A Change in the Wind

Living alone and liking it: Wave of the future?

Not everyone is afraid of being alone; in fact, reports sociologist Eric Klinenberg in a sterling essay (with charts!) in the juggernaut known as The New York Times, about 40% of households in prosperous cities such as San Francisco and Boston are inhabited by "singletons," and up to 50% in D.C. and NYC. 

The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible...Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Further, Klinenberg reports, living alone doesn't mean loneliness or isolation -- in fact, he says that single people often turn out to be more sociable that the marred. 

Still, it's a concept that takes some getting used to. Yes magazine posts a sweet video guide: 

A persistent La Niña leads to a long stretch of dryness

This year national weather and climate forecasters said they saw a La Niña condition developing in the Pacific, and promised dryness, as they did last year. This year, for virtually all of California, and much of the nation as well, they've been right.

Here's the drought forecast, in a graphic from NOAA [National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration]:

More drought to come, looks like...and it's already killed an estimated half-billion trees in Texas.

Yes, that's 500 million trees, as reported last week in the Houston Chronicle. 

Here's a startling image from Jeff Masters' astounding Wunderblog, showing exactly how dry it's been in the country and virtually the entirety of California this past week.. 

The forecast concludes:

The latest GFS model forecast predicts that this unusually dry pattern will persist for at least the next ten days, with the possibility of it breaking down during the last week of January.

At least Texas got some rain,  thanks to "a highly abnormal jet stream pattern that is keeping the northern polar branch of the jet stream far to the north in Canada."

Hmmmm... 

To the stars, through the thorns: Gov. Jerry Brown

Jerry Roberts knows more about California than you, and me, and probably most of the people in the state put together. He's edited major newspapers, for decades; written columns, for decades; launched websites, written books, taugth at university -- his rap sheet is as long as a cliche. He left teaching a year ago to concentrate on his writing, he said, and from the opening to his latest column in the Santa Barbara Independent, it's clear he made the right move. To wit:

Letting loose a little Latin lexicon, Jerry Brown offered up some context from the classics to describe the political challenges facing Sacramento in 2012.

“Ad Astra per Aspera,” the Jesuit-trained governor intoned in a look-ahead interview about the legislative session that began this week.

Chatting with public radio’s ace Capitol correspondent John Myers, the governor translated the expression as, “To the stars through the thorns.”

The whole column is worth reading, but that is beautiful. 

Sometimes it's so easy to see the Jesuit in Jerry Brown.  

Researchers find high levels of mercury in CA coastal fog

This is the story I found at this year's fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union -- how fog off California's coastal coast may be importing mercury from the ocean on to the land. 

The team, led by chemist Peter Weiss-Penzias, reported finding "very high" levels of mercury, a neurotoxin, in the fog, according to a paper presented Thursday to a geophysical science conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

"These are unheard of levels for methylmercury," said Weiss-Penzias. "People have measured methylmercury downstream from old mercury mines, where the bugs [microbes] have to convert inorganic mercury in sediment into methylmercury, and the highest levels they found were four parts per trillion. Well, our highest levels were 10 parts per trillion."

Weiss-Penzias suggested that it's possible that there is a "wash-out" -- a sort of invisible bathtub ring of methylmercury left behind by the fog. That's where he hopes to take his research next. 

Unemployment falls, surprising/pleasing pundits

The New Yorker is thrilled:

This is the best piece of economic news that President Obama has received in many a moon.

On CNBC’s Squawk Box, a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers said, “The trend I am seeing … is that things have turned around.” And he went on: “People don’t feel good about the economy until the labor market turns around. And the labor market has been lousy for a long time. I am pretty hopeful.”

No, those weren’t the words of Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s former chief economic advisor. (He was on the show too, and, as you might expect, he was pretty chipper.) The upbeat comments came from Ed Lazear, the Stanford professor who headed the Council of Economic Advisors from 2006 to 2009 under President George W. Bush.

In his analysis, tough-minded John Cassidy points out that the fall below 9% is probably not a statistical aberation, and is not simply a case of a rise in discouraged workers.

Well, let's hope he's right -- the numbers do look pretty good on a graph. 

Don't they, though? 

How freelance writers survive: by shovel and hoe, w/chickens

Anyway they can:

My turn with spade and hoe started a few years ago when I found myself divorced and flat broke. My livelihood as a freelance writer went out the window when the economy tanked. I literally could afford beans, the dried kind, which I’d thought were for school art projects or teaching elementary math. And I didn’t know how to cook.

Luckily, my late father had hammered into me that grit was more important than talent. So, when I couldn’t afford fancy food — never mind paraben-free shampoo — for my babies, I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?        

Susan Gregory Thomas's line about the peasants is a little condescending, I think. Doubt it was easy to survive as a peasant in 11th-century Sicily.  

Still, I still admire her grit. May need some of that practicality myself. 

Apparently Thomas is not just a good gardener, but also a stylish one. Admire that. 

