There is no contemporary version of the 1870s railroads, the 1920s auto industry or even the 1990s Internet sector. Total economic output over the last decade, as measured by the gross domestic product, has grown more slowly than in any 10-year period during the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s or ’90s.

Perhaps the most important reason, beyond the financial crisis, is the overall skill level of the work force. The United States is the only rich country in the world that has not substantially increased the share of young adults with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree over the past three decades. Some less technical measures of human capital, like the percentage of children living with two parents, have deteriorated. The country has also chosen not to welcome many scientists and entrepreneurs who would like to move here.

The relationship between skills and economic success is not an exact one, yet it is certainly strong enough to notice, and not just in the reams of peer-reviewed studies on the subject. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and much of Northern Europe have made considerable educational progress since the 1980s, for instance. Their unemployment rates, which were once higher than ours, are now lower. Within this country, the 50 most educated metropolitan areas have an average jobless rate of 7.3 percent, according to Moody’s Analytics; in the 50 least educated, the average rate is 11.4 percent.

Despite the media’s focus on those college graduates who are struggling, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that people with a four-year degree — who have an unemployment rate of just 4.3 percent — are barely experiencing an economic downturn.

via The Depression – If Only Things Were That Good – NYTimes.com.

Are we going to blame this on Wall Street?

via Rob Walker: Pictures of the Familiar: Observers Room: Design Observer.

That morning, Raffaele Cava, age 80, was working on the 90th floor of the north tower. After the plane hit, no one could open the exits, so he went to another office and sat with Dianne DeFontes and Tirsa Moya. The hall floors were melting. Suddenly, two men in the stairwell pried open the door, walked in and ordered everyone to go. They were Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz, Port Authority employees who worked one flight down, and who took it on themselves to climb up and down 14 floors, getting scores of people out. They never left.

Tirsa Moya walked Raffaele Cava down all 90 floors.

You could ask no more of human beings.

via The 9/11 Decade – Falling in Love With Death – NYTimes.com.

Having new friends in my new city of Seattle and new neighborhood of Capitol Hill, I decided to catch a movie tonight. About five or six blocks away, I found the Harvard Exit Theatre, the cutest and comfiest random theater I’ve walked into.

Caught “The Guard,” which was solid.

I spent a good 12+ hours putting together movie footage my mom took between 1959 and 1969, which is the first footage of my grandparents (who I never knew) I had ever seen. We distilled 75 minutes of footage into 40 minutes, using only a single iMovie “event,” which seems to have been our first mistake, and adding music, titles, and transitions.

My mom had scheduled a big family dinner for the purpose of watching the video, and as iMovie had become frustratingly slower and slower the longer the movie became, I was still putting the final touches on the video as the evening rolled around. I finally finished, only to find that iMovie refused to export my movie into a watchable format. “Sharing requires more memory to be available,” it told me, along with instructions to quit and relaunch the application.

I did so and tried to export again, but got the same message. Then I tried moving the movie to a computer with more RAM (4GB as opposed to 2GB), but it too required more memory to be available. Neither computer was capable of rendering the movie in real-time at this point.

So anyway, the solution is simple, but not listed on the internet anywhere as far as I could find. It certainly is not in any of the iMovie documentation. First, you do need to relaunch iMovie. Second, rather than opening the movie you want to export, you right-click on it and select export in the Project Gallery. This obviates the need for iMovie to load your project into memory, and allows it to commit all of the computer’s memory to the rendering task.

What a stupid, stupid program. Blegh.

When you’re not part of a community you are more likely to join the herd.

via Marbury: the age of hyper-imitation.

The expression conjures up an image of the soldier with hands pressed together and eyes clenched shut, huddled in the foxhole. The expression seems to imply that everyone close to death makes their peace with God. That everyone confronts the reality that is God.

Certainly a century ago, the guilt of missing too many masses or dying without having confessed would be unbearable for a wounded soldier on the battlefield. But the church no longer has such a firm grip on our subconscious and metaphysical beliefs. Prayer as a reflex to death probably doesn’t happen for many 21st century Americans.

Yet there may still be something to that phrase, even if the soldier remains steadfastly atheist.

The nature of war is random, taking life from civilians and soldiers who are mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. No one can dodge a bullet. But if you are a soldier and you are to survive, survival depends on you, and on your realization of this fact. I mean, if God were in the business of saving, God would not want you to be sitting on your ass praying for the shell to miss with your eyes closed. You better be ready to jump out of the foxhole.

