ReportWire

Tag: past decade

  • Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land

    Why Attacks on Trump’s Mental Acuity Don’t Land

    [ad_1]

    Ten years ago, I stood in the back of a large room at Saint Anselm College in New Hampshire, watching Donald Trump ramble. The celebrity billionaire had been loitering on the fringes of American politics for a few years, but this was my first time seeing him give a proper speech. At least, that’s what I thought he was supposed to be doing. Speaking at the Politics & Eggs forum is a rite of passage for presidential aspirants, and Trump at the time was going through his quadrennial ritual of noisily considering a bid for office. Typically, prospective candidates give variations on their stump speech in this setting. Trump was doing something else—he meandered and riffed and told disjointed stories with no evident connection to one another. The incoherence might have been startling if I had taken him seriously. But the year was 2014, and this was Donald Trump—the man who presided over a reality show in which Gary Busey competed in a pizza-selling contest with Meat Loaf. Nobody took Trump seriously. That was my first mistake.

    Over the past decade, I’ve told the story of what happened next so many times that I can recite each beat in my sleep. The ride to the tarmac in the back of Trump’s SUV. The phone call from his pilot with news that a blizzard had shut down LaGuardia Airport. The last-minute decision to reroute his plane to Palm Beach, and his fateful insistence that the 26-year-old BuzzFeed reporter in the car (me) tag along. What was supposed to be a short in-flight interview turned into two surreal, and oddly intimate, days at Mar-a-Lago, which I spent studying Trump in his natural habitat.

    The article I published a few weeks later—“36 Hours on the Fake Campaign Trail With Donald Trump”—cannot exactly be called prescient, in that I rather confidently predicted that my subject would never run for office. But my portrait of Trump—his depthless vanity, his brittle ego, his tragic craving for elite approval—has largely held up. I described him on his plane restlessly flipping through cable news channels in search of his own face, and quoted him casually blowing off his wedding anniversary to fly to Florida. (“There are a lot of good-looking women here,” he told me once we arrived, leaning in at a poolside buffet.)

    Trump, suffice it to say, did not like the article, and he responded in predictably wrathful fashion. He insulted me on Twitter (“slimebag reporter,” “true garbage with no credibility”), planted fabricated stories about me in Breitbart News (“TRUMP: ‘SCUMBAG’ BUZZFEED BLOGGER OGLED WOMEN WHILE HE ATE BISON AT MY RESORT”), and got me blacklisted from covering Republican events where he was speaking. It was a jarring experience, but enlightening in its way. I’ve returned to it repeatedly over the years, mining the episode for insight into the improbable president’s psyche and the era that he’s shaped.

    As the tenth anniversary of my Mar-a-Lago misadventure approached this week, much of the conversation about Trump was focused on his mental competency. There were political reasons for this. Democrats, hoping to deflect concerns about President Joe Biden’s age and memory, were circulating video clips in which Trump sounded confused and unhinged. Trump’s Republican primary opponents had suggested that he’d “lost the zip on his fastball” or was “becoming crazier.” Nikki Haley had called on Trump (and Biden) to take a mental-acuity test. On social media and in the press, countless detractors have speculated that Trump is losing touch with reality, or sliding into dementia, or growing intoxicated by his own conspiracy theories. The sense of progression is what unites all these claims—the idea that Trump is not just bad, but getting worse.

    Helen Lewis: Biden’s age is now unavoidable

    To test this theory, I went back and listened to the recording of my hour-long interview with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2014. Half-convinced by the narrative of the former president’s worsening mental health, I expected to find in that audio file a more lucid, cogent Trump—one who hadn’t yet been unraveled by the stresses and travails of power. What I found instead illustrates both the risks of returning him to the Oval Office and the futility of trying to prevent that outcome by focusing on his mental decline: He sounded almost exactly the same as he does now.

    This is not to say he sounded sharp. He struggled at times to form complete sentences, and repeatedly lost his train of thought. Throughout our conversation, he said so many obviously untrue things that I remember wondering whether he was a pathological liar or simply deluded.

    Take, for example, our exchange over Trump’s embrace of the “birther” conspiracy theory. Trump had notoriously accused President Barack Obama of forging his U.S. citizenship and, near the end of the 2012 election, had offered to donate $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choosing if he released his college transcripts.

    Here is what Trump said to me, verbatim, when I asked him about the stunt:

    Well, I thought it was good. I mean, I offered $5 million to his charity if he produced his records, so—to his favorite charity if he produced his records. Uh, and I didn’t want to see his marks; I wanted to see where it says “place of birth.” I wanted to see what he put on there. And to this day, nobody’s ever seen any of those records. Uh, they have seen a book that was written when he was a young man saying he was a man from Kenya, a young man from Kenya, ba ba ba ba ba. And the publisher of the book said, “No, that’s what he said,” and then a day later he said, “No, no, that was a typographical error.” Well, you know what a typographical error—that’s when you type the word, when you put an S at the end of a word because it was wrong. You understand that. The word Kenya versus the United States—okay. So he has a book where he said he was from Kenya. Uh, and then, uh, they said that was a typographical error. I mean, there’s a lot of things. Um, I mean I have a whole theory on it, and I’m pretty sure I’m right. Uh, but I have a whole theory as to where he was born, uh, and what he did. And if you noticed, he spent millions and millions of dollars on trying to protect that information. And to this day, I’m shocked that with the three colleges that we’re talking about—you know, Columbia, Harvard, and, and Occidental—that somebody in the office didn’t take that file and say, “Hey, here it is.” I just am shocked. But—and by the way, if it were a positive thing, I would say that it’s something he should’ve done. Because there were a lot of people that agree with me. You know, a lot of people say, “Oh, that was controversial.” A lot of those people in the room loved me because of it. You understand this. You know, there’s a group, a big group of people—I’m not saying it’s a majority, but I want to tell you, it’s a very strong silent minority at least that agrees with me. And I actually said that if he ever did it, I would hope that it showed that I was wrong. And that everything would be perfect. I would rather have that than be right.

    A couple of minutes later, I asked Trump about the charges of racism he’d faced as a result of the birther crusade. His response:

    Don’t forget, Obama called Bill Clinton a racist, and Clinton has never forgiven him for it. Um, uh, many, they called many—anytime anybody disagrees with Obama, they call him a racist. So there have been many people called racists. No, that didn’t, it never stuck in my case, uh, at all. It’s something I was never called before, and it never stuck. At all. But if you notice, whenever anyone got tough with Obama, including Bill Clinton, and including others, they would call him, they would call that person a racist. Uh, so, it’s, it was a charge that they tried, and it never stuck. And you know why it never stuck? ’Cause I am, I am, I am so not a racist, it’s incredible. So it just never stuck. As I think you would notice.

    George T. Conway III: Unfit for office

    What do you do with an answer like this if you’re a reporter? On a substantive level, it’s objectively detached from reality: Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and there is no record of his having called Bill Clinton a racist. On a sentence level, the remarks are incoherent, confused, repetitive, and syntactically strange. Transcribing Trump is a nightmare. So is fact-checking him. In the end, I quoted eight words from this rant—“I am so not a racist, it’s incredible.”

    Maybe that was a failure on my part. For years, a contingent of Trump’s critics have argued that journalists fail to show this side of the former president—that we sanitize him by extracting only his most coherent quotes for our stories. And I’ll be the first to admit that it’s difficult to capture Trump’s rambling rhetorical style in print.

    But does anyone believe that publishing those comments in full would have meaningfully changed the public’s perception of Trump, then or now? There may have been a time—in the 1980s and ’90s, perhaps—when he sounded more articulate and grounded in reality. But that Trump was long gone by the time he announced his first campaign. It was not a secret. We all watched those rallies on TV; we all saw him in those debates. And he was elected president anyway.

    There’s a simple reason coverage of verbal flubs, memory lapses, and general octogenarian confusion is more damaging to Biden than it is to Trump. Biden ran for president on a platform of stability and competence, and that image is undermined by suggestions of mental decline. Accusing Trump of going crazy doesn’t work because, well, he has sounded crazy for a long time. The people who voted for him don’t seem to mind—in fact, it’s part of the appeal.

    After listening to the old recording of my Trump interview, I called Sam Nunberg for a gut check. A former political operative with a thick New York accent and a collection of shiny neckties, Nunberg was the prototypical Trump acolyte when I first met him. But his relationship with his former boss has been rocky since he arranged for my access to Trump in 2014 and accompanied me on that trip to Mar-a-Lago: Trump theatrically fired him after my story came out, hired him back, fired him again, then sued him for $10 million, before eventually agreeing to a settlement.

    Rich Jaroslovsky: The other time America panicked over a president’s age

    The two men haven’t spoken in years, according to Nunberg—but that hasn’t stopped reporters from calling him up for quotes about Trump’s mental state. “They’re wanting me to say he’s not the same,” Nunberg told me. “But I don’t see it, at least publicly. I think he’s the same guy.”

    And what kind of guy is that? “He’s reckless, and he’s a narcissist,” Nunberg said. But that’s not exactly news. He’s always been that way.

    [ad_2]

    McKay Coppins

    Source link

  • Risking Their Lives to Ski While They Can

    Risking Their Lives to Ski While They Can

    [ad_1]

    There’s something fundamentally excessive about winter sports. Instead of curling up with a book or Netflix when the weather turns cold, winter athletes wrestle with inordinate layers and high-tech gear just to make it through the day without frostbite. They sprint across ice with knives strapped to their feet and hurtle down mountains at speeds generally reserved for interstate highways. They fall off ski lifts—or are trapped overnight in them. Show me an experienced winter recreationalist, and I’ll show you someone who has slipped, skidded, and crashed their way to a broken tailbone or torqued knee, and more likely than not a concussion or two.

    But over the past few years, climate change, social media, and a pandemic-era obsession with the outdoors have combined to make these already intense sports even more extreme. Seasoned athletes have long considered bunny slopes and indoor ice rinks to be mere gateways to backcountry skiing (zooming through the tree line on untouched powder—and sometimes jumping out of a helicopter to get there) or “wild” ice skating over remote glaciers and freshly frozen lakes. Now a growing crowd of beginners has started to follow them—and the consequences can be fatal.

    Since the rise of remote work enabled an exodus from big cities in 2020 and 2021, a record number of people have visited U.S. ski areas each winter. Resorts can be so crowded that people wait 45 minutes for a chair lift that, four years ago, might have only had a three-minute line. No wonder skiers are searching farther and farther afield to get their fix. Greg Poschman, the county commissioner chairman of Colorado’s Pitkin County, told me that in just the past few seasons, he’s seen more people up in the backcountry and out on frozen lakes and rivers than he has in a lifetime living near Aspen. That sentiment is echoed by athletes and officials across the United States. All it takes is a sufficiently impressive stunt posted to social media, and once-deserted corners of the natural world will be inundated with hobbyists a few days later.

    In the wilderness, or even the “sidecountry” just outside resort bounds, athletes are exposed to dangers that are rare in more controlled settings. Miles from civilization, no one is policing the landscape for holes in the ice, buried rocks and twigs, and surprise cliffs, not to mention avalanches and ice dams. Perhaps most crucially, pushing out farther from roads and services means being farther from rescue when things go wrong. “You may be doing something that’s a low-risk sport”—ice-skating, snowshoeing, and the like—“but the consequences are very high,” Poschman said.

    Photos: The insanity of downhill ice cross racing

    Even sports that have never relied on curated resorts to thrive are becoming more treacherous. Kale Casey, a five-time Team USA co-captain for sled-dog sports, told me that unpredictable winter seasons are forcing teams away from traditional routes across Alaska that have become unsafe. Portions of the famous roughly 1,000-mile Iditarod race have been rerouted. Mushers are strategically running certain portions of races at night so their dogs—bred for temperatures around –20 degrees—don’t overheat. As the planet warms, and snow coverage of Alaska’s tundra contracts, other winter sports are converging with the mushers on the little snow that’s left. This season, five dogs have been hit and killed by people riding snowmobiles (known locally as snow machines); five more dogs were also injured in these collisions. “During the lockdown, there wasn’t a snow machine available in Alaska,” Casey told me. “Everybody bought them—and they’ve got to go places. Where do they go? They go where we go.”

    Climate change isn’t just pushing winter athletes into more crowded or remote territory. It’s also making that territory less predictable. From across the Northern Hemisphere, the near-identical refrain I heard went something like this: As recently as five years ago, the snow season used to begin sometime around Thanksgiving. It started slowly, with the odd storm or two, building up ice and snowpack gradually as temperatures fell. On a given day, you could be fairly certain of the quality of whatever frigid surface you were skiing on, climbing up, or skating over. And if the weather wasn’t good, well, the snow and ice would be there for you the next day.

    But now everyone I spoke with—whether in Iceland or in alpine California—said the first storms don’t come until January. The weather is unpredictable: Record-setting blizzards are interspersed with snow-melting rain. A dry early season followed by rain and wet snow is the perfect recipe for avalanches, Poschman said. Shannon Finch, who was an avalanche-rescue dog handler in Utah for 12 years before turning to heli-ski guiding, told me that even experts are now “perplexed, confused, and getting caught off guard” in environments they’d previously navigated with ease. Her dog, Lēif, struggled in these new conditions: When someone is buried by an avalanche, their scent is less likely to rise through wetter snow and warmer air temperatures. Consequently, Lēif needed to cover considerably more ground before making a rescue.

    The shorter seasons also create havoc for a uniquely human reason: FOMO. “People are chomping at the bit to get out there” and are willing to take greater risks for good snow or ice, Travis White, who runs a tourism fishing business in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, told me. The result is that even a relatively leisurely activity such as ice fishing suddenly becomes an extreme sport. With fewer waterways icing over, more people from places that no longer freeze regularly are suddenly crowding onto just a few lakes. These newcomers aren’t around to watch the water slowly freeze; they don’t know where to watch out for eddies and currents that may make the ice unstable, or how to avoid the most recently frozen patches, which are also the most dangerous.

    Stories of ice fishers, figure skaters, and hockey players falling in—even dying—abound. Incidents on the snow are common too. Earlier this month, 23 people needed rescuing in Killington, Vermont, after ducking a boundary rope to ski and snowboard out-of-bounds on a particularly good powder day—the kind that’s getting vanishingly rare in the Northeast.

    Read: How skiing went from the Alps to the masses

    White, like many of the other winter enthusiasts I spoke with, also blames social media for the extremification of his sport. Inexperienced ice fishers might see a cool spot posted on Instagram and find it easily, thanks to geolocation. The same goes for wild ice-skating, snowmobiling, and backcountry skiing. Athletes also worry that impressive, engagement-oriented stunts posted online could inspire inexperienced people to try extreme moves in those remote sites. “The only thing that I see on social media is people jumping off cliffs on their skis,” Ben Graves, a Colorado-based outdoor educator and an avid backcountry skier, told me. But only a tiny fraction of skiers who can find said cliffs are good enough to jump off them with something approximating safety.

    That fraction could soon get even smaller. Ívar Finnbogason, a manager at Icelandic Mountain Guides, is deeply concerned by the decline in skill he’s witnessed over the past decade. He stepped away from a career as an ice climber when he became a father, in part because of the danger but mostly because waiting and waiting for the right conditions meant that he simply couldn’t train effectively. “That’s no way for you as an athlete—as someone with ambition—to build up your momentum,” he told me.

    By the end of the century, snow and ice may be so scarce that only the most well-resourced and committed athletes can even attempt these new extremes. With just a degree or two Celsius more warming, much of the Northern Hemisphere can expect massive snow loss. If this happens, the only way to reach the snow might be with a helicopter or a days-long hike.

    Read: The threshold at which snow starts irreversibly disappearing

    A dramatic collapse in winter sports might well result in fewer accidents. But we would also lose something intrinsically human. For many winter-recreation devotees, these sports are more than just activities to pass the time. They are a way of life, dating as far back as 8000 B.C.E. Perhaps those who test their skills against the strength of Mother Nature have it right. Maybe now is the time for winter athletes to take their passions to dangerous new heights, before they lose the option forever.

