to nonetheless remain human beings. “Prisoners retain the essence of human dignity inherent in all persons,” Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. “Respect for that dignity animates the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” An additional justice who understands this, and maybe even a bit more expansively than Kennedy, could usher in a sea change in Eighth Amendment jurisprudence—one that could put a huge dent in mass incarceration. A fair look of the harsh sentences that hundreds of thousands of Americans currently serve makes it clear that the system is no doubt both cruel and unusual. To end mass incarceration, the Court needs another Justice Marhsall.
What Bernie’s liberal critics miss: Attacking him as “unrealistic” is making a huge error
In the coming months, elites in the Democratic Party will surely find all manner of justification for their vague distrust of Bernie Sanders. But understanding the real origin of this mistrust isn't hard: just imagine how awkward it must be to discuss Sanders' full-throated indictment of the shamelessly rich if you exist within a certain sphere of the Democratic establishment. Speaking too plainly about the bald, gluttonous concentration of wealth among America’s richest citizens is self-evidently gauche when one’s trying to enjoy the Crispy Black Bass and Braised Veal Cheek “Surf & Turf” at Le Bernadin — particularly if the meal is being footed by a wealthy friend or benefactor.
Suffice it to say, the sober voices of well-compensated moderation do not like Bernie Sanders' proposals. Influential liberals like Paul Krugman of the New York Times and Neera Tanden of the Center for American Progress are not fans of the candidate's lofty rhetoric. No, Sanders' style is simply below the very serious realists of the Democratic Party. He's making impossible promises, employing the dreaded "unicorns" and "magical thinking" of those vile Republicans. (It’s telling that in Krugman’s most full-throated critique of Sanders’ proposals, he whines that “it would probably create many losers as well as winners — a substantial number of Americans, mainly in the upper middle class, who would end up paying more in additional taxes than they would gain in enhanced benefits.” There's Krugman, bravely imploring his New York Times readership to find it in their hard hearts to pity the poor upper middle class. Such bravery. Such panache.)
"Facts have a liberal bias," these self-proclaimed members of the "reality-based community" have long insisted. This specific brand of self-flattery, central to the mythology that technocrats have constructed for themselves, insists that it's far better to be perceived as cynically pragmatic than to risk being mocked by the rest of the chattering class. That the Republican Party has had enormous success throughout the last few decades employing exactly the brand of ideologically-coherent promise-making Sanders has adopted is summarily ignored.
At their heart, appeals to moderation willfully ignore an obvious and indisputable aspect of our presidential system: the ahistoric procedural tactics marshaled by the Republican Party to accomplish their objectives are adopted because they usually work. And despite brief episodes of political blowback when the party reaches too far, Republicans have done incredibly well for themselves by pushing the limits of acceptable political behavior to their advantage. As our political parties became increasingly ideologically homogeneous, American politics was transformed into a massive, catastrophic Prisoner's Dilemma.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a famous game that outlines how two seemingly-rational parties can behave in a manner that's mutually self-destructive. Here are the basic rules: Two parties play as criminals under interrogation. Both are being questioned in separate rooms, and if neither implicates the other, both will go free in a short time. But if only one implicates their co-conspirator, only the snitch will be free, while the other is handed a lengthy prison sentence; if the conspirators implicate one another, they’ll both spend the maximum time in prison. The problem for players in this game is twofold: not knowing for certain what your co-conspirator will do, and not trusting your co-conspirator to work toward the common good.
With regards to the politics of cynicism, brinksmanship, and mounting constitutional crises, the Democratic Party is the proverbial prisoner who's still holding out hope that their craven co-conspirator will cooperate — this, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Suppose that the Democrats only resort to extreme tactics — fiscal brinksmanship, judicial stonewalling, Senate filibusters, etc. — after the unwritten rules discouraging such behavior have already been broken by their Republican opponents. If we're being especially generous, perhaps we view this reluctance as evidence of the party’s noble sobriety — and not, say, something as simple as bad tactics. Even if that interpretation is true, so what? If the Democrats will still agree to play by the new ugly rules of political reality once the norms are cast aside, what does refusing to play hardball in the first place really accomplish — besides giving the Republicans the political equivalent of one free punch before the fight?
Consider briefly the appointment of Antonin Scalia's eventual successor: Imagine if circumstances were reversed, and a Republican president wanted to replace a liberal justice with a principled conservative, but the Democrats controlled the Senate. Would they refuse to hold hearings on any and all appointments until after the next election? Some on the left would favor this strategy, but the Paul Krugmans of the world would side with moderation, as they always do. Let's respect tradition and institutional norms, they'd likely suggest. We are the "reality-based community," after all, immune to the cynical extremism of both left and right. Sure, we may lose another fight, rolling over to allow an ideologically rigid conservative onto the bench for another three decades, but we helped preserve American democracy from its worst impulses. No matter that this noblesse oblige only delays the inevitable, only forces the fight onto the next Supreme Court appointment, when the circumstances may be reversed and Republican leadership will demonstrate no compunctions about delaying an appointment inevitably to get its way.
