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the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.

as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.

One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.

This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category

he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt

the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.

Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.

“We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.

There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”

the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.

Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”

There’s little predictability in how things will play out after this anthropogenic jolt, especially in the living world. [More on the “great acceleration” behind the jolt is here.]

That’s a very different sensation than, say, mourning the end of nature. It’s more a celebration, in a way — a deeper acceptance of our place on the planet, with all of our synthetic trappings, and our faults, as fundamentally natural.

on whether it’s possible to have a “good Anthropocene.” Kolbert’s Twitter post last spring nicely captured their view:

Taking full ownership of the Anthropocene won’t be easy. The necessary feeling is a queasy mix of excitement and unease. I’ve compared it to waking up in the first car on the first run of a new roller coaster that hasn’t been examined fully by engineers.

Once you begin to get the many feedbacks bouncing off each other and bouncing off the Earth system, it’s going to be very hard to follow what’s going to happen, particularly biologically…. One could not imagine, at the very end of the Cretaceous, the beginning of the Tertiary, that the mammals — these itty-bitty little squeaky furry things, would take over – effectively taking the position that the dinosaurs held for so long. All we can say is that, for sure, it will be different. We’re going down a different trouser leg of history.

in the broadest sense we have to embrace the characteristics, good and bad, that make humans such a rare thing — a species that has become a planet-scale force.

“The way I would like to see it is in, say, 100 years in the future the London Geological Society will look back and consider this period…a transition from the lesser Anthropocene to the greater Anthropocene.”

Fully integrating this awareness into our personal choices and societal norms and policies will take time. It is “the great work,” as Thomas Berry put it.

Technology alone will not do the trick. Another keystone to better meshing humanity’s infinite aspirations with life on a finite planet will be slowly shifting value systems from the foundation up

Edward O. Wilson’s “Biophilia” was a powerful look outward at the characteristics of the natural world that we inherently cherish.

Now we need a dose of what I’ve taken to calling anthropophilia, as well.

We have to accept ourselves, flaws and all, in order to move beyond what has been something of an unconscious, species-scale pubescent growth spurt, enabled by fossil fuels in place of testosterone.

We’re stuck with “The World With Us.” It’s time to grasp that uncomfortable, but ultimately hopeful, idea.

That percentage was up to 37 by 2003. Today, half of America's homeless are over 50.

In fact, people born in the second half of the baby boom (1955-1964) have had an elevated risk of homelessness compared to other age groups throughout their lives.

funded by the National Institute on Aging, has been asking 350 participants in a study we've been conducting since July 2013 in Oakland, California.

In the United States, more than 30 percent of renters and 23 percent of homeowners aged 50 and older spend more than half of their household income on rent.

California has the highest housing costs of any large state, and they are rising faster than elsewhere. It is not surprising that Oakland has a large homeless population.

common perception of homelessness is that it is a problem that afflicts only those with mental health and substance use problems.

They are also disproportionately people of color: Oakland's population is 28 percent African American, but 80 percent of our study participants are.

One of our participants spoke of the shock of losing his job after 27 years:

As research shows, homeless people in their 50's and 60's have similar or worse health problems than people in the general population who are in their 70's and 80's.

The point our study highlights is that the systems set up in the 1980s were not designed to serve an aging population.

An individual who has spent 30 years rotating between institutional care and the streets requires different services than a 54-year-old man who has become homeless for the first time after a period of extended unemployment.

This research sheds interesting light on how humans have influenced and continue to influence the climate. It's a complicated relationship and our knowledge is always evolving.

He also suggests humans are more powerful than they realize. "The bottom line is that we are basically skipping a whole glacial cycle, which is unprecedented.

The workers I interviewed after the recession for my book on unemployment—less-educated factory workers—offer some tentative clues about what might be driving the disquieting trends described by the Case and Deaton study.

This is one of the groups hit hardest by the rising inequality and greater risk of unemployment and financial insecurity that have become features of today’s economy, and their experiences put in concrete terms how the economy and culture have become more hostile to workers not lucky enough to be working in posh offices on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.

When it comes to explaining American economic trends, it is important to remember how critical a role manufacturing and unions have played in the building—and now dismantling—of a strong middle class.

or generations, factories provided good jobs to people who never went to college, allowing families—first white ethnic immigrants, and then others—to be upwardly mobile.

But in the late ’90s—the beginning of the crisis period that Case and Deaton identify—the number of manufacturing jobs in the U.S. dropped dramatically.

Political leaders, bankrolled by the wealthy, rolled back the interventionist policies of the New Deal and postwar period.

Corporations, once relatively tolerant of unions, tapped a cottage industry of anti-union consultants and adopted unseemly tactics to crush any organizing drives in their workplaces.

the two-thirds of Americans over the age of 25 who don’t have a bachelor’s degree

Certainly, it cannot be said enough that African Americans and Latinos continue to fare significantly worse than whites in terms of their overall rates of death and disease, even if the racial gap has narrowed.