    [ad_2]

    Talia Barrington

    Source link

  • Maybe Vitamins Shouldn’t Taste Like Candy

    Maybe Vitamins Shouldn’t Taste Like Candy

    [ad_1]

    These days, the options for dietary supplements are virtually limitless. And whatever substance you want to ingest, you can find it in gummy form. Omega-3? You bet. Vitamin C? Absolutely. Iron? Calcium? Zinc? Yes, yes, and yes. There are peach collagen rings and strawberry-watermelon fiber rings. There are brambleberry probiotic gummies and “tropical zing” gummy worms that promise to put you in “an upbeat mood.” There are libido gummies and menopause gummies. There are gummies that claim to boost your metabolism, to reinforce your immune system, to strengthen your hair, your skin, your nails. For kids, there are Transformers multivitamin gummies and My Little Pony multivitamin gummies.

    I could go on. A simple search for gummy vitamins on the CVS website turns up more than 50 results. This is the golden age of gummies, and that can seem like a great thing. Who wouldn’t rather eat a peach ring than pop a pill? But if the notion that something healthy can taste exactly like candy seems too good to be true, that’s because it is.

    Gummy supplements are a relatively new phenomenon, but gummy candies are not. Starch-based Turkish delight has been around since the late 18th century. In 1860s England, some of the earliest gummies were popularly known as “unclaimed babies” (because they were shaped like infants, many more of which apparently were unclaimed back then). In the 1920s, the German confectioner Hans Riegel founded Haribo and created the gelatin-based gummy bears still consumed around the world today. It would be another 60 years, though, before Haribo gummies arrived on American shores. In the decades that followed, gummy sweets became ubiquitous, taking almost every shape imaginable: worms, frogs, sharks, snakes, watermelons, doughnuts, hamburgers, french fries, bacon, Coke bottles, bracelets, Band-Aids, brains, teeth, eyeballs, genitalia, soldiers, mustaches, Legos, and, as in days of old, children.

    Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s, though, did the supplement industry begin experimenting with gummies. The driving principle was not a new one: As Mary Poppins put it, “A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” Flintstones multivitamins have been around in their hard, chewable form since 1968; even if superior to pills, they basically taste like sweet, vaguely chemical chalk).

    Gummy vitamins, on the contrary, are virtually indistinguishable from the treats they’re modeled on. You could pop men’s multis at the movies the same way you could Sour Patch Kids. (Or Starburst gummies, or Skittles gummies, or Jolly Rancher gummies—pretty much every non-chocolate candy now comes in gummy form.) Which is probably why they’ve become so popular, says Tod Cooperman, the president of ConsumerLab, a watchdog site that reviews supplements. When he founded ConsumerLab in 1999, gummy supplements hardly existed. Adult gummy vitamins didn’t hit the market until 2012. Now, Nina Puch, a scientist who formulates gummies for the food and pharmaceutical consulting company Knechtel, told me, three-quarters of the gummies she designs are supplements rather than candies. Gummy supplements are everywhere. They’re a rapidly expanding seven-plus billion dollar industry, and by 2027 that figure is projected to double.

    But what makes gummy supplements appealing also makes them concerning. The reason they taste as good as candy, it turns out, is because on average, they can contain just as much sugar as candy does. The earliest gummy supplements, Cooperman told me, were basically just candy with vitamins sprayed on. They’ve come a long way since then: The active ingredients are now carefully integrated into the gummy itself by scientists such as Puch, and done so in a way that preserves as much of the gummy’s flavor and consistency as possible. But the nutritional essentials haven’t changed much—the average gummy vitamin contains about the same amount of sugar per serving as one piece of Sour Patch Kids does.

    A little extra sugar is not the end of the world. But there’s also the danger of overdoses. Especially for children, it’s important that medicines and supplements not taste too good, Cora Breuner, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, told me. Consumed in excess, many of the vitamins and nutrients delivered in supplements can be toxic. They have to strike an appropriate balance, neither tasting so bad that kids refuse to take them nor so good that they’ll want too much. Most gummy supplements seemingly fail the latter test, and not without consequences. Annual calls to Poison Control for pediatric melatonin overdoses have risen 530 percent over the past decade, in part, experts suggested to me last year, because of the hormone’s increased availability in gummy form. The overdose numbers are also up for multivitamins.

    The risk of overdose can be greatly mitigated by simply taking care to store gummies where kids can’t get them. The more significant problem, Cooperman told me, is that gummies are simply a less reliable delivery mechanism than the alternatives. Vitamins and many other compounds degrade far faster in gummies’ half-liquid, half-solid state than in traditional pill or capsule form, he said, because gummies offer less protection from heat, light, moisture, and other contaminants.

    To compensate, supplement makers will in many cases load their products with far more of a substance than advertised on the packaging. Some overage is to be expected with all supplements, but the margins for many gummy supplements are gargantuan. “Gummy vitamins were the most likely form to contain much more of an ingredient than listed,” ConsumerLab wrote in its 2023 review of multivitamins and multiminerals. Of the four gummy supplements reviewed, three contained nearly twice as much of the relevant substance as they were supposed to, and the fourth contained only around three-quarters as much.

    A recent analysis of melatonin and CBD gummies yielded similar results: Some contained as much as 347 percent the amount of those substances stated on the label. Because the FDA generally does not regulate supplements as drugs, such wild variability is accepted in a way that it isn’t for actual pharmaceuticals. (In 2020, the FDA granted the first-ever Investigational New Drug Application for a gummy medication, though no such product appears to have come to market.) “If you have something that you need a specific amount of every time you take it, gummies are not the way to go,” says Pieter Cohen, a doctor at Cambridge Health Alliance, in Somerville, Massachusetts, and the lead author of the melatonin-CBD research. Taking too much of a supplement is generally not as dangerous as taking too much of a prescription drug, but, as Breuner noted, many supplements taken in sufficient excess can still be toxic. When I asked Cooperman what advice he had for people trying to navigate all of this, his answer was simple: “Don’t buy a gummy.”

    Perhaps the rise of gummy supplements was inevitable. The supplement industry has become so big in part because it can promote its products as, say, boosting the immune system or supporting healthy bones, without subjecting them to the strict regulatory demands imposed on pharmaceuticals. Supplements blur the line between food and drug, and gummy supplements—designed and marketed on the premise that healthy stuff can and should taste as good as candy—only intensify that blurring. Cohen, for one, thinks the distinction is worth preserving. Calcium supplements should not go down as easy as Haribos. That may be a bitter pill to swallow, but not everything can taste like candy.

    [ad_2]

    Jacob Stern

    Source link

  • The House Republicans Who Have Had Enough

    The House Republicans Who Have Had Enough

    [ad_1]

    House Republicans didn’t exactly have a banner year in 2023. They made history for all the wrong reasons. Last January, they presided over the most protracted election for speaker in a century, and nine months later, for good measure, lawmakers ejected their leader, Kevin McCarthy, for the first time ever. Last month, the House expelled one of its own, George Santos, for only the sixth time.

    The rest of the year wasn’t any more productive. Thanks in part to Republican discord, the House passed fewer bills that became laws than any other year in decades. And for the few important measures that did pass, GOP leaders had to rely on Democrats to bail them out.

    Republican lawmakers have responded by quitting in droves. After the House spent much of October fighting over whom to elect as speaker, November saw more retirement announcements than any single month in more than a decade. Some members aren’t even waiting for their term to end. McCarthy resigned last week, depriving the party that fired him of both his experience and, more crucially, his vote. Representative Bill Johnson of Ohio, a Republican, and Brian Higgins of New York, a Democrat, are each leaving for new jobs in the next several weeks. (Santos would have stuck around, but his colleagues had other ideas.)

    Read: George Santos was finally too much for Republicans

    A roughly equal number of members from each party plan to forgo reelection this year. But the most powerful departing lawmakers are Republicans: The chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Representative Kay Granger of Texas, is leaving after a quarter century in Congress, and the head of the Financial Services Committee, Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina, will end his 20-year House career next year.

    Still, some Republicans are leaving after just a few years in Congress, including Representatives Victoria Spartz of Indiana and Debbie Lesko of Arizona, both former state legislators. For them, serving in Congress simply isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—not when your party can’t seem to figure out how to govern. “People don’t engage with each other,” Lesko told me. “They just make speeches.”

    Here are the stories of four Republicans who are calling it quits at different stages of their career: McHenry, a onetime rabble-rouser who became a party insider; Brad Wenstrup, an Army podiatrist whose House tenure spanned from the Tea Party to Donald Trump; Spartz, a conservative with an impulsive streak; and Lesko, a Trump loyalist who never quite found her way in Washington. Taken together, their departures reflect the rising frustrations within a Republican Party that has floundered in the year since it assumed power in the House—a year in which it has spent more time fighting than governing.

    Debbie Lesko

    On October 17, after House Republicans had just tanked their third choice for speaker, Representative Debbie Lesko finally decided she’d had enough: She wouldn’t be seeking reelection. The 65-year-old grandmother of five had been planning to stay for one more term, but the ouster of Kevin McCarthy and the weeks of chaos that followed changed her mind. “It kind of put me over the top,” Lesko told me.

    Lesko had higher hopes for Congress back in 2018, when she won a special election to represent a safely Republican seat north of Phoenix. “Perhaps I was naive,” she conceded. Lesko prioritized border security during her first campaign and managed to get one border-related bill signed into law while Trump was president and Republicans controlled the House in 2018, but her legislative goals have fallen short since then. In the Arizona state legislature, she had served in the leadership and chaired two powerful committees. “I was used to getting things done in a bipartisan fashion,” Lesko said. The House proved to be far more difficult terrain. As a Trump ally, Lesko found few willing Democratic partners after the GOP lost control first of the House majority in 2018 and then of the presidency in 2020.

    In Arizona, Lesko said, lawmakers actually debated bills and amendments on the floor of the House and Senate; in Washington, by contrast, members just deliver speeches written for them by their young staff. “We don’t listen to each other,” Lesko lamented. “We just go in and read a statement.” She bemoaned the “lack of civility” and the hurling of personal insults between members in both parties. (When I asked if Trump had contributed to the incivility, she said, “I would prefer he not attack people personally, but he does a great job.”)

    Lesko told me she enjoyed most the days she spent interacting with constituents back home, but over six years, they could not make up for the family time she gave up on cross-country flights and on fundraising. “If I felt we were getting a whole lot accomplished, I would sacrifice it,” she said. Instead, Republicans spent a week in January 2023 fighting over their speaker and then did it all over again in October. “That certainly didn’t make me feel like I wanted to stay,” she told me.

    Patrick McHenry

    Representative Patrick McHenry introduced himself to much of America last year as a very frustrated man. The North Carolina Republican opened his unlikely stint as House speaker pro tempore with a memorable slam of the gavel—a brief eruption of anger aimed at the rump group of Republicans who had dethroned his ally, Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

    Read: ‘We put sharp knives in the hands of children’

    When McHenry arrived in Congress nearly two decades ago, he might have counted as one of the renegades. He was a brash 29-year-old who liked nothing more than to pick fights with Democrats on cable news. After his first term, however, McHenry began to shift his strategy and redraw his image. He wanted to become a serious legislator, capable of using influence in Congress to affect public policy. “I realized that my actions were not enabling my goal, so I changed how I operated,” he told me. He became less of a partisan brawler and more of an inside player, studying the institution and how leaders in both parties wielded power. “My early years in Congress were like graduate school,” McHenry said.

    McHenry is leaving with a reputation as a widely respected if not-quite-elder statesman (he’s only 48). He serves as the chair of the Financial Services Committee and acted as one of the GOP’s top negotiators of perhaps the most significant bill to come out of Congress last year, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, which prevented a debt default and ordered modest budget cuts. McHenry is retiring in part because he has to give up the committee gavel he so enjoys; Republican term limits allow most members to hold top committee posts for up to six years.

    He also passed up a bid for a more permanent promotion. At one point in October, some of the same Democrats who had chafed at McHenry’s bombast as a young lawmaker were open to the idea of him serving as speaker. McHenry told me he’d wanted to be speaker earlier in his career, but not anymore. He refused entreaties to seek election as speaker or even to use his temporary position to try to pass legislation. “It would have been to the institution’s detriment and, frankly, even to mine,” he told me. “So I decided the best course of action is to want for nothing during that time period, and that meant resisting the opportunity to use power.”

    When McHenry announced his retirement from the House two months later, he insisted that he was departing with none of the bitterness people might assume he carried. “I truly feel this institution is on the verge of the next great turn,” he said in his statement. When I asked him what gave him hope, he tried to put a positive spin on the dysfunction and disenchantment that have plagued Congress for years. “The operations of the House have been under severe pressure for a while,” McHenry said. “We have an institution that is struggling to perform in the current political environment.” He then made a prediction: “There’ll be significant changes that will happen in the coming congresses to make the place work.”

    He won’t be around to see them. The GOP’s term limits for committee leaders is an often-underappreciated reason for turnover in the party’s House ranks, but McHenry declined to seek a waiver so he could stay atop the Financial Services Committee. “I’m going to honor our rules,” he said. He hasn’t decided what comes next: “This chapter is closing, and I’ve got another chapter ahead of me.”

    Brad Wenstrup

    This much is clear: Representative Brad Wenstrup is not leaving the House out of frustration with Washington gridlock. “I reject the notion that this has been a do-nothing House of Representatives,” he told me. Wenstrup proceeded to read from a list that he said ran to 20 pages of bills that the narrow Republican majority had advanced through the lower chamber of Congress over the past year. Most of these measures are gathering dust in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but the fact that a onetime outsider like Wenstrup would be defending an embattled institution so fervently is itself something of a revelation.

    Wenstrup won election to the House a decade ago as a Tea Party–backed insurgent, having defeated an incumbent Republican in a surprising 2012 primary challenge from the right. He’ll leave next year as a leadership loyalist, positioned in the ideological center of a GOP conference that has grown decidedly more conservative in the past decade. He voted for the debt-ceiling deal in June, despite having criticized his first Republican opponent during their campaign for backing a similar bipartisan agreement. “Am I a conservative? Yes,” he said. “Did I try to advance common sense? Yes. Did I try to establish myself as a statesman? Yes.”

    Read: ‘We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.’

    Wenstrup has become an institutionalist in other ways too. His biggest complaint—a common one among small-government conservatives—is that federal agencies have taken too much power from Congress, evading proper oversight and interpreting laws beyond the intent of the legislators who wrote them. “We have to bring back Schoolhouse Rock,” Wenstrup said, recalling the cartoon that taught a generation of Americans a somewhat-idealized version of legislative sausage-making. “A bill on Capitol Hill gets signed by the president. That’s the law. Agencies don’t get to change it.”

    An Iraq War veteran who served as a combat surgeon, Wenstrup, 65, started his family later than most and has two young children in Ohio. He told me he had decided that this term would be his last in the House before any of the speaker tumult of the past year: “I decided that I wanted to make sure that I raised my kids, not someone else.”

    Victoria Spartz

    Good luck trying to predict Representative Victoria Spartz’s next move. The Indiana conservative is leaving Congress next year after just two terms—assuming she sticks with her plan.

    That hasn’t always been the case during Spartz’s short tenure in the House. She is fiercely protective of her options, and she has made her name by going her own way. At one point this fall, she threatened to resign her seat if Congress did not create a commission to tackle the federal debt. “I cannot save this Republic alone,” she said at the time. (Congress has created no such commission, but Spartz isn’t leaving quite yet.)

    Spartz, 45, is the only Ukrainian-born member of Congress, and she assumed a prominent role in the GOP after Russia’s invasion in 2022. Her nuanced position on the conflict has defied easy characterization. While cheering for Ukraine’s victory, she sharply criticized its prime minister, Volodymyr Zelensky, at a time when much of the West was rallying to his side. Spartz has accused Zelensky of “playing politics and theater” and demanded an investigation of one of his top aides. When members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee traveled to Ukraine on an official visit without her—she doesn’t serve on the panel—Spartz paid her own way and “crashed” the trip. She supports more U.S. aid to Ukraine, but not without conditions, and she believes that the funding must be more targeted toward heavy military equipment rather than humanitarian assistance. “Ukraine must win this war,” she told me, “but wars are won with weapons, and we need to be much faster, much tougher, and better.”

