Huffington (Issue #54)

SNL HEARTBREAKS | WE

THE HUFFINGTON POST MAGAZINE

A NEW AGE HEALER WITH NOTHING TO SAY THE GAZER

BY MALLIKA RAO

EMOJI | YOUR FACE ON STRESS

JUNE 23, 2013

06.23.13 #54 CONTENTS

Enter POINTERS: A Death in the Family ... Should Rebels Be Armed?

JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: Is Stress Making You Less Attractive?

Q&A: Bobby Moynihan on 5 Seasons at SNL HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE

COVER: COURTESY OF BRACO.NET;THIS PAGE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF BRACO.NET; TOM ZELLER, JR.

Voices

‘THE GIFT OF THE GAZE’ For Braco’s followers, seeing is believing.

BY MALLIKA RAO

AMY WRUBLE: 40 Effed-Up Things About Being 40 THEO JANSEN: A New Form of Life ...

Made of PVC Pipe QUOTED

Exit CULTURE: Filling the Silence With Emoji STRESS LESS: The Moment I Knew I Was Overweight EAT THIS: Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just a Poached Egg

TROUBLED WATERS What’s a fisherman to do when fish aren’t where they should be?

BY TOM ZELLER, JR.

TFU FROM THE EDITOR: Man vs. Nature

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ART STREIBER

Man vs.

Nature I

N THIS WEEK’S issue, Tom Zeller looks at the American fishing industry and three different factors affecting it.

First, there’s global warming. As ocean temperatures rise, research suggests many fish species are migrating into deeper waters, upsetting the normal patterns fishermen have relied on and throwing the marine ecosystem into flux. To compound the problem, the industry is facing a man vs. nature predicament where man’s domination

has, in a way, backfired. Our mastery of technology — with methods like GPS and fish-finding sonar that make it easier and more efficient than ever to harvest fish — has ravaged entire populations. As Tom puts it, “humans are extracting fish at a pace that exceeds the stock’s natural ability to replenish its numbers.”

Then, there are changes in policy. America’s commercial fishing business employs more than a million people and generates more than $116 billion in annual sales.

But the government has proposed cuts to the number of fish that can be harvested, so many fisher-

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

men will lose the work that has sustained them for decades. As Frank Mirarchi, a 69-year-old fisherman who has been harvesting cod and flounder in New England for nearly half a century, put it, “We’re gonna lose a bunch of boats.” Mirarchi’s boat is named for his mother, Barbara L. Peters, and he expects he’ll have to put it up for sale soon.

Elsewhere in the issue, Mallika Rao puts the spotlight on the rise of Braco, a Croatian healer whose method is simple and, some say, miraculously effective. His method? As Mallika writes, “All he does, to the delight of his followers, is gaze at them.” Braco is part of a larger universe of healers of varying philosophies and practices, some of them bearing a resemblance to “celebrity fitness trainers, with products and regimens open to anyone willing to pay.”

Still, Braco’s followers swear to his legitimacy, from claims that he hails from Atlantis to elaborate attempts to place him in a tradition of transcendental gurus. These believers say Braco offers something — “just the sight of him seeing you” — all too rare in our world of digi-

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tal distractions, serial multitasking and missed connections.

At a recent appearance, Braco gazed into an audience holding up photos of loved ones, many of them crying. One woman said the encounter made her “feel light and childlike and creative.

Braco gazed into an audience holding up photos of loved ones … One woman said the encounter made her ‘feel light and childlike and creative.’”

To me, that’s what Braco does.

I’ve been carrying a heavy sack of stuff on me for ages now, and it started to drift away.”

Finally, as part of our ongoing effort to reduce stress in our lives, including in our kitchens, we have a feature on how to keep cool while performing a notoriously delicate culinary task: poaching an egg!

ARIANNA

VERA ANDERSON/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

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POINTERS

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A DEATH IN THE FAMILY

Sopranos star James Gandolfini died this week of a heart attack while vacationing in Italy. He was 51.

Gandolfini earned three Emmys for playing mob boss Tony Soprano on the hit HBO show, and also appeared in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly and In The Loop. “He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect,” HBO said. Edie Falco, who played his wife, Carmela, on The Sopranos, said she was “shocked and devastated” by his death. “The love between Tony and Carmela was one of the greatest I’ve ever known.”

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POINTERS

OBAMA: NSA SPYING IS ‘TRANSPARENT’

In an interview with PBS’ Charlie Rose on Monday, President Obama again defended the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance programs.

When asked by Rose if the program should be “transparent in some way,” he responded: “It is transparent. That’s why we set up the FISA court.” The NSA director said Tuesday that the programs have foiled about 50 terrorist plots.

3 OPPOSITION TO ARMING SYRIAN REBELS

4

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BRAZIL ROCKED

BY PROTESTS

After the Obama administration announced last week that it would be arming the Syrian rebels, new polls find that most Americans oppose sending weapons. The Pew Research Center found that 70 percent of Americans don’t think the U.S. military should arm the rebels, while 20 percent think it should. A HuffPost/YouGov poll found similar results — 53 percent of Americans are opposed, while only 19 percent are in favor. A Gallup poll found 37 percent agreed with Obama’s decision to send weapons, while 54 percent disapproved.

Tens of thousands of people are taking part in demonstrations across Brazil, marking some of the biggest protests since the end of the country’s military dictatorship in 1985. The protests began over an increase in bus prices, but evolved into outrage over the high cost of living, poor health services and education, and stadium projects to prepare for the 2014 World Cup. President Dilma Rousseff addressed the protests on Monday, saying, “Peaceful demonstrations are legitimate and part of democracy. It is natural for young people to demonstrate.” Yet the protests have not all been peaceful, with some getting disrupted by violent police crackdowns.

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POINTERS

ARIZONA VOTING LAW STRUCK DOWN

In a 7-2 vote on Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that Arizona can’t require people to prove they’re U.S. citizens before registering for federal elections. Arizona and other states would first need federal or court permission before changing the requirements. Federal law “precludes Arizona from requiring a federal form applicant to submit information beyond that required by the form itself,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion. A VP at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said this “sends a strong message that states cannot block their citizens from registering to vote by superimposing burdensome paperwork requirements on top of federal law.”

FAMED JOURNALIST DIES AT 33

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THAT’S VIRAL TOP NAZI COMMANDER FOUND

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Journalist and author Michael Hastings died in a car crash in Los Angeles this week at 33. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Hastings was best known for his article “The Runaway General,” which infamously led to the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Hastings was also a reporter at Buzzfeed and an author of two books. “He wrote stories that would otherwise have gone unwritten, and without him there are great stories that will go untold,” Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith said in a statement.

A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories.

HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES

EAT IT, HATERS

STUDENT KICKED OUT OF SCHOOL FOR LESBIANISM, MUST PAY THOUSANDS

GENE WILDER CALLS CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY AN ‘INSULT’

THE LATEST THING TO LOOK LIKE JESUS

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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

JASON LINKINS

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ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES

BOBBY JINDAL TAKES A STAND AGAINST... BOBBY JINDAL N AN OP-ED in Politico earlier this week, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal takes a firm stand against Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal. And that’s great. It’s about time that someone took on Bobby Jindal for doing all the stuff Bobby Jindal’s been doing lately that Bob-

I

by Jindal is just sick to death of.

Might as well be Bobby Jindal!

See, Bobby Jindal is letting the world know that he is tired of the way the Republican Party keeps on with this relentless, post-2012 election self-critique. “We’ve had enough,” writes Jindal, adding, “Enough, already.” In Bobby Jindal’s estimation, “excessive navel gazing leads to paralysis” and “at present it looks as if the entire Republican

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal speaks at the 40th annual Conservative Political Action Conference on March 15, 2013.

Enter party needs to go to counseling.”

The overall level of panic and apology from the operative class in our party is absurd and unmerited.

It’s time to stop the bedwetting.

Well, you’ll have to forgive me if I point out that when I test all the dampened sheets for DNA, I get several matches for Jindal. It took all of two weeks before Jindal was publicly castigating his party’s 2012 standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who contended he lost because Obama successfully promised “gifts” to young voters and minorities.

“That is absolutely wrong,” Jindal said back in November, adding, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

From there, Jindal basically fashioned himself the would-be king of the GOP “rebranding effort.” At January’s winter meeting of the RNC, Jindal demanded that those in attendance undertake a deep, navel-based pondering, telling his colleagues that they needed to stop being “the stupid party.”

“I’m here to say, we’ve had enough of that,” said Jindal, who just constantly has had “enough” of stuff. “The Republican Party does not need to change our principles — but we might need to change just about everything else we do,” he told those in attendance, seeming

LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

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to imply that a lengthy period of self-examination was necessary.

As recently as a month ago, Jindal was still at it. At a Republican Senate Majority Committee fundraiser, Jindal provided a keynote speech entirely centered around GOP self-reflection and selfcritique, saying the party needed “to make some changes.” “I think we need to think seriously about where we go from here,” said Jindal,

It’s about time that someone took on Bobby Jindal for doing all the stuff Bobby Jindal’s been doing lately ...

Might as well be Bobby Jindal!” suggesting he was eager to do a lot of serious thinking about where the party should go from there.

Of course, a funny thing happened while Jindal was staking out turf as his party’s most serious critic. First, his attempt at “innovating” — his proposal to eliminate Louisiana’s state income tax and replace it with a regressive increase in state sales taxes — was met with stiff resistance “from the left, the center and the right.” His popularity and clout

Enter diminished from there.

So the man who would rebrand his party has abruptly decided to rebrand himself. With that comes a new plan for the GOP, which he helpfully laid out in Politico: At some point, the American public is going to revolt against ... the leftward march of this president. I don’t know when the tipping point will come, but I believe it will come soon ... the left wants: The government to explode; to pay everyone; to hire everyone; they believe that money grows on trees; the earth is flat; the industrial age, factory-style government is a cool new thing; debts don’t have to be repaid; people of faith are ignorant and uneducated; unborn babies don’t matter; pornography is fine; traditional marriage is discriminatory; 32 oz. sodas are evil; red meat should be rationed; rich people are evil unless they are from Hollywood or are liberal Democrats; the Israelis are unreasonable; trans-fat must be stopped; kids trapped in failing schools should be patient; wild weather is a new thing; moral standards are passé; government run health care is high

LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST

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quality; the IRS should violate our constitutional rights; reporters should be spied on; Benghazi was handled well; the Second Amendment is outdated; and the First one has some problems too.

“Eventually,” Jindal says, “Americans will rise up against this new era of big government and this new reign of politically correct terror.”

What to do until then?

A funny thing happened while Jindal was staking out turf as his party’s most serious critic — his popularity and clout diminished.”

