Why the copyright terms on a goldmine of works from 1923 are about to expire.
Felix the Cat. Image: Wikimedia Commons
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, movies, songs, and books created in the United States in 1923—even beloved cartoons such as Felix the Cat—will be eligible for anyone to adapt, repurpose, or distribute as they please.
A 20-year freeze on copyright expirations has prevented a cache of 1923 works from entering the public domain, including Paramount Pictures’ The Ten Commandments, Charlie Chaplin’s The Pilgrim, and novels by Aldous Huxley.
Such a massive release of iconic works is unprecedented, experts say—especially in the digital age,as the last big dumppredated Google.
“There is certainly great value in effectively restarting the public domain, but the mistake was having extended the term of protection for already created works in the first place,” Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, told Motherboard.
For this we can thank a 1998 rule known as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, famously lobbied for by the Walt Disney Company as a means to extend copyright protections. It was believed that Disney hoped to lengthen the copyright of the 1928 cartoon Steamboat Willie, which marked the debut of a certain Mr. Mouse.
Named for Congressman Bono who who’d sponsored similar legislation in the past, and pejoratively dubbed theMickey Mouse Protection Act, the new rulesmodified an existing law, hitting the brakes on copyright terms for already protected works.
The Act lengthened copyrights of corporate “works made for hire” to 95 years (from 75 years) from their first publication, or 120 years from their creation—thus delaying Mickey Mouse’s earliest entrance into the public domain until 2024; and it alsogranted copyright coverageto works published on or after January 1, 1978, to “life of the author plus 70 years.”
The terms for works published in 1923 were retroactively amended, and have remained copywritten for 95 years.
Compared to Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, America’s copyright laws are in ways more limited, and the decision to gatekeep entire eras of history has been characterized as enormously harmful to society,Motherboard has previously reported.
The end of the “dark ages” of copyright terms could usher in a Renaissance of creativity.
“Stuff from our distant past reappears when copyright goes away,” Christopher Sprigman, a law professor at New York University, told Motherboard.
“[Disney] had things like early Mickey Mouse cartoons that they may ideally want to stay in copyright forever. But that isn’t good for creativity,” Sprigman added.
In 2013, Paul Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,conducted a survey of books for sale on Amazon. He found that more books were for sale from the 1880s than the 1990s.
Public domain waspartly responsiblefor the internet you’re using, and permits Wikipedia editorsto use photos of famous people on their Wikipages. It’s how books become translated into multiple languages, and how researchers can share their scientific findings.
“The public domain of course is the default for creativity and innovation,” Jessica Silbey, co-director of Northeastern University’s Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity, told Motherboard.
“Most people create and invent without expectation of exclusivity that IP law provides,” Silbey added. “Before there was IP, and outside of formal IP systems, there is and was plenty of creativity and innovation. “
Yet copyright rules are complex, and exceptions exist. The terms for thousands of workspublished between 1923 and 1963 weren’t renewed as according to the law, and consequently lapsed into public domain. Sometimes authors willintentionally dedicate worksto the public domain. Other times, a collection of worksmay be protected by copyright, even though the individual works themselves are not.
What’s certain is that works spanning the Great Depression, the Fifties, and the Computer Age will finally be released yearly over the coming decades—opening a floodgate of free and public knowledge, and perhaps kickstarting an exciting revolution of creative ingenuity.
“Celebrating the return of a yearly expansion of the public domain is the appropriate response,” Sibley said.”
The nail salon industry is expected to grow at almost twice the rate of other U.S. industries in the next decade, and report authors make recommendations for key stakeholders: ensure quality jobs and labor protections for nail salon workers…
Preeti Sharma, Saba Waheed, Vina Nguyen, Lina Stepick, Reyna Orellana, Liana Katz, Sabrina Kim, and Katrina Lapira UCLA Labor Center
Key issues, trends, and areas of oversight in the multibillion dollar nail salon industry are highlighted in Nail Files: A Study of Nail Salon Workers and Industry in the United States. This report is the first to examine the nail salon industry nationally with a focus on labor conditions.
Among other discoveries, the report finds:
78% of nail salon employees are low-wage workers. This is more than double the national rate of 33% for all industries.
Nail salon workers experience challenging work conditions and labor enforcement issues. Misclassification as independent contractors is also a key concern.
Nail salons are primarily owned and staffed by immigrants and refugees. The majority of salons are small mom-and-pop businesses with 68% having fewer than 5 employees. The labor force is predominantly Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Nepali, Tibetan, and Latinx, with 81% women and 79% foreign-born.
The nail salon industry is expected to grow at almost twice the rate of other U.S. industries in the next decade, and report authors make recommendations for key stakeholders: ensure quality jobs and labor protections for nail salon workers; guarantee workplace protections and their enforcement; support high-road businesses and good employers; and assure health and safety of nail salon workers.
Nail salons in the United States are a booming multi-billion dollar industry. Due to immigrant and refugee labor and changes in technology, the nail salon industry grew from a high-end, luxury service to an affordable service available to low- and middle-income clients. Nail salons include their predominantly Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Nepali, Tibetan, and Latinx immigrant and refugee labor force. These immigrant and refugee communities have not only created economic niches that are unique to the industry but also developed health, labor, and community organizing initiatives that advocate for quality and safe jobs. They continue to shape the parameters of beauty service work, but they are also a key facet of today’s service economy, subject to its market forces and labor issues.
While there have been some studies focusing on health and safety conditions in salons, few have explored labor conditions. The UCLA Labor Center launched this study in collaboration with the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative to gain a deeper understanding of the nail salon industry through existing literature, policy reports, worker stories and government and other relevant data sources. This is the first report to look at the industry nationally through a labor lens. The report focus on three primary areas: workers, industry, and oversight.
Worker Profile
National data sources estimate there are between 126,300 and 212,519 nail salon workers though this is most likely an undercount. State board data suggests that government sources only account for 33% of certified nail salon workers in California and 47% in New York. Nonetheless, national data do provide a useful profile of workers. The following are key data and issues related to nail salon workers:
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Nail salon workers have strong participation in the labor workforce.
Most are in the labor force (92%) and the industry has low unemployment (3%). The majority (72%) work full-time and year-round (81%).
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Self-employment rates are high for nail salon workers.
30% are self-employed which can include independent contractors, sole proprietors, or members of a partnerships. This rate is three times higher than the national average.
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The majority of nail salon workers earn low wages.
Nearly 8 in 10 workers earn low wages, defined as 2/3 of the median full-time wage. This rate is significantly higher than the national rate of 33% for all workers.
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The industry continues to employ a largely immigrant and female workforce.
The industry is predominantly women (81%) and foreign-born (79%), comprised largely of Vietnamese workers. Nearly half of those born abroad have low English proficiency.
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Most nail salon workers support family members.
A third are heads of households and almost two-thirds have at least one child.
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The industry faces challenging working conditions.
Small sample studies and investigative reporting have found that wage issues in the industry include low wages, being paid a flat, rather than hourly rate, minimum wage and overtime violations, and harassment and surveillance.
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Misclassification is a key concern in the sector.
The industry has a high rate of self-employed workers which includes independent contractors. Some workers may be legitimate independent contractors, but there are concerns that many manicurists are purposely misclassified to avoid
labor laws and protections.
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Nail salon workers are at risk for many different short- and long-term occupational health conditions.
Nail salon workers are exposed to hazardous ingredients and materials present in products and salons and are likely to experience work-related ergonomic body pain.
Industry Profile
According to the County Business Patterns, there are an estimated 23,745 nail salons in the United States.
Similar to the worker estimates, the number of salons may also be an undercount, as some salons may be
unregistered. The following are some key industry trends in the sector:
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Most salons are small mom-and-pop operations.
The industry is dominated by small salons with 9 out of 10 salons having fewer than 10 employees.
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Nail salons are a growing and vibrant industry.
Total revenue for nail salons in 2015 reached $4.4 billion, up 15% from the previous year. Over the next decade, employment in the industry is expected to grow by 13%.
New developments in cosmetics, fashion, and nail polish technology have set the pace for trends in the nail salon industry.
Nail trends include nail art, gel polish, and dip systems while salon cosmetics ingredients are moving towards more “natural” products. Also, the nail salon industry has been trying to attract male-identifying customers.
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Social media and digital technology has also affected salons. Nail art is one of the top five most tagged items on both Pinterest and Instagram. Also, Yelp contributes to salons’ customer engagement and management.
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The gig economy creates on-demand, app-based manicure services. These salons allow customers to order manicures or pedicures through a cell phone app. The manicurist meets customers where they are, though some workers will only go to workplaces or corporate events.
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New and large chains are entering the market. Nail salons have traditionally been mom-and-pop operations, but the sector is seeing some large chains enter the market and/or expand. Industry Oversight and Enforcement In the United States, the nail salon workplace is governed by federal and state regulatory bodies, legislation,and other rules; county and local policies and programs; and state and federal court decisions.
The following is an overview of some of key areas of oversight and challenges:
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Various federal and state agencies oversee labor conditions but face challenges in enforcing labor rights.
Challenges include investigations that are complaint-driven rather than investigator-driven,and are filed against owners whom cannot pay judgments. Additionally, workers and employers have a lack of understanding of labor laws, misinformation, a mistrust of investigators, and a lack of employer record keeping.
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There are also continuing challenges in ensuring safe and healthy conditions in nail salons.
Federal agencies can conduct more research on the environmental effects of chemicals found in nail salon products and push for more legislation, such as those to control toxins that are released into the air. Training about workplace hazards and safety information is inaccessible and many workers are not trained in safe chemical handling.
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There are many programs in local jurisdictions, with volunteer or elected staff, designed to improve work conditions in nail salons.
Programs like the Healthy Nail Salon Recognition Programs (HNSRP) provide a plan to ensure healthy workplaces including safer nail polishes and products, ventilation, and staff training. Programs may also recognize green business practices in salons and introduce green solutions and alternatives.
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State legislation and policies have provided improvements in areas such as language rights, labor protections, health and safety protections, and industry standards.
Some examples include ensuring agencies increase staff, provide materials/forms and licensing in languages other
than English relevant to working populations, provide workers’ rights education for owners and workers, and require cosmetics manufacturers to report chemicals found in their products that are known carcinogens or reproductive toxicants to the California Department of Public Health (CDPH).
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Nail salon advocacy over the past decade has helped to improve working conditions and provide healthier workplaces.
Many of the efforts to improve nail salon conditions mentioned here have resulted from worker-led, community organizing and advocacy. Two examples include the California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative (Collaborative) and the New York Healthy Nail Salons Coalition (NYHNSC), and such efforts are bourgeoning across the United States.
Recommendations
Nail salons are a thriving and growing industry shaped by immigrant entrepreneurship and industry
innovation. As the industry expands, we must continue to ensure safe and quality jobs for the workforce.
The following are recommendations for key stakeholders to ensure labor protections and standards as well
as to continue to advance policies and practices that create environmentally safe and healthy salons for
workers, employers and consumers alike.
1. Ensure quality jobs and labor protections for nail salon workers.
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Agencies need to safeguard worker wages and benefits, address issues of misclassification, mandate safety, health, and workers’ rights training for employers and address language barriers in materials.
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Policy makers should expand worker protections and policies that improve job quality, remove barriers to licensing and address gaps in government data.
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Advocates should develop a continuing education program and curriculum that provides workers with the skills to advance.
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Employers must create pathways for workers to increase their skill sets and provide opportunities for wage increases.
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Researchers should provide technical guidance on future research efforts.
2. Guarantee enforcement of workplace protection.
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Agencies must support workers’ rights through culturally appropriate worker education, addressing barriers to filing claims, creating model agreements and educational materials for independent contractors to use, and funding community partnerships that are better able to build trust with workers to provide necessary information.
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Advocates must center workers by giving them decision-making power, ensuring that organizing initiatives represent the needs of workers, creating multi-stakeholder collaborations and learning best practices from other campaigns, industries, and regions.
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Researchers must conduct further studies to better understand working conditions, labor issues, enforcement efforts, and other needs of the sector, particularly experiences not captured in public government data sets.
3. Support high-road businesses and good employers.
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Agencies should support salon businesses by creating programs on how to run financially and environmentally sustainable and just businesses, educating nail salon consumers on why it is important to pay a fair price for nail services, creating public campaigns that educate customers about nail salon fair and healthy working conditions and safer beauty product alternatives.
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Employers should meet with other high-road employers in the sector to share best practices and business models.
4. Assure health and safety of nail salon workers.
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Agencies should expand healthy nail salon practices that are culturally and linguistically appropriate, raise awareness about safer products and practices, provide health and safety trainings, conduct outreach to workers, run health and safety awareness campaigns, provide informational materials to reduce worker exposure, and use worker health outcomes as indicators of safety, instead of possibly outdated exposure limits.
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Policy makers should address the impact of harmful products by allocating and requiring cosmetic manufacturers and distributors to conduct further studies, requiring proper labels on products that may be hazardous and making products safe by ending the use of harmful ingredients. They should also provide access to healthcare for workers who are particularly vulnerable to health issues in the industry.