. In the decades after World War II, racial minorities were denied many of the jobs, loans, and other resources that allowed the white majority to buy homes and accrue wealth.

If the gains of economic growth have gone largely to the rich in recent years, in that earlier period the white working class could count on hefty rises in living standards from generation to generation, and they grew accustomed to that upward trajectory of growing prosperity.

For example, while the disappearance of high-paying jobs for those with little education is a large part of the overall story of a shrinking middle class, it can’t wholly account for the uptick of mortality identified in the Case and Deaton study.

Likewise, the groups that have been affected most viciously by these market trends in the U.S., African Americans and Latinos, have not suffered the dramatic increases in death by suicide or substance abuse that whites have.

hite Americans, for instance, are more likely to see success as the result of individual effort than African Americans are (though not Hispanics). The less educated, particularly less-educated whites, also share this view to a disproportionate degree.

As scholars of family life as politically distinct as Andrew Cherlin and Charles Murray have stressed, college graduates and the less educated have greatly diverged in terms of when and how they partner up and have kids.

Nowadays, well-educated couples are much more likely to marry, stay married, and have children within marriage than those with less schooling.

A large part of the explanation for this must be that society’s attitudes about the sanctity and permanence of marriage have changed. But it’s important to note that there is an economic dimension to these trends, too—as the frequent separations and divorces I saw among the long-term unemployed made plain to me.

Those struggling financially are less likely to follow the traditional path of first comes marriage, then comes a baby.

The waning of religious belief may be another trend aggravating the modern malaise of the white working class. Since the ’90s, the number of Americans who declare no religious preference on surveys has almost tripled—from 8 percent at the beginning of that decade, to 21 percent in 2014.

Many said their faith was helping them get through their ongoing troubles, yet they rarely or never went to church. Some felt ashamed to be around people because they were out of work.

For others, their religious belief was somewhat a source of self-help, rather than a source of community.

The larger context of this isolation and alienation is America’s culture of individualism. It, too, can worsen the despair. Taken to an extreme, self-reliance becomes a cudgel: Those who falter and fail have only themselves to blame.

America’s frontier spirit of rugged individualism is strong, and it manifests itself differently by race and education level, too.

When asked in national surveys about the people with whom they discussed “important matters” in the past six months, those with just a high-school education or less are likelier to say no one (this percentage has risen over the years for college graduates, too).

To this day, the supreme value of education remains one of the few things that Americans of all persuasions (presidential candidates included) can agree on.

Some of the analysis of the Case and Deaton article has focused rightly on recent developments in this country’s drug crisis—namely, the surge in abuse of prescription opioids, and the resurgence in heroin use, notably among whites.

There is clearly a pressing need to deal more vigorously with this drug problem and the epidemic of fatal overdoses and liver disease that has affected the poor and working class in particular.

At the same time, it should be said that risky individual behaviors are shaped by broader social conditions. As the researchers Bruce Link and Jo Phelan have argued, effective health interventions need to consider the underlying factors that put people “at risk of risks”—specifically, socioeconomic status and social support.

One parting observation, then, is that policies to keep people from sinking into poverty and long-term unemployment can make a huge difference.

it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic

most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial g

Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s

These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.

There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.

Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.

hey also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.

even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water

the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.

these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of lif

graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend

most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates

It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s

Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time

Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilitie

Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.

Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence

there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending

Nearly 60 percent of Republicans between the ages of 23 and 38 say that climate change is having an effect on the United States, and 36 percent believe humans are the cause.

That’s about double the numbers of Republicans over age 52.

voters under the age of 53 cast 62.5 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections. Those 53 and older, by contrast, were responsible for 60.1 million votes.

“Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month,”

voters under the age of 30 found that 73 percent of respondents disapproved of Mr. Trump’s approach to climate change

Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.

“There’s a lot of people out there who would probably vote Republican if they knew there was a conservative agenda on climate change,” Mr. Backer said. Instead, he said, “They’re going to go to the Democratic Party, because that’s the only party that’s talking about the environment.”

The full effect quite likely will not be felt until after the 2020 election cycle. President Trump’s campaign appears to have identified a strategy for winning re-election that relies on polarizing the electorate on issues like race, immigration and, it seems, climate change

“You can be skeptical of climate change all you want, but young people aren’t, and there’s no way conservatives are going to win elections if we don’t deal with climate change,” said Benjamin Backer, 21, the coalition’s founder and president

a Republican polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies. Speaking of younger Republicans, the firm concluded that “climate change is their most important issue” and called the numbers “concerning” for the party’s future.

“I completely agree that we’re offending the climate,” Mr. Bagley said. “But the solutions that are being introduced to fix it are going to drive us back into the Dark Ages.”

a video of 11 Trump voters around a hotel conference table in Florida discussing climate change. Government can’t be trusted to solve climate change, the focus group agreed. But like Mr. Bagley, they also all agreed that climate change is real.

