twentyfour - Advanced

Experiments Are Building the Case to Terraform Mars

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 09:21:00 +0000

Whether it’s extreme climate change, an impending asteroid impact, scientific curiosity or even space tourism, there are compelling reasons to think about calling Mars our second home. But before expanding humanity’s cosmic real estate holdings, scientists will need to make the Red Planet feel a little more like our blue marble.

That, in a nutshell, is the goal of researchers thinking about ways to terraform another planet.

Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, has suggested we nuke the polar ice caps on Mars to unlock liquid water and release clouds of CO2 that would thicken the atmosphere and warm the planet. This notion got some press last year when Major League Baseball player and amateur astrophysicist Jose Canseco tweeted: “By my calculations if we nuked the polar ice caps on Mars we would make an ocean of 36 feet deep across the whole planet,” thereby enshrining the idea in our popular imagination. Giant mirrors concentrating sunlight on the poles and smashing an entire moon into Mars also top the list of grandiose proposals to Earth-ify the Red Planet.

While we may not utilize the kind of cataclysmic forces that some futurists imagine, there are very real efforts, backed up by solid science, currently underway that are building a case for terraforming, one small step for mankind at a time.

Martian Greenhouse

Technically, we’re already getting practice terraforming at a planet-wide scale.

“There’s one solution to terraforming that makes sense when you work out the numbers and it’s something that we know how to do,” says Chris McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “And that’s warming the planet by greenhouse gases. That’s basically how we’re warming up the Earth.”

The basic plan for creating a livable environment on Mars goes like this: Introduce enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to begin a cycle of warming, melting the polar ice caps and releasing CO2. This would kickstart a feedback loop of warming as more and more greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere. When the atmosphere thickens and temperatures warm to the point where life could survive, scientists would introduce hardy microbes that would synthesize the gaseous chemicals, beef up the atmosphere and add molecular diversity to the once-barren planet. Over time, we’d plant trees to provide oxygen, and at some point the Red Planet would be fit for human habitation. All that’s left is patience. Generations and generations of patience.

Based on this plan, McKay estimates that we could fully terraform Mars in about 100,000 years.

There are efforts currently under way to study how we might introduce extremophile bacteria and hardy plants to the Martian environment, once the process of warming is under way.

EXPOSE

The EXPOSE experiments were a collection of crates filled with different bacteria, lichens, fungi and seeds that were attached to the outside of the International Space Station and left exposed for months at a time. Scientists wanted to determine if microbes could withstand the punishing cold and damaging radiation of outer space. Organisms that could reawaken from a dormant stage once back on Earth could be good candidates to colonize another planet. In the first round of testing, a few organisms and seeds grew and reproduced once they returned to Earth — namely those that were shielded from solar radiation. Organisms placed in a simulated Martian environment in the experiment did even better.

This experiment showed that there are Earthly organisms that could theoretically survive on another planet. McKay notes that EXPOSE was designed to identify organisms could survive in space, not necessarily organisms that could populate another planet. Still, the research reveals the kinds of microbes that might thrive on an otherwise inhospitable planet. Part of the second round of the experiment, EXPOSE-R2, just returned from the ISS in March along with Scott Kelly. The results of that experiment should come out in the fall.

Making Our Own Microbes

Instead of looking for Martian-ready microbes that already exist on Earth, scientists could someday build them. A group of scientists funded by DARPA is working on compiling a genetic library that they describe as the “Google Maps of genomes”, according to Motherboard. The database would allow researchers to quickly find genes that encode for useful characteristics from a database of different organisms. In this way, they could pick and choose from multiple genomes to create a microbe that possesses resistance to cold, the ability to thrive in low-pressure environments and the capacity to produce its own food, among other things — all attributes needed to colonize Mars.

Having the genetic code for these characteristics at hand would allow researchers to use CRISPR and other gene-editing techniques to create an organism that combines a host of useful characteristics into one microbe. While we don’t know if any one microorganism on Earth could survive on another planet, by picking and choosing from multiple genomes, we could, perhaps, engineer one that does.

It’s All in the Dome

Instead of changing a whole planet, why not just terraform a few choice locations? This idea, called para-terraforming, would use large domes to enclose a parcel of land that could be engineered for sustainable habitation. Plants grown inside would provide both food and oxygen, supported by bacteria and microbes that would synthesize the chemicals necessary to support life.

An Indiana-based company called Space Hardware Optimization Technology (SHOT) has proposed such a concept, supported by funding from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts, and is working to develop technologies needed to bring the idea to fruition. SHOT hopes to one day send a test environment to Mars, filled with all of the organisms and systems needed to sustain life. It would take the form of a small dome, rooted in Martian soil, that would become a life raft of sorts for the microbes inside. It’s basically the 100,000-year plan, but on a smaller scale.

Creating a Feedback Loop

NASA is also testing the limits of Earth’s foliage in a separate experiment high in the mountains in Mexico. McKay serves as the project’s senior advisor, and he says it is an initial exploration of how plants cope with extreme environments. Scientists will place several species of trees and plants in insulated domes above the tree line where they wouldn’t otherwise survive.

They hope that sheltering the trees will “trigger a sort of a feedback where the organisms get going and they enrich the soil and they create conditions that are more favorable for life, which allows the organisms to continue growing even if we remove the domes,” says McKay.

Such a process would likely be instrumental to terraforming Mars, where the alterations would have to proceed in a series of small steps, each increasing the capacity of the planet to support life.

“As you’re warming up Mars, initially it will all have to be artificial,” says McKay. “But, at some point, it gets warm enough that you can put in plants, simple hardy plants, and at some point it gets warm enough that you can put in trees.”

And the process continues from there, slowly introducing greenhouse gases and breathable elements to the atmosphere, all in the hopes of creating a planet where humans could safely step outside on a Martian evening and look back fondly at our blue-green homeland.

VOCABULARY

amateur - любитель

Getting YouTube Stars to Sell Your Product

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 15:12:00 +0000

YouTube influencers are a sought-after breed. One word from these connoisseurs of cool, these heralders of hipness, and traffic to a website or store soars, products fly off shelves and brands become blockbusters overnight.

But these people can be picky, quirky and hard to connect with — especially for a new brand roaming about the Internet in search of some love and respect.

That was the problem Aihui Ong, the founder of a small healthy snack subscription business, Love With Food, was having.

She could see that some new business was coming to her site from YouTube, where current customers had made videos showing how much they liked her snack boxes. But how to scale that up? How to find those influencers with really big followings and get them on her side?

And that is where the start-up FameBit came in. It is a self-service, online marketplace where brands and YouTube influencers — especially the smaller ones — can connect.

Ms. Ong began using the platform about a year ago and now most of her marketing budget is devoted to YouTube videos. It’s been successful for her. Love With Food’s revenue last year was about $5 million, year-over-year sales are up 15 percent and the cost of acquiring a customer is down 30 percent.