    Spartz again proved to be a wild card during the House’s recurring struggles over picking a speaker. During the 15 rounds of balloting last January, she supported Kevin McCarthy on the first three turns, then voted “present” eight times before returning to McCarthy for the final four rounds. In October, she voted with McCarthy’s critics to bring up a resolution to oust him as speaker, but on the climactic vote, she stuck with McCarthy. “Kevin wasn’t a bad guy. He just didn’t like to govern,” Spartz said.

    Midway through Spartz’s first term, Politico reported on high staff turnover in her congressional office, quoting former aides who described Spartz as a quick-tempered boss who frequently yelled at and belittled her underlings. Spartz made no effort to deny the accounts, telling Politico that her style was “not for everyone.” After winning a second term that fall, however, Spartz quickly announced that she would not seek office in 2024—forgoing both a third bid for the House and open statewide races for governor and Senate in Indiana.

    Her departure, she insisted to me, represents a break from politics, and not a retirement. “Sometimes it’s good to take some time off,” Spartz said. She denied that any of the drama of the past two years—the war in Ukraine, the speaker fights, criticism of her management—contributed to her decision to leave. Her children are now teenagers, Spartz said, and she wants to spend more time with them.

    Still, Spartz doesn’t quite seem at peace with her plans. Given her past shifts, I asked if she still might change her mind and run again. She wouldn’t, she said, but with a caveat: “Unless I get real upset!”

    Given the volatility of the past year in Congress, that’s a threat it would be wise not to ignore.

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • Sick Season Will Be Worse From Now On

    Sick Season Will Be Worse From Now On

    [ad_1]

    Last fall, when RSV and flu came roaring back from a prolonged and erratic hiatus, and COVID was still killing thousands of Americans each week, many of the United States’ leading infectious-disease experts offered the nation a glimmer of hope. The overwhelm, they predicted, was probably temporary—viruses making up ground they’d lost during the worst of the pandemic. Next year would be better.

    And so far, this year has been better. Some of the most prominent and best-tracked viruses, at least, are behaving less aberrantly than they did the previous autumn. Although neither RSV nor flu is shaping up to be particularly mild this year, says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, both appear to be behaving more within their normal bounds.

    But infections are still nowhere near back to their pre-pandemic norm. They never will be again. Adding another disease—COVID—to winter’s repertoire has meant exactly that: adding another disease, and a pretty horrific one at that, to winter’s repertoire. “The probability that someone gets sick over the course of the winter is now increased,” Rivers told me, “because there is yet another germ to encounter.” The math is simple, even mind-numbingly obvious—a pathogenic n+1 that epidemiologists have seen coming since the pandemic’s earliest days. Now we’re living that reality, and its consequences. “What I’ve told family or friends is, ‘Odds are, people are going to get sick this year,’” Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told me.

    Even before the pandemic, winter was a dreaded slog—“the most challenging time for a hospital” in any given year, Popescu said. In typical years, flu hospitalizes an estimated 140,000 to 710,000 people in the United States alone; some years, RSV can add on some 200,000 more. “Our baseline has never been great,” Yvonne Maldonado, a pediatrician at Stanford, told me. “Tens of thousands of people die every year.” In “light” seasons, too, the pileup exacts a tax: In addition to weathering the influx of patients, health-care workers themselves fall sick, straining capacity as demand for care rises. And this time of year, on top of RSV, flu, and COVID, we also have to contend with a maelstrom of other airway viruses—among them, rhinoviruses, parainfluenza viruses, human metapneumovirus, and common-cold coronaviruses. (A small handful of bacteria can cause nasty respiratory illnesses too.) Illnesses not severe enough to land someone in the hospital could still leave them stuck at home for days or weeks on end, recovering or caring for sick kids—or shuffling back to work, still sick and probably contagious, because they can’t afford to take time off.

    To toss any additional respiratory virus into that mess is burdensome; for that virus to be SARS-CoV-2 ups the ante all the more. “This is a more serious pathogen that is also more infectious,” Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. This year, COVID-19 has so far killed some 80,000 Americans—a lighter toll than in the three years prior, but one that still dwarfs that of the worst flu seasons in the past decade. Globally, the only infectious killer that rivals it in annual-death count is tuberculosis. And last year, a CDC survey found that more than 3 percent of American adults were suffering from long COVID—millions of people in the United States alone.

    Read: Is COVID a common cold yet?

    With only a few years of data to go on, and COVID-data tracking now spotty at best, it’s hard to quantify just how much worse winters might be from now on. But experts told me they’re keeping an eye on some potentially concerning trends. We’re still rather early in the typical sickness season, but influenza-like illnesses, a catchall tracked by the CDC, have already been on an upward push for weeks. Rivers also pointed to CDC data that track trends in deaths caused by pneumonia, flu, and COVID-19. Even when SARS-CoV-2 has been at its most muted, Rivers said, more people have been dying—especially during the cooler months—than they were at the pre-pandemic baseline. The math of exposure is, again, simple: The more pathogens you encounter, the more likely you are to get sick.

    A larger roster of microbes might also extend the portion of the year when people can expect to fall ill, Rivers told me. Before the pandemic, RSV and flu would usually start to bump up sometime in the fall, before peaking in the winter; if the past few years are any indication, COVID could now surge in the summer, shading into RSV’s autumn rise, before adding to flu’s winter burden, potentially dragging the misery out into spring. “Based on what I know right now, I am considering the season to be longer,” Rivers said.

    With COVID still quite new, the exact specifics of respiratory-virus season will probably continue to change for a good while yet. The population, after all, is still racking up initial encounters with this new coronavirus, and with regularly administered vaccines. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at Harvard’s T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me he suspects that, barring further gargantuan leaps in viral evolution, the disease will continue to slowly mellow out in severity as our collective defenses build; the virus may also pose less of a transmission risk as the period during which people are infectious contracts. But even if the dangers of COVID-19 are lilting toward an asymptote, experts still can’t say for sure where that asymptote might be relative to other diseases such as the flu—or how long it might take for the population to get there. And no matter how much this disease softens, it seems extraordinarily unlikely to ever disappear. For the foreseeable future, “pretty much all years going forward are going to be worse than what we’ve been used to before,” Hanage told me.

    Read: The next stage of COVID is starting now

    In one sense, this was always where we were going to end up. SARS-CoV-2 spread too quickly and too far to be quashed; it’s now here to stay. If the arithmetic of more pathogens is straightforward, our reaction to that addition could have been too: More disease risk means ratcheting up concern and response. But although a core contingent of Americans might still be more cautious than they were before the pandemic’s start—masking in public, testing before gathering, minding indoor air quality, avoiding others whenever they’re feeling sick—much of the country has readily returned to the pre-COVID mindset.

    When I asked Hanage what precautions worthy of a respiratory disease with a death count roughly twice that of flu’s would look like, he rattled off a familiar list: better access to and uptake of vaccines and antivirals, with the vulnerable prioritized; improved surveillance systems to offer  people at high risk a better sense of local-transmission trends; improved access to tests and paid sick leave. Without those changes, excess disease and death will continue, and “we’re saying we’re going to absorb that into our daily lives,” he said.

    And that is what is happening. This year, for the first time, millions of Americans have access to three lifesaving respiratory-virus vaccines, against flu, COVID, and RSV. Uptake for all three remains sleepy and halting; even the flu shot, the most established, is not performing above its pre-pandemic baseline. “We get used to people getting sick every year,” Maldonado told me. “We get used to things we could probably fix.” The years since COVID arrived set a horrific precedent of death and disease; after that, this season of n+1 sickness might feel like a reprieve. But compare it with a pre-COVID world, and it looks objectively worse. We’re heading toward a new baseline, but it will still have quite a bit in common with the old one: We’re likely to accept it, and all of its horrors, as a matter of course.

    [ad_2]

    Katherine J. Wu

    Source link

  • Do Not Underestimate the To-Do List

    Do Not Underestimate the To-Do List

    [ad_1]

    Productivity is a sore subject for a lot of people. Philosophically, the concept is a nightmare. Americans invest personal productivity with moral weight, as though human worth can be divined through careful examination of work product, both professional and personal. The more practical questions of productivity are no less freighted with anxiety. Are you doing enough to hold on to your job? To improve your marriage? To raise well-adjusted kids? To maintain your health? What can you change in order to do more?

    Anxiety breeds products, and the tech industry’s obsession with personal optimization in particular has yielded a bounty of them in the past decade or two: digital calendars that send you push notifications about your daily schedule. Platforms that reimagine your life as a series of project-management issues. Planners as thick as encyclopedias that encourage you to set daily intentions and monthly priorities. Self-help books that cobble together specious principles of behavioral psychology to teach you the secrets of actually using all of the stuff you’ve bought in order to optimize your waking hours (and maybe your sleeping ones too).

    Underneath all of the tiresome discourse about enhancing human productivity or rejecting it as a concept, there is a bedrock truth that tends to get lost. There probably is a bunch of stuff that you need or want to get done, for reasons that have no discernable moral or political valence—making a long-delayed dentist appointment, picking up groceries, returning a few nagging emails, hanging curtains in your new apartment. For that, I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen.

    First, cards on the table: I’m not an organized person. Much of the advice on these topics is given by people with a natural capacity for organization and focus—the people who, as kids, kept meticulous records of assignments and impending tests in their school-issued planners. Now they send out calendar invites to their friends once next weekend’s dinner plans are settled and have never killed a plant by forgetting to water it. They were, in my opinion, largely born on third base and think they hit a triple. I, by contrast, have what a psychiatrist once called a “really classic case” of ADHD. My executive function is never coming back from war. I have tried the tips, the tricks, the hacks, the apps, and the methods. I have abandoned countless planners three weeks into January. Years ago, I bought a box with a timed lock so that I could put my phone in it and force myself to write emails. Perhaps counterintuitively, that makes me somewhat of an amateur expert in the tactics that are often recommended for getting your life (or at least your day) in order.

    It took me an embarrassingly long time to try putting pen to paper. By the time I was in the working world, smartphones were beginning to proliferate, and suddenly, there was an app for that. In the late 2000s, optimism abounded about the capacity for consumer technology to help people overcome personal foibles and make everyday life more efficient. Didn’t a calendar app seem much neater and tidier than a paper planner? Wouldn’t a list of tasks that need your attention be that much more effective if it could zap you with a little vibration to remind you it exists? If all of your schedules and documents and contacts and to-do lists could live in one place, wouldn’t that be better?

    Fifteen years later, the answer to those questions seems to be “not really.” People habituate to the constant beeps and buzzes of their phone, which makes rote push-notification task reminders less likely to break through the noise. If you make a to-do list in your notes app, it disappears into the ether when you finally lock your phone in an effort to get something—anything!—done. Shareable digital calendars do hold certain practical advantages over their paper predecessors, and services such as Slack and Google Docs, which let people work together at a distance, provide obvious efficiencies over mailing paperwork back and forth. But those services’ unexpected downsides have also become clear. Trivial meetings stack up. Work bleeds into your personal time, which isn’t actually efficient. Above all, these apps and tactics tend to be designed with a very specific kind of productivity in mind: that which is expected of the average office worker, whose days tend to involve a lot of computer tasks and be scheduleable and predictable. If your work is more siloed or scattered or unpredictable—like, say, a reporter’s—then bending those tools to your will is a task all its own. Which is to say nothing of the difficulty of bending those tools to the necessities of life outside of work.

    My personal collision with the shortcomings of digital productivity hacks came during the first year of the pandemic, when many people were feeling particularly isolated and feral. Without the benefit of the routines that I’d constructed for myself in day-to-day life in the outside world, time passed without notice, and I had trouble remembering what I was supposed to be doing at any given time. I set reminders for myself, opened accounts on task-management platforms, tried different kinds of note-taking software. It was all a wash. At the end of my rope, I pulled out a notebook and pen, and flipped to a clean page. I made a list of all the things I could remember that I’d left hanging, broken down into their simplest component parts—not clean the apartment, but vacuum, take out the trash, and change your sheets.

    It worked. When I made a list, all of the clutter from my mind was transferred to the page, and things started getting done. It has kept working, years later, any time I get a little overwhelmed. A few months after my list-making breakthrough, I tried to translate this tactic to regular use of a planner, but that tanked the whole thing. I just need a regular notebook and a pen. There’s no use in getting cute with it. Don’t make your to-do list a task of its own.

    All of this might sound preposterously simple and obvious. If you were born with this knowledge or learned it long ago, then I’m happy for you. But for people like me for whom this behavior doesn’t come naturally, that obvious simplicity is exactly the genius of cultivating it. Your list lives with you on the physical plane, a tactile representation of tasks that might otherwise be out of sight and out of mind (or, worse, buried in the depths of your laptop). It contains only things that you can actually accomplish in a day or two, and then you turn the page forever and start again. If you think of more things that need to be on the list after you think you’re done making it, just add them. If you get to the last few things on the list and realize they’re not that important, don’t do them. This type of to-do list doesn’t take any work to assemble. It isn’t aesthetically pleasing. It doesn’t need to be organized in any particular way, or at all. It’s not a plan. It’s just a list.

    If you’d feel more convinced by some psychological evidence instead of the personal recommendation of a stranger with an aversion to calendars, a modest amount of research has amassed over the years to suggest that I’m on the right track. List-making seems to be a boon to working memory, and writing longhand instead of typing on a keyboard seems to aid in certain types of cognition, including learning and memory. My own experience is in line with the basic findings of that research: Writing down a list forces me to recall all of the things that are swimming around in my head and occasionally breaking through to steal my attention, and then it moves the tasks from my head onto the paper. My head is then free to do other things. Like, you know, the stuff on the list. There are no branded tools you have to buy, and no subscriptions. It cannot be monetized. Write on the back of your water bill, for all I care. Just remember to pay your water bill.

    [ad_2]

    Amanda Mull

    Source link

  • We Have No Drugs to Treat the Deadliest Eating Disorder

    We Have No Drugs to Treat the Deadliest Eating Disorder

    [ad_1]

    In the 1970s, they tried lithium. Then it was zinc and THC. Anti-anxiety drugs had their turn. So did Prozac and SSRIs and atypical antidepressants. Nothing worked. Patients with anorexia were still unable to bring themselves to eat, still stuck in rigid thought patterns, still chillingly underweight.

    A few years ago, a group led by Evelyn Attia, the director of the Center for Eating Disorders at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, tried giving patients an antipsychotic drug called olanzapine, normally used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and known to cause weight gain as a side effect. Those patients in her study who were on olanzapine increased their BMI a bit more than others who were taking a placebo, but the two groups showed no difference in their cognitive and psychological symptoms. This was the only medication trial for treating anorexia that has shown any positive effect at all, Attia told me, and even then, the effects were “very modest.”

    Despite nearly half a century of attempts, no pill or shot has been identified to effectively treat anorexia nervosa. Anorexia is well known to be the deadliest eating disorder; the only psychiatric diagnosis with a higher death rate is opioid-use disorder. A 2020 review found people who have been hospitalized for the disease are more than five times likelier to die than their peers without it. The National Institutes of Health has devoted more than $100 million over the past decade to studying anorexia, yet researchers have not found a single compound that reliably helps people with the disorder.

    Other eating disorders aren’t nearly so resistant to treatment. The FDA has approved fluoxetine (a.k.a. Prozac) to treat bulimia nervosa and binge-eating disorder (BED); doctors prescribe additional SSRIs off-label to treat both conditions, with a fair rate of success. An ADHD drug, Vyvanse, was approved for BED within two years of the disorder’s official recognition. But when it comes to anorexia, “we’ve tried, I don’t know, eight or 10 fundamentally different kinds of approaches without much in the way of success,” says Scott Crow, an adjunct psychology professor at the University of Minnesota and the vice president of psychiatry for Accanto Health.

