Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 939

Have a coke and diabetes: The beverage giant’s shady research practices, exposed

The University of Colorado School of Medicine recently announced it was returning a $1 million gift from Coca-Cola after it was revealed that the money was used to fund the Global Energy Balance Network, an industry pressure group that has worked to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and the author of Soda Politics , called the network a "front group" for Coca-Cola and said she was pleased that the money was returned. The world's largest beverage company has been criticized for pushing a misleading message to the public, blaming the obesity crisis on Americans' lack of exercise and denying that sugary beverages are a main cause of the problem. The company said the returned money would be donated to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. Dana Radcliffe, a professor of business ethics at Cornell University, recently wrote a Huffington Post blog post questioning whether Coke's actions were consistent with its publicly espoused values, including honesty and respect for all its stakeholders. I had a chance to ask Prof. Radcliffe his thoughts about the recent announcement by the University of Colorado, what it means for Coca-Cola and the ethics behind selling sugar. Reynard Loki: What is the impact on Coca-Cola of the University of Colorado's decision to return its gift? Is this just a bump in a rocky road, or does this development carry some significance? Dana Radcliffe: Prior to this decision by the University of Colorado, two high-profile health organizations — the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — which had together received $4.7 million from Coke, severed their relationships with the company. In light of the fact that, since 2010, Coca-Cola has distributed $120 million to various groups involved in health research and other efforts to combat the obesity epidemic, I would not be surprised to see more recipients declining further support from Coke. If a number of those organizations do follow suit, I think Coca-Cola will be forced to rethink its positions on the causes of the crisis and on what its role should be in trying to end it. More specifically, Coke will come under increasing pressure to abandon its initiatives propagating "energy balance" — which imputes weight-related health problems primarily to insufficient exercise — a hypothesis dismissed as "scientific nonsense" by 37 scientists and public health experts in a letter to the New York Times. If it does let go of that nostrum, and if it is truly concerned about helping address the epidemic, it will make protecting consumers' health a part of its business strategy, for example by increasing its investment in producing and marketing beverages other than sugary drinks. RL: Does the decision impact only Coke or are there repercussions for its competitors and the food industry in general? DR: If the scenario I just described unfolds for Coke, then that will strengthen the hand of health and nutrition advocates in pressing food and beverage companies to acknowledge their contributions to the problem and to become part of the solution. To make significant headway in ending the obesity epidemic, we need the food and beverage industry to accept the responsibility that goes with its power to influence consumers' eating and drinking habits. Certainly, it is a highly competitive industry, and to survive companies have to sell products customers want to buy. Currently, makers of food and drinks treat "healthy choice" as a niche: one product category among many. I can't help but think it would benefit both the industry and consumers if it used its considerable consumer-research and marketing skills to increase market demand for healthier products. Indeed, with the country beset by weight-based illnesses, I believe food and beverage companies that focus on exploiting our cravings for sugar, salt and fat — using science to find ways to intensify those cravings — are morally irresponsible. I'm hopeful that as younger and more health-conscious executives assume leadership roles in the industry, it will become a leader in helping solve an urgent societal problem it has helped create. RL: Major cities have been trying to curb consumption of sugary drinks. Coca-Cola's sales are slipping. Michele Simon, a public health lawyer, said we are witnessing a "huge political and public backlash against soda." Do you agree? DR: I don't know that I would describe public concerns about the health impacts of soda as a "backlash" yet. That may be coming. I think, gradually, through the efforts of public health advocates like Ms. Simon and Marion Nestle, consumer preferences are changing. It's a struggle, though, because our cravings for sweets and salty snacks are often hard to resist, a fact of which the food industry has long taken advantage. Frankly, we consumers are going to have to shoulder most of the responsibility for controlling our cravings and acquiring healthier eating and drinking habits. This does not absolve the food and beverage industry of any responsibility for consumers' health. But ultimately, we choose what we eat and drink, and there are resources we can utilize to help us make healthier dietary choices. What I fault the industry for are their intentional efforts to make it harder for consumers to make those choices. RL: In your Huffington Post piece, you wrote, that “many would argue that the company's managers have a fiduciary duty to the company's investors to maximize shareholder value, requiring them to do whatever they can, within the law, to increase profits.” This evidently conflicts with what Coca-Cola chairman and CEO Muhtar Kent lauded as the company's "rich culture of integrity and ethical conduct." [Coca-Cola has a Code of Business Conduct that requires "honesty and integrity in all matters.”] This internal tension isn't just an issue for Coke. How do publicly owned companies deal with this collision of principles? DR: In fact, many legal scholars (such as Lynn Stout of Cornell, in her book The Shareholder Value Myth ) argue convincingly that directors and executives do not have a legal duty to maximize shareholder value — or even to try to do so. Some scholars maintain that corporate leaders are obliged to try to maximize long-term shareholder value, but of course, that "requirement" is no real constraint, since for almost any policy they adopt the leaders can claim they are aiming to maximize long-term shareholder value. Furthermore, in shareholder lawsuits, courts follow the "business judgment rule," which essentially allows boards of directors to decide what is in the long-term interest of the company — as long as the directors aren't engaged in self-dealing. In addition, when it is said that a company's managers must "maximize shareholder value," what is usually meant is that shareholders interests should always come first, ahead of the interests of other stakeholders. But this view — "shareholder primacy" — is morally incoherent, implying that corporate managers cannot act on obligations to employees or customers if that conflicts with the interests of shareholders. Even Milton Friedman, in his famous 1970 New York Times article, "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits," commonly regarded as a main source of the maximize-shareholder-value doctrine, held that managers should pursue profits for investors "while conforming to the basic rules of society, both those embedded in law and those embedded in ethical custom." Clearly, Friedman did not believe that shareholders' interests always trump those of employees, customers, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders. In fact, Muhtar Kent is on solid ground — legally and morally — in acknowledging that Coke's quest for profits should be constrained by its moral responsibilities to its stakeholders. So, in accepting a responsibility to lessen the health risks associated with Coke's products, Kent and his company would certainly not be violating a duty to shareholders. RL: In your article, you also noted that the biases that create conflicts of interest are "generally unconscious and thus can affect even distinguished scientists who are unaware of their bias." You point out that there have been numerous studies that show that "the source of funding influences the outcome of the research, even if the researchers are convinced of their impartiality." If that is the case, is there anything that can be done to prevent these conflicts from happening? Should funding be "anonymized" through a third party? Perhaps, just as academic papers are peer-reviewed, there could be some kind of peer review with regard to funding? DR: Actually, I don't believe anything is simply a philanthropic gift, with no strings attached. Coca-Cola could make such gifts, but such giving is better done through a truly independent non-profit foundation set up by the company purely for charitable purposes. Also, if Coke wanted to support genuinely unbiased research on obesity, it would have to ensure that the recipient organization didn't know Coke was the source of the funding, and given legal disclosure requirements, I don't see how that would work. RL: Since Coke is a purveyor of sugar, which is linked to obesity, the company's messaging to the public, whether through advertising, marketing or biased scientific research, is ultimately a matter of public health. Do we need tougher legislation that prevents companies from essentially lying to the public about their products? DR: I don't favor such legislation, and in any case, it would be hard to prove that companies that sell products containing ingredients (like sugar and salt) that are unhealthy in large amounts are deceiving the public. Consumers have ample access to information about such health risks. The exception to this point is when companies try to confuse the science by supporting and publicizing biased research. I consider that a form of deception. But I would not favor deterring such research by regulation. Exposure and public criticism (with the help of social media), as has happened with Coke's ill-advised creation of the Global Energy Balance Network, can be effective and don't ignite political disputes about "government overreach." RL: Forbes Magazine's 2015 Most Valuable Brands ranks Coca-Cola fourth, after Apple, Microsoft and Google. Ranked five to 10 are IBM, McDonald's, Samsung, Toyota, GE and Facebook. Of the top 10, only Coca-Cola and McDonald's are food companies and thus play a more critical role in the arena of public health than the other companies on the list. Because of their risk exposure to public health — in particular the obesity crisis — should they be held to a different, or perhaps higher, standard in terms of business ethics? Put another way, does the kind of product you're selling impact your ethical responsibility in selling that product? DR: Regardless of what the law mandates, I would argue that — as a matter of ordinary moral decency — if a company makes a product that poses serious risks to public health or safety, it has an obligation to take reasonable measures to mitigate that risk. What is problematic about food and drinks is that the risks they expose us to are long-term and often due to excess consumption of the products. While we can develop powerful cravings for snack foods and sugary drinks, they are not addictive in the way tobacco products are. So, yes, makers of products that are deleterious to our health bear a greater moral burden, in my opinion, than other manufacturers. But the special moral challenge faced by food and beverage makers is, until they can create healthy snacks and sodas, how to drive sales without encouraging excess consumption by particular consumers. Meeting that challenge will take imaginative — and conscientious — leadership. RL: If Coca-Cola invited you to devise a plan to get through the current storm of criticism, what would you tell them to do? Can Coke take this negative press and turn it into an opportunity for positive growth? DR: First, as I mentioned earlier, Coke should stop pushing "energy balance." Its support for that discredited idea makes the company look dishonest. Second, except as a completely philanthropic endeavor, Coke should not seek to fund research on weight-related health problems. As a funding source, it cannot avoid creating conflicts of interest for the researchers, even if they are reputable scientists trying diligently to be objective. Third, I don't think it should try to turn its negative press in this situation into an opportunity. Any such effort is likely to backfire. Rather, it should quietly ramp up efforts to diversify away from sugary drinks and work on making its current brands healthier.

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Shiffrin uses blazing final run to win World Cup slalom

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) — Mikaela Shiffrin shook off the disappointment of a fall the day before and turned in two blistering runs to win a World Cup slalom by 3.07 seconds Saturday, the largest margin of victory in the history of the women's discipline.

The reigning Olympic and world champion flew through the course and finished in a two-run combined time of 1 minute, 39.81 seconds. Veronika Velez Zuzulova of Slovakia wound up a distant second and Sweden's Frida Hansdotter was third.

Shiffrin surpassed the previous slalom record for margin of victory held by France's Florence Steurer. She won by three seconds during a slalom race in 1968, according to information provided by the International Ski Federation.

On the podium after the race, Shiffrin called it a "special day."

And it certainly made up for Friday. Shiffrin was in command of a giant slalom race when she crashed near the finish. She buried her face in the snow as the crowd went silent.

This time, fans roared for the 20-year-old from nearby Eagle-Vail. She was rather subdued in her celebration despite becoming the first American woman to win a World Cup slalom race at Aspen.

"Sometimes that disappointment can hurt your or drive you," Shiffrin said of her fall. "I let it fuel me."

Shiffrin has won four straight World Cup slalom events dating to last season. It's the longest streak in slalom by a female skier since Marlies Schild of Austria captured five straight in 2011-12.

The retired Schild also happens to be one of Shiffrin's childhood idols.

No surprise Shiffrin races a lot like Schild. The resemblance is easy to see for Bernadette Schild, the younger sister of Marlies.

"She skis similar to the way my sister used to ski when she was really good," said Bernadette Schild, who went out early in her first run, ending her day. "She's just sending it."

It was a tough day for the typically strong Austrian contingent as the nation's top three racers veered off course. Schild was at a loss to explain why.

"The course wasn't that hard, actually," she said. "Things like that happen."

This race was scheduled to be held in Levi, Finland, but was relocated because of warm weather there. Aspen will host another slalom race Sunday and Shiffrin will be the overwhelming favorite.

"I know this hill really well now," Shiffrin said. "I think I have an advantage. A lot of these girls aren't used to the terrain and the surface.

"Sometimes, it's tricky to get your mind around the toughness and just hammer anyway."

