True/Slant has been a regular part of my life for almost a year.  I became familiar with the site when the fantastic journalist, Ryan Sager, asked me to site sit for him while he was on vacation. After a week of writing for his blog, Neuroworld, I was convinced that this was a place I wanted to stay.

What stoked me the most was the fresh thinking behind what Lewis Dvorkin and his team had started here: recruit great writers and give them the freedom to build their brands and drive traffic to the site.  I hadn’t seen this concept successfully employed at any other credible news site, but one taste and I knew it was for me.

In addition to Lewis, I want to thank Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel and Steve McNally for making my time here truly a pleasure.  I sensed the dedication of this team from the beginning, and in the months since have only become more impressed with their passion and commitment. You folks started something quite special here and I hope you are proud of it.

As for me, I’m pleased to say this is a temporary goodbye.  As some T/S writers have already mentioned in their farewell posts, we’re not exactly sure what the next chapter will look like, but we’re looking forward to contributing to it.

In the meantime, you can always find me at my home base blog: Neuronarrative, and on Twitter @neuronarrative.

(the header for this post is a quote from Garrison Keillor, in case you were wondering)

If you would like to keep up with my work, please follow me on twitter.

* * *

On a Saturday afternoon I walked into one of the nation’s most impressive collective brains – the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman building, the branch with the lionized front steps. I was there to understand something about death and memory, but not on the usual, personal level. When something social dies – a magazine or a website, for instance – how is it remembered? If we dig deep into the back of the collective mind, what would be there? Those questions led me to the Independent, once a venerable magazine that lived 80 years before dying in 1928. I had never heard of it before, but it was both inspiration and competition to magazines that defined an era — The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic to name a few.

It remains to be seen whether there’s a lasting memory of True/Slant, the brilliant experiment of Lewis Dvorkin, Coates Bateman, Andrea Spiegel, Michael Roston, Steve McNally, 300 contributors and tens of thousands of engaged readers. It certainly competed with, and may very well inspire, those publications that will define this era. But finding the Independent is also a reminder of how ephemeral this business is, as it is meant to be. And yet ….

Deep in the recesses of the human brain, enzymes keep old memories stored for occasional retrieval by the conscious mind, which is usually preoccupied with the present and recent past. Collective memory works the same way – older memories are pushed further and further away from the hustle of the moment.

The microforms room is deep in the recesses of the Schwarzman building, far from the grandeur of the main reading rooms and picture galleries and elegant staircases. Drop ceilings and fluorescent lighting give a greenish tint to the walls, which are neatly decorated with watermarks of logos famous publications. The microfilm you can access in the room itself cover the current New York newspapers. Everything else has to be ordered from a back room.

I found the Independent after looking through a long index of publications in the American Periodical Series, a set of microfilm created in 1941 by the University of Michigan to, “document the origins of American magazine journalism which began in 1741 with Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine and Andrew Bradford’s American Magazine.” The Independent stood out to me for its long life, it’s consistent weekly publication schedule and it’s sudden demise.

I wrote down the reel numbers and handed them to a microfilm clerk named Charles.

“It will be about 20 minutes,” he said. “Those are stored in the basement.”

Sadly, the first two years of the magazine, 1848 and 49, are not part of the series. But it’s safe to guess it didn’t grow quickly – in January 1850, the Independent is a feisty four-page broadsheet published in New York City. It’s filled with Protestant piety, strong anti-slavery convictions and a pre-occupation with Catholicism. “Religious liberty in France is again trampled under the feet of the Jesuits,” declares the unnamed writer under the title, “The State of France” in the January 3, 1850 edition.

Another article tells the cautionary tale of a boy who refuses to submit to Christ’s laws despite the fact that his salvation is not guaranteed and a boy down the street not much older had just recently died. A sermon printed in full warns the readers that disobeying the civil law is a Christian duty and a prayer is nearby asking for strength to abide by the Fugitive Slave Law: “I am liable to be called on to assist in restoring a miserable fugitive to his bondage … Blind my eyes to all the evils of his state; may I disregard his sighs, his tears and his supplications.”

By the turn of the 20th Century, the Independent is a sophisticated magazine. Gone are the preachers and prayers, replaced primarily by college professors and editorials about the state of the world. The Jan. 7, 1903 edition includes a reprint of Count Leo Tolstoy’s “Science and Money,” the first time it was published complete in English, according to an editor’s note. The international desk has also become more sophisticated, though a broad brush is still applied: “The year in South America has been no more turbulent than South American years usually are.”

In 1924 the magazine is bought by a company in Boston and moved there. It has many elements that readers of modern magazines would recognize – a strong books section, long-form pieces from writers around the world, an in-depth 1928 piece by Harry L. Foster about Haiti’s conditions since U.S. Marines took control of the “Colorful Black Republic.”

The penultimate issue notes the magazine’s demise – The Independent was being consumed by The Outlook. “The next number of The Independent, that of Oct. 13, will be the last which we shall publish …”

The last article, “How Shall we Muzzle Monopoly,” ends the book with this: “Monopoly is the great problem of civilization. It is the problem to which Lincoln referred when he said: ‘There has never been but one question in all civilization; there is but one question now; and there never will be but one question in the future, and that is: How to prevent a few men from saying to many men, you work and earn bread and we will eat.’”

Columbus, Ohio. Image by SWolfeNI8W via Flickr

Well, hello, Columbus. ( Click here if you’re not a Philip Roth fan.)

Some people were surprised when Columbus, Ohio, appeared on the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) list of the top twenty-two energy “Smarter Cities,” sharing the spotlight with towns better known for their deep green glow. Places like Portland, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco.

One person who was not surprised was Michael Coleman, mayor of the city that in the 1990s still had the reputation as being just another bleak hole in the Midwestern Rust Belt. Coleman has led efforts to make Columbus a model of energy efficiency, one of the main priorities under a program called “Get Green Columbus.”

The program was already well underway when it received a huge boost from $7.4 million in federal stimulus funds. More than a score of city fire stations and several other city buildings are getting energy efficiency make overs. Businesses and homes are given incentives to lower energy consumption.

Well before the infusion of cash from Washington, Columbus had already completed its first energy efficient affordable housing, called, fittingly, Greenview Estates. The city also developed a recycling program, an initiative clean up air pollution and an infrastructure overhaul to ensure that residents had clean, safe water.

Energy efficiency has been at the core of the Columbus revitalization, however, which is why the NRDC included it as one of the 22 “Smarter Cities” for 2010.

The other cities, grouped by size are -

Large:

Austin, TX

Boston, MA

Chicago, IL

Columbus, Ohio

Dallas, TX

El Paso, TX

Long Beach, CA

New York, NY

Oakland, CA

Portland, OR

San Francisco, CA

Seattle, WA

Medium:

Berkeley, CA

Fort Collins, CO

Huntington Beach, CA

Reno, CA

Springfield, IL

Santa Clarita, CA

Small:

Beaverton, OR

Denton, TX

Dubuque, IA

Santa Cruz, CA

To lean more about how the NRDC picked these cities from among 655 considered, visit the Smarter Cities site.