“Republican orthodoxy is changing,” Mr. Flint said. “You’re safe saying you acknowledge climate change.”

“It’s a matter of honesty,” he said. “Voters believe it is happening, at the very least, they want their politicians to acknowledge reality.”

Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant and a former campaign adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said 2020 candidates in different states would take various approaches to climate change

“Someday Republicans are going to have to come up with some proposals that are responsive to these issues and, frankly, be more reasonable and more thoughtful.”

But ventilators and other organ-support machines impose a lot of stress on the body, and older people are often too frail to be put on them.

positive test rates remained identical between groups. On the 13th, the vaccinated group’s rate fell slightly. Then, on day 14, it dropped by a third.

Israel is the place to watch for the first evidence about how mass vaccination may change things, for it has vaccinated its citizens faster than anywhere else.

Ran Balicer of the Clalit Research Institute in Tel Aviv and his colleagues compared, day by day, a group of 200,000 over-60s who had been vaccinated with an otherwise-similar group of unvaccinated individuals.

Normally, these units have one nurse per patient. Increasingly, however, ICU nurses are having to care for several patients each.

the picture will not be clear until the second doses have been administered, and results from younger people have been included, too.

the country’s national lockdown, which tends to reduce the rate regardless of the effect of vaccines, and the spread of B.1.1.7, a variant of the virus first found in Britain, which is a lot more contagious and so tends to push the rate up.

the day when the proportion of those over 60 who had been vaccinated reached 40%. The number critically ill with covid-19 in that age group grew by about 30% in the week before January 2nd, and also in the following week—but by just 7% in the week after that

among those aged between 40 and 55 (who were vaccinated at a much lower rate at the time) the weekly change in the number of critically ill remained constant, with a 20-30% increase in each of those three weeks.

Eran Segal of the Weizmann Institute and his colleagues reckon that covid-19 deaths in Israel could start tapering off early in March, even if the lockdown ends, as planned, in the last week of January

80% of adults get their second dose by the end of February. (The other 20% are people who cannot be vaccinated for reasons such as allergies, or who refuse to be vaccinated.)

University of Virginia law professor Michael Doran — who held tax policy roles at the Treasury Department under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — calls the current state of affairs “the great American retirement fraud.”

Secure 2.0 would take the fraud to a new level: Its congressional supporters have engaged in Enron-style accounting gimmicks to mask the bill’s effects on deficit

from the outset, IRAs were a generous gift to the upper class. At the time, very few low- and middle-income individuals could afford to stash $1,500 in a retirement account each year — median income for U.S. households was $11,100 in 1974 — so the people taking full advantage of the new IRAs tended to be relatively rich

since the benefit was structured as a deduction, it was worth more to taxpayers in higher income brackets.

In the nearly half-century since, Congress has continually expanded the amount that individuals can pour into tax-deferred savings accounts.

Now, the JCT estimates that 401(k)s and other similar defined-contribution plans cost the federal government $200 billion per year.

individuals can contribute up to $6,000 per year to an IRA ($7,000 if age 50 or older), plus $20,500 to a 401(k) ($27,000 for 50-year-olds and up), with their employers potentially chipping in to bring the 401(k) total to $61,000 ($67,500 for the over-50 set).

In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 58 percent of taxpayers with wage income made no contribution to 401(k)-style plans, and less than 4 percent bumped up against the contribution cap.

As of 2020, approximately 63 percent of U.S. households had no such accounts.

(The very largest IRAs, like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s reported $5 billion account, result from a different loophole: the ability of founders and early-stage investors to stuff IRAs with start-up stock

When JCT released data last summer showing that 28,615 taxpayers had accumulated $5 million or more in IRAs, lawmakers cried foul. Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), who as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee is the top tax writer in the House, lamented the “exploitation” of IRAs. “IRAs are intended to help Americans achieve long-term financial security, not to enable those who already have extraordinary wealth to avoid paying their fair share in taxes,”

I calculated that an individual who made the maximum 401(k) contributions since 1990, investing exclusively in an S&P 500 index fund, would have more than $7 million in her account today.

Forbes revealed more than a decade ago that Thiel and another PayPal co-founder were using their IRAs to shelter entrepreneurial earnings; the Government Accountability Office flagged the IRA-stuffing phenomenon in 2014; and rather than clamping down, lawmakers from both parties sat on their hands.)

The Secure 2.0 bill, sponsored by Neal, doubles down on the inequities of the status quo. It will inevitably result in even more of the mega-IRAs that Neal and other Democrats decry.

Under current law, taxpayers must begin to take withdrawals from their 401(k)s and traditional IRAs at age 72. (It had been 70½ before Secure 1.0, signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2019, raised the age by a year and a half.