Human phobias and pathos are part of what make us human. Violence, fear, and trauma can be crippling. But even as hands shake and legs quiver, another part of us know what needs to be done – to call an ambulance, to pull out the rusty nail, to look away from the cliff, to keep running, to soldier on.

Sometimes we feel very intense things – horror, terror, pain, extreme boredom – that make us want to do nothing more than curl into a fetal ball, but in the same moment another part of us coldly and rationally knows what must be done. And we have the ability to choose to do the latter.

This all brings me to Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void¹, an amazing story of survival under the most unlikely circumstances. Survival after Simpson believed death to be an inevitability.

Big-ass Crevasse

The movie, with narration provided by the actual climbers and reenactments by actors, tells one of the most powerful stories I have ever heard. Simpson and his friend Simon Yates, with a friend waiting in base camp, are attempting to become the first climbers to scale the west face of Siula Grande in the Andes. They make it to the summit, but at the beginning of the descent, Simpson falls and suffers a severe break of his right leg, with the knee joint entirely destroyed and tibia coming up into the thigh.

Yates then courageously decides not to abandon his friend on the mountain, although an injury that severe often is a death sentence. He proceeds to lower Simpson down the mountain with ropes. They have almost reached the bottom when, during the blinding evening snowstorm, he inadvertently lowers Simpson off an ice cliff. After holding Simpson’s entire body weight for 45 minutes with frostbitten fingers in sliding snow, Yates has no choice but to cut the rope.²

Simpson is dropped 150 feet into a deep crevasse at the foot of the ice cliff, a crevasse so deep, black, and foreboding that Yates simply assumes Simpson was dead the following morning. Simpson, however, has fallen onto an ice bridge with few additional injuries. The reader can only imagine the immense, soul-crushing loneliness of the abyss. The idea of sitting at the bottom of a deep, dark, and cold hole has fascinated many writers such as Haruki Murakami, and here is a man who has lived it.

In an amazing stroke of luck, Simpson finds a way out of the crevasse when he abseils further down into the inky black  darkness. But he is still on the mountain face, and must pass through the crevasse-ridden glacier and a moraine field, while incapable of walking. This means he must scoot and crawl his way.

But as soon as he emerges from the crevasse, something remarkable happens:

“There were no dark forces acting against me. A voice in my head told me that this was true, cutting through the jumble in my mind with its coldly rational sound. It was as if there were two minds within me arguing the toss. The voice was clean and sharp and commanding. It was always right, and I listened to it when it spoke and acted on its decisions. The other mind rambled out a disconnected series of images, and memories and hopes, which I attended to in a daydream state as I set about obeying the orders of the voice. I had to get to the glacier.”

The voice is coming from him, and to argue otherwise would be ridiculous. Simpson is an atheist, and confesses he thought nothing of God while hanging in the darkness. But the phenomenon of the voice is fascinating. “It” forces Simpson to set goals – i.e. get to that rock in 20 minutes – and berates him if he fails the task. Much of the time he succeeds.

But the journey down the mountain only gets harder. After a day he starts going snow-blind. After two days Simpson realizes it’s unlikely anyone is waiting at base camp. All the while he is fighting hallucinations. Some are strange, and some are profound – particularly when he awakens to the sound of his voice, in his head, reciting a Shakespearean soliloquy:

Ay, but to die and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensisble warm motion to become
A kneaded clod and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world …³

Simpson survives, due in large part to the voice. This story resonated tremendously with my readings for a Religious Studies class I took, The Experience of God, and with my reading of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The theologian Schubert Ogden’s closest analogy for God’s relation to the world is the relationship between our minds and our brains, and here is a story where the distinction between mind and brain grows vague and indistinct.

Other theologians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer talk about living completely in “this world.” David Foster Wallace’s characters struggle to remain on task as workers in the IRS, fighting the impulse to nap or scratch or daydream. There’s some sort of surreal connection between Simpson’s crawl down the mountain and the plight of the IRS workers. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is,” says one character, “… Actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one.”⁴

I think both experiences show that there is no one true self. That we are much more than “lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.”⁵ Our experiences shape us in ways we may not consciously acknowledge. Simpson has suffered panic attacks since Siula Grande, but has come to terms with the trauma after telling his story and reflecting upon the experience.