“Put on your big boy pants,” says Jindal, helpfully and substantively.

The short version of Jindal’s new plan for GOP renewal, then, is basically 1) attack a bunch of straw men; 2) sit back and chill and enjoy a well-fitting pair of trousers; and 3) profit.

This is a far cry from the Bobby Jindal who suggested “we might need to change just about everything else we do,” but I guess Bobby Jindal has had enough of that guy.

Q&A

FROM TOP: MATTHEW EISMAN/GETTY IMAGES; DANA EDELSON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK

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Bobby Moynihan Is Finally at Ease on SNL...

After 5 Years “It’s scary. You’re auditioning for a show that you’re already on every week ... What you don’t see is the heartbroken people at 11:30 when their skit that they’ve been working on for 72 hours straight gets cut.”

Above: Moynihan visits the SiriusXM Studios on Wednesday. Below: Moynihan in character as “Drunk Uncle” alongside Seth Meyers on SNL’s Weekend Update in 2012.

FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE

DATA

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Is Stress Making You Less Attractive?

It’s official: Stress is not hot. As if it weren’t enough that chronic stress increases the risk of developing a number of serious diseases, weakens the immune system, makes us more susceptible to anxiety and depression, and decreases longevity, it also makes us less good-looking. In fact, a recent study showed that men find women with higher levels of stress hormones to be less attractive.

But that’s not the only way chronic stress can wreak havoc on your looks. The release of stress hormones like cortisol in the body can negatively

affect your physical appearance in a number of ways, from brittle nails and hair loss, to weight gain and a general appearance of exhaustion.

“When people are chronically stressed, they look tired and they feel tired,” stress specialist David Posen, M.D., author of Is Work Killing You?, tells The Huffingon Post.

Check out the infographic below for a breakdown of seven outward signs of stress that might be leaving you looking less than your best.

— Carolyn Gregoire

HAIR LOSS YOUR FACE BECOMES LESS APPEALING

DRY AND DULL SKIN

INCREASED ACNE

TAP CIRCLES FOR INFO

ACCELERATED AGING

ILLUSTRATIONS BY TROY DUNHAM

WEIGHT GAIN BRITTLE NAILS

AP PHOTO/EBRAHIM NOROOZI (ADIOS, AHMADINEJAD); SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES (CHICAGO CARNAGE); NANCY BROWN/BASS ACKWARDS/GETTY IMAGES (NEW AMERICA); GETTY IMAGES (MEET THE TALIBAN)

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The Week That Was TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST

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Vrindavan, India 06.13.2013 A woman opens the door to her room inside an ashram shelter for widows. The area has become host to widows from all over India, many of whom are shunned from society when their husbands die because they’re often seen as a financial drain on their families.

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Chicago, Ill. 06.12.2013 Lightning strikes the Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower) as a massive storm rolls through downtown Chicago.

The storm brought heavy rain, high winds and hail.

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New York, N.Y. 06.10.2013 Gabrielle Ortiz exhales a plume of smoke at Vape New York, an electronic cigarette store in Queens. Electronic cigarettes, or e-cigarettes, are battery powered devices that vaporize a nicotine-laced solution into an aerosol mist.

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Paris, France 06.12.2013 A giant, chrome-brushed, aluminum skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex dinosaur stands at the pier of riverboat company Bauteaux-Mouches.

French sculptor and painter Philippe Pasqua created the statue.

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Glastonbury, England 06.13.2013 A festival worker moves metal bins that will be distributed throughout Worthy Farm, which will host the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts in a few weeks. The Rolling Stones, Mumford & Sons and Arctic Monkeys are set to headline the festival.

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Johannesburg, South Africa 06.15.2013 Children in the Alexandra Township stand with clenched fists next to a mural of former South African President Nelson Mandela. Mandela was hospitalized with a lung infection last week.

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A re-enactor dresses as a knight before staging a medieval jousting competition at Eltham Palace. The “Grand Medieval Joust” event aims to give insight into life at the palace during the Medieval period.

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Istanbul, Turkey 06.15.2013 Workers in the Divan Istanbul Hotel put on gas masks as riot police fire tear gas to disperse a crowd near Gezi Park. Istanbul has seen protests over Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s policies rage on for days.

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Singapore 06.15.2013 A manager from the Jurong Frog Farm collects North American bullfrogs for harvest. The farm has seen a huge boom in sales after developing local Hashima, a dessert ingredient made from the fatty tissue near the fallopian tubes of frogs.

Hashima is regarded as one of the top five most valued Chinese ingredients.

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Al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia 06.16.2013 A sandstorm envelops a herd of camels in a desert 370 km. east of the nation’s capital, Riyadh.

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Brno, Czech Republic 06.14.2013 People dressed in theatre costumes attend an opening parade of the summer international festival, Theatre World Brno 2013.

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Bhubaneswar, India 06.13.2013 A buffalo herder holding a traditional, handmade umbrella keeps watch over his herd as monsoon clouds hover above.

Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post.

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GETTY IMAGES/GALLO IMAGES ROOTS COLLECTION

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AMY WRUBLE

40 Effed Up Things About Being 40

AFTER A FEW YEARS of not being able to read the fine print (apologies to my kid for the guess-the-dose Infant Advil), I broke down and bought my first pair of reading glasses.

At the drug store counter, it was like the reverse of a teen nervously buying condoms.

“First pair of reading glasses,” I informed the clerk, just to prove that I’m not at all embarrassed. “My mom wears those,” she smiled.

And now, I’m mortified.

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AMY WRUBLE

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Here are 40 other effed up things about being 40: 1. Other than Teen Mom, I have no clue what’s on MTV. 2. When people say “middleaged,” they might mean me.

3. I can’t wear sequins or I’ll look like a cougar.

4. I’m more likely to forget to have sex than to forget to floss.

5. If I eat chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast, I’ve gained a size by dinnertime.

6. Even if I finally get a full night’s sleep, I still look like I was up all night. But not up all night doing something cool.

7. At the doctor’s office, I bypass Cosmopolitan and reach for Redbook.

I’ll even read Family Circle.

There are some great recipes in there.

GETTY IMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY RF

8. I’m probably never going to be a Solid Gold Dancer.

9. Going out without makeup is seeming more and more like an aggressive act.

10. The “me” in my head is like the foxy little sister of the “me” in the mirror.

Oooh, my back.”

14. Most days, I choose comfort over style. I’m a traitor to my stilettos.

11. Any girl can look cute like Rachel on Friends in her 20s.

Only Jen Aniston looks cute like Rachel on Friends in her 40s.

15. All the tanning I did in college is showing up now as brown blotches. Get a Sharpie and you could draw a cow on my chest.

12. If I strolled across a college campus, people would assume teacher, not student. (Upside: instant Ph.D!) 13. I’m old enough to drink, vote, rent a car and be elected to the highest office in the land. All that’s left on my age bucket list is admission to the AARP. Thanks, I’ll wait.

16. The Psychedelic Furs, Duran Duran and The Cure are now considered oldies.

17. Everything I wore in high school has been appropriated ironically by hipsters.

18. Only a fortysomething is old enough to remember the TV show, Thirtysomething.

More irony.

19. Oooh, my back.

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AMY WRUBLE

29. I fantasize about taping up the sides of my face. Try it with your fingers — it takes 10 years off instantly.

30. Cripes, my back.

31. Touching my toes is not a guarantee.

32. Forget 50 Shades of Grey — my nightstand is full of wrinkle cream and Bengay.

The apothecary is open!

33. I even have one of those days-of-the-week vitamin boxes.

34. If I buy a turtle it might outlive me.

20. Other than the Kardashians, I don’t recognize anyone in the tabloids. Who are these people, and why are they famous?

SHUTTERSTOCK / GERALD A. DEBOER

21. Ages 31-39 are a total blur. I’m scared I’ll blink and be 200.

22. All of sudden my tight mini-skirts make me look like I’m trying too hard. Hey sluts, incoming at Goodwill!

23. Uhhh, my back.

24. The Real Housewives and I are, like, the same age.

Where’s my butler?

If I buy a turtle it might outlive me.”

25. It’s occurring to me that I might not ever visit every single beach on the planet, and I’m actually okay with that, which feels weird.

26. When I flirt with the cable guy, I don’t get extra channels for free anymore.

35. The bad habits I still have are probably here to stay.

36. I say things like, “What’s the name of that actor, you know, he was in that thing?”

37. I get a hangover from looking at liquor.

38. The next milestone birthday is 50.

39. Did I mention my reading glasses?

27. I still think 21-year-old guys are hot. And they’re like, “Mom?”

40. One word: “Ma’am.”

28. Why didn’t I take naked pictures of myself when I was 30?

Amy Wruble runs the blog Carriage Before Marriage.

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THEO JANSEN

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TECHNOLOGY

COURTESY OF TED

A New Form of Life …

Made of PVC Pipe YES ... MY TEDTALK ... a long time ago it was. Back in 2007, the short, 20-second movies on YouTube of my work were well-visited, but after the TEDTalk, the number of viewers exploded. I didn’t realize this effect then. Coming from Europe, I certainly was aware of the

importance of TED, but I totally underestimated its effect on the Internet. Even now, after six years, people still remind me of that crucial nine minutes of my life. Though I am not a fluent speaker like Sir Ken Robinson or Alain de Botton, my work got a lot of attention.

Let me tell you about the evolutionary development of Strandbeest after 2007.

Dutch artist Theo Jansen shows off the Strandbeest, a 12-meter long plastic structure that is capable of walking when powered by wind pressure.

SCOTT BARBOUR/GETTY IMAGES

Voices

In my talk, I mentioned that the Strandbeest — kinetic sculptures built of PVC pipe that can walk on their own, powered by the wind— would develop a digital brain. But it turns out that working with an analogue brain is much simpler and weighs far less. The “brain” of the animal, which is actually a digital step counter, works — but is a lot of work to make, and it uses up extra walking units simply to carry the brain itself.

In fact, it’s much easier to connect a pump to one leg and let it pump air into PET bottles with every step. As soon as the pressure exceeds a certain limit, an air switch turns over, and the animal knows it walked a certain distance.

These days, the beasts only walk parallel to the coast when the wind

THEO JANSEN

blows either southwest or northeast.

They walk back and forth between two places on the Dutch coast: Kijkduin and Scheveningen. In a way, Strandbeests have turned into migration animals, and the step counter gives them an idea of where they are. While counting their steps, they know more or less where they are between Kijkduin and Scheveningen.

Even more exciting is that they’ve seemed to develop a fas-

TED and The Huffington Post are excited to bring you TEDWeekends, a curated weekend program that introduces a powerful “idea worth spreading” every Friday, anchored in an exceptional TEDTalk. This week’s TEDTalk is accompanied by an original blog post from the featured speaker, along with new op-eds, thoughts and responses from the HuffPost community. Watch the talk above, read the blog post and tell us your thoughts below. Become part of the conversation!