Secure 2.0 would bump that up to age 75. The change would mean that taxpayers with supersize IRAs could enjoy three extra years of tax-free growth before they needed to take money out

Lower-income retirees wouldn’t benefit because they don’t have the luxury of holding off on withdrawals, which they need to cover living expenses.

Another provision would lift the cap on 401(k) catch-up contributions at ages 62, 63 and 64 from $6,500 to $10,000. Factoring in employer matching contributions, that would raise the maximum 401(k) inflow to $71,000 per year.

if lawmakers were genuinely concerned about retirement security for people who need it, they wouldn’t start by aiding taxpayers who can afford to save more each year than most Americans earn. The higher limit on catch-up contributions will simply allow high-income taxpayers to race further ahead.

The top-weighted benefits of Secure 2.0 might be tolerable if they were offset by other tax increases on the rich — if this were all just moving money from one deep pocket to another. But the items audaciously labeled as “revenue provisions” in the bill generate revenue as real as Monopoly money.

The Rothification provisions in Secure 2.0 bring $35 billion of revenue into the 10-year window — ostensibly offsetting the cost of the bill’s giveaways — but the $35 billion is pure make-believe: It comes at the expense of an equivalent amount of revenue down the road.

If lawmakers from either party were truly concerned about the plight of low-income retirees, they would focus on strengthening Social Security, which actually provides a safety net for older people, rather than adding more deficit-financed bells and whistles to retirement accounts for the rich.

the council confirmed that 200 items, believed to be from the Bronze Age, were found.

The Bronze Age in Britain lasted from 2,300 B.C. to 800 B.C., during a period referred to as prehistoric England, before there were written records,

Bronze axes, she said, are “common enough that you would expect to find one, but rare enough to be excited when you do.” She added, “What’s unique about this one is the number of finds in one place, making it a hoard.”

Over the last two decades, museums around Britain have acquired more than 5,000 artifacts that were found by members of the public, including Bronze Age axes, Iron Age cauldrons and Roman coin hoards.

The growing popularity of metal detecting as a hobby meant that more historical objects were being found, including some of archaeological significance that did not meet the previous “treasure” definition, which had been in place since the 1990s. In 2019, 1,311 pieces went through the process in which a committee determines whether an item should be considered treasure, the highest number on record. In 1997, 79 pieces were found.

Since her discovery, Milly has gone out on most Sundays with her grandfather and father in search of more items. She says that when she grows up, she wants to be an archaeologist.

“The Romans have been there, everyone has been there — and we’re the ones to find it,”

But I do think it’s going to be a while before this virus becomes completely normal. And I’ve never been convinced that this current generation of elderly people will ever get to a place where it is completely normal. If you’re 65 or 75 or even older — it’s really hard to teach an immune system new tricks if you’re that age

And so while we may see excess mortality in the elderly decline somewhat, I don’t think we’ll see it ever disappear for this generation who was already old when the pandemic hit. Many will never develop that robust, long-term immunological memory we would want to see — and which happens naturally to someone who’s been exposed hundreds of times since they were a little baby.

There’s a similar story with measles. There is no routine later-life sequelae, like shingles, for measles. But what we do see is that, in measles outbreaks today, there are some people who were vaccinated who get it anyway. Maybe 5 to 15 percent of cases are not immunologically naïve people, but vaccinated people.

Is it really the case that, as babies, we are fighting off those viruses hundreds of times?The short answer is yeah. We start seeing viruses when we’re 2 months old, when we’re a month old. And a lot of these viruses we’ve seen literally tens, if not hundreds of times for some people by the time we’re adults. People tend to think that immunity is binary — you’re either immune or you’re not. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a gradient, and your protection gets stronger the more times you see a virus.

We used to think we just had this spectacular immune response when we first encountered the virus at, say, age 6, and that the immune response lasted until we were 70. But actually what we were seeing was the effect of an immune system being retrained every time it came into contact with the virus after the initial infection — at 6, and 7, and 8, and so on. Every time your friend got chickenpox, or your neighbor, you got a massive boost. You were re-upping your immune response and diversifying your immunological tools — potentially multiple times a year, a kind of natural booster.

But now, in America, kids get chickenpox vaccines. So you don’t have kids in America getting chickenpox today, and never will. But that means that older Americans, who did get it as kids, are not being exposed again — certainly not multiple times each year. And it turns out that, in the absence of routine re-exposures, that first exposure alone isn’t nearly as good at driving lifelong immunity and warding off shingles until your immune system begins to fall apart in old age — it can last until you’re in your 30s, for example but not until your 70s.

With Covid, when it infects you, it can land in your upper respiratory tract and it just start replicating right there. Immediately, it’s present and replicating in your lungs and in your nose. And that alone elicits enough of an immune response to cause us to feel really crappy and even cause us to feel disease.

But we could have just set the narrative better at the beginning: Look, you might get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be really low, and if you get a booster, you might still get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be even lower. That’s something I think humans can deal with, and I think the public could have understood it.