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Oh, the suffering of the CIA: In Showtime’s “The Spymasters,” America’s chief spooks bare their souls on the pain of the terror war

José Rodriguez is a Harley-riding hardass who spent many years as a clandestine counter-terrorism operative in the Central Intelligence Agency, and he’s sick to death of hearing people whine about waterboarding. Some people may have understood Kathryn Bigelow's “Zero Dark Thirty” as a pro-CIA movie, but Rodriguez assures us its depiction of waterboarding as brutal and nightmarish was “total bullshit.” Yeah, that venerable technique of “enhanced interrogation” has been used as torture at other times in history, Rodriguez admits, including by the Nazis, the Soviets and the witch-hunters of the Spanish Inquisition. But not by the CIA. Our guys always had doctors on hand to make sure nobody died, he says. They used small amounts of water, not gallons at a time, to provoke the desired sensation that a detainee was drowning. They generally stopped the procedure after 10 seconds or so (that point is a little vague). “We waterboarded three guys,” Rodriguez scoffs. “Give. Me. A. Break.” Simultaneously charismatic and chilling, Rodriguez is one of the stars of “The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs,” an addictive if perplexing documentary that premieres this weekend on Showtime. He bears little resemblance to the dozen CIA directors interviewed in the film, all the way back to Adm. Stansfield Turner (1977-81) and up to John Brennan, the current incumbent. Those guys don’t all agree about everything, and a few of them clearly feel the agency has gone badly off the rails in the era of “extraordinary rendition” and drone warfare. But as human specimens they’re all pretty much of a piece, the way archbishops or bank presidents are. In fact they reminded me of Jesuit priests, a soft-spoken, pasty-faced brotherhood of white dudes with elite educations and deep roots in the arcane national security apparatus. It’s fascinating to hear them spin their self-justifying anecdotes, offer their guarded and evasive mea culpas and mouth their pseudo-sophisticated clichés, but my general feeling is that we know even less after they’re done talking than we did before. How much do we really understand about the CIA, even after all the attention paid by novelists and screenwriters and journalists to its myths and legends? And how much do we trust the CIA to tell its own story? The answers to those questions may seem simple enough: Not much, or maybe some Rumsfeldian formula like, “We cannot know what we do not know.” But the nature of the questions is not simple at all, and our ambiguous relationship to the much-loathed and much-mythologized government agency whose budget is a state secret, which has spent our tax dollars on the Bay of Pigs invasion, the overthrow of Salvador Allende, “extraordinary rendition,” “enhanced interrogation” and now the secret drone war is a central conundrum of American identity and American life. “The Spymasters” offers an extraordinary opportunity to explore that conundrum, by hearing numerous CIA veterans talk about their work, about the philosophy that guided them, and about the current state of the world’s most infamous spy agency. Along with all 12 living CIA directors and the Mephistophelean Rodriguez, we meet the former terrorism analyst Gina Bennett, an expert on al-Qaida who was the obvious model for Jessica Chastain’s “Zero Dark Thirty” character. By her own account, Bennett destroyed her marriage through her monomaniacal CIA career, and she says that Islamic terrorism is nowhere near as big a threat to America as the measures we adopt in trying to prevent it. There are numerous startling moments of illumination in “The Spymasters,” but the movie’s aims, goals and methods are never entirely clear, which certainly befits its subject. Is this muckraking journalism, or something closer to a propaganda exercise or a feature-length infomercial? Is the apparent candor of all these people who spent years in an agency built on lies, disinformation and “plausible deniability” anything more than the performance of candor for political purposes? I’m not suggesting that directors Jules and Gédéon Naudet – they’re the French filmmaking brothers who shot that accidental video of the first plane striking the World Trade Center on 9/11 – set out to make a CIA whitewash. I’m saying there’s a reason why all these people agreed to talk to them, and a reason why they were allowed to shoot inside the legendary CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Someone came to the conclusion that this movie (a co-production of Showtime and CBS News) was the right venue for a P.R. counteroffensive, and for opening the curtain on many of the disagreements within the American intelligence community: on drones, on torture, on the bad information and bad analysis that led to the Iraq war; on the summary execution of Anwar al-Awlaki, the "terror sheik" who was a U.S. citizen; on whether the agency’s new role as a paramilitary covert army is a violation of its core mission. Those issues are contentious and undeniably important, but beneath and behind them, “The Spymasters” has a running theme that varies surprisingly little from one interviewee to the next. Essentially, the point seems to be to convince us that we don’t understand how hard this stuff really is, or how decent these people really are. They think really, really hard about who should disappear into black-site torture cells, and which Somali villages should be obliterated by robot bombs from above, and they wouldn’t do any of it if it weren’t urgently necessary to protect the homeland from attack. (Every time any government official says the word “homeland,” everything out of his or her mouth for 10 minutes in all directions is rendered meaningless.) There’s a bizarre framing device in which Leon Panetta, Obama’s CIA chief from 2009 to 2011, discusses the deliberations that led to his decision to assassinate a senior al-Qaida figure in a drone attack that also took out the guy’s entire family as collateral damage. We see Panetta looking grave and stricken, staring at the floor, going to church and praying, rosary in hand. I don’t claim to know for certain whether that particular act of mass murder was the correct moral choice, and I think it's important for left critics of the CIA to acknowledge how much we don't know. (Whatever they told Obama between Election Day in November 2008 and Inauguration Day in January 2009, it was some scary shit.) But I do know that turning Panetta into the hero of a Lifetime melodrama about the moral agony behind that decision is profoundly offensive. I can only assume that this movie was inspired by the extraordinary Israeli documentary “The Gatekeepers,” in which several former heads of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, discuss their greatest successes and failures and their controversial role as the bulwark of Israeli rule in the Occupied Territories. The pronounced differences between those films may reflect the differences between the global positions of the two nations, or even the theological distinction between rigorous rabbinical scrutiny and millenarian Christian sermonizing. But I never once had the feeling in “The Gatekeepers” that anyone was feeding me a line or trying to convince me what a good person they were. Whereas every single one of the former CIA directors in “The Spymasters” begins and ends with apologetics: Mistakes were made and bad stuff happened, but we are a great nation and I'm a good guy. It might simply be the difference between a nation founded on the premise that everything will always get better, and a nation founded by an itinerant people who have no reason to believe that. In this context of intense Jesuit spin-craft, there’s something refreshing about Rodriguez’s lack of pretense – perhaps something evil and inexcusable, but also refreshing. He’s the guy who designed and ran the infamous waterboarding program, and he’s not backing down from it by a quarter-inch. He doesn’t think there was anything so bad about it, and he hasn’t lost any sleep at night. Yeah, he destroyed video recordings of CIA agents waterboarding naked detainees, and he understands what conclusions people are likely to draw about that. He also doesn’t care: “I was protecting the people who worked for me.” Anyway, it wasn’t torture because – well, because he says it wasn’t. What we think we know about it from TV and the movies is complete hogwash. Dianne Feinstein and John McCain’s contention that waterboarding produced no “actionable intelligence” and did not aid the search for Osama bin Laden was flat-out wrong. Waterboarding was just not a big deal, as Rodriguez tells the story, except when it was awesome. Accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed really didn’t mind it too much, Rodriguez says. These details are not mentioned in the film, but according to various news reports and the Feinstein-McCain committee, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times, first at a CIA prison called the “Salt Pit” in Afghanistan, then at black sites in Poland and Romania, and then at Guantánamo Bay. That stuff wasn’t what finally rendered Mohammed “compliant,” Rodriguez says. It was more the sleep deprivation, when interrogators allegedly kept him awake for almost eight full days. (After that, Mohammed confessed to 31 different terrorist plots, quite a few of which seem unlikely or imaginary.) If Rodriguez almost seems like a fictional character to begin with – the street-wise, right-wing Latino biker turned black-ops specialist, possibly invented by Dick Cheney as a comic-book alter ego – the entire universe depicted in “The Spymasters” has an aura of unreality or improbability. It doesn’t help matters that Rodriguez and the defensive, bombastic George Tenet (his boss under George W. Bush) and the pedantic and precise Michael Hayden and the tabloid-disgraced Gen. David Petraeus and Panetta and John Deutch and the rest of them are interviewed by Mandy Patinkin, whose character on “Homeland” is pretty much a Jewish version of Rodriguez. It’s much better to have this testimony than not to have it, and every single interviewee in “The Spymasters” makes clear that covert action on its own cannot possibly solve the complex of political, social, cultural and economic problems captured by the word “terrorism.” But we are a people eager to tell stories and eager to hear them, especially when they are stories of rebirth and redemption. If the most secretive and powerful spy agency in human history has abruptly chosen to tell us a story about its new openness, its new humility and its enduring humanity – about how badly its noble mission has been misunderstood and how little it has to hide – we would do well to ask ourselves why.

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“The pigs were glowing deep gold”: The amazing experience that ended my life as a pig farmer