HUFFINGTON 06.23.13

The Strandbeest, made completely out of plastic tubes and bottles, uses a digital stepcounter as its “brain” while walking with the wind.

cinating navigational mechanism that relies solely on the softness of sand. This clues them in on how far they are away from the sea. You must realize — these animals are technically blind and deaf — they cannot hear or see the sea.

I’ve also thought a lot about the reproduction of these animals.

Imagine these Strandbeests making copies of themselves simply by feeding them plastic tubes. I’m sure this is possible, but I need a few more million years to make that a reality.

Today, Strandbeests have an ability to multiply that I wasn’t aware of in 2007. Let me explain.

The leg system of the beach animals works because of a combination of certain lengths of tubes. Because of the proportion of lengths, the animals walk smoothly. You could say that this range of numbers is their genetic code. I published this genetic code on my website and since then, hundreds of

MORE ON TED WEEKENDS WENT SENTIENT A.I. BECOMES REALITY

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THEO JANSEN

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HOW TO IGNORE THE MEANING OF LIFE

Strandbeests have turned into migration animals, and the step counter gives them an idea of where they are.” students, especially in the United States, have been able to produce their own Strandbeests. (Search YouTube for “theo jansen mechanism” and you will find them.)

You may argue that humans do this replication, but I see it differently. The Strandbeest is a selfreplicating meme, a brain virus. It infects the student’s brain. In fact, the Strandbeest abuse students for their reproduction. For two years, this reproduction fell into a flow acceleration. Now, 3D printers produce walking mini Strandbeests.

They are born, not assembled, and walk on the table — which you can see here.

Theo Jansen is an artist and creator of the Strandbeest.

A selection of the week’s related blogs HEADLINES TO VIEW BLOGS ABOUT THIS WEEK’S THEME

THE SPARK OF IMAGINATION

GENERATION ROOMBA

MEET THE HONGERBEEST

QUOTED

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: IAM.BEYONCE.COM; MASSIMO MERLINI/ GETTY IMAGES; JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES

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“ You’re not supposed to put babies in HOT TUBS!!!”

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“ Romantic city is a myth. You can find romance anywhere, if you have the right partner.”

— HuffPost commenter KarateKid, on “Most Romantic Cities In America: MissTravel.com Lists The Best Places To Find Love”

— HuffPost commenter JMB973,

on Beyonce and Blue Ivy relaxing in a hot tub

“ Why in the world did we stop?”

— Matthew Perry at The Hollywood Reporter’s Emmy roundtable, wishing they hadn’t stopped making Friends

“ Where’s the snooping by the NSA and Echelon for this event huh?”

— HuffPost commenter JScott, on Bilderberg 2013, a secretive meeting of Western power brokers in London

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“ I don’t even enjoy 90% of the emails I get, I feel sorry for someone who would need to be looking through these.”

- HuffPost commenter Liz_Wilson_2,

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: VICTOR BOYKO/GETTY IMAGES; BOB D’AMICO/ABC VIA GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/ERIC GAY

on the NSA scandal

At that point in my career, I had become what is known as a blackout drinker ... I have no memory of that event.

— John Galliano

to Vanity Fair, on his anti-Semitic comments in 2011 that caused him to be fired from his position as creative director of Dior

“ Religious freedom does not mean freedom from religion.”

— Rick Perry,

at the State Capitol building in Austin before signing HB 308, which allows public schools to display scenes and symbols of “traditional winter holidays”

“ No disrespect to her [or] her family and husband now, I would say that she could be the one that got away.”

—John Stamos on his love interest in Full House, Lori Loughlin, on HuffPost Live

TOM ZELLER, JR.

06.23.13 #54

FEATURES THE GAZER OCEAN OF TROUBLE

HE LOOKS. HE DOESN’T TOUCH. YOU HEAL?

By MALLIKA RAO

COURTESY OF BRACO.NET

Johnny Podell, the agent behind Cream, Alice Cooper and other iconic rockers, knows all about getting high. His career flamed out in the ’80s when he became so addicted to cocaine, he hawked all of his Platinum record plaques to fund his habit. On a recent brisk spring day in Manhattan, Podell, since reformed, led the charge to sample a drug of a different sort. The supplier, a Croatian man known to followers as Braco (pronounced Brahtzo, the Croatian word for “little brother”), pushes hope.

“Last night, I was as high as I’ve ever been,” Podell told a crowd

gathered in the Crystal Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel. People hollered in agreement. A leather jacket hung from Podell’s skinny frame, and sunglasses shielded his eyes from the light of the chandeliers.

“Eight bucks — not bad! I wish I’d known about this 30 years ago,” he continued, cackling. “I would have saved a lot of money.”

Ever since the psychic Edgar Cayce birthed the American New Age movement in the early 20th century, there’s been no lack of men and women selling miracles to the crystal-pendant set. Braco, though, may be the smoothest salesman yet. His cult of personality has no personality. He’s said to do it all — everything from shrinking tumors to casting love spells — without saying a word or touching a soul. All he does, to the delight of his followers, is gaze at them.

The cross-section of Braco believers streaming into the New Yorker lobby that weekend could have been mistaken for a United Nations tour group bent on exploring the rest of midtown. The

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variety was staggering: Midwesterners in sweatshirts and sensible shoes, pale young Balkan men, Indian couples sporting shawls and turbans, a large contingent of middle-aged black ladies. Some were, in fact, UN employees, converts since 2012, when Braco gazed at them in a church down the street from their Manhattan headquarters. That time, the Croatian ambassador and his wife showed up.

Semi-celebrities were out today too. In the front row sat Tracie Martyn, a self-described “facialist to the stars,” and something of a magician-healer herself. Martyn’s website quotes Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon, both clients, swearing by a facial she delivers with an electric wand. That day, a band of her clients joined her, among them, Podell and Christine Baranski, the Emmy-winning actress from The Good Wife. (“I felt like a dolphin swimming in beautiful water,” Baranski later enthused.) They sat in reserved seats at the front of the packed ballroom.

This was day two for most, including Podell. “I had to come back for more. After all,” he grinned, “I am an addict.”

Podell is the type of fan Bra-

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co tends to befriend: someone who isn’t a household name, but knows a few. In the ballroom, he talked about whisking Braco and a few gazing A-listers, including Martyn, to the backstage of the Beacon Theater for an Allman Brothers concert the night be-

“ Braco doesn’t call himself a healer. But what I experienced can’t be explained any other way.” fore (Duane and Gregg Allman are Podell’s clients from way back).

“We were so lit up, you could have plugged us in,” he crowed, chalking up the night of spot-hopping to “the gift of the gaze,” rather than drugs or alcohol.

For most of the crowd, talking to Braco, let alone hanging with him, is the stuff of dreams. Since 2008, he hasn’t spoken with anyone except those in his inner circle — he refused to be interviewed for this story. The system maximizes the number of people he can “heal” in a day. It’s also a trump card against charges of fraud.

“Braco doesn’t call himself a healer,” Podell told the crowd.

“But what I experienced can’t be explained any other way.”

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AN EXTRAORDINARY TALENT No definitive study on energy healing exists. The biggest so far turned into an anvil around the New Age community’s neck: a 1999 experiment by psychiatrist Elisabeth Targ that seemed to show that a diffuse team of healers stalled the deaths of AIDS patients. The data was later found to be flawed, and, in a surreal twist, Targ herself died of a brain tumor under the watch of an army of healers. At the time, it was popu-

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lar to call her the most prayed-for person in the world.

Hope lives on though. Each year, national grants fund the study of qigong, tai chi, acupuncture, acupressure, meditation and Reiki, a palm-healing technique now offered at more than 800 American hospitals. Solo healers are becoming stars. These aren’t the faith healers of old, who lay hands on writhing bodies in private homes and churches. The new generation are more akin to celebrity fitness trainers, their products and regimens open to anyone willing to pay. The op-

A crowd gathers in the Grand Ballroom of the New Yorker Hotel for one of Braco’s gazing sessions in 2012.

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tions are endless: If Braco’s $8, 8-minute soul-sweep doesn’t do it for you, why not an embrace from Amma, the jolly “hugging saint” from India, who once wrapped her arms around Sharon Stone? Or, if you prefer your healers clean-cut, there’s always Dean Kraft, a psychic who wears suits.

Staring can be transformative, this we know. Scientologists call it “confronting,” as dramatized in The Master, when the drifter played by Joaquin Phoenix loses it while contemplating a wall. In the spring of 2010, the artist Marina Abramovic planted herself in the Museum of Modern Art for a multi-month stare-athon, and all anyone could talk about afterwards was how many visitors cried. Locking eyes is an intimate act. A few years back there was even a flurry of “eye-gazing parties” — “NY’s hottest dating trend,” Elle magazine called it — wherein single people looking for love first looked into a potential partner’s eyes for a few minutes.

But Braco is unique. He may offer less than any star healer on the market: no mantras, no dictums, just the sight of him seeing you. When his ongoing tour, Braco in America, launched in 2010, he

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became a punchline. On his radio show, Howard Stern wondered if the silent Croatian was mentally disabled. A few months later, the comedian Tim Heidecker, of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!, tweeted a link to a YouTube video of Braco gazing at a crowd of tearful onlookers.

“ He looks absolutely like some guy you’d see eating at a cafe in Santa Monica, staring out and doing nothing at all.

There seems to be nothing special about him.”

“I was obsessed,” said Scott Jacobson, a former writer for The Daily Show, who first encountered Braco in a video emailed by a friend in comedy.

“He looks absolutely like some guy you’d see eating at a cafe in Santa Monica, staring out and doing nothing at all. There seems to be nothing special about him, which is why the cutaways to the audience, their responses, are so wonderful.”

Jacobson wound up doing a day’s worth of gazing sessions in 2011 for a gonzo article for Vice magazine (which he later pub-

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lished on his personal website after a dispute over length).

The sessions, held in Woodland Hills, Calif., 20 miles from downtown L.A., drew other skeptics who found the premise hilarious.

Two comics in the audience, Natasha Lejjero and Mark Proksch, upset the peace when they challenged the opening speaker, according to Jacobson. His dispatch describes the security guards, or “guardians,” who linger on the sidelines of every session, asking Jacobson if he knew the duo and could stop them.

At the same time, backers were surfacing. In 2011, Braco was preparing a renewal application for his O-1, or extraordinary talent visa, a three-year ticket to work in the U.S. granted to applicants with impressive references. One of his followers worked for Dennis Kucinich, the one-time presidential candidate who was then a U.S. representative from Ohio. Kucinich, who is part Croat, agreed to a private meeting with Braco. He wrote a welcome statement in Croatian. Soon, he was asking his secretary to clear his schedule and shepherding Braco on a private tour of Congress, chatting — in English — about world peace.

