[Winstonm]

I see today that Kanye West called out Billie Eilish on Instagram.

Well, that certainly ought to make her shake in her bytes.

[y66]

Tara Parker-Pope at NYT said:

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

A few years back, I organized a sold-out event for The Times. The planners marveled at my success, but I knew the real reason so many people wanted to attend. I had invited a secret weapon.

Her name was Jane Brody.

Since my earliest days as a health journalist, I’ve witnessed the power of Jane, a 4-foot-8 dynamo who has blazed a trail for women since she began her journalism career 59 years ago at The Minneapolis Tribune. She also pioneered a revolutionary new form of service journalism at The Times that forever changed how we talk about our health and well-being.

This week, after 57 remarkable years at The Times, Jane Brody published her last Personal Health column.

Jane was among the first journalists to recognize that better health doesn’t happen in the doctor’s office — it’s rooted in the small decisions we make every day, like the foods we eat, the amount we sleep and whether we wear a bicycle helmet. In fact, when Jane first interviewed at The Times in 1965, she told the managing editor, Clifton Daniel, that she thought the paper’s science coverage fell short of serving its readers. “It doesn’t go far enough,” she told him. “It doesn’t help people live better lives.”

While Jane got the job as a science writer, it wasn’t until 1976 that she was able to fully realize her vision for science-based personal health journalism. Arthur Gelb, the assistant managing editor at the time, asked Jane to produce four writing samples for a proposed weekly column on health. Jane wanted to be sure she’d have the freedom to explore any topic, so for the tryout, she included a column on impotence. Her column, named Personal Health, was approved and became a runaway hit.

Jane continued to push boundaries and force her cautious editors to publish stories about topics previously deemed too embarrassing for Times readers. While writing about the risks of cervical cancer, Jane became the first writer to get the words “sexual intercourse” on The Times’s front page. She insisted on using the word “penis” when the paper previously had used the phrase “male sexual organ.” A former editor killed a column she wrote about masturbation, but Jane published a version four years later, after he retired. Jane recalls that her colleagues at the time called her the “sex editor of The New York Times.”

The Personal Health column prompted an outpouring of support from both readers and physicians. Jane recalls being shocked when she saw copies of her articles posted in her doctor’s office. In 1986, Time magazine named her “The High Priestess of Health” and gleefully recounted how she had chased down a 6-foot teenager who had snatched her watch. “The kid must not have been following her exercise regimen,” the writers joked.

Over the years, Jane has helped to broaden the definition of what personal health means, writing about the healing power of poetry, the importance of being a mentor and how to nurture kindness in a new generation.

But my favorite columns, by far, were those that featured Jane herself, embracing her aging body, sharing her struggles and enjoying all that life has to offer. In 2005, Jane famously chronicled her double knee-replacement surgery, bringing honesty to the challenges and pain of rehabilitation after the procedure. Some people feared the column would discourage others from seeking treatment, but Jane always believed that more information was better, even if it was not always what others wanted to hear. Happily, she wrote a sequel: “3 Years Later, Knees Made for Dancing.” Jane’s new knees have hiked in Costa Rica, Tasmania, Peru and Australia, and bicycled through Vietnam, South Africa, Chile, Poland and Portugal.

I first met Jane in 2007 during a Science Times meeting as she sat at a conference table with her fellow reporters, knitting up a storm. (Jane’s knitting through meetings is part of her legend at the paper.) She would stop on occasion to give her two cents about a health story idea. Years later, when Jane moved to the Well desk, I convinced her to write about her passion for knitting. The column was a blockbuster.

Jane has always been ahead of her time. Long before the Great Resignation, Jane wrote about the opportunity to reinvent yourself, sharing her own goals to travel, learn Spanish and attend more concerts and lectures. In her 70s, she took her four grandsons on an Alaskan nature cruise and a tented safari in Tanzania, which she also wrote about. She adopted a Havanese puppy, Max, and shared the story of how she turned him into a therapy dog. She’s still looking for a teacher to help her learn to play the bandoneon, an accordionlike instrument popular in Argentina.

