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jlessner

France's Wrinkle in Time - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Well, in the spring the United States begins daylight saving time several weeks before most of Europe, while in the autumn — this week, in fact — most of Europe ends daylight saving time a week before the United States. Admittedly, some might find this revelation irrelevant, but let me assure you: For airline pilots, trans-Atlantic travelers and the significant number of American expatriates in Europe, these glorious weeks are God’s time.
  • There is actually a group in France dedicated to the cause. The French Association Against Double Summer Time is made up of about 500 members who — in their spare time, naturally — do what they can to let people know that it’s time for a change.
  • Ms. Gabarain and her colleagues point out that, geographically, France is clearly in the wrong time zone. Based on its location, it ought to be on Greenwich Mean Time (like England) instead of Central European Time (like Poland). That fact explains why it has been pitch-black outside until 8 a.m. here this month — Freezing Time, as my daughter Hannah calls it — and also why we basically have to hang thick black vinyl sheets on our curtain rods in July if we want the children to go to sleep before 11 p.m.
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  • The French were actually on Greenwich Mean Time (now called Coordinated Universal Time) as recently as 1940. There were a series of time-zone switches during World War II as Germany occupied part of France, but after the war was over, France was supposed to return to Greenwich Mean Time in 1945. Alas, for reasons that are not altogether clear, the French government canceled that decision at the last moment and has remained on Central European Time ever since.
Javier E

A white Southerner searches for the source of his family's racism - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • What was it in white Southern mores, folkways or history that made this such an indelible — though not unique — characteristic of theirs, that allowed so many of them to do such things or simply to stand in complicit silence, without a peep from conscience, as such things were done all around them?
  • “The Making of a Racist” is at its best in its early chapters as it recounts the author’s childhood indoctrination into the casual racism of the Jim Crow South. Racism was in the books he read. It was in the history he was taught. It was in the social conventions he observed. It was in the jokes he learned. It was like air or water, something that you didn’t question or think about, something that was just . . . there.
  • both were racists in an explicitly racist region, and both passed that to their son. One comes away from those coming-of-age chapters with renewed appreciation for the subtle yet ruthless efficiency with which systemic bigotry reinforces itself. And Dew’s recounting of his slow break from that system is compelling.
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  • race — what Dew calls “the absolute belief in white supremacy — unquestioned white superiority/unquestioned black inferiority” — only deepens the question. What does that mean? Where does that belief come from? What sustains it?
  • It survives, I think, largely because after all these years we cannot imagine ourselves without it, because we are emotionally invested in the intellectually lazy notion that eye shape, hair texture or melanin content can somehow be correlated to individual destiny, honesty, athleticism, musicality, intelligence and worth.
  • As Martin Luther King Jr. once put it: “If it may be said of the slavery era that the white man took the world and gave the Negro Jesus, then it may be said of the Reconstruction era that the Southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. And when his wrinkled stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.
  • “I don’t know where my head or heart was,” he said. “I don’t know where my parents’ heads and hearts were, or my teachers’. . . . We were blind to the reality of racism and afraid, I guess, of change.”
Javier E

'Not I,' by Joachim Fest - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • the elder Fest is described as “tailor-made for a career” with the Nazis. And yet some quirk in his personality made him a fierce Weimar republican, ready to sacrifice himself, even his family, to principles he knew to be right even as everyone around him was yielding to mass hysteria.
  • It reminds us that simple human decency is possible even in the most trying of ­circumstances.
  • One of the largest changes in their lives, however, was watching friends and acquaintances withdraw from them.
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  • Among the greatest surprises, Johannes later recalled, was that it was impossible to predict who, of the people they knew, would stand by them and who would shun them.
  • Joachim reports that his father once said of his Jewish friends that “in their self-discipline, their quiet civility and unsentimental brilliance, they had really been the last Prussians” — the embodiment of all that was good and right about Germany. (It’s necessary to add a wrinkle here: At least some of these Jewish-German conservatives would probably have become Nazis if they could have.
  • Joachim offers a rueful meditation on the fraught German-Jewish relationship, saying it went much deeper than the French-Jewish or English-Jewish connection, and suggesting that the Holocaust “may be interpreted as a kind of fratricide.”
  • Joachim Fest’s fascinating memoir about what it was like to come of age during the years of the Third Reich is unusual because its central character is not the author but the author’s remarkable father. Johannes Fest was the middle-class headmaster of a primary school in suburban Berlin, a pious Catholic and father of five, a cultural conservative who revered Goethe and Kant, and a loyal German patriot
Maria Delzi

