Stories from Slate

Alarmism Is the Argument We Need to Fight Climate Change

Susan Matthews — Mon, 10 Jul 2017 22:43:00 GMT

New York’s David Wallace-Wells has a formidable cover story in the magazine this week, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” that dryly details just how bad things could get due to climate change. The answer? Very, very bad. The timeline? Sooner than you think. The instantly viral piece might be the Silent Spring of our time, except it doesn’t uncover shocking new information—it just collects all the terrifying things that were already sitting out there into one extremely terrifying list.

“No matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough,” Wallace-Wells writes, before running through the known science and stats that explain why rising seas, the focus of most of our climate panic, are just the tip of the iceberg—disease, famine, economic panic, and civil unrest are coming, too. An argument for freaking out, his piece has been decried for being too alarmist. Actually, it is not alarmist enough. As I read it in bed at midnight Sunday night, for the first time I started to realize just exactly why climate change might be a reason not to have children—because if those children have children, this could be their world. That’s how close to the edge we are.

There’s a contingent of people—good people, people with noble goals—who are responding to this piece in horror. Not horror at the future, though that would be understandable. Instead, they are horrified by the rhetorical strategy of using alarmism to make a point about climate change. Horror at the fact that it could make readers like me pause over the idea of bringing children into the world.

Michael Mann, a renowned scientist who does hard work speaking up about climate change, had the same reaction, writing on his feelings about the piece, which he was interviewed for but not quoted in, on Facebook. In the widely shared post he writes:

There is also a danger in overstating the science in a way that presents the problem as unsolvable, and feeds a sense of doom, inevitability and hopelessness. The article argues that climate change will render the Earth uninhabitable by the end of this century. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.

I do not doubt that Mann’s disagreements with how Wallace-Wells represents the science are valid, but in comparison with the scope of the piece, they seem like small gripes about representation rather than convincing arguments warranting factual corrections (he disputes the exact amount of methane that might be released by climate change and Wallace-Wells’ characterization of one study assessing how quickly warming might happen). But I find his criticism hard to stomach, because I don’t think that Wallace-Wells’ piece is an explanation of what will happen. It’s an explanation of what could happen. He says as much:

What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen—that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline.

Mann still takes issue with the piece, writing, “There is no need to overstate the evidence, particularly when it feeds a paralyzing narrative of doom and hopelessness.”

I understand the desire to steer away from hopelessness, doom, and despair, which Mann posits to be antithetical to rational and bold action. Climate change is a uniquely difficult problem specifically because addressing it requires humans to be selflessly interested in the long term, which is neither natural nor easy. But, contrary to the belief perpetuated by a lot of the criticism of this piece, addressing climate change does not rely on people being psychologically self-possessed enough to freely give up meat and airplane rides for the greater good. There is no amount of individual good intention that can solve this massive, structural problem in enough time to have an impact. What we need is leaders who will take this problem seriously. We need it yesterday. And the right way to get there is to tell people the truth about the future and implore them to vote for and insist on a better one.

It’s hard to imagine what might alarm our current leaders into action. Wallace-Wells concludes with the argument that we will wake up to this encroaching disaster because it will be too costly not to—in terms of human life, in terms of economic progress, in terms of international relations. The argument is simple, and borrows somewhat heavily from the simplest analogy out there when it comes to climate change—that of a frog in a slowly boiling pot of water. Humans are the frog, the pot is the planet, and the burner is climate change. A frog might contently sit in the water while it boils without realizing it, but humans are not frogs. At some point, the heat will turn up so high that we will realize that we have to turn it down. Yes, it may come too late, and there may be some irreversible damage, but still, we’ll realize it at some point.

The problem with this assurance is that it takes as a given that to the powerful and privileged— the ones who currently have a say about what we do about climate change—all lives matter equally. That the annihilation of a certain number of people will force these people to change their minds, to take pity and to take action. But this is not the world we live in. It’s not the number of deaths that matters. It’s the type of people who die.

As the piece makes clear, climate change is already killing people, displacing people, making people sick. This is already happening. But it is not propelling us to action. Why not? Well, in America, because almost nothing would compel us to adequate action.

We used to attribute denialism to a lack of understanding of facts. If you could just make Donald Trump sit down and read about the science on climate change—perhaps in a direct and obvious piece like this one—you might get somewhere.

But one clarifying thing about Trump’s presidency is the view it has given us of why powerful people deny climate change. These days, you rarely see leaders argue that it isn’t happening at all—that’s become too gauche to defend. Even Trump, via surrogates, admits to “believing” in climate change. Instead, just as straight racism has become impolite but arguments that suggest alternatives to racism are too costly abound, climate change denialists now make arguments about degrees of certainty, about the improbability of staving it off, about the costs of attempting to do so. The new denialists don’t deny climate change—they just refute the fact that it matters enough to require action.

This approach is evident in one of the only times Trump has publicly talked about climate change since being elected president, in a November interview with members of the New York Times. Editorial page editor James Bennet asked the president-elect to clarify his thoughts on how much human activity is responsible for climate change. Trump replied:

I think right now … well, I think there is some connectivity. There is some, something. It depends on how much. It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.

It also depends on how much it’s going to cost our companies.

The boiling frog isn’t such a perfect analogy for climate change after all. It assumes that we humans are all part of one frog body. We are not. We live in a world where some of us are going to burn alive when we walk outside. And some of us will never have to step outdoors, so we can worry about how much curbing carbon emissions will impact GDP and decide against it.

We don’t need to guard against alarmism, against depression, against anger, against despair when it comes to climate change. Sure, the hopelessness that accompanies pondering our fate might depress people out of recycling their water bottles or switching their light bulbs. That doesn’t matter. If it also scares people into actually taking this issue seriously at the ballot box, the trade-off will be well worth it. Because the ballot box is where it matters. If we force the issue—if we elect people who care about the survival of all humans rather than just a few—then we might have a shot of preventing the hellscape Wallace-Wells has outlined.

If you don’t want that outcome, we need to start by being more alarmed.

Grizzly Bears Are Now the Victims of the Trump Administration’s Climate Denialism

Susan Matthews — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 16:54:50 GMT

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke announced Thursday that the Yellowstone grizzly bear will no longer be listed as protected under the Endangered Species Act. The grizzly’s population has rebounded and it now “stands as one of America’s great conservation successes,” he crowed.

A species being removed from the ESA is rare and, in normal circumstances, should be celebrated. It means that a population has recovered enough to no longer require extra protections, which should be considered a good thing. And the grizzly bear has: When the species was listed in the 1970s, it was estimated that a mere 150 existed. Today, there are about 700 individuals.

This decision, however, seems unlikely to be met with applause. As the New York Times reports, environmental organizations are already lining up to sue to stop it. And 125 Native American tribes have banded together to oppose the delisting because they weren’t consulted in the decision-making. Also, any good feelings animal lovers get from the words “conservation success story” are likely to be squashed by the fact that the delisting means the bears could now be hunted. People really don’t like it when charismatic megafauna get kille d.

Should the grizzly bear be delisted—or this just yet another awful environmental move by the Trump administration, divorced from science and decency? One political litmus test is to check what the Obama administration thought of the grizzly bear’s fate. In March 2016, Dan Ashe, then the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, defended the delisting. And the recovery numbers do look strong (700 sure sounds small, but Yellowstone grizzlies are a top-of-the-food-chain predator living in a small land mass—what matters more is the populations’ stability, not its size).

But scientists have dramatically different opinions about how to read those numbers. Luke Whelan over at Wired has a good rundown of how the two sides of the debate see the issue. One school of thought says that because the bears’ populations have plateaued, that means they’ve hit the carrying capacity, or the number of animals the habitat can sustain, and are in good shape. Under this logic, delisting makes sense. The counterargument suggests that the carrying capacity is lower than it should be because its habitat and food sources have changed since the bear was listed in the ’70s, primarily due to climate change—which means that the bear needs to stay protected. In fact, most of the environmental groups planning to sue over the move basically want to keep the bear listed because of the threat climate change will increasingly pose. And climate change does pose a threat—warmer temperatures are causing white pine beetles to move further and further into grizzly habitat, killing pine trees and hurting a critical food source.

Who’s right? It’s hard to say definitively—it depends on how you read the science, and how you think the ESA should be applied based on that science. Arguing that climate change is going to pose a threat to an animal and therefore warrants (somewhat) proactive listing is a tough sell—honestly, on a long enough scale, climate change and the cascading food chain and habitat problems could justify listing most animals on the ESA. That would be an interesting precedent to set. It’s also unclear how ESA protection could help address the pine beetle problem. The ESA has limited resources and offers limited protections—indeed, many conservationists think it is actually most successful when wielded as a stick to inspire (or coerce) proactive solutions before a species requires listing, rather than as a real way to solve environmental problems. And through that lens, it’s clear that what the grizzly bear really needs is for climate change to be taken seriously, and minimized. The ESA can’t force that—it’s not equipped to.

But that brings us to the crux of the problem. The debate around the grizzly bear’s health is intimately connected to a debate over the threat climate change poses to the species. There is no logical way to have a real conversation about these problems right now. I do not trust Ryan Zinke to cautiously consider how climate change threatens grizzly bears, whether that warrants them staying listed, or whether that means his agency ought to take other steps to address climate change because it threatens grizzlies. Ryan Zinke is frankly an idiot when it comes to climate change. Just watch how he discussed it with Al Franken on Tuesday—he refused to even answer a simple question on what government scientists estimate the impact of climate change will be by the end of the century.

When the government is this bad at accepting basic truths, it makes it hard to have faith that their decisions are good ones—even decisions that seem positive or reasonable. It also creates a world in which we have to fight to keep species listed on the ESA because we know we’re not going to do much else to stop climate change from screwing them over in the long run. It is exhausting and demoralizing to live in a world like this.

The Planet’s Loss Is Trump’s Gain

Susan Matthews — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 01:12:00 GMT

Donald Trump formally announced that the United States is leaving the Paris climate change accord on Thursday afternoon. Notably, he did not once use the term climate change during this announcement. In fact, Trump’s justification for leaving the Paris Agreement was devoid of any references to science generally, or more specifically, to any of the reasons why the accord exists in the first place. In a briefing after the speech, someone reportedly asked whether the president thinks climate change is real, and a White House official replied, “Can we stay on topic?”

Why didn’t Trump talk about climate change in his huge speech on climate change? Maybe it’s because he simply doesn’t have a science adviser to fill in those parts of his speeches. Or maybe it was his gift to Ivanka, the “environmentally aware” daughter and adviser who supposedly unsuccessfully urged him to stay in the agreement. (With this, can we finally dispense of the myth that she is a moderating force on the president?) But the most likely reason of all is the simplest: Trump did not even bother to say anything about climate change while withdrawing the United States from the world’s pact to address climate change because he doesn’t think climate change matters.

He doesn’t think climate change matters because he is not governing in the long-term interests of the American people.

Remember, Donald Trump is a short-term-ist, who—typical of a figure that spent most of his career in corporate America—cares very much about short-term profits but very little about the practicalities of ensuring that things work in the long run. Trump devoted the brunt of his speech to his view of the purported economic harms the Paris Agreement is imposing on the United States. “The agreement is a massive redistribution of United States wealth to other countries,” he claimed. “We need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts, our businesses will come to a halt in many cases, and the American family will suffer the consequences in the form of lost jobs and a very diminished quality of life.” Aside from being literal nonsense with no basis in the reality of energy economics, this calculus completely ignores the fact that if we fail to act, there will be massive long-term economic costs associated with climate change. Natural disasters, droughts, and rising sea levels will all cost the American public—and the world at large—quite a bit in the long run. Even corporate America could see how shortsighted this all was.

It is unfortunate how shortsighted the president is, because the government is supposed to be able to take the longer view. Taking the long view to create sustainable solutions to problems—think our interstate highway system, the railroads, or public investment in medical research—is actually good strategy when you have the credit and money to do it, which the United States government does. The Paris Agreement was not perfect, but it at least attempted to start the world down this path. In announcing that he would withdraw, Trump’s message was extremely clear: America is not interested in sacrificing anything, even dead industries, to create a better future. We will not yield. We deserve everything now, later be damned.

This is particularly sad because most Americans actually do want a better future. In March last year, 64 percent of Americans said they were worried “a great deal or fair amount” about climate change, an eight-year high. Seven out of 10 Americans thought we should stay in the Paris Agreement. In general, Americans recognize that things are going south with the environment—69 percent think that climate change is either already harming people or will harm people in the next few years. While some may still have a hard time using the words climate change because of how politicized the science on it has become in this country, programs to increase “resilience”—the new neutral code word for the fight against climate change—are on the upswing.

In the end, as Alex Kaufman noted in the Huffington Post on Wednesday, Trump’s decision elevated his personal ideology above not only what’s right, but what’s popular. Trump’s short-term-ism extends beyond the economic lens to the even shorter-term goal of scoring a political win. “For an embattled president,” Kaufman wrote, “it does do one thing: It fulfills a campaign promise popular with his base.” In fact, immediately after the announcement, Trump sent out an email to supporters with the subject line “Promise Kept—Paris Climate Deal,” accompanied with video of parts of Thursday’s speech, stamped with another big red “promise kept” sign.

Perhaps pulling out will satisfy the egos of certain supporters who see the decision as a victory over “elitist globalists” (his email attacked “the fake news media, Hollywood, lobbyists, and the entire corrupt establishment”). But for America, it accomplishes nothing. It’s a disaster for our foreign relations. It’s an economically backward strategy. And it hurts our standing as a world leader.

In the end, Trump taking America out of the agreement may actually make it easier for the world to fight this battle. Businesses, states, cities, and other countries are already rushing to fill the void left by America’s absence. Trump’s decision, while embarrassing, nonsensical, and painful, may not matter that much in the long run. But in the short term, it’s another stark reminder of the kind of leader America has—a man who places his own personal gain over that of his country.

The World Is Better Off if We Leave the Paris Agreement

Susan Matthews — Wed, 31 May 2017 20:57:12 GMT

One terrible game to play during this presidency is to assess the actual cost of the damage Donald Trump will have wrought by the time he’s done being president. How many people will lose their health insurance? How many Americans will be blocked from voting? How many hate crimes will we endure?

The president’s failure to acknowledge or address climate change ranks high in the catastrophic-Trump-decisions Olympics. Failure to act—or worse, acting to exacerbate—climate change could have lasting implications for the entire planet. It’s true that the train may be out of the station when it comes to avoiding climate change altogether, but we can still attempt to mitigate and alleviate the worst of the effects. In that context, Trump’s almost-guaranteed decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement, the most promising global initiative addressing climate change, seems like a big deal.

And it is, but not because his decision to withdraw will catapult us toward assured and quick global demise. In fact, in recent weeks, many people have started to realize that Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement is perhaps the best thing that could happen for the future of the agreement and, by side effect, the planet. After all, the accord is largely a voluntary gentleman’s agreement. Trump has exhibited absolutely no gentlemanly interest in keeping the light promises America has made under the agreement, regardless of whether we pull out. He’s already rolled back the policies that would ensure we might make our commitment to Paris, so effectively, he’s stepped out of the accord before officially doing so. It is much better if we, as a nation, are honest about our fickle lack of commitment to these norms than if we stay in and drag down the entire process.

At the Atlantic, Robinson Meyer spoke with a number of experts who believe Trump’s decision might actually have a positive effect on the future of climate negotiations, freeing world leaders to pull together a stronger agreement that forces greater action. At the New York Times, Brad Plumer’s survey of experts came to a similar conclusion—for instance, Australian climate scientist Luke Kemp told Plumer, “I worry that letting the United States just stay in the agreement and do whatever it wants could show how weak Paris is. It sends the message that the agreement is more about symbolism than action.”

The U.S. is failing at both symbolism and action. We are the only country led by someone who does not think climate change poses a real threat, and our problems go beyond the president. Our Republican-led Congress prevented the Paris Agreement from asking countries to make stronger initial pledges in the first place: World leaders knew the American Republicans would never ratify a binding agreement, so they settled for the softer one. More recently, 22 Republicans in Congress have written a letter to Trump imploring him to withdraw even from that. Attorneys general from 10 Republican-led states have done the same. We were never going to lead the way on climate change, even under Obama, because we are held hostage by a GOP that refuses to acknowledge the reality of the threat.

And so America’s decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement is simply an honest reflection of where we stand, where we have stood for many years in this fight: We are not the leaders. We are the problem.

It didn’t have to be this way. We were the first country to develop solar technology, largely understood to be a major solution to our current greenhouse gas emissions quandary. Yet in the past several decades we have ceded that crown to China without putting up much of a fight. As Trump fights to restore the dying coal industry for no logical reason other than nostalgia, China has become the top manufacturer of solar panels. And even if you get past the fact that this is because many politicians still think climate science is negotiable, it’s still an economic and innovation loss that will hurt America’s interests in the long run.

Over the years, the use of solar energy at the White House has become a sort of mood ring that can be read as an indication of the current occupant’s environmental opinions. Former President Jimmy Carter was the first president to put a solar-based energy system to use within the White House, an action he saw as a symbolic step toward America’s future as an energy leader. In his 1979 speech dedicating the solar-based water heating system that would heat the water used in the White House kitchens, he said:

A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken or it can be just a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.

Ultimately, Carter’s fears were borne out. Two years into Ronald Reagan’s presidency, the White House roof was resurfaced, and the solar heating system wasn’t reinstalled. On Reagan’s watch, federal research dollars for renewable energy also dropped from $718.5 million in Carter’s last year to $110.8 million per year. Some of the White House panels wound up in museums: one in the Smithsonian, another in the Carter library, some at a Maine university. In 2010, one went to the Solar Science and Technology Museum—in Dezhou, China. At that time, China was producing 80 percent of all such solar water heaters. (In an equally apt piece of museum symbolism, in April the Kentucky Coal Mining Museum announced that it would convert to solar power to keep its expenses down.)

The White House solar panels were first restored by George W. Bush, whose staff put up an electric system on the grounds in an understated and quiet move. Obama reinstated a rooftop system much more publicly and was showered with praise for the decision. And while Obama took global warming seriously, he was tasked with leading a country partially controlled by many people who did not and who continuously hamstrung his efforts on the issue.