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Advocates should continue to engage workers on health and safety issues and best practices through participatory and peer-to-peer programs.
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Employers should participate in healthy nail salon programs that include guidelines on and support in the creation of a healthier workplace.
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Researchers should continue to conduct and expand research on the cumulative effects of chemicals and exposures on worker health and continue to conduct and expand research on green chemistry to reduce the use of hazardous substances in products and ultimately improve the health and safety of consumers and workers.
The German weekly Der Spiegel, one of the top-selling publications in Europe, is reeling from a scandal that revealed that a star reporter has reportedly faked stories for years.
Many of the faked stories written by Claas Relotius were centered in the United States or in the Middle East.
So far, Der Spiegel editors said Wednesday, they had found that Relotius “made up stories and invented protagonists” in at least 14 of the 60 stories examined so far. But they said the investigation is only beginning. The editors said they were “astounded and sad” by the discovery, which they called “a low point in Der Spiegel’s 70-year history.”
And so far none of the other outlets that ran Relotius’ work over the years have checked in. He had freelanced for Der Spiegel for years before joining full-time a year ago.
The German journalists’ union said it was the biggest fraud scandal in journalism since the “Hitler diaries” published by Stern magazine in Germany and Newsweek in the US in 1983.
It was reminiscent of past scandals in the US including the Jayson Blair snafu at the New York Times, the Stephen Glass scandal at the New Republic and the revoked Pulitzer Prize won by Janet Cooke at the Washington Post.
In one article that came under intense scrutiny, Relotius spent three weeks living in Fergus Falls, Minn., in early 2017, purportedly to try to explain why voters in a typical Midwest town came to support Donald Trump for president. But an article in Medium.com by Fergus Falls residents Michele Anderson and Jake Krohn found that many characters and anecdotes were fake.
“What kind of institutional breakdown led to the supposedly world-class Der Spiegel fact-checking team completely dropping the ball on this one?” they asked after it emerged that Relotius had been forced to resign.
The Der Spiegel editors originally said he “distorts reality” in the piece entitled “In a Small Town.”
Among the many falsehoods Anderson and Krohn found, there is no sign in the town that reads, “Mexicans Keep Out.”
The Clint Eastwood film “American Sniper,” which Relotius claimed had been playing to sell-out crowds for two straight years in the local cinema, had not played there since February 2015.
In one anecdote, he claims a town administrator carried a Beretta pistol on the job, had never seen the ocean and had never been with a woman.
The Fergus Falls writers produced a photo of that same administrator on a vacation trip to the ocean with his longtime live-in girlfriend. The administrator said he owned no Beretta and never carried a weapon at work.
Another picture in the disputed article shows a man described as a “coal plant worker.” In reality, the picture is of a United Parcel Service worker who once ran the local gym. In another, Relotius has a picture of a Mexican woman whom he claimed owned a Mexican restaurant and suffered from kidney disease. In reality, she was a waitress in the restaurant owned by her sister- in-law but was never interviewed.
In another instance, he describes locals watching the Super Bowl — at a pizza place that wasn’t open on the day of the game.
In another instance, he said a local diner had windows facing the coal power plant — when in reality the diner was underground with no windows.
Der Spiegel said it was another one of its reporters, Juan Moreno, who co-authored a piece entitled “Hunters Border” with Relotius in November on a pro-Trump vigilante group said to be involved in hunting down illegal immigrants on the Arizona-Mexico border, who alerted it to sourcing problems. Moreno told editors he had been suspicious of the sourcing on the story all along and on a subsequent trip to the US, he contacted two of the subjects quoted extensively in the article by Relotius.
Both of the subjects said they had never spoken to Relotius.
In an apology to readers, Der Spiegel acknowledged, “For three to four weeks, Moreno went through hell because colleagues and those senior to him did not want to believe his accusations at first.”
It said that Relotius rebuffed the accusations at first “until there came a point when that didn’t work anymore, until he finally couldn’t sleep anymore, haunted by the fear of being discovered.”
As recently as this month, Relotius won Germany’s Reporter of the Year award for a story about a young Syrian boy in which much of the sourcing has now been deemed suspect.
In 2014, he was named CNN’s Journalist of the Year for an article that appeared in a Swiss magazine.
Among other stories that Der Spiegel discovered fabricated was an article in which he claimed to interview the parents of Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who decided to kneel during the playing of the US national anthem before games to protest police brutality.
In his confession, according to the magazine, Relotius said, “I am sick and I need to get help.”
“It wasn’t because of the next big thing,” he was quoted as saying. “It was fear of failing. My pressure to not be able to fail got even bigger the more successful I became.”
Yet, there was a method to his ‘madness.’ Relotius wasn’t just making random ‘mistakes’ in his ‘reporting.’ Relotius was feeding a narrative. In the reporting from Syria Relotius was backing the US, EU and Saudi Arabia’s opposition to the Syrian secular government. Relotius was supporting the insurgent Islamic ‘rebels’ and Al Qaeda types fighting alongside of the Islamic State. In the US Relotius was backing the Liberal establishment media narrative that white working class Americans oppose mass immigration for illogical racist reasons. In the Ukraine conflict Relotius dressed up the fascistic Ukrainian street fighters as innocent democracy protesters facing Soviet made tanks. Relotius picked a side in every conflict and he did so to back the main stream narrative. He never made ‘mistakes’ that went against the main idea the media was pushing to manufacture consent.
With the skill of a fiction writer who knows what his audience wants invented interviews, created malevolent characters, described years long theatrical performances in public that never happened, and described public billboard advertising that simply did not exist in the real world. But his ‘editors’ never noticed? Why? Because they see their job as manufacturing consent for the narrative they push as job number one. Checking facts is done only to the extent that it must be to maintain some credibility.
From Syria to Ukraine to the US border with Mexico Relotius was repeating establishment media propaganda with a single minded devotion that was not bogged down in verifiable ‘facts.’ Relotius won awards, and even won an award after his absurd Mexican vacation reporting was being exposed. Relotius was a top propagandist for the Ministry of Media Truth, until he wasn’t. Darn those pesky ‘fact checkers.’ So what if there really isn’t a billboard in a small American town that says “Mexicans Keep Out!” The image is so chillingly stark that readers flock to a story reporting the billboard. The political movement created by the reporting and support for cause of immigrants rights is more important than the mundane truth to reporter/activists like Relotius. But surely he did not become an establishment media fiction writing activist because of ‘pressure’ or mental failings. Relotius just doesn’t like getting caught.
“I am sick and I need to get help.” wrote Relotius. Is that the answer for someone who is devoted to the Right Wingers in Ukraine, supports the armed Islamic ‘rebels’ in Syria, and opposes Americans who support Trump? Is holding any of these political positions and using the news media to advance them a ‘sickness?’ Relotius is still writing fiction.
Stories about interstellar colonization, magical civilizations, and alternate space races
Photo by Andrew Liptak / The Verge
If there was any bright point in the year, it was that 2018 also brought with it a bumper crop of fantastic science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels that served as an oasis to examine the world around us, or to escape for brighter pastures.
The best books of this year told stories of interstellar colonization, of fantastic magical civilizations, optimistic alternate worlds, and devastating potential futures. They brought us fantastic characters who sought to find their places in the vivid and fantastic worlds they inhabited.
Here are our favorite science fiction and fantasy reads of 2018.
Robert Jackson Bennett is one of those authors who attracts a huge amount of acclaim for his books, and after reading Foundryside, I can see why. It’s an epic, breathtaking novel that’s as much cyberpunk as it is fantasy. We follow a desperate thief named Sancia Grado, who is hired to steal a mysterious box from a warehouse. Sancia has a special ability — she can sense magic imbued in objects, which makes her job easier in a world where magic is everywhere.
Bennett lays out a fantastic story ladened with fantastic characters, but it’s his take on magic that stands out here. It’s treated a bit like computer code, and in this world, people use it for everything: to strengthen city walls, to provide city lights, and imbue weapons with greater powers. Sancia stumbles on a plot to use this power to utterly remake the world, providing a chilling commentary on the lengths that people and corporations will go to ensure that they remain in power.
A long-standing trope in science fiction is that moment when humanity first meets life from somewhere else in the universe. That’s the focus of Sue Burke’s debut novel, Semiosis, which recognizes that alien life likely won’t take the form of a bumpy-headed alien, but something that we might not recognize as intelligent at first blush.
Such is the case here: a spaceship departs from Earth with the mission to build a utopian civilization on a new world. But when the colonists crash-land on a planet named Pax, their focus becomes surviving among the planet’s hostile plant-life. Burke’s novel jumps from generation to generation, following the colonists and their descendants as they realize that not only are they not alone, but that co-existence is a difficult proposition.
One of the more delightful science fiction worlds to hit bookshelves in recent years is Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers “trilogy” — a series of books set in the same world, but which otherwise stand alone. The latest is Record of a Spaceborn Few, which follows the descendants of the last flotilla of starships to depart Earth, who have clung to their way of life aboard the aging fleet.
Chamber’s novel is a beautiful look at a community that is grappling with impending change. It opens with the destruction of one member of the fleet and follows the paths of several characters — parents, newcomers, alien researchers, and others — who work to make their way through life. At its core, the book takes an optimistic view of the importance of traditions and one’s way of life, but the equal importance of bending to change with circumstance.
Myke Cole started his career with his Control Point trilogy — a military fantasy series in which magic appears in the real world. His latest foray is a grim jump over to epic fantasy with The Armored Saint and The Queen of Crows, the first installments of a trilogy that are pointed tales on the dangers of fascism.
The first novel introduces readers to a villager named Heloise who witnesses the brutality of the tyrannical Order, which nominally protects the world from wizards with the power to summon horrific demons. Heloise takes a stand against the order and brings destruction to her home, and in the next installment, becomes the figurehead of a growing movement to oppose and topple the Order. The concluding volume will be out next year.
What if the stakes of the space race were higher? In the opening chapters of Mary Robinette Kowal’s latest two novels, an asteroid lands just off the US Eastern Seaboard and threatens to drastically change the climate. To save humanity, the US and partner countries embark on an ambitious plan to colonize the Solar System.
In the midst of this is a WASP pilot named Elma York, who has the skills and ambition to assist with the effort. In the first novel, she faces systemic sexism and racism as she works to break into the astronaut corps as they set their sights on the Moon. In the second, she joins the first mission to Mars, and contends with not only the challenges of spaceflight, but the attitudes and biases of her crew. These two books are the first steps into a vivid, exciting world, and fortunately, there’s more to come.
R.F. Kuang’s debut novel The Poppy War is the promising opening salvo for an upcoming military fantasy trilogy inspired in part by the atrocities that occurred during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It follows a bright young woman named Rin who earns admission into the Nikara Empire’s elite military academy, Sinegard, an escape from servitude in her impoverished province.
Once she arrives at the school, however, she finds that the road before her will be difficult: she contends not only with her classmates’ racism and a challenging course load at the school, but the onset of a brutal and horrific war. As she enters the fight, she learns that power comes at a horrific cost.
Each story in this collection simmers with a righteous fury at the state of the world. Her characters often find themselves at the end of systematic injustice, and her stories, a mix of cyberpunk, epic and urban fantasy, hard science fiction, and more, critique modern life.
In “The City, Born Great,” a young man comes to terms with his status as the manifestation of New York City, while in “Red Dirt Witch” a mother faces down a powerful creature that represents white supremacy, and is forced to contend with the sacrifices that she and her family must make to ensure that they have a future. For fans of her Broken Earth trilogy, there’s also “Stone Hunger,” in which a girl will stop at nothing to hunt down a man who destroyed her life. The rest of the collection’s stories are just as fantastic and timely.
Set in the distant future, humanity survives on a planet wrecked by climate change and plagues in Larissa Lai’s latest novel The Tiger Flu, which follows a community of cloned women who are battling for their very survival waged by illness and economics.
Lai’s story follows two women: Kirilow, a doctor of Grist Village whose lover Peristrophe dies of a new strain of flu. Peristrophe was vitally important to their community — she could regrow her limbs and organs, and following her death, Kirilow sets out to Salt Water City to try to find someone to replace her. There, she meets Kora, a woman living in the city who might be able to save her community, but who resists leaving her family behind. Lai’s story is an intriguing post-apocalyptic novel, one rife with biotech and the remnants of the world from before.
Cixin Liu is best known for his fantastic Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy — Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death’s End — which begin in the 1970s and run all the way to the heat death of the universe. In his latest novel, Liu explores how obsession can lead to dark and dangerous places.
The book follows a young man named Chen who witnesses the death of his parents in a freak accident — they’re incinerated by a ball lightning strike. The incident leads him down a path to study the phenomenon, leading him across the world. Along the way, he meets an obsessive army weapons engineer named Lin Yun, who wants to harness the power of ball lightning into a new weapon. Liu approaches the story with the same interest in physics and technology as his other books, and highlights the dangers that power and technology can bring.