But it’s why we don’t see the severe disease as much, with a second exposure or an exposure after vaccination: For most people, it’s not getting into the heart and the liver and stuff nearly as easily.

But it doesn’t have to. It’s still causing symptomatic disease. And maybe mucosal vaccines could stop this, but without them we’re likely to continue seeing infections and even symptomatic infections.

through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?

The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists. And, in general, physicians don’t know anything about the details.

But this failure had some pretty concrete impacts. When reinfections first began popping up, people were surprised, they were scared, and then, to some degree, they lost trust in vaccines. And the people they were turning to for guidance — not only did they not warn us about that, they were slow to acknowledge it, as well.

It had dramatic impacts and ripple effects that will last for years to limit our ability to get populations properly vaccinated.

the worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic.

And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?

For babies born today, though, I really think they’re not going to view Covid as any different than other viruses. By the time they are 20, it will be like any other virus to them. Because their immune systems will have grown up with it.

Instead, we set society up for failure, since people feel like the government failed everyone, that biology failed us, and that this was a crazy virus that has broken all the rules of our immune system, when it’s just doing what we’ve always known it would do.

How do you wish we had messaged things differently? What would it have meant to communicate early and clearly that Covid was a textbook virus, as you say?I think the biggest thing would have been just to say, we understand the enemy.

To say that this is a textbook virus, it doesn’t mean that it’s not killing people. Objectively, it’s still killing more people than any other infectious disease

What it means is that we could’ve taken action based on what we knew, rather than waiting around to prove everything and publish papers in Nature and Science talking about things we already knew.

We could have prepared for November and December of 2020 and then for November and December of 2021. But everyone kept saying, we don’t know if it’s going to come back. We knew it was going to come back and it makes me want to cry to think about it. We did nothing and hundreds of thousands of people died. We didn’t prepare nursing homes because we all got to the summer of 2020 and we said, cross our fingers.

We knew how tests worked. We knew about serial testing and why it was important for a public health approach. We knew that vaccines could have really good impacts once they were around. And if you were looking through the correct lens, we even knew that they weren’t going to stop transmission.

We didn’t have to live in a world where we were flying blind. We could have lived in a world where we’re knowledgeable. But instead, we chose almost across the board to will ourselves into this state of fear and anxiety.

And that really started in the earliest days. Almost the first experience I had was a lot like that movie with Jennifer Lawrence —Don’t Look Up.

none of this was complicated. You just had to ask a simple question: what would happen if you took away all immunity from an adult? Well, once you control for no immunity, adults are going to get very, very sick.

Of course, by and large, babies didn’t get very sick from this disease.Babies are immunologically naïve, but they are also resilient. A virus can tear up a baby, but a baby can repair its tissue so fast. Adults don’t have that. It’s just like a baby getting a cut. They’ll heal really quick

An adult getting a cut — you go by age, and every decade of age that you are, it’s going to take exponentially longer for that wound to heal. Eventually get to 80 or 90 and the wound can’t even heal. In the immunology world, this is called “tolerance.”

why are all these organ systems getting damaged when other viruses don’t seem to do that? It’s natural to think, it’s Covid — this is a weird disease. But it’s much more a story about immunity and how it develops than about the virus or the disease. None of our organ systems had any immune defenses around to help them out. And I think that the majority of post-acute sequelae and multi-organ complications and long Covid — they are not the result of the virus being a crazy different virus, but are a result of this virus replicating in an environment where there were such absent or exceedingly low defenses.

Is it the same whenever we encounter a virus for the first time?Think about travelers. Travelers get way more sick from a local disease than people who grew up with that virus. If you get malaria as a traveler, you’re much more likely to get really sick. You don’t see everyone in Nicaragua taking chloroquine every day. But you definitely see travelers taking it, because malaria can be deadly for adults.

What about, not severity, but post-acute complications — do we have long malaria? Do we have liver complications from dengue?

The really hard part of answering that question is there’s just not enough data on the frequency of long-term effects, because nothing like this has ever happened at such scale. It’s like everyone in Europe and North America suddenly traveled to a country where malaria was endemic.

Or think about H.I.V. It essentially kills your immune system, and once the immune barriers are down, other viruses that used to infect humans would get into tissues that we didn’t like them to get into. If there wasn’t such a clear signal of a loss of CD-4 T cells to explain it, people might still be scratching their heads and going, man, I wonder why all these patients are getting fungal infections. Well, there’s a virus there that’s depleting their immune system.

Covid is absolutely waking the world up to this — to the fact that there are really weird long-term sequelae to viruses when they infect organ systems that would normally be protected. And I think we’re going to find that more and more cancers are being attributed to viral infections.