In his first few months in office, Trump has delivered an incredible assault on environmental regulations—in a perverse way, they are perhaps his most successful accomplishment to date. He has not adopted a coherent or informed view on climate change, baffling interviewers with his non sequiturs on the topic and failing to appoint a science adviser. His press secretary doesn’t even have an answer on whether Trump thinks human activity is contributing to global warming.

He’s also left Obama’s solar panels on the roof. One of his press officers said she’s “not aware of any plans to move them.” This is perhaps the most perfect crystallization of Trump’s entire climate strategy and even his lazy, incompetent presidency as whole. When it comes to doing the actual, substantive work of government, the stuff that would make a difference to real human beings, Trump bails. But when it comes to pomp and circumstance, to symbolism, to stunts, he’s all the way there.

The world deserves to take action on climate change free from the grip of this small man and the backward party that has empowered him. As for America? It’s well past time we were left behind. Perhaps this will help us realize that our name and our history is not enough to keep us great: To maintain our position as a world leader, we will actually need to figure out how to lead.

Bret Stephens’ First Column for the New York Times Is Classic Climate Change Denialism

Susan Matthews — Sun, 30 Apr 2017 14:52:15 GMT

The weekend after the New York Times announced it was hiring Bret Stephens—a conservative formerly of the Wall Street Journal whom some consider a climate-change denier—to be its new columnist, I got into a fight with my mother. She was defending his hiring, arguing that he held views that many people hold, and that perhaps allowing him to put them on the pages of the New York Times would allow the paper to regain its position as a news source that can be trusted by people on both sides of the political spectrum. She was right that the public no longer seems to agree on what truth is, but she was wrong that bringing Stephens on would help us resolve this.

His debut column, “Climate of Complete Certainty,” published on Friday, supports my theory. The thesis of the column is that we would do well to remember that there are fair reasons why people might be skeptical of climate change, and that claiming certainty on the matter will only backfire. He casts himself as a translator between the skeptics and the believers, offering a lesson “for anyone who wants to advance the cause of good climate policy.” Technically, he doesn’t get any facts wrong. Painting himself as a moderate, he says it is “indisputable” that warming is happening and is caused by humans. From one angle, his point is quite familiar—it’s actually one that has been made somewhat frequently lately, and by liberal-leaning outlets, too: Shoving the certainty of fact down people’s thro ats is not the way to get them to change their minds, and it’s high time we try something else.

But in reality, the goal of this column is not to help readers learn how to reason with people who are skeptical about climate change. Instead, the column reinforces the idea that those people might have a point. The New York Times push notification that went out Friday afternoon about the column said as much—“reasonable people can be skeptical about the dangers of climate change,” it read. That is not actually true, and nothing that Stephens writes makes a case for why it might be true. This column is not a lesson for people who want to advance good climate policy. Instead, it is a dog whistle to people who feel confused about climate change. It’s nothing more than textbook denialism.

Stephens starts with the unprecedented and embarrassing loss of Hillary Clinton. The Clinton team, he says, “thought they were, if not 100 percent right, then very close.” Stephens is apparently dredging up this point to remind us all to be humble; we have a tendency to be overconfident in our data, he reminds us, we got this one wrong, and we are damned if we forget it. (I would assert that we certainly have not forgotten it, since it’s the entire reason why Stephens now has his job, but no matter.)

He then goes on to compare the Clinton failure and the science on climate change. “Isn’t this one instance, at least, where 100 percent of the truth resides on one side of the argument?” he asks facetiously.

I will be honest, I do not know what “100 percent of the truth” means. But I do know what Stephens is doing here. He is sowing the seeds of epistemic uncertainty. He is telling readers that the experts’ wrongness during the 2016 election is a good justification for doubting other established facts. People are right to look around at the institutions we once held onto and to doubt the veracity of the information they give us. It is entirely reasonable to stop trusting expertise, Stephens subtly suggests. Remember Clinton?

This is a classic strain of climate-change denialism. Stephens does not call a single fact into question throughout his piece. Instead, he’s telling his readers that their decision not to trust the entire institution of science that supports the theory of climate change might actually be reasonable. “Ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism,” he writes. “They know—as all environmentalists should—that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.” Trust nothing, he urges, for nothing deserves trust.

The institutions Stephens questions in his column are not singular entities but entire ideas: scientists who may not see their biases, statistical models that might be skewed, liberals who may be so swayed by their ideology. His argument is convincing because the institutions he mentions can make mistakes. It’s true, there are some problems with how we use probabilities in science. We tend to be bad at distinguishing between correlation and causation. Sometimes our biases do get in the way. Stephens knows this, and he taps into it in his piece. “Much else that passes as accepted fact is really a matter of probabilities,” he suggests. You have to be an idiot or a zealot to believe climate change is certain, whispers the subtext.

Regardless of what Stephens says in this column—and regardless of Clinton’s modeling failures—climate change is a terrible threat to life as we know it on this planet. Anyone who wants to honestly investigate the data will come to the same conclusion that the scientific establishment has: Climate change is real, and dangerous. Our failures elsewhere—even in the disturbing wake of the election of Donald J. Trump—do not negate that. The questions are no longer whether and how but how soon and how bad. Climate change is happening, and “claiming total certainty about the science” does not “traduce the spirit of science.” Instead, it is a reasonable interpretation of the science at hand.

The final shoe drops in the last lines of the piece:

Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it.

What he is suggesting here is that the rational way to go forward with a conversation about climate change is to admit that climate change might not be certain. This is similar to the torturous logic he puts forward throughout the rest of the piece: The only way to be reasonable about this topic is to give in to those who are unreasonable about it. While he calmly insists he is the only logical person around, he is spewing complete bullshit.

Of the many other dishonest ideas floated through the column—and there are many, including that lots of Americans are skeptical of climate change (they’re not), and that the skepticism is caused by doubts about the data (it isn’t)—the idea that truth may not be knowable is the most insidious. That Stephens doesn’t bother to cite which climate-change facts are uncertain may be because he knows exactly what he is doing, and he’s aware he wouldn’t win that argument. Or it may be because he himself has fallen prey to his own argument about epistemic uncertainty, and so he no longer thinks the evidence matters.

Either way, his accusation—that it is not the facts you should question, but the entire system that creates facts at all—is terrifying. It’s much scarier and more damaging than anything I thought he’d put in the paper. I assumed he might mess up a fact or two. That would have been bad, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Facts, after all, can be corrected.

But the New York Times cannot easily correct this one. In publishing this article, the paper of record did something that will be much harder to reverse: It conceded that it is more important to remain palatable to a larger group of people than to maintain its standards of truth and logic and good argument. In this age when the very concepts of reality, facts, and honesty are under attack, this should scare us. Stephens may be wrong about most things, but he was right about one. Some institutions no longer deserve to be trusted.

Why John B.’s Climate Change Obsession in S-Town Is So Unsettling

Susan Matthews — Thu, 13 Apr 2017 11:02:00 GMT

Much of the intrigue of John B. McLemore, subject of the hit podcast S-Town, comes from his inherent contradictions—a genius who never graduated college; a liberal with twisted views on feminism, homosexuality, and racism; a benefactor who appears to have died broke. More than a crime mystery, S-Town is an exploration of John B.’s mind and the suffering he endured. As one of his friends describes it, “John seemed to have made an insurmountable challenge out of living.” It's not completely clear what caused this suffering, though host Brian Reed posits several options throughout the show before finally suggesting that it was mercury poisoning that at the very least exacerbated John’s mental torture.

Another cause, or perhaps a focus, of John’s depression is climate change. Reed devotes a substantial amount of time to his subject’s preoccupation, though not as much as John B. devoted to it during his life. When asked on the Longform podcast what John B. might think of S-Town, Reed says he would have just wanted three episodes explaining climate change and the coming resource crisis. Throughout the show, John’s fatalistic obsession is painted as an indication of his troubled mental state. And indeed, it seems to cost him dearly—his friend Olan attributes the end of their relationship to John’s inability to stop talking about climate change. It’s not just that John is aware of climate change; he ruminates on it obsessively, staying up late to write manifestos and presentations, letting it dominate his mood and darken his outlook on the future. Indeed, his suicide note states that “my absence makes room, and leaves some resources, for others.”

It is clear, throughout the show, that John suffers from mental health “issues” of some kind. It is less clear that John’s reaction to climate change is a manifestation of these issues, rather than a logical response to what is in reality an existential threat to civilization as we know it and the planet at large. Of course, the way he handles those thoughts—the obsessive loops, the monomania—is clearly reflective of some unhealthy psychological patterns. But when it comes to the reality of climate change, I’d say John B.’s take is significantly more logical and less “crazy” than the reaction most of society has.

I don’t think that Reed feels that John’s obsession is all that misplaced, either. One of the most frightening moments of the entire show comes not when he’s investigating a murder but when he’s investigating the list that John sent him of all the problems we’re about to face. His fact-checking endeavor essentially checks out. Resources are going to run out. We are hurtling toward catastrophe. And then Reed switches gears. We don’t have to think about that now, or “at least, any time soon,” he says, as he returns to the story of one man, in one place, at one time.

It is entirely fair that Brian Reed did not want to make a podcast about climate change. He wanted to make a podcast about John B. McLemore, at which he is wildly successful. But in the days since I finished the show, I keep turning over that idea—yes, this is a problem, but it’s not one we have to address anytime soon. This is a constant cultural refrain when it comes to climate change. And it’s a large part of why we’re in this mess in the first place. As the Onion “joked” earlier this week, “according to climatologists, rising CO2 levels must be contained before it’s too late, which it now is.” The Onion is pretty spot-on there. It doesn’t really matter how many lightbulbs well-meaning souls like Olan change; climate change is a massive systemic problem that needs to be fixed through massive, systemic changes, and our country, one of the biggest polluters, is led by the only world leader who doesn’t even admit it’s happening. As John B. himself put it, when it comes to addressing climate change, “The whole world is giving a collective shrug of its shoulders and saying, ‘Fuck it.’ ”

John B. can’t really handle this fact. Most people—even those intimately aware of the threat and the stakes—somehow manage to. That doesn’t mean John’s insane and we’re not. It means some of us have gotten better at deluding ourselves that everything is OK even when it definitely is not. A few weeks ago, a friend and climate activist wrote to me to ask, “If you really agree that civilization itself is at risk without rapid climate action, wouldn't forcing that action become the most important thing you can do?” I do really agree that civilization itself is at risk, but I am not doing much to force action about it. I am saying “Fuck it.” When I wrote my friend back, I said, “When I think about this stuff, I kind of feel my brain disconnecting from the emotional side—like, it's just too much to really internalize.”

In reality, the feeling I get when I think deeply about climate change is the same feeling I get when I remember that someday, at some point, I, me, myself personally, am going to die. There’s fear and disbelief, and my heart seems to collapse in on itself. Eventually, something in me forces myself to stop thinking about it, and I edge away from the cliff. My climate activist friend told me that my response was typical. Most people, it seems, are able to emotionally disconnect from the existential nature of such problems. That’s what we do to survive.

John B. didn’t have this defense mechanism. His coping mechanisms were out of whack, but not his sense of perspective. He felt the reality of our impending doom every day. He kept staring off the edge of the cliff. He couldn’t look away.

Which reaction is “normal”? Mine is certainly more common. It’s also more pragmatic—my brain is forcing me to live my life, in spite of the mess. There’s not much I can do about it, anyway, and frankly, why should I be put out? But if you want to ask which is more logical, which is more moral, which is more correct, the answer is surely John’s. What kind of human can look ahead and realize that we’re headed for a massive disaster and then shrug and still order takeout? Perhaps I’d feel more ashamed if I thought I would still be around to answer for my crimes.

This, of course, is the entire problem of climate change. Addressing it would require massive, selfless sacrificing, for a common good that feels so far off as to be almost immaterial. And even with his obsessing, John too seems totally aware of this. His endless calculations of how much time each man has in a life betrays his own personal (and entirely human) desire to maximize these hours. His despair never quite propels him to activism, either—he is bitterly aware that there is not much to be done.

In the end though, and perhaps inadvertently, S-Town does provide a compelling opportunity for John B. to change all of this. After delivering the image of Mary Grace, sitting, pregnant, on her land, rubbing her belly, hoping for a genius, it ends with John Brooks McLemore being brought home from the hospital. In that moment, as a listener, I realized how much I had come to care about this one soul, this one person, living in this one time, in this one place. It is a triumph for a story to bring its reader, or in this case, its listener, to such a place of compassion. If we can care about John, a man so removed from the lives of many of the show’s listeners, can we find it within ourselves to care about the future Johns, too?

A Surprising Number of People Think United Is Not the Villain. Here Are the Worst Takes.

Will Oremus — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 16:51:00 GMT

A man was brutally dragged off of a United Airlines flight late Sunday night, and normal human beings were justifiably appalled. It may be true, as Dan Gross put it Monday in Slate, that the situation was partly a symptom of airlines' outmoded overbooking practices. But it's also a stark reminder of how casually corporations cast aside basic decency in the pursuit of logistical efficiency and profit maximization. As Derek Thompson put it in the Atlantic, the incident highlights “the profoundly unequal, and even morally scandalous, relationship between consumers and corporations in industries where a handful of large companies dominate the sector.”

And yet! Many people found ways to explain that United isn't really the bad guy. Here are some of the most creative:

1. The most surprising thing is not the part where a passenger was seemingly knocked unconscious while being removed from the plane. It's this:

2. The real villains here are the horrified passengers.

3. "U R ontologically aligned with capital."

4. He totally deserved it.

There are some impressive mental Olympics going on here, though at least in the case of the last one, the author now admits she “didn't emphasize enough that it was handled poorly.”

We'd also be remiss to not mention the contributions of Louisville's Courier-Journal, which published a story this morning explaining that the man who was violently removed from the plane is a doctor “with a troubled past.” That past includes charges of fraudulent prescription writing more than a decade ago, for which he served probation. While the headline of that piece certainly makes it sound like the drug equivalent of the “Well, what was she wearing?” response to a rape victim, the story at least manages to avoid explicitly suggesting that the doctor's personal history should have any bearing on his treatment by United.

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the worst take of all came from the airline itself, which managed to imbue the term “re-accommodate” with Orwellian menace.

Also: This is not an apology.

The New York Times’ Coal Miner Interview Is Why We Won’t Stop Climate Change

Susan Matthews — Thu, 30 Mar 2017 20:03:58 GMT

The problem with journalism, we were told after the election, is that we in the media focused too much on the facts and too little on the people, their stories, and their feelings. Coastal elites holed up with their precious data and forgot about the middle of the country.

So on the Thursday installment of the New York Times’ daily podcast, host Michael Barbaro attempts to do his part to fix this problem. His plan? To interview a coal miner named Mark Gray. It’s a miraculous 10 minutes of radio, ending with Barbaro crying while realizing that he really doesn’t understand coal country at all, and perhaps if he just visited a mine he would have an entirely different perspective on the situation.

It is emotional and compelling storytelling. But it isn’t the kind of journalism we should prioritize going forward. In fact, it’s irresponsible to the point of bordering on unethical.

I don’t blame the coal miner. I blame Barbaro.

It is worthwhile to seek out and interview coal miners like Mark Gray. They’ve gotten the short end of the stick, and it’s smart to try to understand how they and their communities have been and will continue to be affected by the closure of coal mines. But Barbaro has a massive platform, and his uncritical approach and deference to Gray’s claims yields a product that prioritizes wishful thinking over accuracy.

For starters, Barbaro asks when Gray started to see mining jobs decline. He says, “Well, the big turning point was whenever the Obama administration put out regulations on coal. They just put the restriction on coal so hard that the companies couldn’t mine it.”

Gray may have personally experienced a shrinking in the industry (even though there have been well under 100,000 coal jobs in America since 2003), but to place the blame for this on Obama’s regulations simply isn’t true. Obama’s regulations on coal haven’t even taken effect yet. Coal jobs have been declining since well before Obama even took office, thanks to automation and competition from other, cleaner energy sources. Barbaro tries to push back on this, saying that the regulations were announced but not implemented, but he’s steamrolled by Gray:

No. No. That’s not so. What is so is this: You got the EPA. OK, you got your EPA, the federal government saying how we mine coal. Where we can mine coal. When we can mine coal. Obama administration said, look, you can go ahead and build your power plants, your coal plants, you’re just going to go broke. Because they’re not going to let you run it. They’re not going to let you run them. They’re not going to let you mine coal. For the last eight years, more restrictions were put on coal than 80 years. That’s it. That’s the whole nutshell. That’s all.

It’s useful to understand just exactly what coal miners believe has caused their job market to decline. It’s actually quite tragic, in that sense, and when Gray goes on to explain that coal miners don’t want a handout, I feel for him. I don’t think that he should have to rely on charity, either. But I also don’t think that we should endanger the future of our planet so that he can be employed in one specific industry. Barbaro, who is not conducting this interview live, should have attempted to correct the record or offered appropriate context.

So far, it’s bad, but not unforgivable. Moving on. Here is the next exchange, lightly edited for clarity:

Barbaro: What do you say to that idea that coal is the next in this long line of industries that are just too dangerous and need to be dismantled?

Gray: No, it’s not.

Barbaro: And why not?

Gray: Really, it’s not … coal is dangerous in which capacity? Of poisoning you, or what? Mining the coal? You can make mining the coal safe. Burning the coal? Is that dangerous?

Barbaro: That’s the one people are focused on.

Gray: What, the smoke? The fumes coming from coal? How many cars have you got out in the United States right now, how many cars that you’ve got out here that you’re throwing carbon dioxide and throwing out the stuff that people are saying is so dangerous? They’ve picked on one thing, specific thing, that was coal. They picked on coal. They ain’t going here picking on oil companies that do this or do that for oil. They didn’t do that.

