Search Results for: The Nation

Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Woolly Mammoths Roam

Image by Flying Puffin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Ross Andersen’s Atlantic profile of Nikita Zimov and his quest to re-create a Pleistocene ecosystem that will slow the thaw of Arctic permafrost, ultimately slowing global warming — it’s like Jurassic Park, but with a basis in science and no man-eating dinosaurs. Impressive and captivating, it’s a piece worth reading, not least for a fascinating explanation of how grasses went from being slimy ocean plants to covering huge swaths of the planet.

For the vast majority of the Earth’s 4.5 billion spins around the sun, its exposed, rocky surfaces lay barren. Plants changed that. Born in the seas like us, they knocked against the planet’s shores for eons. They army-crawled onto the continents, anchored themselves down, and began testing new body plans, performing, in the process, a series of vast experiments on the Earth’s surface. They pushed whole forests of woody stems into the sky to stretch their light-drinking leaves closer to the sun. They learned how to lure pollinators by unfurling perfumed blooms in every color of the rainbow. And nearly 70 million years ago, they began testing a new form that crept out from the shadowy edges of the forest and began spreading a green carpet of solar panel across the Earth.

For tens of millions of years, grasses waged a global land war against forests. According to some scientists, they succeeded by making themselves easy to eat. Unlike other plants, many grasses don’t expend energy on poisons, or thorns, or other herbivore-deterring technologies. By allowing themselves to be eaten, they partner with their own grazers to enhance their ecosystem’s nutrient flows.

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R.E.M.’s Political Songs Still Resonate Today

Credit: Flickr/Rodrigo Siderakis

Never before has a rock and roll band been as lyrically political as R.E.M. From Murmur to Fables of the Reconstruction, Green’s “World Leader Pretend” and “Orange Crush” to Automatic for the People’s “IgnoreLand,” R.E.M. is the only band of the 20th century that legitimately crossed over from rock to pop and could appeal to hardcore college radio denizens as well as teens who first heard of the Athens-based quartet while surfing the mainstream radio dial.

What other band could draw tens of thousands and sell out arenas with lyrics like, “These bastards stole their power from the victims of the Us v. Them years/Wrecking all things virtuous and true/The undermining social democratic downhill slide into abysmal/Lost lamb off the precipice into the trickle down runoff pool.”?

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Alexandra Petri Is The Only Op-Ed Columnist America Needs Right Now

Alexandra Petri

Hamilton Nolan at Deadspin destroyed the entire New York Times opinion page this week after the paper published a limp musing by Frank Bruni on Trump’s well-done steaks. (“When did we turn into such food snobs here in America, land of the free and home of the Bloomin’ Onion?”) Nolan concludes that more than 80 percent of Times columnists aren’t equipped to properly respond to the sheer brokenness of America. I won’t quibble over who Nolan likes and dislikes, as this is not just a problem with the New York Times. I spend many mornings screaming at my radio while NPR tries to lull me back into business as usual with its warm and soothing commuter-friendly tones. I don’t want All Things Considered, I want Some Things Rejected Outright. Read more…

‘There Was a Lot of Spontaneous Crying’: Chrissy Teigen on Her Postpartum Depression

Chrissy Teigan of MTV's "Snack Off" seen at the 2014 MTV Upfront Press Junket at the Beacon Hotel Lower Level on Thursday, April 24, 2014 in New York, New York. (Photo by Scott Gries/ Invision for MTV/AP Images)

Model, television host, and cookbook author Chrissy Teigen wrote a personal essay for Glamour, in which she confesses to having postpartum depression. For many months after giving birth last year to Luna, her daughter with husband John Legend, Teigen was incredibly unhappy despite have what she recognizes to be a great life. She was also nauseated, and had terrible physical pain. She was relieved when her doctor diagnosed her with postpartum depression, but it took her a while to get far enough past the stigma to come out about it and, well, help dispel the stigma.

I remember being so exhausted but happy to know that we could finally get on the path of getting better. John had that same excitement. I started taking an antidepressant, which helped. And I started sharing the news with friends and family—I felt like everyone deserved an explanation, and I didn’t know how else to say it other than the only way I know: just saying it. It got easier and easier to say it aloud every time. (I still don’t really like to say, “I have postpartum depression,” because the word depression scares a lot of people. I often just call it “postpartum.” Maybe I should say it, though. Maybe it will lessen the stigma a bit.)

I wanted to write an open letter to friends and employers to explain why I had been so unhappy. The mental pain of knowing I let so many people down at once was worse than the physical pain. To have people that you respect, who are the best in the business, witness you at your worst is tough. Even though this was something I shouldn’t have to apologize for, I did want to apologize. Because on a set, people depend on you. A lot of people are coming together and all you have to do, Christine, is put on a unicorn head and shoot a money gun. Editors are wondering what the f-ck happened to the girl they gave a book deal to. This shit was flying through my head and I felt horrible.

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Uncommon Ancestry: Your Dad is My Dad?

Photo by JaredZammit (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Hazlitt, Alison Motluk writes on how fertility doctors impregnating their own clients is more common than you might think and on how the law around tracking sperm donors and donations is impotent against the problem.