The book follows a Native American woman named Maggie Hoskie in Dinétah, the traditional homeland of the Navajo tribe. Protected from the chaos of climate change and war by massive, magical walls, she’s one of a small group of people who have exhibited magical powers and finds work as a monster hunter. When a magical construct snatches a young child from a village, she realizes that there’s a powerful force that threatens her community, and is pulled into the struggle to stop it before they’re wiped out.
Cixin Liu might be one of the best-known Chinese science fiction authors, but there’s a growing effort to bring more fiction from the country to the West. Wellesley College professor Mingwei Song and UCLA professor emeritus Theodore Huters have assembled a fascinating anthology of some of the contemporary stories coming out of China today.
Those include established authors like Cixin Liu, but also newcomers like Chen Qiufan, Xia Jia, Bao Shu, and others, telling stories about alternate realities, other societies, and potential futures for the ascendant nation. The stories range from interstellar wars, messages from a long-dead human race, as well as AI, robotics, and cybernetics. The stories represent just a slice of China’s science fiction community, but it’s an engrossing window into a fascinating body of work.
Time travel is a tricky proposition — science fiction has endlessly explored the possibilities and consequences of changing the past or future, and Tom Sweterlitsch’s book is a complicated take on the trope.
Sweterlitsch opens in the 20th-century with a time-traveling NCIS agent named Shannon Moss who is tasked with investigating a particularly gruesome murder. Moss jumps back and forth in time to try to unmask the killer, exploring different timelines and suspects. It’s a vivid, complicated story that blends crime fiction with cosmic horror that doesn’t release you until the last page is turned.
Comedy in science fiction is often a tricky thing to accomplish — it’s hard to live up to the likes of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. But Catherynne M. Valente accomplished that and more with her novel Space Opera.
“Space opera” is the catch-all term for the type of science fiction novels set in big galactic empires or following starships as they work their way across space. Valente turned it into an excellent pun after a conversation about Eurovision. The book follows a washed-up glam rocker named Decibel who is brought on to represent Earth in a Megagalactic Grand Prix — an interstellar music competition that will judge whether or not Earth can join the greater galactic civilization. It’s side-splittingly witty and wonderfully written, with almost every line in the novel telling a story of its own.
Martha Wells’ first Murderbot novella, All Systems Red, came out last year, and was a huge hit — eventually earning the 2018 Nebula and Hugo Awards for its category. This year saw the rest of the series hit bookshelves, continuing the story of the grumpy-but-good-hearted security android that calls itself Murderbot.
Each story roughly stands on its own, but they make up a larger story in Wells’ universe, following Murderbot as it bounces from planet to planet and tries to figure out its purpose in the universe. Along the way, it finds itself helping people caught up in conflicts against the domineering mega corporations that rule the space lanes, and ultimately helps to take down one that’s been gunning for its friends. While this series has wrapped, Wired just published a new Murderbot short story, and Wells is hard at work on a new novel about the character.
Honorable mentions:
Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi; Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson; The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolander; The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark;
European Travel for the Monstrous Gentlewoman by Theodora Goss; Points of Impact by Marko Kloos; The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel by Jeffrey Lewis; War Cry by Brian McClellan; Time Was by Ian McDonald; Severance by Ling Ma; Black Star Renegades by Michael Moreci;
Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee; Star Wars: Last Shot by Daniel José Older; Gunpowder Moon by David Pedreira; Bandwidth / Borderless by Eliot Peper; Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach by Kelly Robson; Head On and The Consuming Fire by John Scalzi; Vengeful by V.E. Schwab; The Book of M by Peng Shepherd;
The Sky is Yours by Chandler Klang Smith; Mutiny at Vesta by R.E. Stearns; Rosewater by Tade Thompson; Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar; Mecha Samurai Empire by Peter Tieryas; Side Life by Steve Toutonghi; The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay; On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden; TheFreeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts; and The Descent of Monsters by JY Yang.
‘The Voyage Out’ by Virginia Woolf, illustrated by Caroline Picard‘The Voyage Out’ by Virginia Woolf, illustrated by Caroline Picard‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad, illustrated by Matt Kish‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad, illustrated by Matt Kish
In the introduction, Kick writes of the project’s ethos, all three volumes of which were edited simultaneously and thus bear the same editorial sensibility:
I asked the artists to stay true to the literary works as far as plot, characters, and text, but visually they had free reign. Any style, any media, any approach. Spare. Dense. Lush. Fragmented. Seamless. Experimental. Old school. Monochrome. Saturated. Pen and ink. Markers. Digital. Silk-screened. Painted. Sequential art. Full-page illustrations. Unusual hybrids of words and images. Images without words. And, in one case, words without images.
‘The Dreaming of the Bones’ by W. B. Yeats, illustrated by Lauren Weinstein‘The Negro Speaks of Rivers’ by Langston Hughes, illustrated by Jenny Tondera‘Colette’ by Cherí, illustrated by Molly Crabapple
The Canon was always meant as an art project, part of the ages-old tradition of visual artists using classic works of literature as their springboard. It was also conceived as a celebration of literature, a way to present dramatic new takes on the greatest stories ever told. It turned into a lot more — a survey of Western literature (with some Asian and indigenous works represented), an encyclopedia of ways to merge images and text, a showcase of some of the best (and often underexposed comics artists and illustrators. And a kicky examination of love, sex, death, violence, revolution, money, drugs, religion, family, (non)conformity, longing, transcendence, and other aspects of the human condition that literature and art have always wrestled with.
‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce, illustrated by David Lasky‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by D. H. Lawrence, illustrated by Lisa Brown‘Nausea’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, illustrated by R. Crumb‘Nausea’ by Jean-Paul Sartre, illustrated by R. Crumb‘Naked Lunch’ by William S. Burroughs, illustrated by Emelie Ostergren
Given my undying love forAnaïs Nin’s diaries and letters, which have been the subject of several Brain Pickings Artist Seriesoriginalcollaborations, I was particularly delighted to find this contribution by Mardou:
Two years after his infinitely wonderfulillustrations for every page of Moby-Dick, which ranked among thebest art and design books of 2011, self-taught Ohio-based artist Matt Kish returns with an equally exquisite edition of Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness (public library). With one haunting acrylic-paint-and-ink illustration for every page, Kish — whose artwork was included in the excellent compendiumThe Graphic Canon, Vol. 3— reinvigorates the Conrad classic and its timeless themes of race, gender, power, privilege, and the dualities of the human soul.
In the introduction, Kish contrasts his two projects:
Every illustrator, no matter what the project, is confronted with choices. In considering how to approach Heart of Darkness, I had to make a lot of choices, and they were never simple. What struck me while illustrating Moby-Dick was just how vast Melville’s novel seemed. It’s an enormous book that, to paraphrase Whitman, contains multitudes. It contradicts itself in style and tone in gloriously messy ways and it’s strong enough to carry the visions of dozens of artists. . . . With Melville, there is room.
Conrad is something entirely different, particularly when it comes to Heart of Darkness. There is a terrifying feeling of claustrophobia and a crushing singularity of purpose to the story. It’s almost as if the deeper one reads, the further down a tunnel one is dragged, all other options and paths dwindling and disappearing, until nothing is left but that awful and brutal encounter with Kurtz and the numbing horror of his ideas. Where Moby-Dick roams far and wide across both land and sea, Heart of Darkness moves in one direction only, and that is downward.
While it never could have been an easy task to take a well-known piece of literature and breathe some different kind of life into it with pictures, the inexorable downward pull of this black hole of a story — this bullet to the head — made demands that I couldn’t have imagined.
And yet Kish met those demands head-on, with equal parts creative bravery and respect for Conrad’s sensibility, all the while drawing us into that black hole with irresistible magnetism.
I was looking through the classic audio books that were offered on the music service Spotify. I saw ‘Sons and Lovers’ by D. H. Lawrence and remembered that the 1913 semi-autobiographical novel was considered one of the best of the 20th century and in the top 100 list. So, I gave the first chapter a listen. The audio rendition of the 1913 novel was well done and I liked the voice of the person reading the professionally produced reading. So, I looked up the work and found the Project Gutenberg text – http://www.gutenberg.org/files/217/217-h/217-h.htm and also a free Libravox version – https://librivox.org/sons-and-lovers-version-2-by-d-h-lawrence/ for anyone who doesn’t have Spotify, or myself if I’m on a different device and want access to the story. I do hunger for stories.
I saw that there were a number of movie and television series made based on the work. I look it up on Youtube and found a very good version from the UK’s ITV in 2003. Three hours long in two parts, but a real chance to see what the England looked like for some people circa 1910. The movie also has a chance to show how people dressed, and what the insides of the houses of lower class people looked like. A visual chance to look at a long gone time.
(Update: Sorry, the links below to the 2003 version weren’t ‘age restricted’ requiring sign in when I first posted this article. Looking for a way around the restriction)
President Donald Trump reacts to the crowd as he arrives to speak to navy and shipyard personnel aboard nuclear aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford at Newport News Shipbuilding in Newport News, Va.
What’s the War on Terror death count by now, a half-million? How much have we spent, $5 trillion?Five-and-a-half?
For that cost, we’ve destabilized the region to the point ofabject chaos, inspired millions of Muslims to hate us, and torn up the Geneva Convention and half the Constitution in pursuit of policies like torture, kidnapping, assassination-by-robot and warrantless detention.
It will be difficult for each of us to even begin to part with our share of honor in those achievements. This must be why all those talking heads on TV are going crazy.
UnlessDonald Trump decides to reverse his decision to begin withdrawals from Syria andAfghanistan, cable news for the next few weeks is going to be one long Scanners marathon of exploding heads.
“Today’s decision would cheer Moscow, ISIS, and Iran!” yelped Nicole Wallace, former George W. Bush communications director.
“Maybe Trump will bring Republicans and Democrats together,”said Bill Kristol, on MSNBC, that “liberal” channel that somehow seems to be populated round the clock by ex-neocons and Pentagon dropouts.
Kristol, who has rarely ever been in the ballpark of right about anything — he once told us Iraq was going to be a “two month war” — might actually be correct.
Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan will lay bare the real distinctions in American politics. Political power in this country is not divided between right and left, and not even between rich and poor.
The real line is between a war party, and everyone else.
This is why Kristol is probably right. The Democrats’ plan until now was probably toimpeach Trump in the House using at minimum some material from the Michael Cohen case involving campaign-finance violations.
That plan never had a chance to succeed in the Senate, but now, who knows? Troop withdrawals may push a collection of hawkish Republicans like Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, Ben Sasse andmaybe even Mitch McConnellinto another camp.
The departure of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis — a standard-issue Pentagon toady who’s never met an unending failure of a military engagement he didn’t like and whose resignation letter is now being celebrated as inspirational literature on the order of the Gettysburg Address or a lost epic by Auden or Eliot — sounded an emergency bell for all these clowns. The letter by Mattis, Rubio said:
“Makes it abundantly clear we are headed towards a series of grave policy errors which will endanger our nation, damage our alliances & empower our adversaries.”
Talk like this is designed to give political cover to Republican fence-sitters on Trump. That wry smile on Kristol’s face is, I’d guess, connected to the knowledge that Trump put the Senate in play by even threatening to pull the plug on our Middle Eastern misadventures.
You’ll hear all sorts of arguments today about why the withdrawals are bad. You’ll hear Trump has no plan, which is true. He never does, at least not on policy.
But we don’t exactly have a plan for staying in theMiddle East, either, beyond installing a permanent garrison ina dozen countries, spending assloads of money and making ourselves permanently despised in the region as civilian deaths pile up through drone-bombings and other “surgical” actions.
You’ll hear we’re abandoning allies and inviting massacres by the likes of Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan. If there was any evidence that our presence there would do anything but screw up the situation even more, I might consider that a real argument. At any rate, there are other solutions beyond committing American lives. We could take in more refugees, kick Turkey out of NATO, impose sanctions, etc.
As to the argument that we’re abandoning Syria to Russians — anyone who is interested in reducing Russian power should be cheering. If there’s any country in the world that equals us in its ability to botch an occupation and get run out on a bloody rail after squandering piles of treasure, it’s Russia. They may even be better at it than us. We can ask the Afghans about that on our way out of there.
The Afghan conflict became the longest military engagement in American historyeight years ago. Despite myths to the contrary, Barack Obama did not enter office gung-ho to leave Afghanistan. He felt heneeded to win there first, which, as anyone who’s read The Great Game knows, proved impossible. So we ended up staying throughout his presidency.
We were going to continue to stay there, and in other places, forever, because our occupations do not work, as everyone outside of Washington seems to understand.
TV talking heads will be unanimous on this subject, but the population, not so much. What polls we have suggest voterswant out of the regioninincreasing numbers.
A Morning Consult/Politico poll from last year showed a pluralityfavored a troop decrease in Afghanistan, while only 5 percent wanted increases. Polls consistently show the public thinks ourpresence in Afghanistanhas been a failure.
There’s less about how thepublic feelsabout Syria, but even there, the data doesn’t show overwhelming desire to put boots on the ground.
Trump is a madman, a far-right extremist and an embarrassment, but that’s not why most people in Washington hate him. It’s his foreign-policy attitudes, particularly toward NATO, that have always most offended DC burghers.