In this last section, Gray is basically demonstrating why climate change is so hard to fight—it’s a collective action problem. Because there are so many contributors, everyone has a small share of responsibility, and no one wants to personally sacrifice for the greater good unless everyone sacrifices. It’s a psychologically difficult thing to do, and I get why Gray is upset. He’s basically saying, “Why should I suffer and lose my job, when people are still allowed to drive cars?” And he’s right to be frustrated by that. It’s frustrating.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t make the fact that coal is harmful untrue. And besides, coal jobs are not declining because the government wants to limit carbon dioxide emissions. But even if it was, eliminating fewer than 100,000 jobs in the interest of limiting global climate change might be a tough but necessary deal in the long run.

Back to the interview.

Gray: You understand what I’m saying? Have you been to a clean coal plant before?

Barbaro: I have not been to a coal—I’ve not been to a coal plant at all, candidly.

Gray: You’ve never been to a coal plant?

Barbaro: I haven't.

Gray: Please, go see how they use coal. I don’t know where you get your information from—the White House or Capitol Hill or somewhere like that. They don’t live here in Kentucky. They don’t live here—do these people that told you that coal was bad for the ozone layer, bad for the air, have they lived in a coal town? Have they ever been in a coal plant? No, they’re like you. But they go draw conclusions that it’s bad. That’s my take.

Barbaro (crying): Yeah, I'm having a very strong reaction to what you’re telling me, because I realize I haven’t experienced the things that you’re quite rightly asking me if I’ve ever experienced.

Gray: If you go see something for yourself, then you can draw your own conclusions.

I’m sorry, but what can living in a coal town teach you about whether coal is actually damaging to the atmosphere? I am sure that very wonderful and deserving people benefit from mining coal. That has absolutely no bearing on the science.

But interviews like this are exactly the type of thing that will cause us humans, who are emotional creatures, to make less logical decisions about the future of our planet. Combating climate change requires us to make sacrifices now for benefits far down the road. Years, decades, or maybe centuries down the road. The children who will benefit from us lowering our emissions can’t be interviewed on the Daily because they don’t exist yet. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider them.

Here’s how the interview ends:

Barbaro: Mark, I still want to understand whether you think this industry has a real future or if you think—

Gray: Yes it has. It has a real future. It has a future.

Barbaro: How does it have a future?

Gray: You can mine coal. You can mine coal safe. You can burn coal. You can burn coal clean. It has a future, if they would just unregulate it. You know? Companies will come back. Men will go back to work. Slowly. But yeah, surely.

Once again, the concept that all we have to do to help the coal industry regain jobs is deregulate it is false. It is cruel to allow Gray to continue to believe this. It is also irresponsible to elevate his opinion on the matter. Gray is not an expert in this field. He is someone who has lived this, yes—and that means that he has a deep vested interest in believing that deregulation will give him his job back. It’s certainly what coal companies want miners, and journalists, and everyone else, to believe.

But if this is the kind of journalism that results from our new attempt to reach the middle of the country, we will all end up living in Trump’s reality—one in which facts no longer matter.

Trump’s Environmental Executive Order Is As Stupid As It Is Damaging

Susan Matthews — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 19:36:34 GMT

Donald Trump will sign another executive order on Tuesday, this one focused on unraveling the Clean Power Plan, rolling back environmental regulations, and eliminating any hope that the United States meets its obligations to the Paris climate agreement. This order is as damaging as it is dumb. Trump is unraveling critical environmental protections because he thinks it will help revitalize the economy and help the coal industry. It will not. Instead, it will incentivize our country to pour money into energy sources that harm our health and our continued ability to live on this planet while also undermining our ability to become energy independent and to compete in the global marketplace.

It is entirely unsurprising that a man who believes no one is a scientist wouldn’t care much about actual scientists’ pleadings that we find a more sustainable solution to our energy needs. In stripping back Obama administration regulations aimed at lowering carbon emissions, Trump is practically guaranteeing that our country’s emissions—which have been flat for the past few years—will not drop enough for us to meet our commitment to the Paris Agreement and could in fact increase again. But we already knew Trump would make such reckless choices.

It’s more puzzling that Trump would create an order that is also so economically idiotic. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt has been dispatched to defend the rule as “both pro jobs and pro environment,” but so far his talking points have failed to show how the rule is any good for either. Indeed, the New York Times’ Coral Davenport has a particularly scathing assessment of why rolling back the Clean Power Plan and other environmental regulations won’t restore jobs. There are essentially three factors at play here. First, these regulations didn’t kill jobs in the first place, so reversing them won’t help. Second, the decline in energy jobs is due to automation, so even if mines stay open, new jobs aren’t going to follow. Third, despite the outsize role that the coal industry plays in election rhetoric, it constitutes a very small sliver of the economy—less than 100,000 jobs since as far back as 2003. When asked on Tuesday how many coal jobs the order would bring back, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said he was “not aware of [an estimate].”

Much like the disastrous and cruel Muslim ban, this executive order attempts to fix a problem of Donald Trump’s invention. This order, too, demonstrates the same lack of thought regarding how, exactly, the ideas proposed here will fix this fake problem. Fortunately, it is also likely to be subject to extensive court battles, as many environmental watchdogs are itching to take on Trump. One potential challenge could focus on the fact that these reversals will encourage the release of chemicals that harm human health, something the Clean Air Act prevents. (Carbon dioxide has been included in the list of harmful pollutants since 2009).

If Trump really wanted to put people to work in the energy sector, he would focus his efforts on renewable energy—particularly solar energy. The industry already provides more Americans with jobs than oil and gas extraction does, and it’s growing at 12 times the rate of general job creation. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimated in 2016 that the U.S. had more than 200,000 solar jobs while the Solar Foundation estimated that would grow to more than 280,000 within the year.

Even with this growth, we’re still nowhere close to being the dominant player in the field. That distinction goes to China, which is already beating us handily when it comes to solar energy. While the technology was largely developed here, photovoltaic energy capture and storage were primarily made possible by Chinese manufacturing. Last year, China became the world’s top solar energy generator. And earlier this month, the country announced it will put another trillion yuan (nearly $145 billion) into solar energy over the next five years, quintupling the country’s production. Experts and economists are still assessing how China became the dominant player in this market—what mix of tax benefits and incentives caused the industry’s unruly growth there, and how America got lapped—but it’s clear that Trump has no real interest in helping the U.S. attempt to regain its dominance. Meanwhile, even India has realized it can get by without investing in another coal-fired power plant.

As Mike Pence’s appearance in West Virginia this past weekend shows—the vice president assured coal miners they’d get their jobs back—Trump’s policy is more of a stunt than an attempt to, you know, help America. Beyond being a powerful economic engine, renewable energy is popular—even among Trump voters and climate change deniers. A post-election survey conducted by the University of New Hampshire found that 73 percent of respondents thought renewable energy should be a higher priority than oil exploration. Trump voters showed the lowest preference, but even 48 percent of them favor renewable energy exploration.

Trump’s own rhetoric on renewable energy has vacillated wildly—in front of some crowds he professes to love it while at other times he laments that wind turbines occasionally kill birds (a bargain anyone with an actual understanding of the numbers is happy to accept). Mostly, he views renewable energy as a cute side project, and he sees coal, oil, and fossil fuels as the heavy hitters. No doubt this is a manifestation of his desire to seem strong and powerful—and also likely his desire to continue to reward his friends who are heavily invested in the fossil fuel industry. Regardless of Trump’s motivation, his willingness to make bad economic policy based on these misconceptions is troubling.

If Trump were really interested in securing the country’s energy future, he would do well to learn from one of his predecessors. In the 1950s, Harry Truman commissioned a report on the state of America’s resources titled, Trumpishly, “Resources for Freedom.” Even back then, when America was supposedly great, government officials were worried about resources, sustainability, and the long run. Would there be enough steel to do all the construction necessary for the country’s growing infrastructure? Would we have enough oil to heat our homes?

“The long-term trend toward scarcity and higher costs of materials for the Nation’s rapidly expanding economy can be checked only through new and vigorous policies and actions,” Truman wrote in a letter to Jack O. Gorrie, the chairman of the National Security Resources Board. It was 1952, and Truman was thanking Gorrie for the work he and his team had done in assessing the nation’s material security. “The American people, therefore, have an important stake in the development of sound programs in this area.”

Truman’s report devoted ample space to renewable energy while assessing the limits of fossil fuels. (The chapter on oil was titled “How Much? How Long?”) In Chapter 15 of that report, the president’s Materials Policy Commission provided its assessment of the current state of solar energy: The sun provided plenty of energy—we just didn’t have the technology to effectively capture it yet. Decades before climate change and carbon emissions became a matter of critical importance for both world health and national security, an assessment of resources pointed to renewables as the way forward for true energy independence. The chapter concluded that “it is time for aggressive research in the whole field of solar energy—an effort in which the United States could make an immense contribution to the welfare of the free world.”

In the decades since “Resources for Freedom” was published, capturing solar energy has become efficient and commercially viable. The United States has not led the way. Trump’s latest executive order could eliminate the possibility that we’ll ever catch up.

Watch a Gorsuch Defender Say a Dead Victim of Gun Violence Would Support Gorsuch

Mark Joseph Stern — Thu, 23 Mar 2017 21:34:00 GMT

At Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings for Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, experts and witnesses testified about Gorsuch, his past decisions, and his potential to shape the law. The most moving testimony came from Sandy Phillips, a self-described Republican gun-owner whose 24-year-old daughter, Jessi, was killed in the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie-theater shooting. “My daughter went to a movie and was slaughtered,” Phillips said of the massacre, which took 12 lives and injured 70. She continued:

I use the word “slaughtered” because the killer chose to use a weapon designed for the battlefield by the military as part of his arsenal and ambushed people that could not escape. He was able to purchase 4,000 rounds of green-tip .223 high-velocity bullets over the internet without even showing his drivers’ license.

The night Jessi was murdered, I was texting with her. … The last thing she wrote to me was, “I can’t wait to see you. I need my mama.” I wrote back, “I need my baby girl.” Minutes after that text, my phone rang. What I heard on the other end of the phone changed our lives forever. …

Our little girl had been hit six times with the .223s that sprayed the theater in mere seconds. One bullet tore through her leg and entered into the other leg making it impossible to escape. Three more ripped through her abdomen. One hit her clavicle and shattered it. And one exploded through her left eye leaving a five-inch hole that blew her brains onto the theater seats, floor, and people. I live with that image every day of my life.

Phillips noted that she sued the dealer who sold the shooter these bullets, but her case was thrown out because of a federal law that protects gun dealers and manufacturers from civil liability. (Her family was forced to pay the ammo dealer hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees.) She then turned her attention to the issue at hand, pointing out that gun-rights activists are currently pressing courts to strike down bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines. “Cases pushing these radical views could make their way to the Supreme Court in the months and years to come,” she said. She continued:

This committee must know: Does this nominee believe the Second Amendment has limits? Does this nominee recognize that it does not override any other constitutional rights, like my daughter’s right to live in a safe community? Does this nominee understand that, as times change, laws must change, and responsible regulations to protect communities from gun violence have been recognized as, and are, constitutional and necessary? To be confirmed, any Supreme Court nominee must answer these questions clearly and convincingly. If not, the public safety is at risk.

It was then Jamil Jaffer’s turn to speak. Jaffer, a former Gorsuch clerk testifying in support of his one-time boss, began by awkwardly touching Phillips’ shoulder and saying, “Obviously a very a painful story from Mrs. Phillips and her daughter, Jessi.” He then proclaimed:

I think what I want to say to Mrs. Phillips and to members of this committee is that Judge Gorsuch—I’ve known him for 13 years. Judge Gorsuch is the kind of judge that Mrs. Phillips and that Jessie would want on the bench.

After that, Jaffer veered back into his prepared remarks, praising Gorsuch’s ability to apply the law “fairly and evenhandedly to all litigants before him.” He read his laundry list of cases in which Gorsuch “ruled for the little guy,” as if allowing a sexual-discrimination case to proceed or allowing a woman who had been sexually assaulted at work to bring a hostile-work-environment claim against a corporate employer are enough to cleanse Gorsuch’s own alleged troubling comments on women. Either way, nothing in this list demonstrated that Gorsuch has any commitment to realizing that the Second Amendment has limits, so it was particularly bizarre when he closed his argument by again asserting that Gorsuch was the kind of judge Sandy and Jessi deserve.

A few minutes later, when Phillips had another chance to speak, she took the opportunity to clarify something critical:

Phillips asked Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley “if he would please make note in the record that this gentleman next to me does not speak for me or my dead daughter.”

Even before this moment, the strength with which Phillips delivered her testimony was astounding. In speaking up again, she made it clear that her daughter may no longer have a voice, but she would be the one speaking on her behalf—and it would not be in support of Neil Gorsuch.

Gosh, Golly, Goodness: Neil Gorsuch Sure Does Avoid Answering Questions in a Folksy Way

Tatiana Flowers — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 23:20:00 GMT

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch is not only very good at refusing to answer senators’ questions, he’s also quite skilled at sounding very polite while doing so. Gosh, this is just exactly how a judge ought to sound. Golly, these senators sure do have some frustrating questions. Goodness, this confirmation process is taking a long time.

Franken to Gorsuch: “I Had a Career in Identifying Absurdity, and I Know It When I See It”

Susan Matthews — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 22:27:00 GMT

On Day 2 of Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings, we’ve learned the Supreme Court nominee is extremely adept at evading questions. Midway through the afternoon, Sen. Al Franken figured out how to pin him down, asking Gorsuch to explain his dissent in TransAm Trucking v. Administrative Review Board—the “frozen trucker” case.

For a more legally rigorous explanation of how to read Gorsuch’s dissent, see Jed Handelsman Shugerman’s assessment in Slate. And for a nuanced explanation of why questioning Gorsuch’s thinking in the “frozen trucker” case may not be a winning argument for Senate Democrats, Elie Mystal has a compelling piece in Above the Law.

Nevertheless, what is satisfying and noteworthy about this specific exchange is that Franken—in his typical method of conceding his own limitations—turns this case into a story that reveals the “absurdity” of Gorsuch’s reasoning.

He starts by telling the story of Alphonse Maddin, a trucker who realized that his trailer’s brakes were frozen. He calls in for repairs but is told to wait. In the meantime, while waiting in extreme temperatures, he starts to experience what he thinks are signs of hypothermia. As Franken says, “If you fall asleep waiting in 14 below zero weather you can freeze to death. You can die.”

If Maddin had kept the trailer with frozen brakes attached, he would have been able to drive at 10 or 15 miles per hour on the highway. Franken asks Gorsuch whether he would have personally felt safe on the road with Maddin driving that truck. Gorsuch sputters before finally admitting he would not.

After waiting hours, Maddin unhitched and abandoned his trailer temporarily so he could get warm. He returned just 15 minutes later. Franken asks Gorsuch what he would have done in such a situation.

“Oh, senator," Gorsuch replies. "I don’t know what I would have done if I were in his shoes, and I don’t blame him at all for a moment for doing what he did do. I empathize with him entirely.”

Still, Maddin was fired for his actions. And Gorsuch was the only judge to uphold the company’s decision to fire him. Franken concludes:

It is absurd to say this company is in its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death, or causing other people to die possibly by driving an unsafe vehicle. That's absurd. Now I had a career in identifying absurdity. And I know it when I see it. And it makes me—you know, it makes me question your judgment.

Franken bypasses the academic discussion of how Gorsuch read the law and instead makes a much more effective point—that Gorsuch’s ruling in this case reveals something about his heart. And his heart is cold. Maybe not 14 degrees below zero, but certainly a few degrees south of freezing.

Kellyanne Conway Is Not the First Lady of the United States

Susan Matthews — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 20:02:00 GMT

The cover story of this week’s New York magazine is an excellent reported profile of Kellyanne Conway, packed with intimate details patiently gathered by the magazine’s Washington correspondent Olivia Nuzzi. It is a gripping piece, one that does what all good journalism ought to do—leave its readers with a more nuanced and deeper understanding of an issue (or, in the case, a person) than was previously possible. My favorite bit is the breathtaking description of Conway eating a 7-inch scallion (“like a sword swallower on Coney Island or a snake eating a mouse”), followed by the inclusion of Conway’s own admission that until she ate it, she had thought it was a piece of asparagus. The anecdote made me finally understand the oft-repeated claim that Conway is likeable in person.

But the piece fails in one spectacular and bizarre way: It does not prove its thesis. The headline on the cover of the magazine declares Conway as “The True First Lady of Trump’s America.”

Lest you worry this is a case of some disconnected editor applying an inaccurate description, the piece actually does echo the language championed in that cover line. Early on, Nuzzi writes:

By March, she was less a pollster, campaign manager, or communications guru and more what the press expected Ivanka Trump would become in the absence of Melania Trump, who remains in New York with her young son, Barron — a pervasive female double of the president, an extension of his will and much more fiendishly committed to her boss than anyone else working on his behalf. Fewer than 50 days into the new administration, Conway had become almost inseparable from the public’s idea of the Trump White House. That is, the functional First Lady of the United States.

Wait, what? What actions has she taken that put her in the place of “functional First Lady of the United States”? Who cares that Hillary Clinton used the same room as her office when she was first lady, or that Conway is picking a few issues to focus on? Her prime tasks, supported by everything else in this profile, still seem to be advising the president and occasionally serving as his mouthpiece. The Venn diagram of what Conway is doing and the responsibilities of the functional first lady of the United States barely even features an intersection.

Serving as first lady is largely about being a hostess, giving tours of the White House to school groups, and welcoming foreign leaders. Yes, these women take on targeted issues, but usually ones that keep them safely disconnected from the battleground of the presidency. And while it’s true that Melania isn’t stepping up, it also doesn’t really matter that much. First lady is mostly a crazy role that ought to be abolished.

Conway, on the other hand, is doing much more than playing hostess. The piece concludes that Conway’s main job “remains playing media foil, which can mean punching bag, and often results in Conway herself being the story.” This, again, is almost directly the opposite of what first ladies normally do.

Conway does seems to have unprecedented visibility and popularity for a mere advisor. Nuzzi writes:

To judge by her reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual assembly of Republicans that takes place at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, she might as well be a second president, mobbed by reporters and conservatives young and old, who turned around and walked backward to take selfies as she made her way toward the escalators. “We’re on Snapchat!” a woman told her excitedly as she moved sideways, angling her camera at her face. “Thank you for saving the world,” a man said. “Oh,” Conway said, “we’re just getting started.”