    The discrepancy is puzzling to anorexia specialists and researchers. “We don’t fully understand why medications work so differently in this group, and boy, do they ever work differently,” Attia told me. Still, experts have some ideas. Over the past few decades, they have been learning about the changes in brain activity that accompany anorexia. For example, Walter Kaye, the founder and executive director of the Eating Disorders Program at UC San Diego, told me that the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine, both of which are involved in the brain’s reward system, seem to act differently in anorexia patients.

    Perhaps some underlying differences in brain chemistry and function play a role in anorexia patients’ extreme aversion to eating. Or perhaps, the experts I spoke with suggested, these brain changes are at least in part a result of patients’ malnourishment. People with anorexia suffer from many effects of malnutrition: Their bones are more brittle; their brain is smaller; their heart beats slower; their breath comes shorter; their wounds fail to heal. Maybe their neurons respond differently to psychoactive drugs too.

    Read: The challenge of treating anorexia in adults

    Psychiatrists have found that many patients with anorexia don’t improve with treatment even when medicines are prescribed for conditions other than their eating disorder. If an anorexia patient also has anxiety, for example, taking an anti-anxiety drug would likely fail to relieve either set of symptoms, Attia told me. “Time and again, investigators have found very little or no difference between active medication and placebo in randomized controlled trials,” she said. The fact that fluoxetine seems to help anorexia patients avoid relapse—but only when it’s given after they’ve regained a healthy weight—also supports the notion that malnourished brains don’t respond so well to psychoactive medication. (In that case, the effect might be especially acute for people with anorexia nervosa, because they tend to have lower BMIs than people with other eating disorders.)

    Why exactly this would be true remains a mystery. Attia noted that proteins and certain fats have been shown to be crucial for brain function; get too little of either, and the brain might not metabolize drugs in expected ways. Both she and Kaye suggested a possible role for tryptophan, an amino acid that humans get only from food. Tryptophan is converted into serotonin (among other things) when we release insulin after a meal, Kaye said, but in anorexia patients, whose insulin levels tend to be low, that process could end up off-kilter. “We suspect that that might be the reason why [SSRIs] don’t work very well,” he said, though he emphasized that the theory is very speculative.

    In the absence of meaningful pharmacologic intervention, doctors who treat anorexia rely on methods such as nutrition counseling and psychotherapy. But even non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, are more effective at treating bulimia and binge-eating disorder than anorexia. Studies from around the world have shown that as many as half of people with anorexia relapse.

    Colleen Clarkin Schreyer, a clinical psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, sees both patients with anorexia nervosa and those with bulimia nervosa, and told me that the former can be more difficult to treat—“but not just because of the fact that we don’t have any medication to help us along. I often find that patients with anorexia nervosa are more ambivalent about making behavior change.” Bulimia patients, she said, tend to feel shame about their condition, because binge eating is stigmatized and, well, no one likes vomit. But anorexia patients might be praised for skipping meals or rapidly losing weight, despite the fact that their behaviors can be just as dangerous over the long term as binging and vomiting.

    Read: Raising a daughter with a body like mine

    Researchers are still trying to find substances that can help anorexia patients. Crow told me that case studies testing a synthetic version of leptin, a naturally occurring human hormone, have produced interesting data. Meanwhile, some early research into using psychedelics, including ketamine, psilocybin, and ayahuasca, suggests that they may relieve some symptoms in some cases. But until randomized, controlled trials are conducted, we won’t know whether or how well any psychedelic really works. Kaye is currently recruiting participants for such a study of psilocybin, which is planned to have multiple sites in the U.S. and Europe.

    Pharmaceutical companies just don’t seem that enthusiastic about testing treatments for anorexia, Crow said. “I think that drug makers have taken to heart the message that the mortality is high” among anorexia patients, he told me, and thus avoid the risk of having deaths occur during their clinical trials. And drug development isn’t the only area where the study of anorexia has fallen short. Research on eating disorders tends to be underfunded on the whole, Crow said. That stems, in part, from “a widely prevailing belief that this is something that people could or should just stop … I wish that were how it works, frankly. But it’s not.”

    [ad_2]

    Rachel Gutman-Wei

    Source link

  • Zero Lead Is an Impossible Ask for American Parents

    Zero Lead Is an Impossible Ask for American Parents

    [ad_1]

    Over the past eight months, I’ve spent a mind-boggling amount of time and money trying to keep an invisible poison at bay. It started at my daughter’s 12-month checkup, when her pediatrician told me she had a concerning amount of lead in her blood. The pediatrician explained that, at high levels, lead can irreversibly damage children’s nervous system, brain, and other organs, and that, at lower levels, it’s associated with learning disabilities, behavior problems, and other developmental delays. On the drive home, I looked at my baby in her car seat and cried.

    The pediatrician told me that we needed to get my daughter’s lead level down. But when I began to try to find out where it was coming from, I learned that lead can be found in any number of places: baby food, house paint, breast milk, toys, cumin powder. And it’s potent. A small amount of lead dust—equal to one sweetener packet—would make an entire football field “hazardous” by the EPA’s standards.

    My husband and I spent nearly $12,000 removing highly contaminated soil from our backyard, replacing old windows, and sealing an old claw-foot bathtub. We mopped the floors at night, obsessively washed our daughter’s hands, and made sure to feed her plenty of iron, calcium, and vitamin C, which are thought to help limit the body’s absorption of lead. Four months later, when we went back to the pediatrician, her lead levels had sunk from 3.9 micrograms per deciliter of blood to 2.2 mcg/dL. That was better, but still far from zero. And according to the CDC, the World Health Organization, and the Mayo Clinic, zero is the only safe amount of lead.

    We’re one of thousands of families who have gone through that ordeal this year. At least 300,000 American children have blood lead levels above 3.5 mcg/dL, the CDC’s so-called reference value. But parents are largely left on their own to get lead out of their kids’ lives. Families who can afford an abundance of caution can sink tens of thousands of dollars into the project. And they still might never hit zero.

    When Suz Garrett learned that her 1-year-old son, Orrin, had four micrograms of lead in every deciliter of his blood, she and her husband waited for guidance from their doctor or the county health department, but none came. So they sent Orrin to stay with family while they repainted their 19th-century Richmond, Virginia, house and covered the open soil with mulch. Band-Aids like these are cost-effective, but every time you pry open an old window, or your dog tracks in dirt from the neighbors’ yard, invisible specks of lead dust can build up again.

    Read: When lead affects learning

    For nearly a year, the Garretts cleaned religiously. Orrin’s blood levels are still detectable—currently, he’s at 2.1 mcg/dL. Garrett and her husband are fed up. In a few months they’re moving to a new house, one they took out a $200,000 construction loan to renovate. “We ended up gutting it so we would know there’s no lead paint,” Garrett said.

    A few years ago, children like Orrin Garrett and my daughter wouldn’t have been a cause for concern. Until 2012, children were identified as having a blood lead “level of concern” at 10 mcg/dL or more. But for the past decade, the CDC has used a reference value to identify children who have more lead in their blood than most others. The reference number is based on statistics, not health outcomes. When most children tested below 5 mcg/dL, the reference level was five. Today, it is 3.5.

    The reference level has trended down along with lead exposure, which has dropped by 95 percent since the 1970s thanks to policies that removed lead from gasoline, paint, plumbing, and food. But confusion and concern about what classifies as lead poisoning has risen.

    Read: An American history of lead poisoning

    Scientists and public-health officials still can’t say exactly how low lead exposure needs to be to prevent damage for any individual child. When Kim Dietrich, an epidemiologist and a developmental neuropsychologist, started his career in the ’70s, the general consensus was that levels above 40 to 60 micrograms took a significant toll on the developing brain. But work by Dietrich and others showed that harm can be caused at much lower levels. In the early 2000s, pooled data from seven large studies from around the world, including one Dietrich conducted in Cincinnati, showed that an increase in children’s blood-lead concentration from 2.4 to just 10 mcg/dL corresponded with a four-point drop in their IQ. That’s a scary prospect. But, Dietrich told me, “it’s very important not to confuse findings from these large population-level studies with individual impacts.”

    Discerning the effect of low lead levels—below about 10 mcg/dL—on cognitive health is an extremely complicated issue. “If you’ve got a blood alcohol content of 0.2, you’re likely to be horribly dangerous behind the wheel no matter who you are. Lead is a little bit different. Your child’s two might be worse than my child’s 10,” Gabriel Filippelli, a biogeochemist who studies lead exposure in urban environments, told me. Part of the variation in outcomes could be the result of factors we still don’t understand, like a child’s genetic makeup.

    Policing low levels of lead exposure in children costs parents both financially and emotionally. Mary Jean Brown, the former chief of the CDC’s Healthy Homes and Lead Poisoning Prevention Program, told me that concerned parents should be careful not to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Most children will not exhibit any symptoms when they have blood levels of 5 or 10 micrograms per deciliter,” she told me. But “if the mother or someone else says, ‘Johnny’s not like everybody else,’ pretty soon, Johnny isn’t like everybody else.”

    This type of anxiety is familiar to Tanisha Bowman, a health-care worker in Pittsburgh who has spent nearly three years trying to lower her daughter’s blood lead levels. They initially peaked at 20 mcg/dL, and have ranged from two to six over the past year. “There was never anything wrong with her. She was always measuring four to six months ahead,” Bowman said. But it was impossible not to read scary headlines about lead and assume they applied to her daughter. When she had tantrums around the age of 2, Bowman started wondering if she had ADHD, which is sometimes associated with lead exposure. “I will never know what impact, if any, this had on her. And nobody will ever be able to tell me,” she said. (Bowman’s daughter has had no diagnosis related to lead.)

    Read: Why it took decades of blaming parents before we banned lead paint

    In the absence of a specific, outcome-based number to help parents decide when to worry, a mantra has emerged among doctors, reporters, and health institutions: There is no safe level of lead. Filippelli said that he’s used the catchphrase, but it’s a bit misleading. “There is no valid research source to support the ‘No amount of lead exposure is safe’ idea, beyond that fact that to avoid the potential of harm, you should avoid exposure,” he explained in an email.

    As well intentioned as the guidance might be, avoiding all exposure is an impossible quest. Tricia Gasek, a mother of three who lives in New Jersey, tried desperately to locate the source of lead in her children’s blood. She spent $1,000 hiring a “lead detective” to test her home with an XRF device and getting consultations with experts, plus another $600 replacing leaded lights on the front door. Ultimately, she learned that she also had elevated levels and concluded that the lead in her son’s blood was coming from her breast milk—possibly, her doctors thought, from exposure she had as a child. The process was exhausting. “It’s just crazy. Why am I the one figuring all this out?” she says.

    Parents simply can’t get to zero without help. Lead is invisible and pervasive. Although the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and recent product recalls have raised awareness about lead leaching from corroding pipes and hiding inside baby food, the biggest sources of exposure for children are the spaces where they live and play: inside houses and apartments with old, degrading paint and yards with contaminated soil. For many, there is no easy escape. Lead contamination is most common in low-income neighborhoods, which means Black and Hispanic kids are disproportionately affected.

    Read: The poisoned generation

    Many local health departments, including the one where I live, offer home visits to help identify sources of lead, but in many cases only when levels are above 10 mcg/dL. So the majority of children with elevated lead levels receive little or no assistance at all, and families have to play detective, social worker, and home remodeler all at once.

    This is paradoxical, because the problem of low-level lead exposure cannot be solved by focusing on one child or one home at a time. My family’s efforts helped lower our daughter’s lead levels slightly, but they did nothing to address the more widespread problem of lead in our neighborhood, to which she and all the other children nearby are still exposed. Instead of having every lead-exposed family play whack-a-mole in their own home, Filippelli says that if he were appointed czar of lead, he would do a national analysis of high-risk neighborhoods and households, perform targeted testing to confirm hazards, and remediate at scale. There would have to be coordination between the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Environmental Protection Agency, and such programs could cost up to $1 trillion and take a decade. But, he says, we could significantly reduce lead exposure across the board. The trickle-down effects of half a million children becoming smarter, healthier adults would reach everyone, even if we can’t say exactly how much smarter or healthier they’d be.

    For now, my family is still navigating this maze on our own. I’m trying to think of low-level lead exposure as a risk factor—like air pollution and forever chemicals—instead of a diagnosis. Meanwhile, my daughter is doing just fine. As a family, we’ll continue to avoid what lead we can; we’ve decided to spend a whopping $25,000 to repaint the chipping exterior of our house. But we’re still going to let our kid play at the park and climb the walls. After all, there’s no stopping her.

    [ad_2]

    Lauren Silverman

    Source link

  • The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

    The Abortion Backlash Reaches Ohio

    [ad_1]

    Officially, abortion had nothing to do with the constitutional amendment that Ohio voters rejected today. The word appeared nowhere on the ballot, and no abortion laws will change as a result of the outcome.

    Practically and politically, however, the defeat of the ballot initiative known as Issue 1 was all about abortion, giving reproductive-rights advocates the latest in a series of victories in the year since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Fearing the passage of an abortion-rights amendment in November, Republicans in Ohio asked voters to approve a proposal that would raise the threshold for enacting a change to the state constitution, which currently requires a simple majority vote. The measure on the ballot today would have lifted the threshold to 60 percent.

    Ohio voters, turning out in unusually large numbers for a summertime special election, declined. Their decision was a rare victory for Democrats in a state that Republicans have dominated, and it suggests that abortion remains a strong motivator for voters heading into next year’s presidential election. The Ohio results could spur abortion-rights advocates to ramp up their efforts to circumvent Republican-controlled state legislatures by placing the issue directly before voters. They have reason to feel good about their chances: Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, statewide abortion-rights ballot measures have been undefeated, winning in blue states such as Vermont and California as well as in red states such as Kansas and Kentucky.

    Read: The next big abortion fight

    In Kansas last summer, an 18-point victory by the abortion-rights side stunned members of both parties in a socially conservative state. By the final day of voting in Ohio, however, the defeat of Issue 1 could no longer be called a surprise. For weeks, Democrats who had become accustomed to disappointment in Ohio watched early-voting numbers soar in the state’s large urban and suburban counties. If Republicans had hoped to catch voters napping by scheduling the election for the dog days of August, they miscalculated. As I traveled the state recently, I saw Vote No signs in front yards and outside churches in areas far from major cities, and progressive organizers told me that volunteers were signing up to knock on doors at levels unheard of for a summer campaign. The opposition extended to some independent and Republican voters, who saw the proposal as taking away their rights. “It’s this ‘Don’t tread on me’ moment where voters are being activated,” says Catherine Turcer, the executive director of Common Cause Ohio, a good-government advocacy group that helped lead the effort to defeat the amendment.

    Opponents of Issue 1 assembled a bipartisan coalition that included two former Republican governors. They focused their message broadly, appealing to voters to “protect majority rule” and stop a brazen power grab by the legislature. But the special election’s obvious link to this fall’s abortion referendum in Ohio drove people to the polls, particularly women and younger voters. “Voters don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Ohio constitution. They probably don’t spend a ton of time thinking about voting rights,” Turcer told me. But, she said, “the attempt to dilute voter power so that it would impact a vote on reproductive rights made it really concrete, and that was important.”

    Voters in South Dakota and Arkansas last year rejected similar GOP-driven efforts to make ballot initiatives harder to pass. But Ohio’s status as a large former swing state that has turned red over the past decade posed a unique test for Democrats who are desperate to revive their party in the state. “We’ve been beat in Ohio a lot,” Dennis Willard, a longtime party operative in the state who served as the lead spokesperson for the No campaign, told me. That Republicans tried to pass this amendment, he said, “is a testament to them believing that they’re invincible and that we cannot beat them.”

    The defeat of Issue 1 likely clears the way for voters this fall to guarantee abortion access in Ohio, and it will keep open an avenue for progressives to enshrine, with a simple majority vote, other policies in the state constitution—including marijuana legalization and a higher minimum wage—that they could not get through a legislature controlled by Republicans. Democrats, including Willard, are eying an amendment to curb the gerrymandering that has helped the GOP lock in their majorities. They also hope that tonight’s victory will put Ohio back on the political map. “Us winning sends a message to the rest of the country that Ohio has possibilities,” Willard said. “And winning in November demonstrates to people that you can’t write Ohio off anymore.”