As a child and through my teens and 20s my meat eating was fast, copious—gluttonous even—and absolutely thoughtless, totally reflexive. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, New York, around cats, dogs and mobs of grey squirrels, I had only the vaguest, most abstract notion — when I had any notion at all — of a connection between the delectable hamburger patty on my Burger King Whopper and the cow or cows it had once been, or between the crisp, golden, expertly and scientifically flavored fleshy bits of the mountain of Chicken McNuggets that I plowed through with abandon over the years and real, living chickens. It wasn’t a matter of callous disregard, it was one of utter ignorance, a profound inability not only to connect the dots but to even see that there were dots to connect. However, if you look a little more deeply than my eating habits, if you dig down to the level of my emotional relationship with animals from the time I was an early single digits child into my 30s, you find seeds of compassion, kindness, care, and love sprouting over and over again, tenaciously going through abbreviated life cycles of germination and death, alive much too briefly for them to take firm root. Those tender sprouts were quickly snuffed out by the depth of my ignorance, and the intensity of the self-reinforcing bond between eating meat and my identity: I was a meat eater, and to embark on the deeply introspective and difficult task of calling into question that identity was then simply not in the cards. Yet, it cannot be denied or ignored that those sprouted seeds were there, if only long enough to send static electricity-like jolts across the craggy canyons of my subconscious, where they left their marks like handholds on a cliff face. The other thing you find when you look more deeply at my feelings and emotional intelligence during those years is a rudimentary sensibility around an as yet inchoate belief in the sanctity of all living things. When I was 12 years old I watched with a visceral feeling of sadness the slow, agonizing death of a little robin. With its eyes wide open, it gasped its last breaths. Blood pulsed out of the hole in its throat where my friend Joe had enthusiastically shot it with a bb gun. As the bird slowly died, Joe energetically paced around it with a white-knuckled grip on the gun stock, and spoke about his shot as if it were a triumph, with a puffed-up, exaggerated bravura. I had wanted to pick up the blood-soaked bird in my hands and stroke its head and softly whisper to it in an effort to usher it gently into death. Instead, I stood stock-still struggling to hold back the tears that were welling up that I absolutely did not want Joe to see. In my very late teens, perhaps my earliest 20s, while visiting the Philadelphia Zoo I experienced a brief, but intense connection with an adult male lion. He had a rich, full mane, and up close was incredibly big. He had been taken out of his relatively large and enriched outdoor enclosure and placed on display in a barren cage barely bigger than himself just outside of the lion pavilion to entice and excite visitors into touring the pavilion, as a store clerk might set up a display of a few pairs of shoes or a set of golf clubs to attract shoppers. I stood just a couple of feet from the cage, standing as close as I could get without stepping over the battered, thin steel chain, flecks of white paint still clinging to it here and there, that ran in drooping arcs between stout steel poles around the cage to keep spectators at a safe distance. I gazed into the lion’s eyes, and somehow having caught his attention he returned my gaze. We looked into each other’s eyes — into each other, I believe — for a brief, but lingering moment, until a tremendously sad, pathetic thing happened. The lion shifted his head ever so slightly and broke our eye contact, but clearly kept me in his frame of vision, and then he very purposefully and slowly squinted his eyes half-closed twice, the classic feline body language of social/hierarchical submission. Bonded empathetically to the lion by the first moments of our gaze, I was immediately overwhelmed with sadness and a deep feeling of longing and loss. The lion’s confidence, his unimaginable power, his grace, his awesome majesty — his very lion-ness — were gone, utterly. I had communed with a weary, broken soul, bereft of spirit, and the intensity of the experience shook me dramatically. Practically with tears in my eyes and a heart so heavy I could barely carry it, I turned away from the lion and walked directly out of the zoo. I have never, and will never return to another zoo. I do not need to experience the palpable ruination of tattered souls like his ever again. Ten years ago, I became a livestock farmer, more or less impulsively after having been informed about the twin horrors of factory farming and industrial slaughter two years before. When I first found out about them, I had immediately become a vegan, but for a number of reasons, including a lack of conviction on my part and a lack of socio-cultural supports and ready-at-hand infrastructural supports like the vegan options at restaurants and in supermarkets that abound today, I quickly failed as a vegan. By the end of three months, I had dropped 15 pounds off of my already lean frame, and I had become disillusioned by the vegan diet, so I went back to eating meat. However, the veil had been lifted, and I had been moved by seeing, by bearing witness to, even if only third hand through undercover videos, the reality of where the meat on my plate came from — some animal, not an abstraction, but a real living animal, an individual with a complex, rich life experience had been (often brutally) killed, gutted and carved into pieces. I felt that the only way that I could eat meat with a clean conscience was to raise the animals myself and have them slaughtered as humanely as possible. For the next 10 years or so, I raised pigs — and other livestock — to be killed so that people, myself included, could eat their meat. During those years, I delivered about 2,000 pigs to the slaughterhouse. While raising animals for slaughter over those years, I had a series of crises of conscience, like this one that I recorded in a single sentence on my blog in April, 2011: This morning, as I look out the window at a pasture quickly growing full of frolicking lambs, I am feeling very much that it might be wrong to eat meat, and that I might indeed be a very bad person for killing animals for a living. And, for nearly 10 years without fail, I met every crisis of conscience with a satisfactory rationalization, no matter how deeply the crisis cut. In June 2011 I made a trip down to New York City to visit the butcher who purchased most of my pigs. During my visit, I decided to help “break down” the pigs that I had brought with me. While I was working, I bent down and opened a box of offal — organs — and later I wrote this about what I had found inside the box and how it affected me: When I opened the box, I saw a jumble of soft hearts and bloody tongues. I am not sure why it happened. I have no idea what it was about seeing the hearts and tongues like that — after all, I have watched my pigs be stuck with a knife and have their blood gush out onto the floor, I have watched them skinned, have their feet cut off, and their bellies sliced open and their innards come tumbling out, I have seen them cut up into retail cuts — but when I opened that box and saw that jumble of soft hearts and bloody tongues I was physically and emotionally overwhelmed. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. Suddenly, through unfiltered, raw emotion, I felt, quite frankly, like a cold-blooded murderer waking up to the reality of what he had done. I almost threw up. The first tongue I picked up nearly buckled my knees. With the tongue in my hand as I slowly placed it in a cryovac bag, I couldn’t help picturing the pigs as they had been when they were alive, the same pigs that were hanging lifeless on gleaming, stainless steel hooks behind me. And then I thought, What have I done? I continued to ask myself that question over and over again as I worked. I was as far from being able to resolve a crisis of conscience as I had ever been. I was reeling. And then, as if the universe intervened on my behalf, the butcher, who was talking to a customer, a young, neatly dressed woman with short, wavy blond hair, pointed to me and said to her from behind the counter about 15 feet away from where I was working, “That’s Bob, the farmer who raised these pigs.” The woman, a little surprised it seemed, turned to look at me. We made eye contact. She took a step toward me and said earnestly, “Thank you so much for what you do,” and then after a moment turned around and walked out of the shop. The thick paper bag, imprinted stylishly with the butcher shop logo, with thick, tightly woven handles that swung casually by the young woman’s side as she walked was filled with pork chops and bacon wrapped in salmon-colored butcher paper. I watched the bag through the shop’s floor to ceiling display window swinging slightly back and forth until the woman disappeared around a corner. The young woman’s thanks had been so earnest that it steadied me. I stopped reeling. I had my answer. What I had done, I had done for her. I had given her an opportunity, an alternative, a way to opt out of the factory farming and industrial slaughter systems. I had also given the pigs wonderfully rich lives, and made sure they were killed quickly and painlessly. I had nourished that young woman — body and soul. Being reminded by her of what I had done nourished my own soul. Warmed by the shared hearth of our commitment to conscientious omnivorism, the crisis ended, and I went back to work, seeing not deeply unsettling soft hearts and bloody tongues, but the freshest ingredients for delectable pates and terrines. The powerful resolution to that almost insurmountable crisis proved durable. For the next few years, I raised pigs for slaughter without another serious crisis of conscience. I stayed focused on providing the pigs with the best lives and deaths that I could give them. As I matured into an accomplished pig farmer, I became proud of what I was doing. On Jan. 27, 2014, my pig farming life as I had come to know and enjoy it came to a swift, jarring end. As I made my way around the farm on that cold morning, moving from group to group of pigs, with about 30 pigs in each group, I found that all of the pigs were healthy; the feeders were all in good working order; and the ice in the water tanks was breaking easily with just a couple of blows from the sledgehammer that I carried with me on the tractor. It was a perfectly ordinary day, until I had an incredibly intense experience while starting to take care of a group of pigs. The experience lasted only for a single second, maybe two, but it was so extraordinary and powerful — one might rightly call it a mystical experience — that at its end I resolved to change my life completely. Just a second before the experience, I remember hearing very acutely and unusually loudly the sound of the snow beneath my boots as I walked toward the pigs. When it is below 10 degrees Fahrenheit something about the physical properties of snow changes, and instead of just flattening out with a dull squish beneath one’s boots, it very distinctly and crisply crunches. It is as if the snow has lost its elasticity and its molecules are being ground against each other. All that I heard was the crisp crunch, crunch, crunch of the snow as I walked. Off the beaten path the snow was deep, so I was looking down at my feet as I walked to keep from accidentally straying off the path into the knee-high snow. When I got to the edge of the pigs’ fence, I looked up at the pigs, and was swept up immediately into the experience. The pigs and the space around them were glowing deep gold. Waves of what I perceived to be energy were emanating out from them in all directions. When the waves reached me, I was wiped clean as they flowed over me. The particulars of my life vanished instantly, followed immediately by my identity. I no longer had any sense of myself as an individual standing in a frozen field surrounded by 30 pigs. I found myself nowhere and everywhere. I felt what I can only call my “energy body” begin to stir. Then I felt — and even saw in the waves — my energy body, which I believed to be my very being, move away from me and merge with the energy bodies — the very being — of the pigs. I felt, saw and knew in that instant that the pigs and I — despite our radical difference, our complete alterity — were interconnected, so deeply interconnected that we were one continuous being. I felt a momentary, intense vibration as this all sunk in. And then, with much less fanfare than one might expect given the intensity of the experience, it simply ended, as if a light switch had been flipped. I found myself standing inside of the pigs’ paddock, surrounded by 30 pigs jostling around me, eager for their food, with those just underfoot biting at my boots. The pigs weren’t glowing. There were no waves of energy. I was I. And the pigs were the pigs. And yet, while apparently nothing had changed, in fact, everything had. I could no longer feel it or see it, but I could remember what it looked like and how it had felt, and more important, I understood clearly “the message” as I have come to think of it. Pigs, the things that I had been having more or less casually killed for nearly 10 years, were not things at all, they were beings, as richly and profoundly as I myself am a being. As beings, we were equals, more than equals. Their being and my being — all being — was continuous. My being did not end and the pigs’ being begin. My being was always already the pigs’ being and the pigs’ being mine. The implications of the message drilled down easily to the deepest reaches of my understanding. I resolved on the spot, without a moment’s deliberation, to quit pig farming and stop eating meat of any kind (a year later I also gave up dairy and eggs, becoming a vegan). I have always been an open-minded person, but only on the rarest of occasions have I ever been a spiritual one. I have never found questions of spiritual being terribly interesting. Today, however, that has all changed. Spiritual being is not anymore a question that might or might not be of intellectual interest or curiosity because it is no longer a question at all. I had, no matter how fleeting, a direct, lived experience of unmediated spiritual being, and the resonant power of that experience blew me wide open: In the merging of my energy body with the energy body of the pigs, I felt and saw the motive force of the universe in the radiant flash of a microsecond. I felt and saw unconditional love pulsing — waving — through an infinite complex of pathways interconnecting a universe of beings. Until that experience I had been living quite contentedly in a world where small farmers like I raised happy pigs outside where they grazed and played on verdant fields. And, in that world, on every happy pig’s fateful day, they were killed expertly in a small-scale, slow-paced slaughterhouse where I think one can rightly believe that they had no experience of dying. However, when I returned from that mystical experience I found myself face to face with an incredibly powerful idea that I could not rationalize away, that I could not scoot around with mental gymnastics as I had all of those previous crises of conscience, that I simply had to acquiesce to: Happy pigs are indeed real — there are many thousands, tens of thousands of them out there — but happy meat, the fundamental tenet of conscientious omnivorism, is a total myth. Believing in the idea of happy meat requires one to believe that the happiness of happy pigs stretches from their carefree happy time getting fat in grassy fields through their final, short walk along a terribly unfamiliar, deeply unsettling grooved concrete-floored kill chute, through the jolt of high-voltage electricity as they are rendered unconscious, to the painless bloodletting resulting in their deaths. The requirements for belief in the idea of happy meat, however, do not end at death. One must believe also that the happiness of happy pigs is transcendent. The pig’s life ends at its death, but not its happiness. By a well-guarded secret of some mysterious alchemy, the happiness residing in the consciousness of the happy pig transcendentally survives the happy pig’s extinguished consciousness and is transfused intact into the porky flesh of the now dead happy pig, leaving us with happy meat — with absolution. We can eat the happy, porky flesh of the dead pig with a conscience clear. Just for the sake of being thorough, it should also be noted that believing in happy meat additionally requires that one completely obfuscate a most profound reality of meat. Meat arrives on our plates by the exercise of the highest, most extreme, and terrible violence one being can commit against another — when one human commits such violence against another human we call it murder, and we revile it, and we go to the most extreme (often barbaric, murderous) lengths to punish those who commit it. Killing a happy pig by electrocuting it, then plunging a sharp, stout knife into its neck to the hilt to sever the major veins and arteries so that the pig’s blood, brightest red, gushes out in a volume unimaginable until the pig is dead does not make happy meat. Such an act, being the highest, most extreme, and terrible violence one being can commit against another, and also by a perhaps unlikely wisdom drawn from the childhood mountain of McNuggets from the robin from the lion from the truncated happiness of pigs, makes murder.

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We must eat more roadkill. Yes, even you vegetarians

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The secret to reducing inequality: What economists and business leaders still can’t grasp

