The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

 The New York Times

The Book That Explains Our Cultural Stagnation

Partygoers at Art Basel Miami Beach.Credit...Calla Kessler for The New York Times

In May the literary critic Christian Lorentzen published a Substack newsletter about being bored. “Hollywood movies are boring. Television is boring. Pop music is boring. The art world is boring. Broadway is boring. Books from big publishing are boring,” he wrote.

Since I have been rather bored, too, I paid $5 to read the entire piece, but was unconvinced by his conclusion, which lays the blame for artistic stasis on the primacy of marketing. The risk aversion of cultural conglomerates can’t explain why there’s not more interesting indie stuff bubbling up. I’d hoped that when the black hole of the Donald Trump presidency ended, redirected energy might allow for a cultural efflorescence. So far that hasn’t happened.

An obvious caveat: I’m a white middle-aged parent, so whatever is truly cool is, by definition, happening outside my purview. Still, when I go to coffee shops where young people are hanging out, the music is often either the same music I listened to when I was young, or music that sounds just like it. One of the year’s biggest hit singles is a Kate Bush song that came out in 1985. I can think of no recent novel or film that provoked passionate debate. Public arguments people do have about art — about appropriation and offense, usually — have grown stale and repetitive, almost rote.

The articles written about the mildly transgressive Manhattan micro-scene known as Dimes Square are themselves evidence of a cultural drought; chroniclers of the zeitgeist are desperate for new fodder. (I’m guilty of writing one such piece myself.) Lots of people are looking for something scintillating and new and are not finding it.

The best explanation I’ve read for our current cultural malaise comes at the end of W. David Marx’s forthcoming “Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change,” a book that is not at all boring and that subtly altered how I see the world.

Marx posits cultural evolution as a sort of perpetual motion machine driven by people’s desire to ascend the social hierarchy. Artists innovate to gain status, and people unconsciously adjust their tastes to either signal their status tier or move up to a new one. As he writes in the introduction, “Status struggles fuel cultural creativity in three important realms: competition between socioeconomic classes, the formation of subcultures and countercultures, and artists’ internecine battles.”

One of his most resonant examples involves the avant-garde composer John Cage. When Cage presented his discordant orchestral piece “Atlas Ecliptically” at Lincoln Center in 1964, many patrons walked out. Members of the orchestra hissed at Cage when he took his bow; a few even smashed his electronic equipment. But Cage’s work inspired other artists, leading “historians and museum curators to embrace him as a crucial figure in the development of postmodern art,” which in turn led audiences to pay respectful attention to his work. (Yoko Ono once divided the history of music into Before Cage and After Cage.)

“There was a virtuous cycle for Cage: His originality, mystery and influence provided him artist status; this encouraged serious institutions to explore his work; the frequent engagement with his work imbued Cage with cachet among the public, who then received a status boost for taking his work seriously,” writes Marx. For Marx, this isn’t a matter of pretension. Cachet, he writes, “opens minds to radical propositions of what art can be and how we should perceive it.”

The internet, Marx writes in his book’s closing section, changes this dynamic. With so much content out there, the chance that others will recognize the meaning of any obscure cultural signal declines. Challenging art loses its prestige. Besides, in the age of the internet, taste tells you less about a person. You don’t need to make your way into any social world to develop a familiarity with Cage — or, for that matter, with underground hip-hop, weird performance art, or rare sneakers.

In some ways, this is great. People can easily find things they like and waste less time pretending to like things that they don’t. Using cultural capital to signal your place in the status hierarchy is snobby and exclusionary. (Avant-garde art can also be, as Susan Sontag wrote, pretty boring itself.)

But people are, obviously, no less obsessed with their own status today than they were during times of fecund cultural production. It’s just that the markers of high social rank have become more philistine. When the value of cultural capital is debased, writes Marx, it makes “popularity and economic capital even more central in marking status.” As a result, he says, there’s “less incentive for individuals to both create and celebrate culture with high symbolic complexity.”

It makes more sense for a parvenu to fake a ride on a private jet than to fake an interest in contemporary art. We live in a time of rapid and disorienting shifts in gender, religion and technology. Aesthetically, thanks to the internet, it’s all quite dull.

 

Forever Chemicals No More? PFAS

Forever Chemicals No More? PFAS Are Destroyed, With New Technique

By Carl Zimmer NY Times

The harmful molecules are everywhere, but chemists have made progress in developing a method to break them down.

Firefighting foam leftover from a tanker truck accident in Pennsylvania. PFAS chemicals are everywhere, including in foams, nonstick Teflon pans, dental floss and fast food wrappers.Credit...Jana Shea/Alamy

A team of scientists has found a cheap, effective way to destroy so-called forever chemicals, a group of compounds that pose a global threat to human health.