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    For the moment, though, the GOP is in little danger of losing its hold on the state. It controls supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature; the Republican governor, Mike DeWine, trounced his Democratic opponent by 25 points last year to win a second term. One Ohio Republican, speaking anonymously before today’s election, told me that the defeat of Issue 1 and the expected passage of the reproductive-rights amendment in November could actually help the party next year, because voters might no longer believe that abortion access is in danger in the state. (The GOP performed better last year in blue states such as New York and California, where abortion rights were not under serious threat.)

    Republicans in Ohio, and in other states where similar ballot measures have flopped, are now confronting the limits of their power and the point at which voters will rebel. Will they be chastened and recalibrate, or will they continue to push the boundaries? It’s a question the proponents of Issue 1 did not want to contemplate before the votes confirming their defeat were counted. Their critics, however, are doubtful that Republicans will shift their strategy. “It’s unlikely that they will stop right away,” Turcer said. “It will take a number of defeats before they’re likely to understand that voters do not want to be taken advantage of.”

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • The Next Big Abortion Fight

    The Next Big Abortion Fight

    [ad_1]

    For the 150 or so people who filled a church hall in Toledo, Ohio, for a Thursday-night campaign rally last week, the chant of the evening featured a profanity usually discouraged in a house of God.

    “With all due respect, pastor, hell no!” shouted Betty Montgomery, a former Ohio attorney general. Montgomery is a Republican, which gave the largely Democratic audience even more reason to roar with approval. They had gathered at the Warren AME Church, in Toledo, to voice their opposition to a constitutional amendment that Ohio voters will approve or reject in a statewide referendum on August 8. Many of those in the boisterous crowd were experiencing a feeling unfamiliar to Democrats in the state over the past decade: optimism.

    If enacted, the Republican-backed proposal known as Issue 1 would raise the bar for any future changes to the state constitution. Currently, constitutional amendments in Ohio—including the one on next week’s ballot—need only a bare majority of voters to pass; the proposal seeks to make the threshold a 60-percent supermajority.

    In other years, a rules tweak like this one might pass without much notice. But next week’s referendum has galvanized Democratic opposition inside and outside Ohio, turning what the GOP had hoped would be a sleepy summertime election into an expensive partisan proxy battle. Conservatives have argued that making the constitution harder to amend would protect Ohio from liberal efforts to raise the minimum wage, tighten gun laws, and fight climate change. But the Republican-controlled legislature clearly timed this referendum to intercept a progressive march on one issue in particular: Ohioans will decide in November whether to make access to abortion a constitutional right, and the outcome of next week’s vote could mean the difference between victory and defeat for backers of abortion rights.

    A year after the fall of Roe v. Wade, the back-to-back votes will also test whether abortion as an issue can still propel voters to the polls in support of Democratic candidates and causes. If the abortion-rights side wins next week and in November, Ohio would become the largest GOP-controlled state to enshrine abortion protections into law. The abortion-rights movement is trying to replicate the success it found last summer in another red state, Kansas, where voters decisively rejected an amendment that would have allowed the legislature to ban abortion, presaging a midterm election in which Democrats performed better than expected in states where abortion rights were under threat.

    Read: The Kansas abortion shocker

    To prevent Democratic attempts to circumvent conservative state legislatures, Republican lawmakers have sought to restrict ballot initiatives across the country. Similar efforts are under way or have already won approval in states including Florida, Missouri, North Dakota, and Idaho. But to Democrats in Ohio and beyond, the August special election is perhaps the most brazen effort yet by Republicans to subvert the will of voters. Polls show that in Ohio, the abortion-rights amendment is likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote, as have similar ballot measures in other states. For Republicans to propose raising the threshold three months before the abortion vote in November looks like a transparent bid to move the proverbial goalposts right when their opponents are about to score.

    “I don’t think I’ve seen such a naked attempt to stay in power,” a former Democratic governor of Ohio, Dick Celeste, told the church crowd in Toledo. As in Kansas a year ago, the Republican majority in the state legislature scheduled the referendum for August—a time when the party assumed turnout would be low and favorable to their cause. (Adding to the Democratic outrage is the fact that just a few months earlier, Ohio Republicans had voted to restrict local governments from holding August elections, because they tend to draw so few people.) “They’re trying to slip it in,” Kelsey Suffel, a Democratic voter from Perrysburg, told me after she had cast an early vote.

    That Ohio Republicans would try a similar gambit so soon after the defeat their counterparts suffered in Kansas struck many Democrats as a sign of desperation. “The winds of change are blowing,” Celeste said in Toledo. “They’re afraid, and they should be afraid, because the people won’t tolerate it.”

    The upcoming vote will serve as an important measure of strength for Ohio Democrats ahead of elections in the state next year that could determine control of Congress. Democrats have had a long losing streak in Ohio. Donald Trump easily won the state in 2016 and 2020, and Republicans have won every statewide office except for that of Senator Sherrod Brown, who faces reelection next year. Still, there’s reason to believe Celeste is right to be optimistic. A Suffolk University poll released last week found that 57 percent of registered voters planned to vote against Issue 1. (A private survey commissioned by a nonpartisan group also found the August amendment losing, a Republican who had seen the results told me on the condition of anonymity.) Early-voting numbers have swamped predictions of low participation in an August election, suggesting that abortion remains a key motivator for getting people to turn out. Groups opposing the amendment have significantly outspent supporters of the change.

    Abortion isn’t explicitly on the ballot in Ohio next week, but the clear linkage between this referendum and the one on reproductive rights in November has divided the Republican coalition. Although the state’s current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, backs Issue 1, the two living GOP former governors, Bob Taft and John Kasich, oppose it as an overreach by the legislature.

    “That’s the giant cloud on this issue,” Steve Stivers, a former Republican member of Congress who now heads the Ohio Chamber of Commerce, told me. The Chamber of Commerce backs the amendment because, as Stivers said, it’ll help stop “bad ideas” such as raising the minimum wage, marijuana legalization, and proposals supported by organized labor. But, he said, many of his members were worried that the group would be dragged into a fight over abortion, on which it wants to stay neutral: “The timing is not ideal.”

    Read: It’s abortion, stupid

    Democrats have highlighted comments from Republicans who have departed from the party’s official message and drawn a connection between the August referendum and the abortion vote this fall. “They’ve all said the quiet part out loud, which is this election is 100 percent about trying to prevent abortion rights from having a fair election in the fall,” the state Democratic chair, Liz Walters, told me.

    But to broaden its coalition, opponents of the amendment have advanced a simpler argument—preserve “majority rule”—that also seems to be resonating with voters. “I’m in favor of democracy,” explained Ed Moritz, an 85-year-old retired college professor standing outside his home in Cleveland, when I asked him why he was planning to vote no. Once a national bellwether, Ohio has become close to a one-party state in recent years. For Democrats, citizen-led constitutional amendments represent one of the few remaining checks on a legislature dominated by Republicans. Moritz noted that the GOP had already gerrymandered the Ohio legislature by drawing maps to ensure its future majorities. “This,” he said, “is an attempt to gerrymander the entire population.”

    To Frank LaRose, the suggestion that Issue 1 represents an assault on democracy is “hyperbole.” LaRose is Ohio’s Republican secretary of state and, of late, the public face of Issue 1. Traversing Ohio over the past few weeks, he’s used the suddenly high-profile campaign as a launching pad for his bid for the Republican nomination for Senate in 2024.

    LaRose, 44, served for eight years in the state Senate before becoming Ohio’s top elections officer in 2019. (He won a second term last year.) He’s a smooth debater and quick on his feet, but on the Issue 1 campaign, he’s not exactly exuding confidence.

    In an interview, he began by rattling off a litany of complaints about the opposition’s messaging, which he called “intentionally misleading.” LaRose accused Issue 1’s opponents of trying to bamboozle conservative voters with literature showing images of the Constitution being cut to pieces and equating the amendment with “Stop the Steal.” “That’s completely off base,” he said. “We’ve had to compete with that and with a mountain of money that they’ve had, and with a pretty organized and intentional effort by the media on this.”

    LaRose likes to remind people that even if voters approve Issue 1, citizens would still be able to pass, with a simple majority, ballot initiatives to create or repeal statutes in Ohio law. The August proposal applies only to the state constitution, which LaRose said is not designed for policy making. Left unsaid, however, is that unlike an amendment to the constitution, any statutory change approved by the voters could swiftly be reversed by the Republican majority in the legislature.

    “Imagine if the U.S. Constitution changed every year,” he said. “What instability would that create? Well, that’s what’s at risk if we don’t pass Issue 1.” LaRose’s argument ignored the fact that Ohio’s rules for constitutional amendments have been in place for more than a century and, during that time, just 19 of the 77 changes proposed by citizen petitions have passed. (Many others generated by the legislature have won approval by the voters.)

    LaRose has been spending a lot of his time explaining the amendment to confused voters, including Republicans. When I spoke with him last weekend, he had just finished addressing about two dozen people inside a cavernous 19th-century church in Steubenville. He described his stump speech as a “seventh-grade civics class” in which he explained the differences between the rarely amended federal Constitution and Ohio’s routinely amended founding document. The laws that Ohio could be saddled with if the voters reject Issue 1, LaRose warned, went far beyond abortion: “It’s every radical West Coast policy that they can think of that they want to bring to Ohio.”

    The challenges LaRose has faced in selling voters on the proposal soon became apparent. When I asked a pair of women who had questioned LaRose during his speech whether he had persuaded them, one simply replied, “No.” Another frustrated attendee who supported the proposal told LaRose that she had encountered voters who didn’t understand the merits of the idea.

    Republicans have had to spend more time than they’d like defending their claim that Issue 1 is not simply an effort to head off November’s abortion amendment. They have also found themselves playing catch-up on an election that they placed on the ballot. “They got out of the gate earlier than our side,” the state Republican Party chair, Alex Triantafilou, told me, referring to an early round of TV ads that opposition groups began running throughout the state.

    David Frum: The humiliating Ohio Senate race

    The GOP’s struggle to sell its proposal to voters adds to the perception that the party, in placing the measure on the ballot, was acting not from a position of strength but of weakness. The thinly disguised effort to preempt a simple-majority vote on abortion is surely a concession by Republicans that they are losing on the issue even in what has become a reliably red state.

    When I asked LaRose to respond to the concerns about abortion that Stivers reported from his members in the Chamber of Commerce, he lamented that it was another example of businesses succumbing to “cancel culture.”

    Confidence can be dangerous for a Democrat in Ohio. Barack Obama carried the state twice, but in both 2016 and 2020, late polls showing a tight race were proved wrong by two eight-point Trump victories. A similar trajectory played out last year, when the Republican J. D. Vance pulled away from the Democrat Tim Ryan in the closing weeks to secure a seven-point victory in Ohio’s Senate race.

    “Democrats in the state are beaten down,” says Matt Caffrey, the Columbus-based organizing director for Swing Left, a national group that steers party donors and volunteers to key races across the country. He’s seen the decline firsthand, telling me of the challenge Democrats have had in recruiting canvassers and engaging voters who have grown more discouraged with each defeat.

    That began to change this summer, Caffrey told me. Volunteers have flocked to canvassing events in large numbers, some for the first time—a highly unusual occurrence for a midsummer special election, he said. At a canvass launch I attended in Akron over the weekend, more than three dozen people showed up, including several first-timers. As I followed Democratic canvassers there and in Cleveland over two days last week, not a single voter who answered their door was unaware of the election or undecided about how they’d vote. “It’s kind of an easy campaign,” Michael Todd, a canvasser with the group Ohio Citizen Action in Cleveland, told me. “Not a whole lot of convincing needs to be done.”

    The response has prompted some Democrats to see the August election as an unexpected opportunity to reawaken a moribund state party. The referendum is a first for Swing Left, which has exclusively invested in candidate races since it formed after Trump’s victory in 2016. “It’s a great example of what we’re seeing across the country, which is the fight for reproductive freedom and the fight for democracy becoming closely attached,” the group’s executive director, Yasmin Radjy, told me in Akron. “We also think it’s really important to build momentum in Ohio, a state that we need to keep investing in.”

    A win next week would make the abortion referendum a heavy favorite to pass in November. And although Ohio is unlikely to regain its status as a presidential swing state in 2024, it could help determine control of Congress. Brown’s bid for a fourth term is expected to be one of the hardest-fought Senate races in the country, and at least three Ohio districts could be up for grabs in the closely divided House.

    For Democrats like Caffrey, the temptation to think bigger about a comeback in Ohio is tempered by the lingering uncertainty about next week’s outcome—whether the party will finally close out a victory in a state that has turned red, or confront another disappointment. “It would be hard for Democrats in Ohio to feel complacent. I wish we would be in a position to feel complacent,” Caffrey said with a smile. “This is more about building hope.”

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • The Tennessee Expulsions Are Just the Beginning

    The Tennessee Expulsions Are Just the Beginning

    [ad_1]

    The red-state drive to reverse the rights revolution of the past six decades continues to intensify, triggering confrontations involving every level of government.

    In rapid succession, Republican-controlled states are applying unprecedented tactics to shift social policy sharply to the right, not only within their borders but across the nation. Just last Thursday, the GOP-controlled Tennessee House of Representatives voted to expel two young Black Democratic representatives, and Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, on Saturday moved to nullify the verdict of a jury in liberal Travis County. In between, last Friday, a single Republican-appointed federal judge, acting on a case brought by a conservative legal group and 23 Republican state attorneys general, issued a decision that would impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone, the principal drug used in medication abortions.

    All of these actions are coming as red states, continuing an upsurge that began in 2021, push forward a torrent of bills restricting abortion, LGBTQ, and voting rights; loosening controls on gun ownership; censoring classroom discussion of race, gender, and sexual orientation; and preempting the authority of their Democratic-leaning metropolitan cities and counties.

    This flood of legislation has started to erase the long-term trend of Congress and federal courts steadily nationalizing more rights and reducing the freedom of states to constrict them—what legal scholars have called the “rights revolution.” Now, across all these different arenas and more, the United States is hurtling back toward a pre-1960s world in which citizens’ basic rights and liberties vary much more depending on where they live.

    Read: The Republican axis reversing the rights revolution

    “We are in the middle of an existential crisis for the future of our burgeoning multicultural, multiethnic democracy,” and the extreme events unfolding in Tennessee and other states “are the early manifestations of an abandonment of democratic norms,” Janai Nelson, the president and director-counsel of the Legal Defense Fund, wrote to me in an email.

    The past week’s events in Tennessee and Texas, and the federal court case on mifepristone, extend strategies that red states have employed since 2020 to influence national policy. But these latest moves show Republicans taking those strategies to new extremes. Together these developments underscore how aggressively red states are maneuvering to block the federal government and their own largest metropolitan areas from resisting their systematic attempt to carve out what I’ve called a “nation within a nation,” operating with its own constraints on civil rights and liberties.

    “It shows there really is no limit, no institution that is quote-unquote ‘sacred’ enough not to try to use to their advantage,” Marissa Roy, the legal team lead for the Local Solutions Support Center, a group opposing the broad range of state preemption efforts, told me.

    This multipronged offensive from red states seeks to reverse one of the most powerful currents in modern American life. Since the 1960s, on issues including the legalization of abortion and same-sex marriage and the banning of discrimination on grounds of race or gender, the Supreme Court, Congress, and federal agencies have broadened the circle of rights guaranteed nationwide and reduced the ability of states to limit those rights.

    Over the past decade, Republican-controlled states have stepped up their efforts to reverse that arrow and restore their freedom to impose their own restrictions on rights and liberties. Nelson sees this red-state drive as continuing the “cycle of progress and retrenchment” on racial equity through American history that stretches back to Reconstruction and the southern resistance that eventually produced Jim Crow segregation. “The current pendulum swing is occurring both in reaction to changing politics and changing demographics, making the arc of that swing that much higher toward extremism,” she told me.