Image via Wikipedia

There’s something kind of vampirish about Anne Rice’s faith dilemma as it plays out. To wit:

Anne Rice, on Facebook, Wednesday at 1:36 pm:

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being “Christian” or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to “belong” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.

Anne Rice, Chapter 1, Called Out of Darkness in 2008:

If this path to God is an illusion, then the story is worthless. If the path is real, then we have something here that may matter to you as well as to me.

And so, it’s worthless and we can all move on. But wait (Facebook):

As I said below, I quit being a Christian. I’m out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.

In the name of wha… But maybe we could see this coming (Called Out of Darkness):

Is it not possible for us to do with gender, sexuality and reproduction what was long ago done with the stars? To realize that…new sources of information on them may be as valid as the information given us long ago?

Probably not anytime soon with the Catholic Church, so (Facebook):

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me. But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been, or might become.

But of course (Called Out of Darkness):

…my concept of God came through the spoken words of my mother, and also the intensely beautiful experiences I had in church.

Which leaves us with a Body that once sustained Anne, but is now dead to her. However, the life source of the Body has somehow been extracted. So is it still real? Or is it an illusion? This can get a little creepy if you think about it late at night.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Anne Rice: “I quit being a Christian” (beliefnet.com)
• Anne Rice and Christ/ianity (hackingchristianity.net)

Image by GDS Digital via Flickr

Two things run strong and hard on both sides of my family: heart disease and type 2 diabetes. As a deluge of medical research tells us, the two are closely linked.  Often diabetes precedes heart disease, but in my family—particularly on my father’s side—it goes both ways.  My dad had his first heart attack when he was 48, but didn’t develop diabetes until about 10 years later.

The long and short of this is that I have to be careful.  My last blood glucose test revealed that I’m flirting with the pre-diabetic zone (defined as a blood glucose level between 100 and 124; 125 and up is considered diabetic).  So my doctor wisely directed me to consult with a dietician before the situation worsens.

I had my first consult a couple of months ago and received a docket of good advice touching both diet and exercise to rein in the sugar.  But the best advice was simply this: the best way to avoid diabetes is to think like a diabetic and act accordingly.

Basic as it sounds, I think this one-liner brilliant in its simplicity. People spend so much time fretting over the details of their diets, counting calories, reading the latest fad theories about what this or that nutrient does or doesn’t do.  How much better if we just start with what matters most: think differently.

I’m a little more in touch with this than some people because several of my family members have had diabetes and I know how they had to adjust their thinking and behavior to regulate their health.  But even if this isn’t true for you, it’s easy enough to find out. Once you do, it’s not necessarily essential that you perfectly copy the eating and exercise habits of a diabetic (though it may be, depending on your blood glucose situation), but at least get in the proverbial ballpark.

For me, it’s like this: cut way down on everything that is bleached, starchy and processed to the point of barely being food.  That includes white bread, white rice, most pasta, and any sort of processed potato or corn stuff. Those are the really difficult things for me (I’m Italian, after all, and we like our starchy carbs). Then there are the more obvious culprits: cookies, cake, candy.  Also hard, but I’ve found from past experience that once you’ve “de-hooked” yourself from those things for a few weeks, the cravings drop off.   Also take it easy on the juice.  I love juice (grape especially), but the problem is that the juicing process removes most of the fiber and leaves you with a whole lot of sugar.  And, goes without saying, stay away from soda, period.

What’s left?  Lean proteins, nuts, veggies, fruits (not juiced), yogurt (preferably Greek, and low-sugar), natural peanut butter, tea (unsweetened), lots of water, alcohol in moderation (2-3 drinks a week), whole wheat bread (I prefer pita), whole wheat pasta (occasionally), brown rice… You get the idea.   I know, this looks a lot like other diets, but the point here is that this isn’t really a diet. If you have diabetes, you’re not on a diet; you’re eating to maintain your health for the rest of your life.  That’s the way to think.

Throw in some modest exercise, and you’re there.  My latest favorite is swimming.  Just walking a few times a week will also do wonders.

What, so far, has thinking and acting like a diabetic done for me?  I’ve trimmed 16 pounds in less than two months.  Believe me, that was a hard fought 16 to lose, and I have many more to go, but I wouldn’t have lost an ounce without recalibrating my thinking. I have another blood glucose test coming up this month and hope to see a concomitant drop out of the red zone.

This is a topic I’m very close to. My dad died from the lethal combination of diabetes and heart disease, and I don’t plan on following suit.  If you have any questions about anything in this post, please feel free to tweet me @neuronarrative.

Drug information site Erowid recently posted a 1951 Disney comic where Mickey Mouse and Goofy take speed.

In the strip, ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’, Mickey and Goofy discover a new medicine called ‘Peppo’ which is clearly meant to represent amphetamine. Their enthusiasm for the chemical pick-me-up leads them to become salesman for the product in Africa.

Although the idea of Disney characters taking speed seems rather incongruous these days, in 1951 amphetamine was legal and widely available over-the-counter in America, mostly in the form of Benzedrine inhalers.

It wasn’t until the mid-60s when these were made prescription only and non-medical amphetamine wasn’t outlawed until 1971.

As well as casual racism, the strip also features various characters eating ‘hash’ which knocks them out.

For those not familiar with American English, this isn’t a direct reference to hashish or cannabis resin but a reference to a peculiarly unappetising type of food of the same name which, in the story, seems to have been spiked with some sort of unidentified sedative.

However, given the rather unenlightened portrayal of Africans in the piece and the 1950s stereotype of marijuana being a drug of black Americans, I wonder if the lethargy inducing properties of the ‘hash’ are meant to be an indirect reference to the drug.

Link to ‘Mickey Mouse and the Medicine Man’.

Image by SpecialKRB via Flickr

In writing about the mosque/Ground Zero flap today in The New York Times, Clyde Haberman brings up a point that has been bothering me too:

…we have learned that many people must have been out sick the day the teacher taught prepositions. The center is routinely referred to by some opponents as the “mosque at ground zero.”

. . . There’s that “at.” For a two-letter word, it packs quite a wallop. It has been tossed around in a manner both cavalier and disingenuous, with an intention by some to inflame passions. Nobody, regardless of political leanings, would tolerate a mosque at ground zero. “Near” is not the same, as anyone who paid attention back in the fourth grade should know.

This elicits a question: How far away must the mosque be before the Newt-Sarah-Jihad Watch brigade would be satisfied? Richard Land, who heads public policy for Southern Baptists, played games with the at-near difference in a recent column for the Washington Post. He provided a most interesting comparison.