FameBit was founded by high school friends — David Kierzkowski, chief executive, and Agnes Kozera, chief operations officer. (The company was also the beneficiary of a Silicon Valley seed fund, 500 Start-Ups.)

It capitalizes on the rapid growth of influencer marketing, where video creators with a sizable following on YouTube — often considered authorities in a particular niche — feature a brand’s products or services in their videos. An influencer recommendation is akin to that of a friend or family member and is trusted by more than 80 percent of consumers worldwide, according to a 2015 survey by Nielsen.

“When you enlist an influencer to market your product, you get an audience that is very well disposed to that influencer’s opinions because they are fans,” said Paul Verna, a media analyst for the research firm eMarketer in New York.

FameBit allows a small business like Love With Food to advertise opportunities for small to midsize influencers to feature its product or service in videos. These influencers are not great YouTube stars but have sizable, loyal followings. They are also entrepreneurs, whose revenue comes from ads and corporate sponsors whose products or services they feature.

On FameBit, an influencer responds to an ad from a brand (most brands are small companies) with a proposal that includes a bid for the work and the reasons that the influencer is a good fit for it. Each influencer using FameBit has a profile on the platform that includes examples of that person’s work, a demographic breakdown of the audience, and that audience’s level of engagement, such the average length of time they watch a video and number of times it is shared.

Influencers with at least 5,000 subscribers on YouTube, Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Tumblr or Facebook can use FameBit.

FameBit recently teamed up with the e-commerce platform Shopify to enable FameBit’s influencers to open online stores. Likewise, brands using Shopify can search for influencers on FameBit to promote their products.

High-priced influencers with millions of subscribers are generally out of reach for small businesses and are often part of multichannel networks, which function like talent agencies. The networks aggregate YouTube videos around niche topics like beauty, fashion or food and sell ads against it, while providing the YouTube stars they represent with production, promotion and marketing services. In exchange, the networks take a fairly substantial cut of the ad revenue, Mr. Verna said.

Although influencer marketing got its start on YouTube, it has expanded in the last year to encompass other video platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter and Periscope. That is because video creators are increasingly seen as the best way to reach young consumers.

Most entities that offer to connect YouTube talent with brands function as a kind of middleman, facilitating the connection. FameBit’s marketplace is different, allowing influencers and brands to connect directly with one another, in real time. Brands can sign up free, and when an influencer is hired, payment is held until the content is created, approved and published. FameBit takes a 10 percent fee from both sides of the transaction. Its revenue now is about $1 million a month. The company, which is profitable, raised $1.5 million a year ago.

The popularity of influencer marketing has been spurred by the rapidly rising use of ad blocker s, especially for mobile devices. Ad blocking grew by nearly 50 percent from June 2014 to June 2015, according to a report from Adobe and PageFair, a company that tracks ad blocking. Influencer marketing is becoming a way around that.

“It enables brands to still get their messages across,” said Mr. Verna at eMarketer.

Most brands on FameBit pay influencers $500 to $2,000 to feature a product or service. More than 23,000 influencers — largely video creators — use the platform now, Ms. Kozera said, as do more than 3,500 brands, from smaller start-ups like Dollar Shave Club to much bigger names like Adidas and L’Oreal.

Loey Lane, an influencer creating videos about beauty and fashion, has been using FameBit for about a year. Ms. Lane is a plus-size woman and her audience is primarily other plus-size women. When she began using FameBit, Ms. Lane had 20,000 subscribers; now she has 600,000.

Although she was a part of the multichannel network StyleHaul before using FameBit, Ms. Lane’s first opportunities to work with brands came through FameBit. She gets offers for brand partnerships through StyleHaul, but says those opportunities are presented to her at StyleHaul’s discretion; she doesn’t get to pitch herself directly to brands.

“I definitely wasn’t getting those offers when I was smaller and first starting out,” she said. “FameBit was where I got my start with brand partnerships.”

When her video channel first started, Ms. Lane earned about 5 percent of her revenue from integrating brands into videos and the rest came from Google ads.

“As my influence went up I was able to ask for more money, because my platform had a bigger reach,” she said. “Now, even though every video I do isn’t sponsored, a solid 50 percent of my income is from sponsored content.”

She is very careful about the products and brands with which she works. “I only work with those I really like, otherwise it could negatively affect both my credibility and the brand’s.” Ms. Lane always discloses if a video is sponsored by a particular brand. She now earns between four and five figures a month, depending on the time of year and industries she is covering.

Smaller influencers like Ms. Lane often have a lot of sway with consumers, said Coltrane Curtis, founder and managing partner of Team Epiphany in New York and Portland, Ore., a full-service marketing agency whose services include helping brands leverage influencers. (The company does not use FameBit.)

Engagement is what is believable to consumers, not celebrity, Mr. Curtis said. “If the influencer is considered an expert in a particular area and their subscribers follow them because of that, those subscribers will also listen to them.”

VOCABULARY

influencers - авторитеты
blockbusters - блокбастеры

The New Argument About Freedom

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 10:05:00 +0000

There has been a recent surge of interest in the old problem of free will. But away from time-worn debates over the questions ‘Are we free?’ and ‘Are we morally responsible?’ some fresh waters are at last in reach. As I will show, some progress can be made here by putting the age-old problem of determinism aside and by giving up the libertarian ghost. This will leave us open to asking new, clear and sensible questions in a debate that is surely close to everyone’s heart.

Traditionally, conflicting positions on free will have diverged and defined themselves according to the question: ‘Are free will and moral responsibility compatible with determinism’? It does seem that we are free to act, if our choice is not the result of external coercion and reflects our own desires, beliefs and deliberations. This is enough for ‘compatibilists’ to grant us moral responsibility for these actions and declare that free will is compatible with determinism.

However ‘libertarians’ are steadfast in their plea for persons to be truly deserving of praise and blame. If determinism is true then the situations in which we make our choices, and the desires and beliefs upon which we base them, are the inevitable result of chains of cause and effect starting long before our births. So in what sense can we be truly responsible for them? To secure the libertarian quest for moral responsibility it is required that a person is self-determined, rather than merely not physically determined by something else or the result of chance. But as Galen Strawson has demonstrated, any attempts at establishing this will lead to a self-defeating infinite regress.

Consider that a choice or free action must be done for a reason to be non-arbitrary. The reason can be in the form of principles, preferences or values. But if someone is responsible for their actions, they must act in accordance with principles, preferences or values they themselves have freely chosen: that is, one must be responsible for the preferences upon which one acts. The question must then arise, where do these preferences come from? In order to be responsible for our preferences, etc, they too must be chosen in a reasoned and conscious fashion. But for this to be the case, one would have to exist prior to that choice, with a certain set of preferences about how to choose one’s preferences in a reasoned and conscious fashion. And so it goes on. It seems then that being the sort of person one is, having the desires and beliefs one does, is something over which we cannot have ultimate control – it’s only the result of our upbringing, etc. And one’s life and all one does is an unfolding of non-self-chosen preferences. So ultimately speaking, one is not free in any meaningful sense. Determinism is not the problem with responsibility, then; rather, it’s the incoherence of the libertarian quest. As Strawson says, “True self-determination is impossible because it requires the actual completion of an infinite regress of choices and principles of choice”.