You could see the Beltway beginning to lose its mind back in the Republican primary race, when then-candidate Trump belittled America’s commitment to Middle Eastern oil states.
“Every time there’s a little ruckus, we send those ships and those planes,” he said,early in his campaign. “We get nothing. Why? They’re making a billion a day. We get nothing.”
As he got closer to the nomination, he went after neoconservative theology more explicitly.
“I don’t think we should be nation-building anymore,” he said, in March of 2016. He went on: “I watched as we built schools in Iraq and they’re blown up. We build another one, we get blown up.”
Trump was wrong about a thousand other things, but this was true. I had done a story about how military contractors spent $72 millionon what was supposed to be an Iraqi police academy and delivered a pile of rubble so unusable, pedestrians made it into a toilet.
The Special Inspector General for Iraqi Reconstructionnoted, “We witnessed a light fixture so full of diluted urine and feces that it would not operate.”
SIGIR found we spent over $60 billion on Iraqi reconstruction and did not significantly improve life for Iraqis. The parallel body covering Afghanistan, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, concluded last yearthat at least $15.5 billion had been wasted in that country between 2008 and 2017, and this was likely only a “fraction” of financial leakage.
Trump, after sealing the nomination, upped the ante. In the summer of 2016 he said hewasn’t sure he’d send troops to defend NATO members that didn’t pay their bills. NATO members are supposed to kick in 2 percent of GDP for their own defense. At the time, only four NATO members(Estonia, Poland, the U.K. and the U.S.) were in compliance.
Politicians went insane. How dare he ask countries to pay for their own defense! Republican House member Adam Kinzinger, a popular guest in the last 24 hours, said in July 2016 that Trump’s comments were “utterly disastrous.”
“There’s no precedent,” said Thomas Wright, a “Europe scholar” from the Brookings Institute.
When the news came after Trump’s election that he’donly read his intelligence briefings once a weekinstead of every day as previous presidents had dutifully done, that was it. The gloves were off at that point.
“The open disdain Trump has shown for the agencies is unprecedented,” said Patrick Skinner, a former CIA official for both George W. Bush and Obama.
All that followed, through today, has to be understood through this prism.
Trump dumped on basically every segment of the political establishment en route to Washington, running on a classic authoritarian strategy — bash the elites, pose as a populist.
However fake he was, there were portions of the political establishment that deserved abuse, the Pentagon most of all.
We have brave and able soldiers, but their leaders are utter tools who’ve left a legacy of massacres and botched interventions around the world.
NATO? That’s an organization whose mission stopped making sense the moment the Soviet Union collapsed. We should long ago have repurposed our defense plan to focus on terrorism, cyber-crime and cyber-attacks, commercial espionage, financial security, and other threats.
Instead, we continued after the Soviet collapse to maintain a global military alliance fattened with increasingly useless carriers and fighter jets, designed to fight archaic forms of war.
NATO persisted mainly as a PR mechanism for a) justifying continued obscene defense spending levels and b) giving a patina of internationalism to America’s essentially unilateral military adventures.
We’d go into a place like Afghanistan with no real plan for leaving, and a few member nations like Estonia and France and Turkey would send troops to get shot at with us. But it was always basicallyTeam America: World Policewith supporting actors. No wonder so few of the member countries paid their dues.
Incidentally, this isn’t exactly a secret. Long before Trump, this is what Barney Frank was saying in 2010: “I think the time has come to reexamine NATO. NATO has become an excuse for other people to get America to do things.”
This has all been a giant, bloody, expensive farce, and it’s long since time we ended it.
We’ll see a lot of hand-wringing today from people who called themselves anti-war in 2002 and 2003, but now pray that the “adults in the room” keep “boots on the ground” to preserve “credibility.”
Part of this is because it’s Trump, but a bigger part is that we’ve successfully brainwashed big chunks of the population into thinking it’s normal for a country to exist in a state of permanent war, fighting inseven countries at once, spendinghalf of all discretionary funding on defense.
It’s not. It’s insane. And we’ll never be a healthy society, or truly respected abroad, until we stop accepting it as normal.
Incidentally, I doubt Trump really follows through on this withdrawal plan. But until he changes (what passes for) his mind, watch what happens in Washington.
We’re about to have a very graphic demonstration of the near-total uniformity of the political class when it comes to the military and its role. The war party is ready for a coming-out party.
Germany has been rocked by a scandal involving one of the top reporters writing for the reputable Der Spiegel magazine, who turned out to be a fraudster. What made a fabulst into a star? Let’s look at some of his stories. Claas Relotius, the ‘brilliant reporter’-turned-fabricator, carved his way to pages of some of the most prestigious German newspapers with curious, sentimental and touching human stories from everyday life. Although, some of these intimate private stories clearly had some political angle.
Syrian ‘Resistance’ hero
The piece that brought him his latest (and probably the last) journalist award delved into a much more high-profile and much more politicized topic – the Syrian crisis. The articlecentersaround the plight of a Syrian teenager living in the city of Deraa, who stood against the Syrian President Bashar Assad, using graffiti as a tool to express himself.
Written in summer 2018, when the city was still at the hands of the militants, the piece calls Deraa the last “resistance” stronghold and the start of the Syrian conflict a “revolution” while the teenager himself is described as “Syria’s liberator” and a “legend” to “thousands.” Now, Der Spiegel has to embarrassinglyadmitthat this story that so vividly depicted the rebels’ selfless fight against their supposed oppressors was mostly fabricated and many details described in the articles were just made up by the author.
Children ‘orphaned’ by Assad
Another report Relotius dedicated to the dire plight of Syrians tells the readers about a heartbreaking story of two Syrian siblings. “They had lost everything – their parents, their house and their country” at the hands of “dictator” Assad and his soldiers, the article says, inconspicuously interweaving the two orphans’ personal story with that of the battle for the Syrian city of Aleppo.
The piece also puts the blame for the tragedy of the Aleppo residents almost entirely on the Assad government and the Syrian Army, missing on the many extremists, who kept the city hostage.
Death threats over joke
Sometimes, the journalist also entertained his readers with the reports from a little bit more exotic corners of Earth. One particularly eyebrow-raising story recounts a haunting experience of a Scotsman, who was mercilessly chased and almost killed by the people of an entire country – Kyrgyzstan – just for a low joke about their food.
Trump’s ‘border hunters’
Notably, Relotious also often wrote about the US but apparently could not stay unbiased here as well. One of his latest pieces, which became a starting point of Spiegel’s investigation against him, used made up details to play to the popular anti-Trump angle in the complicated situation on the US-Mexico border. It tells the readers about a group of self-styled “border hunters” militia.
Its somewhat unlikeable members praise President Donald Trump and viciously hate all illegals seeking to come to the US. One of the supposed group members, who goes in the story by the imposing alias ‘Pain’, says “he wants to kick the devils, who are running into America, out just like Donald Trump.
This man, however, turned out to be nothing but a phantom born in the fraudster’s inventive mind as the story turned out to be made up as well. Now, Der Spiegel has announced it established a special commission to investigate all Relotius’ works and develop recommendations to help it improve its control mechanisms.
However, it alsoadmittedthat “even with the sincerest of intentions, it is impossible to fully rule out” such incidents in the future as their causes lie in “human frailty” and journalists are just as “fallible” as any other people. So what made it so difficult for Der Spiegel and other reputable media outlets to see that Relotius was a fraudster?
Maybe, he just was that good at delivering the German media what they themselves craved for so much. His pieces seem to be a blend of heartbreaking personal stories perfectly fitted into the ‘liberal’ narrative touted by the Western media. An ideal deception.
Once again, a reporter has been accused of writing fake stories – over a span of years – reinforcing the suspicion that we are living in a post-truth world where words, to paraphrase Kipling, “are the most powerful drug.”
This week, Der Spiegel, the German news weekly, was forced toadmit that one of its former star reporters, the award-winning Claas Relotius, “falsified his articles on a grand scale.”
Indeed, it seems the disgraced journalist was motivated more by the writing style of fiction writers John le Carre and Tom Clancy than by late media heavyweights, like Andrew Breitbart and Walter Cronkite.
Relotius, who just this month took home Germany’s Reporterpreis (‘Reporter of the Year’) for his enthralling tale of a Syrian teenager, “made up stories and invented protagonists,” Der Spiegel admitted.
There is a temptation to rationalize Relotius’s multiple indiscretions, not to mention the failure of his fastidious employer to unearth them for so long, as an unavoidable part of the dog-eat-dog media jungle. After all, journalists are not robots – at least not yet – and we are all humans prone to poor judgment and mistakes, perhaps even highly unethical ones.
That explanation, however, falls short of explaining the internal forces battering away at the foundation of Western media, an institution built on the shifting sand of lies, disinformation and outright propaganda. And what is readily apparent to those outside of the Western media fortress is certainly even more apparent to those inside.
A good example is Russiagate. This elaborate myth, which has been peddled repeatedly and without an ounce of 100-percent real beef since the US election of 2016, goes like this: A group of Russian hackers, buying a few hundred social media memes for just rubles to the dollar, were able to do what all the Republican campaign strategists, and all the special interests groups, with all of their billions of dollars in their massive war chest, simply could not: keep Democratic voters at home on the couch come Election Day – a tactic now known as “voter suppression operations” – thereby handing the White House to Donald Trump on a silver platter. Or shall we say ‘a Putin platter’?
Don’t believe me? Here’s the opening line of a recent Washington Post article that should be rated ‘R’ for racist: “One difference between Russian and Republican efforts to quash the black vote: The Russians are more sophisticated, insidious and slick,” wailed Joe Davidson, who apparently watched too many Hollywood films where the Russkies play all of the villains. “Unlike the Republican sledgehammers used to suppress votes and thwart electorates’ decisions in various states, the Russians are sneaky, using social media come-ons that ostensibly had little to do with the 2016 vote.”
Meanwhile, Der Spiegel, despite being forced to come clean over the transgressions of Claas Relotius, will most likely never own up to its own factual shortcomings with regards to their dismal reporting on Russia.
(Manufacturing Consent)
For example, in an article published last year entitled ‘Putin’s work, Clinton’s contribution,’ the German weekly lamented that “A superpower intervenes in the election campaign of another superpower: The Russian cyber-attack in the US is a scandal.” Just like their fallen star reporter, Der Spiegel regurgitated fiction masquerading as news.
However, there is no need to limit ourselves to just media-generated Russian fairytales. The Western media has contrived other sensational stories, with its own cast of dubious characters, and with far greater consequences.
Consider the reporting in the Western media prior to the 2003 Iraq War, when most journalists were behaving as cheerleaders for military invasion as opposed to conscientious objectors, or at least objective observers. In fact, two reporters with the New York Times, Michael Gordon and Judith Miller, arguably gave the Bush administration and ahardcore group of neocons inside Washington, which had been pushing for a war against Saddam Hussein for many years, the barest justification it required for military action.
Just six months before the bombs started dropping on Baghdad, Gordon and Miller penned a front-page article in the Times that opened with this stunning claim: “Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today.”
The article in America’s ‘paper of record’ then proceeded to build the case for military action against Iraq by quoting an assortment of anonymous senior administration officials, anonymous Iraqi defectors, and anonymous chemical weapons experts. In fact, much of the story was based on comments provided by one ‘Ahmed al-Shemri,’ a pseudonym for someone purported to have been connected to Hussein’s chemical-weapons program. The authors quoted the mystery man as saying: “All of Iraq is one large storage facility.”
Gordon and Miller also claimed their source had said that “he had been told that Iraq was still storing some 12,500 gallons of anthrax.” Several months later, just weeks before the US invasion of Iraq commenced, US Secretary of State Colin Powell invited the UN General Assembly to imagine what a “teaspoon of dry anthrax” could do if unleashed on the public.
Powell, who later said the testimony would be a permanent “blot” on his record, even shook a tiny faux sample of the deadly biological agent in the Assembly for maximum theatrical effect.
Shortly after the release of the Times piece, top Bush officials appeared on television andalludedto Miller’s story in support of military action. Meanwhile, UN inspectors on the ground in Iraq never found chemical weapons or the materials needed to build atomic weapons. In other words, the $1-trillion-dollar war against Iraq, which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, was a completely senseless act of aggression against a sovereign state, which the US media helped perpetrate.
Aside from the question of whether readers really put much faith in these fantastic media stories, complete with pseudonymous characters and impossible to prove claims; there remains another question. Does the Western media itself believe its own stories? The answer seems to be no, at least not always.
With regards to the Russiagate story, for example, an investigative journalism outfit, Project Veritas, caught a few Western journalists off-guard about their true feelings in relation to the claims against Russia, and their feelings in general about the state of the media.
“I love the news business, but I’m very cynical about it – and at the same time so are most of my colleagues,” CNN Supervising Producer John Bonifield admitted, unaware he was being secretly filmed.
When pushed to explain why CNN was beating the anti-Russia drum on a daily basis, things became clearer: “Because it’s ratings,” Bonifield said. “Our ratings are incredible right now.”