Afghanistan's Worsening, and Baffling, Hunger Crisis - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • In the Bost Hospital here, a teenage mother named Bibi Sherina sits on a bed in the severe acute malnutrition ward with her two children. Ahmed, at just 3 months old, looks bigger than his emaciated brother Mohammad, who is a year and a half and weighs 10 pounds.
  • Afghan hospitals like Bost, in the capital of war-torn Helmand Province, have been registering significant increases in severe malnutrition among children. Countrywide, such cases have increased by 50 percent or more compared with 2012, according to United Nations figures. Doctors report similar situations in Kandahar, Farah, Kunar, Paktia and Paktika Provinces — all places where warfare has disrupted people’s lives and pushed many vulnerable poor over the nutritional edge.
  • Reasons for the increase remain uncertain, or in dispute. Most doctors and aid workers agree that continuing war and refugee displacement are contributing. Some believe that the growing number of child patients may be at least partly a good sign, as more poor Afghans are hearing about treatment available to them.
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  • What is clear is that, despite years of Western involvement and billions of dollars in humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, children’s health is not only still a problem, but also worsening, and the doctors bearing the brunt of the crisis are worried.
  • Nearly every potential lifeline is strained or broken here. Efforts to educate people about nutrition and health care are often stymied by conservative traditions that cloister women away from anyone outside the family. Agriculture and traditional local sources of social support have been disrupted by war and the widespread flight of refugees to the cities. And therapeutic feeding programs, complex operations even in countries with strong health care systems, have been compromised as the flow of aid and transportation have been derailed by political tensions or violence.
  • Perhaps nowhere is the situation so obviously serious as in the malnutrition ward at Bost Hospital, which is admitting 200 children a month for severe, acute malnutrition — four times more than it did in January 2012, according to officials with Doctors Without Borders, known in French as Médecins Sans Frontières, which supports the Afghan-run hospital with financing and supplementary staff.
  • One patient, a 2-year-old named Ahmed Wali, is suffering from the protein deficiency condition kwashiorkor, with orange hair, a distended belly and swollen feet. An 8-month-old boy named Samiullah is suffering from marasmus, another form of advanced malnutrition in which the child’s face looks like that of a wrinkled old man because the skin hangs so loosely.
  • Médecins Sans Frontières helped Bost Hospital nearly double the number of beds in the pediatric wing at the end of last year, and there are still not enough — 40 to 50 children are usually being treated each day, mostly two to a bed because they are so small. Nearly 300 other children, less severely malnourished, are in an outpatient therapeutic feeding program.
  • “It’s quite an unusual situation, and it’s difficult to understand what’s going on,” said Wiet Vandormael, an M.S.F. official who has helped coordinate with Bost Hospital.
runlai_jiang