This impulse on the Republican side is not healthy, make no mistake, nor is it conducive to the operation of an effective government capable of basic function. The problem for Democrats is that this nightmare scenario is basically already upon us. As Scott Lemieux noted recently in The New Republic, if the balance of power in Washington remains unchanged after the election (a very real possibility) there's no reason to assume that the Republican Senate will have any greater incentive to name a replacement for Scalia than they do now. Allowing the Supreme Court to remain with only eight justices for five or nine years might seem insane or impossible at the moment — and perhaps Senate Republicans will decide to work with President Obama to appoint a moderate and avoid electoral blowback. But perhaps not? The point is that our system is structured in such a way as to make the possibility of a full-on constitutional crisis as likely as one party simply desiring to cause one.
The Prisoner's Dilemma is a brutal game because it’s such a powerful indictment of principled behavior: Unless you can really trust your co-conspirator, keeping quiet is a sucker's game. If you're gonna do the time, might as well bring that jerk in the other room down with you.
Powerful Democratic surrogates like Krugman love to differentiate themselves from those kooky Republicans: A recent Twitter meme compared the talking points of the two parties' debates as evidence of this basic superiority. And the divide in tone between the two parties is striking. But what's being implied — that one party is full of Serious People and the other party is not — only serves to flatter those making the argument. Democrats have been crowing about their seriousness for decades, and yet their party has been losing electoral ground nationally the whole damn time. The Democrats' reluctance to use extreme procedural tactics until after the Republicans have broken prior norms is sensible only if winning itself is less important than slightly delaying the inevitable degradation of our politics into complete and utter gridlock.
Perhaps such a goal is noble. But it's telling that the same left-of-center voices who are so offended by Sanders' rhetorical tactics seem oblivious to the actual stakes involved. When Democrats refuse to play dirty, no matter how noble their reasoning, they will always inevitably become the sucker. Sanders seems to implicitly understand this aspect of the game. Krugman? Well, he's just not living in reality.
February 20, 2016
Jeb’s done: Bush drops out of presidential race after awful showing in South Carolina; Trump victorious
Republican Jeb Bush ended his campaign for the presidency Saturday after a disappointing finish in South Carolina, acknowledging his failure to harness the hopes of Republican voters angry at the political establishment. The former Florida governor and political scion told supporters in Columbia that he’d tried to stay true to what he believes. Still, he was lagging far behind in the primary in South Carolina, where his well-organized campaign was outmatched by insurgent billionaire Donald Trump, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m proud of the campaign that we’ve run to unify our country and to advocate conservative solutions,” a visibly emotional Bush said. “The presidency is bigger than any one person. It’s certainly bigger than any one candidate.” The son of George H. W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush entered the race to huge expectations in June, and quickly fueled them with fundraising. Working with a super PAC that has supported his candidacy, Bush and allies raised more than $150 million by the end of 2015 — far more than any of his GOP rivals. However, Bush’s presence in the race and fundraising potential wasn’t enough to dissuade more than a dozen other Republicans from entering the race, including fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush’s failure to ignite was not simply a factor of the size of the GOP field. Bush, like others, was caught off-guard by the durable popularity of political outsiders — particularly Trump. The final stage of Bush’s campaign became an all-out bout with the outspoken real estate mogul — the two frequently referring to each other as a “loser.” Bush took shots at Trump’s lack of experience while Trump attacked Bush’s family legacy, particularly the unpopular Iraq war waged by his brother George W. Bush. Bush, meanwhile, offered himself as an experienced public executive and potential world statesman informed in part by his father’s and brother’s wartime presidencies. But it wasn’t a case strong enough to translate into votes. “I just don’t see a third Bush presidency,” Julie Michau of Beaufort, South Carolina, said Wednesday after attending a Bush event. There were other problems as well. The policy-oriented Bush was overshadowed in early debates by Trump and Rubio, which dramatically slowed his early autumn fundraising. Bush went on to finish sixth in the Iowa caucuses, but barely squeezed ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire for a fourth place finish. South Carolina was viewed as a last early voting state for Bush to make a mark. Having previously kept his family at arm’s length, Bush brought all family ties to the forefront ahead of South Carolina. His father and brother both won the South Carolina primary when they were seeking the presidency, and he had set his hopes high there for a campaign revival. Despite support for the Bush family among a segment of devoted South Carolina Republicans, Bush himself had a halting final week of campaigning. At a Wednesday town hall meeting in Summerville he was offered more advice than policy questions, the same day he learned South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had endorsed Ru Watch highlights from South Carolina Republican primary:
[jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/SChighlights.petercooper.2.20.16.mp4" image="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/donald_trump85.jpg"][/jwplayer]