The chemicals — known as PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances — are found in a spectrum of products and contaminate water and soil around the world. Left on their own, they are remarkably durable, remaining dangerous for generations.

Scientists have been searching for ways to destroy them for years. In a study, published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers rendered PFAS molecules harmless by mixing them with two inexpensive compounds at a low boil. In a matter of hours, the PFAS molecules fell apart.

“I was truly shocked,” said Shira Joudan, an environmental chemist at York University in Canada who was not involved in the new research.

The new technique might provide a way to destroy PFAS chemicals once they’ve been pulled out of contaminated water or soil. But William Dichtel, a chemist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study, said that a lot of effort lay ahead to make it work outside the confines of a lab. “Then we’d be in a real position to talk practicality,” he said.

Chemists first created PFAS compounds in the 1930s, and the chemicals soon proved to be remarkably good at repelling water and grease. The American company 3M used PFAS chemicals to create Scotchgard, which protects fabric and carpets. PFAS chemicals put the nonstick in nonstick Teflon pans. Firefighters began putting out fires with PFAS-laced foam. It’s easy to encounter PFAS in our everyday lives, including in the dental floss we thread between our teeth and the food wrappers used in restaurants.

They’re also harmful. Even low chronic levels of PFAS exposure have been linked to an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, low birth weight and reduced immunity.

“Nearly every American has them in their bodies,” said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group that conducts research on PFAS chemicals.

Handling a PFAS-laced food wrapper or wearing a pair of jeans treated with the chemicals can expose people to their dangers. But PFAS chemicals can also reach us through the environment.

They are released into the air from factories that use them in manufacturing. Some companies have dumped PFAS chemicals, which have spread into rivers and groundwater. The Department of Defense has sprayed PFAS chemicals on its bases during firefighting training exercises.

Once PFAS chemicals escape into the environment, they are pretty much there for good because their molecular structure lets them resist decay. Each molecule is a long carbon chain studded with fluorine atoms. The bonds between the carbon and fluorine are so strong that they can’t be broken by water, enzymes from bacteria or other natural substances.

As a result, PFAS chemicals have accumulated in water and soil across the planet. Earlier this month, a team of scientists reported that they could even find PFAS in raindrops falling on Tibet and Antarctica. Many of the samples they analyzed had PFAS concentrations higher than the level the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency considers safe.

“We’ve really polluted the whole world with this stuff,” Dr. Dichtel said.

Although the dangers of PFAS have been known for years, governments have been slow to grapple with them. In June, the Biden Administration announced new measures to monitor the chemicals, cut down on their release and deal with the damage they can do to human health.

A crucial step in undoing the damage of PFAS chemicals is removing them from the environment. Dr. Dichtel has been a part of this effort, inventing sticky polymers that can pull the molecules out of contaminated water.

But on its own, filtering out PFAS is not a complete solution. “Most technologies for PFAS treatment in use today only serve to remove PFAS from water, but that just concentrates the PFAS wastes,” said Timothy Strathmann, an environmental engineer at the Colorado School of Mines.

A common method to get rid of this concentrated PFAS is to burn it. But some studies indicate that incineration fails to destroy all of the chemicals and lofts the surviving pollution into the air. In May, the Defense Department halted its incineration of fire-suppressing foam.

Chemists have been searching for safer ways to get rid of PFAS, but it’s been difficult to find methods that are cheap and safe. In 2020, Dr. Dichtel stumbled across a possible treatment that was surprisingly simple.

At the end of a PFAS molecule’s carbon-fluorine chain, it is capped by a cluster of other atoms. Many types of PFAS molecules have heads made of a carbon atom connected to a pair of oxygen atoms, for example.

Dr. Dichtel came across a study in which chemists at the University of Alberta found an easy way to pry carbon-oxygen heads off other chains. He suggested to his graduate student, Brittany Trang, that she give it a try on PFAS molecules.

Dr. Trang was skeptical. She had tried to pry off carbon-oxygen heads from PFAS molecules for months without any luck. According to the Alberta recipe, all she’d need to do was mix PFAS with a common solvent called dimethyl sulfoxide, or DMSO, and bring it to a boil.

“I didn’t want to try it initially because I thought it was too simple,” Dr. Trang said. “If this happens, people would have known this already.”

An older grad student advised her to give it a shot. To her surprise, the carbon-oxygen head fell off.