I think Jane’s greatest strength, however, has been to serve as a comforting voice during times of uncertainty. She tackled a taboo topic in her book “Jane Brody’s Guide to the Great Beyond,” a primer for helping families prepare for the end of life. Just a year later, Jane put its precepts into practice when her husband, Richard Engquist, was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. She always thought of her readers, sharing her personal story of living with her husband’s fatal diagnosis; then, after he died, she wrote about her anguish in “The Pain of Losing a Spouse Is Singular.”

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jane wrote about how she coped during life in lockdown. Jane crafted one of the most popular columns of her career at the age of 80, when she shared thoughts on how to age gracefully. I was delighted she agreed to host a lively conversation with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci about living well into your 80s and beyond. To mark her 80th birthday, she shared this advice:

Strive to do what you love for as long as you can do it. If the vicissitudes of life or infirmities of age preclude a preferred activity, modify it or substitute another. I can no longer safely skate, ski or play tennis, but I can still bike, hike and swim. I consider daily physical activity to be as important as eating and sleeping. I accept no excuses.

While Jane accepts no excuses for herself, she’s quite compassionate about the health struggles of others, including my own challenges with losing weight. “People come in all shapes and sizes,” Jane told me. “We’re not all meant to look like fashion models or ballet dancers, nor should we want to.”

That said, being in Jane’s presence does tend to bring out the best in people. I remember waiting for an elevator with some guests at a Times event a few years ago, when suddenly we heard Jane’s voice booming from down the hall.

“Jane’s coming!” someone said. It was immediately clear that none of us wanted Jane to see us taking the elevator, so we all sprinted toward the stairwell just as she power-walked around the corner. Jane, of course, headed straight for the stairs, and we all dutifully followed her.

And that is the power and joy of Jane Brody. For more than five decades, Jane’s wisdom, wit and writing have lifted us up, motivated us to try harder and nudged us to be just a little better than we were before.

[y66]

Good read: When Her Husband Said He Wanted to Die, Amy Bloom Listened

I've been looking for an organization like Dignitas as a contingency plan if ever needed.

[y66]

From Ezra Klein Interviews C. Thi Nguyen:

Quote

...EZRA KLEIN: And something I think that gets to— because it would be easy, in a very condescending way, to sit here and say, oh, those QAnon people got trapped in a bad game, not me. But to me what all of this cashes out into is that one of the difficult things about being alive during, as you put it, the great endarkenment, is we are all choosing which explanations to believe, built to some degree on structures of social trust, not a first person verification. We can’t verify a lot of what we believe we know about the world.

And in addition to that, we often don’t even realize we’ve opted into one, either because everybody around us has opted into the same one and so it just seems like the way the world is. And I guess this is one of my big questions for you as somebody who studies this, which is how do you develop a sensitivity— not a cynicism and maybe not even always a skepticism, but just first a sensitivity to being able to see all the different game-like scored, simplifying systems that you’ve adopted and all of the values they are pushing you towards? How do you develop game mindfulness?

C. THI NGUYEN: That’s a great phrase that I may steal and credit to you. I actually think there’s a tiny hint in how pleasurable games are. And this is going to make me sound kind of awful, but the way I navigate the world right now is I’ve developed a fair amount of defensive suspicion about certain kinds of pleasure. A marker of design game-like systems is that they’re very pleasurable to operate in.

So if someone out there was trying to create a belief system to get you onto it using game-like design theory to get you into this exciting usable space, then you should expect it to just feel really good when you adopt that belief system. And I think this is one of the markers, right? The real world is extremely frustrating, extremely difficult, full of things that you don’t want to believe, full of things that are hard to understand.