We contain multitudes. I’ve been having dreams where I’m two or ten years in the past, and the people are vividly alive in my mind, flawlessly acting as they’re supposed to. There are many voices in our heads, and we don’t have to obey the squalling baby screams (“a small, naked child, curled on the ground, its skin raw and tough, flayed-looking, and it lay shuddering under a seat where it had been left, unwanted, stuffed out of sight, struggling for breath”⁶), even if they are the loudest.

Confronting death shatters the illusion of an immortal, imperial self, playing the world like pawns on a chessboard. And when things are not going its way, the imperial self turns into a childish self, deserving of pity and pampering and better treatment from unfair life (“IT’S SO UNFAIR. I CANNOT BELIEVE…”). Simpson had a choice to wallow in self-pity, being royally screwed by the weather and bad luck, abandoned by his friends, and in terrible physical pain. A situation so bad it surpassed the hyperboles of fiction. He did not.

For the vast majority of Americans not mired in poverty or sickness, this is a choice we have every day.

¹ Touching the Void is currently available on Netflix streaming and, apparently, on Youtube.

² This is a decision much debated among mountaineers. Both Simpson and Yates agree it was the right choice to make. Simpson points out that he would have died hanging in the snowstorm if Yates waited much longer.

³ Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1.

⁴ This seems to be the most frequently quoted line in The Pale King, probably because it’s simple and weird and … quotable. I would hasten to add that it certainly does not come from the author, and its clichéd quality is meant to challenge our conventional notions of courage but not replace them. It’s a quote that makes us think about about how we normally think.

⁵ David Foster Wallace, Kenyon Commencement Speech. Myself and other Pomona grads quote the hell out of this; I’m sure it would annoy him to no end.

⁶ This is Voldemort, nemesis and doppelganger to Harry Potter as described in J.K. Rowling’s The Deathly Hallows. Both were orphans.

With its five seasons finally concluded after last week’s finale, it is safe to say that Friday Night Lights (“FNL”) is about much more than football. Case in point from the finale: as the quarterback launches a long, spiraling, slow-motion pass into the brisk Texas night, the camera cuts to all the characters in attendance, lingering on each of their faces in turn —first friends and families, then players and coaches. The outcome of the game hangs in the balance, but suddenly it doesn’t matter. It’s the people that matter: the residents of the fictional town of Dillon, Texas.

FNL paints a portrait of a contemporary American small town where football is king. The show revolves around Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), principal/guidance counselor, and her husband Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler). Both were nominated for Emmys in 2010. Their relationship has been consistently hailed as the “best portrayal of a marriage on TV,” and their conflicts make a perfect target for armchair feminist analysis. The pair shepherd two crops of high schoolers from adolescence to adulthood. Among the students are the strong, convention-breaking blond Tyra Colette (Adrianne Palicki), the stuttering, lovable replacement QB Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the Taylors’ sexually rebellious daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden), ex-juvie recruit Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan, a talent from “The Wire”), and of course, the brooding heartbreaker Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch).

The show also features Esquire magazine’s 2010 Sexiest Woman Alive (Minka Kelly), a successful abortion (a rarity in TV), a Christian speed-metal band, a teenage girl football coach, and the best parent-teen sex talk you’ll ever see (record it and show it to your kids). There are a few gay characters, and a lot of half-time speeches and “Texas Forever” too. Enough of them for Slate magazine’s Meghan O’Rourke to call the show “singularly designed to make men cry.”

Derek Jeter's future wedding party?

Despite critical acclaim and a cult following, FNL never achieved widespread success, and it only survived past the second season because of a last second co-production agreement with DirecTV. FNL’s inability to make it mainstream may be a product of its lack of a core demographic audience—it was first marketed to men for the football and then to women for the drama. Yet I see this as more of an asset than a detriment: it’s masculine and feminine, teen and family, blue and red state.

FNL celebrates football without shying away from its seedy underbelly. At their best, sports inspire, like baseball did for Japanese-Americans in World War II internment camps. At their worst, they place too much pressure on young people and trivialize real problems, like Tami’s budget crisis at Dillon High when football boosters wanted to erect a Jumbotron. In the same way, FNL plays with the tension between individual and community. Dillon is a town that feels stuck in a time warp, with cars from the 70s and the absence of consumer electronics (until they inexplicably appear in Season 4). Many of the characters want out and do leave; one of FNL’s anthems is entitled “Devil Town.” The town takes children and makes them into their parents, obsessing over a violent sport. But it is a genuine community where Coach’s players—and Tami’s advisees—routinely knock on the Taylors’ door late at night with their quandaries. Football unites them and holds the community together: church on Sunday mornings, and football on Friday nights.