The concept of Short-Termism is fast becoming the darling of progressive economic policy wonks. Predictably, the discourse is littered with inaccuracies and half-truths as pundits rush to publish so as not to be left behind. It is time for a serious convening of interested experts to sort through the issues, but none is scheduled. Until one is convened, a brief walk through the weeds is in order. “Quarterly Capitalism,” a subset of Short-Termism, is the main focus of the discussion. Managers of businesses are increasingly obsessed with turning a profit immediately, even if it means foregoing investments that promise an even greater payoff in the future. The “fast-buck” option is often the worst outcome for workers and is often connected with tactics like outsourcing and “just-in-time” employment of part-time and freelance workers. Quarterly Capitalism is promising as an explanation for the battle of attrition that the Fed has had to wage against weak employment since the onset of the Great Recession, eight years ago. It should also be a consideration in Fed deliberations about raising interest rates. The fear of inflation expressed by more conservative Board governors who want to raise rates centers on theories holding that unacceptable inflation will occur if unemployment rates drop below a “natural rate.” Ironically, Quarterly Capitalism has probably altered the nature of employment so significantly that conservatives’ argument about the theoretical relationship between interest rates and the natural unemployment rate no longer works. Most of all, Quarterly Capitalism is probably a key to policies that can successfully address inequality of income and wealth. Real, long-term growth that delivers well-paying and secure employment would boost the middle and lower income echelons, reducing inequality. Publicly-held corporations have increasingly paid out profits to shareholders by buying in shares and paying huge dividends rather than investing in expansion and research and development. One major source of confusion is the connection between Quarterly Capitalism and these share buybacks. Some analysts suggest that the share buybacks are the cause of problem. In this narrative, greedy shareholders demand cash and management has to comply by paying out profits rather than growing the company. The problem with this analysis is that it is using the wrong end of the telescope. Institutional investors are not greedy for cash—they are greedy for investments that yield high returns. If they receive a pile of cash, they will reinvest it. Indeed, investors want managers to engage in buyback programs, but the reason is that investment of profits will not pay off for a long time, and this yields a poor result based on their valuation models. They want to move funds to a short payback alternative. In particular, managers of other people’s money, increasingly the arbiters of investment, will look better underperformance metrics. Thus, the problem is that there is an aversion to investment in growth by US public companies, not greed for cash. Restrictions on share buybacks may have some fine consequences as a policy, but they do not get to the core of the Quarterly Capitalism problem. The main thing that causes observers to use the wrong end of the telescope is that they view shareholders as individuals, generally fat cats lighting cigars with $100 bills who are voracious hoarders of cash. It is true that among individuals only the wealthy have meaningful stock holdings, but increasingly even they own most of their stock indirectly. For example, mutual fund holdings, indirect vehicles for holding stock, are 16 times higher than they were 25 years ago, and now constitute 5 percent of the entire value of all stocks. The dominant class of owners of shares are institutional investors—mutual funds, insurance companies, public and private pension funds, exchange traded funds and hedge funds. To those, one should add managed IRA’s and 401k’s, which behave like institutional investors since the managers make the decisions for most, as a practical matter. Institutional investors follow performance models that are biased toward short-term performance, and that is what is driving the aversion to investing profits. Another detour into illogic is the discussion about where the money that is paid our in share buybacks and dividends goes. The amount is something like $1.5 trillion per year. One group points out that it just gets reinvested in the economy. That might be fine if it were true. However, with the massive corporate profits of the last few years, one would expect to have seen much more GDP growth and certainly faster increases in the quantity and quality of employment. The amount is close to the annual increase in stock market capitalization since the end of the Great Recession, $1.7 trillion per year. Perhaps it just gets absorbed by relocating investment into shares that fit valuation models. The other recipient of buyback money is undoubtedly the financial sector itself, which has grown very large over the last 35 years, absorbing more and more capital while generating few jobs for average households. With a market capitalization that has grown to $6.9 trillion, a substantial portion of profits paid out to investors could have found a home in financial sector shares. But some say that consumption by the wealthy sopped up much of the share buyback loot, presumably consumption that did not feed back into well-paying jobs and growth. Frankly, to make a difference, we would be talking about one hell of a lot of French champagne and Russian caviar. It is true that in recent years, high-income households consume a greater percentage of their income than before, and some undoubtedly came from cash generated by investment holdings. But the real reason is probably the massive influence of the fast-growing group that Thomas Piketty refers to as the “supermanagers.” They are the beneficiaries of Wall Street bonuses and executive stock options who have been the driving up the average wealth of the top 1 percent. These newly rich supermanagers undoubtedly have to consume a great deal to catch up. The Quarterly Capitalism discussion comes down to the increasing resistance to investment of available capital in the growth of US businesses and its relationship to increased periods of underemployment after recessions, declining wage share of total income and the resurgence of inequality of wealth and income. One thing is abundantly clear: if the enormous profits generated by corporate America are not plowed back into the capital base of the economy, either directly or through fiscal policy, growth will be limited for the foreseeable future and the vast majority of households will languish. If companies are not motivated to use cash on hand to grow, there is no interest rate that the Fed can conjure up that will kick-start meaningful growth, at least no interest rate that is greater than zero. That means, without government spending, we are stuck with sluggish growth sandwiched in between recessions and increased inequality—that is, of course, if a much worse downturn is not our fate.

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The man behind the “Hamilton” sound: Hidden Beatles references, the “hip-hop horse” sample and why if “it’s all computerized, there’s no heart to it”