People might respond to a popular first lady that way, I guess. But even considering how beloved she was in her party, I don’t think many people thought Michelle Obama was saving the world. On the other hand, this greeting of Conway actually seems appropriate for people devoted to the Trump cause, given the high-profile role she has had in securing the presidency and then serving in the administration.

The final piece of evidence for Conway-as-first-lady seems to be this:

With the president holed up in the White House, separated from his wife and sons, and nostalgic for the energy and camaraderie of the campaign trail, Conway’s familiarity is a comfort. She’s often the only senior staffer who’ll indulge his preference for fast food and even accompanied him after his joint-session address to Congress for burgers.

What does this prove, besides the fact that Conway and her boss seem to be friends? There’s a vague hint of the idea that men and women can’t have platonic relationships and that men are bound to misbehave in their wives’ absence (more plausible in Trump’s case given his … romantic history). But insofar as demonstrating that Conway is trying to fill in a first lady–shaped hole, this is not convincing. Indeed, the profile goes to great lengths to explain how generally sociable and charming the woman is. Perpetually hungry Conway would try to curry favor by getting burgers with her boss.

So should we blame this bad cover line on the fact that sexism is still alive and well in Trump’s America, and that strong women are still regulated to the role of wife, supporter, soother, but never leader? No—in fact I think Nuzzi does a great job of highlighting the tangled bizarreness of Kellyanne Conway and feminism, overall. And of course, Nuzzi is not responsible for the line; her editors are. But in the end, I think this line was created to do exactly what bombastic cover lines have long been designed to do—sell magazines.

The First Thing You Should Do When You Wake Up? Share Your Dreams.

Susan Matthews — Fri, 24 Feb 2017 21:17:52 GMT

Telling someone about your dreams is a unique combination of boring, selfish, and indulgent. Which is why you should do it first thing, every day, and to a loved one. Let me explain.

Just over a year ago, Amanda Hess argued in Slate for why dream talk should no longer be taboo, no longer deserving of the title of “the bore by which all other bores are measured.” Hess makes a compelling and convincing case, drawing from psychological theory, scientific literature, and cross-cultural analysis. I will use none of those things as evidence—I will simply use my own experience, and common sense.

The common sense part should be clear: I think we can all agree that dreams are awesome, in the traditional sense of the word. I have nightmares somewhat frequently (more so these days), and I still think that dreams are cool. In a dream, you can fly, or feel like you’re screaming at the top of your lungs but no sound comes out. It’s great! Anyway, the best thing about dreams is that that they bolster your experiences in the otherwise experience-free activity of being asleep. Considering the amount of time we spend asleep, this can really measure add up. Since we dream, on average, 2 hours per night, and live, on average, 78.8 years, we could ultimately end up spending 6.5 years in a lifetime dreaming. It’s a substantial amount of time to ignore.

We all dream, we just don’t always remember doing so. But talking about dreams, particularly when you first wake up, can make them easier to remember. It’s those initial moments as you’re waking up where the dream still feels accessible, lingering in the synapses waiting to be solidified into your conscious mind. Talking about your dreams—or writing them down—helps.

When I was little enough to be woken up by my mom in the morning, the first words out of my mouth were usually “Mom, I had the weirdest dream!” My mother, also a person who regularly had and remembered crazy dreams, was very sympathetic to my outbursts. She even encouraged them, fueled, I think, by the fact that my father had no patience for dream-talk. She was happy to engage in some dream-listening if it meant she also had a captive audience for her own dream-sharing.

These days, I’m too old to be woken up by my mom so I’ve directed my habit at another willing participant—my boyfriend. The first words out of my mouth most mornings are still “I had the weeeirdest dream.” And then I proceed to tell him about it. For the first few minutes of the day, we engage in some very deep pseudo-psychoanalysis, usually about me because I’m better at remembering my dreams, but also sometimes about him. (I actually think that he’s gotten better at remembering his dreams since we’ve been dating, on account on my insistence on dream-talk, but he says his dream memory comes and goes in “spurts.”) I asked him if my habit bothers him, and he lovingly said that it doesn’t, and that he’s largely just amused by my unlimited capacity for marveling at the fact that I had the weirdest dream, because this is a daily occurrence.

At any rate, his sportsmanship shows exactly why sharing your dreams first thing in the morning is a great idea. Beyond the fact that this is the time you’ll remember them best, if you’re waking up with someone, you have a captive audience. And while perhaps it is preferable if this person has decided to be in a committed relationship with you, it’s also a great icebreaker if, say, they are not someone who is in a committed relationship with you. It’s a fun way to engage with your (potential) partner about something silly and weird and occasionally a little serious, before you move on with your day. At an intimate time of day, these little exchanges make me feel safe and loved as a crawl out of my dream world back into the (nightmare) world. If I didn’t do it, I would probably just be buried in my phone checking my email (this is what tends to happen when I don’t dream). Much better to engage with the human being in bed next to me.

So there you have it. Talking about your dreams first thing is fun in the moment, possibly productive for your current or prospective relationship, and might add years to your life, in a way. Everyone should do it.

I Can’t Stop Looking at Naked Birds

Susan Matthews — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 14:13:00 GMT

Lately I’ve been looking at naked birds a lot. I’ve always liked naked birds, by which I mean birds without feathers. My favorite species of bird is the marabou stork, a grandfatherly looking bird with a mostly featherless head and an obscene appendage hanging from its neck. Once I was at the Bronx Zoo, and it started to rain, and while all the other animals took cover, the marabou stork just stood there, unperturbed, the surly old neighborhood crank who’s long past caring if he gets a little wet. Very good bird.

The marabou stork’s nakedness is natural, but there are other reasons for naked birds to be naked. Some birds are naked because they pluck their own feathers out. There are two major reasons for a bird to pluck itself naked. One is medical: The bird has some sort of condition, maybe an infection or a parasite or a disease or a bad diet. The other major reason is behavioral: The birds end up plucking out their feathers because of stress.

This is known behavior for captive birds. Science historian and writer Laurel Braitman, who witnessed a good deal of stressed-out animals while researching her book Animal Madness, says that she’s never met anyone who has seen birds compulsively plucking their feathers in the wild. “They tend to do it when something’s wrong,” she told Audubon in 2014. “More things tend to be wrong in captivity.”

Birds are generally smart. Kept in captivity, lacking proper entertainment and interaction, their brains seem to get the better of them. So some of them end up picking out the feathers that help keep them dry and warm and safe, and they wind up looking like something you’d find on a roasting spit. They can’t help it; stress is a terrible thing. They attack the very shelter nature had given them, something neurotics of all animal classes can relate to.

I am captivated by naked birds, by their trembling little bodies. They are captured beautifully by Oliver Regueiro in this photo essay, for example. Here is a cockatoo named Oscar, who is naked thanks to a condition called beak and feather disease. She has a good home and seems like a good bird. Apparently she has been called the ugliest bird in the world, a distinction that should really go to the potoo. Earlier in the day I discovered Rhea, a wonderful naked bird with a very intense social media presence. She is chronically naked, so nice people knit her little bird clothes to keep her warm.

Anyway, for some reason, I’ve found myself staring at naked birds more and more in recent weeks. There’s something about them that feels very relatable in this current moment. They are vulnerable without their bright plumage, stripped down to their almost unrecognizable but very birdy cores.

For many of them their vulnerability is a response to conditions imposed upon them by humans. But there are also communities of other humans who see the vulnerability and decide to do something about it—to knit clothes, for instance, to make the birds a little less vulnerable. Humans mitigating the damage humans have wrought. There is despair in that, and some comfort, too.

Scientists Are About to Be Censored. They Shouldn’t Censor Themselves.

Susan Matthews — Fri, 27 Jan 2017 20:56:55 GMT

Donald Trump has been in office one week, and it has not gone well. It turns out we should have been taking him literally this whole time. Yikes.

The fears about a Trump presidency are many and varied, but one of the most persistent has been the threat of censorship over science. Remember, Trump’s climate change denialism goes beyond the common refrain of “I’m not a scientist”—he basically suggests that no one is a scientist, except maybe that uncle of his who was a professor at MIT. His administration has already announced that it will try to undermine climate data collection and is likely to try to adjust critical calculations like the social cost of carbon. We’re on high alert because we should be— let’s not forget that as soon as Trump took office, all mentions of climate change were scrubbed from the White House’s website.

Into this climate came the bizarre dispute between Trump and, of all things, the National Park Service.* The brief recap is that the National Park Service’s main Twitter account retweeted side-by-side photos of the inauguration in 2009 and 2017, which plainly show that Barack Obama’s first-term crowd was larger. The account also tweeted about the disappearance of the White House’s webpages on climate change when the site turned over to Trump’s team.

The tweets were deleted within hours and described as “mistaken” the next day:

An internal memo from the organization’s Washington office was sent to employees asking everyone to “immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts until further notice.”

This seems like a hasty (and jerky) reaction from an office in transition, one that might be a bit apprehensive about getting under its new boss’ famously thin skin. But reporting from the Washington Post, via sources with inside knowledge of the situation, provided frightening clarity on the situation. In an unbelievably self-absorbed move, it turns out that President Donald Trump woke up on his first day in office and decided that one of his first moves as leader of the free world would be to call the acting director of the National Park Service to complain about the photos that showed small crowds and admonish him for the tweets (which, remember, had already been deleted).

From the Washington Post:

On the morning after Donald Trump’s inauguration, acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds received an extraordinary summons: The new president wanted to talk to him.

In a Saturday phone call, Trump personally ordered Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the Mall, according to three individuals who have knowledge of the conversation. The president believed that the photos might prove that the media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.

Trump also expressed anger over a retweet sent from the agency’s account, in which side-by-side photographs showed far fewer people at his swearing-in than had shown up to see Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009.

That Donald Trump seems to have spent a good portion of his first week in office obsessing over his supposed “ratings” is a terrifying indication of his mental stability and fitness to lead our country.

But another frightening part of the story is how the action seems to be influencing other government employees.

On Monday, news was leaked about an apparent gag order issued to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It would be completely in character for the Trump administration to do such a thing, but frighteningly, it seems that this directive didn’t come from inside the White House. In fact, the USDA gag order came from … the USDA. As Science magazine reported Thursday, “Firestorm over supposed gag order on USDA scientists was a self-inflicted wound, agency says.” The memo that got so much grief was “a poorly worded effort by career official—not anyone appointed by Trump.” This particular “gag order” has since been rescinded.

And consider the other National Park Service Twitter account to get attention this week—the Badlands National Park, which tweeted four links about climate change on Tuesday afternoon that were subsequently deleted, prompting extensive outrage and several “alt” Twitter accounts. On Tuesday night, National Park Service officials said the Badlands was not told to remove the tweets but choose to do so on its own. The gag order that was issued to National Park Service accounts on Friday had apparently been lifted on Saturday morning. Press Secretary Sean Spicer said he hadn’t heard of specific bans and declined to comment.

Many took this to mean that the Trump administration had gone full censorship and was also lying about it—a frightening and also totally understandable reaction given, well, everything.

Despite Spicer’s otherwise appalling performance, I don’t think the Badlands debacle is evidence yet of an administrationwide attempt to muzzle scientists. (I’m not saying that will never happen—and maybe it has happened—but that evidence seems thin.) It’s a tough line to draw given that we are living under a president with authoritarian tendencies who does seem to set more store by Twitter than most rational humans. But my fear is that the Badlands reaction and the USDA debacle are indicators that something far more insidious is already happening: self-censorship.

It’s completely reasonable for government employees to assume that tweets about climate change would bother Trump, who is a denier. It is terrifying that they would start censoring themselves so as not to upset him.

All government entities are going through transitions, and it’s a tense time, to say the least. They may even be accurately intuiting Trump’s wishes. But as we continue to fret about freedom of information, we’d be well-served to remember how censorship tends to manifest. Often, it doesn’t come down from the top. The mere threat of censorship, and the accompanying fear of reprisal, can do the trick.

So far, Trump seems to get most incensed over what he sees as personal slights against him—something the National Park Service seemed to intuit when they removed the tweets in the first place (self-censorship!). Let him stew there. Make him, or his deputies, censor climate change information themselves. (Also make them censor “critical” tweets about the president himself!) And if or when that happens, please email us at tips@slate.com.

*Correction, Jan. 27, 2017: This story originally misidentified the National Park Service as the National Parks Service. (Return.)

Scott Pruitt’s Answer on Lead in Water Wasn’t As Egregious As Critics Claim

Susan Matthews — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 20:15:22 GMT

Scott Pruitt, Donald Trump’s nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency, is getting a lot of flak for his answer to a question from Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland, at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing:

Cardin: I want to continue on clean water for one moment. We've had significant problems with safe drinking water and clean water. Let me ask you a preliminary question. Do you believe there is any safe level of lead that can be taken into the human body, particularly a young person?

Pruitt: Senator, that’s something I have not reviewed nor know about. I would be very concerned about any level of lead going into the drinking water or obviously human consumption, but I've not looked at a scientific research on that.

Critics are slamming him for not being informed on the research (here's Rep. Keith Ellison). Mother Jones is reporting that “the science on this issue is clear” and quotes both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the EPA, which both state that there is no known safe blood level for lead in children.

But Cardin wasn’t asking about safe levels of lead in human blood. The way his question was phrased, it sounds more like he’s asking if there’s any safe level of lead that can be taken into the human body, which I believe should be interpreted as questioning whether there’s any safe level of lead in drinking water. That’s a very different question than asking about levels in blood.

I’m a science editor, and I wasn’t sure of the answer, so I checked to see what the EPA says. And it turns out that the EPA defines lead-free piping as piping that has a weighted average of less than 0.25 percent lead. That’s not zero, though it’s very close.

From EPA.gov:

Section 1417 of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) establishes the definition for “lead free” as a weighted average of 0.25% lead calculated across the wetted surfaces of a pipe, pipe fitting, plumbing fitting, and fixture and 0.2% lead for solder and flux. The Act also provides a methodology for calculating the weighted average of wetted surfaces.

Sure, you can argue that Pruitt should know what the EPA defines as lead-free if he’s going to lead the department. But this exchange does not indicate that Pruitt thinks it’s fine that kids drink water contaminated with lead.

Donald Trump and RFK Jr. Are Vaccine-Skeptical Soulmates

Susan Matthews — Tue, 10 Jan 2017 22:35:00 GMT

This post has been updated with new information since it was originally published.

President-elect Donald Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday morning, a sit-down that might at first seem odd: One, after all, is a Democratic scion and environmental lawyer, while the other is about to be the world’s only climate change–denying head of state. As recently as August 2016, RFK Jr. referred to Trump as “dangerous” and “a demagogue,” but now they’re conspiring over common ground: They both refuse to accept the science on vaccination.

Apparently it went swimmingly. Soon after the meeting, Reuters correspondent Ginger Gibson tweeted that RFK Jr. said Trump “asked him to chair a commission on vaccine safety and he agreed.” (According to pool reports, Kennedy said “He asked me to chair a commission on vaccine safety and scientific integrity.”) Trump’s team later said that while the PEOTUS “enjoyed the discussion,” no formal offer had been made, stating “The President-elect is exploring the possibility of forming a committee on Autism, which affects so many families; however no decisions have been made at this time.” More alarming than the fact that these statements contradict each other is the fact that in referencing the same potential committee, Kennedy describes it as a “vaccine safety committee,” while Trump’s team calls it a “committee on Autism.” This reinforces the false idea that there is a link between the two.

The framing of the committee as a way to explore safety standards is indicative of exactly what makes the Trump–RFK Jr. pairing so frightening—and why it might be effective. Both men reject the established science on vaccination—science that shows that vaccines are safe and that they save lives. (The irony of vaccines is that they’ve been so successful at eradicating terrible diseases that many people now feel able to question their utility.)

And yet both men also pretend they are not as bad as the “anti-vaxxers” who erroneously think vaccines cause autism. Kennedy and Trump have each made pointed statements about the fact that they vaccinated their own children. They seem to think this should allow them to say whatever else they want about vaccination without receiving the same sort of criticism that anti-vaxxers get. Of course, as prominent public figures the exact opposite should be true: They should be held to a higher standard than confused parents when it comes to vaccination. Instead they both spew dangerous falsehoods—falsehoods that apparently may now make their way into actual policy.

Take Trump. He’s not an anti-vaxxer, he says, but a slow vaxxer. Here’s how he described vaccinating his son, Barron, in 2007:

[W]e’ve taken him on a very slow process. He gets one shot at a time then we wait a few months and give him another shot, the old-fashioned way. But today they pump the children with so much at a very young age. We do it on a very, very conservative level.

As Brian Palmer explained in Slate in December, “Trump has staked out a centrist position, smack dab between scientific fact and total bullshit. … But mixing one part fact with one part fiction does not get you something that is partially true.”

It gets you something that is one-half fiction. And slow-vaxxing, while I suppose is better than no-vaxxing, is still dangerous. Palmer explains:

Delaying vaccination introduces a lot of unnecessary risk.

“If you get pertussis as an infant, it’s potentially deadly,” notes [Daniel Salmon, deputy director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health]. * “If you get it as an adolescent, it’s usually a prolonged cough.”

This is one of the primary factors guiding the current vaccine schedule, Salmon explains. We give vaccines to children when they most need them. Delaying vaccination is not conservative—it’s ignoring the evidence.

But this is classic Trumpism: His refusal to accept the expertise of others while describing his own sense as common-sense allows him to make completely incorrect claims and deny that there’s anything wrong with them. While campaigning, Trump even met with disgraced scientist Andrew Wakefield, whose discredited work helped birth the anti-vax movement, at a donor event.

This mistrust of expertise fits right in with RFK Jr.’s vaccination theories, which are built around the blatantly false idea that vaccines are unsafe, and the more paranoid idea that there is a conspiracy to cover this up extends from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to elected officials to journalists. My Slate predecessor Laura Helmuth got a full rundown of RFK Jr.’s vaccine theory when he called her to complain about our coverage of his views in 2013, which Slate referred to as “anti-vax,” a label that Kennedy rejected, saying he was “very much pro-vaccine.” Kennedy wrote a book that attempts to connect a component of vaccines to neurodevelopment disorders including autism, called Thimerosal: Let the Science Speak, and regularly attempts to meet with elected officials regarding his concerns.