What is striking about this is that since the argument didn’t appeal to determinism, it seems that the problem that has been the bane of the free will debate can be dispensed with. This realisation opens up a whole new avenue of investigation. Determinism is moot, but this does not mean that the issue of moral responsibility is also dispensed with. Rather the question becomes something like “Is moral responsibility compatible with the ultimate absence of libertarian free will?”

Strawson’s approach to this question is to take the same line as the hard determinist: he concludes that moral responsibility is impossible, and hence that it would be wrong to praise or blame anyone on account of his or her actions. In response, Professor Saul Smilansky, author of Free Will and Illusion (2000), claims that Strawson demonstrates the impossibility of libertarian free will, but not of moral responsibility; even though libertarianism is incoherent so that ultimate responsibility eludes us, there still remains the real and important compatibilist sense in which we are free to act and so can take responsibility for our actions. For the compatibilist, distinguishing between an action that was coerced and one that was conducted with autonomy is relevant to the way we should treat the agent. Consider Adam, Beryl and Cheryl. Adam steals something whilst Beryl does not. Cheryl also steals, but is a kleptomaniac. The hard determinist perspective hold all morally equal – as morally unresponsible. From the compatibilist perspective, however, since both Adam and Beryl were able to resist, yet only Beryl did, there are grounds for holding Adam responsible. However, since Cheryl is a born kleptomaniac, we have reason to distinguish her from Adam. Despite some potential ultimate injustice in holding Adam responsible and punishing him, to hold Cheryl responsible and punish her would be much more unjust. In fact, the failure of hard determinism in distinguishing between such cases shows its inadequacy.

It has been shown that determinism need no longer be our main concern in considering moral responsibility, since the problem over it arises whether determinism is true or false. The futile search for libertarian free will can also at last be laid to rest. I have tentatively suggested what seems the most fruitful avenue of investigation from this point: this is also Smilansky’s suggestion, to “start from the collapse that results from the realization of the absence of libertarian free will and its implications, and then reconstruct the free will related conceptual world on the basis of the shallower compatibilist resources” (from a personal correspondence).

A revolution is occurring in the debate on free will that requires the renouncement of instinctively-held ideals and beliefs. The first step is to renounce the idea that the central problem concerns determinism. This will in turn pave the way for the truth about libertarianism to be seen. Giving up libertarianism, however, isn’t a step to be taken lightly, since it encapsulates the kind of freedom we normatively think we have and need. The greatest obstacle therefore, is going to be whether people can live with the truth concerning free will.

VOCABULARY

coercion - принуждение
establishing - налаживание
incoherence - согласованность

How Foods Affect Mental And Emotional Health

Sat, 28 May 2016 15:35:00 +0000

How Foods Affect Mental And Emotional Health

In an interesting story about a family who followed an optimum diet of chiefly fresh fruits, complemented by some nuts and seeds, the three children in the family had been following a predominantly all-fruit diet for several years. During that period, they were extremely well-behaved. They were kind and gracious to their parents and to each other. They cooperated in their work and play with no signs of irritability.

As an experiment, the mother one day fed the children several slices of whole wheat bread. Within an hour after the meal, the children were fighting among themselves and had several outbursts of anger and emotional fits.

Coincidental? Perhaps, but consider that many people are allergic to wheat products and that wheat eating is usually associated with warlike populations.

The point here is that when a person follows a pure, high-quality diet, any substandard foods consumed will quickly make their presence known by their effects on the mental and emotional states.

Not only does wheat eating result in health problems and consequent emotional and mental disturbances, but also eating foods high in fat tends to dull the mind and cloud the thinking. Fat digestion is so demanding that much blood is diverted away from the brain to the digestive system. As a result, the thinking processes become slower and a mild form of depression occurs.

The above examples represent only mild cases. When extremely poor-quality foods are eaten, their effects on the mind and emotions are much more dramatic—sometimes causing complete mental breakdowns and personality transformations. Unhealthful foods and their effects will be discussed later.

The effects of food on the mind have been studied for many thousands of years by Oriental philosophers. Many of these philosophers have gone so far as to categorize the effects that many commonly-eaten foods have on the mental state.

Classification of Foods

Although Western science has only recently discovered the relationship between mental states and nutrition, people in the Eastern countries have been aware of the effects of diet on the mind since around 4000 B.C.

The Bhagavad Gita, an ancient Hindu text on spiritual conduct, classifies foods into three types:

Pure foods (“sattvic”),
Stimulating foods (“rajasic”), and
Impure or rotten foods (“tamasic”).

Pure Foods

Pure foods, which consist primarily of fresh fruits and vegetables, are said to bring calmness and tranquility to the mind. These foods are reputed to increase the clarity of mind and sweetness of disposition. They are especially recommended by those desiring spiritual growth and a meditative mind.

Stimulating Foods

Stimulating foods including spices, meat, eggs, onions, etc., are said to create animal passions and to cause a restless, unsatisfied state of mind. These foods contribute to nervous disorders and emotional outbreaks.

Impure Foods

Impure foods which include putrified, processed and preserved foods, decrease thinking capacity, dull the senses and contribute to chronic mental ailments. They accelerate the aging process and cause early death.

Regardless of our particular beliefs in religious systems, we should appreciate the painstaking observations made over thousands of years by these students of the diet and the mind. They have long known, as is being discovered by scientists, that the quality of our food directly affects the quality of our thoughts.

In his series on Diet and War, J. I. Rodale provided a correlation between a country’s tendency toward war or peace based on its national dietary. He discovered that the national attitude was more warlike and aggressive in proportion to the amounts of sugar, meat, wheat and rye products consumed by its populace. Throughout history, it has been the meat-eating nomads who have made war on the peaceful agrarian tribes.

The Two Ways That Food Affects Our Mind and Emotions

Basically, foods affect our mental and emotional state in two ways:

They either furnish or deplete vital nutrients upon which our mental and emotional health depend, and
They either do or do not produce toxic by-products, in the body which poison the brain and contribute to emotional problems.

As for some examples, eating grapes furnishes the blood with readily-assimilated natural sugars and minerals that are conducive to mental activity; consuming white sugar, on the other hand, depletes the body of B-vitamins, and this leads to nervousness and mental depression. Eating fresh raw foods places little or no toxic matter in the body; whereas eating preserved and cooked foods saturates the bloodstream with toxins that poison the body and interfere with brain function.

We can deduce from the above observations that optimum nutrition for physical, mental and emotional health consists of selecting those foods that, first, can supply the body with all of its nutrient needs and that do not interfere with the nutritional balance, and, second, contribute little or no toxic by-products.