Alex Lacamoire has probably seen "Hamilton" more times than anyone. The music director, who also orchestrated the score and co-arranged the songs with composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, serves as the show’s conductor. So seven times a week (his associate does one performance) he has the “best seat in the house.” Along with 10 pit musicians—a pop rhythm section (drums, percussion, guitar, bass, two keyboards) and a string quartet (two violins, viola, cello)—Lacamoire creates the "Hamilton" sound. (Lacamoire also plays keyboards, giving him a total of five hats to wear.) And while Miranda was dropping references to everything from The Notorious B.I.G. to Jason Robert Brown in the lyrics and the melodies, Lacamoire was crafting orchestral odes to everyone from the Beatles to the Beastie Boys to D’Angelo. However, Lacamoire was not a hip-hop head until he met Miranda. (The two first worked together on "In the Heights" and also collaborated on "Bring It On: The Musical.") “Once I met Lin, he opened my mind because here was a dude who was loving on ‘Defying Gravity’ just as much as he was loving on Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself,’” Lacamoire says, sitting in the living room of his Upper West Side apartment. “I had always heard the music and always listened to it, a little bit passively, but because of Lin, I started to actively listen to what hip-hop was doing.” Lacamoire also spent about “a month and a half” working with Questlove and Black Thought of the Roots, recording and mixing the original cast recording, which holds the number one spot on the Billboard rap album charts for the week of Nov. 28. While most original cast recordings (pro tip: never call a musical theater album a “soundtrack” unless you want to unleash theater geek fury) are recorded in a day and a half due to time constraints and the cost to bring the actors into the studio, Lacamoire suggested recording "Hamilton" more like a pop album, where the time was spread out over about two weeks. Atlantic Records agreed and the rest is history, quite literally. (If you’ve been living under a rock, Hamilton is a hip-hop-infused retelling of the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton and is currently sold out on Broadway for the foreseeable future.) But the original cast recording, which was released in September, has brought the show and the music to the world, so we decided to nerd out with Lacamoire about all of the inspirations and secrets behind the sound. Let’s start with the basics. What does an orchestrator and an arranger do? Arranging is big-picture stuff—as in deciding the feel of the song, what the tempo can be, maybe deciding things like where the drums come in, where the guitars come in, deciding what key a song is in. And orchestration is the detail work. That is actually saying and writing down, “Okay, I want the violin to play this particular figure, I want the drums to play this particular figure,” and really putting pencil to paper, or in my case, note to computer and just really giving color to things. For example, as an orchestrator, I will decide when I want the strings to play something or what they'll do, and to me what they play can be super effective and be the thing that either makes someone cry or not. Like in "It's Quiet Uptown,” right after the forgiveness happens, there's this one high string line that creeps in slowly, and any time I hear that, I cry. How did you choose the makeup of the "Hamilton" band? I knew early on that I wanted the makeup of the band to be what it is now, which is basically a pop rhythm section and a string quartet. And it's very digital, it's a lot of synthesizers. And then I knew that I wanted the string quartet to be the acoustic instruments that you don't need to plug in to hear. So they are of the time period. I actually looked online for what the colonial instruments of time were and violins and strings were the thing to play! There were other instruments that I snuck into the orchestration. For example, a hammered dulcimer was very popular around the time. What is a hammered dulcimer? It basically looks like a harp. It's a big trapezoidal block of wood with strings all along it, and you basically hit it with these two little hammers—they look like forks almost and you just hit them in succession. It's a gorgeous instrument, and I use that in "It's Quiet Uptown." I use it in "Winter's Ball.” It’s actually sampled, so it's on the keyboard so we do fake it a little bit, just because it doesn't happen enough to warrant having a real hammered dulcimer player. Is there another strange instrument in the pit? I mean, there's a banjo! You would never expect to find a banjo in a hip-hop band, but “The Room Where it Happens” just cried for it. That to me is probably my single greatest idea in the whole show, only because it's so quirky and is so of the style of the music. It’s so Kander and Ebb-y, Dixieland, so I just sat down to orchestrate it, and I'm thinking to myself, “What can the guitar do?” And literally in a flash of light, I'm like, “Oh my god, it could be a banjo!” It invokes the feel of the song and I think it really fits in the world of it, but it's also so left of center and not what you would expect. You can really hear the banjo on the album. What's wonderful about the cast recording is we were able to get really detailed about things. You're always going to be able to hear something on a cast album in a different way because it's meant to be digested in your ears. I love listening to things on headphones because you really can pick out the details of things so we really have ear candy all over the record. We were really able to highlight certain things that you might not be able to notice in the theater. What were some of the things you highlighted on the cast album? If you listen to "My Shot," there's a ton of cool effects on people's voices. There's a moment where one of the guys goes "Wooo!" and you hear it echo, panning back and forth. In "Wait for It," the vocals really pan left and right. It really echoes in different parts of the chamber, if you will. Those are things that you can really only do on a record because if you do too much cool stuff onstage, you start losing focus on the story and it distracts you, so the record was a chance for us to do things that you might not be able to experience in the theater. Are there other ways that the recording is different from the theatrical experience? One cool color that we added for the record was we added live harp. I definitely call that an upgrade. We do have harp in the show, but it's all synthesized. If you listen to "Say No to This,” when they're kissing, the harp is just going nuts. And that's doubled with the harp in our show so we have basically two harps going on—the live one and a digital one just like going crazy. It happens in "Hurricane" and "Blow Us All Away;" there's harp all over that. But then it also plays gentler things like in "Dear Theodosia" and "It's Quiet Uptown.” Lin-Manuel Miranda writes really specific musical themes for each character; do you identify certain instruments with certain characters? Absolutely. So for me, there's some cool Burr moments that the cello echoes. To me, the cello is dark and sinister and can have some really slithery things. If you notice in "Wait for It," there's a line where he says "But there are things that the homilies and hymns won't teach ya" and the cello's [mimics cello line]. When Eliza sings, it's almost always very acoustic, guitar and strings. That’s why "That Would Be Enough" doesn't have any drums in it—there’s nothing electric in that song at all. Same thing with “Burn.” It starts with a piano, there's an acoustic guitar in it, the strings are very prominent in her songs. So for me, if Hamilton is the kinetic, electric, contemporary, digital element where there's always a percussive groove and always a percolating sound to him, Eliza is the soother. She's the opposite. She's the gentle warm embracing quality, the yin to his yang. What was it like working with the Roots on the album? It was so great. The Roots for me were super instrumental in pushing us to go further with the album. Their big things were one, turn up the drums because that's where the hip-hop lies, and number two was to really capitalize on the use of the effects. Whenever we had a record scratch, Questlove was like, “Turn that up.” If you listen to "My Shot," when you hear Lin with some distortion on his voice when he goes "Enter me (He says in parentheses)” that was Questlovle's idea. Those are things that you don't normally find on cast albums, meaning they're really like ornaments. And hip-hop records are full of cool ear candy moments. "10 Duel Commandments" was another one that sounded very much the way it does because of Questlove's influence. Like, we did the mix of that song and it was cool and it sounded like a band playing it but he was like, "Man, you could make it sound way more hip-hop.” He suggested putting the hi-hat through distortion, which we did. Who were some of the artists who influenced how you arranged and orchestrated the music? I'm not a huge hip-hop connoisseur by any means. When I was growing up, I was super into the Beastie Boys; I was super into Black Sheep. There's a Beastie Boys reference in "The Schuyler Sisters”—at the very beginning, there's like this really cool, blasty horn thing, that's in "The New Style.” Because of Lin, I got into Jay Z and in "10 Duel Commandments,” the fact that the hi-hat is aggressive and steady, I definitely got that from Jay Z records. I'm super into D’Angelo, and there’s something about the groove for "Washington on Your Side;” the drum is very relaxed and very delayed—there’s a swing to it. It's almost like a stuttered beat. If you listen to D’Angelo’s "Voodoo" record, there's tons of the stutter beat happening all over the place, especially on that track "One Mo’ Gin.” Lin-Manuel has a lot of Easter eggs, if you will, in the lyrics and the melodies. Do you have any in the orchestrations? There's a moment in “My Shot” where Lin quotes a Mobb Deep song, so as you hear the lyric "I'm only 19 but my mind is older;” there's a rising line from "Shook Ones Part II" that we wound up putting on the strings as an homage. So the violins do this little smeary thing under that lyric. “You’ll Be Back” has a bunch of Beatles references in the orchestration, with nods to “Mr. Kite,” “Getting Better,” and “Penny Lane.” “Right Hand Man” has a "hip-hop horse": a horse whinny sample that was chopped and screwed to make it sound more like a DJ scratching. And “Burn” has a little harp moment that represents Icarus to highlight the lyric, “You’ve married an Icarus.” It’s an upward phrase, that then falls quickly downward to evoke his plummet. You also live-orchestrated most of the numbers in the show. You’re not playing tracks on a computer in the theater—you’re playing it live. I wanted it to be live on principle because the Roots play hip-hop live, Beyoncé's band does it live, Jay Z's band does it live. We can do it too. And I just wanted it to be fun for the guys to play. It's not as fun to just let the Ableton spit out a bunch of loops and let the computer do the work for you. And there's a lot of stuff that people don't realize is live. In “The Room Where it Happens,” that whole beginning segment sounds like it's a loop, but it's two drummers going at it with percussion. Same thing with the rap battles. All the rap battles are live except for the piano figure in “Cabinet Battle #1.” The only thing that's not live in “Cabinet Battle #2” is the synth. I just wanted it to be an organic experience. If it's super digital and it's all computerized, there's no heart to it.Alex Lacamoire has probably seen "Hamilton" more times than anyone. The music director, who also orchestrated the score and co-arranged the songs with composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, serves as the show’s conductor. So seven times a week (his associate does one performance) he has the “best seat in the house.” Along with 10 pit musicians—a pop rhythm section (drums, percussion, guitar, bass, two keyboards) and a string quartet (two violins, viola, cello)—Lacamoire creates the "Hamilton" sound. (Lacamoire also plays keyboards, giving him a total of five hats to wear.) And while Miranda was dropping references to everything from The Notorious B.I.G. to Jason Robert Brown in the lyrics and the melodies, Lacamoire was crafting orchestral odes to everyone from the Beatles to the Beastie Boys to D’Angelo. However, Lacamoire was not a hip-hop head until he met Miranda. (The two first worked together on "In the Heights" and also collaborated on "Bring It On: The Musical.") “Once I met Lin, he opened my mind because here was a dude who was loving on ‘Defying Gravity’ just as much as he was loving on Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself,’” Lacamoire says, sitting in the living room of his Upper West Side apartment. “I had always heard the music and always listened to it, a little bit passively, but because of Lin, I started to actively listen to what hip-hop was doing.” Lacamoire also spent about “a month and a half” working with Questlove and Black Thought of the Roots, recording and mixing the original cast recording, which holds the number one spot on the Billboard rap album charts for the week of Nov. 28. While most original cast recordings (pro tip: never call a musical theater album a “soundtrack” unless you want to unleash theater geek fury) are recorded in a day and a half due to time constraints and the cost to bring the actors into the studio, Lacamoire suggested recording "Hamilton" more like a pop album, where the time was spread out over about two weeks. Atlantic Records agreed and the rest is history, quite literally. (If you’ve been living under a rock, Hamilton is a hip-hop-infused retelling of the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton and is currently sold out on Broadway for the foreseeable future.) But the original cast recording, which was released in September, has brought the show and the music to the world, so we decided to nerd out with Lacamoire about all of the inspirations and secrets behind the sound. Let’s start with the basics. What does an orchestrator and an arranger do? Arranging is big-picture stuff—as in deciding the feel of the song, what the tempo can be, maybe deciding things like where the drums come in, where the guitars come in, deciding what key a song is in. And orchestration is the detail work. That is actually saying and writing down, “Okay, I want the violin to play this particular figure, I want the drums to play this particular figure,” and really putting pencil to paper, or in my case, note to computer and just really giving color to things. For example, as an orchestrator, I will decide when I want the strings to play something or what they'll do, and to me what they play can be super effective and be the thing that either makes someone cry or not. Like in "It's Quiet Uptown,” right after the forgiveness happens, there's this one high string line that creeps in slowly, and any time I hear that, I cry. How did you choose the makeup of the "Hamilton" band? I knew early on that I wanted the makeup of the band to be what it is now, which is basically a pop rhythm section and a string quartet. And it's very digital, it's a lot of synthesizers. And then I knew that I wanted the string quartet to be the acoustic instruments that you don't need to plug in to hear. So they are of the time period. I actually looked online for what the colonial instruments of time were and violins and strings were the thing to play! There were other instruments that I snuck into the orchestration. For example, a hammered dulcimer was very popular around the time. What is a hammered dulcimer? It basically looks like a harp. It's a big trapezoidal block of wood with strings all along it, and you basically hit it with these two little hammers—they look like forks almost and you just hit them in succession. It's a gorgeous instrument, and I use that in "It's Quiet Uptown." I use it in "Winter's Ball.” It’s actually sampled, so it's on the keyboard so we do fake it a little bit, just because it doesn't happen enough to warrant having a real hammered dulcimer player. Is there another strange instrument in the pit? I mean, there's a banjo! You would never expect to find a banjo in a hip-hop band, but “The Room Where it Happens” just cried for it. That to me is probably my single greatest idea in the whole show, only because it's so quirky and is so of the style of the music. It’s so Kander and Ebb-y, Dixieland, so I just sat down to orchestrate it, and I'm thinking to myself, “What can the guitar do?” And literally in a flash of light, I'm like, “Oh my god, it could be a banjo!” It invokes the feel of the song and I think it really fits in the world of it, but it's also so left of center and not what you would expect. You can really hear the banjo on the album. What's wonderful about the cast recording is we were able to get really detailed about things. You're always going to be able to hear something on a cast album in a different way because it's meant to be digested in your ears. I love listening to things on headphones because you really can pick out the details of things so we really have ear candy all over the record. We were really able to highlight certain things that you might not be able to notice in the theater. What were some of the things you highlighted on the cast album? If you listen to "My Shot," there's