Having a mosque at Ground Zero would be the equivalent of having a Japanese Shinto shrine built next to the USS Arizona. Do the followers of Shinto have a right to have a shrine in Honolulu? Yes. In close proximity to the USS Arizona? No.

From what I could tell on Google Maps, the closest Shinto shrine to the USS Arizona is 6.7 miles away. The closest Baptist church (not strictly Southern Baptist, mind you, but neither was Truman) I could find in Hiroshima was .5 miles away from their Ground Zero.

Yes, the proposed ‘mosque’ (Haberman points out that it’s probably not what you imagine) would be closer than both of those examples, but not ‘at.’ Here’s the map of the where the Islamic center would be in relation to Ground Zero, as provided by the developers’ web site.

And one reminder: The distance between Ground Zero and Al Qaeda headquarters, where the attack was planned, is over 6,000 miles.

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• The ‘Mega-Mosque’ Hate Video Rejected by NBC and CBS (littlegreenfootballs.com)
• “More than Half of US Public Opposes Mosque Near Ground Zero” and related posts (globalethics.org)

My analysis, however, along with the entire business model around which specialty running shoe stores are based, might be fundamentally flawed.

In fact, according to a report on the NYTimes.com Well blog, running shoe advice given by everyone within the industry – from medical professionals like podiatrists and physical therapists to coaches and marketers – is almost entirely based on unscientific findings.

When scientific method is applied to examine whether running shoes serve their essential purpose – to prevent injury – studies consistently show no difference between “proper” and “improper” shoes.

Over the course of three large studies, the most recent of which was published last month in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, the researchers found almost no correlation at all between wearing the proper running shoes and avoiding injury. Injury rates were high among all the runners, but they were highest among the soldiers who had received shoes designed specifically for their foot types. If anything, wearing the “right” shoes for their particular foot shape had increased trainees’ chances of being hurt.

Among the concepts the studies debunk are whether pronation is an inherent injury risk. Pronation, the inward rolling motion of feet and lower legs upon striking the surface (caused by collapsing arches) is a distinguishing factor for determining what the “right” shoe is for runners.

The majority of runners pronate to some extent, which is why moderate stability shoes like Asics 2150 and Brooks Adrenaline, are the most oft-purchased shoes in any specialty running shoe.

But there’s a biological reason humans naturally pronate. To sustain the high impact that running has on the body, pronation naturally dissipates shock over a larger surface area of your foot, rather than being concentrated in one part.

Although it looks physically traumatic to the body, when viewed in slow motion, there aren’t much conclusive findings to connect pronation to an increased injury risk. Meaning, the in-store gait analysis process that specialty running promote so heavily would be based on little more than a marketing ploy.

There are a couple caveats to consider before you throw out your $100 running shoes and convert to barefoot running, however.

First of all, the NYTimes.com article doesn’t specify what kinds of shoes the subjects used in the studies. Are they all high-end shoes, in which the only variable is functional category (neutral vs. stability vs. motion control)? There’s a big difference between high-end shoes, which cost between $85 – $140, and low-end pairs, which usually cost less than $50 and fall apart within a month of heavy use. It’s likely that a noticeable difference would emerge if the sample size compared shoes by price rather than functionality. In which case there would still be merit to purchasing high-end running shoes, albeit less merit in the gait analysis process.

Secondly, any running store staffer who tells you that shoes will exclusively prevent an injury is either ignorant or lying. It would be an easy sale, telling customers what they want to hear,  that their injury is as quick a fix as buying new running shoes.

Unfortunately, like training itself, injury prevention requires a holistic approach. Stretching and strengthening exercises, which build up flexibility and support in the muscles, ligaments and tendons that running stresses the  most, are essential. So are regular massages, if you can afford them. If you can’t, pick up a cheap substitute, like a foam roller, a rolling stick or one of Trigger Points special density rollers.

Above all, don’t go into the shoe-buying process without your own information and perspective. Try on shoes in all of the functional categories, not just the ones your sales associate recommends. Try to feel the difference between the shoes and ask your associate what their purposes are. And remember that the best fitting shoe in the store will likely be the best fit for your training, regardless of whether it is the one subscribed to you.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Holy Grail of the solar industry — reaching grid parity — may no longer be a distant dream. Solar power may have already reached that point, at least when compared to nuclear power, according to a new study by two researchers at Duke University.

It’s no secret that the cost of producing photovoltaic cells (PV) has been dropping for years. A PV system today costs just 50 percent of what it did in 1998.

Breakthroughs in technology and manufacturing combined with an increase in demand and production have caused the price of solar power to decline steadily. At the same time, estimated costs for building new nuclear power plants have ballooned.

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title (pdf).

Two factors not stressed in the study further bolster the case for solar.

1) North Carolina is not a “sun-rich” state (pdf). The savings found in North Carolina are likely to be even greater for states with more sunshine –Arizona, southern California, Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, Nevada and Utah.

2) The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power (CSP). CSP promises utility scale production and solar thermal storage, making electrical generation practical for at least six hours after sunset.

Power costs are generally measured in cents per kilowatt hour – the cost of the electricity needed to illuminate a 1,000 watt light bulb (for example) for one hour. When the cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of solar power fell to 16 cents earlier this year, it “crossed over” the trend-line associated with nuclear power. (see chart below)

Chart by Blackburn and Cunningham, 2010

The authors point out that some commercial scale solar developers are now offering electricity at 14 cents a kWh in North Carolina, a price which is expected to continue to drop.

While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years.

The report is significant not only because it shows solar to be a cheaper source of energy than nuclear. The results are also important because, despite the Senate’s failure to pass a climate and energy bill this year, taxpayers now bear the burden of putting carbon into the atmosphere through a variety of hidden charges – or externalities, as economists call them. Fossil fuels currently account for 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. annually. (Nuclear generates 20 percent.)

Having dropped below the cost of nuclear power, solar energy may now be one of the least expensive energy sources in America.

Image via Wikipedia

Rounding a bend in the road around a local airport the other day, I glanced to the left and saw a cop sitting in the grass off the pavement. The white SUV was easy to see. The guy wasn’t trying to hide, but he didn’t need to because people love to come whipping around this particular stretch of road — it lends itself to speeding — and probably a few of them can’t slow down soon enough and shoot past the cop’s position.

As I passed him, however, I was struck by a very depressing thought: The day is coming when your car — your very own, much loved member-of-your-family automobile —  is going to fink on you, rat you out, and otherwise get you in trouble.

Oh, yeah. Because eventually cars will have a communication system that by law will have to be able to communicate with the police. This will be factory-installed in the name of safety. It will amount to this: You’ll pass by a cop’s location, and your car will tell the laptop in his car how fast you’re going.