It appears that DMSO makes the head fragile by altering the electric field around the PFAS molecule, and without the head, the bonds between the carbon atoms and the fluorine atoms become weak as well. “This oddly simple method worked,” said Dr. Trang, who finished her Ph.D. last month and is now a journalist.

Unfortunately, Dr. Trang discovered how well DMSO worked in March 2020 and was promptly shut out of the lab by the pandemic. She spent the next two and a half months dreaming of other ingredients which she could add to the DMSO soup to hasten the destruction of PFAS chemicals.

On Dr. Trang’s return, she started testing a number of chemicals until she found one that worked. It was sodium hydroxide, the chemical in lye.

When she heated the mixture to temperatures between about 175 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit, most of the PFAS molecules broke down in a matter of hours. Within days, the remaining fluorine-bearing byproducts broke down into harmless molecules as well.

Dr. Trang and Dr. Dichtel teamed up with other chemists at U.C.L.A. and in China to figure out what was happening. The sodium hydroxide hastens the destruction of the PFAS molecules by eagerly bonding with the fragments as they fall apart. The fluorine atoms lose their link to the carbon atoms, becoming harmless.

“Once you give it a chance, this thing will unzip,” Dr. Dichtel said.

Dr. Strathmann, who was not involved in the research, said that the new study was important because it was based on chemistry profoundly different from other methods that were being studied. “We’re going to need some creative solutions,” he said.

Dr. Dichtel and his colleagues are now investigating how to scale up their method to handle large amounts of PFAS chemicals. They’re also looking at other types of PFAS molecules with different heads to see if they can pry those off as well.

“It’s a huge challenge, but it’s in our grasp,” he said.

“This research is desperately needed,” Dr. Stoiber said. But she cautioned that even if the new technique works outside the lab, it will not solve the PFAS problem all by itself because the scale of the problem has gotten so big — and is getting bigger.

Scientists estimate that over 50,000 tons of PFAS are emitted into the atmosphere each year. Meanwhile, chemical companies are inventing new PFAS molecules at a brisk clip.

“The reality of the situation is that there is really no magic solution right now other than undertaking the hard work of recognizing just how difficult the problem is and turning off the tap so that we don’t make it any worse,” she said.

Carl Zimmer writes the “Matter” column. He is the author of fourteen books, including “Life's Edge: The Search For What It Means To Be Alive

The MAGA Army

The MAGA Army that wants to overturn the Socialist regime in Washington. 

Can You Pass the 10-Second Balance Test?

This simple, often neglected skill can pay huge dividends later in life.

By Hilary Achauer NY Times

Len Kaplan began having difficulty walking in a straight line when he was in his 50s. Scoliosis combined with compressed discs in his back were causing his balance to deteriorate.

“Physical therapy, regular exercises, just wasn’t getting the job done. I needed something different,” Len, now 80, said.

Around that time Len and his wife, Ginny, took a cruise with twice-daily Tai Chi classes. Ginny, 77, said they loved Tai Chi — which consists of slow, controlled movements and deep breathing — so much they found a class in nearby Yorba Linda, Calif., when they returned home. The habit stuck.

Len and Ginny have now been taking Tai Chi and balance classes regularly for more than 15 years. Len is able to easily walk in a straight line and his balance has improved. Last September while visiting Greece, Len and Ginny decided to hike the nearly 100 steps to the top of the Acropolis. Up they went, over slippery, uneven steps with no hand rails. They made it to the top and were rewarded with ancient ruins and sweeping views of Athens below.

“At my age I know people who would go, ‘Oh no, I’ll stand at the bottom in the parking lot and take pictures, thank you,’” Ginny said, “but how fun is that?”

Balance training is an important but often-neglected skill, one that impacts both our longevity and our quality of life, beginning around age 40. A study in June by a Brazilian team found that 20 percent of the 1,700 older adults tested couldn’t balance on one leg for 10 seconds or more. And that inability to balance was associated with a twofold risk of death from any cause within 10 years.

If you have tried out the one-legged test (with a wall or chair nearby for safety) and didn’t pass, don’t panic. It’s never too late to start working on balance training, even if you can pass the 10 second test, especially if you’re over age 50. This doesn’t have to mean handstands and acrobatics. In fact, you can start at home without any equipment.

What the 10-Second Test Can (and Can’t) Tell Us

Falls are the second leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide, yet doctors don’t have an easy way to check balance, like they do blood pressure or pulse. In this test, which can be done in less than a minute, the patient gets three attempts to do a 10-second one-legged stand on either leg.