Republican Jeb Bush ended his campaign for the presidency Saturday after a disappointing finish in South Carolina, acknowledging his failure to harness the hopes of Republican voters angry at the political establishment. The former Florida governor and political scion told supporters in Columbia that he’d tried to stay true to what he believes. Still, he was lagging far behind in the primary in South Carolina, where his well-organized campaign was outmatched by insurgent billionaire Donald Trump, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m proud of the campaign that we’ve run to unify our country and to advocate conservative solutions,” a visibly emotional Bush said. “The presidency is bigger than any one person. It’s certainly bigger than any one candidate.” The son of George H. W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush entered the race to huge expectations in June, and quickly fueled them with fundraising. Working with a super PAC that has supported his candidacy, Bush and allies raised more than $150 million by the end of 2015 — far more than any of his GOP rivals. However, Bush’s presence in the race and fundraising potential wasn’t enough to dissuade more than a dozen other Republicans from entering the race, including fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush’s failure to ignite was not simply a factor of the size of the GOP field. Bush, like others, was caught off-guard by the durable popularity of political outsiders — particularly Trump. The final stage of Bush’s campaign became an all-out bout with the outspoken real estate mogul — the two frequently referring to each other as a “loser.” Bush took shots at Trump’s lack of experience while Trump attacked Bush’s family legacy, particularly the unpopular Iraq war waged by his brother George W. Bush. Bush, meanwhile, offered himself as an experienced public executive and potential world statesman informed in part by his father’s and brother’s wartime presidencies. But it wasn’t a case strong enough to translate into votes. “I just don’t see a third Bush presidency,” Julie Michau of Beaufort, South Carolina, said Wednesday after attending a Bush event. There were other problems as well. The policy-oriented Bush was overshadowed in early debates by Trump and Rubio, which dramatically slowed his early autumn fundraising. Bush went on to finish sixth in the Iowa caucuses, but barely squeezed ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire for a fourth place finish. South Carolina was viewed as a last early voting state for Bush to make a mark. Having previously kept his family at arm’s length, Bush brought all family ties to the forefront ahead of South Carolina. His father and brother both won the South Carolina primary when they were seeking the presidency, and he had set his hopes high there for a campaign revival. Despite support for the Bush family among a segment of devoted South Carolina Republicans, Bush himself had a halting final week of campaigning. At a Wednesday town hall meeting in Summerville he was offered more advice than policy questions, the same day he learned South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had endorsed Ru Watch highlights from South Carolina Republican primary:[jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/SChighlights.petercooper.2.20.16.mp4" image="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/donald_trump85.jpg"][/jwplayer]
Republican Jeb Bush ended his campaign for the presidency Saturday after a disappointing finish in South Carolina, acknowledging his failure to harness the hopes of Republican voters angry at the political establishment. The former Florida governor and political scion told supporters in Columbia that he’d tried to stay true to what he believes. Still, he was lagging far behind in the primary in South Carolina, where his well-organized campaign was outmatched by insurgent billionaire Donald Trump, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m proud of the campaign that we’ve run to unify our country and to advocate conservative solutions,” a visibly emotional Bush said. “The presidency is bigger than any one person. It’s certainly bigger than any one candidate.” The son of George H. W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush entered the race to huge expectations in June, and quickly fueled them with fundraising. Working with a super PAC that has supported his candidacy, Bush and allies raised more than $150 million by the end of 2015 — far more than any of his GOP rivals. However, Bush’s presence in the race and fundraising potential wasn’t enough to dissuade more than a dozen other Republicans from entering the race, including fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush’s failure to ignite was not simply a factor of the size of the GOP field. Bush, like others, was caught off-guard by the durable popularity of political outsiders — particularly Trump. The final stage of Bush’s campaign became an all-out bout with the outspoken real estate mogul — the two frequently referring to each other as a “loser.” Bush took shots at Trump’s lack of experience while Trump attacked Bush’s family legacy, particularly the unpopular Iraq war waged by his brother George W. Bush. Bush, meanwhile, offered himself as an experienced public executive and potential world statesman informed in part by his father’s and brother’s wartime presidencies. But it wasn’t a case strong enough to translate into votes. “I just don’t see a third Bush presidency,” Julie Michau of Beaufort, South Carolina, said Wednesday after attending a Bush event. There were other problems as well. The policy-oriented Bush was overshadowed in early debates by Trump and Rubio, which dramatically slowed his early autumn fundraising. Bush went on to finish sixth in the Iowa caucuses, but barely squeezed ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire for a fourth place finish. South Carolina was viewed as a last early voting state for Bush to make a mark. Having previously kept his family at arm’s length, Bush brought all family ties to the forefront ahead of South Carolina. His father and brother both won the South Carolina primary when they were seeking the presidency, and he had set his hopes high there for a campaign revival. Despite support for the Bush family among a segment of devoted South Carolina Republicans, Bush himself had a halting final week of campaigning. At a Wednesday town hall meeting in Summerville he was offered more advice than policy questions, the same day he learned South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had endorsed Ru Watch highlights from South Carolina Republican primary:[jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/SChighlights.petercooper.2.20.16.mp4" image="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/donald_trump85.jpg"][/jwplayer]