And sometimes someone will present me with a system of belief. And as I adopt it, it just gives me everything I want. The world seems to start to make sense. I feel empowered. I feel good. Everything’s falling into place. And I’m not saying that’s necessarily false, because sometimes that’s what it feels like to really figure things out. But I’m saying sometimes you just need to be suspicious.

And I feel like my evolution towards someone that didn’t eat so much crap food that I always felt like crap is, now when I’m eating something, sometimes I can have this internal marker that’s like, oh, that’s just too delicious, that’s just— oh, that’s too yummy. And I immediately pause and I’m like, wait, has this been designed for me to over-consume and just buy lots of bags of?

I’m trying to develop the same kind of instinct in belief systems. Someone hands you a belief system and you’re like, oh, this feels so good. That’s— and then you have to pause and be like, wait, is this designed just to make me feel good? So the short answer is I’m now suspicious of pleasure, which I hate.

EZRA KLEIN: I was thinking while you were talking about this— about “Baba Is You,” the game we were talking about earlier, which I began playing after reading your book. So I’ve been very attentive to what it feels like to play the game, what it feels like to work with that agency and work with those means. And I’ve really noticed the feeling of pleasure when I solve a level. The emotional experience of playing “Baba Is You” is curiosity, frustration, some more frustration, a little bit of excitement, then some more frustration, then, ah, like got it.

And I understand what you’re saying as being partially that life doesn’t really give you that many of those, ah, got it moments. And because part of my concern is that what’s really working to give these games a lot of pleasure, and these platforms and so on, is the way they flatter our groups, the way they split us into social ecosystems, and then give us points for looking better and better and better in our ecosystem.

I think that when you started looking at the world in a way where your view of your own ecosystem is, ah, we got it, we got the truth nobody else has, the morals nobody else has, that’s the thing it seems to me you want to be really suspicious of. Because it’s pretty unlikely that you and your buddies figured it all out.

C. THI NGUYEN: Wait, can I be optimistic for a second?

EZRA KLEIN: I would love you to be.

C. THI NGUYEN: I am both worried about the overuse of pleasure in getting us to hook onto the truth. The true does not correlate perfectly with pleasure, so you need to be suspicious there. But I also think one of the things that understanding what games are and how they do really deeply helps us see is how much pleasure there is in the world that we might be missing.

So the essential insight that I got from Suits is that in so many games, the target isn’t the point. The point is this rich experience along the way. And I think a lot of the mistakes we make with games is we get into these things and we forget about these larger purposes. The fact that they can be fun. The fact that they can be beautiful. We just hyper-obsess and hyper-narrow on the product at the end. And I’m worried that in a lot of other cases, this attention to product over process is poisoning us and making us miss out on possible pleasures.

So in the book, I end up distinguishing between two kinds of aesthetics— object aesthetics and process aesthetics. So object aesthetics is like when an artist makes a thing like a painting. And you look at the thing and the thing is beautiful. And process aesthetics is where games fit for me. The artist makes a thing. And you interact with the thing and you’re beautiful. Your actions are beautiful, or comic, or thrilling. And I think there’s actually all this process aesthetics elsewhere in the world that a lot of us who have been trained to be hyper-oriented towards just the measurable output miss out.

Here’s my best example. I started thinking about this a lot in cooking. Because I got really interested in why so many cookbook reviews focus on how good the dish is and not many cookbook reviews focus on how fun, or entertaining, or lovely, or awful the process of cooking is. I mean, I don’t know how much you cook. But I found that there are a lot of restaurant cookbooks, that if you follow the directions perfectly, you do yield this incredible dish. But the process is just this miserable, grinding, gross things.

And then other recipes where they’re kind of looser and more casual and the end product isn’t as perfect, but the whole process of making them is delightful. Everything flows. You’re smelling things. You’re tasting things. You’re listening to the sizzle. Everything just feels right. And one of the things I worry about in thinking about games and processes is that a lot of activities— they have a capacity to be rich and pleasurable in the doing and then yield a good outcome.