“The idea here was just to come up with a really simple test that might be an indication of a person’s ability to balance,” said Dr. Jonathan Myers, a professor at Stanford University, researcher at the Palo Alto VA Health Care System and an author of the balance study. He said the inability to perform this task was powerfully predictive of mortality. In the study, one in five people could not manage it.

“With age, strength and balance tend to decrease and that can result in frailty. Frailty is a really big thing now that the population is aging,” Dr. Myers said.

Balance problems can be caused by a variety of factors, many of them age-related, said Dr. Lewis Lipsitz, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and the director of the Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife.

When your vision is affected by cataracts, or the nerve signals from your feet to your brain slow down, this makes it more difficult to balance. While it’s impossible to prevent all types of age-related decline, you can counteract the impact on your balance through specialized training and building strength.

“There’s a downward spiral of the people who don’t go out, who don’t walk, who don’t exercise, who don’t do balance training, and they become weaker and weaker. And muscle weakness is another important risk factor for falls,” he said.

Researchers have previously connected balance and strength with mortality, finding that the ability to rise from the floor to a standing position, balance on one leg for 30 seconds with one eye closed and even walk at a brisk pace are all tied to longevity.

But no test is perfect. Dan Layne, who runs the Center for Balance, where Len and Ginny study Tai Chi, said the Brazilian paper caused a stir in his classes, which include balance and fall prevention. Many of his students, whose ages range from 30 to 105, tried it and failed. They approached him, worried.

“I’ve got a lot of people that can’t balance for 10 seconds, but their balance control is fine. They’re not falling and they’re living long lives,” Mr. Layne said. Even if your vision is impaired, or your coordination is affected by arthritis, you can improve your balance — at any age.

“The body is very adaptive. And if one pathway doesn’t work to maintain your balance, by training other pathways in the body and the brain you can overcome some disabilities,” Dr. Lipsitz said.

Balance-Enhancing Activities

Balance training goes hand-in-hand with strength training. The stronger the muscles in your legs, glutes, feet and core, the better your balance. You can improve your balance by taking Tai Chi or yoga classes, but weight training, dancing, rock climbing or aerobics classes are also excellent ways to work on your balance skills.

“Really any type of exercise seems to help with balance and fall risk,” said Dr. Avril Mansfield, a senior scientist at KITE-Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, who specializes in movement science.

But some forms of exercise are better than others. If your only movement is walking on a smooth surface, with no side-to-side movement, it’s not going to significantly improve your balance, said Dr. Rachael Seidler, a professor in the Department of Applied Physiology and Kinesiology at the University of Florida.

If you really want to improve your balance, Dr. Seidler said, you’ll get the most benefit focusing on several specific exercises.

Training Your Balance at Home

So how do you get started? Fortunately, most balance training doesn’t have to require any special equipment, and you can start at home. As with any new exercise program, be sure to talk to your physician first, and have a chair nearby to grab onto if you feel unsteady.

Try these five balance exercises two to three times a week, gradually increasing the difficulty as you feel comfortable and start to improve your strength.

Single-leg stance

Stand behind a chair, holding on with both hands. Lift one leg off the ground, bending the lifted knee toward your chest and stand on one leg for five seconds. Repeat five times, then do the same with your other leg. Too easy? Hold onto the chair with one hand, release both hands or try closing your eyes.

Body-weight squats

Stand with feet hip distance apart, toes forward. Bend your knees and lower yourself until your thighs are parallel to the floor, keeping your weight in your heels. Extend your arms in front of you if you need help with balance, or squat lower if it’s too easy. Repeat 10 times. Hold a dumbbell to add to the difficulty.

Start on your hands and knees, back flat. Lift one leg straight behind you and lift the opposite arm straight in front, so you are balancing on one knee and one hand. Hold for five to 10 seconds, then repeat on the other side.

Stand behind a chair, holding on with both hands. Lift one leg to the side, trying to keep your body as still as possible. Repeat with the other leg, five times per side. Increase the intensity by holding the leg up longer or letting go of the chair

Stand up straight and put one foot directly in front of the other, with your heel touching your toe. Keep equal weight on both feet, knees slightly bent. Hold for 30 seconds, then switch feet, repeating three times. Close your eyes to make it more difficult.

Hilary Achauer is a freelance writer focused on fitness, health, wellness, and parenting.

 

The Power of Talking to Yourself

 The Power of Talking to Yourself

“External self-talk,” as it’s clinically known, gets a bad rap. But it can be great for pushing through all sorts of obstacles.