    The vote in the Tennessee House of Representatives, for instance, marked a new level in the long-term struggle between red states and blue cities. In most red states, Republicans control the governorship and/or state legislature primarily through their dominance of predominantly white non-urban areas. Over the past decade, those red-state Republicans have grown more aggressive about using that statewide power to preempt the authority of, and override decisions by, their largest cities and counties, which are typically more racially diverse and Democratic-leaning.

    These preemption bills have removed authority from local governments over policy areas including minimum wage, COVID masking requirements, environmental rules, and even plastic-bag-recycling mandates. Legislatures have accompanied many of these bills with other measures, such as extreme gerrymanders, meant to dilute the political clout of their state’s population centers and shift influence toward exurban and rural areas where Republicans are strongest. In Tennessee, for example, the legislature voted to arbitrarily cut the size of the Nashville Metropolitan Council in half, a decision that a state court blocked this week. Many of the bills that red states have passed since 2020 making it harder to vote have specifically barred techniques used by large counties to encourage participation, such as drop boxes or mobile voting vans.

    Republicans who control the Tennessee House took this attack on urban political power to a new peak with their vote to expel the two Black Democratic representatives, Justin Pearson and Justin Jones, who represent Memphis and Nashville, respectively. Though local officials in each city quickly moved this week to reappoint the two men, the GOP majority sent an ominous signal in its initial vote to remove them. The expulsions went beyond making structural changes to diminish the power of big-city residents, to entirely erasing those voters’ decision on whom they wanted to represent them in the legislature. Conservative legislatures and governors “have become so emboldened [in believing] that they can tread on local democracy,” Roy said, “that they are going all out and perhaps destroying the institution altogether.”

    One of the most aggressive areas of red-state preemption this year has been in moves to seize control of policing and prosecutorial powers in Democratic-leaning cities and counties, which typically have large minority populations. In Georgia, for instance, both chambers of the GOP-controlled state legislature have passed bills creating a new oversight board that would be directed by state officials and have the power to recommend removal of county prosecutors. In Mississippi, both GOP-controlled chambers have approved legislation to expand state authority over policing and the courts in Jackson, the state capital, a city more than 80 percent Black. The Republican governor in each state is expected to sign the bills.

    Tennessee legislators passed a bill in their last session increasing state authority to override local prosecutors. This week they went further. Although it didn’t attract nearly the attention of the expulsion vote, the Tennessee House Criminal Justice Committee on Tuesday approved a bill to eradicate an independent board to investigate police misconduct that Nashville residents had voted to create in a 2018 referendum.

    In 2019, the GOP legislature had already stripped the Nashville Community Oversight Board of the subpoena power that was included in the local referendum establishing it. The new legislation approved this week, which is also advancing in the State Senate, would replace the board and instead require that citizen complaints about police behavior in Nashville and other cities be directed to the internal-affairs offices of their police departments. The legislation is moving forward just weeks after five former police officers were indicted in Memphis for beating a Black man named Tyre Nichols to death. “You would think that while the Tyre Nichols case is going on … that we would be really wanting more oversight, not less,” Jill Fitcheard, the executive director of the Nashville oversight board, told me. Coming so soon after the vote to expel the two Black members, the attempt to eradicate the oversight board, she said, represents “another attack on democracy in Nashville.”

    Texas has joined this procession with bills backed by Governor Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick advancing in both legislative chambers to make it easier for state officials to remove local prosecutors who resist bringing cases on priorities for the GOP majority, such as the measures banning abortion or gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

    But Abbott last Saturday introduced an explosive new element into the red-state push to preempt local law-enforcement authority. In a statement, Abbott directed the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole to fast-track consideration of a pardon for a U.S. Army sergeant convicted just one day earlier of killing a Black Lives Matter protester in 2020. Abbott, who had faced criticism from conservative media for not intervening in the case, promised to approve the pardon, and criticized the Democratic district attorney who brought the case and the jury that decided it in Travis County, an overwhelmingly blue county centered on Austin.

    Although many Republicans are seeking ways to constrain law-enforcement officials in blue counties, Abbott’s move would invalidate a decision by a jury in such a Democratic-leaning area. And whereas the preemption legislation in Texas and elsewhere targets prosecutors because of the cases they won’t prosecute, Abbott is looking to override a local prosecutor because of a case he did prosecute.

    Read: America is growing apart, possibly for good

    Gerry Morris, a former president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers now practicing in Austin, told me that Abbott’s move was especially chilling because it came before any of the normal legal appeals to a conviction had begun. Morris said he can think of no precedent for a Texas governor intervening so peremptorily to effectively overturn a jury verdict. “I guess it means if you are going to kill somebody in Texas,” Morris said, “you need to make sure it’s somebody Governor Abbott thinks ought to be killed; because if that’s the case, then he’ll pardon you.”

    The past week’s third dramatic escalation came from District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, an appointee of former President Donald Trump with ties to the social-conservative movement. Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the FDA’s approval in 2000 of mifepristone was in one sense unprecedented. “Never has a court actually overturned an FDA scientific decision in approving a drug on the grounds that [the] FDA got it wrong,” William Schultz, a former deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on a press call Monday.

    But in another sense, the case merely extended what’s become a routine strategy in the red states’ drive to set their own rules. Nearly two dozen Republican state attorneys general joined the lawsuit in support of the effort to ban mifepristone. That continued a steady procession of cases brought by Republican-controlled states to hobble the exercise of federal authority, or to erase rights that had previously been guaranteed nationwide.

    The most consequential example of this trend is the case involving a Mississippi abortion law that the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority used to overturn Roe v. Wade last summer. But shifting coalitions of GOP state attorneys general have also sued to block environmental regulations proposed by President Joe Biden, and to prevent him from changing Trump-administration immigration-enforcement policies or acting to protect LGBTQ people under federal antidiscrimination laws. Red states “have been very interested in opposing virtually every rule or guidance that would provide nondiscrimination protection to LGBTQ people,” says Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign.

    All of these legal and political struggles raise the same underlying question: Can Democrats and their allies defend the national baseline of civil rights and liberties America has built since the 1960s?

    Democrats have found themselves stymied in efforts to restore those rights through legislation: While Democrats held unified control of Congress during Biden’s first years, the House passed bills that would largely override the red-state moves and restore a set of national rules on abortion, voting, and LGBTQ rights. But in each case, they could not overcome a Republican-led Senate filibuster.

    The Biden administration and civil-rights groups are pursuing lawsuits against many of the red-state rights rollbacks. But numerous legal experts remain skeptical that the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority will reverse many of the red-state actions. The third tool available to Democrats is federal executive-branch action, such as the Title IX regulations the Education Department proposed last week that would invalidate the blanket bans against transgender girls participating in school sports that virtually all the red states have now approved. Yet federal regulations that attempt to counter the red-state actions may prompt resistance from that conservative Supreme Court majority.

    And even as Democrats search for strategies to preserve a common baseline of rights, they face the prospect that Republicans may seek to nationalize the restrictive red-state social regime. Congressional Republicans have introduced bills to write into federal law almost all of the red-state moves, such as abortion bans and prohibitions on classroom discussion of sexual orientation or participation in school sports by transgender girls. Several 2024 GOP presidential candidates are starting to offer similar proposals.

    The past week has seen Republicans reach a new extreme in their effort to build a nation within a nation across the red states. But the next time the GOP achieves unified control of Congress and the White House, even this may seem like the beginning of an attempt to impose on blue states the rollback of rights and liberties that continues to burn unabated through red America.

    [ad_2]

    Ronald Brownstein

    Source link

  • Please Don’t Call My Cervix Incompetent

    Please Don’t Call My Cervix Incompetent

    [ad_1]

    If you haven’t been pregnant, you’d be forgiven for thinking the language of pregnancy is all baby bumps, bundles of joy, and comparisons to variously sized fruits. But in the doctor’s office, it’s a different story. The medical lexicon for moms-to-be can be downright harsh. Case in point: the phrase geriatric pregnancy, which, until recently, was used to refer to anyone pregnant after their 35th birthday.

    This unfortunate term is thought to stem from a concept that dates back to the 1970s, when amniocentesis, a procedure to screen for genetic abnormalities, was becoming routine. That year, the National Institutes of Health identified 35 as the age at which the risk that the test would harm the fetus was roughly equal to the chance of a fetus being born with Down’s syndrome. In the four-plus decades since, advancements in screening technology have made that calculation essentially obsolete—and the idea that your 35th birthday is some sort of cliff-of-no-return absurd. Moms, for their part, always hated the phrase: When Jamila Larson, a 49-year-old mother of two in Hyattsville, Maryland, was called “geriatric” by a midwife in 2011, “it felt like a gut punch,” she told me.

    Though you’ll still hear it occasionally, this term has (thankfully) been on its way out for a while. One reason is changing demographics. As more and more women give birth after turning 35—in 2020, about one in five babies in the United States was born to a mom who had passed that birthday—labeling them as particularly “old” no longer makes sense. Last August, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) announced that its preferred terminology is now “pregnancy at age 35 years or older”—or, even better, that doctors and researchers should simply indicate patients’ age in five-year increments starting from the age of 35.

    This is how progress works: When a medical term outlasts its usefulness, we thank it for its service and move on. So it may surprise you to learn that a litany of dubiously appropriate and medically inaccurate words are still used to describe pregnancy and childbirth. Over the past decade, the field of medicine has acknowledged that language has the power to perpetuate bias among doctors, and worked to scrub its vocabulary of such terms, including schizophrenic (which reduces a person to a stigmatized disease), drug abuser (which reduces a person to their addiction), and sickler (a derogatory term for someone with sickle-cell disease). And yet, doctors continue to describe women’s bodies using charged terms such as hostile uterus, incompetent cervix, and habitual aborter—words that arguably sound worse than the now-shunned geriatric pregnancy. Why do some words evolve, while others insist on haunting moms’ medical charts like ghosts of medicine past?

    [Read: The culture war over ‘pregnant people’]

    Geriatric pregnancy got a spurt of publicity in 2021, when the makers of the fertility and motherhood app Peanut turned their attention to the minefield of pregnancy language. After a video of a distraught woman whose doctor told her she would be “geriatric” if she were to get pregnant garnered attention on the app, Peanut launched a campaign to come up with more neutral-sounding alternatives to existing medical language. That April, they released a glossary of proposed replacements. Still, more attention from the public doesn’t always translate into institutional action: Although 20,000 people have downloaded Peanut’s glossary, there hasn’t been any official movement within medicine to do away with the original terms.

    Across the U.S., doctors are still doling out diagnoses that sound not only archaic, but downright weird. Many of these terms are enshrined in the global catalog of diseases that doctors use to report procedures to insurance companies, known as the ICD-11. The latest version of that glossary, released in 2022, still includes the phrase elderly primigravida, which is basically a synonym for geriatric pregnancy. In 2016, during her second pregnancy, Larson’s notes read “elderly multigravida”—meaning she was both over 35 and had been pregnant before.

    Or consider incompetent cervix, a term that is in both the ACOG dictionary and the ICD-11. Really, it means a pregnant person’s cervix has dilated before the pregnancy is complete, which can lead to premature birth or miscarriage. Meena Khandelwal, an ob-gyn and the director of research for obstetrics and gynecology at Cooper University Health Care in Camden, New Jersey, told me she avoids using the phrase in front of patients (she sometimes uses weak cervix instead, though she isn’t sure that it’s much better). But because incompetent cervix is entrenched in insurance codes and her hospital’s record-keeping system, the phrase is likely to show up in patients’ notes anyway.

    [Read: She got pregnant. His body changed too.]

    To be sure, communicating that the cervix has opened early is crucial; it prompts doctors to monitor the situation using ultrasound, to temporarily sew the cervix closed, or to try another treatment. Providers need to be able to inform one another about patients quickly and clearly; one could argue that is a much more important function of medical jargon than protecting patients’ feelings. The point of language evolution is not to make words so gentle that they become meaningless.

    But in many cases, the existing language is less clear and precise than gentler alternatives. For example, failure to progress—a general term meaning that labor has lasted longer than expected—says nothing about the reason the labor is slow. And calling a patient “geriatric” offers less information than simply stating whether she is in her 30s, 40s, or 50s. The outdated words even have the potential to worsen patient outcomes: a 2018 study on physician bias found that when doctors read stigmatizing language in a patient’s charts, they tended to have more negative attitudes toward the patient and treat their pain less aggressively. Besides, “incompetent” is a strange way to describe whether a cervix is open or closed. It makes it sound like this organ should be worried about its next annual review.

    This odd quality unites many pregnancy-related terms: They make it sound as if the pregnant person, or their body part, could have chosen a different path. When you are told your uterus is being “hostile” or are accused of “failure to progress,” it’s hard not to feel like you’ve somehow failed the assignment. “It sends a message of ‘You could be normal, but you’re not. You’re not working with us here,’” says Kristen Syrett, an associate professor of linguistics at Rutgers University. Even geriatric pregnancy, which doesn’t explicitly apply blame, seems to suggest that a mom-to-be has knowingly brought more risk upon her unborn child by choosing pregnancy “later” in life.

    [Janice Wolly: My first pregnancy]

    Many moms told Peanut that the most devastating label they encountered was habitual aborter. That term usually refers to someone who experiences multiple miscarriages before 20 weeks of pregnancy, a condition that affects 1 to 2 percent of women. (Its cousin is spontaneous abortion, which means such a miscarriage has happened once). From a purely medical perspective, abortion refers to any procedure that terminates a pregnancy, and includes procedures to empty the womb after a miscarriage. But in layman’s terms, it has come to mean a chosen termination of a pregnancy. That, plus the implication that aborting is a bad habit you can’t seem to break, made the term feel particularly inappropriate. “It’s really horrific if you think about it,” says Somi Javaid, an ob-gyn and the founder of the health-care company HerMD, who consulted on the Peanut project.

    This sense of blame becomes more acute when you consider that for many people, reproductive organs are intimately tied to a sense of identity and self-worth—at least compared with, say, the kidneys. In the context of wanting a child, it’s difficult to hear that your uterus is “hostile” or your cervix is “incompetent” without thinking that those terms apply to your whole self. Even physicians can be taken aback: When Javaid was in her 20s, her own doctor deemed her “infertile” in her notes on account of her “old” uterus—meaning that its lining had thinned, a side effect from a fertility medication she was taking. “It felt like being slapped in the face,” she told me. “The impact of the word was not muted by my knowledge at all.”

    Medical terms can, and do, change. But usually the field is responding to larger shifts in the culture, rather than leading the charge. That’s what happened with the phrase pregnant women, which organizations including the ACLU and the CDC have been incrementally phasing out in favor of pregnant people, a term that has sparked vigorous debate about inclusive language and feminism. Last February, ACOG followed suit, announcing that it would “move beyond the exclusive use of gendered language” to better encompass the fact that people of all genders can become pregnant.

    [Helen Lewis: Why I’ll keep saying ‘pregnant women’]

    With geriatric pregnancy, the change was likely more bottom-up, starting with doctors themselves. After all, for many, it was personal: The length and intensity of medical training increases the odds that doctors will have children later than other women—that they will be, in their own language, geriatric moms, says Monica Lypson, a vice dean at Columbia University’s medical school who researches equity and inclusion. Lypson was deemed “geriatric” when she was pregnant at age 36—a choice of words she found “jarring” as a patient.

    Perhaps because incompetent cervix, habitual aborter, and the like refer to conditions that aren’t so common, many providers don’t realize just how hurtful they can be. Ariel Lefkowitz, an internal-medicine physician who cares for patients with pregnancy complications in Toronto, told me that he used to think of failure to progress the same way as he thought of kidney failure or heart failure. He didn’t notice the negative connotations until his wife, Sarah Friedlander, started training to be a birth educator and pointed them out. Now he sees that “it’s a lot more loaded, it’s a lot more personal,” he said.

    That realization pushed him to think harder about the bias embedded in medical language in other fields, such as failure to cope. “We’re so medicalized and supposedly neutral and in this clinical environment,” said Lefkowitz, who in 2021 co-wrote an editorial in the journal Obstetric Medicine on the importance of inclusive language in obstetrics. “It’s very easy to become numb to the ridiculous ways in which we speak.”