When Braco’s visa application went

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out, it was with a letter from Kucinich’s office inside.

Kucinich is the highest-profile American politician to help Braco gain a visa. (While Braco staff members say former Wyoming Gov. David Freudenthal made a

“ You know why kids aren’t allowed, right? This kinda stuff is considered 18+ ever since the Emperor got himself a new outfit.

Kids *ask questions*.” crucial call after Braco’s first visa application was rejected, Freudenthal told The Huffington Post he can’t recall doing so, saying with a chuckle, “You’d think I’d remember someone like that.”)

Today, Braco is the first and only Croat to hold the O-1, a class of certification associated with Olympians and Oscar winners.

What could be so compelling about a man who seems to stand for nothing? Jacobson, the Daily Show writer, talks about an “unpretentious” vibe. “He seems to live modestly, he doesn’t charge much.

This isn’t like Scientology, where by the time you clear, you’ve spent hundreds of dollars,” says David

COURTESY OF BRACO.NET

Braco is the first — and only — person from Croatia to hold a U.S. O-1 visa, a type of work permit typically reserved for Olympians or celebrities.

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Bromley, a Virginia Commonwealth University professor who tracks suspect religious phenomena.

Kucinich rebuffed a question about the gazing sessions — “I don’t know anything about those things” — but spoke glowingly of his fellow Croat in an interview with The Huffington Post. “He’s a gentle, sensitive soul. Would there were more people like him.”

The legends are doozies: that he hails from Atlantis; that a fallen sunbeam pierced his mentor, wiring Braco into a sort of mystical hotline to the sun. Most project his divinity onto the products hawked at every gazing session: the $35 DVDs, which purchasers often rub on their skin to ease muscle pain, and the pendants from his sun-inspired jewelry line, some priced upwards of $5,000.

Braco’s factotums won’t discuss financial figures. One employee estimated that 3,000 people sat in the Crystal Ballroom over the course of the weekend this spring.

An official Braco website puts his record at 10,000 people in one day. But because customers typically attend multiple sessions in a day, ticket sales don’t translate into a conclusive head count.

Braco’s growing tour schedule

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tells a clearer story. This year he spends only two weeks at home in Zagreb with his wife and son.

He’ll gaze in cities of varying demographics, many in America: Richmond, Va.; Phoenix; Sacramento, Calif.; Portland, Ore. He visits Texas and Massachusetts

By 2008, Whitecliff says, Braco’s fans were so great in number — and his critics so irritating — he came up with the idea of simply standing and staring at whole masses of people. for the first time (as well as the Netherlands, and recently, Australia). New York and Los Angeles, where the Podells of the world live, will host multiple stops.

Not every miracle sounds farfetched. That a person’s mood might improve under a constant kindly gaze, for instance, isn’t such a leap. So too might a sick dog seem to chill out when played one of the rare recordings of Braco speaking (called “The Voice”), in a soothing Croatian drone. Vanishing tumors are another thing. In response to HuffPost’s requests for evidence more rigorous than first-person

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anecdotes — a follow-up survey, or anything medical — Braco’s staff said they didn’t have the manpower or funding to track outcomes.

On cult-watch forums, critics say his sessions are designed to force a placebo effect, squeezing Braco into 10 minutes toward the end of an hour packed with hypemen and -women. They deride a ban on pregnant women and children, whom Braco’s literature warns may be “overburdened” by the energy.

“You know why kids aren’t allowed, right?” wrote a commenter on the site NewAgeFraud. com. “This kinda stuff is considered 18+ ever since the Emperor got himself a new outfit. Kids *ask questions*.”

BRACO IN AMERICA Nearly every English-language factoid about Braco comes from the two employees closest to him in the U.S.: Angelika Whitecliff and Jane Sibbett. At first glance, the leggy blondes, both of whom live in Hawaii and wax poetic about energy fields and swimming with the dolphins, seem like twins.

In reality, they’re at odds. The women promote the “Braco In America” campaign more or less

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independently, and even run similar but competing websites selling his goods. Sibbett, an actress (she played Ross Geller’s lesbian ex, Carol, on Friends) is linked into L.A. and New York. She can be breezy and persuasive about how Braco won over her “pragmatic mind,”

“ Believe me, if I were to hear myself, I would think it’s crazy, too.” whereas Whitecliff, a hardcore New Age-ist, never expresses doubts.

Tall and angular, she flits around sessions gripping a cup of coffee and trembling with nervous energy.

Whitecliff met Braco first, at a UFO conference in Las Vegas in 2009. She followed up with a pilgrimage to Zagreb, where she wrote a memoir, 21 Days With Braco, that she says was meant to prep American audiences for his arrival.

In it, she details the moment Braco commissioned her help. By her account, he told her she was the one to bring him to America.

Back home in Hawaii, she hired Sibbett to film a line of DVDs, in which followers detail the miraculous turns in their lives. (These can be purchased on the dueling websites: Braco.net, run by

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Whitecliff, and BracoAmerica. com, Sibbett’s site.)

By the time of Braco’s first gaze on American soil — at a conference in Hawaii run by Whitecliff — Sibbett and her TV writer husband had moved from L.A. She and Braco got to know each other, she says, with volleyball matches and swim trips. “I took him horseback riding.”

She recounts taking a walk one night and running into Braco, also on a stroll. The “mystical, magical meeting” lasted for hours. “He said, ‘I would like you to bring me to the mainland. I think you can do it.’”

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He gave her a sun pendant, “different from Angelika’s,” said Sibbett, “a miniature version of the one he wears ... yellow with diamonds.”

She called her friends, including old Friends pals. Three weeks later, Braco gazed in L.A. The tickets sold out, Sibbett said. “Kenny Loggins came.”

She booked up the West Coast.

(Whitecliff, she says, seemed reluctant to share her contacts.) A helpful new friend came in the form of the Rev. Michael Beckwith, star of the self-help franchise, The Secret. They discussed how energy “goes beyond the boundaries of time and space.” The two took the logical next step, live-streaming footage of Braco gazing at Beck-

Advertisements for Braco’s gaze therapy appear in New York, where an estimated 3,000 people attended Braco’s sessions this spring.

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with’s megachurch in Culver City, Calif., so anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card could be healed beyond the boundaries of time and space.

This sort of work is new for Sibbett. “She’s a little too poised and a little too perfect for what she’s doing,” said Jacobson, who contacted her for his article. “The way she was kind of interrogating me and hedging her bets, giving me disclaimers: that not everyone feels it the first time, that you need to come back for more. If I knew of somebody who had mystical healing properties, I wouldn’t bend over backwards to qualify the experience.”

Whitecliff, meanwhile, who lists her interests as UFOs, telepathy and angels on one online profile, seems right at home. Opening speakers at gazing sessions recite the life story told in her book: that before Braco was Braco, he was Josep Grbavac, the son of wealthy parents in Zagreb. He accompanied his mother to a psychic, Ivica Prokic, who saw the future by peering into a mirror. The young Grbavac, with his master’s degree in economics, was a doubter. But Prokic won him over. The psychic gave him his new name and fore-

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told his powers, saying he would use them in America after a great shift (Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential win, according to Whitecliff). A year later, in 1995, Prokic died. Braco took his place at his center in Zagreb.

Prokic’s demise is put down to a freak accident, a “rogue wave” that

[Braco] may offer less than any star healer on the market: no mantras, no dictums, just the sight of him seeing you. swept him away off the coast of South Africa, where Whitecliff says the two friends went on holiday.

(The story raises the antennae of skeptics, who offer a more sinister reading of two people going somewhere, and only one returning.)

By 2008, Whitecliff says, Braco’s fans were so great in number — and his critics so irritating — he came up with the idea of simply standing and staring at whole masses of people.

“There’s a profoundness to him,” said Martyn, the high-wattage facialist. “We all speak too much and waste our energy and words.

He doesn’t speak that much, and when he says something, it’s very

COURTESY OF BRACO.NET

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potent and purposeful.”

On the night of the Allman Brothers concert, she recalled, “Someone said, ‘Oh, it’s so late.’

And he said something to the effect of, ‘What is time? It’s just a number.’ We were all like, ‘Did you hear what he just said?’ There is a profoundness to him, and not in the normal guru way.”

Sibbett calls Braco a “real man.

He eats everything. He doesn’t drink, but he does smoke. There’s a lot of spiritual people who do.”

She remembers finding “creepy” videos of people fainting and screaming on YouTube before taking the job, and knowing Braco needed an image change. In the DVDs she produces, Braco often stares out at the Pacific Ocean, his hair floating on the breeze.

Sibbett’s first session was in Whitecliff’s living room. She and her husband couldn’t stop giggling, stuck in what she calls a “bliss bubble.” Soon, she says, she saw Braco, who was gazing via Skype, “shape-shift into a Native American man with feathers in his hair.” More sessions transpired, and she became sure that her allergy problems, brought on by the moist Hawaiian climate, were getting better.

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“Believe me, if I were to hear myself, I would think it’s crazy, too,” she said. “But it happened.”

ONLY THE BEGINNING Braco’s friends want him to blow up. They talk about seeing him on Oprah’s couch, the seat where gurus are made. They cite role models such as Eckhart Tolle, the German spiritualist who vaulted into bestseller lists after Winfrey gushed

Jane Sibbett, who runs one of Braco’s websites, shoots DVDs of Braco staring off into the Pacific Ocean.

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about his book, The Power of Now. If Braco gives only one interview, he couldn’t do much better.

“We’re a connected group of people,” Martyn said. “If I can tell someone who can tell someone else — I mean, that’s how things happen.”

Take Podell, whom Martyn convinced to join her in the ballroom that weekend. By the time he was on stage priming the crowd, he’d agreed to consider a request from Braco to introduce him all over the country. That day, he wrapped up his first try in the standard way.

After asking the crowd to stand, he paused, then said gravely, “I now present to you — Braco.”

Instrumental music filled the air, operated by employees and volunteers sitting stage right at a long table covered in laptops and binders.

On cue, a slight man appeared from the opposite side of the hall.

He climbed the stage without moving his arms, and pivoted to the audience. Grey hair fell onto sloped shoulders clad in a silky white shirt.

His features looked soft, almost melted. This was Braco. He may as well have stepped off the life-size poster in the hotel lobby.

He slowly scanned the room.

Some in the audience held up photographs of loved ones, images

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of sick humans and pets. A man swayed precariously, as if he’d fallen asleep standing up. People of both sexes shed tears.

And why not? There was no denying the thrill, especially in a city where making eye contact can feel like a provocation.