Don’t think so? Live long enough, you’ll get to enjoy this and much more. Rental car companies are already letting subcontractors spy on you and fine you. Retailers are tagging their crappy clothes so that they can track your movements and spending habits. A respected American aircraft manufacturer, maker of one of the aeronautic icons of WWII, is proud to offer a high-altitude, long-flying spy drone that will undoubtedly spy on Americans. I’ve already written a post about the day when the Earthly landscape itself spies on you using “smart dust.”

I hate all this because I’m getting intensely beleaguered of being observed, tracked, and otherwise spied upon in “the Land of the Free.” I must point out, however, that at times I submit voluntarily to observation either because I simply can’t get around it, or a desired activity results in observation.

This blog and also my Facebook profile are examples of that voluntary action. Search engines survey the words I use in blog posts, and advertising related to the concepts of those words pops up on Beaufinn now and then. Some months ago when I wrote about wild boars in Germany, an ad for boar hunting in America appeared on my site.

As for Facebook, we all fell for it, really, including me. We unnecessarily gave away a ton of personal information, and that site is now obviously all about watching and monitoring people and their activity, and trying to sell stuff to them. I no longer post photos to my Facebook profile, and comment minimally on my own activities, because I find it akin to reporting on myself to both the world and also to a hidden authority about which I get to know nothing.

Privacy has become a commodity, and I’m starting to invest more and more, or at least try.

As for that idea about your car ratting you out to the cops, that’s not entirely about privacy, because if you’re just +2 mph over the limit, you’re doing that in public. What’s wrong with that is the passivity of it — that my machine, not I, files a report that I wouldn’t deign to file. The person is in charge of the machine, or should be. My car shouldn’t be making phone calls that I didn’t dial or wouldn’t dial.

Is it all about safety and peace of mind? Will we feel wonderfully secure in a world where our cars are talking to the other cars and regulating their speed together while we, in our GPS-tracked, holographic clothes, can spend the drive to work already doing work using our cranially implanted PDAs? While overhead, the drones know exactly who’s where, what they had for breakfast, how much they weigh, their blood sugar and heart-rate, and if they’re pregnant or not?

At lunch, you take a walk, and the genetically modified trees can detect the skin cells you shed. They record your presence in an embedded chip.

Oh, yes — trees will be computerized in the future.

I just wonder: How soon?

HT: Why Evolution is True

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

If the announcement of a new government study doesn’t send your heart racing, Grist staff-writer Tom Philpott has an excellent overview of the ethanol energy analysis in today’s edition.

For my fellow ADHDers, here’s the take home message from a new Congressional Budget Office (CBO) study: Government funding of corn-based ethanol, bad.

Philpott translates the CBO’s data into simple English: “Subsidizing corn-based ethanol is a mind-numbingly expensive way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

Another of Philpott’s bullet points: The modern agribusiness model for growing corn is so energy intensive that corn-based ethanol “is really just a clever way to convert natural gas and coal into car fuel.”

There’s another good reason for steering clear of ethanol, one not mentioned in the CBO study or in Philpott’s summary.

Ethanol kills.

In a 2009 study, Professor Mark Z. Jacobson, director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program at Stanford University, ranked alternative fuel sources for powering cars, based on environmental effects. Ethanol ranked at the bottom of the list, in part because the tailpipe emissions from burning bio-fuel cause as many premature deaths as gasoline — somewhere around 10,000 each year.

So let’s see: Crazy-expensive, causes deaths from air pollution. But, heh, ethanol is “Alternative Energy.” So, it’s all good, right?  Sure, and because smokers sometimes switch to chewing tobacco as an alternative to cigarettes, a wad of Skoal could be considered  health-food.

Using the friendliest assumptions possible (note that some prominent researchers argue that ethanol actually generates more GHG emissions than gasoline), CBO reckons that by supporting ethanol through the tax break, taxpayers are shelling out about $750 for every metric ton (2,205 pounds) of carbon kept out of the atmosphere by ethanol. To put that number in perspective, note that the carbon-offset company Terrapass values 1,000 pounds of emissions reductions at $5.95. Converting that to metric tons, Terrapass charges about $13 to do what the ethanol industry is charging us $750 for.

If greenhouse gas reductions are the goal, merely handing $5.16 billion to Terrapass to buy offsets would be about 57 times more effective than subsidizing ethanol production.

Of course, from my perspective, a far more effective use of that money would be to invest in technologies and infrastructure that reduce energy consumption altogether, like mass transit. But using it to encourage people to convert corn into car fuel is surely madness.

via Ethanol gets skewered by recent CBO assessment | Grist.

Memory eraser? Image via Wikipedia

Why is this not on every front page in America? Instead it’s oil spills and the economy. But this item actually affects lives:

Diana Kerwin of Northwestern University and colleagues studied 8,745 normal post-menopausal women ages 65 to 79 who participated in the Women’s Health Initiative, a massive federal study examining a host of health issues.

For every one-point increase in a woman’s body mass index (BMI), her score on a 100-point memory test dropped by one point, the researchers reported last week in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

via the The Check Up: Washington Post

Unfortunately, most of the reports covering this story missed the real news. Just read NaturalNews.com’s conclusion: “Either way, experts recommend that overweight people strive to lose weight as part of a healthy overall lifestyle.” Yeah fine fine, but think about what’s really been proven in this study: Gorging on ice cream does indeed help you forget heartbreak.

Now, this won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy, but here’s the formula. Let’s say you score 80 on your memory test, which means you remember that time your ex promised to always be honest about his/her feelings, so that if any real problems in the relationship started to arise for him/her, it would not come as a surprise. In fact you can’t stop remembering that, right?

Okay, let’s say you’re 5 feet 5 inches and weigh 145 pounds. Your BMI is 24.1, according to the NIH, unless you are a man and then it’s another number. Your memory is going to need a lot of degrading, at least a 10-point drop. So get serious. Häagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream is 540 calories per cup. If you sit still all day, eat three regular meals that cover the base 1,380 calorie intake needed, you could get to a 34.1 BMI index in a month by eating about 16 cups of chocolate ice cream per day. (I am not a medical professional, please consult a doctor to verify these numbers.)

If you are a post-menopausal woman, that is.

I am not, which might explain why this study does not apply to me. As I have mentioned before, I spent the past year losing weight. I am now 72 pounds lighter than I used to be, which means I’ve dropped 11 points on the BMI. That has not stopped me from getting three parking tickets in a MONTH because I keep forgetting to re-park the car after the street sweeper goes by.

But I’m being the typical killjoy blogger now. And you’re probably feeling like this did not help your heartbreak at all, but you’re wrong there. I bet it never occurred to anyone before to eat ice cream after a bad breakup and that’s got to be good for something.

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David Graham, president of Telecommunications On Demand, the company near Orlando where [Internet content reviewer Ricky Bess] works, compared the reviewers to “combat veterans, completely desensitized to all kinds of imagery.” The company’s roughly 50 workers view a combined average of 20 million photos a week.