In Helmuth’s piece, journalist Seth Mnookin succinctly describes Kennedy’s problematic assessment of the CDC: “What he has done is taken concern that there could be a problem as evidence that there was a problem.” This, coincidentally, is why putting Kennedy in charge of a commission on vaccine safety would be so frightening.

Kennedy has already shown himself to be willing to sacrifice much of his political clout over beliefs that, when examined by experts in the field, do not stand up to scrutiny. Apparently it was worth it: His previously unpalatable opinions might be elevated by the most powerful man in the world.

*Correction, Jan. 11, 2017: This story originally misidentified Daniel Salmon as the director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety. He is the deputy director. (Return.)

I Am Glad the Harlem Deer Is Dead

Susan Matthews — Sat, 17 Dec 2016 00:22:09 GMT

I am happy the Harlem deer is dead. It’s a shame the deer didn’t die sooner.

If you’re not familiar with what the Washington Post calls “the saga of a single-antlered deer in Harlem,” well, we can start with the choice of that word saga, which evokes epic narratives and burly pagans and longships slaloming through the fjords—stories, however romanticized, of humans doing human things. This was a different sort of story. The Harlem deer was a white-tailed buck who somehow wound up at Jackie Robinson Park in Harlem, where the deer was spotted a couple weeks ago. Things were fine, mostly. The locals gave the deer a name. Two names, actually: “J.R.,” for the park, and “Lefty,” since the deer was missing a left antler, as you can see in the above image from CBS New York. Then the deer left the park, and the police were called to catch the deer, since the mammal posed a threat to human safety due to its kind’s tendency to run into cars.

Then the city had to decide what to do with the deer. There were no good solutions. Transporting the deer was going to be risky and expensive, and would likely result in the deer’s demise. Euthanizing the deer was the humane choice, city officials concluded.

Pro-deer advocates, apparently a thing, rallied behind the deer, and eventually state officials stepped in to oversee its relocation to safer pastures. Essentially, at this point, the Harlem white-tailed deer had become the symbol of the power struggle between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who lives for dumb stuff like this.

And then the deer died, presumably due to the considerable amount of stress it had experienced in a short period. This guaranteed that discussion of the deer would continue for days as its spirit ascended to whatever viral-beast heaven is home to the souls of Harambe and Cecil the Lion.

Like I said, I am relieved and glad that the deer is dead. The East Coast is overpopulated with deer. A smaller deer population is better for deer and for people, too. Overabundance means that many animals will suffer due to lack of adequate food and habitat. It’s possible that food and habitat scarcity (due to overpopulation) is what forced this deer into Harlem in the first place. This is not a great life for a deer. They don’t have great access to food or habitat here.

So of course the deer should have been euthanized. When we talk about healthy populations, we’re talking not about the individual health of all the members but about the population’s ability to sustain itself by reproducing. Deer are definitely sustaining themselves, as the grilles of many rural Chevrolet Silverados can attest. The species could stand to lose this individual.

I want the scarce government resources allocated toward animals to be aimed at making populations as healthy and sustainable as possible, not to helping certain celebrity individuals survive. On those grounds, in part, New York state policy is appropriately skeptical of deer relocation:

Capturing and relocating deer is difficult and expensive. Costs range from $110 to $800 per deer captured, depending on the method used. Efforts become less efficient as deer numbers decline and deer become more wary. Capture and relocation is also stressful to the animal. Injury and loss of some deer during capture and relocation efforts are common and can be significant, and the long term survival of relocated deer is often low. Personnel handling deer are exposed to potential physical injury from the deer and to accidental exposure to the immobilization drugs. Another serious constraint on capture and relocation programs is the availability of release sites to receive the captured deer.

And then, brusquely:

Permits are not issued to relocate deer to the wild because acceptable release sites are not available and because the poor chances for deer survival do not warrant the risks.

Cuomo, though, broke with his state’s policy to try to save the deer. That’s because the deer had gone viral in the way that animals do when they wander adorably over to our column on the taxonomic table. Humans have evolved to be very good at recognizing and empathizing with individual animals and quite bad at understanding population-level dynamics. There was now sentiment for Cuomo to gin up by inserting himself into the fate of the deer, and so public resources were expended on this individual that would’ve been better used on, say, habitat restoration in Jamaica Bay.

And for what? Ultimately, a deer that could have been euthanized ended up dying in a more painful way, because humans went blundering into nature and made all the usual mistakes. There was a saga here, but it was still just one about humans doing human things.

It’s Not Over

Susan Matthews — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 04:07:00 GMT

The images below were taken by Christian Hansen at the Oceti Sakowin camp at Standing Rock in early December.

There were fireworks the night the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not grant the easement allowing the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline—low, bright explosions lighting up the makeshift civilization on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. And then the protesters got back to work.

The Army Corps’ unexpected announcement on Dec. 4 has largely been hailed as a victory for the people who’ve spent months trying to block final construction of the pipeline. But at the camp, where members of more than 700 tribes have gathered with the Standing Rock Sioux—and have stayed, despite frigid temperatures—the news was received a bit more cautiously. Even when David Archambault II, chairman of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, told protesters it was time to go home and be with their families for the winter, many were reluctant. They know this decision is not conclusive—it’s more of a punt so the Army Corps can “explore alternate routes” and consider an Environmental Impact Statement “with full public input and analysis.” And the whole thing could be reversed by President-elect Donald Trump once he takes office.

We don’t know. But whatever happens next, the ideals that catalyzed the Standing Rock protest are not going away. The people fighting for them are in it for the long haul, because in a broader sense that’s what the protest was about—advocating for the long view amid the triumphal short-termism of our current political culture. The protesters in Standing Rock are eminently aware that this “victory” is not the end but rather another twist in a longer fight. And while others are lamenting how the Army Corps’ decision will make the process drag on, for the protesters, that’s OK. They’re committed to ideals that have a longer shelf life than the market cycle, or even a presidential term. “It’s more than this pipeline, on this land, at this time,” Daphne Singingtree, a protester who has spent weeks at Standing Rock and intends to stay, told NPR after the Army Corps’ decision was announced. “I see this movement continuing on.”

Pipeline supporters, by contrast, have short-term goals. They want to finish the pipeline, start pumping oil, and start making money. Their arguments for why it should go through rely on short-term considerations: The pipeline is mostly complete, and right now we’re shipping oil on trains, which is more dangerous. Plus, the government is about to open a gleaming new water-treatment plant, so, really, the concern that a pipeline break could contaminate their drinking water is actually unnecessary. Case closed.

These arguments hold up so long as you think about them only within the narrow framework of the short term. As soon as you consider the long term, they fall apart. The Standing Rock Sioux are not just interested in where they’re going to get their water right now. They’re worried about where they’re going to get their water forever. “As American citizens, we all have a responsibility to speak for a vision of the future that is safe and productive for our grandchildren,” Archambault wrote in the New York Times in August.

The long term is what brought the environmentalists there, too, even though the actual decisions made at Standing Rock so far have been more fundamentally about land rights than about climate change. (Pollution provides a bridge between the two issues.) Archambault connected these dots on Minnesota Public Radio on Wednesday: “If, for the first time, this nation can listen and hear us, they’ll understand that this is about climate change,” he said. “We all have to take a good look at ourselves and say, ‘Are we dependent on fossil fuels?’ If we say yes, we’re creating the demand for the Dakota Access pipeline and for future pipelines,” both of which threaten land and water.

These concerns intermingled at Standing Rock, and one lasting prize of the protests might be the alliances they produced, a sort of coalition of the long term: Sioux Indians worried about their drinking water. Environmental activists concerned about the viability of the planet and the way our fossil-fuel dependence gets consecrated in our infrastructure. Veterans showing up out of a wish to protect the Constitution. Black Lives Matter activists who saw their own long cause in the police brutality visited upon Native Americans at Standing Rock and across the country. Mainline protestants who want to acknowledge the injustices tribes have suffered in the past and wish to support them in this “spiritual battle” for their right to their sacred grounds.

Standing Rock attracted the politically engaged, but also the politically disaffected. Some there had grown so disillusioned that Trump’s upset win barely registered when the news reached them the morning after the election. Still, they were camping out in the Great Plains in the middle of winter for a cause. Much has been said about the Americans whose grievances have not been recognized or addressed by our current politics. Some took their dissatisfaction to the ballot box. Others took it to Standing Rock. And many there do not trust the permanence of the Army Corps’ decision, making them unwilling to leave. Veterans continued arriving even after the announcement. “I celebrate with caution,” Tara Houska, a member of the Couchiching First Nation, told the Guardian, when explaining her intent to stay. “We know that Trump is coming and with that, we know our fight will continue.”

The man now preparing to take office embodies the antithesis of the protesters’ vision. Trump is pro-pipeline generally, and he stands to gain financially from this one specifically. He will be the only world leader to deny the reality of climate change and the first president to have been elected without prior government experience. He is the short-termer–in-chief, having attained the office in part by running on his corporate experience, his supposed ability to get results. That’s what the protesters are up against: the elevation of the American belief that government ought to run like a corporation, one that prioritizes short-term results over long-term progress. On Wednesday, Trump named a climate change denialist to head his EPA. Oil executive Rex Tillerson is the leading front-runner for secretary of state. Short-termism is running the country. Standing Rock is not going away.

Update, Dec. 13, 2016: This photo essay has been updated to remove a photo. We published the photo without proper context and have decided to remove it after learning more about the possible context.

Trump’s Pick to Lead the EPA Transition Team Is a Proud Climate Skeptic

Susan Matthews — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 21:01:00 GMT

We already know Trump doesn’t believe climate change is real, and that his presidency is likely to be a disaster for the planet. Wednesday we got word that Myron Ebell is his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. Ebell is a well-known climate skeptic who wears these credentials proudly.

While I know in my brain that “transition team” means “transition until Trump is president,” I cannot help but read this as "transition until we get rid of (or neuter) the EPA." Trump has made it clear that he has no use for environmental regulation during his run.

That was bad, but what was worse was how Paul Ryan reiterated the idea Wednesday morning:

Look, it’s not just the health care law that we can replace, because we now have shown the willingness and the ability to do it. There are so many more things that I am excited about. Think about the laid-off coal workers now who see relief coming. Think about the farmers here in Wisconsin who are being harassed by the EPA in the waters of the USA. Think about the ranchers in the west who are getting harassed by the Interior Department or the laid-off timber workers.

Things are not looking good for environmental protections.

See more Slate coverage of the election.

AIDS’ “Patient Zero” Has Already Been Exonerated. Why Do Scientists Keep Debunking the Myth?

Mark Joseph Stern — Tue, 01 Nov 2016 15:06:00 GMT

Nature published a buzzy new study on Wednesday that, among other things, debunked the popular theory that the “Patient Zero” of AIDS in North America was a French Canadian flight attendant named Gaëtan Dugas. The main point of the paper was to use genome sequencing to assess which strain of HIV first entered the continent and when. Along with doing that, the 10-member team of researchers also sequenced Dugas’ viral genome to determine where he fit in the timeline and whether his infamy was warranted. The answer was a definitive no: Dugas, the team noted, carried a strain quite typical of other strains in America at the time—biologically contradicting the theory that he was the originator of the virus on this continent.

The study is complex, clever, and fascinating. It asks relevant questions about the origin of AIDS in this country that should be assessed scientifically. But bringing Dugas into it is entirely unnecessary. The notion that Dugas was Patient Zero has already been thoroughly debunked—for one thing, the evidence that he was the first North American patient with AIDS was never based on science to begin with. Indeed, we have long known that he only earned the title through a transcription error: In 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drew a diagram of HIV case clusters. Dugas was marked Patient O, for Outside of California. But because he happened to be drawn at the center of one cluster, CDC personnel read Patient O as Patient 0, i.e., the first AIDS patient in America. The moniker stuck and the myth took off, becoming conventional wisdom when Randy Shilts profiled Dugas as Patient Zero in his AIDS history And the Band Played On. Ever since, Dugas has been maligned as a modern day Typhoid Mary—but worse, because he ostensibly spread his disease through sexual activities that many Americans considered immoral.

Patient Zero, then, is a myth and always has been. As scientists pointed out as early as 1988, the timing never made sense: Even if the CDC’s diagram had labeled Dugas 0 for Patient Zero, its analysis would have been incorrect, because the study in question inaccurately measured the development of the virus. (In counting backward to identify a rough date of infection, the CDC alleged that several patients in the diagram had developed AIDS within 11 months of HIV infection. In reality, HIV typically takes five to 10 years to progress into AIDS in an untreated patient.) Whoever brought AIDS to the United States—and it doesn’t much matter who did—it was not Dugas. So why did 10 esteemed scientists feel the need to go back again and debunk this known myth?

At heart, the study is focused on the team’s brilliant methodology and cutting-edge genome sequencing. The techniques it employs in order to assess degraded serum samples seem worthwhile and may allow us to gain a more precise understanding of the spread of the epidemic. The research methods refined and described in the paper will surely be of use to HIV/AIDS researchers today.

And, sure, if they were already running all these tests on all these samples, it is not that much extra work to track down Dugas’ sample and analyze it, too. But we are at the point where we ought to ask whether it is truly necessary to include Dugas, even with the goal of exonerating him. He has already been exonerated. Furthermore, the mistakes that caused Dugas to be blamed for AIDS were not science-based. Do we really need a biologic refutation to what was never a biologic fact?

One unfortunate but eminently plausible possibility is that the study simply needed a hook—to land the paper in a renowned journal, to draw media attention, to break into the news cycle. To be sure, the researchers likely had no ill intent in using Dugas to draw attention to their study. But the effects of their decision are regrettable. Patient Zero is, and has always been, a moralizing and homophobic narrative used to pin the blame of AIDS on homosexual promiscuity. The Patient Zero story puts outsized importance on the role of gay men in the AIDS crisis, and seems to blame them for the sudden outbreak of the epidemic. It frames the spread of AIDS as a morality tale, complete with heroes and villains, assigning culpability to the men who spread the virus through sex. Of course, these men could not know that they were carrying a virus that scientists had not yet discovered. Today we recognize the folly of this narrative. But the Patient Zero narrative brings us right back to the 1980s, when many Americans believed that that gay men somehow brought AIDS upon themselves by engaging in fundamentally aberrant and immoral behavior.

It was thus somewhat disturbing to see Patient Zero splash across the headlines last week, in a number of high-profile articles that often forgot to mention that Dugas had already been exonerated. (The Wall Street Journal’s write-up declared that “A new genetic analysis may settle a longstanding debate over how the nation’s AIDS outbreak started”—when, in fact, the debate over Dugas ended long ago, and the origins of America’s AIDS outbreak remain a mystery.) At this point, evoking the Patient Zero myth only to debunk it once again feels counterproductive: It extends the lifespan of an idea that has long been used to justify homophobia under the thin veneer of “science,” and it puts attention on the first AIDS patient as though finding and blaming him is somehow important. The team behind the Nature study may have legitimately important insights into the science of HIV genome sequencing. They shouldn’t feel compelled to tie their findings to a story that perpetuates a toxic conception of HIV and moral culpability.

We’ve Misdiagnosed the Problem With Donald Trump

Susan Matthews — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 09:15:00 GMT

Lately, I have been having dreams about Donald Trump. In one, I’m in the audience as he walks out onto the debate stage, and the version of Hillary Clinton who follows him out is bald and deranged. In another, I’m waiting for Kanye West to perform at Madison Square Garden, but Trump does instead. No matter the dream, I wake up feeling the same way: scared.

And waking life is scary enough. During the last presidential debate, the country watched Trump scoff at one of the basic tenets of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. His campaign now runs on paranoia and delusion—and in the spare moments when it’s not paranoid or delusional, it’s merely incoherent. When asked in the second debate to explain his boasts about sexually assaulting women, Trump basically answered that it doesn’t matter because ISIS is worse. “No one has more respect for women than I do,” he said in the final debate. Some in the audience laughed, and maybe there was catharsis in that laughter, but I wanted to throw something at my television screen.

It’s Trump’s denialism that sets me off. It’s so casual—as casual as when he told Billy Bush that he can touch women against their will because he’s a star. He lives in an alternative reality, one in which the widespread backlash against him simply doesn’t exist. What could make someone so disturbingly unaware? So confident in his right to the presidency? Could it be that he is actually unable to grasp objective truth? Might he actually be mentally ill?

Several people, spanning media and medicine, have tried to answer these questions, psychologizing Trump or at least discussing the propriety of psychologizing Trump. Can we blame the candidate’s apparent insanity on an actual psychological condition? Are we watching the manifestation of a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder?

There have been cautiously speculative stories in the New York Times, here on Slate, in Vanity Fair and the Washington Post and the Atlantic, all of them seeming to grow from the same unspoken wish: to explain away the crazy by labeling it as a real disorder. We like to put a name to our monsters. Diagnosing Trump, whether doing so without examining him is proper or not, helps.

* * *

This isn’t the first time narcissistic personality disorder has been employed as a means of understanding a scary political movement. The godfather of personality disorder analysis, Theodore Millon, was drawn to the field in part by Nazis and fascists. Born in Manhattan in 1928 to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, Millon addressed his doctoral dissertation to “a theme of great concern at that time, which had to do with post-Second World War concerns regarding the Nazi Fascistic kind of mentality,” as he told fellow psychologist Michael Shaughnessy. “I did a research study on assessing the characteristics of authoritarian or fascistic personalities.”

He would go on to develop the Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory—the MCMI, currently in its fourth edition—which is considered the gold standard for the assessment of personality disorder pathology. Reading his analysis of narcissistic personality disorder now, you wonder if he was actually writing this from the press pen at a Trump rally. (Millon died in 2014.) Consider this analysis from his 2011 treatise, Disorders of Personality: Introducing a DSM/ICD Spectrum From Normal to Abnormal:

Narcissists are neither disposed to stick to objective facts nor to restrict their actions within the boundaries of social custom or cooperative living. … Free to wander in their private world of fiction, narcissists may lose touch with reality, lose their sense of proportion, and begin to think along peculiar and deviant lines.