Foods that disrupt the nutritional balance of the body and toxify the system are the nutritional culprits of poor mental and emotional health. Most of these culprits are actually “nonfoods” (such as sugar, alcohol, caffeine drinks, etc.) and have no legitimate place in the human diet.

Nutritional Robbers

Every day millions of people ingest various substances that have no food value at all. Worse yet, these “nonfoods” not only do not supply any needed nutrients, but they also rob the body of vital minerals, vitamins, etc. As a result, eating these nonfoods cheats the body of nutrients and has profound harmful effects on the mind and emotions.

Perhaps the most pervasive and insidious nutritional robber is white sugar.

Sugar

Sugars occur naturally in most of our foods. Fruits especially are high in sugars that supply the body and mind with high-quality fuel. Sugars in their natural forms as they occur in fresh, unprocessed foods are a valuable part of the diet.

Refined white sugar, however, is a chemical menace because it lacks the essential minerals and B-vitamins for its metabolism. As a result, the body surrenders its own minerals and B-vitamins for use in metabolizing refined sugar.

The sugar-caused depletion of vitamins and minerals from the body upsets the body’s nutritional balance and predisposes the individual to mental and emotional illnesses that have their roots in nutrient deficiencies.

White sugar causes emotional outbreaks, especially in children and adolescents. Interestingly enough, it was discovered that the juvenile offender in Chicago on the average consumed over three times more white sugar in his diet than did the nonoffender. Schools that have removed their carbonated drink and candy machines have discovered that vandalism and absenteeism also decrease.

Long-term sugar consumption, as indulged by the majority of the American population, leads to chronic blood-sugar level problems that may manifest as diabetes or hypoglycemia. People with such blood-sugar problems are prone to periods of depression, irritability and nervous attacks. Many times they actually experience “nervous shakes” as their blood-sugar level slides and rises.

An abnormal plunge in blood-sugar levels is insidious—it sends shock waves through every cell in the body and affects the brain and nervous system most of all. An erratic mental state results, and some of the accompanying symptoms are: headaches, fatigue, insomnia, irritability, restlessness, crying spells, nervous breakdowns, excessive worry, inability to concentrate, depression, forgetfulness, suicidal thoughts, illogical fears, allergies and so on.

Caffeine, Nicotine and Alcohol

Besides sugar, some other nutritional robbers are the cigarette, the cup of coffee and the martini.

Nicotine, as obtained from smoking tobacco, adds to metabolic dysfunctioning. It impairs the absorption of vitamin C and interferes with the blood circulation. By constricting the blood vessels, nicotine robs the brain of its essential nutrients, particularly blood glucose, its major fuel. In fact, not only does nicotine inhibit vitamin C absorption, but it actually destroys some or all of the vitamin C already in the blood. One of the mental effects of vitamin C depletion is increased irritability. Smokers tend to be quick to irritate and often exhibit emotional outbursts.

The drug, caffeine, found in coffee, tea, cola drinks and chocolate, causes nervous disturbances, including anxiety. One to three cups of coffee contain enough caffeine to cause anxiety and other emotional disturbances. Caffeine also stimulates insulin secretion, thereby disturbing the blood-sugar level in the body.

Alcohol, too, disturbs the blood-sugar level. In fact, low blood sugar occurs in 70-90% of all alcoholics. As a result of studies, it was also discovered that most alcoholics suffer from a niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency that leads to periods of depression and feelings of lack of self-worth. Such emotional states may then lead to more alcohol drinking in an effort to escape these feelings.

All of the above-mentioned nutritional robbers tend to be self-perpetuating; that is, they create the very conditions that often make the user of these items return to them. Caffeine withdrawal symptoms, for example, can be halted by drinking another cup of coffee. The irritability caused by smoking is soothed by another cigarette. The “shakes” caused by a period of sobriety can be removed by another slug of whiskey. The crashing blood-sugar level created by sugar intake can be temporarily raised by a candy bar or other sugary “food.” In short, all of these nonfood items are actually addictive drugs just as opium and heroin are. If we are truly concerned about the “drug problem” in America, it would be best if we set our own house in order first. This would remove the cause of many of 6ur mental and emotional problems that result from faulty nutrition.

VOCABULARY

putrified - разлагающийся
hypoglycemia - гипогликемия (пониженная концентрация глюкозы в крови)
withdrawal - вывод

The Hedonic Treadmill – Obstacle to Happiness

Fri, 06 May 2016 14:36:00 +0000

Did you ever wonder why some people do not seem to be happy at all, even though they have everything one could dream of? There’s an interesting theory that offers a possible explanation why rich people are no happier than those that are less fortunate.

This theory is known as the “hedonic treadmill.”

Definition of the hedonic treadmill

The hedonic treadmill describes the tendency of people to return to their usual level of happiness after major events in their lives (both positive and negative). This tendency is also known as hedonic adaptation. The driving force behind this theory is the idea that a permanent gain in happiness cannot be accomplished through the multiplication of money, as desires and expectations rise as well, leading to no improvement. In fact, the theory clearly supports the idea that money cannot buy happiness.

The theory of the hedonic treadmill was fine-tuned by the British psychologist Michael Eysenck, who likened the attempt of gaining happiness to a person running on a treadmill. The person is running for the sole purpose of staying in the same place. There is no rest for a person motivated by endless desires.

The theory of hedonic adaptation also states that your happiness is—in the long run—not affected by major events with a big impact on your life. You may be heavily affected by good and bad fortunes, but in the end you will always return to your stable level of happiness.

How a hedonic adaptation works

That theory of the hedonic treadmill does not deny that a person will feel incredibly happy after something extraordinarily positive happened. The same holds true for negative events. In fact, the theory acknowledges that spikes in happiness or sadness are caused by major events in a person’s life. However, the theory also states that the initial happiness/sadness starts to dissipate after some time has passed. The person finds itself right at the starting point, in this case the person’s usual level of happiness.

Major research on the subject

There is a notable study that contributed largely to the theory of the hedonic treadmill. Entitled “Lottery winners and accident victims: is happiness relative?” the study compared the levels of happiness of accident victims with that of lottery winners.

Interestingly, the researchers found that the happiness levels of both groups were, in the long run, at approximately similar levels. This means that there wasn’t one group that was happier than the other. Even though the lottery winners were initially confronted with significant spikes in happiness, they quickly returned back to their regular level of happiness. The same held true with the quick tons of accidents, only that this group was confronted with spikes of sadness.

Ways to overcome the hedonic treadmill

Many people notice that the happiness they pursue is more often than not out of reach. Despite running as fast as they can on the treadmill they still stay on the same level of happiness. That is until we realize that we constantly desire more, instead of learning to appreciate what we already have. In order to avoid the hedonic treadmill is important to realize that our desires never cease and that they never will be satisfied, no matter what we do.