BBC - Travel - The people descended from Spartans - 0 views

  • the Mani peninsula is home to a clannish community that claims warrior heritage.
  • From the steep hilltops, stone houses resembling small castles stand with their backs to the colossal Taygetos mountains and look out over the stoic Ionian Sea.
  • This is the land of the Maniots, a clannish community said to be descended from Spartans, the legendary warriors of Ancient Greece.
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  • He had the build of a warrior – sturdy and broad-shouldered – but his wrinkled face was warm and relaxed.
  • Oikonomeas grew up in the village of Neochori on the Mani Peninsula’s north-west coast and never left.
  • Oikonomeas explained that I was savouring a snack that was likely eaten thousands of years ago by Greece’s infamous soldiers.
  • “Lelegas, the first king of Sparta, was probably the first one to manufacture it,”
  • n 371BC, the Spartans were defeated by soldiers from the city-state of Thebes, sparking the downfall of Sparta.
  • But the Spartans living on the Mani peninsula, sheltered from the rest of the Peloponnese by the Taygetos mountains, held strong, defending their territory for centuries from the Thebans, and later Ottoman, Egyptian and Franc forces, among others
  • Oikonomeas still remembers his mother spooning hardboiled eggs into his mouth to make him stronger, insisting that as the only boy it was up to him to continue the family legacy.
  • until the 1970s, when construction of new roads opened the peninsula to the rest of the Peloponnese, that the Maniots began to embrace newcomers.
  • During its time as an autonomous region, the peninsula was governed by different families, or clans;
  • e clans struggled for power, violent vendettas erupted that could last for years.
  • “The punishment was inflicted on the whole clan and not just the perpetrator
  • Such was the Maniot sense of pride.” He noted that until recently Maniots would refer to their sons as ‘guns’ and their daughters as ‘barrels with gunpowder at the foundations of their house’.
  • That’s not the only reminder. Almost anyone who was born and raised on the Mani peninsula will tell you they have Spartan blood in their veins.
  • The region remained self-governing until the mid- to late 19th Century, when the Greek government reduced the peninsula’s autonomy.
  • ral to recite mourning songs at h
  • Any trace of authentic Spartan DNA long ago disappeared; all that’s left of the warriors are their legends. Some historians and anthropologists say similarities between ancient and modern rituals – like the mourning songs – are strong indicators of a relationship between Ancient Spartans and modern Maniots,
Javier E

Opinion | When Republicans Rejected John Bolton - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Mr. Bolton, President Bush’s under secretary of state for arms control and international security, had a general disdain for diplomacy that rankled several Republican members of the committee, including George Voinovich of Ohio and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. Mr. Lugar had quietly counseled the administration not to nominate him.
  • That disdain, in and of itself, did not sink his nomination. Rather, it was the testimony we heard and evidence we uncovered that Mr. Bolton had a habit of twisting intelligence to back his bellicosity and sought to remove anyone who objected
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  • As under secretary of state, Mr. Bolton insisted that Cuba was attempting to build a biological weapons program. The national intelligence officer for Latin America and the State Department’s top biological weapons expert disagreed. In a fit of rage, Mr. Bolton tried to have both reassigned.
  • Mr. Bolton made it something of a habit to request the identity of American officials whose names had been blacked out of sensitive intelligence intercepts. Some members of the Foreign Relations Committee were concerned that he was seeking information to use against those who disagreed with him — the very kind of improper “unmasking” that President Trump has falsely accused some members of the Obama administration of pursuing.
  • Other witnesses came forward to allege abusive behavior by Mr. Bolton during his time as a lawyer in the private sector — screaming, threatening, throwing documents and, in the words of one woman, “genuinely behaving like a madman.”
  • In a remarkable speech to his colleagues on the committee, a visibly pained Mr. Voinovich explained his decision to vote against Mr. Bolton, effectively killing the nomination. We’ve heard, he said, that Mr. Bolton is “an ideologue and fosters an atmosphere of intimidation. He does not tolerate disagreement. He does not tolerate dissent.”
Javier E

A caravan of angry Michiganders exposes the complicated politics of the coronavirus shu... - 0 views