Fortunately, FNL doesn’t moralize on this tension, allowing it to focus on good storytelling. The show’s cinematography brings it further down to earth; FNL was filmed documentary-style in Texas with three simultaneous cameras, a technique that the actors have universally praised.

The end of FNL will be felt deeply by many here at the 5Cs. “The characters are real and reliable and flawed at the same time,” said Gabbi  PO’13. “Anybody can relate to [their] struggles.”

“It goes underneath football, which is a manifestation of their shared culture and experiences,” agreed Hannah PO ’13. “It’s about growth and community, growing together and compromising together and sacrificing.”

For me, FNL rivals The Wire in its ability to teach and change its viewers. I learned how a community works and thinks.

“I understand football after watching FNL,” Gabbi added. Yet as Hannah warned, “You have to be willing to invest emotionally in the show.”

You will also lose huge chunks of your day and cry an embarrassing amount.

Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose!

What bothers me most, however, is that both sides of the organic debate spend millions in press and advertising to attack each other instead of looking for a resolution. Organic supporters tend to vilify new technologies, while conventional supporters insist that chemicals and massive production monocultures are the only way to go. This simply strikes me as absurd. Synthetic doesn’t necessarily mean bad for the environment. Just look at technological advances in creating biodegradable products; sometimes, we can use our knowledge and intelligence to create things that are both useful, cheap enough and ecologically responsible, as crazy as that idea may sound.

I also firmly believe that increasing the chemicals used in agriculture to support insanely over-harvested monocultures will never lead to ecological improvement. In my mind, the ideal future will merge conventional and organic methods, using GMOs and/or other new technologies to reduce pesticide use while increasing the bioavailability of soils, crop yield, nutritional quality and biodiversity in agricultural lands. New technology isn’t the enemy of organic farming; it should be its strongest ally.

via Mythbusting 101: Organic Farming > Conventional Agriculture | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network.

As far as I’m concerned, Christie Wilcox’s Scientific American blog posting on the myths of organic agriculture is one of the more complete analyses of organic’s strengths and weaknesses I have seen in a mainstream publication in years¹. But it misses the mark more than a few times. I read all the literature I could get my hands on for my senior thesis (“Policies to Improve Organic Agriculture: Prospects to Meet an Agrarian, Ecological, or Resource Vision” – yep, I ran out of creative juices for a title…) and found very few pieces that holistically and neutrally evaluated organic agriculture. Wilcox gets top marks for effort.

Many arguments for and against organics rest on just a handful of scholarly articles, in addition to a wealth of anecdotal accounts. Like her peers, Wilcox does not present a comprehensive review of the literature. However, she is right to question many of the “myths” surrounding organic agriculture,  and her overall point about the black and white conversation around organics is spot on.

It’s refreshing that Wilcox critiques organics while sharing its goals. We need more of these kinds of conversations and a whole lot more scientific research of sustainable agriculture if we really are serious about an environmentally-sensitive agriculture for more than just the privileged few.

Pesticides – Better under Organics

Wilcox makes some questionable inferences in her pesticide section. Yes, organic farms do use pesticides, sometimes a lot of them. That myth can be safely busted. “Organic pesticides” are substances derived from naturally harvested resources, to be distinguished from conventional pesticides, which are synthesized by humans. The USDA’s working definition of organic agriculture hinges on this somewhat arbitrary distinction between natural and manufactured resources.²

Some naturally-derived, “organic” pesticides – Wilcox singles out Rotenone – do have detrimental effects on human health. But does that mean organic foods are inflicting the same pesticide residue burdens as conventional foods? That depends on which organic pesticides are used and how much is applied.

Wilcox cites an evaluation of organic pesticides by the EU Crop Protection Association, which found half of organic pesticides to fail safety standards.³ This is worrisome indeed. But Wilcox infers that this means large quantities of harmful organic residues are found in organic food (in the US as well as the EU). That is a possibility, but she presents no evidence for this whatsoever.

Instead, Wilcox brings up studies showing the presence of synthetic pesticide residues in organic foods (European Food Safety Authority (2009) and Consumer Reports (1998)). I think Wilcox’s implication here is that organic farmers are cheating and using synthetic pesticides. The other explanation for their presence, which Wilcox does not account for, is contamination (“drift”) from adjacent conventional farms and persistence of pesticides in the environment.