In the same media sting operation, Van Jones, a prominent CNN political commentator who has pushed the anti-Russia position numerous times on-air, completely changed his tune when caught off-air and off-guard. “The Russia thing is just a big nothing burger,” he remarked.
This brings us back to the story of the fallen Der Spiegel journalist. It seems that a deep cynicism has taken hold in at least some parts of the Western media establishment. Journalists seem increasingly willing to produce extremely tenuous, fact-challenged stories, many of which are barely held together by a rickety composite of anonymous entities.
And why not? If their own media bosses are permitting gross fabrications on a number of major issues, not least of all related to Russia, and further afield in Syria, why should the journalists be forced to play by the rules?
Under such oppressive conditions, where the media appears to be merely the mouthpiece of the government’s position on a number of issues, those working inside this apparatus will eventually come around to the conclusion that truth is not the main priority. The main priority is hoodwinking the public into believing something even when the facts – or lack of them – point to other conclusions.
Thus, it is no surprise when we find Western reporters imitating the greatest fiction writers, because in reality that is what they have already become.
An overstuffed bookcase (or e-reader) says good things about your mind.
By Jessica Stillman
Lifelong learningwill help you be happier, earn more, and even stay healthier, experts say. Plus, plenty of the smartest names in business, fromBill Gatesto Elon Musk, insist that the best way to get smarter is to read. So what do you do? You go out and buy books, lots of them.
But life is busy, and intentions are one thing, actions another. Soon you find your shelves (or e-reader) overflowing with titles you intend to read one day, or books you flipped through once but then abandoned. Is this a disaster for your project to become a smarter, wiser person?
If you never actually get around to reading any books, then yes. You might want to read up ontricks to squeeze more reading into your hectic lifeand why it pays tocommit a few hours every week to learning. But if it’s simply that your book reading in no way keeps pace with your book buying, I have good news for you (and for me; I definitely fall into this category): Your overstuffed library isn’t a sign of failure or ignorance, it’s a badge of honor.
Why you need an “antilibrary”
That’s the argument author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes in his bestsellerThe Black Swan. Perpetually fascinating blog Brain Pickings dug up and highlighted the section ina particularly lovely post. Taleb kicks off his musings with an anecdote about the legendary library of Italian writer Umberto Eco, which contained a jaw-dropping 30,000 volumes.
Did Eco actually read all those books? Of course not, but that wasn’t the point of surrounding himself with so much potential but as-yet-unrealized knowledge. By providing a constant reminder of all the things he didn’t know, Eco’s library kept him intellectually hungry and perpetually curious. An ever-growing collection of books you haven’t yet read can do the same for you, Taleb writes:
A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
An antilibrary is a powerful reminder of your limitations — the vast quantity of things you don’t know, half-know, or will one day realize you’re wrong about. By living with that reminder daily you can nudge yourself toward the kind of intellectual humility that improves decision-making and drives learning.
“People don’t walk around with anti-résumés telling you what they have not studied or experienced (it’s the job of their competitors to do that), but it would be nice if they did,” Taleb claims.
Why? Perhaps because it is a well-known psychological fact that it’s the most incompetent who are the most confident of their abilities and the most intelligent who are full of doubt. (Really.It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect.) It’s equally well established that the more readily you admit you don’t know things,the faster you learn.
So, stop beating yourself up for buying too many books or for having a to-read list that you could never get through in three lifetimes. All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people.
Pawtucket RI – Toy manufacturer Hasbro today presented a new version of the classic strategy board game Risk which will be commercially available from spring 2018. In Risk Syria, up to 32 players (Russia, USA, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Germany, Iran, etc.) can engage in a proxy war on the battleground of Syria using an unending series of dice games to dispute the bombed-out city of Aleppo and the handling of so-called ‘Islamic State’.
The special feature of Risk Syria (€55.99, US$ 64.99) is that neither Assad’s government in Damascus nor the extremists take part in the game as powers in their own right. Instead, they are just game characters (soldier=1, tank=5, combat helicopter with barrel bomb=10) who are mercilessly played off against one another and sent to the slaughter by the real powers in the background.
One of 25 mission cards included in the game
Risk fans will quickly become confident with the mechanics of the game. Many rules are quite close to the original, such as the workings of attack and defence. The novelty here is that for every defeated soldier unit, five Syrian civilian units must also be removed from play.
The game is finished when there are no more Syrians. After a duration of about 37 hours, which is typical for Risk, the power that benefitted most of the civil war has won. Mission cards are drawn at the beginning of the game and define the players’ goals. These include increasing your profile in your home country, strategic access to natural resources, increasing your sphere of influence and strengthening your domestic arms industry.
If the Syria edition of Risk is well received on the board game market, Hasbro has plans to develop further board games relating to topical events. Potential future projects include a Greek version of Monopoly, Akropoly (all players start with horrendous debts), Trump Jenga (the player who builds the tallest tower wins the right to grope the female players) and ‘IS’ Chess (with a veiled queen who always follows one square behind the king; camels instead of knights; eight suicide bomber pawns).
Nearly two years before the U.S. government’s first known inquiry into the activities of Reddit co-founder and famed digital activist Aaron Swartz, the FBI swept up his email data in a counterterrorism investigation that also ensnared students at an American university, according to a once-secret document first published by Gizmodo.
The email data belonging to Swartz, who was likely not the target of the counterterrorism investigation, was cataloged by the FBI and accessed more than a year later as it weighed potential charges against him for something wholly unrelated. The legal practice of storing data on Americans who are not suspected of crimes, so that it may be used against them later on, has long been denounced by civil liberties experts, who’ve called on courts and lawmakers to curtail the FBI’s “radically” expansive search procedures.
(Aaron Swartz killed himself because he wanted to work for the government and thought his conviction for computer crimes would prevent that)
In November 2008, days before Swartz’s 22nd birthday, FBI investigators were combing the internet for any information they could find on the young man fated to become one of the internet’s most celebrated figures. At the time, the bureau was working to determine whether Swartz had violated any laws when he downloaded millions of court documents from an online system known as PACER.
The FBI would ultimately conclude that no crime had been committed and that the court records already belonged to the public. (Some three years later, the U.S. government charged him with crimes related to mass-downloading from another database.) But on that day in November, the investigators would leave no stone unturned.
Drawing from information published on Wikipedia and using investigative tools such as Accurint, FBI employees began quietly building a profile of the oft-described technology “wunderkind,” noting, for example, his involvement in the creation of the formatting language Markdown and RSS 1.0, and jotting down the various code frameworks that Swartz had helped to create and organizations that he had helped to found. Eventually, with all open source avenues exhausted, an FBI employee sat down at a computer terminal that, to most people, would appear plucked straight from the 1980s. The employee ran a search using the bureau’s automated case support system, a portal to the motherlode of FBI investigative files.
When the FBI worker typed in Swartz’s internet domain—aaronsw.com—he got a hit. A single file popped up bearing the case number 315T-HQ-C1475879. The prefix, 315, is a numerical classifier that was assigned to the file when it was created nearly two years before. It told the FBI employee that Swartz’s domain was linked, though not precisely how, to an international terrorism case. And then they cracked it open.
315T-HQ-C1475879
This case has been something of a mystery since its existence was first unearthed by journalists and researchers who engaged the FBI in lengthy court battles over records related Swartz, a celebrated internet rights activist, who, while being targeted by overzealous prosecutors in January 2013, died by suicide.
As mentioned, the newly released document, obtained first in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by transparency group Property of the People, reveals that Swartz was already of investigative interest to the FBI years before he was criminally charged with downloading millions of articles and documents from JSTOR, an expansive digital library of academic journals, in early 2011 and, more importantly, nearly two years before the Justice Department considered charges against him related to his PACER activity—the first known law enforcement probe to involve him, until now.
The FBI has long argued in favor of growing its profound authority to acquire Americans’ private communications data in huge quantities without a judge’s approval. But the document obtained by Property of the People, which was formerly classified “secret,” appears to exemplify, using a rather high-profile figure, the many inherent risks in allowing police agencies to secretly stockpile data on innocent Americans in the name of national security.
The document appears to show that in early 2007, the FBI cataloged a substantial amount of email metadata from the computer science and IT departments of the University of Pittsburgh, citing as justification the pursuit of a terrorism lead.
The terrorist group at the center of the investigation is also identified by name—Al Qaeda.
That any information about Swartz was collected during an Al Qaeda investigation—only to be retrieved nearly two years later for totally unrelated purposes—adds a familiar and sympathetic face to a controversial procedure in intelligence gathering commonly referred to as a “backdoor search.” That is, the FBI gathering information about Americans who are not accused of crimes, often without a warrant; storing that information in databases, sometimes for years; and later accessing it during the course of another investigation that ultimately has nothing to do with terrorism whatsoever. (Backdoor searches are most commonly associated with Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, an authority that was unavailable to the FBI at the time.)
While the substantive details of this terrorism investigation remain a mystery, legal experts who spoke to Gizmodo said they were alarmed—but not the least bit surprised—to hear the FBI used information gleaned in a terrorism case as it tried to build a criminal one against Swartz long after.
“It’s disturbing that the FBI is mining this information for unrelated criminal investigations that have nothing to do with why it was collected in the first place,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative counsel. This practice, she said, is another example “of the way in which this authority has been abused by the government and underscores the need for reform.”
Certain types of electronic information, most of which can be described as “metadata,” may be acquired by the FBI without a warrant, provided it certifies there’s a “specific and articulable” link to suspected terrorist activities. This is basically the legal equivalent of a hunch, a threshold which is floors below probable cause. And this key: Obtaining that same information under any other circumstance—except in the case of espionage—would otherwise require a court order.
How specifically the FBI came to possess Swartz’s email data remains unclear.
But after reviewing the document and other related files, several legal experts told Gizmodo the most likely explanation was that the FBI had used a National Security Letter (NSL), a ubiquitous tool for obtaining email header data at the time. An NSL would have enabled federal agents to demand access to the data and then impose a gag order to maintain secrecy around the investigation, all without a judge’s approval.
Authorized under the Stored Communications Act, in cases of suspected terrorism or espionage, these letters enable the FBI to seize a variety of electronic records under its own authority. While agents cannot use an NSL to acquire the contents of an email message, the FBI’s notes appear to show that, in Swartz’s case, it sought only “email headers,” data the FBI would argue falls well within the scope of its power to seize.
Property of the People co-founder Ryan Shapiro, who holds a PhD from MIT, told Gizmodo that the Justice Department was “particularly aggressive” in court while trying to keep its prior, and formerly undisclosed, investigative interest in Swartz under wraps. It only relented, he said, when it seemed the U.S. attorney feared an unfavorable ruling, which could impact the Justice Department in future court cases.
“The FBI does nearly everything in its power to maintain its functional immunity from the Freedom of Information Act. As one element of its anti-FOIA efforts, the FBI is notorious for the deliberate poverty of its FOIA searches,” he said. “In this case, the Bureau even made the ludicrous claim that documents about Aaron Swartz’s email address, email header data, and domain weren’t related to him, and therefore were outside the scope of the FBI’s search for records about Swartz. It took us years of litigation to force the FBI to finally search for and even partially release this important document.”
The FBI declined to comment on the case and instead pointed to Justice Department guidelines that define the scope of the FBI’s authority. “The manner in which the FBI acquires information must meet a legal threshold, and the use of that information is governed by legal statutes and guidelines on investigations established by the Attorney General. In addition, the FBI’s use of its legal authorities is subject to robust oversight by all three branches of government,” it said.
University snooping
While heavily redacted, the document obtained by Property of the People offers multiples clues as to the origin of the collected email data. It almost certainly originated from the University of Pittsburgh (PITT). At the time of writing, however, it remains unknown what connected the University to an investigation involving Al Qaeda in 2007. (Several key portions of the records are redacted, with exemptions referencing the National Security Act of 1947.)
Notably, the document references two sets of email data labeled “Computer Science” and “CSSD” (“Appendix A” and “Appendix B,” respectively).
While “Computer Science” is admittedly ambiguous—though clearly related to an academic department somewhere—“CSSD” has special relevance to Pittsburgh. As University literature describes it, Computing Services and Systems Development (CSSD) has long provided the “network infrastructure and telecommunications backbone for the University community,” offering among other forms of support, computer resources and training to students and faculty members alike.
The term “CSSD” is also unique to the Pittsburgh campus. The University, which today accommodates more than 28,000 students and a staff of nearly 5,000, further describes it as follows:
“Computing Services and Systems Development (CSSD) supports the teaching and research missions of the University by providing mechanisms (infrastructure, consulting, development and training) to students engaged in academic activities and to faculty in their laboratories and classrooms. CSSD is responsible for maintaining a contemporary IT environment, while exploring the next generation of technology, innovative computing, and telecommunication solutions.”
Only two pages of the document were released—a cover sheet and a second page pulled from one of the “email header” lists—so it is unclear precisely how much data the FBI may have acquired.There are clues, however, that suggest it may have been a substantial amount.