  • Video from the scene shows people milling around the cars, many of them sporting signs and flags supporting President Trump.
  • The irony, of course, is that what’s being protested is, in broad strokes, what Trump himself has advocated at the state level: efforts to reduce interactions and, therefore, limit the spread of the virus.
  • “COVID-19 infection rates are rising more slowly, public health officials are talking about lights at the end of the tunnel, and models show Michigan hitting it’s viral ‘peak,’ ” a blog post from the group reads. “That’s good news and suggests that we’re moving in the right direction.”
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  • “Meanwhile in Lansing, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has extended and expanded her lockdown order,” it continues, “keeping Michigan workers off the job site and preventing them from feeding their families.”
  • This is a false dichotomy. Rates of infection are dropping almost certainly because of the stay-at-home order. As we’ve seen elsewhere, the effectiveness of a measure to contain the virus is being used as a rationale for revoking the measure.
  • here’s another wrinkle, too. The group was founded by Greg McNeilly, political adviser to the DeVos family, a powerful name in Michigan Republican politics who’ve also contributed to the group financially.
  • This is precisely the line that Trump is trying to walk: encouraging skepticism of Democrats and boosting the idea that the shutdown should come to an end — but cognizant to at least some degree of what happens if the shutdown ends too early.
  • For all of his bluster about having the authority to decide what happens, the protest makes clear how the political position in which Trump finds himself is in at least one way lucky. He can advocate the policy — and see that governors get the blame.
  • Data compiled by Johns Hopkins University show that about two weeks after the March 23 order, the number of confirmed cases in the state each day began to drop. A few days later, the number of deaths from covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, did, as well. In recent days, though, those figures have moved back up.
mimiterranova

Pfizer And Moderna Make Progress On COVID-19 Vaccine Goals : Shots - Health News : NPR - 0 views

  • President Biden's promise that there will be enough vaccines for every U.S. adult by the end of May has some Americans wondering if it's too good to be true.
  • Nearly 64 million Moderna doses and 61 million Pfizer doses had been distributed as of Wednesday afternoon. The first doses went out shortly after the Food and Drug Administration authorized the vaccines for emergency use in December.
  • Help has included using the Defense Production Act, a wartime power both Biden and former President Donald Trump have used to speed vaccine manufacturing. The Biden administration also helped Pfizer obtain equipment that it couldn't get during the Trump administration.
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  • "That's in an ideal situation," said Baylor, now president and CEO of Biologics Consulting. "But there could be fluctuations . . . So it doesn't mean that there are catastrophic issues, but it does mean that something has — most likely in the manufacturing process, could be in testing — something has delayed that entire manufacturing process to miss the mark."
  • "So much of drug manufacturing and vaccine manufacturing is pretty opaque. We don't ... have a lot of visibility there,"
  • There one's other wrinkle worth noting. Pfizer and Moderna only need to "release" the doses to the government to fulfill their contractual obligations, meaning the doses don't have to leave the factories to be counted toward the commitment. The companies just have to say they're ready to go for distribution. So the companies can hit their contractual targets before the doses are delivered to vaccination sites.
Javier E

For 2020 Democratic Candidates, Nerdiness Is Good - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the educational composition of the two parties has diverged. From 1997 to 2017, the share of registered Republican voters who finished college stayed the same. Among Democrats, it rose by 15 points. T
  • In 2010, Democrats were seven points more likely than Republicans to say that colleges and universities have a positive effect on America. By 2017, they were 36 points more likely.
  • a decade or two after Bush and DeLay realized that anti-intellectualism mobilizes Republicans, Warren and Buttigieg have realized that intellectualism mobilizes Democrats
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  • To the debates over whether America is ready for a woman or a gay president, Warren and Buttigieg are adding an additional wrinkle: Is it ready for a nerd president, too?
brookegoodman