A few loaded minutes of silence,

There was no denying the thrill, especially in a city where making eye contact can feel like a provocation. and Braco was gone. The crowd shuffled into order, seats resumed, photographs hidden. The floor opened to volunteers. A middleaged woman with thinning hair raised her hand.

“I feel light and childlike and creative,” said Irina from New Jersey. “To me, that’s what Braco does. I’ve been carrying, like, a heavy sack of stuff on me for ages now, and it started to drift away.

Of course, I started to analyze it, but I told my mind, ‘It’s going to be okay. You can feel as light as you want.’”

Mallika Rao is an arts and entertainment reporter at The Huffington Post.

WHEN CLIMATE CHANGE AND FISH COLLIDE

BY TOM ZELLER, JR.

PREVIOUS PAGE: DOUG ALLAN/ GETTY IMAGES

With a limberness that defies his 69 years, Frank Mirarchi heaves himself over the edge of a concrete wharf and steps out onto a slack, downward sloping dock line bouncing 20 feet above the lapping waters near Scituate, Mass. He shimmies laterally along the pylons, steadying himself with a grip on some steel rigging, until he reaches the roof of the pilot house on his boat, a groundfish trawler called the Barbara L. Peters, after his mother-in-law.

He descends to the motor room and rubs a hand along a clean stretch of engine piping. “I’ll be done painting in here soon,” says Mirarchi, who has been harvesting cod, flounder and other quarry from the Gulf of Maine and, further out, from the lucrative shallows of Georges Bank for the better part of five decades.

“Then I’ll move outside.”

Painting is about all the action Mirarchi’s boat has seen lately. Facing massive cuts in government-proscribed limits

to the groundfish species at the very heart of New England’s commercial fishing economy, the Barbara L. Peters — like the 30 or so other nominally active boats remaining in this New England sector, and dozens more boats up and down the Northeast coast — has been locked hard against its pier, rising and falling with the tides but going nowhere.

“We’re gonna lose a bunch of boats,” Mirarchi says, referring to the high odds that some fishermen, perhaps even himself, will be forced to abandon the livelihood that has sustained them for decades. Mirarchi barely broke even last

OCEAN OF TROUBLE

HUFFINGTON 06.23.13

PHOTO TOM ZELLER, OR ILLUSTRATION JR. CREDIT TK

“It’s a beautiful boat,” says Frank Mirarchi, referring to his groundfish trawler. “It just doesn’t have any fish to catch.”

year, and with official catch allocations for some crucial species down by nearly 80 percent for the season that opened May 1, he expects that he will be forced to put the Barbara L. Peters — only eight years old — up for sale. “What else am I going to do? My entire life’s résumé is running boats, and they aren’t hiring these days.

“It’s a beautiful boat,” Mirarchi adds.

“It just doesn’t have any fish to catch.”

Why that should be so is a matter of heated and sometimes rancorous debate. Nature being what it is, after all, good years and bad years on the high seas are par for the course. And while federal regulators have been on a long and difficult quest for balance, managing the nation’s historically over-harvested commercial fishing grounds remains an exceedingly difficult task, not least because determining just how many fish are out there at any given time still requires a bit of groping in the darkness.

As one marine expert famously quipped,

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MY ENTIRE LIFE’S RÉSUMÉ IS RUNNING BOATS, AND THEY AREN’T HIRING THESE DAYS.”

counting fish is like counting trees, except “the trees are invisible and keep moving around.”

But a growing number of scientists, as well as fishermen like Mirarchi, recognize that another factor — global warming — is sending the already delicate and opaque mechanics of marine ecosystems into a period of rapid flux. Some research suggests, for example, that as ocean temperatures rise, many fish species are being driven into deeper waters or toward the planet’s poles. Those same shifting conditions, meanwhile, are inviting historically anomalous breeds into new ranges — with unpredictable results.

The precise degree to which these phenomena are contributing to Mirarchi’s current plight is difficult to say, but ample evidence suggests that such changes are already affecting fisheries across the globe. Last month, researchers at the University of British Columbia published an analysis revealing that a large roster of fish species have been on the move in response to rising temperatures for at least the last four decades,

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and that in some marine ecosystems, particularly in the tropics, fish abundance was quickly dwindling.

These and other impacts are expected to continue cascading throughout the aquatic food web, from tiny zooplankton to the higher-order and commercially valuable species on which fishermen like Mirarchi depend for their livelihoods.

Indeed, despite decades of efforts aimed at restoring the health of the nation’s commercial fisheries — which generate more than $116 billion in annual sales and employ more than 1 million people — rising temperatures, increasing acidity and other ocean changes are undermining years of acquired knowledge about how our oceans work and how their harvests can be sustainably managed.

This now has armies of scientists, conservation groups and regulators scrambling to get a handle on what’s happening. In a new report released last month ahead of a national conference on fisheries management in Washington, D.C., researchers described climate change as “the single greatest challenge facing fishery managers.”

And yet, critics say, efforts to monitor and account for the impacts of new climate variables on the marine food web remain too new, too few and woefully underfunded. This is particularly true given that it takes years to translate sound marine science into effective public policy, which in turn can determine the success or failure of local economies along the nation’s coasts.

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“I’m going nuts,” Mirarchi says.

“I’m going all around to different meetings and talking to everybody, from regulators to congressmen to other fishermen to fishery associations, and everybody says, ‘We don’t know how to fix this.’ None of us, individually — nobody knows how to fix this.”

At the end of April, despite weeks of protests by fisherman and local politicians, federal regulators announced that they would try to fix it, at least in part, by maintaining steep cuts in catch limits for the 2013-2015 fishing seasons. Limits on cod, among the most historic and lucrative species associated with these waters, were set 78 percent below 2012 levels for the Gulf of Maine and 61 percent below last year’s mark for Georges Bank. Varieties of yellowtail and witch flounder, haddock and American plaice have also seen dramatically lower catch limits.

Many fishermen argue that the fish are more plentiful than these cuts suggest, and that environmental groups and government scientists, who conspired to implement a new system for divvying up catch quotas among local fishermen in 2010, are simply inept and unable to provide an accurate measurement of fish abundance. But others suggest that the very real effects of climate change are now being made plain in New England’s waters, as cod and other species seek out more comfortable conditions.

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Mirarchi, who has acquired the sort of wry, world-weary temperament that often comes with a profession at the nexus of so many opposing interests, says there’s lots of blame to go around. But until scientists and regulators get a grip on how the ocean is changing, he adds, one of the planet’s most vital food sources — and the multibillion-dollar industry built around it — hangs in the balance.

As the new fishing season opened on May 1, researchers were reporting that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had topped 400 parts per million — higher than at any point in human history. Mirarchi, meanwhile, once again made the trek down to the Scituate town pier and boarded his boat — not to fish, but to paint.

“Something is different out there. You can call it climate change or whatever you want, but the whole thing is a mess,” he says. “They project some fish as being abundant but we can’t catch them. They project the others as being scarce and we can’t get away from them. There’s a real disconnect and we’re not able to put the two halves together to make it work very well at all.

“And,” he says, “it’s getting worse.”

A BRUTAL EFFICIENCY It may not be revelatory to note that fish are a crucial source of nutrition to the human animal, though it’s an easy fact

ANN HERMES/THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR VIA GETTY IMAGES

Fisherman Baldassare Noto unloads the daily catch from a commercial fishing vessel in Gloucester, Mass.

PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK

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to forget in economies of seeming abundance like ours. As it is, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimated in 2012 that, worldwide, the full complement of commercial angling, trawling and farming currently yields an annual haul of 150 million metric tons of fish, worth about $200 billion — of which roughly 130 million metric tons ends up feeding someone.

For a little fewer than half the planet’s nearly 7 billion inhabitants, fish comprise as much as 20 percent of the animal protein in their diets — and a significantly higher percentage in poor and island regions where subsistence hinges on just a few basic and readily accessible staples like fish.

Inland fishing, to be sure, accounts for a chunk of the angling activity. But the lion’s share of the global seafood bounty — about 80 percent — comes from comparatively small and patchy subsections of ocean habitat where fish thrive.

Meanwhile, mankind’s proficiency at exploiting those spots has taken a heavy toll. Opinions on the precise numbers vary widely, but by most accounts a staggering number of fish stocks have been hunted to the point of wholesale population collapse. Of the 600 varieties currently monitored globally by the United Nations, for example, the organization estimates that roughly 90 percent are being either “fully exploited,” meaning that any

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uptick in fishing would be unsustainable, or “overexploited,” which is just what it sounds like: Humans are extracting fish at a pace that exceeds the stock’s natural ability to replenish its numbers.

It’s little wonder: Decades of technological improvements, including the rise of GPS and fish-finding sonar and the deployment of massive trawl nets and more muscular boats to pull them, have permitted commercial fishers to hunt with an ever more brutal efficiency — faster, deeper and over wider areas. And these developments have come in tandem with other ocean stressors like the increased demand for seafood, wanton coastal development and proliferating ocean pollution, all of which can spell trouble for anglers and their quarry.

Object lessons abound, including the collapse of Canada’s Atlantic cod fishery 20 years ago. A combination of lax government oversight and the rise of rapacious trawling technologies had, by the mid-1990s, reduced cod stocks — the cornerstone of coastal economies in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia for the better part of four centuries — by more than 90 percent. Tens of thousands of fishing and related industry jobs evaporated amid an emergency government moratorium on cod fishing in the area.

While two decades of restrictions have begun to yield small signs of recovery, the amount of codfish in and around

Cod on the Move

JANET NYE, NEFSC/NOAA

A map from NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center shows the locations of cod populations in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean from 1968-1972.

Newfoundland’s Grand Banks remains just 10 percent of what it was in the 1960s, according to the intergovernmental Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Council.

Great Britain is now grappling with a cod collapse of its own, and the aggregate size of commercial hauls the world over — from Peruvian anchovies and bluefin tuna to Irish Sea sole — are shrinking as populations of fish go bust.

A famous study published in the journal Science in 2006 predicted that, absent efforts to reverse the trend, all known commercial seafood species faced collapse by mid-century.

Whether these most dire assessments are overstated is a matter of debate, and some newer studies have suggested that a combination of government regulation and diligent conservation is helping to stabilize the falloff, at least in some ar-

eas. But there is little question that, collectively, humankind has been making wanton and unsustainable use about of a preBy 2003-2008, of 36 fish stocks in the cious resource for ahalf long time.

Northwest Atlantic Ocean, including appeared towere Signs of trouble for U.S.cod, fisheries have shifted northward, plain as far back asaccording the 1970s, the to one when 2009 study.

waters around the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere had become an international free-for-all, with industrial-strength trawlers — including huge fleets from the Soviet Union — plumbing the depths just 12 miles off the American coasts with relish. One estimate has suggested that by the mid-1970s, annual harvests were removing as much as 60 percent of the adult cod from populations along the U.S. and Canadian coasts — three times the level considered sustainable for the long term.