Republican Jeb Bush ended his campaign for the presidency Saturday after a disappointing finish in South Carolina, acknowledging his failure to harness the hopes of Republican voters angry at the political establishment. The former Florida governor and political scion told supporters in Columbia that he’d tried to stay true to what he believes. Still, he was lagging far behind in the primary in South Carolina, where his well-organized campaign was outmatched by insurgent billionaire Donald Trump, and Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. “I’m proud of the campaign that we’ve run to unify our country and to advocate conservative solutions,” a visibly emotional Bush said. “The presidency is bigger than any one person. It’s certainly bigger than any one candidate.” The son of George H. W. Bush and brother of George W. Bush entered the race to huge expectations in June, and quickly fueled them with fundraising. Working with a super PAC that has supported his candidacy, Bush and allies raised more than $150 million by the end of 2015 — far more than any of his GOP rivals. However, Bush’s presence in the race and fundraising potential wasn’t enough to dissuade more than a dozen other Republicans from entering the race, including fellow Floridian, Sen. Marco Rubio. Bush’s failure to ignite was not simply a factor of the size of the GOP field. Bush, like others, was caught off-guard by the durable popularity of political outsiders — particularly Trump. The final stage of Bush’s campaign became an all-out bout with the outspoken real estate mogul — the two frequently referring to each other as a “loser.” Bush took shots at Trump’s lack of experience while Trump attacked Bush’s family legacy, particularly the unpopular Iraq war waged by his brother George W. Bush. Bush, meanwhile, offered himself as an experienced public executive and potential world statesman informed in part by his father’s and brother’s wartime presidencies. But it wasn’t a case strong enough to translate into votes. “I just don’t see a third Bush presidency,” Julie Michau of Beaufort, South Carolina, said Wednesday after attending a Bush event. There were other problems as well. The policy-oriented Bush was overshadowed in early debates by Trump and Rubio, which dramatically slowed his early autumn fundraising. Bush went on to finish sixth in the Iowa caucuses, but barely squeezed ahead of Rubio in New Hampshire for a fourth place finish. South Carolina was viewed as a last early voting state for Bush to make a mark. Having previously kept his family at arm’s length, Bush brought all family ties to the forefront ahead of South Carolina. His father and brother both won the South Carolina primary when they were seeking the presidency, and he had set his hopes high there for a campaign revival. Despite support for the Bush family among a segment of devoted South Carolina Republicans, Bush himself had a halting final week of campaigning. At a Wednesday town hall meeting in Summerville he was offered more advice than policy questions, the same day he learned South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley had endorsed Ru Watch highlights from South Carolina Republican primary:[jwplayer file="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/SChighlights.petercooper.2.20.16.mp4" image="http://media.salon.com/2016/02/donald_trump85.jpg"][/jwplayer]
Clinton narrowly pulls ahead, winning Nevada caucuses by 5 percent
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Hillary Clinton seized the momentum in the fierce fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, turning back a challenge from Bernie Sanders in Nevada's caucuses on Saturday and pushing toward even friendlier primaries in the South. "The future that we want is within our grasp," the former secretary of state, first lady and senator told cheering supporters after her Nevada win. The numbers back her up in her second bid for the presidency. If Clinton solidifies her support among black voters over the next month and wins the Southern contests, she could amass a significant number of delegates in the push toward the 2,383 needed to win the nomination. There are more than 1,400 delegates at stake in states such as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, and depending on the outcome and proportional allocation of delegates, Clinton could build a comfortable lead. Wins also could drive superdelegates to her candidacy. She currently holds a sizable lead among those elected leaders and party officials. Still, Sanders told his supporters after his Nevada loss: "The wind is at our backs. We have the momentum." After a devastating, double-digit loss to Sanders in New Hampshire, Clinton prevailed in Nevada with the backing of women, union workers, minorities, moderates and voters who are certain she will have a better shot at winning in November, according to entrance polls. A large majority of blacks supported Clinton, an outcome that bodes well for Clinton in South Carolina on Feb. 27. Alma Lopez, 45, was among a group of housekeepers from the Bellagio waiting to enter a caucus site at the nearby Caesars Palace hotel. Lopez and her co-workers broke into chants of "Hillary!" as they waited. "She understands what it means to be a woman, a mother, a human being," Lopez said. The 57,000-member Culinary Workers Union didn't endorse in the election, but it circulated literature ensuring its members knew where and when to caucus and had staff ensure they were able to get to their sites Saturday. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called casino bosses to ensure that workers would get paid time off to caucus. He also reached out to the union to try to encourage the group to push their members to caucus, even without a formal endorsement, according to aides. The state party's initial estimates were that 80,000 Democrats caucused Saturday, about 10,000 more than most expected but still well below the nearly 120,000 who showed up in 2008. Clinton's win in Nevada means she will pick up most of the state's delegates. With 35 at stake, Clinton will gain at least 18. Sanders will pick up at least 14. Three delegates remain to be allocated, based on votes in the congressional districts. Entrance polls of Nevada voters found that a third said the economy was their major concern, while a quarter cited income inequality — the centerpiece of Sanders' campaign. Whites were split between the two candidates. Sanders did well with self-identified independents and two-thirds of those participating in a caucus for the first time. The polling survey was conducted for AP and the television networks by Edison Research. ___ Associated Press writer Nicholas Riccardi contributed to this report from Las Vegas.