Uber disposes of tens of thousands of bikes, sparking backlash - CNN - 0 views

  • Washington, DC (CNN)Videos and photos are surfacing of thousands of Uber's Jump bikes and scooters stripped of parts and crammed into trucks to be scrapped.
  • Roughly 20,000 to 30,000 Jump vehicles have now disappeared from streets nationwide in recent weeks, according to estimates from four former Jump employees. Uber confirmed that tens of thousands of its bikes and scooters are being "recycled."
  • Asked why Lime did not take all of Jump's bikes, the spokesman said the company took the newest bikes that will allow it to offer a quality bikeshare service over the long term. The rest were left for Uber to deal with.
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  • "Our acquisition of JUMP was a direct investment in the idea that the best way to get around a city is sometimes not in a car at all," Khosrowshahi said in a Sept. 2018 blog post. By 2019, Uber users were taking six times as many trips on Jump's vehicles compared with the year before.
  • Shared bikes like Jump's are generally made with proprietary parts, which better protects them from theft and vandalism, but makes it all but impossible for a local bike shop to perform maintenance.
  • Bikeshare companies have donated bikes in the past, and some groups told CNN Business they would have been interested in such an offer.
  • Unlike Spin and Ofo bicycles, Jump's bikes have the additional wrinkle of an electric battery, which wasn't designed to be charged in someone's home. The battery could be removed, but the bikes weigh about 75 pounds, making them difficult to pedal.
  • Cris Moffitt, who posted online videos of Jump bikes being scrapped, said he hoped to spur the company to donate any remaining bikes to a non-profit. Moffitt said he depended on a bike in college to get to work and school after he wrecked his car.
aleija

How Mail Votes Could Delay Election Results - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It’s possible that we won’t know who won on election night.
  • Why? Well, tens of millions of people are voting by mail this year, and counting each ballot involves numerous steps, many of them done by hand. And some critical battleground states don’t start processing mail-in ballots until Election Day or very close to it.
  • Once election officials receive a ballot, they get it ready for counting. This stage is known as pre-processing, and in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and some parts of Michigan, it doesn’t start until Election Day.
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  • Ballots are then flattened so that they can be run through scanners.Officials inspect the ballots for wrinkles, tears, stains or smeared ink — all things that can throw off a scanner.
  • If there is a problem with the envelope, some states allow officials to contact the voter to “cure” the deficiency. In some cases, ballots that cannot be cured are “spoiled” and, if there is time, the voter is issued a new ballot. In other cases, uncured ballots are marked for rejection.
  • Officials in Pennsylvania and Michigan have said results could take several days to report.
Javier E

Opinion | Fixing Health Care Starts With the Already Insured - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Health insurance is supposed to provide financial protection against the medical costs of poor health. Yet many insured people still face the risk of enormous medical bills for their “covered” care. A team of researchers estimated that as of mid-2020, collections agencies held $140 billion in unpaid medical bills, reflecting care delivered before the Covid-19 pandemic
  • that’s more than the amount held by collection agencies for all other consumer debt from nonmedical sources combined
  • three-fifths of that debt was incurred by households with health insurance.
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  • in any given month, about 11 percent of Americans younger than 65 are uninsured. But more than twice that number — one in four — will be uninsured for at least some time over a two-year period.
  • Perversely, health insurance — the very purpose of which is to provide a measure of stability in an uncertain world — is itself highly uncertain. And while the Affordable Care Act substantially reduced the share of Americans who are uninsured at a given time, we found that it did little to reduce the risk of insurance loss among the currently insured.
  • them do. The experience with the health insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act makes that clear.
  • The risk of losing coverage is an inevitable consequence of a lack of universal coverage. Whenever there are varied pathways to eligibility, there will be many people who fail to find their path.
  • About six in 10 uninsured Americans are eligible for free or heavily discounted insurance coverage. Yet they remain uninsured. Lack of information about which of the array of programs they are eligible for, along with the difficulties of applying and demonstrating eligibility, mean that the coverage programs are destined to deliver less than they could.
  • incremental reforms won’t work. Over a half-century of such well-intentioned, piecemeal policies has made clear that continuing this approach represents the triumph of hope over experience,
  • The only solution is universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic.
  • Coverage needs to be free at the point of care — no co-pays or deductibles — because leaving patients on the hook for large medical costs is contrary to the purpose of insurance.
  • But it turns out there’s an important practical wrinkle with asking patients to pay even a very small amount for some of their universally covered care: There will always be people who can’t manage even modest co-pays.
  • Finally, coverage must be basic because we are bound by the social contract to provide essential medical care, not a high-end experience.
  • Keeping universal coverage basic will keep the cost to the taxpayer down as well.
  • as a share of its economy, the United States spends about twice as much on health care as other high-income countries. But in most other wealthy countries, this care is primarily financed by taxes, whereas only about half of U.S. health care spending is financed by taxes. For those of you following the math, half of twice as much is … well, the same amount of taxpayer-financed spending on health care as a share of the economy. In other words, U.S. taxes are already paying for the cost of universal basic coverage. Americans are just not getting it. They could be.
  • at a high level, the key elements of our proposal are ones that every high-income country (and all but a few Canadian provinces) has embraced: guaranteed basic coverage and the option for people to purchase upgrades.
Javier E