a ton of cool effects on people's voices. There's a moment where one of the guys goes "Wooo!" and you hear it echo, panning back and forth. In "Wait for It," the vocals really pan left and right. It really echoes in different parts of the chamber, if you will. Those are things that you can really only do on a record because if you do too much cool stuff onstage, you start losing focus on the story and it distracts you, so the record was a chance for us to do things that you might not be able to experience in the theater. Are there other ways that the recording is different from the theatrical experience? One cool color that we added for the record was we added live harp. I definitely call that an upgrade. We do have harp in the show, but it's all synthesized. If you listen to "Say No to This,” when they're kissing, the harp is just going nuts. And that's doubled with the harp in our show so we have basically two harps going on—the live one and a digital one just like going crazy. It happens in "Hurricane" and "Blow Us All Away;" there's harp all over that. But then it also plays gentler things like in "Dear Theodosia" and "It's Quiet Uptown.” Lin-Manuel Miranda writes really specific musical themes for each character; do you identify certain instruments with certain characters? Absolutely. So for me, there's some cool Burr moments that the cello echoes. To me, the cello is dark and sinister and can have some really slithery things. If you notice in "Wait for It," there's a line where he says "But there are things that the homilies and hymns won't teach ya" and the cello's [mimics cello line]. When Eliza sings, it's almost always very acoustic, guitar and strings. That’s why "That Would Be Enough" doesn't have any drums in it—there’s nothing electric in that song at all. Same thing with “Burn.” It starts with a piano, there's an acoustic guitar in it, the strings are very prominent in her songs. So for me, if Hamilton is the kinetic, electric, contemporary, digital element where there's always a percussive groove and always a percolating sound to him, Eliza is the soother. She's the opposite. She's the gentle warm embracing quality, the yin to his yang. What was it like working with the Roots on the album? It was so great. The Roots for me were super instrumental in pushing us to go further with the album. Their big things were one, turn up the drums because that's where the hip-hop lies, and number two was to really capitalize on the use of the effects. Whenever we had a record scratch, Questlove was like, “Turn that up.” If you listen to "My Shot," when you hear Lin with some distortion on his voice when he goes "Enter me (He says in parentheses)” that was Questlovle's idea. Those are things that you don't normally find on cast albums, meaning they're really like ornaments. And hip-hop records are full of cool ear candy moments. "10 Duel Commandments" was another one that sounded very much the way it does because of Questlove's influence. Like, we did the mix of that song and it was cool and it sounded like a band playing it but he was like, "Man, you could make it sound way more hip-hop.” He suggested putting the hi-hat through distortion, which we did. Who were some of the artists who influenced how you arranged and orchestrated the music? I'm not a huge hip-hop connoisseur by any means. When I was growing up, I was super into the Beastie Boys; I was super into Black Sheep. There's a Beastie Boys reference in "The Schuyler Sisters”—at the very beginning, there's like this really cool, blasty horn thing, that's in "The New Style.” Because of Lin, I got into Jay Z and in "10 Duel Commandments,” the fact that the hi-hat is aggressive and steady, I definitely got that from Jay Z records. I'm super into D’Angelo, and there’s something about the groove for "Washington on Your Side;” the drum is very relaxed and very delayed—there’s a swing to it. It's almost like a stuttered beat. If you listen to D’Angelo’s "Voodoo" record, there's tons of the stutter beat happening all over the place, especially on that track "One Mo’ Gin.” Lin-Manuel has a lot of Easter eggs, if you will, in the lyrics and the melodies. Do you have any in the orchestrations? There's a moment in “My Shot” where Lin quotes a Mobb Deep song, so as you hear the lyric "I'm only 19 but my mind is older;” there's a rising line from "Shook Ones Part II" that we wound up putting on the strings as an homage. So the violins do this little smeary thing under that lyric. “You’ll Be Back” has a bunch of Beatles references in the orchestration, with nods to “Mr. Kite,” “Getting Better,” and “Penny Lane.” “Right Hand Man” has a "hip-hop horse": a horse whinny sample that was chopped and screwed to make it sound more like a DJ scratching. And “Burn” has a little harp moment that represents Icarus to highlight the lyric, “You’ve married an Icarus.” It’s an upward phrase, that then falls quickly downward to evoke his plummet. You also live-orchestrated most of the numbers in the show. You’re not playing tracks on a computer in the theater—you’re playing it live. I wanted it to be live on principle because the Roots play hip-hop live, Beyoncé's band does it live, Jay Z's band does it live. We can do it too. And I just wanted it to be fun for the guys to play. It's not as fun to just let the Ableton spit out a bunch of loops and let the computer do the work for you. And there's a lot of stuff that people don't realize is live. In “The Room Where it Happens,” that whole beginning segment sounds like it's a loop, but it's two drummers going at it with percussion. Same thing with the rap battles. All the rap battles are live except for the piano figure in “Cabinet Battle #1.” The only thing that's not live in “Cabinet Battle #2” is the synth. I just wanted it to be an organic experience. If it's super digital and it's all computerized, there's no heart to it.Alex Lacamoire has probably seen "Hamilton" more times than anyone. The music director, who also orchestrated the score and co-arranged the songs with composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, serves as the show’s conductor. So seven times a week (his associate does one performance) he has the “best seat in the house.” Along with 10 pit musicians—a pop rhythm section (drums, percussion, guitar, bass, two keyboards) and a string quartet (two violins, viola, cello)—Lacamoire creates the "Hamilton" sound. (Lacamoire also plays keyboards, giving him a total of five hats to wear.) And while Miranda was dropping references to everything from The Notorious B.I.G. to Jason Robert Brown in the lyrics and the melodies, Lacamoire was crafting orchestral odes to everyone from the Beatles to the Beastie Boys to D’Angelo. However, Lacamoire was not a hip-hop head until he met Miranda. (The two first worked together on "In the Heights" and also collaborated on "Bring It On: The Musical.") “Once I met Lin, he opened my mind because here was a dude who was loving on ‘Defying Gravity’ just as much as he was loving on Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself,’” Lacamoire says, sitting in the living room of his Upper West Side apartment. “I had always heard the music and always listened to it, a little bit passively, but because of Lin, I started to actively listen to what hip-hop was doing.” Lacamoire also spent about “a month and a half” working with Questlove and Black Thought of the Roots, recording and mixing the original cast recording, which holds the number one spot on the Billboard rap album charts for the week of Nov. 28. While most original cast recordings (pro tip: never call a musical theater album a “soundtrack” unless you want to unleash theater geek fury) are recorded in a day and a half due to time constraints and the cost to bring the actors into the studio, Lacamoire suggested recording "Hamilton" more like a pop album, where the time was spread out over about two weeks. Atlantic Records agreed and the rest is history, quite literally. (If you’ve been living under a rock, Hamilton is a hip-hop-infused retelling of the life of founding father Alexander Hamilton and is currently sold out on Broadway for the foreseeable future.) But the original cast recording, which was released in September, has brought the show and the music to the world, so we decided to nerd out with Lacamoire about all of the inspirations and secrets behind the sound. Let’s start with the basics. What does an orchestrator and an arranger do? Arranging is big-picture stuff—as in deciding the feel of the song, what the tempo can be, maybe deciding things like where the drums come in, where the guitars come in, deciding what key a song is in. And orchestration is the detail work. That is actually saying and writing down, “Okay, I want the violin to play this particular figure, I want the drums to play this particular figure,” and really putting pencil to paper, or in my case, note to computer and just really giving color to things. For example, as an orchestrator, I will decide when I want the strings to play something or what they'll do, and to me what they play can be super effective and be the thing that either makes someone cry or not. Like in "It's Quiet Uptown,” right after the forgiveness happens, there's this one high string line that creeps in slowly, and any time I hear that, I cry. How did you choose the makeup of the "Hamilton" band? I knew early on that I wanted the makeup of the band to be what it is now, which is basically a pop rhythm section and a string quartet. And it's very digital, it's a lot of synthesizers. And then I knew that I wanted the string quartet to be the acoustic instruments that you don't need to plug in to hear. So they are of the time period. I actually looked online for what the colonial instruments of time were and violins and strings were the thing to play! There were other instruments that I snuck into the orchestration. For example, a hammered dulcimer was very popular around the time. What is a hammered dulcimer? It basically looks like a harp. It's a big trapezoidal block of wood with strings all along it, and you basically hit it with these two little hammers—they look like forks almost and you just hit them in succession. It's a gorgeous instrument, and I use that in "It's Quiet Uptown." I use it in "Winter's Ball.” It’s actually sampled, so it's on the keyboard so we do fake it a little bit, just because it doesn't happen enough to warrant having a real hammered dulcimer player. Is there another strange instrument in the pit? I mean, there's a banjo! You would never expect to find a banjo in a hip-hop band, but “The Room Where it Happens” just cried for it. That to me is probably my single greatest idea in the whole show, only because it's so quirky and is so of the style of the music. It’s so Kander and Ebb-y, Dixieland, so I just sat down to orchestrate it, and I'm thinking to myself, “What can the guitar do?” And literally in a flash of light, I'm like, “Oh my god, it could be a banjo!” It invokes the feel of the song and I think it really fits in the world of it, but it's also so left of center and not what you would expect. You can really hear the banjo on the album. What's wonderful about the cast recording is we were able to get really detailed about things. You're always going to be able to hear something on a cast album in a different way because it's meant to be digested in your ears. I love listening to things on headphones because you really can pick out the details of things so we really have ear candy all over the record. We were really able to highlight certain things that you might not be able to notice in the theater. What were some of the things you highlighted on the cast album? If you listen to "My Shot," there's a ton of cool effects on people's voices. There's a moment where one of the guys goes "Wooo!" and you hear it echo, panning back and forth. In "Wait for It," the vocals really pan left and right. It really echoes in different parts of the chamber, if you will. Those are things that you can really only do on a record because if you do too much cool stuff onstage, you start losing focus on the story and it distracts you, so the record was a chance for us to do things that you might not be able to experience in the theater. Are there other ways that the recording is different from the theatrical experience? One cool color that we added for the record was we added live harp. I definitely call that an upgrade. We do have harp in the show, but it's all synthesized. If you listen to "Say No to This,” when they're kissing, the harp is just going nuts. And that's doubled with the harp in our show so we have basically two harps going on—the live one and a digital one just like going crazy. It happens in "Hurricane" and "Blow Us All Away;" there's harp all over that. But then it also plays gentler things like in "Dear Theodosia" and "It's Quiet Uptown.” Lin-Manuel Miranda writes really specific musical themes for each character; do you identify certain instruments with certain characters? Absolutely. So for me, there's some cool Burr moments that the cello echoes. To me, the cello is dark and sinister and can have some really slithery things. If you notice in "Wait for It," there's a line where he says "But there are things that the homilies and hymns won't teach ya" and the cello's [mimics cello line]. When Eliza sings, it's almost always very acoustic, guitar and strings. That’s why "That Would Be Enough" doesn't have any drums in it—there’s nothing electric in that song at all. Same thing with “Burn.” It starts with a piano, there's an acoustic guitar in it, the strings are very prominent in her songs. So for me, if Hamilton is the kinetic, electric, contemporary, digital element where there's always a percussive groove and always a percolating sound to him, Eliza is the soother. She's the opposite. She's the gentle warm embracing quality, the yin to his yang. What was it like working with the Roots on the album? It was so great. The Roots for me were super instrumental in pushing us to go further with the album. Their big things were one, turn up the drums because that's where the hip-hop lies, and number two was to really capitalize on the use of the effects. Whenever we had a record scratch, Questlove was like, “Turn that up.” If you listen to "My Shot," when you hear Lin with some distortion on his voice when he goes "Enter me (He says in parentheses)” that was Questlovle's idea. Those are things that you don't normally find on cast albums, meaning they're really like ornaments. And hip-hop records are full of cool ear candy moments. "10 Duel Commandments" was another one that sounded very much the way it does because of Questlove's influence. Like, we did the mix of that song and it was cool and it sounded like a band playing it but he was like, "Man, you could make it sound way more hip-hop.” He suggested putting the hi-hat through distortion, which we did. Who were some of the artists who influenced how you arranged and orchestrated the music? I'm not a huge hip-hop connoisseur by any means. When I was growing up, I was super into the Beastie Boys; I was super into Black Sheep. There's a Beastie Boys reference in "The Schuyler Sisters”—at the very beginning, there's like this really cool, blasty horn thing, that's in "The New Style.” Because of Lin, I got into Jay Z and in "10 Duel Commandments,” the fact that the hi-hat is aggressive and steady, I definitely got that from Jay Z records. I'm super into D’Angelo, and there’s something about the groove for "Washington on Your Side;” the drum is very relaxed and very delayed—there’s a swing to it. It's almost like a stuttered beat. If you listen to D’Angelo’s "Voodoo" record, there's tons of the stutter beat happening all over the place, especially on that track "One Mo’ Gin.” Lin-Manuel has a lot of Easter eggs, if you will, in the lyrics and the melodies. Do you have any in the orchestrations? There's a moment in “My Shot” where Lin quotes a Mobb Deep song, so as you hear the lyric "I'm only 19 but my mind is older;” there's a rising line from "Shook Ones Part II" that we wound up putting on the strings as an homage. So the violins do this little smeary thing under that lyric. “You’ll Be Back” has a bunch of Beatles references in the orchestration, with nods to “Mr. Kite,” “Getting Better,” and “Penny Lane.” “Right Hand Man” has a "hip-hop horse": a horse whinny sample that was chopped and screwed to make it sound more like a DJ scratching. And “Burn” has a little harp moment that represents Icarus to highlight the lyric, “You’ve married an Icarus.” It’s an upward phrase, that then falls quickly downward to evoke his plummet. You also live-orchestrated most of the numbers in the show. You’re not playing tracks on a computer in the theater—you’re playing it live. I wanted it to be live on principle because the Roots play hip-hop live, Beyoncé's band does it live, Jay Z's band does it live. We can do it too. And I just wanted it to be fun for the guys to play. It's not as fun to just let the Ableton spit out a bunch of loops and let the computer do the work for you. And there's a lot of stuff that people don't realize is live. In “The Room Where it Happens,” that whole beginning segment sounds like it's a loop, but it's two drummers going at it with percussion. Same thing with the rap battles. All the rap battles are live except for the piano figure in “Cabinet Battle #1.” The only thing that's not live in “Cabinet Battle #2” is the synth. I just wanted it to be an organic experience. If it's super digital and it's all computerized, there's no heart to it.