In an effort to establish some order, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act officially extended the territorial rights of the United States — and the economic benefits therein — out to 200 miles, and it laid down some basic tenets for sustainable fishing. The legislation was updated in 1996 and 2006, and Congress is now considering whether to reauthorize the act again this year — all in an ongoing quest to establish the optimal suite

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of controls, which can range from limiting the number of days commercial anglers are permitted at sea, capping the amount of fish that can be caught, or closing certain areas to fishing altogether, depending on what experts believe any particular fish stock can handle.

In 2010, the New England Fisheries Management Council — one of eight such bodies that oversee commercial fishing in the U.S. under the auspices of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — refined the controls by implementing a “catch share” system for the region’s highly prized groundfish. Modeled after similar systems used by various other U.S. and international fisheries, the idea is simple: Government scientists, using a combination of historical catch data and trawl surveys, determine the size of a fish population and how much of it can be sustainably caught. That total catch limit is then divvied up as “shares” among the region’s commercial fishermen, who can then pursue their allocations on the high seas, or sell them to other anglers on an open market.

Catch-share systems are by no means universally popular, and the jury is still out on their overall impacts. Some recent studies suggest, for example, that while they may help to stabilize fish populations, they are less effective in restoring health to the marine ecosystem, which would ideally include boosting the

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overall biomass of the target fish that remain in our oceans.

This year’s drastic cuts in cod allocations, which met with angry protests ahead of the season that opened early in May, suggested to many critics that the catch-share system in New England was an utter failure. But some environmental groups and fishery regulators insist that the system is both sound and necessary, explaining that an earlier sampling anomaly led them to overestimate certain stocks in the preceding years and forced them to make big cuts in the current season.

“We know that for some fishing communities that have relied heavily on cod, haddock and flounder, the next several years are going to be a struggle,” said John Bullard, the northeast regional administrator for NOAA’s fisheries division, at the end of April, in a public defense of the cutbacks. “We’ve done everything we can to include measures that may help soften the blow of quota cuts, but it’s going to take a collective effort to find more ways to keep both the fishery and the businesses that support it viable while these stocks recover.”

The more pressing question now, however, is whether any management strategy can bring the cod, or other traditional species, back. Optimists surely can point to year-over-year improvements in the percentage of stocks that federal regula-

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tors consider to be overfished in the U.S. But scientists are also mindful that 150 years of carbon pollution have begun to break down and reassemble the undersea environment in ways we do not fully understand. Indeed, for all the concern over the impacts of global warming on land-based agriculture, forests and glaciers, the oceans are at the front lines of the climate assault, becoming increasingly acidic and absorbing as much as 80 percent of the additional heat being generated by the greenhouse effect.

Given that cod development and ecology is so dependent on water temperature, one analysis has predicted that if bottom temperatures in the Gulf of Maine rise just one degree Celsius in coming decades,

THEY PROJECT SOME FISH AS BEING ABUNDANT BUT WE CAN’T CATCH THEM. THEY PROJECT THE OTHERS AS BEING SCARCE AND WE CAN’T GET AWAY FROM THEM.”

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yields of the fish could drop by 21 percent.

A one-degree uptick from that would reduce cod catch by as much as 43 percent, and higher temperatures would likely drive the fish out of the area completely.

At the end of April, NOAA’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center reported that sea surface temperatures on the Northeast continental shelf — which runs roughly from Cape Hatteras, N.C., on up through the Gulf of Maine — had reached their highest level in 150 years of recording. The change, the agency noted, appeared to be impacting distributions over the whole stretch — from black sea bass, summer flounder and longfin squid to butterfish, American lobster and, of course, haddock and cod.

But scientists and regulators still don’t have a good handle on how the full array of new climate-driven variables — rising temperatures, changing currents, shifting thermal layers, increasing acidity — are combining to alter the ecosystems in which our favorite seafood items live and breed. “It isn’t always easy to understand the big picture when you are looking at one specific part of it at one specific point in time,” said Michael Fogarty, who heads the Ecosystem Assessment Program at NFSC, in a statement accompanying the historic temperature data.

“What these latest findings mean for the Northeast Shelf ecosystem and its marine life is unknown,” Fogarty said.

“What is known is that the ecosystem is changing, and we need to continue monitoring and adapting to these changes.”

TOM ZELLER, JR.

Dr. Jeffrey Runge of the University of Maine deploys “bongo” nets in Maine’s Damariscotta River Estuary in a hunt for Calanus specimens.

GROPING FOR ANSWERS The chilly waters of the Damariscotta River Estuary mingle with Atlantic Ocean currents about midway up Maine’s coast, roughly 60 miles north of Portland. About four miles from the estuary’s mouth, aboard the research vessel Ira C., Jeffrey Runge, a marine scientist with the University of Maine and the independent Gulf of Maine Research Institute, grabs hold of a pair of shallow plastic drums, yoked side-by-side like giant bongos, as they are heaved out of the water by an overhead winch. Each drum is about two feet in circumference and open at one end. On the other, they are skirted with fine mesh nets that taper over several feet into a pair of

narrow steel collection cylinders, each about the size of a loaf of bread.

Dragging the apparatus behind the boat for several minutes has drawn an aquarium of minuscule creatures into the cylinders, including a species of rice-sized zooplankton that can be seen darting and swimming, like so many sea monkeys, in the collection jars where they eventually end up. This breed of zooplankton is technically known as Calanus finmarchicus, Runge says as he raises a jar to his eyeball, and it carries a staggering payload of rich, fatty acids known as lipids.

This makes it a crucial source of nutrition for, among myriad other creatures, foraging species like herring and mackerel — which, as it happens, are among the many food sources for predatory species further up the food chain, including Gulf of Maine groundfish like cod.

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The lifecycle of Calanus finmarchicus in the Gulf of Maine has been in flux in recent years, and Runge is among several marine scientists who believe that changes in the climate, including rising ocean temperatures, increased precipitation and drainage cycles along coastal estuaries like this one, are playing a role.

If that’s the case, the entire food web in this historically abundant fishery may be reorganizing itself in response to new environmental inputs, with implications across dozens of interdependent species, including humans.

“If this Calanus finmarchicus disappeared — no one has really done the quantitative analysis, though it’s something I would like to try to work out,” Runge says.

“But what impact might that have on the system? How would that cascade? Just intuitively it seems like it would be a big effect. The warmer temperatures throughout the water coming from the Gulf of Maine — that really affects how quickly Calanus can metabolize their lipid supplies, and it’s really dramatic.”

Research like Runge’s is both vital and woefully behind the climate curve. Speculation about the potential impacts on the oceans and marine life have been percolating in scientific circles for decades. But in terms of understanding and monitoring the changing dynamics of ocean systems as a whole, and what impact that might have on the fisheries that provide jobs,

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revenue and economic stability for dozens of coastal communities, we are, by most accounts, still groping in the darkness.

“I think fundamentally that this climate forcing is going to be big, and it’s going to make for big changes in ways that we don’t understand,” Runge says.

“I think we are fundamentally unprepared for that, in terms of infrastructure, and if we really had unlimited resources, I would like to see some kind of observation program in places like the Gulf of Maine, with much more extensive sampling and many more variables.”

Efforts along these lines are underway, Runge notes, pointing to organizations like the Northeast Regional Association of Coastal and Ocean Observing Systems, or Neracoos as it is known, which is part of the wider U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System. These entities, which grew out of the Integrated Coastal and Ocean Observation System Act of 2009, operate as federal-regional partnerships seeking, among other things, to improve and support marine commerce and science-based resource management.

In 2009, the National Science Foundation also authorized funding for the Oceans Observatories Initiative. The project aims to build a network of ocean sensors that measure the full complement of “physical, chemical, geological and biological variables in the ocean and seafloor” and provide “improved detec-

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WHEN SHELLED ORGANISMS ARE AT RISK, THE ENTIRE FOOD WEB MAY ALSO BE AT RISK.”

tion and forecasting of environmental changes and their effects on biodiversity, coastal ecosystems and climate.”

In April, the Obama administration released a roadmap for implementing the president’s own 2010 ocean policy plan, which is nominally aimed at improving the resilience of the nation’s ocean economy. “Science is the foundation upon which sound management of ocean and coastal resources is based,” John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and co-chair of the National Ocean Council, said in a statement announcing the implementation plan. “The president’s National Ocean Policy and the new implementation plan will help advance relevant science and its application to decision-making to strengthen the economies of our coastal regions while increasing their resilience and sustaining their resources.”

But for all this brewing activity, such endeavors remain both embryonic and, given the scope of the problem and the austere economic posture of lawmakers, cash-starved.

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Consider, for example, rising ocean acidification, a direct result of oceans absorbing excessive carbon dioxide pollution. As pH levels in marine waters drop, so too does the ability of so-called calcifying creatures — assorted corals, clams, oysters, sea urchins and some varieties of plankton — to develop. And as the Carbon Group at NOAA’s own Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory notes: “When shelled organisms are at risk, the entire food web may also be at risk.” The sentiments echo those of the National Research Council, whose 2010 “national strategy” for addressing ocean acidification concluded that the ocean’s chemistry is changing at a pace that “exceeds any known to have occurred for at least the past hundreds of thousands of years.”

Coral reefs alone support a wide array of fish species and other ocean life, act as a buffer against shoreline storms and waves and floods, and are increasingly providing clues to new medicines for a variety of human ailments, from cancer and arthritis to heart disease. And yet, given the ever upward trajectory of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, scientists in December suggested that virtually every coral reef might be dead or dying by the end of this century.

Given the dire outlook, many stakeholders argue that far too little is being done.

One study, prepared in 2012 by the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, noted that federal funding for research and monitoring of ocean acidification averaged about $29 million annually

GEORGETTE DOUWMA/ GETTY IMAGES

Coral reefs are a fundamental part of the ocean food web, and one study suggests their existence is in danger due to increases in acidification.

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over the last four years. The foundation compared this to estimates, both public and private, of how much cash will actually be needed to address the problem in coming decades. The Ocean Carbon and Biochemistry program, a joint effort supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA, suggested that as much as $100 million annually — more than three times current funding levels — would be needed over the coming decade.

Taking a wider view of ocean science and management, the bipartisan Joint Ocean Commission Initiative, in its ocean policy report card last year, put the issue bluntly: “Ocean management, science, and education programs remain severely underfunded, hindering them from effectively supporting our national security and economic interests and undermining the health of ocean resources.”