It wasn’t that long ago that we first learned that most cases of cervical cancer were caused by H.P.V. — I think the 1980s. And now we have a vaccine for H.P.V. and rates of cervical cancer have fallen by two-thirds.

what about incidence? We’ve talked at a few points about how important it is to think about all of these questions in terms of the scale. What is the right scale for thinking about future long Covid, for instance, or other post-acute sequelae?

I think the absolute risk, per infection, is going down and down and down. That’s just true.

he U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which shows a much lower risk of developing long Covid now, from reinfection, than from an initial infection earlier in the pandemic.

the worst is definitely behind us, which is a good thing, especially for people who worry that the problems will keep building and a lot of people — or even everyone — will get long Covid symptoms. I don’t think there’s a world where we’re looking at the babies of today dealing with long Covid at any meaningful scale.

a lot of the fear right now comes from the worst cases, and there’s a lot of worst cases. Even one of the people that I know well, I know in their mind they’re worried that they’ll never recover, but I think objectively they are recovering slowly. It might not be an eight month course. It might be a year and a half. But they will get better. Most of us will.

This vision involves “a mix of dependence on others and obligations to them,” Levin writes, “and so a connection with specific people with whom you share some meaningful portion of the actual experience of life.”

Levin understands the allure of nostalgia; indeed, he believes that almost all contemporary politics is based on it

These competing nostalgias, though more sophisticated than Trump’s, are no less misguided, and lead to bad politics and policy.

Sure, there is plenty to long for, Levin says. In the early decades of the post-World War II era, the United States enjoyed “relative cultural cohesion, low economic inequality, high confidence in national institutions, and widespread optimism about the nation’s prospects” (especially if you were white and male). But that was a unique pivot point in U.S. history, a time when the country was straddling two opposing forces that would define the American century: consolidation and diffusion.

The first half of the 20th century, Levin contends, was an age of consolidation, with a peerless industrial economy, a strong centralized government and a relatively uniform cultural identity shaped by a powerful mass media.

In the century’s second half, by contrast, the U.S. economy became more diversified and deregulated, while cultural conformity broke down in favor of individualism and the politics of personal identity.

for a fleeting moment at midcentury, it enjoyed the best of both. “The social, political, and economic forms of American life at midcentury made possible a degree of prosperity and cohesion that in turn enabled many Americans to flourish,”

“Democrats talk about public policy as though it were always 1965 and the model of the Great Society welfare state will answer our every concern,”

Republicans talk as though it were always 1981 and a repetition of the Reagan Revolution is the cure for what ails us.”

This stale — and stalemated — debate leaves people discouraged with politicians who don’t seem engaged with their current struggles. “In the absence of relief from their own resulting frustration, a growing number of voters opt for leaders who simply embody or articulate that frustration,”

the nostalgia of the traditional political class is also pernicious and “blinding,” Levin argues, because it keeps us from grappling with the real problems assaulting us in the age of diffusion

“In liberating many individuals from oppressive social constraints, we have also estranged many from their families and unmoored them from their communities, work, and faith,”

“Rather than decrying the collapse of moral order, we must draw people’s eyes and hearts to the alternative.” Their incessant focus on religious liberty, for example, while important, may be counterproductive, “a fundamentally plaintive and inward-looking minority asking to protect what it has and in essence to be left alone,”

In unleashing markets to meet the needs and wants of consumers, we have freed them also to treat workers as dispensable and interchangeable.

In pursuing meritocracy, we have magnified inequality.”

“In loosening the reins of cultural conformity and national identity we have weakened the roots of mutual trust.

he worries that the price of this new freedom has been high. “We have set loose a scourge of loneliness and isolation that we are still afraid to acknowledge as the distinct social dysfunction of our age of individualism, just as crushing conformity was the characteristic scourge of an era of cohesion and national unity,”

The answer to all this is the pursuit of what Levin describes as a “modernized politics of subsidiarity — that is, of putting power, authority and significance as close to the level of interpersonal community as reasonably possible.”

He is most concerned with the thicket of institutions in the middle — families, schools, religious organizations, all the things usually lumped together as civil society.

“we should see it as an effort to open up the space between them — the space where a free society can genuinely thrive.” Our objective should be to “channel power and resources to the mediating institutions of society and allow for bottom-up problem solving that takes a variety of specialized, adapted forms.”

It is a very Tocquevillian vision, with a dash of Catholic social teaching thrown in. No doubt, to yearn for the renewal of these traditional institutions is its own kind of nostalgia.

So how do we go about strengthening families, religious organizations, schools and all those mediating institutions?

He calls for a “mobility agenda,” with economic growth spurred by tax and regulatory reform

a more competitive and low-cost health-care system, lower budget deficits — all part of a standard conservative recipe.

He proposes education reform that includes more professional certificates, apprenticeships “and other ways of gaining the skills for well-paid employment that do not require a college degree.”