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Josh Rouse: “I get grumpy if I don’t write songs”

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A field guide to calling bullsh*t: “Politicians are doing their job in creating BS, but they’re not calling each other out for it often enough”

On his final epic rant for the “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart dropped the truth bomb that bullshit is everywhere. There are four basic kinds of BS, Stewart declared. There’s 1) everyday BS, 2) institutional BS, 3) mountains of BS, and 4) the BS of “infinite possibilities.” In other words, the kind of bullshit that’s also called “procrastinating.” Thanks to Mark Peters’ new book, “Bullshit: A Lexicon,” we can now rehearse BS variation no. 4 while exploring the fuller taxonomy of bullshit in all of its crapspackle glory. The writer of several columns, including the “Best Joke Ever” for “McSweeney’s,” Peters is an accidental aficionado of claptrap and hokum. Over the past decade, as a sidebar to other projects, he ended up collecting more than 200 different words and phrases that mean “bullshit.” The result is the perfect book to read in the loo, and I mean that as a compliment. For the most part, these words are euphemisms, not obscenities, nestling comfortably in the social sphere where it’s better to call someone out for spewing "donkey dust" than to insult their intelligence by using boring four-letter words. Conspicuously absent from his lexicon are words from the military playbook, though grunt slang is rich with glorious filth. “Cheesedicking.” “Dicked up.” “Goat roping.” These highly inappropriate words to use at dinner parties are variations on the “cock” words he also avoids, such as “cock and bull,” and “cocked up.” In other words, Peters has written a sort of field guide to help novice nitshitters navigate their way around conversational meadow muffins, and the best way to do this is by reeling off swell words that strike contemporary ears as kind of charming. Such as “Sweet Fanny Adams,” a 1920s phrase meaning “bullshit.” Peters explains that it’s the “the polite form of a vulgar phrase.” The precise nature of which I will leave to your imagination. The book organizes “bullshit” into categories ranging from “scams” to “gibberish,” with many shades in between. Each word comes with a brief history of how it came to be known as a variation of BS. Recently, I chatted with Peters to dig into the mysteries of bullshit. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. How did bullshit come to mean bullshit? Because there is “bull” (as in load of bull) and there is “shit,” but what made bullshit more popular than, say, “horsefeathers” or “bird turds”? I don’t know if this is an answer but I have a dog, and I live in a dog-heavy area. There is a lot of dog shit in my neighborhood. So if you say, “dogshit!” most people will assume that you’re referring to the literal stuff on the ground. Whereas very few of us living in cities today will see or step in actual bullshit. So when you say, “bullshit!” everyone knows that you’re not talking about an actual pile of turds. That doesn’t apply to everyone, of course. In the course of researching this book, when I googled “horse dumplings” or “horse donuts”—these being variations of “bullshit”—I was surprised to find how many times their use was literal. In many places, it would seem, horse shit is still an actual problem. For those of us who live with livestock, “bullshit” never refers to bull shit, which is instead referred to in polite company as “cow patties.” There’s “bullshine,” and “bullsugar,” too, with the euphemistic version being very close to the original version, but nicer. Family friendly. I write a column about euphemisms for “Visual Thesaurus,” and ironically—or fittingly, I suppose—I couldn’t mention the name of my book… so I had to use a euphemism. Given the free flow of four-letter words on the Internet and cable TV, how bad is it to say “shit,” really? It feels, say, 15 percent more naughty than “crap.” It’s only a little bit bad. But saying “bullcrap!” doesn’t have the same effect as “bullshit!” at all. A little bit of taboo is all it takes to get the right amount of emphasis. Do you have any favorites in this book? I like “four flusher.” In a card game, it’s a variation of “you’re bluffing, you trash talkin’ braggart!” It’s a way of declaring that your opponent has a hand one short of a flush and therefore the cards he’s holding are worthless. I swear it has absolutely nothing do with flushing the toilet after a load of crap has been dumped, though, well, the image works a little too well. I also like flubdub. It’s has a folksy, fun sound and is also a word for an apple dumpling. It’s interesting that the fun ones hide the insult inside nursery-rhyme imagery. Very Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky-style bullshit. For example, back in 2009, PETA tried to re-brand fish as “sea kittens” in an attempt to get people to stop eating fish. So that was a pretty blatant attempt at “cute” renaming. As you can imagine, a lot of people called bullshit on that one. The campaign didn’t seem to go anywhere. You can’t really cross the taxonomic line. There’s fish, and there’s mammals. But mostly, you can’t rename fish after a house pet known to love tuna and hate water. A cat of any kind would make a terrible, terrible fish. So of course PETA got serious blowback. As the young people say: “What is this fuckery?” Fuckery! That’s one I missed. “Fuckery” seems quite popular now in Internet land. Which makes sense when you consider that “fuck” is the all-purpose American swear word. In Germany, it's “scheiβe.” In France, it's “merde.” Swearing works best if the word is one syllable, forceful, expectorated. “Bullshit” almost seems sophisticated by comparison. It shows that BS clings to its taboo-ness by a thread. It’s “crap” with a bit more strength. “That’s BULLSHIT!” carries more passion. But it’s still not exactly offensive. Not anymore. It’s not just the word, it’s also in the delivery and the attitude. That makes me think of Eddie Murphy’s “banana in the tailpipe” line reading in “Beverly Hills Cop.” A film that uses the word “bullshit” constantly, because Murphy uses it to call out authority figures while mocking social pretenses. One of the things that struck me in the process of writing this was how much BS was in the eye of the beholder. And yes, BS is everywhere. We talk about it, produce it, and say, “That’s bullshit!” Or in the case of Joe Biden, “That's a bunch of malarkey!” [In a 2012 vice-presidential debate, Paul Ryan’s critique of the Obama administration’s response to Benghazi prompted Biden to call him out, spawning the hashtag #malarkey, not to mention endless gifs.] It’s a shame that Biden isn’t running for president, because we won’t be hearing much more of that word. Politicians are doing their job in creating BS, but they’re not calling each other out for it often enough. Every politician should have this book so they would have better ammunition. Which brings us back to the many euphemisms for bullshit you describe in this book. The very existence of so many variations reflects changing ideas regarding what can be said in polite society, how we police public discourse and, to a certain degree, enforce gendered patterns of speech—“ladies don’t swear,” that sort of thing. Meaning that euphemisms for bullshit are basically, well, BS. Because they avoid being accountable for shitty realities in order to maintain the status quo. George Carlin denounced euphemisms in the service of comedy. [Carlin’s career was essentially dedicated to calling out “humanity’s bullshit,” including a famous routine, “Everything is bullshit.” (“Parents are full of shit, teachers are full of shit, clergymen are full of shit, and law enforcement people are full of shit.”) Jon Stewart’s final bit pays homage to Carlin.] You can see them another way: euphemisms are the circles drawn around outrages in order to stop fanning the flames. They’re certainly creative, and highly revealing regarding the boundaries of social permissiveness. Other terms are just pure fun. For example, I wish I could call someone a wanker. If you do that in the U.S., you become one. Bullshit: here to stay? No matter what your political or religious beliefs, everybody has had it up to here with BS. One of its powers is that it covers so much.