Here’s how you can avoid hedonic adaptation:

1. Know where you want to be

Most people know that they want to earn a lot of money so that they can buy a huge mansion and have several luxury cars. But, as lottery winners can testify, a big house and all those other fancy things can only satisfy you to a certain extent. Instead of knowing what you want to pocess it is more productive to know exactly where you want to be. Have a goal or a vision for your life. Aim to be the person that goes to bed being satisfied of knowing that they are working on something really important and wonderful, instead of being the person that just goes to bed with the knowledge of possessing a lot of money.

2. Maintain a proper balance in life

We all tend to forget that happiness emerges out of balance. As a consequence, we sacrifice our valuable time we could spend with our family in order to acquire material possessions in the hope of gaining what happiness by doing so.

We also tend to forget that too much of a thing can quickly diminish its positive aspects. For this reason, try to establish a harmonious balance in your life. Make sure to invest time in your hobbies, friends and family just as much you invest in your professional endeavors.

Realize that materialism can only provide you with short-term happiness. If you’re looking for something sustainable, seek for the true pleasures that can be found in non-material aspects of life.

3. Start meditating

Various scientific studies have highlighted the beneficial impact meditation can have on your level of happiness. One explanation for this is that vacation helps you to reduce negative feelings, such as depression and anxiety.

4. Make use of the Pareto Principle (80/20 rule)

We create 80% of our results with only 20% of our efforts. Is it possible that this concept can also be applied to happiness? Is it possible that only 20% of our activities and possessions are contributing to 80% of our happiness? It most certainly is!

Try to apply the Pareto Principle to your own life. Find out what it is that contributes a major part to your happiness. Once you have realized the major factors that make you happy you are able to aggressively sort out anything else that does not make a contribution.

5. Help others improve their lives

Knowing that you have helped another person live a better life is a profound experience. Scientists of the University of British Columbia and the Harvard Business School found that helping others can have a significantly positive impact on your own happiness. The researchers found that spending money on others predicted greater levels of happiness.

Revision of the hedonic treadmill

In recent years the theory of hedonic adaptation was challenged by scientists, who suggested the following revisions to the concept of the hedonic treadmill:

Firstly, the researchers point out that a person’s set points are not hedonically neutral. Secondly, the scientists argue that every person has different set points, influenced by their attitudes and temperaments. Thirdly, it is argued that an individual can have multiple set points of happiness. Another important aspect that the scientists raise is that set points do not necessarily have to be static. Instead, the happiness set points of a person could be subject to changes under specific conditions. The last argument that was raised by the researchers is the idea that people adapt their set point accordingly to external events.

In conclusion

The theory of hedonic adaptation states that a person will always return to their stable level of happiness, no matter what happens to them. On the positive side this means that despite having negative fortune, a person is able to deal with the setback accordingly, make peace with the situation and regain the previous level of happiness. Critics of the theory point out that the happiness set points should not be considered stated, but dynamic instead. They also highlight that people are able to change their own set points in response to external events.

VOCABULARY

hedonic - гедонистический
multiplication - умножение
attempt - попытка
spikes - шипы
significant - значительный
cease - прекращение
possessing - владеющий
acquire - приобретать
diminish - уменьшить
endeavor - стремиться

Domestic Harmony

Thu, 14 Apr 2016 15:57:00 +0000

On a Saturday night, a curious sonic mash-up drifts from a terraced house in Brooklyn. There’s the standard hubbub of clinking beer bottles and boisterous hipster chatter, but it soon gives way to the most improbable of sounds: Brahms’s String Quartet No. 1, performed by an ensemble decked out in faded jeans and polo shirts.
The event is organised by Groupmuse, an online service that facilitates house parties featuring chamber music performances. After the first movement, the guests, nearly all in their twenties and scattered around the living room, clap, cheer and whoop, unbothered by any sort of recital protocol. One young woman even records the performance on her phone. ‘I like the enthusiasm and energy of having people right at your feet,’ says Katherine Lim, a violinist in the Nova Quartet, an ensemble from the Juilliard School, who raise around $225 in audience donations after a bowl is passed around.

Users sign up to host or attend free Groupmuses, as the parties are called, on the organisation’s website. Anyone can take part, although there are a limited number of guest slots and the host can filter out anyone they feel might be unsafe. According to the founders, more than 20,000 people have been to Groupmuse events since the service was launched in 2013. Most are millennials.
Groupmuse is one of a growing number of ‘sharing economy’ start-ups (like Uber and Airbnb) that allow users to monetise their goods and services via websites and mobile apps. It arrives as more orchestras and opera companies have sought to stem the greying of their audiences by hosting events in nightclubs, bars and other spaces where youth can be found… But as with many peer-topeer businesses, Groupmuse has drawn some scrutiny for its practices involving worker pay, overtime rules and other regulations. And some observers question whether the company can sustain its aggressive growth plans without more revenue sources.
Sam Bodkin, a graduate of Columbia University’s political science programme, came up with the idea for Groupmuse after attending informal house gatherings of New England Conservatory students. ‘Each Groupmuse is so different because they represent their own members instead of an old institution that has its own way of doing things,’ he says. ‘We tell [hosts], “invite all your friends and encourage them to host.” That’s how we ensure that we’re always expanding our social circles. We especially like people who don’t know classical music, who are not performers and just want to spread this experience far and wide.’
The 26-year-old Bodkin organised the first Groupmuse in Boston – with its large number of educated young people – before expanding to New York in 2014, followed by fledgling branches in San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, DC. Next is Chicago and eventually European capitals including London and Berlin. In late 2015, the company raised $140,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to cover expansion and administrative costs (funding to date has come from a handful of private donors; Bodkin says he and his fourstrong team have not drawn salaries).

Despite its youthful sensibility and social media platform, Groupmuse has a certain retro appeal. It evokes an age, predominantly during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when chamber music was played at home with invited guests, before the need to sell tickets turned everything on its head. Arun Sundararajan, a New York University business professor who studies the sharing economy, believes Groupmuse taps a desire to return to these older times.
‘People crave experiences that were common in the past but have been marginalised by the way the economy has evolved in the last 200 years,’ says Sundararajan. People now want to go back to a more connected, more community-like form of consumption, even if it’s not always efficient. ‘I’m struck that here’s a marketplace that’s creating the experience of music that used to be more common in the past, before it became marginalised as we went deeper and deeper into our industrial economy.’
Groupmuse events run a wide gamut and aren’t always high on glitz. In one stretch this past autumn I heard a pianist play Chopin for a dozen guests squished into his Harlem bedroom; a string quartet host its own Groupmuse in an Upper West Side tenement with views of brick walls; and a (ticketed) ‘Rite of Spring Dance Party’ at Brooklyn Masonic Temple, which drew several hundred rowdy revellers for a nightclub-style performance of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. (Other so-called ‘Massive Muses’ have taken place in settings like a Long Island vineyard and a Brooklyn cemetery.)