A ‘PHENOMENAL WEIRDNESS’ Perhaps not surprisingly, these shortfalls have left fishermen, regulators and coastal economies flat-footed. Runge points by way of example to shifts in the growth process of one of Maine’s iconic seafood staples: the lobster. Warmer waters caused the prized crustaceans to molt earlier than expected last year. “It contributed to a mini-economic crisis in the lobster industry here in Maine,” Runge says. “You had this early molting, and then there was a supply of lobsters

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that now were of size much earlier than usual, and processors in Canada just weren’t ready for that. So you had this tremendous oversupply of lobsters early in the year that flooded the market and the price just took a nose dive.”

Early molting appears to be underway again this year — and similar behavior and lifecycle shifts are being documented in fisheries the world over. In September, scientists at the University of British Columbia reported that warming oceans appeared to be causing fish to get smaller. The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, modeled some 600 fish species from oceans all over the globe, projecting that in aggregate, average maximum body weight of fish was likely to decrease between 14 and 20 percent over the first half of this century.

Last spring, Britain’s Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, which unites a wide array of scientists, government agencies and industries, issued an analysis that found “clear changes in the depth, distribution, migration and spawning behaviors of fish — many of which can be related to warming sea temperatures.” Sole were reported to be moving away from the Netherlands and toward the eastern edges of the English Channel, the group noted, while sea bass and red mullet had drifted northward.

Many of the Gulf of Maine’s subarctic species — including Runge’s Calanus

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CAMERON THOMPSON, UNIVERSITY OF MAINE/GULF OF MAINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Calanus finmarchicus is a lipid-rich zooplankton that provides crucial nutrition for a variety of Gulf of Maine fish species.

finmarchicus — are already at the southern extent of their range, and experts suspect they are slowly being replaced by species migrating up from more temperate waters to the south. As the numbers of precious cod mysteriously dwindle in the gulf — possibly migrating north and westward with the Calanus — Mirachi and other fishermen are reporting increasing numbers of shortfin squid, black sea bass, blue crab and other species that had never been here in appreciable numbers before.

One common response to all this is, of course, so what? If changing ocean characteristics drive some fish away, others will likely arrive, suggesting that dry-docked fishermen like Mirarchi, and the fishdependent economies of which they are

a part, need only to adapt to new quarry.

The U.K.’s MCCIP noted, for example, that rising populations of sea bass, red mullet, anchovy, octopus and squid, among other species, could represent new opportunities for British fishermen.

But Jake Kritzer, a senior scientist with the Environmental Defense Fund who also serves on the New England Fishery Management Council’s science and statistical committee, suggests it’s not that simple. “Just because we’ve seen some black sea bass in the Gulf of Maine doesn’t mean we’re going to have a viable black sea bass stock in the Gulf of Maine anytime soon, and therefore that we can write off cod and just shift our attention over there,” Kritzer says.

“And even if it does, in order for it to be sustainable, we still need to understand the stock dynamics of black sea bass in the Gulf of Maine, which is something

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we’ve never had to look at before.”

Add to that uncertainty the sizable time lag that exists between scientific understanding and its translation into public policy, and it’s likely that the intersection of commercial fishing, environmental conservation and government oversight is going to become increasingly chaotic and contentious in coming years.

Writing in the journal Nature last month, the researchers from the University of British Columbia, whose new analysis suggests that fish and invertebrate movements in response to warming waters have been underway since the 1970’s, suggested the stakes were high for everyone. “This study shows that ocean warming has already affected global fisheries in the past four decades,” they wrote, “highlighting the immediate need to develop adaptation plans to minimize the effect of such warming on the economy and food security of coastal communities, particularly in tropical regions.”

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

“It’s an immensely complicated situation,” Kritzer says. “You have climate change overlaying everything, and it seems to be changing the way everything works, which means we have a lot of problems. It’s getting harder and harder to assess the stocks, to model them and understand their dynamics and predict what’s going to happen. Because those models are based on years and years of

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experience reading fish stocks and studying them, they have been tested over a long time and they rely on a certain set of assumptions and conditions that now seem to be rapidly changing. Tools that have been fairly well established and worked well in the past just don’t seem to be working as well anymore.”

Until science gets a handle on things, Runge says, that’s going to be a social, economic and regulatory problem. “I think we’re just going to be responding kind of blindly to what happens.”

Down the hall from Runge’s office at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Andrew Pershing, an ocean ecosystem modeler, has been enthusiastically documenting historically high ocean temperatures in the area and what he calls the “phenomenal weirdness” unfolding in the Gulf of Maine. “This event is larger than the Midwest drought, and like the drought, it has impacted ecosystems and people,” he wrote last October. “However, because it took place in the ocean, it will be several years before we know the full extent of its impact.”

In a meeting at his office, Pershing says that this is the task that he and his fellow ocean scientists now face. “I just really feel like there’s a lot to be learned,” Pershing says. “I think that we can view it as doom and gloom, as a lot of challenges, but I think there’s also — I feel like this region has the potential to

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ADAPTED FROM WWF’S 2012 LIVING PLANET REPORT.

World Fishing Fleet Expansion To measure fishing intensity, researchers used the fish landed in each country to calculate the “primary production rate,” or PPR for each region of the ocean. PPR describes the total amount of food a fish needs to grow within a certain region. The red areas depict the most intensively and potentially overfished areas. Between 1950 (top map) and 2006 (bottom map), the area fished by global fishing fleets has increased ten-fold.

KEY At least 10% PPR extraction At least 20% PPR extraction At least 30% PPR extraction

be a really interesting example for the rest of the country, or the rest of the world, for demonstrating how you manage a fishery through climate change.”

IN THE MEANTIME Last month, as eleventh-hour debate was

brewing around the tough new catch limits for New England, several hundred fishermen and an assortment of local and national politicians from the Northeast gathered in Boston to air their grievances and entreat regulators at NOAA to increase the looming quotas.

“We’re here to fight for a way of life that we believe in,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) declared at the outset of the rally, “and that’s what we’re going to do, and we’re going to do it together.”

In the end, however, NOAA didn’t budge.

Mike Fogarty, the marine biologist and head of the agency’s ecosystem assessment program for the region, defends the government’s fish stock analyses — though he adds that more integrated approaches to understanding and modeling the ocean biosphere, including the ability to identify and fold in crucial new inputs arising from climate change, remain a work in progress.

He points to NOAA’s nascent Integrated Ecosystem Assessment program, which is based on a wider regulatory philosophy called ecosystem-based management. The doctrine aims, for example, to move away from blunt, species-by-species counting and quota-setting in favor of continually taking the pulse of an ecosystem and all its various interdependencies as a whole.

This includes not just a more thorough understanding of how a given natural resource lives and breathes, but also how society derives economic benefits from it, and how humans function as fundamental

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parts of the machinery — both delivering impacts to, and absorbing consequences from, the environment.

Accurately accounting for all the new variables being introduced by ever-rising carbon dioxide emissions will, of course, be fundamental to this holistic management approach — though again, it’s all just getting started. “The basic situation is that consideration of climate change issues is beginning to be taken into account [and] into management,” Fogarty says.

“But we have a long, long way to go.”

That’s cold comfort for Mirarchi. Inside the pilot house of his trawler, he grips a Styrofoam cup of coffee and ticks off the grim arithmetic that lies before him. This, he says, will likely be his last season as a fisherman. “Understand, I was already at zero last year with quotas for twice as much fish,” he says. “So you do the math: If Frank is at zero with 2x

I DON’T REALLY SEE, AT AGE 70, GOING OUT AND GETTING A JOB TO PAY THE MORTGAGE ON A BOAT THAT’S LOSING MONEY.”

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fish, where is Frank with 1x fish? Somewhere below zero.

“I don’t really see, at age 70, going out and getting a job to pay the mortgage on a boat that’s losing money,” he continues. “My wife really doesn’t.”

Last September, as it was becoming clear that the area’s groundfish anglers would be facing steep cuts in catch allocations this season, the Commerce Department issued a disaster declaration for the entire fishery, giving some hope to Mirarchi and his fellow fisherman that they might be able to weather another bad year. Some funding for this was initially tucked into the aid package following Hurricane Sandy, but Republicans in Congress ultimately stripped it out.

To date, lawmakers have been unable to agree on funding for beleaguered fishing communities in New England.

Asked if he was worried, Mirarchi chuckles briefly before growing more serious. “How would you feel?” he says. “You spend your whole life doing something, and all of a sudden everything you learned, everything you taught your kids, it’s worth nothing — because it doesn’t make economic sense anymore.”

Tom Zeller Jr. is a senior writer covering the environment and the recipient of a 2013-14 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Exit

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Filling the Silence With

BY BIANCA BOSKER

Exit FEW YEARS ago, I staged an emoticon intervention with my father.

I’d realized with horror that he had been sprinkling smiley faces into the messages he sent to his friends, relatives and even business acquaintances, so I sat him down for a stern conversation about the crippling un-coolness that the habit conveyed. No one, I told him, should be caught dead using .

At the time, I congratulated myself on being a caring daughter who’d saved her father from looking like a fool. Yet recently, I’ve realized my dad was just an early adopter.

Emoticons and their more intricate Japanese cousins, emoji, have been enjoying a renaissance, while stickers — cartoon-like digital illustrations — are carving out a niche of their own.

The growing popularity of all this cutesy communication is usually attributed to the difficulty people have conveying emotion and nuance via quickly-typed text. But emoji and their ilk are more than elaborate punctuation marks, and in fact part of their appeal is precisely their indefinite meaning. They’re a way to say something to someone when

A

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you don’t have anything to say, a digital alter ego that establishes a virtual presence with another person, without any specific purpose besides “hi.” Using emoji, in a sense, is like hanging out online.

In the past year, frowny faces, clinking beer mugs, adorable chicken legs and other illustrations have become virtually omnipresent online. My Instagram feed frequently has more emoji than photographs: Snapshots are captioned with a sprinkling of emoji, which range from the mundane (heart, kissy lips, crying face) to the poetic (bowl of ramen, power plant, dancing girls in black leotards and cat ears).

Facebook recently launched its own breed of emoticons, a stable of yellow faces depicting feelings of disappointment, annoyance and the feeling “meh” that are based on research done by Darwin. Startups are even touting stickers as a business model: The social networking app Path launched a store that peddles its own, branded stickers, while Lango, a messaging app that sells images users can add to their texts, said hundreds of people had purchased its $99.99 all-inclusive sticker packs within a few weeks of the app’s launch.

An app created by Snoop Lion, aka

Exit Snoop Dogg, sells $30,000 a week worth of digital stickers, according to the Wall Street Journal.

And while my father still isn’t the typical emoji and emoticon user, emoji use in Japan spread from teenage girls, their early adopters, through all demographics. Lango notes that its users are currently about 40 percent male, and between 15 and 25 years old on average.