We must relearn to eat: Here’s how we teach our kids — and ourselves — to find pleasure in what’s good for us
So many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat—how we approach food—is what really matters. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us. Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts—more or less half-hearted—to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. Bone marrow from wild game is considered the best first baby food among the hunting tribes of Tanzania. If you were born in the Far Eastern republic of Laos, it could be gelatinous rice, pre-chewed by your mother and transferred from her mouth to yours (this is sometimes called kiss-feeding). For Western babies, that first bite of solid food may be powdered cereal from a packet or puree from a jar; it could be organic pumpkin, steamed and strained and served with a hypoallergenic spoon; or a random nibble from a parent’s plate. Aside from milk, there is simply no such thing as a universal food. Not even for babies. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world. But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training him or her how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Unlike the anteater, which eats only small termites, we have few natural instincts to fall back on. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likable, which are lovable, and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature. Or that’s how it used to be. In today’s food culture, many people seem to have acquired uncannily homogeneous tastes, markedly more so than in the past. In 2010, two consumer scientists argued that the taste preferences of childhood provided a new way of thinking about the causes of obesity. They noted a “self-perpetuating cycle”: food companies push foods high in sugar, fat, and salt, which means that children learn to like them, and so the companies invent ever more of these foods “that contribute to unhealthy eating habits.” The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products—despite their illusion of infinite choice— deliver a monotonous flavor hit quite unlike the more varied flavors of traditional cuisine. I went to the cinema with one of my children recently. We stood at the ice cream concession and I realized, with a jolt, that almost all of the options—other than plain vanilla—contained chocolate in one form or another. Would we pick mint chocolate chunk or cherry chocolate chunk or chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie pieces or caramel ice cream with pieces of caramel chocolate? The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way. Once you recognize the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we currently approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to “hide” vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares, blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love zucchini for its own sake. In our harried, sleep-deprived state, as parents we find it hard to play the long game. We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord. By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, in doom-laden terms, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. As of 2010, poor diet and physical inactivity accounted for 10 percent of all deaths and disease worldwide, ahead of tobacco smoke (6.3 percent) and household air pollution (4.3 percent). Around two-thirds of the population is either overweight or obese in rich countries, and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. Everything tastes better with bacon! As the journalist Michael Moss exposed in 2013, the big food companies engineer foods with a chemically calculated “bliss point” designed to get us hooked. Newspapers sometimes project a future in which obesity levels continue to rise indefinitely until almost everyone in the world is affected. But there’s something else going on here that usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. Others find these supposedly irresistible foods the opposite of blissful. If two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, then fully a third is not. This is astonishing, given just how many opportunities there now are to eat doughnuts. Exposed to the same food that bombards us all, these lucky people have learned different responses. It’s in all our interest to find out how they have done it. Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. If only children could be taught how to cook and plant vegetable gardens, they would automatically become healthier. It sounds convincing: school gardens are a lovely thing. But by themselves, they are not enough to make a child relate to food in healthy ways. Our difficulty is not just that we haven’t learned to cook and grow food, however important that is; it’s that we haven’t learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness. Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of day. Much cooking now, however, is nothing like this. In my experience as a food journalist, chefs and food writers are, if anything, more prone to compulsive eating and other disordered food obsessions than non-cooks. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neopolitan rum babas, and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a ton of cheese. * The reason that many find it hard to eat healthily is that we have never learned any differently. Like children, most of us eat what we like, and we only like what we know. Never before have whole populations learned (or mislearned) to eat in societies where calorie-dense food was so abundant and policed with so few norms about portion sizes and meal times. Nor is overeating the only problem that plagues modern affluent civilizations. Statistics suggest that around 0.3 percent of young women are anorexic and another 1 percent are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them. What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others—whether overweight or underweight—are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of carbs or fat grams and unable to derive straightforward enjoyment from meals. A 2003 study of 2,200 American college students suggested that weight concern is very common: 43 percent of these students were worried about their weight most of the time (across both sexes), and 29 percent of the women described themselves as “obsessively preoccupied” with weight. Our dietary malaise is often discussed in fatalistic terms, as if our preference for hamburgers were a life sentence: diets don’t work, sugar is addictive, and so on. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments. Admittedly, no one has ever encountered a food environment quite like the one in which we now find ourselves, flooded with cheap calories in deceptive packaging. Surviving in our current situation will entail very different skills from those needed by a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Yet there is every reason to suppose that we are capable of acquiring these skills if we give ourselves half a chance. If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Imagine you were adopted at birth by parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite unlike the ones you ended up with. We all begin life with an innate liking for sweetness and a suspicion of bitterness, yet there is nothing inevitable in our physiology that says we will grow up dreading vegetables and craving fudge. The trouble is, we do not tend to see it this way. Excerpted from "First Bite: How We Learn To Eat" by Bee Wilson. Published by Basic Books. Copyright 2015 by Bee Wilson. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.So many of our anxieties around diet take the form of a search for the perfect food, the one that will cure all our ills. Eat this! Don’t eat that! We obsess about the properties of various ingredients: the protein, the omega oils, the vitamins. But this is getting ahead of ourselves. Nutrients only count when a person picks up food and eats it. How we eat—how we approach food—is what really matters. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what’s good for us. Our tastes follow us around like a comforting shadow. They seem to tell us who we are. Maybe this is why we act as if our core attitudes to eating are set in stone. We make frequent attempts—more or less half-hearted—to change what we eat, but almost no effort to change how we feel about food: how well we deal with hunger, how strongly attached we are to sugar, our emotions on being served a small portion. We try to eat more vegetables, but we do not try to make ourselves enjoy vegetables more, maybe because there’s a near-universal conviction that it is not possible to learn new tastes and shed old ones. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. All the foods that you regularly eat are ones that you learned to eat. Everyone starts life drinking milk. After that, it’s all up for grabs. Bone marrow from wild game is considered the best first baby food among the hunting tribes of Tanzania. If you were born in the Far Eastern republic of Laos, it could be gelatinous rice, pre-chewed by your mother and transferred from her mouth to yours (this is sometimes called kiss-feeding). For Western babies, that first bite of solid food may be powdered cereal from a packet or puree from a jar; it could be organic pumpkin, steamed and strained and served with a hypoallergenic spoon; or a random nibble from a parent’s plate. Aside from milk, there is simply no such thing as a universal food. Not even for babies. From our first year of life, human tastes are astonishingly diverse. As omnivores, we have no inbuilt knowledge of which foods are good and safe. Each of us has to use our senses to figure out for ourselves what is edible, depending on what’s available. In many ways, this is a delightful opportunity. It’s the reason there are such fabulously varied ways of cooking in the world. But we haven’t paid anything like enough attention to another consequence of being omnivores, which is that eating is not something we are born instinctively knowing how to do, like breathing. It is something we learn. A parent feeding a baby is training him or her how food should taste. At the most basic level, we have to learn what is food and what is poison. We have to learn how to satisfy our hunger and also when to stop eating. Unlike the anteater, which eats only small termites, we have few natural instincts to fall back on. Out of all the choices available to us as omnivores, we have to figure out which foods are likable, which are lovable, and which are disgusting. From these preferences, we create our own pattern of eating, as distinctive as a signature. Or that’s how it used to be. In today’s food culture, many people seem to have acquired uncannily homogeneous tastes, markedly more so than in the past. In 2010, two consumer scientists argued that the taste preferences of childhood provided a new way of thinking about the causes of obesity. They noted a “self-perpetuating cycle”: food companies push foods high in sugar, fat, and salt, which means that children learn to like them, and so the companies invent ever more of these foods “that contribute to unhealthy eating habits.” The main influence on a child’s palate may no longer be a parent but a series of food manufacturers whose products—despite their illusion of infinite choice— deliver a monotonous flavor hit quite unlike the more varied flavors of traditional cuisine. I went to the cinema with one of my children recently. We stood at the ice cream concession and I realized, with a jolt, that almost all of the options—other than plain vanilla—contained chocolate in one form or another. Would we pick mint chocolate chunk or cherry chocolate chunk or chocolate ice cream with chocolate brownie pieces or caramel ice cream with pieces of caramel chocolate? The danger of growing up surrounded by these endless sweet and salty industrial concoctions is not that we are innately incapable of resisting them, but that the more frequently we eat them, especially in childhood, the more they train us to expect all food to taste this way. Once you recognize the simple fact that food preferences are learned, many of the ways we currently approach eating start to look a little weird. To take a small example, consider the parents who go to great lengths to “hide” vegetables in children’s meals. Is broccoli really so terrible that it must be concealed from innocent minds? Whole cookbooks have been devoted to this arcane pursuit. It starts with the notion that children have an innate resistance to vegetables, and will only swallow them unawares, blitzed into pasta sauce or baked into sweet treats; they could never learn to love zucchini for its own sake. In our harried, sleep-deprived state, as parents we find it hard to play the long game. We think we are being clever when we smuggle some beets into a cake. Ha! Tricked you into eating root vegetables! But since our children are not conscious that they are consuming beets, the main upshot is to entrench their liking for cake. A far cleverer thing would be to help children learn to become adults who choose vegetables consciously, of their own accord. By failing to see that eating habits are learned, we misunderstand the nature of our current diet predicament. As we are often reminded, in doom-laden terms, eating has taken a dramatic collective wrong turn in recent decades. As of 2010, poor diet and physical inactivity accounted for 10 percent of all deaths and disease worldwide, ahead of tobacco smoke (6.3 percent) and household air pollution (4.3 percent). Around two-thirds of the population is either overweight or obese in rich countries, and the rest of the world is fast catching up. The moral usually drawn from these statistics is that we are powerless to resist the sugary, salty, fatty foods that the food industry promotes. Everything tastes better with bacon! As the journalist Michael Moss exposed in 2013, the big food companies engineer foods with a chemically calculated “bliss point” designed to get us hooked. Newspapers sometimes project a future in which obesity levels continue to rise indefinitely until almost everyone in the world is affected. But there’s something else going on here that usually gets missed. Not everyone is equally susceptible to the dysfunction of our food supply. Some people manage to eat sugary, salty, fatty foods in modest quantities, and then stop. Others find these supposedly irresistible foods the opposite of blissful. If two-thirds of the population is overweight or obese, then fully a third is not. This is astonishing, given just how many opportunities there now are to eat doughnuts. Exposed to the same food that bombards us all, these lucky people have learned different responses. It’s in all our interest to find out how they have done it. Many campaigners would say cooking is the answer. If only children could be taught how to cook and plant vegetable gardens, they would automatically become healthier. It sounds convincing: school gardens are a lovely thing. But by themselves, they are not enough to