Book Review - Churchill's Empire - By Richard Toye - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.
  • When the Kurds rebelled against British rule in Iraq, he said: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes.” It “would spread a lively terror.” (Strangely, Toye doesn’t quote this.)
  • it’s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn’t everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye’s research is that they really didn’t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum.
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  • This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
  • If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.
  • Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.
  • In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.
  • This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”
Javier E

Opinion | An Iconic Landscape, Threatened by Trees - The New York Times - 0 views

  • For a host of ingenious reasons, Native people had long set fire to the prairie: to rejuvenate vegetation and attract bison herds, to ward off mosquitoes and snakes, to ease travel, even to hinder their enemies in battle. Intentionally or not, they were also keeping the Eastern redcedar at bay, confining the scrappy conifer to the prairie’s deepest wrinkles.
  • white settlers were slow to catch on. Confronted by fire, wild or not, they fought back, desperate to save their homes, their crops, their livestock, their culture at large. At the same time, they planted trees in a land without: for shelter, for timber, for shade, for a touch of their forested homelands back east
  • “Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons,”
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  • The federal government encouraged this practice from the start. The Timber Culture Act passed in 1873, permitted homesteaders to claim an additional 160 acres of free land by planting trees on at least a quarter of it. Decades later, desperate to curb the Dust Bowl, President Franklin Roosevelt channeled roughly $14 million — mostly via emergency relief and the Works Progress Administration — to the Prairie States Forestry Project, resulting in nearly 19,000 miles of windbreaks throughout the Great Plains, many of them composed of Eastern redcedar.
  • Still today, the Department of Agriculture subsidizes the planting of redcedar for everything from windbreaks to wildlife habitat. State programs provide similar cost-share programs, and it’s from all of these plantings (and more) the spread — or the “encroachment,” as ecologists call it — generally begins.
  • In 2018, the rangeland ecologist Dirac Twidwell and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska began the Eastern Redcedar Science Literacy Project to catalog the fallout
  • Eastern redcedar can transform a thriving tallgrass prairie into a closed canopy woodland in just 40 years. In the process, critical biodiversity is evicted from the landscape. The majority of grassland bird species are no longer present where Eastern redcedar cover exceeds just 10 percent of land cover. Beyond 30 percent, most small mammals vanish, too. And as too many ranchers and other land managers can now attest, both forage production and plant diversity take a nosedive in the Green Glacier’s wake.
  • Allergies. Wildfires. Tick-borne disease. All of these problems climb while stream flow and groundwater recharge rates often decline. True, a juniper woodland sequesters more carbon. But the grassland it muscled out was a more reliable carbon sink, storing more than 90 percent of its capture underground, safe from wildfires that would send that carbon into the atmosphere. From virtually every angle — environmental or economic, livestock or literature, air quality or landscape aesthetics — the Green Glacier is a problem.
  • “The Great Plains biome is dying,” Dr. Twidwell said. “Losing grasslands at this scale is akin to losing tropical rainforests or coral reefs.”
  • for decades now, discussion about the Green Glacier has been largely relegated to the dusty confines of trade journals and agricultural conventions. Perhaps this is because the vast majority of our remaining grasslands are privately owned. Perhaps, as our forests burn and our levees break, there is little sympathy left for the livestock industry, responsible for roughly 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — never mind the many effects of tree encroachment that bleed far beyond the ranch.
  • If America wants to preserve what’s left of Cather’s spiritual homeland, something greater than what Dr. Twidwell calls “postage-stamp prairies,” then “the clock is ticking,”
  • The good news is that prescribed fire, where done repeatedly, has proved to effectively halt the Green Glacier’s spread. In fact, the Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance, a group of neighboring landowners in southwestern Nebraska, is one of the first documented groups to halt the encroachment on a regional scale.
Javier E