Levin’s intention here is less to offer detailed proposals than to shift the locus of policymaking itself — and to infuse it with greater humility. “There is not much that public policy can do,” he admits, “to create communities that do a better job of encouraging constructive behavior: it could, however, do less harm, and it could leave room for such communities to form, and protect the space in which they take root and grow.”

The result is a bifurcated America, torn between wealth and poverty, order and disorder. “Increasingly, society consists of individuals and a national state, while the mediating institutions — family, community, church, unions, and others — fade and falter.”

Instead, social and religious conservatives should “assert themselves by offering living models of their alternative to the moral culture of our hyper-individualist age.”

In other words, less hectoring and lecturing, less trying to remake the culture at large, and more strengthening one’s “near-at-hand community,” Levin writes. He calls this approach “subcultural traditionalism

he sees it in “civic groups that channel their energies into making neighborhoods safe and attractive, or into helping the poor, or protecting the vulnerable, or assimilating immigrants, or helping fight addiction

in schools that build character and inculcate the values parents think are most important; in religious congregations that mold themselves into living communities of like-minded families, and that turn their faiths into works to improve the lives of others;

in the work of teachers and students who are committed to liberal learning and engagement with the deepest questions.”

Such a localized focus, Levin maintains, is not “an alternative to fighting for the soul of the larger society, but a most effective means of doing so.”

I suspect the fulfillment of Levin’s vision would require a party and a movement that grasp the exhaustion of their current approach. A November defeat, especially a landslide, might accomplish that

Our foundation of Earth knowledge, largely derived from historically observed patterns, has been central to society’s progress. Early cultures kept track of nature’s ebb and flow, passing improved knowledge about hunting and agriculture to each new generation. Science has accelerated this learning process through advanced observation methods and pattern discovery techniques. These allow us to anticipate the future with a consistency unimaginable to our ancestors.

But as Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge. Some patterns will change significantly; others will be largely unaffected

The list of possible disruptions is long and alarming.

Historians of the next century will grasp the importance of this decline in our ability to predict the future. They may mark the coming decades of this century as the period during which humanity, despite rapid technological and scientific advances, achieved “peak knowledge” about the planet it occupies

One exception to this pattern-based knowledge is the weather, whose underlying physics governs how the atmosphere moves and adjusts. Because we understand the physics, we can replicate the atmosphere with computer models.

But farmers need to think a season or more ahead. So do infrastructure planners as they design new energy and water systems

The intermediate time period is our big challenge. Without substantial scientific breakthroughs, we will remain reliant on pattern-based methods for time periods between a month and a decade. The problem is, as the planet warms, these patterns will become increasingly difficult to discern.

The oceans, which play a major role in global weather patterns, will also see substantial changes as global temperatures rise. Ocean currents and circulation patterns evolve on time scales of decades and longer, and fisheries change in response. We lack reliable, physics-based models to tell us how this occurs.

Our grandchildren could grow up knowing less about the planet than we do today. This is not a legacy we want to leave them. Yet we are on the verge of ensuring this happens.

For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.

Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.

Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.

Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.

One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.

The metaphor my colleagues often use invokes religion. In Wannabe U, the author describes the process of trying to turn UConn into a nationally competitive school as the faculty being ‘dechurched’. In this metaphor, we are a separate estate of society that has putative access to its resources, as well as the right to reject democratic oversight, managerial imperatives, and market discipline. We answer to no one but ourselves.

When the economic support from the Golden Age began to crack, we tenured faculty couldn’t be forced to share much of the pain. Our jobs were secure, so rather than forgo raises or return to our old teaching loads, we either allowed or encouraged those short-term fixes—rising tuition, larger student bodies, huge introductory lectures.

All that was minor, though, compared to our willingness to rely on contingent hires, including our own graduate students, ideal cheap labor. The proportion of part-time and non-tenure track teachers went from less than half of total faculty, before 1975, to over two-thirds now

In the same period, the proportion of jobs that might someday lead to tenure collapsed, from one in five to one in ten. The result is the bifurcation we have today: People who have tenure can’t lose it. People who don’t mostly can’t get it.

If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.

The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.

why is not part of the answer a secondary education certification scheme that is serious and ideally nation-wide. The British GCSE/A-levels is something that seems to work. Herding the cats that would be necessary to implement something like that is, I grant, a monstrous task, but perhaps no more difficult than revising the university system. As things stand now, the lack of standards in most high schools means wasted opportunities of academic development for a very large part of our reasonably gifted teenage population. A revised university system would still leave in place the distinctly inadequate high school system we have now.

The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible.

The metaphor I have come to prefer (influenced especially by Richard Rorty) is that we in the academy are workers, and our work is to make people smarter — ourselves, our peers, our students, which is a goal that has to be constantly negotiated among various constituencies.