Were narcissists able to respect others, allow themselves to value others’ opinions, or see the world through others’ eyes, their tendency toward illusion and unreality might be checked or curtailed. Unfortunately, narcissists have learned to devalue others, not to trust their judgments, and to think of them as naïve and simpleminded. Thus, rather than question the correctness of their own beliefs they assume that the views of others are at fault. Hence, the more disagreement they have with others, the more convinced they are of their own superiority and the more isolated and alienated they are likely to become. ... They are increasingly unable to assess situations objectively, thereby failing further to grasp why they have been rebuffed and misunderstood. Distressed by these repeatedly and perplexing social failures, they’re likely, at first, to become depressed and morose. However, true to their fashion, they will begin to elaborate new and fantastic rationales to account for their fate. But the more they conjecture and ruminate, the more they lose touch, distort, and perceive things that are not there. They may begin to be suspicious of others, to question their intentions, and to criticize them for ostensive deceptions …

I received these excerpts from a psychologist, one who did not want to publicly speculate on Trump’s mental condition but who was alarmed at the prospect of someone seemingly afflicted with a severe case of this disorder assuming the presidency. (The American Psychological Association has an ethical standard discouraging members from making armchair diagnoses of a person they have not examined face-to-face, akin to the American Psychiatric Association’s much-debated Goldwater Rule.)

Elsewhere, Millon writes:

Deficient in social controls and self-discipline, the tendency of CEN narcissists to fantasize and distort may speed up. The air of grandiosity may become more flagrant. They may find hidden and deprecatory meanings in the incidental behavior of others, becoming convinced of others’ malicious motives, claims upon them, and attempts to undo them. As their behaviors and thoughts transgress the line of reality, their alienation will mount, and they may seek to protect their phantom image of superiority more vigorously and vigilantly than ever. Trapped by the consequences of their own actions, they may become bewildered and frightened as the downward spiral progresses through its inexorable course. No longer in touch with reality, they begin to accuse others and hold them responsible for their own shame and failures. They may build a “logic” based on the relevance and entirely circumstantial evidence and ultimately construct a delusion system to protect themselves from unbearable reality.

In the last debate, when Trump proclaimed he would “keep us in suspense” about whether he’d accept the outcome of the election, Clinton replied with a plainly rehearsed summation of her opponent’s routine denialism. It felt almost as if she’d been reading Millon herself:

You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case; he said the FBI was rigged.

Millon: Rather than question the correctness of their own beliefs they assume that the views of others are at fault:

He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him.

They are increasingly unable to assess situations objectively, thereby failing further to grasp why they have been rebuffed and misunderstood:

Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering; he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him.

They may find hidden and deprecatory meanings in the incidental behavior of others …

There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him …

… becoming convinced of other’s malicious motives, claims upon them, and attempts to undo them

This is—this is a mindset. This is how Donald thinks. And it’s funny, but it’s also really troubling.

That’s exactly how I feel about reading Millon. The Times’ devastating analysis of Trump’s mental ticks falls into place. The monster has a name. Diagnosis—even unofficial diagnosis—is comforting. And once you know what’s wrong, you can start to treat the problem.

Except you can’t treat it, not in this case. For one thing, there is no accepted treatment for narcissistic personality disorder. But in a larger sense, it turns out that Trump’s mental health is not the thing most in need of treatment.

* * *

Back in June, writer Maggie Koerth-Baker adjudicated for FiveThirtyEight the question of whether it was appropriate to diagnose a presidential candidate with a mental illness. She wrote:

The basis of diagnosing a mental health disorder is that the person feels disordered. Human behavior and personality exist on a spectrum and the thing that makes the difference between, say, somebody who is a bit scatterbrained and somebody with ADHD is that the latter is debilitated by the symptoms they experience and has trouble functioning in society. And it’s hard to make a case for that being true of somebody successfully running for president of the United States. “Whether you like him or not, he seems to function,” [Northwestern University psychologist Dan] McAdam said.

Whether or not you believe a person must feel disordered to receive treatment for a mental illness (I don’t), whether or not Donald Trump actually has narcissistic personality disorder (who knows), there is one important truth in this passage: Donald Trump certainly seems to function.

And not only function. He excels. We can theorize all we want about the disorders that allow him to act in ways both divorced from reality and indifferent to the lives and rights of other human beings. But Trump is not encumbered by his pathological behavior. In fact he is often celebrated for it. You could argue that his pathologies helped him win one of our two major parties’ nominations for president.

This says more about us than it does about Trump and any mental disorder he might have.

Psychologist Nigel Barber, assessing Trump’s mental health in Psychology Today, offered a telling caveat: “Some of the DSM criteria are less relevant to Trump given his birth to money and life as a plutocrat that guarantee contact with high-status persons and being fawned over as a VIP.” Barber still diagnosed Trump with narcissistic personality disorder, while allowing that the privilege into which Trump was born may exempt him from some of the diagnostic conventions of the mental health world.

I’d go further than Barber: I think the privilege into which Trump was born has exempted him from the operating rules of civilized society. Whether he’s bragging about sexual assault, denying reality during the debates, or promising to reject the democratic process itself if it does not happen to favor him, the thread that connects them all is privilege. The impunity he has enjoyed is chilling, and so is his blithe certainty that it will always be there for him. The privilege he derives from his gender and his fame and his father and his class and his race seems to have granted him a lifetime pass. The result of such a life is a man whom we cannot help but pathologize.

But Trump’s own pathologies are nothing next to the pathologies of a society that allowed him to reach the doorstep of the highest office in the land, to live on this earth for 70 years and never once be held accountable for his failings with other people. A society that lets a man like this live and prosper is sick.

Trump Says Misogynistic Things All the Time. The Lewd Video Is Still Sickening.

Susan Matthews — Fri, 07 Oct 2016 22:07:26 GMT

I try to avoid listening to Donald Trump whenever possible, but it’s been hard since he’s become a major party nominee for president. The man says misogynistic things quite regularly, and it is uncomfortable and disturbing to witness.

So when the Washington Post published a video Friday afternoon in which, they claimed, Trump was caught having “extremely lewd” conversations about women, I almost didn’t watch it. More of the same, right? We already know Trump is a misogynist.

But I watched the tape. And even though I knew this about Trump, I feel sicker after seeing it than I can remember feeling in a while. It’s not just the vulgarity of the comments, though they’re plenty vulgar.

This video reveals the private Donald Trump to the public. As if public Donald Trump wasn’t bad enough, this video reminds us that there’s an aspect of the man that’s even worse than what he shows to the public. You see it in the transformation Trump and his conversation partner Billy Bush undergo when they exit the bus and move from (what they assumed was) a private sphere into a public one. They are still committing acts of sexual harassment and abusing their power when they ask the actress who greets them to give each of them a hug. But they’re buttoning up—they know the tone of the conversation they had on the bus cannot be repeated in anything close to a public sphere.

It’s not the comments that are so shocking. As graphic and violent as the contents of the video are, most women have heard worse. What’s shocking is that I thought I had a handle on the extent of the misogyny of the man. I thought that his apparent lack of filter meant that the casual misogyny he constantly displays was as bad as it gets.

It’s not. In this video, Trump is joking about sexual assault. That is apparently what he does in private. And this is just one time, when his mic has happened to be on.

In the video Trump tells Bush: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” He adds that stars of his magnitude can “Grab [women] by the pussy. You can do anything.” This chimes with Jill Harth’s allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in 1993. In July, she told the Guardian that Trump groped her. She says he “pushed me up against the wall, and had his hands all over me and tried to get up my dress.”

The new video provides direct proof that Donald Trump is even worse than he typically reveals himself to be, and that was already pretty bad. Disturbingly, it means that Trump realizes there is some sexism that should be hidden, so the things he’s said in public have passed through his personal filter of what’s OK.

That's terrifying.

We Don’t Know Whether Roller Coasters Cure Kidney Stones

Susan Matthews — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 18:46:52 GMT

There was big news in the field of kidney stone research last week, as anyone who scans the internet would know. “Research Finds Thrilling Cure for Kidney Stones: Roller Coasters,” declared NBC News. “How a Roller Coaster Can Help You Pass a Kidney Stone,” explained Gizmodo. “Little Kidney Stone? Ride a Roller Coaster, Says Study,” reported CNN. “Passing a Kidney Stone Can Be a Real Roller Coaster Ride,” wrote Slate’s own Phil Plait. At last check, there were 149,000 results in Google News.

This was indisputably fun science. Researchers made a 3-D–printed model of a kidney, placed real kidney stones inside, and took the contraption on a roller coaster 20 times to see whether the jostling of the ride helped pass the stones. The conceit is immediately understandable; it’s basically a blue-ribbon science fair project. A hypothesis is offered by professional scientists, evidence is marshaled to support said hypothesis, and the whole thing is written up in a peer-reviewed journal. The solution seems low-cost and fun. More than fun, this is relatable science: Roger Bacon rides the Cyclone.

That it went viral was entirely inevitable. It was also unfortunate.

After watching the news reports on this study balloon, I couldn’t shake the thought that the only good response to a study like this is not to report on it at all. (And yet here we are.) That’s because, beneath all its quirkiness and all that delightful banter about urine, it is not a paper that is ready for prime time. This is a bit of niche research, an exceedingly preliminary finding that is simply one research team saying: Hey, this might be a thing. Could we please look at these nebulous conclusions some more to see if they are real? But inevitably, in the passage from specialized research investigation into wacky-science viral glurge, that cautious incrementalism had become a “thrilling cure.”

This happens even in spite of carefully constructed sentences to couch the conclusions in the tentative language of what “might” be true and what “could” work. But when that kind of language is warranted for even full-blown clinical trials, all the mights and coulds in the world can’t effectively indicate to readers that this research is the babiest of baby steps.

The fact is it’s downright impossible to use the results in this study to reach any kind of conclusion about whether roller coasters in general help people in general pass kidney stones.

The author of the paper was David Wartinger, an osteopathic urologist and professor emeritus at Michigan State’s College of Osteopathic Medicine. He seems fully aware that there is a lot of implicit delight to be found in the tale of a scientist who repeatedly fills a fake kidney up with pee and takes it on a roller coaster in an attempt to help patients. The study even offers the winsome detail that researchers wanted to try the experiment with pig or cow kidneys but decided against it “owing to ambient temperature and the inappropriate display of such material in a family-friendly amusement park.”

I mean, this is a scientist with a sense of humor. We love a scientist with a sense of humor. He’s also a doctor who listens to his patients. We love a doctor who listens to his patients. Here’s how the study came to be: The researchers had heard a number of anecdotes about people who thought that going on a roller coaster had helped them pass a stone. One guy in particular told them that three rides on a specific coaster, Walt Disney World’s Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, had resulted in three passages of three stones. So they scanned the shape and size of his kidney, 3-D–printed a silicone replica, and took it to Disney World to ride that roller coaster. The model was filled with the kidney stones the patient had actually passed. When the researchers sat in the front of the roller coaster; the stones passed four out of 24 times (a pass rate of 17 percent). When they sat in the back of the coaster, they passed 23 out of 36 times (pass rate of 64 percent).

If anything, this was worse than what the guy had experienced himself in real life (remember, he went on the ride three times and passed a stone each time—100 percent pass rate). This may indicate problems with the model—it was 3-D printed out of silicone, not kidney, for example.

For a control, they compared their roller coaster rides with their trips on “the most benign theme park ride we could find” at Disney World, the Railroad. (No stones were passed on the this “ride.”) That’s fair if you’re asking whether a roller coaster is more effective than other amusement park rides at helping you pass a kidney stone.

But what we really need to know is whether riding a roller coaster helps you pass a kidney stone more reliably than just, say, existing in the world. To that end, the study includes one stat: “A renal calculus greater than 6 mm in diameter has about a 1 percent chance of spontaneous passage without intervention.”

That sounds pretty small! The stones they tested passed way more than 1 percent of the time! Of course, the stones they tested were also much smaller than 6 millimeters in diameter (the study gives their size only in cubic millimeters—annoying, certainly; willfully misleading, perhaps—but the biggest stone they tested had a diameter of 4.5 millimeters). And the research from which they pulled their 1 percent chance stat has plenty of other, more helpful numbers that they failed to include: Of patients studied with kidney stones, 83 percent of them spontaneously passed their stones without any medical intervention. For patients who had stones smaller than 2 millimeters, the average time it took for the stones to spontaneously pass was just 8.2 days. Furthermore, “for 95% of stones to pass it took 31 days for those 2 mm, or less, 40 days for those 2 to 4 mm, and 39 days for those 4 to 6 mm.” That study concluded that half of stones bigger than 5 millimeters might require an intervention. (Five millimeters is sort of the turning point for when stones become a problem—which is actually exactly why we want to find reliable ways to help people reliably pass smaller stones.)

All in all, this research shows how one man’s stones in one man’s “kidney” (made out of silicone) reacted to a ride on one roller coaster. But there are a lot of other factors involved in why someone does or doesn’t pass kidney stones. “Size alone doesn’t explain it,” said Ivan Porter II, a nephrologist at the Mayo Clinic. Some people will pass stones naturally while others never will. Movement alone doesn’t explain it, either. “We already have anecdotal evidence that there are certain things that move people around that help,” said Porter. “But in some people it has zero effect.” It might have something to do with the various shapes of people’s kidneys, or the shapes of the stones they develop, or something about their urine (and in this model, they mixed one man’s kidney shape with another man’s urine—the researcher donated to this cause). We already knew the subject of the model was predisposed to passing these exact kidney stones on this exact roller coaster. The experiment was just a way of showing that there was perhaps something to this idea, and getting it on the books in the peer-reviewed literature.

Wartinger explained to me that he actually conducted the study in 2008; he just didn’t get around to publishing it until now. “I put the study in my desk drawer for quite a while,” he said. “It was basically shame that made me write it up.”

It was probably more than shame alone that propelled him, though: If he were going to go on to study this effect in actual humans, he’d need to show off the preliminary reasons for his hunch. “This is the validation model for getting the attention to do the human trial,” he said.

Wartinger is pretty responsible about all of this. When we spoke, he admitted it might sound as if he was overreaching, but he added that, since 2008, he’s taken his fake kidney on roller coasters another couple hundred times and the effect has still stood up. He knew the research wasn’t strong enough to start recommending coaster rides in his practice, though he does recommend them to his friends. “What I would tell my friends is a different standard than what I can recommend for patients,” he said.

If the method does work, that’s very cool, because it shows that the conversations doctors have with their patients are rewarding, as Plait wrote. Plus, it could be a low-cost fix to an expensive problem, one that shows that there are certain ways that humans can retain control over their own health.

But what if it doesn’t?

The reason the roller coaster study has gotten all this attention isn’t because this is clear science backing up a novel new treatment. “To try to think that you could apply this to the general population would be an absolute disaster,” said Porter. The reason it’s gotten so much attention is that people like roller coasters and oddball eureka moments.

And in fact, there’s nothing really wrong with this study. It’s a little thin, and the 6 mm/1 percent stat is on the verge of being deceptive, but none of the problems is significant enough to warrant a debunking. There’s nothing really to debunk. There’s also nothing really to affirm. It took me the better part of 1,500 words to explain exactly what this experiment shows. This is a classic case of “Huh! That might be a thing. Let’s test it a lot more.” Which is exactly what Wartinger was trying to do when he published the study in the first place. He and his researchers had found a weird thing that they wanted to study more rigorously so that eventually they might know how to get people of all types to be able to pass kidney stones of small to medium sizes, before they become a problem that requires medical intervention. Noble goal!

So where did NBC, or anyone else, get the idea that Wartinger had found a “Thrilling Cure”? If you’re looking for culprits, you could begin with the press release blasted out by Michigan State. “GOT KIDNEY STONES?” read the headline, “RIDE A ROLLER COASTER.” Wartinger said he expected the attention, but he sounded a little ashamed of it. “I’ve tried not to look at the online articles,” he said. “Some of them are clearly just meant to fill space and catch people’s attention.

“I wish it was a little bit less quirky and took it a little more seriously,” he added. “It’s difficult to get people to read more than a few paragraphs or get past the byline.”

Much has been said about the bad incentives that prevail in both the scientific literature and the science media. Everyone is encouraged to do some degree of violence to the very science they’re tasked with illuminating. Scientists structure their research in order to get the attention they need to publish papers, get tenure, and continue to do their work. University flacks hype the scientists’ findings in order to win them that attention. Journalists have to simplify and popularize even further in order for people to pay any attention at all. Of course you’re more likely to read “Passing a Kidney Stone Can Be a Real Roller Coaster Ride” than “Validation of a Functional Pyelocalyceal Renal Model for the Evaluation of Renal Calculi Passage While Riding a Roller Coaster.” A more conservative “Scientists Find Some Evidence to Support the Vague Notion That Roller Coasters May Possibly, in Some As Yet Ineffable Way, Help Certain People Pass Certain-Size Kidney Stones” would certainly fall somewhere in the middle. But the internet does not reward cautious explanation of how science plods along in the murky pursuit of truth—it feasts on share-worthy exclamations that presume anything published in the literature is fact.

In reality, science is a very slow process. Researchers need to investigate their ideas incrementally. They need to show their work and make the case for funding so that the next study might be a little more rigorous. As science journalists, we need to be more skeptical of single studies and less quick to tell ourselves that adding a might exonerates us of any charges of overhyping. What we chose to cover matters as much as how we cover it. We should take a cue from the kidneys and let the small stuff pass.

Cereal Is the Most Normal Thing You Can Eat. But Do You Eat It Correctly?

Susan Matthews — Mon, 03 Oct 2016 15:00:49 GMT

If it is a normal morning, I probably had cereal for breakfast. That’s been true my entire life. Growing up with two working parents, cereal was standard on school days because it was easy. We could make it ourselves, and there was no risk of accidentally leaving the toaster or kettle on. On snow days, my mom, a teacher, would stay home and cook up a big pot of Cream of Wheat; and after Easter, breakfast was leftover brightly dyed hard-boiled eggs. But these were special occasions. On every other normal (nonweekend) morning, it was cereal.