Opinion | Our Kids Are Living In a Different Digital World - The New York Times - 0 views

  • You may have seen the tins that contain 15 little white rectangles that look like the desiccant packs labeled “Do Not Eat.” Zyns are filled with nicotine and are meant to be placed under your lip like tobacco dip. No spitting is required, so nicotine pouches are even less visible than vaping. Zyns come in two strengths in the United States, three and six milligrams. A single six-milligram pouch is a dose so high that first-time users on TikTok have said it caused them to vomit or pass out.
  • We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online
  • I was stunned by the vast forces that are influencing teenagers. These forces operate largely unhampered by a regulatory system that seems to always be a step behind when it comes to how children can and are being harmed on social media.
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  • Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us
  • when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.
  • Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world
  • Greyson Imm, an 18-year-old high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., said he was 17 when Zyn videos started appearing on his TikTok feed. The videos multiplied through the spring, when they were appearing almost daily. “Nobody had heard about Zyn until very early 2023,” he said. Now, a “lot of high schoolers have been using Zyn. It’s really taken off, at least in our community.”
  • all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous.
  • The tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris International acquired the Zyn maker Swedish Match in 2022 as part of a strategic push into smokeless products, a category it projects could help drive an expected $2 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024.
  • P.M.I. is also a company that has long denied it markets tobacco products to minors despite decades of research accusing it of just that. One 2022 study alone found its brands advertising near schools and playgrounds around the globe.
  • the ’90s, when magazines ran full-page Absolut Vodka ads in different colors, which my friends and I collected and taped up on our walls next to pictures of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — until our parents tore them down. This was advertising that appealed to me as a teenager but was also visible to my parents, and — crucially — to regulators, who could point to billboards near schools or flavored vodka ads in fashion magazines and say, this is wrong.
  • Even the most committed parent today doesn’t have the same visibility into what her children are seeing online, so it is worth explaining how products like Zyn end up in social feeds
  • influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they l
  • With ruthless efficiency, social media can deliver unlimited amounts of the content that influencers create or inspire. That makes the combination of influencers and social-media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.
  • Videos like his operate like a meme: It’s unintelligible to the uninitiated, it’s a hilarious inside joke to those who know, and it encourages the audience to spread the message
  • Enter Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News megastar who recently started his own subscription streaming service, has become a big Zyn influencer. He’s mentioned his love of Zyn in enough podcasts and interviews to earn the nickname Tucker CarlZyn.
  • was Max VanderAarde. You can glimpse him in a video from the event wearing a Santa hat and toasting Mr. Carlson as they each pop Zyns in their mouths. “You can call me king of Zynbabwe, or Tucker CarlZyn’s cousin,” he says in a recent TikTok. “Probably, what, moved 30 mil cans last year?”
  • Freezer Tarps, Mr. VanderAarde’s TikTok account, appears to have been removed after I asked the company about it. Left up are the large number of TikToks by the likes of @lifeofaZyn, @Zynfluencer1 and @Zyntakeover; those hashtagged to #Zynbabwe, one of Freezer Tarps’s favorite terms, have amassed more than 67 million views. So it’s worth breaking down Mr. VanderAarde’s videos.
  • All of these videos would just be jokes (in poor taste) if they were seen by adults only. They aren’t. But we can’t know for sure how many children follow the Nelk Boys or Freezer Tarps — social-media companies generally don’t release granular age-related data to the public. Mr. VanderAarde, who responded to a few of my questions via LinkedIn, said that nearly 95 percent of his followers are over the age of 18.
  • They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend.
  • The helicopter video has already been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, and iterations of it have circulated widely on TikTok.