The page with Swartz’s email address is labeled page 26. When the FBI looked up the file, it noted the address was contained in Appendix A (“Computer Science”). So we know the first email header list takes up at least 26 pages, but maybe more. There is no reference to the size of Appendix B. The total size of the file, then, could be anywhere between 27 pages and 50 pages or 100 pages or 2,000—only the FBI knows for sure.
It is also unclear why Swartz was, presumably, in contact with a student or staff member in the PITT computer science department, though he is known to have been involved in multiple software development projects at the time, and had by then realized his own passion for collecting and sharing—frequently with other academics—datasets containing massive amounts of information, which he earnestly believed should be free and easily accessible to everyone.
“Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves,” he later wrote in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. “Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.”
Scientists Just Rescued One of the Last Sumatran Rhinos to Save the Entire Species
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Gizmodo contacted the university in early November. After a week, PITT said it was still “digging” into the matter. On November 20, Gizmodo informed PITT that it was planning to publish a story stating that the FBI obtained the communications data of staff and students in connection with a terrorism investigation. Following that, correspondence from the University ceased for over a week.
In response to a later email raising the possibility that a National Security Letter was used to acquire to data on staff and students, a PITT spokesperson replied: “I’m afraid we have no comment.” The spokesperson would also not say whether the University had a policy of challenging the government gag orders that accompany NSLs, which are designed to prevent people and institutions from ever notifying the public about the letter’s existence.
National Security Letters
In 2007, the FBI would not have required a warrant to obtain the email headers from a public university. The Patriot Act, passed in the wake of the September 2001 terrorist attacks, significantly lowered the threshold for using NSLs and also made them much easier to acquire by expanding the number of FBI officials who could sign them. Today, the most senior agents at the FBI’s 56 nationwide field offices—special agents in charge (SAC)—are able to approve the use of an NSL.
NSLs may be used to acquire sans warrant a range of consumer credit information and other transnational records. But importantly, the statute authorizing their use in cases of electronic communications—under Title II of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act—do not permit the FBI to acquire the content of emails without a warrant. NSLs may be used, however, to acquire evidence in pursuit of secret warrants issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), for developing evidence prior to the initiation of a terrorism investigation, and to corroborate information obtained by other means.
While the FBI informed Gizmodo that its use of such tools is governed by legal statutes and guidelines established by the U.S. Attorney General, the bureau has routinely violated and misinterpreted those guidelines, according to the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel and the FBI’s own inspector general. Notably, these abuses were rampant around the time that the FBI appears to have acquired the PITT email data.
Between 2003 and 2006, the FBI reported the issuance of more than 192,000 letters, according to 2009 testimony before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary. However, the FBI’s inspector general also determined that this figure was also inaccurately low.A review of four field offices revealed the reported number of letters was, in fact, 22 percent lower than the actual number of letters issued. It also identified 26 possible intelligence violations, including the issuance of NSLs “without proper authorization.”
Out of 77 FBI files, the inspector general foundthat 293 letters had been used. Of those, 22 possible violations were discovered that had not been previously reported. The violations included “improper requests under the pertinent national security letter statutes” and “unauthorized collections.” Moreover, some of the justifications used to obtain the letters were overly convenient and inherently flawed.
The FBI Pittsburgh Field Office, which requested the analysis of the email headers linked to Swartz, also has a “troubling” history with regard to the monitoring of peaceful activists, notes a 2010 inspector general report.
In response to suspicions of illegal spying on anti-war activists raised by California Representative Zoe Lofgren, the FBI launched an internal investigation to determine whether it had targeted “domestic advocacy groups” based solely on activities protected under the First Amendment. Notably, even the issuance of an NSL cannot be based solely on observations of constitutionally protected speech. (Lofgren is, incidentally, the author of Aaron’s Law, a bill that sought to reform the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, under which Swartz was charged prior to his death. The bill did not pass.)
The inspector general’s report contradicted the 2006 congressional testimony of then-FBI Director Robert Mueller over FBI surveillance of a peaceful protest held in Pittsburgh four years earlier. While he claimed the bureau had a solid lead on a person of interest in a terrorism case, who just so happened to be a prominent local Muslim, the report found that the FBI had no evidence linking the man to anything. Even worse, it wasn’t until an agent was already undercover at the rally that the FBI learned he was there. Prior to that, it didn’t have “any reason to believe” he’d be in attendance, the report says.
“The fundamental issue with an NSL,” says Reporter’s Committee director and lawyer Gabe Rottman, returning to the subject, “if one was used in this case, is that the FBI can issue it on its own discretion and can collect pretty sensitive information, such as email headers.” But at the time, the FBI also claimed the authority to collect arguably much more sensitive data without a warrant or court order, such a person’s web browsing history.
It’s particularly worrying, he said, that the FBI can use what oftentimes turns out to be imaginary threats to national security as an excuse to stockpile U.S. citizens’s private data, even when no proof exists they’ve committed a crime. “Just as Aaron’s email was apparently picked up here,” he said, “you could have a reporter or some of their source information get scooped up and mined later. And that’s a matter of great concern.”
1.We All Sing With the Same Voice by J. Philip Miller and Sheppard M. Greene
What It’s About: This is a song book that connects kids around the world. The verses highlight differences between kids, illustrated on the pages of the book. The chorus brings all of these kids with many differences together, singing “We all sing with the same voice. The same song. The same voice. We all sing with the same voice and we sing in harmony.”
Why It’s Important: Not only will the music engage kids as young as three, but it also encourages global awareness and connection at a young age. Everyone is different and unique, and this book celebrates those differences while singing together as friends.
2.Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids by Carol McCloud
What It’s About: This book introduces an idea that everyone has an “invisible bucket.” These buckets are used to hold your good thoughts and feelings about yourself. When you do something kind, you help fill someone else’s bucket.
Why It’s Important: This provides kids with a visual representation of the importance of kindness. It focuses on social interactions and how our actions positively or negatively affect other people. This book would be especially beneficial as kids begin to develop empathy towards others.
3.A Sick Day for Amos McGee by Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead
What It’s About: This story is about a zookeeper who is great friends with all of the animals and takes the time out of his day to do what they like with them. One day, he is too sick to go to work and the animals decide to come and visit him.
Why It’s Important: This sweet story shows how kind actions towards others are repaid. The animals all take care of Amos when he needs a friend, which shows children how important continual kindness towards others is.
4.Each Kindness by Jacqueline Woodson
What It’s About: This story is about a new girl at school, named Maya and how Chloe, who has gone to the school for a while, reacts when she arrives. Chloe is not welcoming towards Maya and excludes her from the group games. Maya leaves and Chloe is left feeling full of regret.
Why It’s Important: This story does not have the happy ending that so many books do, but teaches a critical lesson. Every choice we makes affects others in either a positive or negative way, and we do not always have an opportunity to fix our negative actions.
5.Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Pena
What It’s About: This 2016 winner of the Newbery Medal follows a young boy, CJ, and his grandmother on their way home one day. CJ spends most of the journey asking “How come…?” questions about everyone and everything. His grandmother answers each question with patience and eventually they leave the bus to volunteer at a soup kitchen.
Why It’s Important: CJ is asking seemingly simple questions throughout the book, but his grandmother’s responses always elicit empathy toward the other characters throughout the book. It serves as a reminder that everyone we encounter has skills and a story, but we must be kind and open-hearted in order to hear it.
6.Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts
What It’s About: In this book, we see a young boy dreaming about getting a pair of really cool shoes. Unfortunately, his family does not have the money for this dream to become a reality. He eventually finds the shoes in a thrift shop in near perfect condition and buys them even though they are too tight. Another kid in his class can’t afford new shoes either, and his feet would fit in the cool shoes when the narrator’s would not. So, the narrator decides to give his shoes away.
Why It’s Important: This book highlights the importance of giving and making difficult decisions. We see the narrator struggle to decide if he can really give his shoes away, but when he decides to, both he and the boy who receive his shoes end up happier than they were before.
7.Horton Hears a Who by Dr. Seuss
What It’s About: This book is about an elephant who discovers an entire community living on a speck of dust. With his big ears, Horton is the only animal in the jungle who is able to hear the Whos. Despite being made fun of by the other animals, Horton stands by Whoville because he knows it is the right thing to do.
Why It’s Important: Not only is Horton doing the right thing, he is doing the right thing while everyone around him is bullying him to give up. This teaches an important lesson about standing by what you believe in, no matter what you face. With older children, you can also use this book to discuss the importance of advocating for those who do not have a voice.
8.Enemy Pie by Derek Munson
What It’s About: This is about a boy who is having a great summer until Jeremy Ross moves in down the street. Jeremy excludes people from birthday parties and laughs when they strike out in baseball. The narrator’s father makes enemy pie to help defeat Jeremy Ross. In order for enemy pie to work, the boys have to play together all day. By the end of the day they are good friends and enjoy the pie together.
Why It’s Important: This tells a classic story of judging a book by its cover or making judgements about people based on insignificant details. After spending quality time together the two enemies learned that they actually got along quite well.
9.Ordinary Mary’s Extraordinary Deed by Emily Pearson and Fumi Kosaka
What It’s About: This story is about an average girl who decides to pick some blueberries for her neighbor. The neighbor bakes blueberry muffins and gives plates of them to five other people. This good deed turns into a chain of strangers doing kind things for other strangers. Eventually, Mary has someone do something nice for her whose kind actions can be traced back to Mary’s blueberry picking.
Why It’s Important: This is another book that shows the important your actions can have on others, but it also shows the ways your actions can ripple out to affect total strangers.
10.The Invisible Boy by Trudy Ludwig
What It’s About: This sweet book tells the story of Brian, a quiet boy who never makes a fuss or much noise at all. He feels invisible compared to the other children who are the center of the teacher’s attention by being loud, or the children with lots of friends who get picked first for sports. When a new kid comes to school, he makes Brian feel a lot less invisible.
Why It’s Important: All kids are different. Some are outgoing and some are quiet. This book celebrates those differences, while teaching the importance of welcoming all types of kids to play and participate.
11.The Three Questions by Jon J Muth
What It’s About: This book is about a boy named Nikolai who wants to be a good person, but is not always sure how. He wants to discover the answer to the three questions: When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do? His three animal friends help him answer these questions, but they all have slightly different approaches. He eventually learns that the right time is now, the important one is the one you are with, and the right thing to do is good.
Why It’s Important: This book takes a more conceptual approach to helping others, but would serve as an extremely useful tool for starting a discussion with older children about why kindness is an important character trait.
12.Rude Cakes by Rowboat Watkins
What It’s About: This book is about a cake, who is, very rude. He never says please or thank you, never listens, and doesn’t share well. One day a giant cyclops takes the rude cake and wears him as a hat. The cyclops has great manners, but the cake hates being a hat. After finally getting away from the cyclops, the cake becomes much more polite.
Why It’s Important: Although this book is quite out there, it teaches how far good manners and behavior can go toward getting what you want.
13.The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein
What It’s About: A familiar book to many, this book tells the heartfelt story of a boy and a tree who loved each other very much, but the boy ends up taking parts of the tree until the tree is worn down into a stump. At the end of the book, the boy (now an old man) just needs a place to sit, so he and the stump sit together.
Why It’s Important: This book shows the continual generosity and kindness of the tree, and how much the actions of the boy affected the tree. It can be used to teach children that kindness is important, but you should never give up so much that you suffer. You can also use it to teach give and take, the importance of a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship.
You might think the best book to read to your young child is one they’ll love. One that, when you close the final page, makes them shout, “Again, again!” One that, before you even say, “Go pick out a bedtime book,” is already in their hand and waving in front of your face, an old and familiar friend.
Or you might think that that book, the one you’ve read 652 times and counting, should meet its untimely death in a pizza oven.
While it’s a good thing that your kid wants you to read the same book over and over—after all, the repetition can bring about a sense of security—it can start to fray on your nerves. To say the least.
Maintaining sanity is easier, however, if you choose excellent books from the outset. The kind of books that you won’t mind reading for the hundredth or thousandth time.
Here are my picks for Books-That-Stand-Up-to-Multiple-Readings:
“In the morning, after she gets up, and moves the cat, and brushes her teeth, and combs her ears, and moves the cat, Olivia gets dressed. She has to try on everything.”
The Pete the Cat books (by Kimberly and James Dean)
“Dear Farmer Brown, The barn is very cold at night. We’d like some electric blankets. Sincerely, The Cows.”
Parts (by Tedd Arnold)
What a great sense of humor! This poor lil dude is convinced he’s falling apart, which will keep you chuckling even after the dozenth read:
“Next day when I was outside playing with the water hose, I saw that little bits of skin were peeling from my toes. I stared at them, amazed, and then I gave a little groan, to think that pretty soon I might be peeled down to the bone.”
Rosie Revere, Engineer (by Andrea Beaty)
This story—encouraging little Rosie to follow her dreams without embarrassment or fear of failure—is so touching, you might never not tear up when you read it to your daughter or son:
“Her great-great-aunt Rose was a true dynamo who’d worked building airplanes a long time ago. She told Rosie tales of the things she had done and goals she had checked off her list one by one.”