As an adult, I still eat cereal in the mornings before work, in my bathrobe while my hair is drying as I skim the news and pack myself something for lunch. If that scene sounds super normal, you are not paying attention to how I am eating the cereal. My way is the correct way, yet I have observed others acting in error. But don’t worry, we’ll make it normal soon enough.

Here’s what I do: I start with a very small pour of cereal. Then I add a large quantity of milk. Certainly too much milk for said amount of cereal. The cereal floats up, I eat it, and then I refill the bowl with equally small portions of cereal, about four to seven times, depending on how hungry I am. And then I drink the milk.

If I am adding strawberries or blueberries to my cereal (definite yes, if they’re available), those go in first, at the bottom, because I try to add the proper amount for the entire cereal-eating experience, not just the initial bowl. Strawberries and blueberries don’t get soggy. They can hang out in the milk for the duration.

Most people think “crispy” is the ideal texture for cereal. I know because I surveyed my colleagues, and 73.8 percent of them agreed. (Nineteen percent admitted they eat too fast for it to matter, and 7.1 percent apparently prefer cereal soggy. Those people are not normal!) Yet the current normal way to eat cereal—throw a bunch in a bowl and eat your way through—means most people eat most cereal in suboptimal form, the later bites becoming soggier with each passing minute. We should not accept this way of life. It is obvious that we must normalize the pour-in-small-amounts method.

Another good thing about this method is that it makes drinking the milk at the end of the bowl more pleasant. That’s because the milk is way more drinkable and less likely to contain chunks of soggy cereal. To answer an obvious question, drinking the milk at the end is, in fact, normal—60.5 percent of my colleagues agree. When consumed correctly, cereal makes milk better. As one astute colleague put it when qualifying why Cinnamon Toast Crunch was his favorite kind of cereal: “First you enjoy the cereal, then you enjoy the cinnamon-flavored milk.” Two others said they only drink the milk when it’s chocolate-y. And if you follow my strategy, you end up with perfectly flavored cereal milk—not too intense, but definitely yummier than normal milk.

It’s a win-win. Also, this method really helps to limit the amount of soggy cereal that gets left in the bowl, which makes the dish easier to wash in the end. Making the dish easier to wash could actually help staunch cereal’s decline (sales have dipped by about 30 percent in the past 15 years). Apparently, according to one survey, almost 40 percent of millennials complain that cereal is not convenient because it still leaves behind a dish to clean. This is a very #millennial complaint and one that Slate staffers clearly don’t share—81.4 percent thought cereal was a low-key breakfast option, with 25.6 percent naming it THE most low-key breakfast food you can eat. Half of my survey respondents identified as millennials, and I suppose it’s possible that all 18.6 percent of people who don’t think cereal is low-key are millennials, but frankly, I didn’t bother to check. That’s because it’s normal to resent cleaning dishes at any age.

Read more from Normal, Slate's pop-up blog about how you're supposed to do it.

Everyone Says Trump Is 6-Foot-2. So Why Does Trump’s Doctor Say He’s 6-Foot-3? A Theory.

Susan Matthews — Thu, 15 Sep 2016 18:51:00 GMT

Donald Trump went on quacky Dr. Oz's TV show Thursday to talk about his health, and somehow, the weirdest number to come up had nothing to do with his testosterone (though, yes, that too was discussed).

Instead, it was Trump’s claim, through his doctor’s letter, that he is 6-foot-3.

Most everyone else puts him at 6-foot-2. That’s what Google says. That’s what Donald Trump: His Worth, Work, and World, by the staff of Forbes, says. That’s what the probably reliable CelebsMemoir.com says. In fairness, Bing.com suggests 6-foot-3, and Trump himself doth protest that media outlets don’t give him the inch. But look at that photo up there of Trump next to Jeb Bush. Jeb is 6-foot-3. Donald is … not.

Why does this matter? My colleague Jeremy Samuel Faust suggested a theory to me. It has to do with the other disputed number floating around prior to the show’s airing: his weight, which the doctor’s note put at 236 pounds, though some reports suggested he's 267 pounds. At 6-foot-3, 236 pounds, his body mass index is a convenient 29.5—overweight but just a biscuit shy of obese (BMI of 30). At 6-foot-2, 236 pounds, he’s at 30.3—obese. BMI is a worthless measure of physical health, but maybe in this case it tells us a little something about a man's self-regard. Is it possible that Trump’s doctor added the extra inch so that his patient, who is not exactly lacking in vanity, would not be “officially” obese? Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

Medical Records Won’t Tell Us Anything Useful About the Candidates’ Health

Susan Matthews — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 20:06:54 GMT

Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are two of the oldest and most despised presidential aspirants in American history. These twin facts, dropped into the ghoulish antagonism of an election’s stretch run, have mixed together to produce a national conversation that’s essentially about whether either of the candidates is going to die anytime soon.

Somewhere in all the partisan anger and lurid conspiracy theorizing surrounding that question is a legitimate worry: As a nation, we are considering two presidential candidates who are 68 and 70 years old for an office that requires at least four years—and possibly eight—of grueling work. Regardless of whom you support, it would be nice to know that the president will survive his or her tenure in office.

Which is why the video of Clinton appearing to wobble as she exited the 9/11 memorial ceremony on Sunday afternoon was a jarring moment. It at once frightened the worriers and fed the ghouls, and it redoubled calls, even from a surprisingly restrained Trump, for more disclosure about each candidate’s health. But there is no medical record or doctor’s note of any kind whose release would defuse the issue. These documents are opaque even to other doctors, and it’s hard to imagine Clinton’s nastiest foes being satisfied by anything short of a handwritten note from God himself, co-signed by Louis Pasteur and Hippocrates. Everything in this election has been politicized. Why not the candidates’ white blood cell counts, too?

Clinton’s campaign released a statement on Sunday explaining that she had been diagnosed with walking pneumonia on Friday afternoon and had become dehydrated at the 9/11 event. While some people paired this with her coughing fit the previous weekend as indication that it actually is time to worry about Clinton’s health, the diagnosis likely explains both incidents. Her campaign staff has also been sick—pneumonia is an infection that is easily spread among people.

Unsurprisingly, the incident has renewed calls for Clinton to be more upfront about her health, led by Trump himself, as he promised to release “very specific numbers” from his own medical tests.

Trump can release these numbers if he wants to. But they won’t tell us much about how his body would respond if pneumonia broke out at his campaign headquarters. Nor does the fact that Clinton came down with the disease tell us much about her health overall, about her health over the next several years if she serves as president, or even about her life expectancy.

A medical record is not as useful as we might like it to be. For one thing, it’s not a singular document with a discoverable reveal, like a tax return. As Margot Sanger-Katz pointed out in the New York Times late last week, medical records are extremely hard to gather and do not offer clear takeaways. There will be years of information spread across different doctors’ offices that will be incomprehensible to many—even doctors. Beyond the logistical challenges of gathering a complete set, Sanger-Katz writes:

Good luck reading those records when you get them: pages of lab readings, check-box answers, billing codes and illegible handwriting. Few patients can understand the records, and neither can many physicians. That’s why, even in the most wired of medical offices, receptionists still hand you a clipboard and ask you to write your medical history before the doctor will see you.

Yes, your own recounting of your medical history is just as valuable to your doctor in getting an indication of your current state of health as any independent assessment of medical records. Maybe more so. That’s in part because health is unpredictable—a bout of pneumonia could happen to anyone. Cancer can strike at random. Medical records won’t solve that. And yet we’re still clamoring for the paperwork.

There’s hope that a release of medical records would quiet the unfounded reports that either candidate is hiding a major medical scandal. In a smart piece in Politico several weeks back, Dan Diamond argued that voters have the right to know as much as they can about the candidates, and having an independent medical team review each could offer an unbiased assessment.

The idea itself is fine (if difficult to enforce, given privacy rights around medical information). But there’s no real reason to believe it will depoliticize the issue. It would just shift the locus of criticism. Were the doctors truly independent? Was all information released to the public?

Trump and Clinton have lived in the public eye for so long it’s unlikely that either has experienced an undisclosed major health issue—one that would hinder his or her ability to serve as president. It’s equally unlikely that submitting to an independent physician’s assessment or releasing a data dump of medical records or test results would quell the politicized conversation about how fit they are to serve.

The life expectancy calculator offered by the Social Security Administration gives Trump another 15.2 years to live, while Clinton has 18.4 years. This is because Clinton is both a little younger and is female (the calculator takes only age and gender into account). But even a more nuanced prediction of each candidate’s likelihood of getting different diseases would not really be helpful in assessing his or her fitness to serve. How would voters weigh a 23 percent chance of developing cancer against a 16 percent chance of, say, Alzheimer’s?

They would probably still vote for the candidate whose positions they actually agree with. While further public assessment might provide a fuller picture of either candidate’s risk profile, all the knowledge in the world can’t yield a promise of good health going forward—the only thing that might have a hope of stopping the whisper campaigns.

Just look at what’s happening today. Though the conspiracy theory around Clinton is related to a supposed neurological condition, something completely unrelated to pneumonia, the exponents of that theory are jumping on this minor illness as evidence supporting their crusade. And if they’re not doing that, they’re calling the pneumonia diagnosis a media hoax. Sometimes they’re doing both things at once. “Pneumonia, incidentally, is a complication of Parkinson’s disease,” one of the paranoiacs wrote, under the headline “Media Hoax! Sick Hillary Clinton Does Not Have Pneumonia.” This is about politics, not wellness.

SpaceX Rocket Explodes During Test-Fire, No Casualties Reported

Susan Matthews — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 15:21:14 GMT

A SpaceX Falcon 9 exploded during a customary test-fire on Thursday morning at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The large blast, subsequently followed by smaller explosions over several minutes, was caught on radar and shook buildings several miles away, according to the Associated Press. The rocket was unmanned at the time of the explosion, and initial reports suggest there were no casualties, authorities at Cape Canveral told the Verge. It is standard protocol to clear the launch pad in advance of such tests.

Thursday morning’s test was part of a standard preparation for the anticipated Saturday launch of a satellite, the Amos 6, into orbit. SpaceX released a statement confirming that the rocket was carrying its payload, meaning that the Amos 6 was on board.

This is not the first time one of Elon Musk’s rockets has exploded—in June 2015, another Falcon 9 rocket exploded after takeoff due to a failed strut in the ship, and in January, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded while attempting a sea-pad landing. In both cases, the rockets were unmanned and there were no casualties. Following the 2015 explosion, SpaceX halted launches for six months but has seen more success recently—in April they finally landed a Falcon 9 rocket after four failed attempts.

The Brevard County Emergency Management Office announced that there was no threat to the general public. Initial reports suggest the area is being evacuated due to “toxic air.” Inhaling remnants from any type of explosion can be damaging, and officials were monitoring the air for the presence of toxic fumes, according to the AP.

Should We Feel Bad for Ryan Lochte?

Christina Cauterucci — Fri, 19 Aug 2016 22:04:21 GMT

Resolved: We should feel bad for Ryan Lochte.

Arguing the affirmative is Susan Matthews. Arguing the negative is Christina Cauterucci.

Affirmative: Ryan Lochte is not a sympathetic character. He’s a privileged white dude who has made millions off of being an attractive swimmer. That alone means it’s hard to feel bad for him. We didn’t even really feel bad for Lochte when we learned he and his fellow swimmers were robbed at gunpoint. That would happen to Ryan Lochte, famed Olympic oaf, we thought. But, hey, he was fine. And then we realized he wasn’t actually mugged but in fact had been drunk and vandalized a gas station and was held accountable for his misguided actions by security guards at said gas station. And then he had the gall to go on television and lie about what had happened. What a jerk!

All that said, I do feel bad for Ryan Lochte. Because I think that Ryan Lochte actually does believe that something bad happened to him, and I don’t think he realized he was lying. Also, it is possible for someone to be a jerk and for said jerk to experience something traumatic. Lochte did not make up an elaborate lie and sell it to the press in an evil plan to paint Rio de Janeiro as a dangerous city. He told his mom that something scary happened to him, which is what he believed. He exaggerated parts of the story, it seems, but mostly he just interpreted something that happened to him incorrectly.

What did Ryan Lochte lie about, exactly? “The guy pulled out his gun,” he told Billy Bush in his first interview about the incident, “he cocked it, put it my forehead, and said ‘get down.’ ” The part about the guy putting a gun to his forehead was a cinematic exaggeration that he copped to in a later interview, with Matt Lauer. His cab had not been pulled over, as he admitted to Lauer, and he left out that the incident had been provoked by the fact that he and his teammates had damaged private property. But on the central question of what happened early Sunday morning in Rio, Lochte told something very close to the truth. An armed person purporting to be acting in an official capacity waved around a gun and demanded money. Lochte thought he was being mugged. The armed person thought he was doing what he needed to do to get payment for the swimmers’ bad behavior.

“It is traumatic to be out late with your friend in a foreign country—with a language barrier—and have a stranger point a gun at you and demand money to let you leave,” Lochte said in a quasi-apologetic statement he almost certainly did not write himself. This is a poorly constructed sentence, because it makes it incredibly easy to mock Lochte for saying partying with his friends had been “traumatic.” But it is traumatic to have a stranger point a gun at you and ask you for money in a language you can’t understand. That’s the case even if Lochte did something dumb and destructive, and even if he deserved to be fined for it.

Particularly egregious is the notion that we can use the gas station surveillance footage that shows him joking with his friends to argue Lochte wasn’t actually upset. People respond differently to trauma, and trauma often manifests in ways that don’t match our expectations. It’s bad form to accuse Lochte of being a faker because he doesn’t look like what we think a traumatized person should look like. People should not be expected to perform their trauma.

Negative: I can’t believe we’re actually having a debate about this. No, we should not feel bad for Ryan Lochte. This is a 32-year-old multimillionaire superstar who allegedly damaged private property in a foreign country, tried to get away without being held accountable for it, then lied to the world for days in an effort to shift the blame from himself to residents of a country battling a reputation for poverty and crime. In a widely publicized NBC interview days after the fact, he feigned incredulity that anyone could possibly think he wasn’t telling the whole truth, then sat smugly by while everyone from the Rio 2016 spokesman to his own father defended him. Every turn of this story supports the conclusion that Lochte doesn’t have the decency to admit to any damage he causes. Instead, he’ll take exactly as much leeway as his privilege affords him, even when those without his fame, money, and U.S. passport suffer for it.

In his apology, Lochte claims it was “traumatic” for him to be out late in a foreign country with someone pointing a gun at him and demanding money. He claims that he wasn’t “careful and candid” enough in his description of what happened Sunday night. This is patently false. Lochte’s account wasn’t too hasty or too stilted—it was untrue. He said he was robbed; he wasn’t. His accounts of the night shifted as he spoke to the Brazilian police and the media, and it’s clear that much of what he said in various accounts was false. But most importantly, the very premise of his story was a lie. He and/or his friends destroyed property at a gas station. Employees demanded remuneration. This is exactly what happens in malls and fancy boutiques all across the U.S.: You break it, you buy it. Security guards in the U.S. have guns, too, and they sure as hell use them (on black people, at least) when would-be criminals try to get away. Language barrier or not, if my American friends and I had just kicked down the door of a Brazilian gas station and damaged a mirror, I would understand why employees were yelling at me. I would know it was not a robbery but a warranted demand that I pay for the stuff I broke.

As for Lochte’s alleged traumatization, if he and his buddies hadn’t tried to get away without paying for the damage they caused—or if they, you know, hadn’t destroyed property in the first place and allegedly peed on the gas station and physically fought gas station employees—the situation would not have escalated. If you’re scared of being out late in a foreign country, don’t stay out late in a foreign country. If you’re nervous a language barrier might impede your ability to communicate with someone accusing you of destroying property, don’t destroy property in a place where you don’t speak the language.

If Lochte had lied about some stupid, destructive thing he did during an Olympic stint in London or Vancouver or L.A., I might be more inclined to let it go without writing a point-counterpoint about it, if not afford him any outright pity. But this was Rio de Janeiro. The narrative leading up to the 2016 Olympic Games has focused in large part on Brazil’s efforts to get its act together, along with criticisms of the corruption of its government, its treatment of people living in poverty, and its response to Zika. It’s actively fighting a reputation for widespread violent crime. Lochte perpetuated a narrative of Rio as a poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, justice hellhole to cover his own sorry, entitled ass. So no, we should not feel bad for him.

Affirmative: It is unfortunate that this happened and that it has received such outsized media attention. But that’s not Lochte’s fault—he didn’t even try to bring this case to the police or the media himself (it was his mother who retold her son’s story to the press, prompting the police investigation and the spiral of media attention). Lochte misinterpreted something that happened to him, and then got caught. This is why any reporting on crime should be skeptical until the incident has been fully assessed. Now it has, and the record has been corrected. As a result, I learned that Brazilian law allows people to make donations to avoid criminal prosecution for minor offenses. (Hey, maybe there’s something to corrupt Brazilian governance.) I don’t think we need to set up a collection box for Lochte. But he made an honest mistake, and one that was pretty quickly corrected.

This Olympics has not been kind to him. He has the distinction of being famous for being “dumb.” This incident certainly doesn’t help matters (and he is definitely bad at interviews). But honestly, all of the time spent decrying Lochte’s lack of intelligence is a bit embarrassing. Not everyone is smart, just as not everyone can swim 200 meters in less than 2 minutes. I am not as good at anything as Ryan Lochte is at swimming, and his commitment to his sport requires a certain type of mental stamina that is worth appreciating, even if it is not the mental fortitude we’re used to recognizing.

Of course, the fact Lochte is a good swimmer doesn’t mean he should be excused from any sort of bad behavior. He probably deserves to lose his various endorsement deals, though I would argue that’s more because of his drunken misbehavior than his misinterpretation of the “mugging.” But for the last week, Lochte has been treated as either the village idiot or a symbol of white privilege who explains everything that is wrong with our society. His crimes don’t warrant either (and the first is quite frankly a bit offensive).