make a child relate to food in healthy ways. Our difficulty is not just that we haven’t learned to cook and grow food, however important that is; it’s that we haven’t learned to eat in ways that support health and happiness. Traditional cuisines across the world were founded on a strong sense of balance, with norms about which foods go together, and how much one should eat at different times of day. Much cooking now, however, is nothing like this. In my experience as a food journalist, chefs and food writers are, if anything, more prone to compulsive eating and other disordered food obsessions than non-cooks. For cooking to become the solution to our diet crisis, we first have to learn how to adjust our responses to food. Cooking skills are no guarantee of health if your inclinations are for twice-fried chicken, Neopolitan rum babas, and French aligot: potatoes mashed with a ton of cheese. * The reason that many find it hard to eat healthily is that we have never learned any differently. Like children, most of us eat what we like, and we only like what we know. Never before have whole populations learned (or mislearned) to eat in societies where calorie-dense food was so abundant and policed with so few norms about portion sizes and meal times. Nor is overeating the only problem that plagues modern affluent civilizations. Statistics suggest that around 0.3 percent of young women are anorexic and another 1 percent are bulimic, with rising numbers of men joining them. What statistics are not particularly effective at telling us is how many others—whether overweight or underweight—are in a perpetual state of anxiety about what they consume, living in fear of carbs or fat grams and unable to derive straightforward enjoyment from meals. A 2003 study of 2,200 American college students suggested that weight concern is very common: 43 percent of these students were worried about their weight most of the time (across both sexes), and 29 percent of the women described themselves as “obsessively preoccupied” with weight. Our dietary malaise is often discussed in fatalistic terms, as if our preference for hamburgers were a life sentence: diets don’t work, sugar is addictive, and so on. What we forget is that, as omnivores, we are extremely gifted at changing the way we eat to accommodate different environments. Admittedly, no one has ever encountered a food environment quite like the one in which we now find ourselves, flooded with cheap calories in deceptive packaging. Surviving in our current situation will entail very different skills from those needed by a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer. Yet there is every reason to suppose that we are capable of acquiring these skills if we give ourselves half a chance. If our food habits are learned, they can also be relearned. Imagine you were adopted at birth by parents who lived in a remote village in a far-flung country. Your tastes would be quite unlike the ones you ended up with. We all begin life with an innate liking for sweetness and a suspicion of bitterness, yet there is nothing inevitable in our physiology that says we will grow up dreading vegetables and craving fudge. The trouble is, we do not tend to see it this way. Excerpted from "First Bite: How We Learn To Eat" by Bee Wilson. Published by Basic Books. Copyright 2015 by Bee Wilson. Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
Yes, I’m voting for Hillary because she is a woman — but it’s not quite as simple as that
"Saturday Night Live" opened up recently with a skit of 20-something couples having a Hillary versus Bernie discussion over brunch-time mimosas. When they each sheepishly fess up their love for Bernie to the others, they then collectively grasp at straws to capture what they don’t like about Hillary. In swoops Kate McKinnon, playing Hillary Clinton, on a swing from above in her asexual power suit, singing Bonnie Raitt’s “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” The skit had me in stitches but it was the kind of moment where, while laughing, you suddenly realize the joke is on you. And it’s personal. Not only did it perfectly satirize Hillary’s predicament, but it brilliantly captured something even bigger (and sadder), which is the professional and public experience of the educated career woman. In my world (academia), this is a common experience for women. What I’m referring to is this phenomenon of having your knowledge and expertise discounted, minimized or dismissed because of amorphous personal traits, expressed so perfectly on the skit in a simple noise, "she’s just 'eh.'" And everyone agrees. It's being the most learned and experienced person in the room, yet people take more seriously the less experienced, loud-talking male who has some kind of charisma on his side, the kind that she could never have because gender norms have long taught us that "intelligent" and "woman" equals anti-charisma. This is the kind of thing Gloria Steinem knows. This is the kind of thing Madeleine Albright knows. This is the kind of thing I hear from women in academia all the time. It's the kind of thing women in their 20s haven't quite experienced yet. Let's go back to “eh” for a second. Not until school is out do you realize that this is the noise that comes with the advanced degree because education in a woman is still a turn-off to many. This is classic implicit bias, manifesting in our inability to articulate the feeling. It’s a visceral response to a person. It’s how people feel when you go somewhere you don’t belong, when you speak up when it was expected you should just listen, when you threaten an establishment that doesn’t really want to include you. People just get annoyed. It’s the adverse effect of Sandberg-style leaning in. At first it will be boyfriends whose egos take a bruising as you blaze past with your ambitions. You know how they never seem interested in your school or work? So you break up and forge ahead. But then it turns out to be a lot of people. At work. Among friends. Slowly trying to chip you down, slowly reminding you that you are out of bounds. I spent most of my 20s in college and graduate school, soaking up as much as I could about my field. I had that “fire in the belly” passion, studied long nights, read books in my field just for fun, and was fascinated by the professors who shaped my mind. Then there were the signs. For some women it was sexual harassment in school; I was lucky that wasn’t me. Instead, I remember in my early clinical training days how a new patient would look me up and down and say, “Are you my therapist?” Starting in the one-down position certainly puts the pressure on to perform. I remember going out to buy a whole new wardrobe of “grown-up” clothes from the working woman sections of Kohl’s and JCPenney’s and tying my hair back to age myself. I couldn’t masquerade it away, though. The questioning of my credentials continued. Admittedly, I never felt entirely comfortable in clinical practice. It felt too much like having to prove myself to the patient. I eventually gravitated toward a career in research and teaching. Now for my 30s. Life was long hours of writing manuscripts and grants while preparing class lectures, all while juggling the home front. The credibility question persisted. I remember a student flagging me down before class was about to start to ask, “Are we going over anything important today?” to assess whether it was worth his time to stay. Message: My lectures are not important. Or the student who went all the way to the dean to argue against taking my required course