And then we do this thing where we hyper-focus on the outcome or the product and we trade away all the richness or beauty that’s possible in the process. So I mean, here’s one thing— when I cook for a party, I often cook for like two hours, three hours, and people eat for like 20 minutes. In some ways, what’s most important is the richness and aesthetic quality in the process of cooking itself.

EZRA KLEIN: I think that’s a lovely point. And it speaks very deeply to your point about games as this inversion of means and ends.

C. THI NGUYEN: Yeah, so I mean, I’m trying to tie this in some galactic way to all the stuff about Twitter. But thinking about games shows me two possibilities that are like two flip sides of the same coin. And the richness of games is when temporary hyper-focus on a goal opens up all this rich, sculpted, interesting activity, all these amazing movements, or decisions, or calculations that are just lovely. That’s the promise of games.

And the danger of games and the game-like attitude is when we hyper-focus on that goal and we forget about all the other stuff that could happen along the way. And we just narrowly see the goal. And like, games for me are good when you engage in a duality of experience of them. You spend some time buried and trying to win, but you realize that winning isn’t the point. And then you step back and you see, oh my god, the process of doing it was so rich and so lovely.

And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. We never think about what follows from it. The big worry with the impact of highly gamified external systems is it encourages us not to step into a game and step back from it and think about the richness of the activity and whether it was worth it. What I’m worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you don’t see any of the other stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: I like that as a galactic bow on it. So instead of ending where we normally do, which is requesting three book recommendations, I want to get three game recommendations from you. And tuned to— I basically have played no adult board games. I’ve played some video games. So if like me, you’re maybe somebody who played games when you were younger, but you’ve not exactly kept up, what are some games that’ll really tie you into that pleasure of adopting a new sculpted, as you put it, agency?

More

[y66]

A net-zero future for gas utilities? Switching to underground thermal networks

Looks promising.

[y66]

A husband and wife are sitting on the porch sipping wine. The wife says "I love you". The husband says "Is that you or the wine talking?". The wife replies "It's me, talking to the wine"...

[pilowsky]

I really don't know why, but playing cards under water.

[y66]

Noah Trevor said:

Meanwhile, in the battle, McDonald’s and Starbucks are cutting ties with Russia, both announcing they would temporarily close all locations in the country. No Starbucks, no McDonald’s — that’s a sad life to live. And no pick-me-up in the morning, no Happy Meals — or, as they call them in Russia, meals.

[y66]

Sam Sifton at NYT said:

https://messaging-cu...896ed87b2d9c72a

Good morning. How are you doing? I’m moved to ask that question every couple of months because I think it’s important to acknowledge that you might not be doing well at all. We are two years into the pandemic and some two weeks into the war in Ukraine. There’s heartbreak everywhere, and there are times for all of us when it seems too much to bear.

That we bear it anyway may be a sign of our humanity, but it can come with a psychological cost. So, try to give yourself a break today or some day real soon. Get out of your head. Reboot and recharge. (These nostrums are clichéd, I know. But they’re no less important for that.) You might take a long walk or a long drive, might spend a day on the couch with a book, might fix something difficult or go to the store.

And of course you should cook. No person in the history of the world has ever spent a Sunday making the Big Lasagna and not emerged from the experience thrilled (and exhausted), with an amazing meal to serve to family or friends. You cannot control the darkness that surrounds us. But you can make a lasagna and, in so doing, experience a kind of temporary, mood-lifting escape.

[y66]

Happy Pi day!

[kenberg]

y66, on 2022-March-14, 10:20, said:

Happy Pi day!

If you get exponentially Pi eyed, and add one for good measure, you are a big fat zero.
Don't ask!

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2022-March-14, 15:33, said:

If you get exponentially Pi eyed, and add one for good measure, you are a big fat zero.
Don't ask!