When the military rationale for both the GI Bill and the Soviet struggle ended, so did overall American interest in the kind of funding that drove the Golden Age. There is not now and has never been a broad commitment to higher education as a social good in this country

ow you can say — and many of my colleagues do — that this is all just a matter of getting state governments to take on different concerns or convictions, or getting a more nationalized educational system. That was the song my parents, both educators, sang, and the song I grew up singing. But the period when the states really drove funding up lasted just 15 years — 1960 to 1975 — and has been in decline for 40 years since.

I can — barely — imagine some states increasing some subsidies to some campuses at a rate faster than inflation. Some of the schools in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Michigan are candidates for this. I cannot, however, imagine my tenured colleagues tolerating the situation that makes higher education broadly affordable in social democracies, which would require us earning less while teaching more.

I am done, in other words, thinking of myself and my peers on faculty as blameless, and I am done imagining that 40 years of evidence from the behavior of democratically elected legislatures is some sort of readily reversible blip. I do not believe that the caste system that has established itself at elite institutions can be funded at the rate which we insist we need, and I do not believe that we will willingly see any of our own benefits reduced to help our junior colleagues or our students.

Students feel compelled to acquire credentialing as a means of improving their economic positions. Unfortunately, along the way, “professional” training has taken precedence over education. The two have become conflated in the public mind.

Today it is not only that the PhD:s are abundant but also that in many areas peak knowledge is short lived. You might be competent when you graduate but five years later that competence is of yesteryear and the ones with the newest knowledge kick you out just like you kicked someone else out five years ago. We need a base to stand on but then we need to go in and out of education during our whole lives to keep up with development. This puts a strain on each end everyone of us as individuals but it also calls for a whole new role for academia

Change the game and lower the transaction costs: Instead of treating students as backseat passengers in a higher educational vehicle that’s geared towards the transmission of self-contained content, i.e., content produced by professors for the self-serving purpose of publication–put steering wheels in the hands of students, take them out on road trips, negotiate real problems–and they will become self-educating

Note that having a college degree only retains value right now because there isn’t a better (more predictive, and trusted) credential to be had for people who are seeking jobs.

the online versions of education have reduced the college experience down to what’s easy to implement and easy to measure: receiving lectures, and activities of the quiz-and-test variety. It’s not clear that the value of the traditional old-school college experience (and it’s accompanying degree) were the result of those particular aspects of the experience. Granting degrees based only on coursework runs the risk of diluting the perceived value of the degree.

A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.

I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus

to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.

The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system

the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.

every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!

There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,

depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.

When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”

While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies

the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house

fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students

It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row

the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster

The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify

The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus

But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses

the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today

during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.

Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.

This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?

The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.

American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.

Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene

In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor

Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers

, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities

lawsuits began to pour in.

Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.

For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.

comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.

you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual

the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.

there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.

these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.

But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.

Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?

“I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance

, the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years

the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”

the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.

So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?

I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.

the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

unusually high-resolution analysis of pollen grains taken from sediment beneath the Sea of Galilee and the western shore of the Dead Sea, backed up by a robust chronology of radiocarbon dating, have pinpointed the period of crisis to the years 1250 to 1100 B.C.

this pollen count was done at intervals of 40 years — the highest resolution yet in this region,

the uniqueness of the study also lay in the combination of precise science and archaeological and historical analysis, offering the fullest picture yet of the collapse of civilization in this area at the end of the Bronze Age. “Egypt is gone. Forever,” said Professor Finkelstein. “It never got back to that level of prosperity again.”

the team extracted about 60 feet of cores of gray muddy sediment from the center of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel, passing through 145 feet of water and drilling 65 feet into the lake bed, covering the last 9,000 years. At Wadi Zeelim in the southern Judean Desert, on the western margins of the Dead Sea, the team manually extracted eight cores of sediment, each about 20 inches long.

Pollen grains are one of the most durable organic materials in nature, she said, best preserved in lakes and deserts and lasting thousands of years. Each plant produces its own distinct pollen form, like a fingerprint. Extracting and analyzing the pollen grains from each stratum allows researchers to identify the vegetation that grew in the area and to reconstruct climate changes.

The results showed a sharp decrease in the Late Bronze Age of Mediterranean trees like oaks, pines and carobs, and in the local cultivation of olive trees, which the experts interpret as the consequence of repeated periods of drought.

The droughts were likely exacerbated by cold spells, the study said, causing famine and the movement of marauders from north to south. After the devastation came a wet period of recovery and resettlement, according to the experts — a new order that gave rise to the kingdoms of biblical times.

The fatal synergy between human and natural disasters eradicated perhaps one-third of the human population.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms

One consequence of crop failures and food shortages stands out in French military records: Soldiers born in the second half of the 1600s were, on average, an inch shorter than those born after 1700, and those born in the famine years were noticeably shorter than the rest.

In the 17th century, the fatal synergy of weather, wars and rebellions killed millions. A natural catastrophe of analogous proportions today — whether or not humans are to blame — could kill billions. It would also produce dislocation and violence, and compromise international security, sustainability and cooperation.