– “Policing the Web’s Lurid Precincts,” The New York Times: July 19, 2010

20 million images divided by 50 workers = 400,000 images screened per worker per 5-day week, or
80,000 images screened per worker per eight-hour day, or
10,000 images screened per per hour, or
167 images screened per worker per minute, or
2.78 images screened per worker per second.

Dear Mr. Graham: Do you really want to keep your reviewers from walking around the office like Christopher Walken in “The Deer Hunter”? Hire more reviewers.

(Due diligence: These insane calculations only hold up if you believe the numbers Graham fed the Times, which I don’t. Doesn’t anybody over there have a calculator?)

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The fissure that has been slowly opening between BP and National Incident Commander Thad Allen, widened further today, making it appear more likely that the disagreement could end in an all-out battle of wills between the giant multinational oil company and the former Coast Guard Admiral who represents the U.S. government.

The conflict surfaced in early June, in a dispute over who was responsible for withholding a video showing the magnitude of the spill. (This was before live spill-cams became a fixture on the internet.)

“The video has been available to the unified command from the very beginning.” BP official Mark Proegle told ABC news. “It’s always been here…They had it.”

Confronted with accusations of censorship, the Coast Guard said that BP had prevented them from airing of the video, on the grounds that the images on the tape were “proprietary.”

At around the same time, joint press conferences with BP officials and Adm. Allen were discontinued. Since then each side has held separate press briefings.

Tension escalated with several incidents beginning in the early morning on Sunday and extending into the predawn hours Monday.

Today’s direct contradiction over whether or not there are seeps of oil or gas coming from the seabed near the well is the most serious disagreement yet. If there are seeps, Allen is likely to end the testing phase and order BP to open the well to avoid an even more catastrophic failure. If that happens, BP would have little choice to either follow Allen’s order or disobey him and directly challenge U.S. authority over management of the site.

Although National Incident Commander Adm. Thad Allen says that there are “seeps” near BP’s broken Macondo well, BP isn’t acknowledging them.”I’m not sure that we have,” spokesman Mark Proegler said when asked about the seeps. In a letter Sunday to BP Chief Managing Director Bob Dudley, Allen said that tests have “detected a seep a distance from the well head and undetermined anomalies at the well head.”

via BP: Seeps, what seeps? | NOLA.com.

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Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes, died one year ago today. Soon after his death a series of blog posts and articles looked at the impact he had on the memoir genre. This article tries to both quantify and qualify just what effect he had on literature and whether it has waned.

***

“F***ing Kansas City,” Frank McCourt complained inside of my 1996 Volkswagen Jetta. “I’m never coming here again. I won’t survive it.”

It was the fall of 1997. I was a 28-year-old newsletter editor for the public library, driving the literary sensation from his hotel room at Crown Center—a shopping and hotel district owned by Hallmark—to a Unity church where he would soon enchant a crowd of more than 1,200. The author of Angela’s Ashes, the anointed Pulitzer Prize winner and yearlong bestselling author at the height of his fame…was cussing out my hometown. In my car! I should have felt triumphant, but I was sick with nerves and keenly focused on two goals: don’t wreck and don’t say anything stupid. He was already tired and displeased—not unreasonably so—I didn’t want to add to it.

“It’s a lovely city,” McCourt continued, kindly, “but I’ve never been worked so hard in my life.”

By the time he arrived in Kansas City, the buzz around McCourt was deafening. Everyone wanted a piece—schools, Irish societies, literary societies, donors to the library. The evening he landed, we whisked him to a fundraiser at an Irish bar. The next day he was booked for five appearances before his big speech that night.

“Kansas City might be the end of me,” he predicted.

His trip in a way was a beginning for me, because one short telephone interview the week before he arrived altered my writing career. Here’s a recap: I wrote a small profile about him for the library newsletter that was placed on each seat in the Unity auditorium. The mother of Molly Rowley, a speechwriter for then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, sent the newsletter to her. Rowley, a former journalist, sent me an email a week after McCourt’s talk, wondering if I ever considered being a journalist. I responded that I had just left journalism after working at a string of small-town newspapers in the rural Midwest. Rowley called and said I should be writing for her former newspaper, The Kansas City Star, and then she let one editor know that. First I wrote book reviews, then event previews and finally full-length feature stories for the Sunday magazine. Out of the blue, I was doing what I had actually set out to do with my life.

I know Molly is the real hero, but if not for McCourt and his book, I have no idea where my career would be today. And I sometimes wonder how many other writers could say the same, whether they realize it or not. If Frank McCourt had not written Angela’s Ashes, and had it not launched into the stratosphere, how many no-name authors would have had their memoirs published in the past 14 years? Which brings up another question. What hath Frank McCourt wrought? Is he responsible for what Oregon Public Radio called “Memoir Nation”—the overheated desire to expose one’s own life for fame or money, sometimes disregard certain nuisances such as facts?

Soon after McCourt’s death last summer, critic Lee Siegel drew a straight line from the Irishman to James Frey, the falsifier of life stories and the embodiment of all that is wrong with modern memoirs.

Wherever Frank McCourt is now,” Siegel wrote in the Daily Beast, “and whatever sins he has to answer for, one will surely be that he bears much of the blame for the endless waves of memoirs that have been engulfing us since Angela’s Ashesappeared in 1996. … ”

Was Siegel right? Did McCourt open the floodgates?

The 15 minutes start ticking

After 30 years of struggling with his story in various forms—a play, a novel, a revue—McCourt finally found his form. The result was a memoir with a modest printing and little publicity. No one was predicting the international sensation Angela’s Ashes would become. Ben Yagoda, author of Memoir: A History says it was fortuitous timing for McCourt.

“Trends, social forces, whatever is happening at the time all played a part when Frank was trying to figure out how he would write his book,” Yagoda says.

The year before, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It found big audiences by recounting childhoods on the edge of sanity and safety, but nothing on par with McCourt. Yagoda says the confessional culture was taking hold, “with shows like Oprah and Fresh Air. There was a desire for writers with unusual personal stories to tell. And they could tell their own stories.”

The memoir genre was suddenly open not only to celebrities and dignitaries, but to anyone with a story they once wouldn’t dare share at a dinner party. Now they were spilling it all over the page. Is it a coincidence that blogging and reality television would soon become part of the lexicon? But without McCourt, the publishers might have never opened those floodgates for anything more than a trickle.

Look at the Nonfiction Best Seller List the first week of 1996, the year Angela’s Ashes was published:

THE ROAD AHEAD, by Bill Gates with Nathan Myhrvold and Peter Rinearson.

MY AMERICAN JOURNEY, by Colin L. Powell with Joseph E. Persico.

CHARLES KURALT’S AMERICA, by Charles Kuralt.

SISTERS. Essays by Carol Saline. Photographs by Sharon J. Wohlmuth.