    The outdated terms that are currently stuck in the ICD-11, doctors’ offices, and the pages of medical journals may yet change. More doctors are recognizing that how patients perceive their words can have real impacts on health outcomes, says Julia Raney, a primary-care provider for adolescents who has created workshops on using mindful language in clinical settings. Accordingly, medicine is moving toward more person-centered care, including a focus on concrete risks rather than on blame and stereotypes. For instance, in her work with teens, Raney will note that they have a BMI in the 95th percentile rather than refer to them as simply “obese.” The goal is not to shield the patient from reality, but to better define their medical needs. Like ACOG’s move to designate moms as “35–39” or “40–44” rather than “of advanced maternal age,” this has the double benefit of being both less judgmental and more medically precise.

    [Anya E. R. Prince: I tried to keep my pregnancy secret]

    Doctors also have new reasons to be careful with their language. Since April 2021, an “open notes” law has given patients the right to freely and electronically access just about everything their doctors write about them. While the rule is still largely unknown to patients, open notes can make doctors more conscious (and, sometimes, anxious) about how what they write could affect their patients. “I think we’re all aware of that when we write anything,” Steve Lapinsky, an editor in chief of the journal Obstetric Medicine, told me. This increased transparency, he said, might just be the kick medicine needs to accelerate the pace of language change and do away with terms like incompetent cervix once and for all.

    [ad_2]

    Rachel E. Gross

    Source link

  • America Loves Coffee. Why Not Yerba Mate?

    America Loves Coffee. Why Not Yerba Mate?

    [ad_1]

    It shouldn’t be hard to persuade people to take a sip of yerba mate. It’s completely natural. It makes you feel simultaneously energized and relaxed. You can drink it all day without feeling like your stomach acid is burning through your esophagus. It’s the preferred caffeine source of Lionel Messi, Zoe Saldaña, and the Pope. I’m drinking yerba mate with my Argentinian mother-in-law as I write this, and I’ll probably be drinking it with her or my husband when you read it. And yet, my track record for tempting friends into tasting it is abysmal.

    The average Argentinian or Uruguayan drinks more than 26 gallons of the green infusion each year, but as far as I can tell, the average North American has never even tried South America’s most consumed beverage—at least not in its traditional form. After more than 100 years, plenty of added sugar, and growing consumer desire for “clean caffeine,” something companies are calling yerba mate is finally on shelves near you. But in this land of individualism and germophobia, the real thing will simply never catch on.

    The plant has been seen as a moneymaking commodity since Europeans first arrived in the Americas. Long before North Americans rejected yerba mate, European colonizers were falling head over heels for the stuff. Within a few decades of their arrival in what is now Paraguay in the early 16th century, the Spanish were already drinking the local infusion they’d picked up from the indigenous Guaraní. The Guaraní people had used yerba mate—which they called ka’a—as a stimulant and for its medicinal effects since time immemorial. They collected leaves from a particular species of holly, dried them, and then either chewed the ka’a or placed it in an orange-size gourd to be steeped in water and passed among friends.

    An early-19th-century lithograph of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the ruler of Paraguay, holding yerba mate (Source: Letters on Paraguay by John Parish Robertson and William Parish Robertson)

    The Spanish liked the energy yerba mate gave them and began selling the leaves. But according to Christine Folch, the author of the upcoming book Yerba Mate: A Stimulating Cultural History, Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay were the ones who transformed yerba mate into a true cash crop, by developing techniques for cultivating it on a large scale—methods that relied on the forced labor of indigenous people. Yerba-mate use exploded. By the 1700s, it was consumed all over South America:from what is now Paraguay across Peru, Bolivia, southern Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile.

    In the United States, the first major push to popularize and cultivate yerba mate didn’t happen until 1899, when representatives from Brazil and Paraguay boasted about its benefits at the International Commercial Congress in Philadelphia. Soon after, the first U.S.-based firm, the Yerba Maté Tea Company, was founded. The company’s marketing slogan was straightforward and catchy: “Drink Yerba Maté Tea and be happy.” “Here, then, we have an ideal drink,” a 1900 Yerba Maté Tea Company pamphlet proclaimed, “one that promotes digestion, gives immediate strength of the body and brain and acts soothingly upon the nervous system.” Plus, it added, “the ladies will be especially interested to know that it exercises absolutely no bad effects upon the complexion.”

    Early 20th-century advertisement of a woman in a large hat drinking yerba mate with the caption "Drink Yerba Mate and be happy"
    Promotional material published by the Yerba Maté Tea Company in 1900 (Source: Yerba Maté Tea by William Mill Butler)

    The promotion frothed up interest: Curious individuals wrote to their local newspaper asking where to buy yerba mate, and farmers searched for information on how to grow it. Newspaper articles from the time prophesied a future when yerba mate might displace tea and coffee. Entrepreneurs formed new companies hawking yerba mate; some saw Prohibition as a perfect opening for the buzzy nonalcoholic drink. It was peddled hot and cold. In the 1930s, the United States Army even considered distributing daily rations of the beverage to soldiers.

    And yet, by the end of the 1930s, demand remained low. Marketers were perplexed, writing, “When can we expect an increase in consumption? The United States and France have proven themselves impervious to all temptation.” Americans just didn’t seem to have a taste for yerba mate; one 1921 review in the New York Herald read, “The flavor and taste were of a peculiar rank and insipid nature. If our South American friends can relish this beverage they are very welcome to all of it that grows.”

    Read: The quest to make the best worst cup of coffee

    True, yerba mate is bitter and tastes like freshly cut grass. But coffee tastes like burnt rubber the first time you try it, and Americans can’t get enough. Something deeper is going on here. Ximena Díaz Alarcón, an Argentinian marketing and consumer-trends researcher, says it makes sense that Americans never put down their mugs of coffee or tea to pick up a gourd filled with yerba mate. “There’s no cultural fit,” she told me from her home in Buenos Aires.

    Traditionally, yerba mate is consumed from a shared gourd through a shared straw called a bombilla. “Here in Argentina,” Alarcón said, “mate is a cultural habit, it is a tradition, and it is about sharing with others.” But sitting down for an hour or two and sharing a beverage, especially from the same straw, is not something Americans are accustomed to.

    Still, even when entrepreneurs of the past stripped away the communal aspect of yerba mate and sold it to North Americans in individual tea bags, coffee and tea definitively won out. That makes sense: A huge part of the appeal of mate is the ritual and community of it, not just the compounds it contains. Bagged mate simply doesn’t have as much going for it. In order to persuade Americans who have no connection to the tradition of yerba mate to incorporate it into their lives, the drink has to be both convenient and superior to coffee or tea—in the process, losing the very things that make it so beloved in South America.

    From the April 2020 issue: Capitalism’s favorite drug

    Over the past decade, Americans’ burgeoning thirst for healthy, plant-based caffeinated drinks has helped bring yerba mate into food fashion—at least superficially. Today, you can find it at the corner store and at major grocery chains such as Whole Foods and Walmart. But the yerba mate that fits American culture has no leaves, no straws, and no gourd. Instead, it is an ingredient mixed into canned and bottled energy drinks. This style of yerba mate is convenient and fast, and requires no swapping of spit.

    Although carbonated, canned yerba mate has been around since the 1920s, the demand for it is new. Today, “people want more natural products and simpler ingredient lists,” says Martín Caballero, an editor at BevNET who grew up drinking yerba mate when visiting family in Argentina. “So using yerba mate as an energy caffeine source has been something we’ve seen more of.” Like, a lot more: In 2021, the Coca-Cola Company launched Honest Yerba Mate; Perrier now has an “Energize” line featuring yerba mate, and the start-up Guru sells an organic energy drink “inspired by Amazonia’s powerful botanicals.” (For the record, yerba mate doesn’t actually grow in the Amazon.)

    At least one company has directly felt the difference between marketing real yerba mate and the diluted stuff. Guayakí, founded in 1996, built its entire business around working with indigenous communities in Paraguay to sustainably grow the plant. At first, the company sold only tea bags and loose-leaf yerba mate, but in the mid-2000s, it shifted its focus to selling yerba-mate energy drinks. Adding bubbles and sugar paid off, as did an ambitious marketing campaign targeting college students: Over the past decade, Guayakí has likely introduced more Americans to yerba mate than all previous marketing efforts combined. And although I admire their efforts and business philosophy, their canned “Classic Gold” tastes an awful lot like watered-down Diet Coke. But perhaps that’s the strategy.

    Read: Always have three beverages

    These days, it’s easy to find young influencers promoting the canned version of yerba mate—or, as they often call it, “yerb.” Meanwhile, I’ve mostly given up my role as an ambassador for old-school yerba mate. My friends and colleagues just aren’t interested in sharing a green, bitter drink. But my baby couldn’t be more excited about it. Every morning, we offer her our gourd and silver straw (after sucking up the warm water so she doesn’t get jacked up on caffeine), and she grins before placing la bombilla between her tiny lips. I like to think she loves it for the same reason I do: not for the taste, but for the intimacy and ritual.

    [ad_2]

    Lauren Silverman

    Source link

  • Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    Thanksgiving’s Most Underrated Food

    [ad_1]

    Since the start of 2022, I’ve consumed more than my body weight in sweet potatoes. The average American eats closer to the equivalent of one (1) fry a day, but for the past decade, I’ve had at least half a pound of the roots at almost every dinner. I travel with sweet potatoes more reliably than I travel with my spouse. All I need in order to chow down is a microwave and something to cushion my hands against the heat.

    Tomorrow, Americans will finally put sweet potatoes in the spotlight—and still not appreciate all that they’re worth. Families across the country will smother the roots with sugar and butter beneath a crunchy marshmallow crust. This classic casserole may be the only serving of sweet potatoes some people have all year—which is a travesty in terms of both quantity and (sorry) preparation style. Sweet potatoes deserve so much more than what Thanksgiving serves them. And maybe they’d get it, if they weren’t so misunderstood.

    For starters, sweet potatoes are not potatoes or yams. Each belongs to a distinct family of plants. And although potatoes and yams are technically tubers, a riff on a plant stem, sweet potatoes are a modified root. The common name doesn’t exactly help, which is why many experts want to change it from sweet potato to … sweetpotato. Even in grocery stores, confusion abounds. A small part of Lauren Eserman-Campbell, a geneticist and sweet-potato expert at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, dies every time she spots a can of Bruce’s Yams.

    Mostly, the sweet potatoes in American markets resemble Bruce’s (Not) Yams: orange-fleshed, brown-skinned, sugary, moist. But the plant’s true range is much more diverse. The outside comes in earthy umbers, ruddy reds and purples, and sandy beiges; the interior can be cream, buttercup yellow, cantaloupe, lilac, even a shade of violet that verges on black. Some are rather watery; others are almost as dry and starchy as bread. Not all of them are even perceptibly sweet. And thanks to the plant’s zany genetics—six copies of each of 15 chromosomes—nearly every combo of color, texture, taste, shape, and sugar and water content can spring out of a cross between, say, a dryish, veiny purple and a moist, smooth-skinned orange. Craig Yencho, a sweet-potato breeder and geneticist at North Carolina State University, told me that, given enough time, “I could find a sweet potato that would be enjoyable to just about any consumer.”

    The common misconception that potatoes are fattening and devoid of nutrition (slander!) might make some people assume the same or worse of sweet potatoes. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Pit their nutritional profile against other staple crops, such as rice, wheat, and corn—all of which command a larger share of the world market—and, in many respects, “sweet potato is on top,” says Samuel Acheampong, a geneticist at the University of Cape Coast, in Ghana. The orange-fleshed varieties, in particular, come chock-full of iron, zinc, and beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A; the purples are rich in cancer-fighting anthocyanins. Even sweet-potato leaves are a powerhouse, packed with folate and a surprising amount of protein. Also, they’re delicious stir-fried.

    Read: America’s lost story of crops rewrites the history of farming

    Sweet potatoes tend to get America’s attention only in November, but they’re hardy, flexible, and ubiquitous enough to be an anytime, anywhere kind of food. They’ve taken root on every continent, save for Antarctica; they’ve been rocketed into space. Acre for acre, sweet potatoes also yield edible crop far more efficiently than many other plants do, “and that is really important in families where they don’t have enough quality food,” says Robert Mwanga, a sweet-potato geneticist based in Uganda, where some locals eat the roots at nearly every meal. In Kenya, sweet potatoes have sustained communities when other crops have failed. Among some populations, the roots have earned an apt moniker: cilera abana, protector of the children.

    But even among scientists, sweet potatoes get, if not a bad rap, at least an underwhelming one. “It’s a tiny community, and there’s not a lot of funding,” Eserman-Campbell told me. “I went to a sweet-potato breeders’ meeting one time, and I just thought there would be more people there.” It doesn’t help that the plants can be a bit of a genetic pain, Mwanga told me. Their many copied chromosomes make breeding tricky, and new sweet-potato varieties can be propagated only by clonal cuttings. Among consumers, the sweet potato has also struggled to shed its reputation as a poor person’s food, turned to in times of famine or war and culturally linked to rural, low-income farmers.

    People in the Western world are catching on—especially now that nutritionists so often tout sweet potatoes as a superfood, says Ana Rita Simões, a taxonomist at Kew Gardens, in London. In the past decade, demand for Yencho’s sweet potatoes has tripled, maybe quintupled; “I have never seen a crop take off like that,” he said.

    Read: The correct time to eat Thanksgiving dinner

    Culinarily, though, Americans are still batting in the sweet potato’s minor leagues. The big hitter remains the Thanksgiving casserole—a dish Acheampong likes but remains a bit mystified by. “You guys add a lot of sugar,” he told me, which is amusing, considering that the orange-fleshed varieties are already plenty sweet. Plus, the casserole is (gasp) under the thumb of Big Confection: Its invention was commissioned as part of a ploy to sell more marshmallows. It’s sugar all the way down.

    I am not here to yuck anyone’s yam; I celebrate any dish that features sweet potatoes. More preferable, though, would be casting these wonderful roots in a starring role. In other parts of the world, sweet-potato recipes run the gamut from sugary to savory, from appetizer to main to dessert. They’re pureed, stir-fried, noodle-fied; they’re blended into soups, beverages, and pastries. They’ve even found their way into booze. Imagine how they could dress our Thanksgiving tables: sweet potatoes roasted; sweet potatoes grilled; sweet potatofurkey—I mean, why the heck not.

    Read: How to engineer the optimally delicious Thanksgiving plate

    Or perhaps there is a more modest proposal to be made: Enjoy the roots all on their own. Yencho, like me, is a purist; he likes his sweet potatoes plain, baked until soft, no condiments necessary. They just don’t need anything else.

    [ad_2]

    Katherine J. Wu

    Source link

  • The Next Presidential Election Is Happening Right Now in the States

    The Next Presidential Election Is Happening Right Now in the States

    [ad_1]

    Kristen McDonald Rivet let out a big, slightly rueful laugh. “I was underestimating the level of national attention this race was going to get,” she told me. “In the extreme, I was underestimating it.”

    A city commissioner in Bay City, Michigan, McDonald Rivet decided earlier this year to run as a Democrat for the State Senate. She knew the race would be competitive in a closely divided district. But she had little inkling that the seat she was seeking would come to be regarded by Democratic operatives as one of the most crucial in the country.

    Thousands of people run for state legislatures every two years, and many of the campaigns are important but sleepy affairs that hinge on debates over tax rates, school funding, and the condition of roads and bridges. Not this year, however, and not in Michigan. With Republican election deniers running up and down the ballot in key battlegrounds, many Democrats believe that the fight for power in state capitals this fall could ultimately determine the outcome of the presidential election in 2024.

    Read: How the Democrats rallied

    Democrats have carried Michigan in seven of the past eight presidential elections, but they have not held the majority in its State Senate for nearly 40 years. This year, however, they need to pick up just three seats to dislodge Republicans from the majority, and a new legislative map drawn by an independent redistricting commission has given Democrats an opportunity even in a year in which the overall political environment is likely to be challenging for the party.