Kat Palmer learned in grade nine biology that two blue-eyed parents can’t have a brown-eyed child. She thought that was curious, because she had brown eyes and both her parents had blue. But when she joked about it at home, she got a shock: her mother told her she’d been conceived at a fertility clinic, using sperm from an anonymous donor. The man she knew and loved as her dad was not her biological father.

Palmer knew she sort of looked like him, but she felt she looked like a lot of the Jewish men she knew, including her dad. The cousin helped her draft an email to Barwin, in which she used both genetics and genealogy to raise the possibility that he might be her biological father. She expected the doctor to ignore her, but he emailed back within the hour, with a phone number.

When she called him, about a week later, he was apologetic and baffled. He just couldn’t fathom how this had happened, he told her. The only thing he could think of was that he’d bought a new sperm counting machine that same year, and perhaps he had contaminated it when he was testing it with his own semen.

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Mary Beard’s Voyage Into ‘Herland’

Martin Bureau / Pool Photo via AP

Mary Beard opens “Women in Power: From Medusa to Merkel,” her cover essay in this week’s London Review of Books, with one of the most satisfying depictions of female dominance in American letters—Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1915 comic novel Herland. Gilman’s book is satisfying because it’s thoroughly realized and genuinely funny, writes Beard:

It’s a fantasy about a nation of women—and women only—that has existed for two thousand years in some remote, still unexplored part of the globe. A magnificent utopia: clean and tidy, collaborative, peaceful (even the cats have stopped killing the birds), brilliantly organized in everything from its sustainable agriculture and delicious food to its social services and education. And it all depends on one miraculous innovation. At the very beginning of its history, the founding mothers had somehow perfected the technique of parthenogenesis. The practical details are a bit unclear, but the women somehow just gave birth to baby girls, with no intervention from men at all. There was no sex in Herland.

For an all-female society that’s lived without men for 2,000 years, Herland is doing very well, thank you very much. The government functions smoothly, the air is clean, and the diet is vegetarian. No sooner do three male scientists bumble along than the sexist observations follow, and sadly, they still hold up.

Beard calls on Herland not to say what one might expect—that more than a century after Gilman’s imagined future the very thought of a powerful woman is still consigned to fantasy—but rather that powerful women don’t appear in our collective imagination at all. Why? Because “our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male.” It’s a continuation of an argument Beard began in her 2014 LRB essay “The Public Voice of Women,” which looked at the classical history of when and why women speak out in public, and how they often use male rhetoric. “It is still the case that when listeners hear a female voice, they don’t hear a voice that connotes authority; or rather they have not learned how to hear authority in it.” In that essay, she explored how women speak and are heard; here, it is how they are seen. Of course, there are the clothes.

The regulation trouser suits, or at least the trousers, worn by so many Western female political leaders, from Merkel to Clinton, may be convenient and practical; they may be a  signal of the refusal to become a clothes horse, which is the fate of so many political wives; but they’re also a simple tactic—like lowering the timbre of the voice—to make the female appear more male, to fit the part of power.

But to my surprise, given the prominent placement of clothing in Herland, this the beginning and end of Beard’s fashion critique, especially since the wardrobe Gilman devised for her citizens is ingenious. Instead of “modern” underwire bras poking them in the soft tissue, and “panties” (that gross, girlish word) that do or do not hide so-called VPL, the women of Herland wear “a one-piece cotton undergarment, thin and soft, that reached over the knees and shoulders.” On top of this very sensible base they layer several tunics, depending on the season, the middle of which is “shingled” with pockets (not a feature of women’s clothing at the time Gilman was writing). Their hair they keep short, “hatless, loose, and shining.” And, my favorite detail: The base under-layer, which is essentially a modified union suit, doubles as athletic wear, “as perfect a garment for exercise as need be devised, absolutely free to move in,” Gilman writes. No more lugging a bag to the gym! In Gilman’s novel, even the male interlopers are impressed:

The garments were simple in the extreme, and absolutely comfortable, physically, though of course we all felt like supes in the theater. There was a one-piece cotton undergarment, thin and soft, that reached over the knees and shoulders, something like the one-piece pajamas some fellows wear, and a kind of half-hose, that came up to just under the knee and stayed there—had elastic tops of their own, and covered the edges of the first.

Then there was a thicker variety of union suit, a lot of them in the closet, of varying weights and somewhat sturdier material—evidently they would do at a pinch with nothing further. Then there were tunics, knee-length, and some long robes. Needless to say, we took tunics.

Beard writes that when we imagine powerful women we imagine “national politicians, CEOs, prominent journalists, television executives and so on,” which “gives a very narrow version of what power is.” And so she asks us to rethink our very definition of power, first by “decoupling it from public prestige.” I’d add that it would also help with this project if we rethought our relationship to fashion, in a serious, systemic way, not merely on a case-by-case basis. If I wanted to swan about in Herland tunics, I would probably pop over to Eileen Fisher, a brand that has turned comfort into an unaffordable luxury, and top it off with a pink pussy hat while I’m at it. But isn’t that joke too easy? Shouldn’t there be more than just one mass-market designer who’s addressing what it means for women to present themselves in ways that feel both professional and physically forgiving? There are an infinite number of daily negotiations and frustrations with dressing oneself and being seen in this world that Beard misses in her binary between pantsuit armor and clothes-horse.