DAVID BRINKLEY, by David Brinkley.

Three journalists, one army general and the richest man in the world commanded the top five. Those are safe bets to sell books relative to no-names. In the first six years of the 90s, not one Publishers Weekly’s yearly Top 10 Best-Selling Nonfiction slot was held by a memoirist, unless already famous. It’s hard to see this now, but the odds were long that McCourt would rise to the level he did.

On September 22, 1996, McCourt made his first appearance on The New York Times Bestseller’s List, quietly, in the 15 slot. In December of that year, the book hit number 1—ahead of David Brinkley, Tim Allen, the Duchess of York, even Dogbert.

By the time McCourt came to Kansas City, he had been on the list for 51 weeks straight, often on top. Just below him was another no-name-come-bestselling-memoirist Monty Roberts, who McCourt jokingly referred to as, “that asshole that talks to horses.” McCourt ended the year atop the PW Best-Seller list for 1997. His brother Malachy joined the Times best-seller list in 1998 with A Monk Swimming. They were sharing the limelight with Sebastien Junger’s storm and Jon Krakuaer’s thin air, but a memoir hurricane was brewing. The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote in March, 1997: “Now we are in an exhibitionist era and publishers are frantically signing up the hampers. We have revenge memoirs. Good mommy memoirs. Bad mommy memoirs. Bad daddy memoirs. Very bad surrogate daddy memoirs. …”

What caught Dowd’s attention was an astronomical payout for the memoir of a 98-year-old central Kansan named Jessie Lee Brown Foveaux. Warner Books backed up the $1 million Brinks truck during the auction for Foveaux’s “Any Given Day,” the recounting of an abusive marriage to an alcoholic. The book’s existence came to light when her writing teacher Charley Kempthorne sent the manuscript to the Wall Street Journal, which published a story about it. Would a bidding war have ensued if not for McCourt’s astronomical success at just that time? It clearly did not hurt Ms. Foveaux’s chances.

Not long after McCourt visited, I started a program in several public library systems around Kansas City called “A Thousand Stories,” a memoir-writing class for retired-age people. The point was to teach them simple journalism techniques so they could share their life stories with family. People showed in droves—but they had bigger plans than family bonding.

“I want to publish my book and I don’t mind if they pay me a million dollars for it,” said Virginia, the first woman to walk into my first class.

The second woman arrived with more realistic financial goals.

“I’m too old to worry about getting rich,” said Margaret, 89. “I want to publish something in The New Yorker.

No pressure.

Piper Kerman, recent first-time author of Orange is the New Black: My Year in a Woman’s Prison says that if any floodgates had opened, it was within writers themselves.

“I think there’s a sense of ownership of our stories that has evolved over the past few years,” Kerman says, “we realize they are valuable.”

Was this realization a good thing for the publishing industry or was Siegel right that McCourt is dangling in literary purgatory?

A few at the top

No one topped or even matched McCourt for success. But after scanning every New York Times Bestseller List from 1997 to the present, I counted 47 memoirs by non-famous people that reached for at least one week. That’s not storming the gates of literature, but it’s no trickle either.

Some of those books became institutions in their own rights—Augusten Burrough’s Running with Scissors spent just a month on the list, but later became a movie and made the former PR writer a literary celebrity. Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead has a similar story, including the movie. The range of quality and of topics are vast: “An American runs a beauty school in Kabul”—“A former child soldier from Sierra Leone describes his drug crazed killing spree”—“A young woman recalls her excessive drinking”—“The widow of a state trooper becomes a chaplain on search and rescue missions in the Maine woods.” If sales are the test—and they are—it does appear plenty of bets on obscure memoirists paid off.

Cruise over to Amazon.com and the trend continues. Three Cups of Tea, which Greg Mortensen co-wrote with journalist David Oliver Relin, has been an Amazon.com bestseller for years. He followed up with his own Stones into School last year. A London inner-city ambulance worker, writing under the pseudonym Tom Reynolds, parlayed his blog into two top sellers under the series, “Blood, Sweat and Tea.” Julie Powell did the same with Julie and Julia. Randy Pausch, a computer professor at Carnegie Mellon, became an overnight literary sensation with Last Lecture, his reflections about life after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. Jill Bolte Taylor turned her stroke into a New Age phenomenon with My Stroke of Insight.

Laura Munson is perhaps the latest beneficiary. A column she wrote, based on her memoir This is Not the Story You Think It Is for the Times’ “Modern Love” column caused a firestorm of reaction. She explained on her site: “My agent, Tricia Davey went out with the book version that Monday morning, and after writing for twenty years, having completed fourteen novels and endured countless rejections…within forty-eight hours, I had a book deal.”

In hunting for the obscure, I found another impact of McCourt’s book—the rise of the semi-famous memoirist—which accounted for 58 more bestsellers in the past 14 years. It started with Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie and continued with Eat, Pray, Love and Commited by journalist Elizabeth Gilbert, several raunchy, unrepentant best-sellers by Chelsea Handler, The Glass Castle by journalist Jeanette Walls, who has had a four-year run near the top of Amazon’s best sellers list.

So Siegel is right about the “waves” of memoirs—thousands were printed and hundreds prospered. But just looking at what has done well, has it really been all that insidious?

Drivel or more?

Poet and playwright Nick Flynn turned the memoir into his own form with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City and The Ticking is a Bomb. He told me memoir is another method of doing his work—he doesn’t even see the forms of poetry and memoir being that distinct.

“The things I try to do in poetry, the different ways of approaching language, I try to do that through memoir—they line up well,” Flynn says.

If memoir is a form where great writing can happen, then what is Siegel’s complaint? Certainly fiction, for instance, provides a solid tonnage of crap each year and we don’t condemn Mary Shelley for that. Not that McCourt has been matched all that often for critical laurels either.

Reading through lists of best nonfiction books of the decade, I found only a handful of memoirs. Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which he says was slightly fictionalized, was the most consistent choice. Eggers is also the only moderately obscure memoirist (he was a journalist in San Francisco) to be nominated for a Pulitzer since McCourt won in 1997. The National Book Award has a similar record and memoirs in general didn’t fair well in The National Book Critics Circle Award after McCourt won—despite having a Biography/Autobiography category. In 2005, the critics split the categories so that a memoir wins each year. Established writers Francine du Plessix Gray, Daniel Mendelsohn and Edwidge Danticat won the first three. Ariel Sabar, a longtime journalist, won the next and the British novelist and editor Dan Athill won the most recent.

That may change if it’s true what Priscilla Painton, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, says: “We’re looking for beautifully written stories that compel people to read. Who’s writing it doesn’t matter so much as that is really fine writing.”

That probably won’t calm Siegel’s indignation over McCourt’s legacy, because his real problem is with the frauds.

Will Frey be the last word?