    If Michigan is famously shaped like a mitten, the Thirty-Fifth District sits between its thumb and forefinger, encompassing the tri-cities of Saginaw, Bay City, and Midland near the shores of Lake Huron. The area voted narrowly for Joe Biden in 2020, but Mariah Hill, the caucus director for the Michigan Senate Democrats, told me she considers it the party’s “majority-making seat.”

    McDonald Rivet won her election as a commissioner in Bay City with about 350 votes; this year, in her first run for a partisan office, she told me she had raised about $425,000, which is a considerable sum for a state legislative candidate. National groups such as EMILY’s List, the States Project, and EveryDistrict are directing money and resources to her campaign.

    Progressives have been intensifying their focus on state legislative power over the past decade. In the 2010 GOP wave, Republicans caught Democrats flat-footed, swept them from majorities across the country in 2010, and then locked in their advantage for years to come through gerrymandering in many states. Democrats reclaimed seven state legislative chambers in 2018, but their momentum slowed in 2020, when they failed to pick up a single chamber. They also lost the majorities they had gained in New Hampshire.

    Read: The Democrats whose 2020 goal is grander than the presidency

    In an earlier era of U.S. history, battles for control of state legislatures took on national importance as proxy fights for power in Washington. Before the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, state legislatures—not voters—appointed U.S. senators. In modern times, however, state legislatures are frequently overlooked relative to their influence on policies that most directly affect voters’ lives. Donors shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to sway presidential and congressional elections. But while gridlock often consumes Capitol Hill, state capitals are hives of legislative activity by comparison.

    The urgency behind the Democratic push to win back legislative chambers escalated in the run-up to 2020, when the party knew that the majorities elected that year would be tasked with drawing legislative and congressional maps after the decennial census. But it might be even greater now. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in June allowed states to severely restrict or altogether ban abortion, instantly raising the stakes of legislative races across the country.

    Another potential Supreme Court decision has spiked Democratic fears to a new level. The justices in the term that begins this month will hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, an election-law case that legal experts say could dramatically reshape how ballots are cast and counted across the country. Republican litigants want the high court to affirm what’s known as the independent-state-legislature theory, which posits that the Constitution gives near-universal power over the running of federal elections to state legislatures. A ruling adopting that argument—and four conservative justices have signaled that they are open to such an interpretation—would allow partisan legislative majorities to ignore or overrule state courts and election officials, potentially granting legal legitimacy to efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to overturn the will of voters in 2024.

    Read: The case that could blow up American election law

    With the next presidential election in mind, Democrats have prioritized gubernatorial elections in the closely fought states, including Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Georgia, where Trump tried to jawbone legislators and other high-ranking officials into overturning his defeat in 2020. They’ve also steered donations to long-neglected secretary-of-state races in some of those same battlegrounds. But the looming Supreme Court ruling in Moore v. Harper has, for some Democrats, turned the fight for state legislative control into the most pivotal of all. “A single state legislative race in Michigan or Arizona could well prove more important to our future than any congressional or U.S. Senate race in America,” Daniel Squadron, a co-founder of the States Project, told me.

    Squadron’s group is spending $60 million to back Democrats in state legislative races in just five states, in what it is calling the largest investment by a single outside organization ever for those campaigns. The effort is in part designed to counter what has historically been a significant GOP advantage, led by the Republican State Leadership Committee and major conservative donors, such as the Koch family.

    Precisely how realistic the States Project’s goals are, and where Democrats should be spending most heavily, is a source of some debate within the party. In Arizona, a swing of just more than 1,000 votes in the State House and 2,000 votes in the State Senate would have flipped those chambers to Democrats in 2020, and the party needs to pick up only one or two seats this year to win majorities. But Arizona’s maps became more favorable to Republicans in redistricting, and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee—the party’s official state legislative arm—views winning majorities there as a relative long shot, especially during a difficult midterm year in which Democrats typically lose seats. The DLCC is instead more focused on protecting Democratic incumbents in Arizona and defending the party’s narrow advantages in states like Colorado and Nevada. Jessica Post, the committee’s president, acknowledges that there is a “philosophical difference” between the DLCC and some of the outside progressive groups.

    “We think that the playing field is wider than simply flipping three battleground states,” Post told me. “We think that we have to protect Democratic majorities across the country.” The States Project is also investing in a few states where Democrats narrowly control the legislature, including Maine and Nevada. But Squadron defended the decision to play offense elsewhere, noting that swaying state legislative races costs “a fraction” of what it does to influence statewide and national elections. “It’s necessary,” he said. “The stakes are high enough that whether the odds are low, medium, or high, we have to take this on.”

    There is widespread agreement, including among Republicans, that the Michigan State Senate is in play, and that the race in the Thirty-Fifth District could be decisive. “There’s no question things are tight right now,” Gustavo Portela, the deputy chief of staff for the Michigan Republican Party, told me. GOP candidates are focusing their campaigns heavily on inflation, he said, though he noted that the new maps tilt toward Democrats and that Republicans currently lag them in fundraising.

    Campaigns and outside groups are running TV ads in some districts, but the candidate who wins a state legislative race tends to be the one who knocks on the most doors. McDonald Rivet is facing a Republican state representative, Annette Glenn, who supported Trump and called for a “forensic audit” of the 2020 election in Michigan, which Joe Biden won by more than 150,000 votes. (Her campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)

    With an army of about 100 volunteers, McDonald Rivet told me her team has already knocked on more than 30,000 doors. Many of the people who answer cite worries about kitchen-table economic issues, or schools, or health care, or abortion—the topics you’d expect voters to bring up. But a surprising number, McDonald Rivet said, express unprompted concern about the future of American democracy, about whether election results will be respected. “I often hear people say, ‘I never thought I would question the health of democracy,’” she said. “‘These are things I have taken for granted my entire life.’”

    Protecting democracy is just one of the many issues McDonald Rivet highlights when she talks with voters, either at their homes or during the small meet-and-greet events she holds in the district. But she, too, is worried. Michigan Republicans have nominated election deniers for both governor and secretary of state. McDonald Rivet told me that some Republican candidates for the state legislature have stated publicly that the only electoral outcome they would accept in 2024 is a Trump victory.

    Read: The election denier who could run Michigan’s elections

    When I asked Portela whether a Republican legislative majority would honor the result of the popular vote for president, he twice dodged the question. “That’s nothing but fear-mongering from Democrats who are desperate,” he replied. “That’s not what’s at stake right now.” Perhaps he’s right. But to Democrats, it’s the evasiveness, the refusal to affirm a fundamental tenet of American elections, that suggests they are right to worry.

    [ad_2]

    Russell Berman

    Source link

  • The Glory of Feeling Fine

    The Glory of Feeling Fine

    [ad_1]

    A few months ago, I got food poisoning. The sequence of events that led to my downfall began with a carton of discounted grocery-store sushi purchased and consumed on a Thursday, which led to me waking up a little queasy on a Friday, which devolved into a 12-hour stretch of me vomiting and holding myself in a fetal position, until my legs ached from dehydration. On Saturday the smell of my partner cooking breakfast still made me gag; I sipped water, napped fitfully, and nibbled little golf balls of white rice.

    But Sunday, glorious Sunday, I awoke to a marvelous lack of pain and fatigue. The brain fog was gone. My skin felt plump with fluids. Enthralled by recovery, I found myself behaving with uncharacteristic serenity. When I dropped and broke a ceramic bowl while unloading the dishwasher, I didn’t curse and freak out. Instead, I swept up the shards with cheer. I wouldn’t sweat the small stuff. I was my normal self again, and it felt sublime.

    Yet as I relished in my newfound bliss, a foreboding thought gnawed at me: I knew that as the hours passed and the specter of illness retreated, my fresh perspective, too, would fade. So much of my exuberance was defined by absence, the lifting of the burden of aches and puking. It would only be a matter of time until normal felt normal again, and I’d be back to worrying about all the petty minutiae I always worry about.

    People have different baselines of health, and some might be more or less appreciative of whatever condition they’re in. Even so, humans have long lamented the ephemeral joy of relief. The feeling manifests in all kinds of circumstances: meeting a deadline, passing a test, finishing a marathon. And it can be especially acute in matters of wellness. “Health is not valued, till sickness comes,” wrote the 17th-century British scholar Thomas Fuller. Or as the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer bemoaned: “Just as we do not feel the health of our entire body but only the small place where the shoe pinches, so too we do not think of the totality of our well-functioning affairs, but of some insignificant trifle that annoys us.”

    So many of us, in other words, are very bad at appreciating good health when we’re fortunate enough to have it. And anyone experiencing this transcendent gratitude is unlikely to hold on to it for long. Indeed, by Monday morning, the afterglow of recovery had worn off; I was engrossed in emails and work again, unaware that just 60 hours prior I could barely sit upright in bed, let alone at my desk. This troubled me. Am I cursed to be like this forever? Or is there anything I can do to change?

    To some extent, I’m sad to report, the answer might well be no. While certainly some people can have experiences of major illness or injury that change their entire outlook on life, the tendency to revert to forgetfulness seems to run pretty deep in the human psyche. We have limited attentional resources, the UC Davis psychology professor Robert Emmons told me, so in the interest of survival, our brain tends not to waste them focusing on systems that are working well. Instead, our mind evolved to identify threats and problems. Psychologists call this negativity bias: We direct our attention more to what’s wrong than what’s right. If your body’s in check, your brain seems to reason, better to stress about the project that’s overdue or the conflict with your friend than sit around feeling like everything’s fine.

    Read: Does ‘counting your blessings’ work?

    A second psychological phenomenon that might work against any enduring joy in recovery from illness is hedonic adaptation, the notion that after positive or negative life events we, basically, get used to our new circumstances and return to a baseline level of subjective well-being. Hedonic adaptation has been used to explain why, in the long term, people who won the lottery were no happier than those who didn’t; and why romantic partners lose passion, excitement, and appreciation for each other over time.

    Arguably, adaptation need not be seen as any great tragedy. For health, in particular, there’s an element of practicality in the human capacity to exist without fussy attentiveness. This is how we’re supposed to operate. “If our body isn’t causing us problems, it doesn’t actually pay to walk around being grateful all the time. You should be using your mental energy on other things,” Amie Gordon, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, told me. If we had to sense our clothes on our bodies all day, for example, we’d constantly be distracted, she said. (This is actually a symptom of certain chronic disorders, like fibromyalgia—Lauren Zalewski, a writer who was diagnosed with both fibromyalgia and lupus 22 years ago, told me that it makes her skin sensitive to the touch, as if she constantly has the flu.)

    All that said, there are real costs to taking health for granted. For one, it can make you less healthy, if as a result you don’t take care of yourself. For another, maintaining some level of appreciation is a good way to avoid becoming an entitled jerk. Throughout the pandemic, for instance, there has been “this language around how the ‘only’ people dying are ‘old people’ or people with pre-existing conditions,” as if these deaths were more acceptable, Emily Taylor, a vice president for the Long-COVID Alliance, a group that advocates for research into post-viral illnesses, told me. Acknowledging that our own health is tenuous—and that certainly, many of us are going to get old—could counter this kind of callousness and encourage people to treat the elderly and those with chronic conditions or disabilities with more respect and kindness, Taylor argued.

    In my view, there’s something to be gained on an individual level, too. In recent years I’ve seen friends and loved ones deal with life-altering injuries and diagnoses. I know that one’s circumstances can turn on a phone call or a moment of inattention. To be healthy, to have basic needs met—to have life be so “normal” that it’s even a little boring—is a luxury. While I am living in those blessedly unremarkable times, I don’t want my fortune to escape my notice. When things are good, I want to know how good I’ve got it.

    Read: How to be thankful when you don’t feel thankful

    What I want, really, is to hold on to a sense of gratitude. In the field of psychology, gratitude can be something of a loaded term. Over the past decade or so, articles, podcast episodes, self-help books, research papers, celebrities, and wellness influencers alike have all extolled the benefits of being thankful. (Oprah famously kept a gratitude journal for more than a decade.) At times, gratitude’s popularity has been to its own detriment: The modern-day gratitude movement has been criticized for overstating its potential benefits and pushing a Western, wealthy, and privileged perspective that can seem to ignore the realities of extreme suffering or systemic injustices. It’s also annoying to constantly be told that you should really be more thankful for stuff.

    But part of the reason gratitude has become such a popular concept is due to bountiful research that does point to genuine emotional upsides. Feeling grateful has been associated with better life satisfaction, an increased sense of well-being, and a greater ability to form and maintain relationships, among other benefits. (The research on gratitude’s effects on physical health is inconclusive.) For me, though, the pull is less scientific and more commonsense anyway: Learning to genuinely appreciate day-to-day boons like having good health, or food in the fridge, seems like being able to tap into a renewable source of contentment. It’s always so easy to find stress in life. Let me remember the things to smile about, too.

    One way to make the most of gratitude may be to reframe how people tend to think of it. A popular misconception, Emmons told me over email, is that gratitude is a positive emotion that results from something good happening to us. (This might also be part of the reason it can be hard to appreciate conditions like health that for many people remain stable day after day.) Gratitude is an emotion, but it can also be a disposition, something researchers call “trait gratitude.” Some people are more predisposed to feeling thankful than others, by virtue of factors like genetics and personality. But Emmons says this kind of “undentable thankfulness” can also be learned, by developing habits that contribute to more of a persistent, ambient awareness, rather than a conditional reaction to ever-changing circumstances.

    What does this look like, practically speaking? “I don’t know that we can, with every breath we have every moment, feel grateful that we’re breathing. That’s a pretty tall order,” says Gordon. “But that’s not to say that you don’t build in a moment for it at some point in your day.” If you’re recovering from a cold, for example, you can practice pausing whenever you’re walking out the door to appreciate that your nose isn’t stuffy before just barreling on with life. Another tactic, from Emmons, is to reflect upon your worst moments, such as times you’ve been ill. “Our minds think in terms of counterfactuals,” he said, which are comparisons between the way things are and how they might have been. “When we remember how difficult life used to be and how far we have come, we set up an explicit contrast in our mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.”

    Read: Don’t teach your kids to fear the world

    You can also think of gratitude as an action, Emmons has written. This hews closer to the historical notion of gratitude, which as far back as the Roman days was associated with ideas like duty and reciprocity—when someone does something kind for us, we’re expected to return the favor, whether that’s thanking them, paying them back, or paying it forward. In that sense, being grateful for your body probably means doing your best to care for it (and, probably, refraining from risky behaviors like rolling the dice on discounted grocery-store sushi).

    In 2015, Lauren Zalewski, the writer with fibromyalgia, founded an online community that supports people living with chronic pain by helping them to cultivate a grateful mindset. She tells me that before her diagnosis, she took her health for granted and “beat her body up.” Now, she eats vegan, takes supplements, does yoga, stretches, sleeps more, and gets sun regularly—these are the small things she has personally found helpful for managing her constant pain. “So while I am a chronically ill person,” she muses, “I consider myself pretty healthy.”

    Looking back on my food-poisoning incident, I think I was primed to ruminate more deeply than usual on the topics of sickness and health. In the past two and a half years, I’ve watched COVID-19 show that anyone can get ill, perhaps seriously so. Now, as the head of the World Health Organization tells us that “the end is in sight” for the pandemic  (and President Joe Biden controversially declares the pandemic over), it’s tempting to imagine that humanity is on the brink of waking up the morning after a hellish sickness.

    It’s probably delusional to hope that even a global pandemic could prompt some kind of long-term collective mental shift about the impermanence of health, and of life. I didn’t become a radically different person after recovering from puking my guts out a few months ago either. But maybe the simple act of remembering the health we still have in the pandemic’s wake can make a small difference in how we go forward—if not as a society, then at least as individuals. I’m sure I’ll never fully override my tendency to take my body for granted until it’s too late. But for now, each day, I still get the golden opportunity to try. And I’d like to take it.

    [ad_2]

    Gloria Liu

    Source link