‘Today’s world is all about direct sharing,’ says Javor BraΩi´c, the Harlem-based Chopin pianist who was, it turns out, hosting his first house concert. ‘The trend is to get rid of the middlemen and offer a virtual platform for users to connect. I’ve played at the big stages, and I’ve had quite a share of recognition, so the glamorous world of classical music is available to me. I’ve just never found it to be that appealing. Groupmuse offers exactly the kind of direct contact with the audience that I’ve been dreaming of.’
Not all musicians hold an idealistic view of the organisation. ‘One of the biggest things I’ve heard students talk about is that they don’t have a guaranteed pay,’ says Rachel Roberts, the director of New England Conservatory’s Entrepreneurial Musicianship department. ‘I’ve heard students talk about what that means for the sustainability of the organisation, because musicians are highly trained professionals.’ Roberts adds, however, that ‘it does put the creative control in the hands of the performers who choose to partner with hosts.’
Other ‘gig economy’ services do involve guarantees of pay, though their impact remains to be seen. A Silicon Valley start-up called Hellostage.com, founded by former Vienna Konzerthaus chief executive Bernhard Kerres, aims to be an online marketplace for musicians, promoters and artist managers. Another service, Office Music, organises monthly recitals in cubicles and conference rooms around New York. Founder David Whitwell says that companies pay up to $14,000 a year for the service and musicians are paid $200 for a 45- to 60-minute performance. Whitwell, a trombonist, is sharply critical of Groupmuse. ‘If they’re not even concerned with guaranteeing pay for the central product of their entire organisation, then you have to question their entire motives,’ he says.
In December, after online pundits began to ask questions about compensation, Groupmuse issued a lengthy statement asserting that every musician can expect to earn at least $50 per event, and that the current average is $83. Bodkin added in an interview that while he’s a ‘firm believer in workers’ rights’, an artist shouldn’t bid on a Groupmuse event unless they know what they’re getting into. ‘This is supposed to be a platform that is grooming the next generation of classical musicians,’ says Bodkin. ‘The best way to do that is to get experience playing for a crowd, building up your chops in this lowimpact way, and developing stage charisma.
Bodkin is more eager to talk about Groupmuse’s expansion efforts. He outlines his plans for a ‘freemium’ membership scheme, in which the most active guests will pay a small monthly fee to attend events and receive various perks including discounts at major arts organisations. Part of the goal is to manage serial attendees who monopolise slots week after week. Also being explored are corporate sponsorships and more ticketed ‘Massivemuse’ events. ‘The aim is to be fully sustainable by the time we’ve spent every dollar of the Kickstarter funding,’ adds Bodkin.

It’s an ambitious plan given other potential challenges that loom, such as local municipalities looking into safety concerns among peer-to-peer services (private homes are frequently not held to the same legal and regulatory standards that protect both hosts and guests at private businesses). But for now, Groupmuse appears to be riding a healthy momentum, with press coverage from major news outlets including the CBS Nightly News, The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian. In the third week of December, the company reported its busiest week to date, with 30 events in cities across the US.
At a Sunday afternoon Groupmuse event on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, guests snack on coffee cake, crisps and pretzels while the Madkoi Quartet, from the Manhattan School of Music, play Dvoπák’s ‘American’ String Quartet. The host, Violetta Norrie, isn’t that worried about welcoming strangers (including a BBC Music Magazine reporter) into her home. ‘It’s a chill crowd and these are people who might not otherwise attend a concert in the red velvet surroundings of Lincoln Center,’ she says. As if to underscore her point, the quartet launch into their final piece, a cover of Clean Bandit’s perky pop song ‘(No Place I’d) Rather Be’.

VOCABULARY

peer-topeer - пиринговый
marginalised - маргинальный (находящийся на границе двух сред)
gamut - гамма

Extreme Study Abroad: The World Is Their Campus

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 15:49:00 +0000

As educators question what college should look like in the 21st century, one answer is: global.

And to higher education trailblazers, that means more than junior year abroad or overseas internships. They find campuses to be insular places that leave students ill prepared for a globalized world, and they question the efficacy of traditional pedagogy, especially the lecture format, at a time when the same information can be imparted online.

Consider one emerging approach, wherein students hop from campus to campus across continents, earning an undergraduate degree in the process. In these programs, they spend the majority of their college years outside the United States and immerse themselves in diverse cultures. Foreign cities are their classrooms.

“More and more students, especially at the elite end, are realizing, ‘I can get my basic learning on the Internet and then have this collection of experiences around the globe that enhances who I am as a person,’” said Michael B. Horn, a co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute.

Campus hopping is not for everyone. Many students don’t want to give up the sustained community built over four years on a campus. Administrators note that 18-year-olds who choose this unorthodox college path have a special blend of traits: maturity, curiosity, adventurousness, flexibility and openness.

If It’s Third Semester, This Must Be Berlin

W. Louis Brickman, 18, could have taken many paths to college. As a student at the prestigious Hunter College High School in New York, he was accepted at several elite liberal arts schools and two research universities. But he surprised teachers and friends by choosing to enter the second class at the Minerva Schools, a start-up based in San Francisco, where he will spend three-quarters of his time in other countries. “I’m passionate about international travel, and it felt to me inadequate to stay in one place for four years,” said Mr. Brickman, who was born in Berlin and raised in Manhattan.

Minerva, which is affiliated with the Keck Graduate Institute, was founded by a former tech executive, Ben Nelson, who believed that traditional colleges were not adequately preparing students for the real world.

After freshman year in San Francisco, students will move to a new country each semester; by the time they graduate, they will have lived in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Bangalore, Istanbul and London. Minerva’s first two classes comprise 139 students from 35 countries. They live together in leased residence halls, where they cook for themselves, and meet for seminars in libraries, museums or parks. Not owning buildings enables Minerva to keep costs to $22,950 a year, including tuition and housing but not travel.

Continue reading the main story

Minerva’s approach to upending traditional education goes beyond travel. Professors lead live video seminars that are reserved for group projects and debate — students often meet to take the classes together. And while majors are offered in the usual fields, like humanities, science and business, the overarching goal is to teach students to think critically and creatively and to communicate and interact well with others.

“We want them to be able to adapt to jobs that don’t even exist yet, so we give them a great range of the best cognitive tools,” said Stephen Kosslyn, Minerva’s founding dean.

Based on research into how students learn, Minerva’s faculty concluded that a key skill is being able to apply learning in new and different contexts. Toward that end, students keep blogs during their travels about how they’re using the concepts they learned freshman year. Yes, they’re graded.

“For the past 14 years of my life, I’ve been imagining I’d have this traditional college campus experience, so that part has been somewhat of a challenge,” Mr. Brickman said. “But every class is relevant to the real world.”

Living Like the Locals

When Clarissa Gordon, a 21-year-old senior, was studying in India, the electricity would often go out when a paper was due. She would have to find an outside source so she could email it to her professor, but she felt she learned as much from experiences like that as from writing the papers themselves.