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Our mandatory breast-feeding fetish: Race, class, big business and the new politics of motherhood

Yummy Mummy is a small store in the middle of a quietly commercial block of Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. Flanked by a dog accessory store and a beauty salon, it is surrounded by expensive boutiques specializing in children. A quick glance reveals a children’s optician, a children’s photographer, a handful of children’s clothing stores, and a nanny agency. Tastefully decorated and brimming with designer apparel and accessories for nursing mothers, Yummy Mummy fits right in. Its plum brown awning greets customers and passers-by with a friendly, if pointed, message: happy breastfeeding. Located on the Upper East Side, just one block away from the mansions and penthouses of Park Avenue, Yummy Mummy is a self-styled “breastfeeding emporium.” A steady stream of new mothers pushing state-of-the-art strollers flock here to buy everything from bottles and bras to “hip, stylish” nursing clothes and breastfeeding supplements like Lactation Cookies. As it happens, Lactation Cookies look just like ordinary chocolate-chip cookies, but they include ingredients such as oats, brewers’ yeast, and flax seed to boost breast-milk production. (Yummy Mummy also sells fenugreek for the same purpose, which at ten dollars a package, costs half the price.) Still, Yummy Mummy’s main business is breast pumps, which it sells at the small Lexington Avenue store and through its bustling website. Although breast pump sales have been brisk ever since Amanda Cole opened her store in 2009, they soared dramatically in 2013. That year, President Obama made a bold intervention in the world of breastfeeding advocacy by reforming the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to require health insurance companies to cover the cost of breast pumps for new mothers. At first, Cole worried that making breast pumps free to anyone with health insurance would be bad for business. Even before the ACA reform went into effect, the United States accounted for 40 percent of the global market in breast pumps, with 2.3 million breast pumps sold in 2010 alone. After the reform, analysts predicted the breast pump market would expand by 50 percent, and Cole didn’t want to miss out on that burgeoning growth. She moved quickly to make the new legislation work to her advantage. Insurance companies will only reimburse customers who purchase equipment through an accredited durable medical equipment (DME) supplier. These specialized stores normally sell institutional items like hospital beds and oxygen tanks; their no-nonsense aesthetic is light years away from the boutique-y world of Yummy Mummy. But, by deftly navigating the bureaucracy necessary to have Yummy Mummy accredited as a DME, Cole positioned her store to profit from the new plan almost immediately. Only months after the breast pump benefit went into effect, consumer demand had soared to the point that she hired an additional seventeen workers and rented space for a call center to handle the national orders coming through the store’s website. Yummy Mummy now has established relationships with twenty-five different insurance plans and ships hundreds of pumps per week. Industry analysts expect this market to grow even more, as news of the benefit spreads. By the end of the decade, the American breast-pump market should reach almost one billion dollars—and the market for the other breastfeeding equipment Yummy Mummy sells, including clothes, bras, creams, and pillows, will be roughly double that. With a little help from President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, breastfeeding has become very big business indeed. * Like so many lifestyle companies today, from Whole Foods to the Arbor Collective skateboard company, Yummy Mummy is a compelling mixture of conscience and commerce, an enterprise dedicated to doing well by doing good. As a new mother in Manhattan, Cole was committed to breastfeeding but frustrated by the absence of good breastfeeding products and informed advice. Ultimately, that frustration exposed a market opportunity. Her neighborhood needed a place that would cater to, and support, nursing women. In 2009, Cole opened a store she envisioned as a one-stop shop for premium breastfeeding products and a community hub where expectant or new parents could consult well-informed sales associates—including Cole herself, who is now a certified lactation counselor. The store also offers a range of courses. There are standard offerings such as “Childbirth Preparation” and “Baby Safety & CPR” and less standard offerings such as “Eat, Drink, Doula.” Billed as a form of “speed dating,” “Eat, Drink, Doula” streamlines parents’ search for a labor coach by introducing them to five to ten prospective doulas in a single session. The consumer culture that has grown up around breastfeeding says a great deal about its core demographic, its lifestyle priorities, and the resources it has to dedicate to breastfeeding. As its cheeky name suggests, Yummy Mummy’s mission is not confined to the worthy causes of infant and maternal health and environmental and economic well-being mentioned on its website. In contemporary slang, a yummy mummy is a sexy, glamorous mother—well dressed and, usually, well heeled too. Tabloids use the term to praise celebrity moms like Miranda Kerr and Angelina Jolie for refusing to let motherhood cramp their fabulous lifestyles—and wardrobes. Yummy Mummy too signals that breastfeeding is no longer just for the crunchy earth-mother crowd. Along with breast pumps and vitamins, the store offers all the trendy fashion items and accessories a mother needs to “nurse in style.” Breastfeeding is the new black. At this moment in the long history of infant feeding, when maternity and breastfeeding boutiques with whimsical names—like The Pumping Station in Santa Monica or Manhattan’s Upper Breast Side—have multiplied in desirable zip codes around the country, it’s worth remembering that the very idea of “nursing in style” marks a dramatic cultural shift. Not very long ago, the idea of breastfeeding stylishly would have seemed patently absurd. Back in the 1970s, many of the women who revived the practice of breastfeeding in the US were making a political statement, not a fashion statement. They were taking a stand for women’s right to choose how to feed their babies, and against big businesses like Nestlé that were peddling formula in poor countries at the expense of babies’ lives. But the mainstreaming of breastfeeding has generated not only countless bad puns—a nursing pillow called My Breast Friend, a postpartum girdle called the Mother Tucker—it has also stimulated a booming market in luxury breastfeeding paraphernalia that the earlier generation of feminists, hippies, and countercultural mavericks could never have imagined. One of the most popular electric pumps in the US, manufactured by the Swiss company Medela, is called the Pump in Style. Anyone even remotely familiar with the mechanics of breast pumping will find the idea of pumping in style amusing, at best. Naked from the waist up, with suction cups attached to each swollen nipple as the pump yanks loudly and rhythmically to coax milk into plastic cylinders, not even Heidi Klum could look stylish. But the name is telling nonetheless. It bespeaks an ideal of motherhood that is alluring to many women—and profitable to the many manufacturers and stores that promise ways of achieving it. The trappings of contemporary breastfeeding culture—including breast pumps, designer apparel from companies with names like Boob and Glamourmom, and Lactation Cookies—reflect the tangled web of social, political, and commercial interests that sustain it. This new culture—at once wholesome and hip—is partly the result of a hard-won social pride. Many of those who revived breastfeeding in the twentieth century—feminists, hippies, and members of La Leche League included—encountered considerable resistance. And some still do. Sometimes these tensions are generational and subtle. New mothers who breastfeed often report that their own mothers, who didn’t, are critical and defensive. After all, you turned out all right, didn’t you? Other times the resistance is not subtle at all. To this day, women are harassed for breastfeeding in public at places as diverse as Friendly’s Restaurant, Target, and Anthropologie clothing store. When seen in this light, the new generation of breastfeeding advocates’ emphasis on style can be seen as an important effort to show that breastfeeding and motherhood are compatible with having a life—a life that doesn’t rule out fitness, fashion, and fun. This is an undeniably good cause. The many initiatives designed to protect a woman’s right to breastfeed in public represent a similarly worthy expression of female pride. In fact, this particular right has recently become, quite literally, a cause célèbre. Famous mothers like Kourtney Kardashian, Gwen Stefani, and Maggie Gyllenhaal have all made a point of being photographed nursing in public. As with gay rights and other identity-based political movements, their strategy is to embrace visibility as a way of refusing stigma and shame. In 2015, even Pope Francis weighed in, encouraging mothers to nurse their babies during a baptismal ceremony in the Sistine Chapel. More formally organized initiatives exist now too. Started several years ago in New Zealand, the Big Latch On has become a global event in which women come together to breastfeed in public, en masse, on a given day in the beginning of August, during World Breastfeeding Week. The advocacy organization Best for Babes runs a national hotline for mothers who are harassed for nursing in public. The phone number is 855-NIP-FREE. And then there’s one of the most colorful citizen initiatives, The Milk Truck, a big pink van with a three-foot-high fiberglass breast and flashing nipple on its roof that rescues women in Pittsburgh who are harassed for breastfeeding in public. Initiatives like the Big Latch On and The Milk Truck strike me as positive examples of breastfeeding advocacy. Their goal is to protect women’s ability to choose how and where to feed their children. But as I’ve discovered again and again while writing this book, breastfeeding advocacy too often crosses the line into lactivism, including compulsory breastfeeding, breastfeeding as a moral crusade, and breastfeeding as a means of distinguishing good from bad parents. When it does, it limits rather than protects women’s choices. Some lactivists have in fact described “choice” as the language of the enemy. Their campaigns are specifically designed to undermine the idea that women can take into account their own individual circumstances—jobs, child-care options, and so on—when choosing how to feed their babies. At their most extreme, lactivists view breastfeeding as an end in itself—an activity to be defended at all costs, even when it threatens the health and well-being of babies and mothers. Not long ago, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen displayed an unexpected flair for policy reform when she called for a “worldwide law” requiring women to breastfeed for six months. In Saudi Arabia, women are legally obligated to breastfeed—for two years. Here in the U S, politicians and policy makers have stopped short of legislating breastfeeding, but they have decided that breastfeeding should be viewed as a matter of public policy rather than a personal choice. Since 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC ), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the U S Surgeon General have all officially identified breastfeeding as “a public health issue.” This declaration places formula feeding on a par with smoking and unsafe sex as a form of risky behavior that threatens not only individual health but American society at large. As Dr. Richard Schanler, the chair of the AAP Section on Breastfeeding, explained in an interview, “This is a health issue for the better health of our infants, so why are we just leaving it up to the whim of the family to do whatever they feel like?” In fact, so many people agree with Schanler and Bündchen these days that breastfeeding has become what political scientists like me identify as a consensus issue—an issue that unites people who otherwise disagree about pretty much everything else. Feminists and fundamentalists, yuppies and hippies, conservatives and liberals, the medical establishment and its alternative-medicine critics: for all their differences, they are all aligned on this particular issue. The problem is that these unlikely bedfellows not only believe in breastfeeding and practice it themselves; they often believe that everybody else should too. Breastfeeding is no longer just a way to feed a baby; it is a moral marker that distinguishes us from them—good parents from bad. For many well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class parents, breastfeeding is an early foray into competitive parenting. They breastfeed because it promises to produce children who are healthier, more secure, and smarter. In these circles, breastfeeding is also an indicator of financial or professional success—only mothers who have the luxury of time or job flexibility can breastfeed long enough to claim the full health benefits. In the United States today, breastfeeding is undeniably a marker of class status, although not for everyone. For the Christian right, the value of breastfeeding is different. Fundamentalist Christians cite scripture to show that breastfeeding is part of God’s plan. It also offers proof of intelligent design—the theory that the universe was created by God’s design rather than the big bang and evolution—and it signals womanly submission to God’s will. Ironically, breastfeeding means just the opposite to feminists, for whom it is often a form of empowerment that offers evidence of the life-sustaining force of female bodies. For the hippie and hipster left, breastfeeding is also a moral imperative, though here too, for different reasons. Hipsters breastfeed because they are environmentalists, because they support the local food movement, and because they are critical of the huge multinationals that make formula. Breastfeeding is part of a package of lifestyle choices that will often include yoga, farmers’ markets, fair-trade coffee, cloth diapers, and homemade baby food. If you fi d yourself feeding your baby formula at the Food Co-op in Park Slope, you may as well be wearing a coat made of baby sealskins. Excerpted with permission from "Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy" by Courtney Jung. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.    Yummy Mummy is a small store in the middle of a quietly commercial block of Manhattan’s Lexington Avenue. Flanked by a dog accessory store and a beauty salon, it is surrounded by expensive boutiques specializing in children. A quick glance reveals a children’s optician, a children’s photographer, a handful of children’s clothing stores, and a nanny agency. Tastefully decorated and brimming with designer apparel and accessories for nursing mothers, Yummy Mummy fits right in. Its plum brown awning greets customers and passers-by with a friendly, if pointed, message: happy breastfeeding. Located on the Upper East Side, just one block away from the mansions and penthouses of Park Avenue, Yummy Mummy is a self-styled “breastfeeding emporium.” A steady stream of new mothers pushing state-of-the-art strollers flock here to buy everything from bottles and bras to “hip, stylish” nursing clothes and breastfeeding supplements like Lactation Cookies. As it happens, Lactation Cookies look just like ordinary chocolate-chip cookies, but they include ingredients such as oats, brewers’ yeast, and flax seed to boost breast-milk production. (Yummy Mummy also sells fenugreek for the same purpose, which at ten dollars a package, costs half the price.) Still, Yummy Mummy’s main business is breast pumps, which it sells at the small Lexington Avenue store and through its bustling website. Although breast pump sales have been brisk ever since Amanda Cole opened her store in 2009, they soared dramatically in 2013. That year, President Obama made a bold intervention in the world of breastfeeding advocacy by reforming the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to require health insurance companies to cover the cost of breast pumps for new mothers. At first, Cole worried that making breast pumps free to anyone with health insurance would be bad for business. Even before the ACA reform went into effect, the United States accounted for 40 percent of the global market in breast pumps, with 2.3 million breast pumps sold in 2010 alone. After the reform, analysts predicted the breast pump market would expand by 50 percent, and Cole didn’t want to miss out on that burgeoning growth. She moved quickly to make the new legislation work to her advantage. Insurance companies will only reimburse customers who purchase equipment through an accredited durable medical equipment (DME) supplier. These specialized stores normally sell institutional items like hospital beds and oxygen tanks; their no-nonsense aesthetic is light years away from the boutique-y world of Yummy Mummy. But, by deftly navigating the bureaucracy necessary to have Yummy Mummy accredited as a DME, Cole positioned her store to profit from the new plan almost immediately. Only months after the breast pump benefit went into effect, consumer demand had soared to the point that she hired an additional seventeen workers and rented space for a call center to handle the national orders coming through the store’s website. Yummy Mummy now has established relationships with twenty-five different insurance plans and ships hundreds of pumps per week. Industry analysts expect this market to grow even more, as news of the benefit spreads. By the end of the decade, the American breast-pump market should reach almost one billion dollars—and the market for the other breastfeeding equipment Yummy Mummy sells, including clothes, bras, creams, and pillows, will be roughly double that. With a little help from President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, breastfeeding has become very big business indeed. * Like so many lifestyle companies today, from Whole Foods to the Arbor Collective skateboard company, Yummy Mummy is a compelling mixture of conscience and commerce, an enterprise dedicated to doing well by doing good. As a new mother in Manhattan, Cole was committed to breastfeeding but frustrated by the absence of good breastfeeding products and informed advice. Ultimately, that frustration exposed a market opportunity. Her neighborhood needed a place that would cater to, and support, nursing women. In 2009, Cole opened a store she envisioned as a one-stop shop for premium breastfeeding products and a community hub where expectant or new parents could consult well-informed sales associates—including Cole herself, who is now a certified lactation counselor. The store also offers a range of courses. There are standard offerings such as “Childbirth Preparation” and “Baby Safety & CPR” and less standard offerings such as “Eat, Drink, Doula.” Billed as a form of “speed dating,” “Eat, Drink, Doula” streamlines parents’ search for a labor coach by introducing them to five to ten prospective doulas in a single session. The consumer culture that has grown up around breastfeeding says a great deal about its core demographic, its lifestyle priorities, and the resources it has to dedicate to breastfeeding. As its cheeky name suggests, Yummy Mummy’s mission is not confined to the worthy causes of infant and maternal health and environmental and economic well-being mentioned on its website. In contemporary slang, a yummy mummy is a sexy, glamorous mother—well dressed and, usually, well heeled too. Tabloids use the term to praise celebrity moms like Miranda Kerr and Angelina Jolie for refusing to let motherhood cramp their fabulous lifestyles—and wardrobes. Yummy Mummy too signals that breastfeeding is no longer just for the crunchy earth-mother crowd. Along with breast pumps and vitamins, the store offers all the trendy fashion items and accessories a mother needs to “nurse in style.” Breastfeeding is the new black. At this moment in the long history of infant feeding, when maternity and breastfeeding boutiques with whimsical names—like The Pumping Station in Santa Monica or Manhattan’s Upper Breast Side—have multiplied in desirable zip codes around the country, it’s worth remembering that the very idea of “nursing in style” marks a dramatic cultural shift. Not very long ago, the idea of breastfeeding stylishly would have seemed patently absurd. Back in the 1970s, many of the women who revived the practice of breastfeeding in the US were making a political statement, not a fashion statement. They were taking a stand for women’s right to choose how to feed their babies, and against big businesses like Nestlé that were peddling formula in poor countries at the expense of babies’ lives. But the mainstreaming of breastfeeding has generated not only countless bad puns—a nursing pillow called My Breast Friend, a postpartum girdle called the Mother Tucker—it has also stimulated a booming market in luxury breastfeeding paraphernalia that the earlier generation of feminists, hippies, and countercultural mavericks could never have imagined. One of the most popular electric pumps in the US, manufactured by the Swiss company Medela, is called the Pump in Style. Anyone even remotely familiar with the mechanics of breast pumping will find the idea of pumping in style amusing, at best. Naked from the waist up, with suction cups attached to each swollen nipple as the pump yanks loudly and rhythmically to coax milk into plastic cylinders, not even Heidi Klum could look stylish. But the name is telling nonetheless. It bespeaks an ideal of motherhood that is alluring to many women—and profitable to the many manufacturers and stores that promise ways of achieving it. The trappings of contemporary breastfeeding culture—including breast pumps, designer apparel from companies with names like Boob and Glamourmom, and Lactation Cookies—reflect the tangled web of social, political, and commercial interests that sustain it. This new culture—at once wholesome and hip—is partly the result of a hard-won social pride. Many of those who revived breastfeeding in the twentieth century—feminists, hippies, and members of La Leche League included—encountered considerable resistance. And some still do. Sometimes these tensions are generational and subtle. New mothers who breastfeed often report that their own mothers, who didn’t, are critical and defensive. After all, you turned out all right, didn’t you? Other times the resistance is not subtle at all. To this day, women are harassed for breastfeeding in public at places as diverse as Friendly’s Restaurant, Target, and Anthropologie clothing store. When seen in this light, the new generation of breastfeeding advocates’ emphasis on style can be seen as an important effort to show that breastfeeding and motherhood are compatible with having a life—a life that doesn’t rule out fitness, fashion, and fun. This is an undeniably good cause. The many initiatives designed to protect a woman’s right to breastfeed in public represent a similarly worthy expression of female pride. In fact, this particular right has recently become, quite literally, a cause célèbre. Famous mothers like Kourtney Kardashian, Gwen Stefani, and Maggie Gyllenhaal have all made a point of being photographed nursing in public. As with gay rights and other identity-based political movements, their strategy is to embrace visibility as a way of refusing stigma and shame. In 2015, even Pope Francis weighed in, encouraging mothers to nurse their babies during a baptismal ceremony in the Sistine Chapel. More formally organized initiatives exist now too. Started several years ago in New Zealand, the Big Latch On has become a global event in which women come together to breastfeed in public, en masse, on a given day in the beginning of August, during World Breastfeeding Week. The advocacy organization Best for Babes runs a national hotline for mothers who are harassed for nursing in public. The phone number is 855-NIP-FREE. And then there’s one of the most colorful citizen initiatives, The Milk Truck, a big pink van with a three-foot-high fiberglass breast and flashing nipple on its roof that rescues women in Pittsburgh who are harassed for breastfeeding in public. Initiatives like the Big Latch On and The Milk Truck strike me as positive examples of breastfeeding advocacy. Their goal is to protect women’s ability to choose how and where to feed their children. But as I’ve discovered again and again while writing this book, breastfeeding advocacy too often crosses the line into lactivism, including compulsory breastfeeding, breastfeeding as a moral crusade, and breastfeeding as a means of distinguishing good from bad parents. When it does, it limits rather than protects women’s choices. Some lactivists have in fact described “choice” as the language of the enemy. Their campaigns are specifically designed to undermine the idea that women can take into account their own individual circumstances—jobs, child-care options, and so on—when choosing how to feed their babies. At their most extreme, lactivists view breastfeeding as an end in itself—an activity to be defended at all costs, even when it threatens the health and well-being of babies and mothers. Not long ago, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen displayed an unexpected flair for policy reform when she called for a “worldwide law” requiring women to breastfeed for six months. In Saudi Arabia, women are legally obligated to breastfeed—for two years. Here in the U S, politicians and policy makers have stopped short of legislating breastfeeding, but they have decided that breastfeeding should be viewed as a matter of public policy rather than a personal choice. Since 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC ), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the U S Surgeon General have all officially identified breastfeeding as “a public health issue.” This declaration places formula feeding on a par with smoking and unsafe sex as a form of risky behavior that threatens not only individual health but American society at large. As Dr. Richard Schanler, the chair of the AAP Section on Breastfeeding, explained in an interview, “This is a health issue for the better health of our infants, so why are we just leaving it up to the whim of the family to do whatever they feel like?” In fact, so many people agree with Schanler and Bündchen these days that breastfeeding has become what political scientists like me identify as a consensus issue—an issue that unites people who otherwise disagree about pretty much everything else. Feminists and fundamentalists, yuppies and hippies, conservatives and liberals, the medical establishment and its alternative-medicine critics: for all their differences, they are all aligned on this particular issue. The problem is that these unlikely bedfellows not only believe in breastfeeding and practice it themselves; they often believe that everybody else should too. Breastfeeding is no longer just a way to feed a baby; it is a moral marker that distinguishes us from them—good parents from bad. For many well-educated middle- and upper-middle-class parents, breastfeeding is an early foray into competitive parenting. They breastfeed because it promises to produce children who are healthier, more secure, and smarter. In these circles, breastfeeding is also an indicator of financial or professional success—only mothers who have the luxury of time or job flexibility can breastfeed long enough to claim the full health benefits. In the United States today, breastfeeding is undeniably a marker of class status, although not for everyone. For the Christian right, the value of breastfeeding is different. Fundamentalist Christians cite scripture to show that breastfeeding is part of God’s plan. It also offers proof of intelligent design—the theory that the universe was created by God’s design rather than the big bang and evolution—and it signals womanly submission to God’s will. Ironically, breastfeeding means just the opposite to feminists, for whom it is often a form of empowerment that offers evidence of the life-sustaining force of female bodies. For the hippie and hipster left, breastfeeding is also a moral imperative, though here too, for different reasons. Hipsters breastfeed because they are environmentalists, because they support the local food movement, and because they are critical of the huge multinationals that make formula. Breastfeeding is part of a package of lifestyle choices that will often include yoga, farmers’ markets, fair-trade coffee, cloth diapers, and homemade baby food. If you fi d yourself feeding your baby formula at the Food Co-op in Park Slope, you may as well be wearing a coat made of baby sealskins. Excerpted with permission from "Lactivism: How Feminists and Fundamentalists, Hippies and Yuppies, and Physicians and Politicians Made Breastfeeding Big Business and Bad Policy" by Courtney Jung. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. Copyright © 2015.    

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