Baker et al. (2002) believe contamination explains synthetic pesticide residues. They analyzed three data sets from the USDA, the CA Department of Pesticide Regulation, and the Consumers Union. They found pesticide residues in conventional produce in 73% of USDA samples, 31% of CA DPR samples, and 79% of Consumers Union samples. This can be compared to 23%, 6.5%, and 27% respectively for organic samples, with the 23% USDA figure dropping to 13% if eliminating long-lived banned substances such as DDT. Conventional samples were also found to have at least six times as many samples with multiple residues.⁴

Given that Baker et al. published in a peer-reviewed food contaminants journal, I give a lot of weight to their statement that “there is no objective evidence to support the assertion that natural pesticide residues pose a hazard… The botanical insecticides tend to break down rapidly in the environment, are comparatively non-toxic, and are used by a relatively small fraction of growers, ordinarily only as a last resort.”

But Wilcox does bring up this Bahlai et al. (2010) article, in which the authors found organic pesticides to have reduced efficacy against aphids with a higher mortality rate for beneficial insects as compared to conventional pesticides. It’s difficult to extrapolate from this study, but it does challenge Baker et. al’s assertion.

Following the explosive growth of organics nine years later, it may be time for Baker et al. to update their study. Tom Philpott brings up the 2009 USDA Pesticide Data Program report (Tom – why not find the primary source?). I could not verify the Organic Center’s analysis of the report linked to by Philpott. Tests on organic lettuce found the allowable organic pesticides spinosad in 18.3% of samples and azadirachtin A/B at 1.8%/0.3%. Only a handful of the 387 samples contained prohibited (conventional) chemicals, at levels easily attributable to residual environmental contamination.

Overall, the evidence points to organic produce having lower toxic pesticide residues than conventional produce. Myth not busted.

Nutrition – Toss up

Although the relative nutrition of organics was not addressed at length in my thesis, I did read the relevant body of nutrition literature. As Philpott and Tom Lawskawy at Grist point out, there’s a lot of studies that have found higher levels of certain nutrients in organic produce. Wilcox cites a bunch that have found no difference in nutrition.

One reason I omitted discussion of organics’ nutrition is the impreciseness of the organic label. Briefly, the USDA certification follows a resource definition for organics (natural vs. manufactured inputs), whereas most people probably hold an “ecological” (crop rotations, cover crops, compost, etc.) definition and a lot of people hold an agrarian (small farm, low input) definition.

Although USDA-certified, supermarket-sold organic produce appears to have lower pesticide residues, it may not have higher nutrition than conventional produce. This could explain the studies finding no nutritional differences. But ecological/agrarian, farmers’ market-sold organic produce could have higher nutrition than conventional produce and USDA supermarket organic, which would explain the findings of other studies. As far as I know, there are no peer-reviewed studies looking at nutritional differences between USDA supermarket organic and ecological/agrarian produce.

Bottom line: it’s unclear.

Yields – Organics far less

The yield question – how much food is produced per acre – is most often framed as an issue of feeding the world.

Post incomplete…

Tom Laskawy at Grist was quick to respond with a rebuttal. . Laskawy quickly dismisses organics’ yield problem by focusing on the GMO question. The GMO question is an important one – an issue well-worth debating. But I simply have not found anything to convince me that the act of gene manipulation itself is problematic – most of the critiques, Laskawy’s included, center on the implementation of GMOs.

More to come…

¹ By far, my favorite thesis resource was Julie Guthman’s Agrarian Dreams: The Paradox of Organic Farming in California (2004). Please read it alongside your Wendell Berry. Guthman is, as far as I could find, the only person in this country who has conducted a wide-scale, quantitative evaluation of organic farms’ agrienvironmental/ecological practices. All other evidence of “conventionalization”  is anecdotal.

² The USDA definition differs from what I call the “working definition.” According to the National Organic Program website, organic agriculture is “a production system that is managed in accordance with the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 … to respond to site-specific conditions by integrating cultural, biological, and mechanical practices that foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity.” The actual regulations under the National Organic Program (i.e. the “working definition”) do not require any practices, and simply apply to agricultural inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers.

³ I could not locate the actual report online, only a news release. It would certainly be more useful if a listing of the chemicals was available.

p>⁴ Baker, B. P., Benbrook, C. M., Groth, E., & Benbrook, K. L. (2002). Pesticide residues in conventional, integrated pest management (IPM)-grown and organic foods: Insights from three US data sets. Food Additives & Contaminants: Part A, 19(5), 427-446.