  • YouTube said it eventually determined that four versions of the Carlson Zyn videos were not appropriate for viewers under age 18 under its community guidelines and restricted access to them by age
  • Mr. Carlson declined to comment on the record beyond his two-word statement. The Nelk Boys didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on the record. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes tobacco or its alternatives. The company said that it has over 40,000 trust and safety experts who work to keep the platform safe and that it prevented teenagers’ accounts from viewing over two million videos globally that show the consumption of tobacco products by adults. TikTok added that in the third quarter of 2023 it proactively removed 97 percent of videos that violated its alcohol, tobacco and drugs policy.
  • Greyson Imm, the high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., points to Mr. VanderAarde as having brought Zyn “more into the mainstream.” Mr. Imm believes his interest in independent comedy on TikTok perhaps made him a target for Mr. VanderAarde’s videos. “He would create all these funny phrases or things that would make it funny and joke about it and make it relevant to us.”
  • It wasn’t long before Mr. Imm noticed Zyn blowing up among his classmates — so much so that the student, now a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, decided to write a piece in his school newspaper about it. He conducted an Instagram poll from the newspaper’s account and found that 23 percent of the students who responded used oral nicotine pouches during school.
  • “Upper-decky lip cushions, ferda!” Mr. VanderAarde coos in what was one of his popular TikTok videos, which had been liked more than 40,000 times. The singsong audio sounds like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually a call to action. “Lip cushion” is a nickname for a nicotine pouch, and “ferda” is slang for “the guys.”
  • “I have fun posting silly content that makes fun of pop culture,” Mr. VanderAarde said to me in our LinkedIn exchange.
  • I turned to Influencity, a software program that estimates the ages of social media users by analyzing profile photos and selfies in recent posts. Influencity estimated that roughly 10 percent of the Nelk Boys’ followers on YouTube are ages 13 to 17. That’s more than 800,000 children.
  • I’ve spent the past three years studying media manipulation and memes, and what I see in Freezer Tarps’s silly content is strategy. The use of Zyn slang seems like a way to turn interest in Zyn into a meme that can be monetized through merchandise and other business opportunities.
  • Such as? Freezer Tarps sells his own pouch product, Upperdeckys, which delivers caffeine instead of nicotine and is available in flavors including cotton candy and orange creamsicle. In addition to jockeying for sponsorship, Mr. Carlson may also be trying to establish himself with a younger, more male, more online audience as his new media company begins building its subscriber base
  • This is the kind of viral word-of-mouth marketing that looks like entertainment, functions like culture and can increase sales
  • What’s particularly galling about all of this is that we as a society already agreed that peddling nicotine to kids is not OK. It is illegal to sell nicotine products to anyone under the age of 21 in all 50 states
  • numerous studies have shown that the younger people are when they try nicotine for the first time, the more likely they will become addicted to it. Nearly 90 percent of adults who smoke daily started smoking before they turned 18.
  • Decades later — even after Juul showed the power of influencers to help addict yet another generation of children — the courts, tech companies and regulators still haven’t adequately grappled with the complexities of the influencer economy.
  • Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all have guidelines that prohibit tobacco ads and sponsored, endorsed or partnership-based content that promotes tobacco products. Holding them accountable for maintaining those standards is a bigger question.
  • We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social-media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion.
  • Laws should require tech companies to share data on what young people are seeing on social media and to prevent any content promoting age-gated products from reaching children’s feeds
  • hose efforts must go hand in hand with social media companies putting real teeth behind their efforts to verify the ages of their users. Government agencies should enforce the rules already on the books to protect children from exposure to addictive products,
  • I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.
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