Or as my Dad used to say, Pi r round, cornbread r square

[y66]

Matt Yglesias said:

Idaho is booming (the @bendreyfuss effect), big urban-to-rural shift internal to the northeast and California, the arid plains continue to empty out, and I'm not really sure how to characterize the intra-south shift in population.

[y66]

Matt Yglesias said:

O. J. Simpson said:

He was wrong but I understand the sentiment.

[y66]

Quote

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter recently took 25 images of the Sun from a distance of 46 million miles that, when stitched all together, form the highest resolution photo of the Sun (and its corona) ever created.

https://kottke.org/2...-sun-ever-taken

[y66]

Eric Topol said:

Medical dogma is that people with heart failure need to adhere to a low salt diet. The largest randomized trial reported today failed to show any benefit for reducing clinical events

https://www.thelance...0369-5/fulltext

Enjoy your bacon.

[Gilithin]

y66, on 2022-April-04, 14:13, said:

Enjoy your bacon.

Except that there are plenty of studies highlighting the dangers of processed meats. So while taking additional salt may or may not be a risk factor (a single study is not conclusive evidence in itself) bacon is surely not the best suggestion regardless.

[pilowsky]

Gilithin, on 2022-April-04, 14:58, said:

Except that there are plenty of studies highlighting the dangers of processed meats. So while taking additional salt may or may not be a risk factor (a single study is not conclusive evidence in itself) bacon is surely not the best suggestion regardless.

Heart failure is a much more dangerous disease than most cancers.
The outcome from the day of first diagnosis is still abysmal.

In 2019 it was reported in the BMJ that "Survival rates in patients with heart failure were 75.9% (95% confidence interval 75.5% to 76.3%) at one year, 45.5% (45.1 to 46.0) at five years, 24.5% (23.9 to 25.0) at 10 years, and 12.7% (11.9 to 13.5) at 15 years. Table 3 shows survival rates by age and sex. Women had worse short term and long term outcomes than men (one year survival 74.5% v 77.2% (P<0.001) and 15 year survival 11.0% v 14.1% (P<0.001)). Age at diagnosis was a significant determinant of subsequent survival."

The reason that a reduction in dietary salt is recommended for the whole population is that it is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure.
Persistent high blood pressure causes target organ damage (blood vessels, heart, kidney brain etc) that may in turn lead to heart failure.
By the time you have heart failure the benefit of not eating salty bacon is considerably attenuated.

It's worth noting that a high-salt diet is generally associated with a high-fat, high-sugar diet.
Do the food mall experiment: where do you see the candidates for heart failure - at the salad bar or at Ray Kroc's cafe?
Plucking a single association (or comment from Topol) without understanding the full context is like opening 4NT and wondering why partner doesn't respond with 5H - 2 key cards and no queen.

[pilowsky]

y66, on 2022-April-04, 14:13, said:

Enjoy your bacon.

Your link doesn't work. And your comment bears no relation to the current debate about salt intake.
Or was it just an attempt at humour?
In any event a quick search reveals this from Eric Topol's twitter feed:
"Salt substitute really worked well to reduce major cardiovascular events in a large randomized trial conducted in China
@NEJM
today #ESCCongress2021
https://nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2105675?query=featured_home".


So you seem to be reprocessing a comment that Topol made about a study conducted using data from China that was based on information from 600 rural villages.


Suggesting that if you are a rural villager in China and have a very large salt intake (and where the rate of smoking is much higher) then maybe...

[y66]

I fixed the link in my post and here it is again along with a link to Topol's tweet. Sorry for the confusion and misrepresentation of the health risks of eating bacon, not to mention other health and environmental problems associated with industrial pork production.

Reduction of dietary sodium to less than 100 mmol in heart failure (SODIUM-HF): an international, open-label, randomised, controlled trial

Topol's tweet

re: the link problem -- it looks like the forum software incorrectly parses links containing parentheses.