because she already knew everything I was going to teach (in spite of never having taken coursework in this area). Message: My courses are not important. Or after my first NIH grant was funded, having a male colleague comment, “Wow, they must have more money for your field.” Message: My success must be a lucky break. One of my personal favorites was when my female colleague was invited to be expert commentator on a major TV program. In the makeup room they drew wrinkles on her face to make her look more “mature” (read: credible). Of course, when they turned their backs, she wiped the wrinkles off. Message: You don’t look credible. The stories are endless and they are a thousand little knives as you climb the ladder. You respond by working harder to prove yourself, to build the résumé so it can’t be argued. Now my 40s are here and, admittedly, it's getting exhausting. It's become clear that building the résumé does not fend off these experiences. Why, at this stage, do I still need to prove myself? It is still standard fare to meet someone at a cocktail party, tell them what I do, and then sit through a lecture on their theories on my area of expertise without their once asking my opinion. (In spite of the fact that I now have real wrinkles!) Meanwhile, across the room my male colleague is wowing the crowd forming around him with anecdotes about his work. Even when his musings venture wildly outside of his expertise, he can still enrapture a crowd. He’s no "eh." I have a couple of fantastic male mentors who I know have great respect for me, and every time either of them introduces me, they add, "She's really smart!" At first this makes me proud, but then I wonder why do I require an endorsement? The pride quickly gives way to deep embarrassment. The truth is, I’m burning out. I don't want to compete with loudmouths who know less. I don't want the kid in my class who thinks there's nothing to learn. I’m tired of requiring an endorsement. I don’t fake smile anymore. I’m less polite. I talk over people. I have no idea what my 50s and 60s will bring. As in most fields, the female part of the herd is going to thin out as the ranks get higher. The road is likely to bring new challenges as senior women attempt to peel men's fingers off the power structures it has taken years of career climbing to even glimpse. What is happening to Hillary Clinton is discouraging. Her career is far more successful than mine; her thousand knives were not little. She’s been hit hard. Her physical self, her mind, her integrity, her daughter. How does she persist? How does she not wake up daily in a rage? How has she not quit? I look to her for strength. So yes, I'm voting for Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. But it's not quite as simple as that. Women aren’t unidimensional. Hillary Clinton is a woman with a platform for women. She and Bernie are so similar that during debates they say “I agree with him/her” more than any married couple ever has. However, just by being president, she will change the country in ways no man can. All women stand to benefit from the impact that female executive leadership will have on the psyche of the country. On our daughters. She will slowly erase the “eh” factor for the rest of us. This means my daughter will have a different experience. She may be taken seriously, respected, and not require male endorsement to get through doors. Her effort and accomplishments will be acknowledged. I wonder how much she could accomplish without that burden? I will vote for anything that spares her even a tiny bit of having to tirelessly prove her competence to a world that isn't going to believe it. They don’t believe it because female leadership is not a part of our history. It needs to be. When we listen to the comments (from men and women) about Hillary Clinton, we must consider them through the lens of implicit bias and we must, even more importantly, not exempt ourselves from that bias. We need to ask ourselves, what does “eh” mean? Is there substance to this feeling? We also have to adjust the bias in our assessment of her. By getting this far, she’s a measure smarter than she's been credited. She has survived experiences her male colleagues could never know. And, she keeps going. She has proved she has more energy, more toughness and more resilience than anyone running because the hurdles she overcame to get here were so much bigger. Even if Hillary Clinton loses, she has stimulated conversations that need to be had. She’s taking one for the team by shouldering body blows of unconscious bias in front of the entire world. For that, as women, we have to thank her. In between punches, one day maybe she’ll tell us how she endured it all and kept pushing on. I, for one, would like to know. Sherry Pagoto, Ph.D., is a behavioral scientist, licensed clinical psychologist, and mom to an 8-year-old girl. She tweets at @DrSherryPagoto and blogs at FUdiet.com.
There’s another water pollutant Americans have to worry about: Mercury
Several years after scientists thought they had put the problem to rest, they have once again discovered increasing concentrations of mercury, this time in rainwater. “It’s a surprising result,” says David Gay from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who is a co-author on the new study. “Everybody expected [mercury levels] to continue going down. But our analysis shows that may not necessarily be the case.” The results, recently published in
Science of the Total Environment
, is surprising because long-term trends had shown a decrease in mercury emissions whereas data collected between 2007 and 2013 indicate an unsettling upturn from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest. The trend, however, is not due to regional activity. The authors speculate that because the U.S. has controlled its emissions since the 1970s, the toxic element was initially released via coal-burning power plants in Asia, drifted through the upper atmosphere for months, hit turbulence over the Rocky Mountains and was then pulled from the air in the form of rain. Hannah Horowitz from Harvard University, who was not involved in the study, was surprised to see a similar—albeit less detailed—trend in her own work. After seeing the regional effects in this new study, she agrees that the toxic element likely comes from outside the U.S. “We see for other types of pollutants that [the Rocky Mountain region] tends to be more influenced by nonlocal sources because of its higher elevation—it has access to the free tropospheric air,” she says. Given that it is such a recent phenomenon, scientists cannot be sure what an increase will mean for the environment and public health. “As a general rule, we are very concerned about mercury because it can be present at very dilute levels in the environment, parts per trillion, but in the food chain—in a food that we eat and that other animals eat—it can reach levels that are toxic,” says Peter Weiss-Penzias from the University of California, Santa Cruz, who led the study. Mercury magnifies as it travels up the food chain from minnows to fish to large mammals, including human beings. Pregnant women, for example, are often discouraged from eating fish because the element poses extreme risks to the developing fetus, particularly the central nervous system and brain. It is possible that the calculated rise of 2 percent per year will result in a large accumulation in the ecosystem over the coming years, Weiss-Penzias says. “And once an ecosystem is contaminated with mercury, it can take decades for it to become uncontaminated.”