“They put us in cities that are not typical for studying abroad, and they let us learn how to live like the people,” she said. “I feel like they teach us how to survive.”

L.I.U. Global, born out of a Quaker school established 50 years ago and later acquired by Long Island University, debuted a European program last year and added three new minors. Students spend a year in Costa Rica and a year in Spain and Italy as a group, and then choose whether to spend a year in China or traveling across Asia and Australia. Senior year they do an internship somewhere in the world, then return to the Brooklyn campus to write a thesis on a global issue to earn a bachelor’s degree in global studies.

“We take the world and its problems as the syllabus for the college,” said Jeffrey Belnap, the dean. “Most study-abroad programs think in dyadic terms — it’s that way in this country and this way in my country — but that’s just the first step in understanding global realities.”

Faculty from both L.I.U. and partner universities teach classes in situ. The school is also experimenting with Google Classroom, a software platform, for class discussions across five continents. Cost of attendance, including in-country expenses and some airfare, is about $50,000.

Ms. Gordon, who is Haitian-American and grew up in West Orange, N.J., is now in Trinidad and Tobago studying how art forms like calypso and theater have been used for political and social purposes, such as emancipation. She hopes to go on to graduate school, and eventually work with refugees. She had applied to traditional schools like Penn State before discovering L.I.U. Global. “I could have sat in a classroom and learned from textbooks,” Ms. Gordon said, “but there’s no other education you can get that’s traveling and learning from people, whether it be a rickshaw driver in India or a Buddhist from a monastery in Tibet.”

The Hop On / Hop Off Degree

Erin McNellis, 21, did not travel far when she started at Webster University in St. Louis, where she also grew up. But she chose it because its international program would enable her to keep on traveling.

Webster has campuses in seven countries, and partnerships with schools in seven more. Students can study in Thailand, Ghana, China, Japan, Mexico and throughout Europe. About 20 percent of its students study elsewhere in the world; some never study in St. Louis at all.

“For us, it’s not about: You go somewhere, you study for a bit and you come back to St. Louis,” said Elizabeth J. Stroble, Webster’s president. “It’s much more about: How can you make the world your home?”

Students can spend full terms at Webster’s campuses abroad, and some courses combine an online or in-person class with an immersion trip; for example, a human rights studies class traveled to Rwanda and a class on international criminal law ended with a trip to Leiden, the Netherlands.

For a seamless transition, credits are the same as on the St. Louis campus, as is the $25,300 tuition, though Webster tacks on a $500 study-abroad fee and in many cases does not pay for airfare.

Ms. McNellis, a senior double-majoring in math and international studies, is spending part of this semester in Athens to study city life in ancient Greece. She has also studied in Rome, London and Madrid and completed an archaeology internship in Ireland. She said that hopping among campuses had given her a different experience than the usual study abroad: “It’s not just a vacation. I’m going to learn.”

“You remember that the other people across the world from you are people,” she said. “They have their own thoughts and motives and dreams and desires. It’s a humbling realization that we’re all the same.”

VOCABULARY

trailblazer - новатор
enhance - усилить
unorthodox - неортодоксальный (оригинальный)
maturity - зрелость
inadequate - неадекватный
dyadic - состоящий из 2 элементов

Where Are the Hardest Places to Live in the U.S.?

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 11:05:00 +0000

Annie Lowrey writes in the Times Magazine this week about the troubles of Clay County, Ky., which by several measures is the hardest place in America to live.

The Upshot came to this conclusion by looking at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. We then averaged each county’s relative rank in these categories to create an overall ranking.

(We tried to include other factors, including income mobility and measures of environmental quality, but we were not able to find data sets covering all counties in the United States.)

The 10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.

We used disability — the percentage of the population collecting federal disability benefits but not also collecting Social Security retirement benefits — as a proxy for the number of working-age people who don’t have jobs but are not counted as unemployed. Appalachian Kentucky scores especially badly on this count; in four counties in the region, more than 10 percent of the total population is on disability, a phenomenon seen nowhere else except nearby McDowell County.

Remove disability from the equation, though, and eastern Kentucky would still fare badly in the overall rankings. The same is true for most of the other six factors.

The exception is education. If you exclude educational attainment, or lack of it, in measuring disadvantage, five counties in Mississippi and one in Louisiana rank lower than anywhere in Kentucky. This suggests that while more people in the lower Mississippi River basin have a college degree than do their counterparts in Appalachian Kentucky, that education hasn’t improved other aspects of their well-being.

As Ms. Lowrey writes, this combination of problems is an overwhelmingly rural phenomenon. Not a single major urban county ranks in the bottom 20 percent or so on this scale, and when you do get to one — Wayne County, Mich., which includes Detroit — there are some significant differences. While Wayne County’s unemployment rate (11.7 percent) is almost as high as Clay County’s, and its life expectancy (75.1 years) and obesity rate (41.3 percent) are also similar, almost three times as many residents (20.8 percent) have at least a bachelor’s degree, and median household income ($41,504) is almost twice as high.

Wayne County may not make for the best comparison — in addition to Detroit, it includes the Grosse Pointes and some other wealthy suburbs that could be pulling its rankings up. But St. Louis, another struggling city, stands alone as a jurisdiction for statistical purposes and ranks even higher over all, slightly, with better education and lower unemployment making up for a median household income ($34,384) that is lower than Wayne County’s but still quite a bit higher than Clay County’s $22,296.

At the other end of the scale, the different variations on our formula consistently yielded the same result. Six of the top 10 counties in the United States are in the suburbs of Washington (especially on the Virginia side of the Potomac River), but the top ranking of all goes to Los Alamos County, home of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which does much of the scientific work underpinning the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The lab directly employs one out of every five county residents and has a budget of $2.1 billion; only a fraction of that is spent within the county, but that’s still an enormous economic engine for a county of just 18,000 people.

Here are some specific comparisons: Only 7.4 percent of Clay County residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, while 63.2 percent do in Los Alamos. The median household income in Los Alamos County is $106,426, almost five times what the median Clay County household earns. In Clay County, 12.7 percent of residents are unemployed, and 11.7 percent are on disability; the corresponding figures in Los Alamos County are 3.5 percent and 0.3 percent. Los Alamos County’s obesity rate is 22.8 percent, while Clay County’s is 45.5 percent. And Los Alamos County residents live 11 years longer, on average — 82.4 years vs. 71.4 years in Clay County.

Clay and Los Alamos Counties are part of the same country. But they are truly different worlds.

VOCABULARY

cluster - группа
jurisdiction - юрисдикция
overwhelmingly - очень, чрезвычайно
percentage - процент
retirement - пенсия, отставка

Suffragette

Fri, 12 Feb 2016 11:31:00 +0000

Let’s get this out of the way: Meryl Streep has one scene in Suffragette, and her screen time amounts to five minutes, if that. Considering that Streep is among the top-billed and pictured in almost all of the promotional materials, the effect is more than just misleading, as many outlets have already purported. In fact, it could be said, without hyperbole, that Streep’s pop-up appearance in Suffragette is one of the most glorified cameos of all time.