 

The problem with America: Too much cake

Vanity Fair puts the entire California chapter of Michael Lewis's new book, Boomerang, on the Web, and boy is it good. Lewis really is all that. Long but highly recommended. Here's the thinky part:

The road out of Vallejo passes directly through the office of Dr. Peter Whybrow, a British neuroscientist at U.C.L.A. with a theory about American life. He thinks the dysfunction in America’s society is a by-product of America’s success. In academic papers and a popular book, American Mania, Whybrow argues, in effect, that human beings are neurologically ill-designed to be modern Americans. The human brain evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in an environment defined by scarcity. It was not designed, at least originally, for an environment of extreme abundance. “Human beings are wandering around with brains that are fabulously limited,” he says cheerfully. “We’ve got the core of the average lizard.” Wrapped around this reptilian core, he explains, is a mammalian layer (associated with maternal concern and social interaction), and around that is wrapped a third layer, which enables feats of memory and the capacity for abstract thought. “The only problem,” he says, “is our passions are still driven by the lizard core. We are set up to acquire as much as we can of things we perceive as scarce, particularly sex, safety, and food.”

Even a person on a diet who sensibly avoids coming face-to-face with a piece of chocolate cake will find it hard to control himself if the chocolate cake somehow finds him. Every pastry chef in America understands this, and now neuroscience does, too. “When faced with abundance, the brain’s ancient reward pathways are difficult to suppress,” says Whybrow. “In that moment the value of eating the chocolate cake exceeds the value of the diet. We cannot think down the road when we are faced with the chocolate cake.”

The richest society the world has ever seen has grown rich by devising better and better ways to give people what they want. The effect on the brain of lots of instant gratification is something like the effect on the right hand of cutting off the left: the more the lizard core is used the more dominant it becomes. “What we’re doing is minimizing the use of the part of the brain that lizards don’t have,” says Whybrow. “We’ve created physiological dysfunction. We have lost the ability to self-regulate, at all levels of the society. The $5 million you get paid at Goldman Sachs if you do whatever they ask you to do—that is the chocolate cake upgraded.”

Years ago Sam Shepherd wrote a play -- Angel City -- about living and working in Hollywood, in which a producer turns green, slimy, and eventually into a lizard. The writer saw further than he knew, perhaps.

Lewis' story also includes an enthralling encounter with the fearless-unto-the-point-of-recklessness Arnold Schwarzenegger...really worth a look. 

The usefulness of forgetting: Tennessee Williams

 

"A bad memory is a great convenience." 

 

Tennessee Williams, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, 1950

 

The quote is from the nouvella. Here's the poster from the first movie made of this story. 

 

[My god, what a cast! Lotte Lenya?!? Who was nominated for Best Supporting for the role? I have to see this picture.] 

The Holy Family: Tennessee Williams on Van Gogh

As mentioned in an earlier post, while at the University of Iowa's dramatic writing program, Tennessee Williams, then a complete unknown, set out to write a play about Vincent Van Gogh.

He didn't get past a few scenes, but the idea still fascinates. 

In a letter to a friend William Holland, dated 11/18/1937, he wrote:

The Van Gogh trouble is that there is too much dramatic material. it is hard to make a selection. Van Gogh was a great social thinker and artist -- he had tremendous love for humanity and believed in the community of artists -- he painted common people at work and tried to establish an art colony in southern France -- but he was constantly misunderstood and persecuted -- crowds gathered outside his window, shouting "Fou-roux" -- "the red-headed madman" -- that suggests a main theme -- a man with a great love for humanity whom humanity rejected -- he formed many disappointing relationships -- his brother Theo was his only supporter -- his story would be the story of an artist's relations to society -- not one artist but all. 

From Selected Letters, pp116

Pictures of Williams at this time in his life are rare: here's a yearbook picture from 1936.  

 

 

 

Texas drought: "Years before the cows come home"

Today reporter Molly Hennessy-Fiske took a potentially mundane story about how the drought in Texas is changing the traditional cattle business and wrote her way on to the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times with her boldness:

The cowboys rose well before dawn, stars still high in the West Texas sky. They strapped on spurs and leather chaps and climbed into their saddles for one last roundup.

They didn't have to do much to rustle the cattle from the dusty flats about 220 miles west of Dallas. Hundreds of hungry black Angus and Herefords, tired of foraging for scarce, drought-dry grass, came running — drawn by the hope of feed.

But it's not just color. She also slips in some climate science:

Texas has suffered more than $5.2 billion in agricultural losses this year from the dry spell, including in the cattle industry. No relief is in sight and the state climatologist says this could be the start of a 10-year drought, part of changing weather patterns worldwide.

Want a little more? Here's the Texas state climatologist's thoughtful discussion of the three suspects in the most recent Texas drought: the Pacific Decadal Oscilation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, and "the long-term oceanic warming trend." It's very complicated, but John Neilsen-Gammon concludes:

At this point, all I can say is that we're in a period of frequent Texas drought until further notice. This period, with both the Pacific and the Atlantic working against us, might be over in a year or two, or it might last another fifteen or twenty years. it seems likely to last another decade. 

Texas cattle producers can't wait. They're leasing pastureland in Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana, and shipping their cattle out of state. 

Or, as Hennessy-Fiske puts it, with a touch of wit:

Many [cattle-managers]say they plan to return at least some cows once Texas greens, but admit it could be years before the cows come home.

Kudos to the reporter, I say. Good job.