“When James Frey was discovered to have fabricated the events of his life that gave his memoir such picaresque piquancy, the foundation of the entire nonfiction world was shaken,” Siegel writes, “not just the book industry, but every corner of print and broadcast journalism.”

But the Frey scandal sparked another conversation about the relativity of truth when memory is involved. Writers like David Carr (The Night of the Gun) and Flynn address that issue directly in their works.

“I don’t have a very good memory at all,” Flynn says. “I don’t pretend this is a perfect memory. The important thing is to try to get the memory down imperfectly and ask yourself why you remember it that way. And then find out exactly what happened at that moment, investigate your memory by asking others. And see where you misremember.”

Of course Frey had a different agenda–hopping up his story for dramatic effect, then naming it a memoir because publishers weren’t biting on it as a novel. And Frey’s indiscretion didn’t stop the lies. Since his Oprah-anointed fiction was outed, writers Margaret Seltzer, Nasdijj and JT LeRoy (all pseudonyms ) gained critical acclaim for their memoirs before they were exposed as fabrications.

“There’s nothing new about this,” Yagoda says. “Since the beginning of so-called true stories, there have been questions about their authenticity.”

Is the McCourt era over?

Yagoda senses the frauds have put the brakes on the memoir surge.

“That’s not a scientific study, by any means,” he says, “it’s just a hunch that publishers are moving away from the memoir a bit.”

It does appear that 2007 and 2008 (32 bestsellers for non-celebrities) was better for memoirists than 2009 and 2010 (on pace for about 20). The big-splash memoirs lately are going back to known names—such as Christopher Hitchens now, George W. Bush and, amazingly, Mark Twain in November. That star power feels an awful lot like the list pre-McCourt.

Some of that energy to reveal private lives is being absorbed, and perhaps fueled, by the social media. SMITHmag.net offers a publishing tool specifically for memoir-writing, but what is going on at Facebook, Twitter, WordPress and many other sites is also allowing obscure memoirists to unravel their lives in any form they want, without the restrictions of editors and standards for factuality, but also without any financial reward.

Does Painton think that obscure memoirs will sell in the future?

“How should I know?” Painton laughs. “Who would have guessed that vampire love stories were going to be hot five years ago?”

So a memoir from a vampire in love?

“If you hear of one, let me know,” she says, before considering the implications of that statement in print. “No, never mind.”

A life exposed

Speaking of vampires, when McCourt finished his rousing talk in Kansas City, he looked like all the life was sucked out of him.

“Do you need a drink?” I asked.

“God no,” he said. “I want to go to bed.”

I did ask McCourt one incredibly stupid question, about whether he ran into Steinbeck when he hung out with the literati at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village.

“He lived on Long Island for Christ’s sake,” he said. “That’s two hours away.” But I also asked him a question he loved—about whether he was embarrassed writing about all that masturbation he did as a youth. “Ah, yes!” he laughed, “Instead of ‘Cool Hand Luke,’ they could have called me ‘Tired Hand Frank.’”

Exposure was the nature of the business and McCourt understood that as well as anyone. Did he ever get tired of the exposure? “Not when the royalty checks arrive,” he joked over the phone, during the interview.

If he helped usher in a Memoir Nation, McCourt did so happily. What he exposed about his life, through three memoirs in total, made him one of the most popular writers in America for a decade.

But why do people want to know? Why do they care about the intimate details of another person’s life? Actually, Flynn says, the point is not the writer at all.

“You begin to realize that no one really cares about your life,” he says. “It’s what they see in your writing that reminds them of theirs. And that’s exactly how it should be.”

Cynics will condemn this post as incestuous journalism. To them, I can only say: good for you. Suspicion is a good starting point for critical reading. On the other hand, I claim nothing objective about this list. It’s just a snapshot of my personal preferences and recommendations.

Scorched Earth - Jeff’s posts are usually the first ones I turn to after signing-in on T/S. The fact that Jeff writes about environmental issues is obviously a major draw for me, since I generally cover the same beat. But, there are good environmental reporters and bad ones, and Jeff is excellent. I like his writing style, too. He combines the best elements of old-school journalism with a blogging sensibility that isn’t shy about having a POV. I like!

Broadside — I’d read Caitlin even if her blog didn’t have one of the cleverest names on the roster. That’s because the same attributes on display in the title are also found in each post: smart, female, witty and with good aim and a willingness to set off the cannons when necessary. Okay, I admit I don’t know for sure if Caitlin meant to include that last definition of broadside in her title. Maybe she only had the two meanings in mind: Broad, as in a strong woman, and broadside, a reference to the old one-sided news-posters. But, read her posts and then you tell me if you don’t hear the roar of cannons.

Native Pop — For affluent white people in Phoenix, Arizona — where I live — it’s entirely possible to go through life never seeing or having to think much about what’s going on in Indian Country, despite the state’s large population of indigenous peoples. The only part of a reservation most Phoenicians will ever see is the inside of Casino Arizona. National media coverage is about the same. That’s one reason why Rob’s T/S blog, Native Pop, is a valuable addition to this site. Rob is a staff writer for the influential Native publication, Indian Country Today and his blog shares the ICT’s geographic coverage and, more important, the emphasis on today. With the rare exception of the newest Twilight film, media Indians are frozen in time: the middle-to-late 19th century.

The Not-So Private Parts — To be honest, it took me some time to actually read Kashmir’s blog. The naughty title and her picture led me to think the was an E-version of the Hollywood scandal sheet, a faulty conclusion which says much more about me than it does about her. I became a fan after reading a single post. Kashmir writes with insight (a recovering corporate lawyer) and clarity about contemporary privacy issues and the law –  and she manages to do it with a breezy style that makes reading her column a not-at-all guilty pleasure.

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Everything in Russia is supposed to be bigger, meaner, and tougher than most everywhere else. At least, that’s the clichéd impression foisted upon the West by movies, TV, and cheap novels.

So, if Russia has its own Nessie-like beast, then of course the monster eats people, having devoured 19 anglers since 2007, as noted by The Daily Mail last week:

Russian fishermen are demanding a probe into a creature resembling the Loch Ness monster in a remote Siberian lake.

Locals say that ‘Nesski’ has devoured anglers who have been pulled into the murky waters of Lake Chany from their boats.

Those claiming to have glimpsed the creature say it resembles the classic long-necked image of Scotland’s fabled monster. It has also been called ’snake-like’, while other accounts suggest a large fin and huge tail.

The latest mysterious death of a 59-year-old man last week has fuelled demands for a proper probe into what lurks beneath the surface of Chany, one of Russia’s largest freshwater lakes.

‘I was with my friend… some 300 yards from the shore,’ said 60-year-old Vladimir Golishev. ”He hooked something huge on his bait, and he stood up in the boat to reel it in.

‘But it pulled with such force that he overturned the boat. I was in shock – I had never seen anything like it in my life.