“They say she’s to speak,” whispers devoted suffragette Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) to hesitant new member Maud (Carey Mulligan), as they hasten to attend a rally where suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst (Streep) is expected to come out of hiding to address her followers. Indeed, Pankhurst strides onto the balcony and delivers a rousing speech, which closes on the tone-deaf line, “I would rather be a rebel than a slave!” as the London police flood into the street below. Pankhurst flees in a town car, but not before having a little moment with Maud at the car window, telling her to “Never surrender. Never give up the fight.” Pankhurst escapes, never to be seen in the film again, while Maud and her friends are arrested and thrown in jail. Um, what is that bullshit?

Something else that must be said, because it is so egregious: There are no black people in this movie. None. And the fact that the film is set in Edwardian England is no excuse for the omission. There were plenty of black people living in London and other cities like Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool in 1912; their stories, apparently, just didn’t matter as much to the people who made Suffragette.

And here is where the problem of white feminism comes into play. The film has already received some blowback from a Time Out London photo shoot in which its stars wear T-shirts emblazoned with Streep’s “slave” line, the terrible irony of it being what the film chooses not to address: that the early suffragette movement was overtly racist. With so many fictional characters mixed in with historical ones like Pankhurst, the filmmakers could have equitably shown some cracks in the system, such as having one character discuss how black women are not welcome to join the fight, and having the fictional character of Maud, perhaps, confront that notion. Or they could have shown an actual black person; that would have been even better. But instead, the issue is tidily ignored.

Class is an underlying theme of Suffragette, however, as it is implied that a wealthy and well-connected woman like Alice (Romola Garai) can afford to give more of herself to the movement than a poor woman who works day in and day out at a laundry, like Violet, Maud, and many others. While that subject could have been made more explicit — like how many of the early suffragettes only wanted the vote to go to upper-class white women, not all women, and certainly not black women — the horrors of being a poor women at that time are shown, often in graphic detail. Also examined is the dynamic between husband and wife and the “shame” that a suffragette brings upon the man (or men) to whom she is supposed to obey. As Maud’s husband Sonny, Ben Winshaw — whom you might recognize as Q from the new slate of James Bond films — is excellent at toeing the line, of somehow not being a monster while also denying any part of himself that would allow his wife autonomy.

And yet, there is the quandary of Maud. You want to like Mulligan, with her sad, cherubic face, adorable son (Adam Michael Shaw), and makeup-ed web of scars covering her left arm from shoulder to wrist. But Maud is an obvious manipulation, a screenwriter’s rendering of the most sympathetic of suffragettes for audiences to invest in and applaud. She is the perfect stock waif turned vigilante, written expressly to generate the maximum emotional response from the events that surround and invade her; because that’s easier, perhaps, than tinkering with the story of a person who actually lived. She’s got some great lines, like “War is the only language men listen to” and “We’re half of the human race; you can’t stop us,” but not for a second did I believe that Maud, and not a Hollywood screenwriter, was the one speaking them. With no slight to Mulligan’s performance, which is as good as we have come to expect from her, the character never feels authentic. She is fleshed out on paper, given a horrific backstory and a cause worth fighting for, but we can still see the strings.

Meanwhile, most of the other characters are half-baked, with the exception of Winshaw’s Sonny and Duff’s Violet. The second-billed Helena Bonham Carter is a treat as always, every line delivered with a little flick of idiosyncrasy, but her character — based on real-life suffragette Edith Bessie New — lacks the luster of the actress playing her. Another important, real-life person, Emily Wilding Davison (Natalie Press), is given too little personality or screen time to strongly register as the heart of the movement’s rallying cry towards the end. And we learn next to nothing about the movement’s leader. How did Pankhurst feel when her calls for radicalism resulted in tragedy? What was her story? What were her flaws? The film declines to tell us, deciding instead to present Pankhurst as more of an elusive Messiah figure than a real woman amongst women. Streep, wasted in this cameo, could have given us so much more.

In fact, the more that this critic thinks about Suffragette — a film which specifically targets her highly marketable demographic of young, white feminists to inspire — the more the memory of it sours. Though an earnest effort by British director Sarah Gavron, Suffragette falls short on inclusivity and depicting flaws within the movement, of which there were many. The women represented here are brave and often awe-inspiring, but the film could have been much braver.

VOCABULARY

authentic - достоверный, подлинный
egregious - вопиющий, отъявленный
flees - бежит
surrender - отказ, капитуляция
target - цель, мишень, задача
toeing - лишние

Jacobean Chic

Fri, 22 Jan 2016 13:46:00 +0000

Centuries before it was an ill-advised soft drink, Red Bull was a theatre in Shakespeare’s England, a lesser-known competitor to the Globe. Starting around 1606, it was the home of Queen Anne’s Men, whose raucous spectators, sometimes provoked by what they saw onstage, often wound up in court for brawling. (Picture a Jacobean CBGB.) The Puritans banned all theatre in 1642, but didn’t quite succeed: the place was frequently raided for illegally hosting “drolls,” or comic sketches. The playhouse officially reopened after the Restoration, but it was torn down within the decade. Oh, well.

Fittingly, this hotbed of transgression has a namesake Off Broadway. Since 2003, Red Bull Theatre has devoted itself to stylish mountings of the classics, with a nose for the perverse. The company’s ostensible mission is to stage plays with “heightened language”—a draw for actors—but, under the artistic direction of Jesse Berger, its sleek, runway-ready productions specialize in those old standbys sex and violence, typically culminating in a cascade of blood. Naturally, Jacobean drama plays to the company’s strengths: it has staged punky renditions of “The Revenger’s Tragedy,” in 2005 (poison!); “The Witch of Edmonton,” in 2011 (black magic!); and, last spring, “ ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” (incest!). But the troupe also tackles modern classics, notably Jean Genet’s “The Maids,” in 2012, featuring the superb stage actresses Jeanine Serralles and Ana Reeder. As usual, it all looked smashing.

Perhaps redundantly, Red Bull is calling its new lineup a “season of scandal,” beginning with Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s 1622 tragedy, “The Changeling,” playing at the Lucille Lortel through Jan. 24. (The season continues, in April, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s gossip-minded comedy “The School for Scandal.”) In Berger’s staging of “The Changeling,” Sara Topham plays the unhappily betrothed Beatrice, who asks her father’s loathsome servant De Flores (Manoel Felciano) to dispatch her fiancé, freeing her up to marry Alsemero (Christian Coulson). His price for doing the deed, he informs her: “thy virginity.” Arson, lunacy, and murder have the day. It would make Queen Anne’s Men proud.

VOCABULARY

drolls - шуты
loathsome - отвратительный, гадкий
raided - рейд, набег
ostensible - мнимый