Here’s a positive book with a lovely message. Even if it’s the seventh night this week you’re reading it, you’ll feel good about reading:
“I like me wild. I like me tame. I like me different and the same.”
The Pigeon books (by Mo Willems)
The lessons in the Pigeon books are important ones, teaching kids to handle the word “no,” how to ask for things, how to share. The stories are fun and simple and familiar to anyone living with tiny humans.
Take “The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog!” about, yes, the pigeon finding a hot dog, and his curious (and innocent?) chick friend, who says, “I have a question. I’ve never had a hot dog before … What do they taste like?” The pigeon gushes about the snack for a while before realizing the chick may have ulterior motives, saying … “Wait a second. This hot dog is MINE. I found it!”
The Book with No Pictures (by B.J. Novak)
No matter how many times you read this, it’s going to make you laugh. That’s the whole point: to get grown-ups to laugh because they have to say silly things:
“Here is how books work: Everything the words say, the person reading the book has to say. No matter what. That’s the deal. That’s the rule. So that means … Even if the words say … BLORK. Wait—what? That doesn’t even mean anything. Bluurf.”
All things Dr. Seuss
Since 1937, when the first Dr. Seuss book—“And to Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street”—was published, these books have been staples for little kid libraries. Why? Well, we love books that rhyme, don’t we? They’re fun to read, and, if we pick right, we can find plenty of Seuss books with a pretty killer message.
Take “The Lorax” and his message of preserving the forests:
“NOW … thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground, there’s not enough Truffula Fruit to go ‘round. And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!”
In the Night Kitchen (by Maurice Sendak)
Some of the best stories for kids have hidden messages, an extra layer for adults. “In the Night Kitchen” has incredible artwork and a kooky storyline for kids, but according to Sendak, his book actually references the Holocaust—just not in a way little ones would understand:
“(…) the bakers who bake till the dawn so we can have cake in the morn mixed Mickey in the batter, chanting: Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! Stir it! Scrape it! Make it! Bake it! And they put that batter up to bake a delicious Mickey-cake.”
(Disclaimer: This book has had its share of controversy because protagonist Mickey is naked. It’s still one of my personal favorites.)
Any books by Nancy Tillman
The illustrations in these books are especially gorgeous—bold and dreamy—and the stories are sweet.
“On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, ‘Life will never be the same.’ Because there had never been anyone like you … ever in the world.”
I was hauling wood last night. Precious wood… How many board feet did I move? Some of the wood I carried was hearty hard wood with strength that soft pine could never see. I was toting wood that was first used as trim in my house in 1905. I was discarding what seemed like hundreds of piece of more or less good wood. I need to clear my cellar.
So into the construction dumpster the wood was going.
I was using a neighbor’s construction debris bags. Perhaps ‘deconstruction’ debris is a better word.
The house they live in caught fire. I remember the night. I was in deep sleep at about 2 am when my front door rang. I sprang out of bed and went to the front window. I peered at the porch in front of the door; no one was there. I looked to the street and saw a shaved headed man with no shirt on. Was he drunk? He went to the neighbor across the street’s house and rang the door bell. I wondered what he was looking for. I lost sight of him in the bushes in front of my windows.
I heard a woman’s voice call out, the man answered, “Call the fire department, my house is on fire.” He sounded so calm. I wondered which house it was as grabbed some shorts and a tank top and shoes. I heard him give the address to the woman but did not know the house on the main street off our side street. I went out and looked up Pope’s Hill and saw the red and orange flames coming out of a house I knew about fifty yards away. Joe and his wife and young daughter were people I saw every couple of days on the street as I skated, or put out the trash, or trimmed my hedges. They did not have a driveway so they parked on my side street.
Often when I was out skating at 5 o’clock in the morning I would look up on the hill there small house was on and see lights. I knew Joe’s wife liked to get to the gym early in the morning.
The night of the fire I was looking up the hill at a house with flames coming out of a window and licking up the side of the structure. The trees above where glowing with the light. The fire engines came very quickly and soon the double width street was filled with numerous fire and emergency vehicles. Up and down the steep hill there were red and white lights flashing and dozens of people standing around while a crew of ten men went up the steep steps to the house to put out the flames.
I saw Joe talk with fire marshals and he explained that he was asleep around 2 o’clock when he woke up to smoke and the smell of fire. He thought of his wife and daughter, but quickly remembered that they had gone on vacation a day before. I happened to be on the street inline skating when the family walked by to go to their car so Joe could drive his wife and daughter to the airport.
Within hours I was handing a spare shirt to Joe as he stood shirtless on the street watching his home burn.
The multiple crews of the fire brigade smashed their way through windows and doors and walls and put the fire out. The blaze had only been going for about half an hour when it was extinguished. The night was hot, and I heard the fire marshal explain that the men only put in twenty minutes of work before being relieved by another crew. But…the damage to the small house was total. I got a look inside later and saw everything burned, furniture, floor, books, electronic devices….burned and melted and blackened. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the inside of a burned home before. What a lesson in fire safety. That was part of the reason I was clearing all the dead wood out of my cellar.
So as the early evening fell and I was putting out the regular trash barrels and recycle bin I started collecting the waste wood I had from a torn down fence in the backyard. I saw a big crane lifting the full portable dumpster bags that looked like they were about twenty feet by ten feet and four feet high.
There were four of them arrayed on the lawn above the high wall of the hill house. I figured Joe would not mind if I used them, and that the workers would probably not notice the evening additions. I was planning to tell Joe the next time I saw him. I exchanged the t-shirt I gave him for the wood toss.
Despite the investment of hundreds of millions of dollars over the past several decades on the part of pharmaceutical companies, we still don’t have any meaningful treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, in a recent extensive study just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the two most commonly prescribed medications for Alzheimer’s disease not only don’t work, but actually may worsen brain function.
In his inaugural address, President Kennedy stated, “The time to fix the roof is when the sun is shining.” We now know that to a significant degree, Alzheimer’s disease may well be preventable. So let’s get out the ladder and fix the roof.
Our most well-respected medical literature reveals powerful relationships between various lifestyle choices and risk for developing Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers from the Mayo Clinic, for example, revealed that deriving most of dietary calories from carbohydrates was associated with an 89% increased risk for either mild cognitive impairment, or full-blown dementia. In their study, those consuming the highest levels of fat actually demonstrated a 44% reduction in risk. And this is in-line with a New England Journal of Medicine Study showing how Alzheimer’s risk is increased in lockstep with blood sugar measurements, a reflection of dietary choices.
Higher levels of physical exercise translate into lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease as well. Even having good levels of vitamin D seems to be associated with a significantly reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease.
Getty ImagesBounce
There are certainly a lot of factors that may be associated with either increased or decreased Alzheimer’s risk, but just paying attention to those listed above will move the needle in terms of improving brain health and function an increasing your resistance to Alzheimer’s disease.
I’m a board-certified neurologist with over 30 years of clinical practice under my belt. As a neurologist, I became increasingly frustrated with the idea of simply waiting for something to happen and then hoping there would be a drug to fix it. And to be sure, losing my father to Alzheimer’s disease certainly strengthened my mission to emphasize the importance of prevention as it relates to this devastating illness.
So, let me tell you how I personally leverage the very best science to reduce my Alzheimer’s risk.
• Eating few carbs, lots of healthy fat. Our dietary choices are hugely influential in our overall health, and perhaps nowhere else is this as evident as it relates to brain health. I limit my net carbs to around 30 to 50 g a day, and add in a lot of terrific fat in the form of extra virgin olive oil, nuts and seeds, and wild fish. I also supplement with the omega-3, DHA, 1000mg each day, as well as MCT oil, 1-2 tablespoons daily. This diet, along with the MCT oil, helps to create ketones, a specific type of fat that’s extremely beneficial for brain function and protection.
Getty Imagesdulezidar
• Supplementing here and there. Other supplements supported by good science include vitamin D, whole coffee fruit concentrate, turmeric, a good probiotic, and B complex.
• Working out daily. Sure, we know that exercise is good for us and generally makes us feel good, but the extensive literature relating to higher levels of exercise to reduce risk of Alzheimer’s disease makes it clear that this is a lifestyle choice too good to turn down. So, I do at least 30 minutes of aerobic activity every day, including running, using an elliptical machine, or biking. Resistance training is also very important, and while I do favor free weights, I certainly spend plenty of time using machines as well. Finally, although I can’t specifically relate stretching to directly reducing Alzheimer’s risk, stretching can help reduce your risk of injury and therefore will help prevent you from getting sidetracked from your exercise program.
Hopefully, there will come a day when scientists do develop an effective Alzheimer’s treatment. But for now, we’ve got to do everything we can to implement the science that supports the idea that to a significant degree, Alzheimer’s is a preventable disease.
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David Perlmutter, M.D.David Perlmutter, M.D., is a board-certified neurologist, a fellow of the American College of Nutrition, and a New York Times bestselling author.
I searched online told see…with a search for ‘Xenagogue Vicene.’ Dozens and dozens of images, many from this blog.
These pictures go from cave art to satellites above the Earth, hand draw to computer generated. I love the area of images and melange of subjects and books and women and history and news. So many devices to capture and manipulate and create and recreate pictures. Straight lines and curved lines and dots and pixels. I have an art gallery at my fingertips.
“Men who sleep badly,” Bertrand Russell wrote, “are always proud of the fact.”
Illustration by Jun Cen
Contemporary sleep evangelizers worry a good deal about our social attitudes toward sleep. They worry about many things, of course—incandescent light, L.E.D. light, nicotine, caffeine, central heating, alcohol, the addictive folderol of personal technology—but social attitudes seem to exercise them the most. Deep down, they say, we simply do not respect the human need for repose. We remain convinced, in contradiction of all the available evidence, that stinting on sleep makes us heroic and industrious, rather than stupid and fat.
“If we don’t continue to chip away at our collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success, we’ll never be able to restore sleep to its rightful place in our lives,” Arianna Huffington wrote a couple of years ago, in her best-selling how-to guide “The Sleep Revolution.” By way of inspiration, she offered her own conversion story. She was once lackadaisical about getting enough rest. She thought that to get on she had to stay up. Only when months of chronic exhaustion led her to pass out and break her cheekbone on her desk did she wake up, as it were, to the madness and masochism of her work ethos and set about repairing her “estranged relationship with sleep.” These days, she retires at an eminently sensible hour each night, takes a hot bath with Epsom salts, drinks a cup of lavender or chamomile tea, and, just before getting into bed, writes a list of the things she is grateful for—which is a great way, she tells us, to “make sure our blessings get the closing scene of the night.” As a consequence of her sleep-hygiene regimen, not only has her quality of life improved but her business has done fabulously, too. Sleep isn’t the enemy of success and ambition, she’s discovered, it’s the royal road to the corner office. “Sleep your way to the top!” she jauntily enjoins us.
Although Huffington’s book has doubtless been helpful for many, her proselytizing leaves the misleading and slightly infuriating impression that sleep is a life-style choice, a free resource, available to all who care enough to make it a priority. It is a beguiling idea, that one might transform one’s sleep, and the rest of one’s life, with a few virtuous acts of renunciation—no electronics in the bedroom, no coffee after 2 P.M.—and a few dreamy self-care rituals involving baths and tea. But the fact that some of the leading indicators for poor sleep and sleep loss are low household income, shift work, food insecurity, and being African-American or Hispanic suggests that the quest for rest is not so simple. Huffington does acknowledge, in passing, that “the vicious cycle of financial deprivation also feeds into the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation,” but she goes on to note, piously, that “the more challenging our circumstances, the more imperative it is to take whatever steps we can to tap into our resilience to help us withstand and overcome the challenges we face.” The tone here is reminiscent of Mrs. Pardiggle, in “Bleak House,” distributing improving literature to the slum-dwelling poor. Try telling the lady at the food bank that she should tap into her resilience and sleep her way to the top.
Or try offering that advice to an insomniac. Chronic insomnia, a condition that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, currently afflicts some forty million Americans, is not really caused by coffee and Facebook, although it may certainly be aggravated by these things. According to the neuroscientist Matthew Walker—in his 2017 book, “Why We Sleep”—insomnia, strictly defined, is a clinical disorder most commonly associated with an overactive sympathetic nervous system, and it is triggered, typically, by worry and anxiety. Insomniacs can write twee lists of their blessings until the cows come home, but their cortisol levels will still tend to look as if they’re gearing up to storm the Bastille. Walker likens the insomniac’s problem to that of a laptop that won’t stop running, even after its lid is closed: “Recursive loops of emotional programs, together with retrospective and prospective memory loops, keep playing in the mind, preventing the brain from shutting down and switching into sleep mode.”
The same image appears in “Insomnia” (Catapult), a short, ludic book about long white nights, by the British writer, and veteran insomniac, Marina Benjamin:
On nights when I cannot easily will myself back to sleep because the switch has already flipped to ON, I begin to sense some unknown part of my brain, some lower-order, engine-room, grafter gland, busy itself running an hours-long system scan. . . . Patiently, systematically, this biological algorithm roots through my store of mental files, searching out broken bits of code—ideas that refuse to link up, shards and stray threads of mental activity—and desperately tries to join them.