‘I pulled off my clothes and swam for the shore, not daring hope I would make it.’

This report surfaced in the same week that approximately 1,200 Russians drowned while going swimming during a terrible heat-wave because many of those victims went swimming while drunk. Others were children who drowned while unattended.

To note that fact is not to attribute Nesski to the drunken impressions of Russian anglers. An investigation into what Nesski might or might not be could at least be interesting, but clearly that particular monster, toothy and lethal, is not as completely dangerous as vodka or parental inattention.

via The Daily Mail » Russian fishermen demand an investigation into killer Nesski’s 19 lake deaths  in three years.

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The folks at Energy Fiend have developed an online calculator called “Death by Caffeine” that tells you roughly how many Red Bulls, Monsters, Rock Stars, etc you’d have to drink to keel over.  The number of drinks you can choose from on the killer-drink drop down menu is staggering, but upon closer inspection it looks like they include regular sodas like Pepsi, Coke and the like along with the amped up drinks (and even energy mints and coffee ice cream).

I’m going to enter my information, choosing Red Bull as my initial poison. Here’s the result:

It would take 204.75 cans of Red Bull to put you down.

Comparatively:

Gulp down 474.78 cans of Coca-Cola Classic and you’re history.

You could drink 297.82 cans of Mountain Dew before croaking.

It would take 109.20 cups of Starbucks Tall Caffe Americano to put you down.

If you eat 341.25 Cups of Haagen-Dazs Coffee Ice Cream, you’ll be pushing up daisies.

By the way (and I say this as a die-hard coffee drinker), imbibing caffeine to stay awake is one of the silliest things we humans do.  The reason is this: in the brain, caffeine acts as an antagonist (a blocker) of adenosine–the neurotransmitter that pushes us closer and closer to sleep until we nod off–and it’s very good at accomplishing this. The problem is that with less exposure to adenosine, we become even more sensitive to the neurotransmitter’s effects. If we reduce our intake of caffeine, or simply become more tolerant of it, we actually find ourselves becoming more tired. So then we jack up the caffeine to counteract the withdrawal, but that just increases our tolerance.

Takeaway: you can only fool your brain into not sleeping for so long before succumbing to the inevitable crash.

HT: MindHacks

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Hatred is corrosive, it almost always hurts the hater. While you don’t always see it, sometimes the foundation of someone’s character can get so worn away that the person’s facade cracks and falls: like Mel Gibson. The story of his well-documented flame-out into a hate-filled, abusive former movie-star would benefit from understanding more about how hatred can destroy a hater.

His abusive behavior didn’t start with current money troubles and stresses. Nor is it simply a narcissist running amok. It comes from hate.  Hate that was amply foreshadowed by the virulent anti-Semitism about which we all worked so hard not to know we knew. Four years ago at the time of Gibson’s anti-Semetic rant during a DUI arrest, Christopher Hitchens didn’t work not to know the obvious, he shoved it in our face:

And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

This is not just proved by his twistedly homoerotic spank-movie The Passion of the Christ, even though that ghastly production did focus obsessively on the one passage in the one of the four Gospels that tries to convict the Jewish people en masse of the hysterical charge of Christ-killing or “deicide.” It is validated by his fealty to his earthly father, a crackpot who belongs to a Catholic splinter group of which our Mel is a member. This group more or less lives off the stench of medieval anti-Semitism.

via Is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite? – By Christopher Hitchens – Slate Magazine.

Empty core? That is hopefully just Hitchens’ rhetorical excess; if Gibson’s core was empty we’d have little useful to learn from him. He’s a person not a monster, even though he acts monstrously. Gibson has inside of him the same all-too human unconscious processes through which we all live our lives.

In trying to learn something from Gibson’s behavior I am not some sort of pollyanna closing his eyes or trying to make lemonade from an oil slick. I slow down to rubberneck at car-crashes as much as anyone, and if I see something I end up feeling the same fascinated horror I felt reading about Gibson’s catastrophic crash. And the truth is that there is no bigger celebrity crash out there than Gibson (sorry LeBron and Lindsay, but Mel journeyed alone into the realm of the unredeemable: all you need LeBron is a championship—or two—to be a hero again and Lindsay, well, you’ll be America’s sweetheart as soon as you get sober and make a good movie—or two).

So, what can we learn about ourselves from Gibson’s hatred more interesting than the soporific tautology, “people are people.” Can we learn anything useful?

Ken Eisold, a friend and colleague, has written a terrific new book What You Don’t Know Your Know. He pulls together a story about a “new unconscious” from research done in a variety of different fields. What he says about prejudice is helpful. He writes that “prejudice is a universal process rooted in normal development” that come from “how our brains create categories as part of our adaption to reality.” Furthermore, these prejudices and stereotypes can become malignant when we start to protect our identity by putting all the crap into other groups. They—whoever “they” may be—are the ones who are lazy, cheap, avaricious, or devious; we’re not, we’re fine!

But prejudice gets worse, much worse; ordinary bigotry is still pretty far from Gibson’s behavior. Our unconscious process of creating categories and attaching identity-protective values to those categories can degrade further to the level of rape and abuse, genocide, and ethnic cleansing when we dehumanize other people. That’s how a neighbor becomes vermin to be extinguished, a President becomes an anti-American Muslim/socialist/noncitizen, or a woman gets attacked for being nothing more than a “bitch” or a “cunt” (to use two of the more unsavory terms from Gibson’s latest taped rage).

Unconscious dehumanization drives much that we call evil and understanding how it operates in each of our lives is the lesson from ”The Hatred of the Gibson.”

Staring with his hatred of Jews and ending with recordings of verbal abuse and allegations of much worse, we can see that when you nurture processes of dehumanization instead of fighting them you end up dehumanizing yourself. Out of control dehumanization is like a cancer that needs to be caught early and aggressively fought. Luckily, traffic with the new unconscious moves in both directions. So, when what you don’t know you know sends up a flare—be it in a dream, a confusing feeling, an out of character behavior, or a train of thought arriving at a perplexing station—pay attention. You’re trying to tell yourself something important you don’t know you know.

And if you think you’re immune to dehumanization, that it is something you would never ever do, that it is something “they”—the evil others—do but not you, think again. It is something that happens inside our unconscious all the time. We couldn’t get through a day without it, full human awareness would just be too painful. We adaptively dehumanize others when we blind ourselves to the homeless guy sleeping by the train station, to events in Darfur, or even to the suffering of future generations because of our addiction to burning fossil fuels. In fact, we even entertain ourselves with it by putting the LeBrons and Lindsays of the world up on celebrity pedestals.

Like rubberneckers at the highway crash relieved that what could have happened to them happened to someone else, our fascination with Gibson’s hatred includes some relief that he was the one that crashed, not us. What we don’t know we know is that any of us could have been Mel, it’s all a matter of degree. He’s not “other,” he’s us.