 

By Paul McAdory The New York Times

Trembling in bed at night, my blankets pulled tight over my head save for an opening I left my face, I would whisper my troubles to my closest confidant: Wall. Wall was the wall nearest my childhood bed and, other than the occasional stray bang or muffled skittering, a nonverbal communicator. That didn’t stop me from hearing and heeding his counsel. Nor did his cheap facade — brownish faux-wood paneling littered with stickers — temper my belief in his tender depths. Wall was a boy like me, but calmer, cooler, more reflective. He listened to me, debated me, grasped the ends of sentences I didn’t finish. Off him I could bounce ideas as well as balls until sleep finally conquered fright.

I no longer speak to Wall or to any of his relations: Laces, Ceiling, cantankerous Floor. We seem to have forgotten how to communicate with one another. Besides, we hardly see each other anymore. Instead, I speak aloud to myself. At the museum where I work, I enumerate the day’s tasks and the tools they require: drill, star bit, mag tip, level. In the supermarket, I interrogate my mental shopping list and disparage myself for its illegibility: We need, um … noodles? Eggs? Do we? (Expletive.) I’ve become what I always was: my own Wall. 

Psychologists call what I do “external self-talk” to differentiate it from regular self-talk, otherwise known as one’s internal monologue or dialogue. Plenty of people do it — just watch a tennis match if you don’t believe me. It’s viewed as normal within certain bounds, even beneficial, though speaker discretion is advised. Like many normal behaviors, it’s also weird if the wrong person observes it, especially when you’re young.

I’ve become what I always was: my own Wall.

As a kid, I knew that if I talked to myself on school grounds, I risked becoming That Freak Who Talks to Himself, and that the act’s popular associations — acute psychosis, maladjustment — tend toward the negative. Stigma kept me quiet, but its potency diminished as I aged. Also: Look around. People walk the streets talking and gesticulating, tiny white buds in their ears. They pontificate to phone cameras. Determining which unseen audience a pedestrian is addressing has become too difficult a calculation to bother solving; fading self-consciousness and the strange effects of consumer electronics have freed me.

Still, I tend to be alone in my apartment or office for my liveliest conversations. They often kick up when I reach an impasse while writing and follow a regular loop. Pressure accumulates until release becomes inevitable. No longer will my internal monologue suffice. The harder reality of spoken language starts to steam out of my mouth. I curse myself. I catch myself. My mutterings invert to a plastic positivity: You’re not the worst person; you needn’t disappear into the ether. Rather, you are good and capable and quite possibly fine. Referring to myself as “you” happens unconsciously, as the voice speaking and the ear hearing edge apart. The gap widens. First person jumps to second. When my assurances fail to assure me, I try a Beckett impression and general advice: You must go on, you’ll go on. As stuck as ever, I gradually transform my pep talk into a kind of psychodynamic session with the self through which I discern the shape of my blockage. I get practical: Break your problem into parts, describe what’s missing, incorporate what impedes you. The distance of “you” finally affords perspective and authority. I make a change. I call it progress. Bubbles of genuine self-belief surge: You can do this; then, I can do this; then, Let’s do this. How could I have doubted myself? Later I’ll sight another impasse, and the process will repeat.

Others might prefer to call a friend for help. Why not turn outward? Isn’t this talking to yourself a little antisocial? While I have yet to forswear friendship and its succor entirely — maybe one day! — I have found that vocalized self-analysis, and the willingness to trudge through intellectual and moral quandaries in noisy solitude, is a valuable complement to more traditional conversational outlets, especially when it comes to creative thinking. When I asked friends if they talk to themselves, one described free-associating and playacting to prepare for high-stakes meetings. Another friend, a photographer, refines his intended aesthetic for a job by talking it through, out loud, and anticipates how he’ll deal with hypothetical difficulties come shoot day. 

Clearly, the twin phenomena of wellness and self-optimization thrum under the hood here. One can imagine the S.E.O.-inspired headlines: “How Talking to Yourself Can Help You Work Smarter, Faster.” Fair enough, but external self-talk is also a means of negotiating who one is and might be. The fear we associate with a person who publicly talks to themselves at length, and without apparent concern for or awareness of the impact their performance has on those around them, is the fear of an eroding self, its supposed constancy and singularity unraveling, its loose threads chatting with each other chaotically. But the act of speaking to myself is a reminder that constancy and singularity are illusory to begin with. That my multiplicity is, in turn, a kind of promise: I needn’t be as I am. You needn’t, either. We might be different than expected in a minor way. Or we might be able to formulate a difficult sentence, which might lead to a paragraph, then a fresh piece, then a new person. Probably not — very probably talking to yourself will not change the world. It may not even radically change you. But the dialogue between current and potential selves is small proof that such change is possible. Or maybe that’s just something I like to tell myself.