There is much here about the misery and indignity of her condition. Benjamin likens her insomnia to a sad, coked-up old swinger who doesn’t want the party to end and insists on keeping her out on the dance floor, swaying along unhappily to his mortifying gyrations. She writes feelingly about the frustrations of being awake when you don’t want to be: the bleak thoughts that are apt to beset a person lying silent in the darkness at 3 A.M.; the intense loneliness; the desperation brought on by the impossible project of trying to relax. “I try to stay my galloping pulse,” she writes, “by thinking of water or mountains, or fluffy sheep. I tell myself I am heavy, heavy, heavy. I pursue sleep so hard I become invigorated by the chase.” One of the particular cruelties of insomnia is that any conscious effort to fall asleep tends to worsen the problem, which is why some therapists recommend the technique of “paradoxical intention”—tricking yourself into sleep, by trying to stay awake.
Yet for all her sorrow and self-pity Benjamin is rather pleased by her solitary nighttime self and the neurotic, “choleric” temperament from which she believes her insomnia springs. Cholerics, she writes, “are individualists and pioneers who like to lead and to seek out exhilarating experience. . . . Restless at night, they are assailed by indigestion and stress, or by violent dreams that jolt them into states of feverish or fiery readiness.” Her moans about her futile thought-loops alternate with flattering descriptions of her radiant nocturnal consciousness: “It is as if all the lights in my head had been lit at once, the whole engine coming to life, messages flying, dendrites flowering, synapses whipping snaps of electricity across my brain; and my brain itself, like some phosphorescent free-floating jellyfish of the deep, is luminescent, awake, alive.”
This slightly preening sense of specialness is not uncommon among insomniacs—particularly, it seems, the writerly sort. Bertrand Russell observed that “men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.” Such pride, he speculated, was a feint on their part—an effort to turn a frailty into an advantage—and perhaps he was right. Vladimir Nabokov’s famous dismissal of “the moronic fraternity” of sleep certainly sounds like someone turning up his nose at a club that won’t have him: “I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive.” But in the insomniac’s self-satisfaction there is also, perhaps, a genuine fear of the nonbeing, the nullity, of sleep. When Benjamin discusses her dislike of mindfulness and meditation techniques, she remarks that she is terrified of the “stupefaction” and “blankness” to which she imagines they lead. She yearns for the replenishment of sleep, but she doesn’t want “to slip unknowingly from being into nothing.” Aristotle called sleep “a privation of waking,” and a simultaneous longing for and resistance to that privation seems to lie at the heart of insomnia’s torment.
Alice Robb’s book “Why We Dream” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is a spirited rebuke to the idea of sleep as a mere parting with consciousness. In exploring the pleasures and uses of dreams, she seeks to persuade us that sleep is not just the “off” to waking’s “on” but another realm of being, a second consciousness, rich in adventure and wisdom. The contemporary indifference to our dream lives, she writes, is a regrettable historical anomaly, one that leads us to squander “five or six years’ worth of opportunity (20-25 percent of total time asleep) over the course of an average lifetime.”
The greater community of dream enthusiasts includes, by Robb’s own admission, a fair number of cranks. At the annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, held in a medieval abbey in the Netherlands, she encounters people who believe in dream telepathy, and in using “energy fields” for dream interpretation. She also attends a dire-sounding Dream Ball, at which attendees dress up as characters and enact scenes from their dreams. Nonetheless, she is able to tread a careful and persuasive line between robust skepticism and open-mindedness, resisting the tendency of some dream explorers to conflate “their own intuition with evidence,” but also acknowledging that the line between mystic garbage and truth can be blurry. She quotes a Harvard psychology professor, Deirdre Barrett, who accepted a paper on extrasensory perception for the academic journal Dreaming, which she edits. “My stance is that what defines scholarly research is the approach and the design,” Barrett says. “It’s anti-science to insist on a conclusion.”
Science has long understood that REM sleep—the stages of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement, in which most dreaming takes place—plays a vital role in our mental health. The human need for REM is so uncompromising that, when it is inhibited over a long period by excessive alcohol use, the pent-up backlog will release itself in a form of waking psychosis, otherwise known as delirium tremens. For a long time, the scientific establishment suspected that dreams were a superfluous by-product of the REM state. But in recent decades, thanks in large part to the advent of brain-imaging machines, scientists have been able to establish that dreams themselves are essential to the benefits of REM sleep. First, dreams knit up the ravelled sleeve of care by allowing us to process unhappy or traumatic experiences. Typically, during the REM state, the flow of an anxiety-triggering brain chemical called noradrenaline is shut off, so that we are able to revisit distressing real-life events in a neurochemically calm environment. As a result, the intensity of emotion that we feel about these events in our waking lives is reduced to manageable levels. In “Why We Sleep,” Walker attributes the recurring nightmares of P.T.S.D. sufferers to the fact that their brains produce an abnormal amount of noradrenaline, preventing their dreams from having the normal curative effect. When the dreaming brain fails to diminish the emotion attached to a traumatic memory, it will keep trying to do so, by revisiting that memory night after night.
Dreams also help us to master new skills; practicing a task or a language in our sleep can be as helpful as doing so when we are awake. And they appear to be crucial in honing our capacity for decoding facial expression: the dream-starved tend to slip into default paranoia, interpreting the friendliest expressions as menacing. Perhaps most alluring, dreams help us to synthesize new pieces of information with preëxisting knowledge, and to make creative lateral connections. The long list of inventions and great works said to have been generated in dreams includes the periodic table, the sewing machine, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be,” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
According to Robb, there is a means by which we can harness the visionary and problem-solving capacities of dreaming: the lucid dream. This is the kind of dream in which a person is aware of dreaming, and is able to wield some control over events—to decide to fly, say, or to visit Paris. “Those who master lucidity,” Robb writes, “can dream about specific problems, seek answers or insights, stage cathartic encounters, and probe the recesses of the unconscious.” Fifty-five per cent of people have experienced lucidity at least once, apparently, but most of us need to train ourselves to dream lucidly with any consistency. The main training method requires you to ask yourself at regular intervals during the daytime whether you are asleep or awake. The idea is that, since waking habits have a tendency to show up in dreams, you are likely to pose the same question while you are asleep. When you ask yourself “Am I awake?” and the answer is no, lucidity should theoretically commence.
Oscar Wilde is said to have identified the most frightening sentence in the English language as “I had a very interesting dream last night.” Robb, who regularly attends dream groups at which people take turns analyzing one another’s dreams, fiercely disputes this prejudice. “One of the saddest consequences of our cultural contempt for dreaming is the trope that dreams make for boring conversation,” she writes. Whether she helps or hinders her argument by citing the dream-centric badinage of the Rarámuri tribe of northwestern Mexico is debatable. The Rarámuri, for whom “ ‘What did you dream last night?’ is rivalled only by ‘How many times did you have sex?’ as the most popular morning greeting among men” will strike many readers as an excellent advertisement for the virtues of discretion on oneiric matters.
The two chief factors determining your interest in someone else’s dreams would seem to be your level of emotional investment in the person telling the dream and the extent to which you believe that dreams can be intelligently interpreted. Nabokov, who had quite a rich dream life and often used dreams in his fiction, was briefly taken by a hokey theory that dreams were precognitive, but otherwise he maintained that they were without significance, a stance probably influenced by his extreme antipathy to Freudian theory. “I have ransacked my oldest dreams for keys and clues,” he wrote, “and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare’s works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents.” By now, widespread disenchantment with Freud’s interpretive code has resulted in a wholesale dismissal of dreams’ latent content. In “Why We Sleep,” Walker concedes that dreams tell us something useful about our underlying emotional concerns, but he insists that the information they deliver is “transparent” and requires no interpretation. This is a convenient position for someone who is uncomfortable about the absence of any scientific method for validating interpretations, but it is not a very satisfactory one. What is the “transparent” meaning of the dream in which your teeth fall out? What is the unambiguous message of “Kubla Khan”?
Part of the charm of Robb’s book lies in her willingness to journey beyond the bounds of what is scientifically verifiable—to embrace the strictly unrigorous ways in which humans attempt to extract meaning from their dream lives. The readings that she and her fellow-enthusiasts come up with in their groups are amateurish, opinionated, riddled with vaguely therapeutic cliché—but so, too, are the literary interpretations generated in the average book club, or the stories that most of us tell ourselves about our waking behavior. In celebrating dreams as poetic artifacts, Robb offers a welcome antidote to the medicine administered by most sleep gurus. She is a more persuasive sleep saleswoman precisely because she does not champion slumber solely as a mental-health aid—an enhancer of acuity and efficiency, and so forth—but as an end in itself. She did not succeed in selling me on the concept of the dream group, but her spirited advocacy has persuaded me to make some modest efforts to remember my dreams and to keep a dream journal. The results, it has to be said, have not been very exciting so far. I appear to spend an inordinate amount of my dream life on the subway or squabbling with ex-boyfriends. The other night, I did encounter some famous figures, both living and dead, but, alas, I wasted my allotted time with them discussing, at rather tedious length, my desire to have a lucid dream. ♦
For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that heart disease is the leading cause of death among Americans; in fact, in 2015 heart disease accounted for one in every four deaths. Although there are several types of heart disease, the most common is coronary artery disease (CAD), an accumulation of cholesterol and other substances along arterial walls. This buildup forms a plaque that over time narrows the arteries and impedes blood flow. Undiagnosed or poorly controlled CAD eventually weakens the heart and raises the risk for a heart attack.
What causes CAD? Of course genes are involved, as well as factors such as tobacco use, sedentary lifestyle, a diet high in processed foods and saturated fat, stress, high blood pressure and obesity. However, a risk factor that is sometimes overlooked is the natural waning of reproductive hormones, i.e., estrogen and testosterone.
During a woman’s transition into menopause, a period often referred to as perimenopause, her progesterone, testosterone and estrogen levels begin declining. According to Cleveland Clinic, this raises a woman’s risk for CAD because estrogen increases good cholesterol (HDL), decreases bad cholesterol (LDL), relaxes blood vessels and absorbs free radicals in the blood that can potentially damage blood vessels.
As a man enters his 40’s, he begins experiencing andropause, an age-related decrease in testosterone. According to the Mayo Clinic, a man usually has a one percent drop in testosterone every year after age 40. Research published in Nature linked low testosterone levels with CAD risks such as obesity, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome, as well as an overall risk for cardiovascular disease.
To help offset the potential health problems associated with low hormone levels, scientists developed Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) for women and Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) for men. However, various journals have published conflicting articles concerning the risks and benefits associated with HRT and TRT.
For instance, a study in the British Journal of Medicine suggested that HRT lowers the risk of heart disease; whereas, research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association linked HRT with heart disease and breast cancer. As general guidance for the medical community, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) recommends living a heart-healthy lifestyle and using HRT for specific medical conditions.
Additionally, articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and PLOS ONE reported an increased risk for heart attacks and strokes among men who began using TRT. Meanwhile, authors of an article published in the Journal of Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics and a review in the Journal of the American Heart Association found that TRT contributed to maintaining heart health. Experts at Harvard Men’s Health Watch explained that evidence supporting the heart-health benefits of TRT is mixed, and the long-term effects are not fully understood yet.
Fortunately, there are tactics you can try to naturally boost your estrogen and testosterone levels. For example:
Controlling stress – When stressed, our bodies release cortisol, a hormone that may cause an estrogen imbalance and block the effects of testosterone. View tips to help you manage stress.
Strength training – Studies have suggested that intense strength training may help raise testosterone levels. When training, try to regularly increase the amount of weight being lifted, lower the number of repetitions and select exercises that work multiple muscles groups, e.g., squats. Be sure that you consult your MDVIP-affiliate physician before beginning or revamping an exercise program.
Eating foods that can help raise estrogen and testosterone levels.
Studies conducted by the Linus Pauling Institute of Oregon State University indicated that eating plant-based foods that contain phytoestrogens may help women raise estrogen levels. Examples of such foods include:
Seeds: flaxseeds and sesame seeds
Fruit: apricots, oranges, strawberries, peaches, many dried fruits
Results from research conducted by the University of Texas at Austin suggested that men can help raise their testosterone levels by eating foods high in monounsaturated fat and zinc. Also, a study published in Biological Trace Element Research concluded foods high in magnesium can help maintain testosterone levels. That said, consider including the following foods in your diet.
Oils: olive, canola and peanut (monounsaturated fat)
Avocados (monounsaturated fat and magnesium)
Olives (monounsaturated fat)
Nuts: almonds and cashews (monounsaturated fat, zinc and magnesium)
Oysters (zinc)
Wheat germ (zinc)
Shellfish: lobster and crab (zinc)
Chickpeas (zinc)
Oatmeal (zinc)
Kidney beans (zinc)
Raisins (magnesium)
Dark green leafy vegetables (magnesium)
Bananas (magnesium)
Low-fat yogurt (magnesium)
Aside from maintaining appropriate hormone levels, you can also lower your risk of CAD by working with your physician.
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xenagoguevicene 