Negative: I agree that talk of his stupidity has been overblown, though I do think his general sense of oblivion is one reason why no one is saying Lochte is the mastermind of an evil plan. (I doubt he has the capacity to be the mastermind of so much as a trip to the grocery store.) But his decision to leave out a really important part of the story of his so-called mugging—the fact that it occurred immediately following an act of significant vandalism and alleged mass urination—in his statements to police, Olympic officials, his family, and NBC betrays the fact that he was actively trying to cover for himself. He didn’t have to give a woe-is-me interview on NBC. He didn’t have to embellish his made-up version of the story with claims he had a gun to his forehead. He could have kept quiet about the whole thing and dealt with it on his own instead of blabbing to his mom, then the world, and blaming Rio’s crime rate for the fallout of his own aggro show of entitlement.

He did not believe he was mugged. He could not have believed he was mugged! To believe a group of guys could trash a gas station bathroom and then completely coincidentally be mugged by angry gas station employees and security guards—who, I imagine, were probably physically indicating the damage done to get past the alleged language barrier—would require a level of stupidity Ryan Lochte couldn’t hope to muster.

To make matters even worse, for all the talk of his oafishness, Lochte should have known better. He’s older than all the other swimmers involved in the incident, more than a decade older than two of them. As one of the two stars of the U.S. team, he should have been setting an example for them. Instead, the Rio police chief noted, Lochte posed a particular “very angry” threat to the gas station attendants when they confronted him. Then, Lochte conveniently left the country while his teammates took the heat. This is not the behavior of a man who mistakes the logical consequences of an act of vandalism for a senseless mugging.

Affirmative: There’s no doubt Lochte’s behavior at the gas station was immature and embarrassing for the U.S. That still doesn’t mean he deserves what happened to him next, which again, sounds like a jarring experience that anyone would come away from shaken and upset. It is possible for bad things to happen to jerks. Ryan Lochte is a jerk, and a bad thing happened to him. As his spokesperson said, we’ve spent enough time on this. I’m looking forward to not thinking about Ryan Lochte for at least four years, if ever again.

Negative: I think I’ve made my case for why Ryan Lochte did wrong by willfully obscuring the events that led to security guards relieving him and his friends of a whopping $50. But to get back to the original question, there’s one more reason why we shouldn’t feel bad for him: He doesn’t need our pity. He’s a rich white guy home safe in America with his Olympic medals and endorsement deals. Who should we feel bad for instead? The gas station employees, who had to deal with a bunch of drunk American jerks breaking things, peeing on their place of employment, then getting aggressive when held to account. Lochte’s mom, who set this whole thing off when she repeated Lochte’s story of being robbed to the press and probably feels like a schmuck now. The other Olympic athletes, whose events and accomplishments have been overshadowed by Lochte’s nonsense. The people of Rio, whose city was defamed by a little shit from the States who’s used to getting a free ride through life. And, most importantly, the victims of actual Rio-based crimes for whom justice has no doubt been delayed or diverted by a police force embroiled in Lochte’s lie.

Are Bridge Players Subconsciously Changing Their Game Strategy in Response to Trump?

Susan Matthews — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 13:33:00 GMT

Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency has made waves throughout much of society. Members of the Republican Party establishment probably engage in some strange form of cognitive dissonance just to get out of bed each morning. Much of the country has got to be willfully suppressing the fear that would decimate their mental health if they allowed it to take over. I can say that because I’m a science journalist and misinformed mental health diagnoses are my specialty.

But how are elite bridge players taking the news? Yes, elite bridge players. A team of social scientists decided to take on a completely irrelevant question that has no meaning for anyone (besides the authors’ own desire to get a paper published). They came up with some fascinating results that I am sharing with you because of my own vested interest in getting clicks.

The researchers assumed most bridge players are Democrats, which just sounds right. Then they set out to learn whether American bridge players subconsciously changed their strategy in response to Donald Trump’s unpopularity among Democrats. In order to find out, they assessed how many times bridge players utilized a contract move called “No Trump.” It doesn’t really make sense, but preliminary data suggest that more American bridge players used No Trump after the rise of the Donald.

The researchers used data from tournaments in 1999 and 2015, played by both Americans and Europeans. A statistical assessment of plays, which I don’t fully understand, showed that Americans played more No Trump contracts in 2015 compared with in 1999, particularly when researchers cherry-picked which data to analyze. This was not the case in Europe, which the authors say lends more credence to their theory. The p-value is less than .05, which is what I know makes something statistically significant, probably. Of course, there’s no actual reason this correlation means there’s any reason to assume causation. But personally, I’ve already bought into the idea.

Helpfully, the researchers went so far as to explain exactly why their shoddy work should stand even if it fails to show significant results when replicated, as is the scientific standard for confirming results:

To save everyone trouble, we will preregister now the following responses to any future failed replications: (1) The replication was unfaithful to our original study because of various details not mentioned in this publication because of lack of space; (2) The replication was successful in demonstrating a heretofore unhypothesized interaction with outdoor temperature, relationship status, parental socioeconomic status, or some other crucial variable not included in our original study; and (4) Had the replication used a large enough sample size, it would surely have been statistically significant.

In short, disbelief is not an option. The results are not made up, nor are they statistical flukes. You have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these studies are true.

For a look at the entire paper, which is, in fact, as much of a joke as this article, please see here. Shoutout to the footnotes.

Don’t Be Upset About Harambe

Susan Matthews — Tue, 31 May 2016 19:45:34 GMT

The Cincinnati Zoo’s decision to shoot a 17-year-old gorilla named Harambe to save a 4-year-old child who fell into the enclosure Saturday has generated lots of channels of outrage. Primatologists are debating just how agitated the gorilla looked (pretty agitated). People who have most likely never taken care of several small children at once are arguing about just how negligent the boy’s mother was (probably not negligent). And animal rights activists are surfacing in great numbers to demand justice for the gorilla.

Sure, the safety of the barricade should be investigated, and apparently the Cincinnati police are on the case. But a Change.org petition that wrongly blames parental neglect has more than 300,000 signatures, while a Justice for Harambe Facebook page has more than 100,000 likes. Another Change.org petition (also more than 100,000 signatures) proposes that we create “Harambe’s Law,” which would create “legal consequences when an endangered animal is harmed or killed due to the negligence of visitors.”

But let’s not pretend that what happened to Harambe somehow illuminates the broader threat to gorillas as a species. Perhaps we should be more willing to investigate what caused these apparently beloved animals to reach the point of critical endangerment in the first place.

Harambe was a western lowland gorilla, one of two subspecies of the western gorilla, which is on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s “Red List of Threatened Species” as critically endangered. The IUCN attributes the western gorilla’s listing there to the steep population decline (80 percent) that the species has seen over just three generations. The two main factors causing the decline: hunting and disease-induced mortality (namely, Ebola).

Yes, Harambe was part of the Gorilla Species Survival Plan, a group that aims to conserve and study captive gorillas. But the survival of this species in the long run depends not on any one individual, but rather on creating a healthy population that is able to reproduce at a sustainable rate and live in habitats that provide them with reliable food sources. We should look at Harambe’s death as an unfortunate consequence of what essentially amounts to a freak accident and invest the time and money being spent mourning him into doing things that actually matter for gorilla survival. Unfortunately, these things—preserving their habitats, stopping poaching, slowing climate change—are much more difficult and complex endeavors than advocating that child protective services investigate whether the 4-year-old’s parents acted negligently.

But if the online outrage so far is any indication—or, in case we’ve forgotten, the weeks of full-volume rebellion that followed the shooting of Cecil the lion last summer—we won’t. As human beings, we are primed to confront issues on the individual scale, not on the population scale. It’s comforting, because as individuals ourselves, it makes us feel like we matter. But it’s not how nature works. Nature is, by our standards, cruel in how little it cares about individuals. This is hard for us to grasp, so when we see something that our brains register as tragic, like the preventable death of one beloved gorilla, we freak out.

Gorillas are regularly sacrificed on the altar of human misdeed, but those deaths are vague and impersonal, involving long-standing custom and large-scale anthropogenic trends. They don’t get coverage on the local news. They seem inevitable and even natural in the way that the death of a single gorilla on constant public view does not. It is easier to be outraged when there appear to be discrete individuals to blame, and we are not among them.

Unfortunately, with respect to gorillas’ potential to survive in the wild one day, we are indeed the culprits. Even if we were able to rein in threats from hunting and Ebola, “under the most optimistic scenarios, population recovery would require on the order of 75 years (Walsh et al. 2003),” the IUCN notes. “Much sooner, perhaps 20 to 30 years into the future, habitat loss and degradation from agriculture, timber extraction, mining, and possibly climate change will become a major threat.”

We all hold collective responsibility for habitat destruction, for resource exploitation, for climate change. We all have created a world that satisfies our needs first and considers the needs of nature and animals second. It is not as visceral a consideration as if we ourselves were pulling the trigger, but it is our collective lifestyle that has endangered the gorilla and that has created a situation in which its recovery feels unlikely. But this is messy. This does not lend itself to scathing tweets about how a gorilla’s parenting skills may be better than some human’s. This forces us to take some of the blame.

Harambe’s name is derived from the Swahili word harambee—which translates roughly to “pull together.” A better way to honor this creature’s legacy would be to take the lesson of his name and do so for the rest of his kind—not to pass a toothless law in his honor to make us feel momentarily better.

Join the Slate Anti-Marathon

Susan Matthews — Tue, 31 May 2016 09:57:00 GMT

“I run because it’s cheaper than therapy.” I read this on the back of a T-shirt during a recent half-marathon, and although I was out of breath, I laughed out loud. (It was mile 10, and I was a little punch-drunk.)

I laughed because I could relate. I run because it makes me feel better, physically and psychologically. When I’m on a regular running schedule, I take better care of myself. I sleep better and feel less anxious. The problem is that I’m not always on a regular running schedule. If I don’t have a race looming, I let my running slip. Perhaps this makes me a bit pathetic—but it also makes me human. It’s also why I am training for my first-ever marathon.

This endeavor, in the words of my esteemed colleague Daniel Engber, is “imbecilic.” I politely disagree. He’s right that the length of a marathon is arbitrary. But I’m not running the marathon because I want to run 26.2 miles in one go. I’m doing it because the challenge will make me more committed to running than I would be otherwise.

I am very bad at working out regularly. I didn’t make it to the gym once in my college career, even though it was free and every machine had a private television. But when a friend suggested we run a half marathon, I found that having such a goal made me much more likely to stick to a running schedule.

So rather than knock the marathon as an arbitrary accomplishment, let’s use it as a model for other forms of self-improvement. Why should runners have all the fun (and all the pain)? That’s why Slate Plus is launching the Slate Anti-Marathon.

I’m inviting my fellow Slatesters, and Slate readers, to train alongside me—at anything you like. You’ll spend the same amount of time training each week as I spend training for the marathon, and the intensity of your training will build over several months. Ideally, you’ll have something you want to be able to do on marathon day (Nov. 6) that you can’t do today. You’ll have a goal and a deadline to motivate you, just like I do.

A few specifics: My training will take place over 22 weeks, starting on Sunday and culminating on Nov. 6. At the start, it will require around three hours a week, but by late summer we’re looking at at least four hours a week. Come fall, weekly training will be in the four-to-six-hour realm. (I’ll post my full training schedule on Sunday when we launch, but feel free to divide your time as you like during the week.)

Along the way, I’ll be chatting in Slate Plus with the Slatesters participating in the Anti-Marathon to check in on how it’s going for them. I’ll also be interviewing some experts about how goal-setting, habit-forming, and any other questions that come up as we go through this process together. And we’ll have a private Facebook group where we can all check in about our progress. (If you’re not a Slate Plus member, sign up now to participate!)

So pick a goal: Acquire a new language, learn to code, become a better cook, master swing dancing, finish a draft of that novel. We’ll talk about our progress together, share training tips, and keep one another motivated. And then we’ll cross the finish line together—on foot or otherwise.

This Week’s Worst Person in Westeros: Jon Snow

Jacob Brogan — Mon, 09 May 2016 12:09:00 GMT

After each episode in Game of Thrones Season 6, we’ll be adjudicating a crucial question: Who is currently the worst person in Westeros? This week, technology and culture writer Jacob Brogan is joined by Slate science editor Susan Matthews.

Brogan: Hi, Susan! Thanks for joining me this week to talk about “Oathbreaker,” which turned out to be the comedy episode of Game of Thrones. We had some A+ incest humor from the always-welcome Lady Olenna, and Tyrion showed up just long enough to propose what I think was a drinking game of thrones, for which we absolutely need to establish some rules. Plus, we saw Sam throwing up into a pot and witnessed Tormund deflating last week’s miraculous resurrection with a joke about how small Jon Snow’s dick is: “I saw your pecker. What kind of god would have a pecker that small?” I’d be irritated with that one, but Tormund’s nickname is Giantsbane, so I guess he’s seen bigger.

There was plenty of awful stuff going on, but for once it mostly felt incidental to the humor. So who’s the worst this week? The High Sparrow? Qyburn and his creepy child army? Perhaps even Jon Snow himself?

Matthews: You know, when we saw Sam come back finally, I was so relieved, because he normally provides such reliable comic relief. But then the entire episode really kept on surprising me when it came to Game of Thrones humor. In particular, Jaime and Cersei walking around with their one huge Frankenstein guardian is starting to feel quite laughable. He may be undead, but he is just one dude. Even Cersei admitted the limits to his power!

The army of child spies was an unexpected twist. Varys owned up to his personal strategy for getting what he wants (by making people happy), but giving kids candy to do his bidding is so gross and would feel pretty predatory if we weren’t constantly reminded of his eunuch status. There was an equally terrible vibe between Tommen and the High Sparrow—as soon as he asked to sit down, alarm bells started going off, but Tommen continues to be the most boring king/character possible.

I’m going to have to say that Jon Snow himself is my vote for the worst person in Westeros this week, though. I mean, he just got revived from being dead and the first thing he says is that he’s pissed about getting murdered? Um, that was just resolved for you, Jon. Embrace your great new haircut and perk up.

Brogan: This may be the ultimate joke that the episode played on us: We’ve been waiting for months to learn whether Jon had really kicked the bucket, and now that he’s back, I kind of wish that he was gone again. Varys and Qyburn give candy to orphans, and the High Sparrow is turning poor, stupid Tommen against his mother, but in this episode we had the distinct pleasure of watching Jon literally murder a child. Was Olly terrible? Yes, always. But watching Jon hang him was still a lot.

Now, the obvious rejoinder there is that Jon is just doing his duty as lord commander of the Night’s Watch. But as he storms off at the end of the episode he pronounces, “My watch has ended,” presumably indicating that death has freed him from his vows. How are we supposed to feel about that?

Matthews: The scene where Jon had to hang his murderers felt quite reminiscent of one of the earliest episodes where Ned Stark beheads someone himself because that’s what being an honorable leader requires. But Jon’s reaction to this duty felt very un–Ned Stark to me. Of course, in this same episode we’ve learned that Ned Stark might not be the great, honorable leader that we might have always assumed.

There was a moment where I wanted to give Jon the benefit of the doubt—in his mind, coming back from the dead has always been associated with becoming a white walker. So I guess I can see how maybe it’s a little scary. But then Alliser Thorne’s last words were about how he’s done his duty and now he will get to rest, while Jon is going to have to keep fighting everyone’s battles forever. First of all, I’m not even sure Jon is immortal? Melisandre almost certainly doesn’t know! And second, can we just have one episode of having our hero back before he spirals into an existential crisis about (possible) immortality?

Brogan: Jon’s had his low points and his bleak moments, but he’s also been the closest thing that we have to a clasically heroic fantasy protagonist on this show. That early beheading scene is a good reference point, not least of all because it involved Ned punishing a member of the Night’s Watch who’d fled the Wall after seeing the white walkers, I think. By contrast, Jon’s encountered plenty of monstrous foes and has carried on largely unperturbed. But he dies for a few days and suddenly he’s smoking clove cigarettes and reading Camus?

I suppose it’s reasonable that he would spiral a bit after coming back from the dead: That line about seeing nothing after being stabbed was a brutal indication of what he went through—and a nice rejoinder to those who thought he’d warged into his direwolf, Ghost. Still, I think the link back to the younger—and slightly debased—Ned that we get in this episode is important. It turns out that doing your duty doesn’t make you good. And reneging on your responsibilities may not be any better.

Perhaps death has revealed the true Jon Snow to us: He’s always been that sort of sexy, distant emo dude with good hair, but now we’re getting to know the real guy and it turns out that he kinda sucks. But, hey: butt shot!

Matthews: Right, the real Jon Snow might not be the hero we thought. But frankly who isn’t a sucker for twisted, tormented men? Jon Snow can be the worst person in Westeros, but honestly twisted Jon Snow may be even sexier.

Brogan: Old Jon Snow knew nothing. Existentialist Jon Snow knows nothingness. And we love to hate him for it.

Matthews: I’m still mad at him for his completely weird reaction to being resurrected. If being alive again isn’t going to make him even slightly happy, what will? Go away, Jon Snow.

Brogan: Jon Snow, you are the worst.

The Audio Book Club Meets Lab Girl

Susan Matthews — Fri, 06 May 2016 15:32:45 GMT

To listen to the Audio Book Club discussion of Lab Girl, click the arrow on the player below.

Subscribe in iTunes ∙ RSS feed ∙ Download ∙ Play in another tab
Slate Plus members: Get your ad-free podcast feed.

Slate critics Susan Matthews, Laura Miller, and Katy Waldman discuss Lab Girl, Hope Jahren’s joyful memoir of plants, the scientific process, and friendship. How does Jahren negotiate, even rank, her identities as scientist, woman, mother, and platonic soulmate to her lab manager, Bill? Does the “Trees: they’re just like us!” gambit work—or is Jahren making a subtler argument about what it means to be a plant and a human?

Next month, the Audio Book Club will dig into Eligible, a contemporary update on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice by Curtis Sittenfeld. Read the book and stay tuned for our discussion in June!

Visit our Audio Book Club archive page for a complete list of the more than 75 books we’ve discussed over the years. Or you can listen to any of our previous club meetings through our iTunes feed.

---

See all the pieces in this month’s Slate Book Review.

Podcast produced by Jayson De Leon and Andy Bowers.