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‘Wir Schaffen Das’: Angela Merkel, the Refugee Crisis, and the Complexity Behind a Simple Statement Like ‘We Will Do It’

pro-refugee street art in berlin, germany
A mural in support of refugees on a building in Berlin, Germany (photo by Sven-Kåre Evenseth (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

For the Winter 2017 “Home” edition of Lapham’s Quarterly, Renata Adler — whose parents fled Germany in the early 1930s — returns to her familial homeland to explore Germany’s present-day reaction to the refugee crisis, and the millions of people now trying to get in rather than out.

The “land” in question was of course Germany, which had—in living, though dwindling, memory—launched by far the worst, most immense, cruel, specific persecution in the history of mankind. One from which there were relatively few refugees fortunate enough to escape. The millions now seeking asylum were not in the old sense “refugees.” Most had fled (in German, they are called Flüchtlinge, people fleeing) from civil wars or in search of a better life. (The Yazidis, in Iraq, and the Tutsi, in Rwanda, would be refugees in the old sense. Their persecutors, eager to exterminate them, would not permit them to escape.) Historically, there has existed no genuine “right” to asylum from war, poverty, oppression, intolerable living conditions in the land from which you came. Even asylum from specific persecutions, extermination, genocide had been denied throughout the world to people trying to escape the Holocaust. Merkel’s invitation was, in part, an attempt—by welcoming all who could assert a claim for asylum—to expiate, atone for, above all to avoid repetition of this vast, unprecedented crime. Throughout human history, there had been migrations, voluntary and involuntary, of all kinds. But the current problem, whatever its moral claims, was vastly different from the Holocaust. It was different as well from every earlier migration. There seemed to exist no way for the more fortunate peoples of the earth to absorb all those less fortunate, even if their cultures were highly compatible. Which, in this case, they were not.

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Uncommon Ancestry

Longreads Pick

How fertility doctors impregnating their own clients is more common than you might think and on how the law around tracking sperm donors and donations is impotent against the problem.

Source: Hazlitt
Published: Mar 7, 2017
Length: 25 minutes (6,341 words)

The David Letterman University of Excessive Self-Deprecation

Over at Vulture, David Marchese sits down to a nice long conversation with the great David Letterman to rap about Dave’s thirty-three years in television, the evolution of late-night, what obligations comedians have to put comedy in service of our nation, and the loneliness of retirement. Wait, why is this man retired? Dave, please pop your head up more often!

How? Is comedy useful for that?

Comedy’s one of the ways that we can protect ourselves. Alec Baldwin deserves a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Sadly, he’s not going to get it from this president.

Can you explain that a bit more? How does satire protect us from Donald Trump?

The man has such thin skin that if you keep pressure on him — I remember there was a baseball game in Cleveland, and a swarm of flies came on the field and the batters were doing this [mimes swatting at flies] while the pitcher was throwing 100 miles an hour. Well, that’s Alec Baldwin and Saturday Night Live. It’s distracting the batter. Eventually Trump’s going to take a fastball off the sternum and have to leave the game.

There’s this idea that reducing Trump to a punchline could make him seem harmless or helps to normalize him. Is there any validity to that argument?

I guess it’s a possibility. On the other hand, Donald Trump can be Donald Trump, but if he doesn’t help the people that need help, then he’s just a jerk. That press conference that he held berating the news media? I mean, how do you build a dictatorship? First, you undermine the press: “The only truth you’re going to hear is from me.” And he hires the Hunchback of Notre Dame, Steve Bannon, to be his little buddy. Bannon looks like a guy who goes to lunch, gets drunk, and comes back to the office: “Steve, could you have just one drink?” “Fuck you.” How is a white supremacist the chief adviser to our president? Did anybody look that up? I don’t know. How’s this interview going? Do you think you’re talking to a normal person here? Don’t I seem like I’m full of something?

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The Name’s Grass. Mr. Grass.

Image in the pubic domain

Yes, watching-grass-grow.com is a real website where yes, you can watch grass grow — dozens of people tune in every day to see what will happen on and around Alex Komarnitsky’s lawn. In Southwest magazine, Bradford Pearson profiles Komarnitsky — aka Mr. Grass — and explores his own fascination with a stranger’s front lawn.

At the end of the day I went home, but something stopped me from closing out the window. The next day I reloaded the screen. Same thing the third day. Eventually, I just kept it open all the time. I’d pull it up when I wanted to zone out for a few minutes and watch this shamrock-green lawn. I started evangelizing to friends and family; no one found it nearly as interesting. So I’d sit at work with 33 or 27 or 52 strangers, and we’d watch in silence as the mail was delivered, or a bird landed on a signpost, or the residual morning dew evaporated as the sun rose and filled the driveway.

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