As we continue communicating more consistently, with more people, in more places, than before, we’ve turned to images as a way to transpose some offline customs, like comfortable silences between friends, into the online realm.

Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist researching technology use at the University of California, Irvine, explains that while email and desktop correspondence tends to be focused on completing a set task, a great deal of mobile communication — given how frequently we have our hands on our phones — is about sharing an “ambient state of being.”

People tend to text a great deal with just two to three people they know well, but they simultaneously seek to maintain a “virtual co-presence” with nearly a dozen acquaintances.

In these cases, pictures —

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Which emoticons you use says something about you. Just as your word choice or accent says something about you.” vague, but also personalized — come in handy. A typed message seeks a definite outcome or answer. Emoji are like the smile from a colleague across the room, or the small talk you make walking to get coffee. It’s pointless communication that nonetheless puts you in a good mood.

“Part of the reason the volume of text messaging is so high because lot of exchange is just, ‘This is what I’m doing, this is what I’m feeling,’ which is transmitting, ‘I’m here with you, I’m connected to you,’” said Ito. “People often like to feel like they’re inhabiting the same space as each other... Emoji and emoticons are really good for conveying that kind of thing.”

As people come to rely on emoji to translate face-to-face habits into the digital sphere, many have picked out a favorite emoji they return to over and over again. For me, it’s the monkey cradling its head in its hands. A friend says she’s partial to the “cheek guy” — a smiling yellow face — while another

Exit finds himself returning to the ghost sticking its tongue out.

The ambiguity of emoji can also make them frustratingly passiveaggressive, allowing people to send a response that’s not a real answer.

A friend complained that her boyfriend has adopted a maddening habit of sometimes answering her specific questions with “ .” It’s an evasion, albeit a friendly one.

“You can create a mist of meaning,” noted Tyler Schnoebelen, cofounder of Idibon, a startup analyzing language data, and author of a study on the use of emoticons in social media. “People have a sense of where you’re at, but it’s a little bit obscure because these expressive things don’t mean anything particular.”

Companies pushing stickers in their apps boast that their huge (and growing) selection of images ensure an illustration for every occasion, or a sticker pack for every personality.

“If you give people a library of a thousand images that lets them says exactly what they want to say, they’re going to gravitate toward those images,” noted Jennifer Grenz, vice president of marketing at Lango.

Saying exactly what you want to

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‘I’m here with you, I’m connected to you.’

People often like to feel like they’re inhabiting the same space as each other.” say is, to a large extent, beside the point. Enthusiastic emoji users take pride in showing how much they can do with very little, and part of the appeal is seeing how a limited cast of emoji characters can be repurposed in unexpected ways. Under the hashtag #EmojiArtHistory, the miniature digital figurines have been used to recreate great works of art, such as Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” ( ). The Brooklyn Academy of Music followed up with #EmojiAvantGarde, encouraging followers to translate pieces by artists like like Pina Bausch and John Cage into emoji.

“Which emoticons you use says something about you,” noted Schnoebelen. “Just as your word choice or accent says something about you.”

It’s high time there was a German word for the pleasure derived from using a particularly obscure emoji in a particularly clever way. Or maybe you could just say, .

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JOSE MOSQUERA/ GETTY IMAGES

Exit

When we asked readers to tweet about the moment they knew they needed to de-stress, the responses were alarming. Breaking points were marked by health crises, family problems and other types of suffering. We decided to go deeper into some of these stories in the hope that others can recognize signs of extreme stress and start to figure out their own paths to de-stressing.

The Moment I Knew I Was Overweight

BY JON WORTMANN

HE MOMENTS when we realize we need to change are the most precious in a human life.

No one should be afraid of scales. They are simply instruments that reveal mass. I hadn’t stood on one in three years.

I had been telling myself that all that mattered was how I looked. I thought I looked good. I convinced myself most mornings, as I’d puff out my chest and pull in my belly, that a little roundness looked good on me.

If 10 is your stress level in the middle of a car accident and one is your stress level waking up from a good

T

Exit nap, I learned four months ago what happens to a human body when you walk around at an eight or nine for six years. Hint: You get really fat.

It’s not like people didn’t try to tell me.

My brother is a surfer, thin and fit and living in California.

My dad once joked at a family reunion, “Put my two sons together and they are the perfect size.” I thought it was a good joke.

I was an athlete into my early thirties. I played college tennis, became a runner after that and a swimmer when running hurt too much. I took pride in my fitness.

When at 37, the physical trainer my wife hired for me asked, “You used to be an athlete, right?” it should have triggered a competitive desire to change.

But his workouts hurt too much, and he was a 22-year-old football player who took pleasure in humiliating the older chubby guy, so I stopped going.

When at 38, my doctor asked, “You’ve been in shape before, right?” and I couldn’t remember when, it should have been a clue.

When at 39, I couldn’t get through a quarter of the workout with the college golf team

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I coach, the guys’ commentary about the large animals I resembled should have made me aware I needed to de-stress. Great irony: I work with them on managing stress on the course.

I used to be able to run up mountains. Literally, in high school, I ran up the last 2,000 feet of a 14,000-foot mountain in Colorado. I hiked one of those mountains with a buddy last sum-

When I got on the scale and the number said 253 — I have no memory of what the doctor said after that.” mer, and I asked if he’d be climbing faster on his own. He said, not thinking, “Oh yeah, but this is much more relaxing.”

Nothing anyone said, however, made a difference. The siren call of a cheeseburger, or three, always satiated the stress each evening. My survival response was soothed by what all ancient men craved: meat.

Then I got sick. I thought it was just a virus, but I couldn’t sleep or eat for two days. I could barely breathe at one point, and when I finally went to the doctor, it was no

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Exit big deal. Just a simple case of strep.

What was a big deal was when I got on the scale and the number said 253. I have no memory of what the doctor said after that.

To be fair, I’m a big guy. At 6’4”, I was built to hunt down large, angry beasts and protect my tribe.

But when I was running, I weighed less than two hundred pounds. My fighting weight is 205.

That night I asked my wife why she didn’t say anything. She said, “I didn’t want to make you feel bad, and you know I love you no matter what you look like.”

No matter what I look like?

Had I become her worn, but wellloved stuffed animal that stayed in the closet because it brought back fond memories, but was too shabby to leave in plain sight?

I started imagining what 50 pounds would look like as a mound of ground beef or a stack of American cheese. I calculated the number of martinis it would take to put on 40 pounds. The answer: more than a thousand. And worse, the body compensates for eating or drinking a little more at first, so the answer over the years is thousands.

Then I asked the simple question: Why? What had happened that I

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Working 60 hours, often more, each week, I used entire pizzas rather than a walk to calm down.” stopped paying attention to my fitness and what I put in my body?

The answer was simple: I misunderstood who I am.

I go by a number of titles in my life. I’m a minister. I’m an executive coach and speaker. I’m an author. I’m a golf coach. I’m a community organizer. In each of my

Exit roles, I attempt to help people.

In all I do, I’m a teacher, cheering people on as they learn the most important skills and lessons that make life worth living. We’re all worth loving, even on our worst days, and I try to help people focus on what’s most important so each day gets a little better.

But what I forgot, as I tried to serve others, is I need help, too.

Working 60 hours, often more, each week, I used entire pizzas rather than a walk to calm down.

I chose wine, in my fatigue and frustration, over the very techniques I speak and write about.

The wine wasn’t the problem; the problem is that I kept my stress at such a high level all the time that no amount of wine allowed me to truly slow my brain down.

Then I stepped on the scale.

Why did I let myself stay so stressed for so long? I forgot the most important lesson about stress. It is not a bad thing. It comes from our brain when we’re not seeing something important we need to pay attention to.

What was I ignoring? The best teachers and coaches are always learning. I spent so much time helping others that I forgot to make time to explore new lessons

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and learn new skills. Every day is a priceless moment to savor a beautiful world. I wasn’t recharging my body and brain so that I’d have enough energy to enjoy my work and my life.

We each can reduce stress when we figure out what our brains are

When at 38, my doctor asked, ‘You’ve been in shape before, right?’ and I couldn’t remember when, it should have been a clue.” trying to tell us. We all have more power than we realize to improve our lives each moment.

Sixteen weeks after stepping on the scale, I’m down 19 pounds. I’m still screwing up most weeks, but not as often. I’m still trying to do too much without first recharging, but now I let stress teach me when I need to step back.

Now I realize and I continue to learn: Even the stressful moments are precious.

Jon Wortmann is a mental coach and author of Hijacked by Your Brain: How to Free Yourself When Stress Takes Over.

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EAT THIS

Don’t Be Scared, It’s Just a Poached Egg

BY KRISTEN AIKEN

HUFFINGTON 06.23.13

Poached eggs aren’t just for serving with toast or on top of Eggs Benedict.

You can put them on your ratatouille, your homemade pizza, or a juicy steak.”

N CASE YOU HAVEN’T already figured it out, poached eggs are good on everything. They’re exquisitely tender, their yolks become nature’s greatest sauce, and their farm-fresh flavor is unadulterated because they’re cooked in water instead of oil or butter. Basically, poached eggs are the best.

But because they require a little more TLC than scrambled or fried eggs, many home cooks steer clear of them. But don’t listen to the haters — you don’t have to be a genius to make a poached egg.

Here’s why you need to master them: Poached eggs aren’t just for serving with toast or on top of Eggs Benedict. You can put them on your ratatouille, your homemade pizza, or a juicy steak (the yolks burst into a sauce that’s like a lazy man’s bearnaise). Their velvety yolks were made for dipping asparagus spears into, and they’re the perfect accompaniment for a green salad. Just follow the instructions ahead, and you’ll be well on your way to poached egg zen.

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SHUTTERSTOCK / FOTOGROOVE (ASPARAGUS); RYERSON CLARK/ GETTY IMAGES (SAUCE PAN)

I

HOW TO MAKE POACHED EGGS: NOTE: Blue italics below indicate when we’re holding your hand through the process.

1. B efore you start, lay out a couple of paper towels on your countertop. Then fill a mixing bowl with cold water. You’ll need these later.

2. B ring 3 to 4 inches of water to a boil in a saucepan. Add 2 tablespoons distilled white vinegar. This will help set the whites. Never salt the poaching liquid; salt, unlike vinegar, will break up the white, not set it.

3. T urn the heat on your stove down to low, until the water is just barely bubbling. The key to making poached eggs is to cook them in a gentle environment to prevent the whites from separating. Once you’ve achieved this, maintain this low temperature throughout the rest of the process.

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CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: JOFF LEE/ GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/DORLING KINDERSLEY; GETTY IMAGES/DORLING KINDERSLEY; DAVID MARSDEN/ GETTY IMAGES

4. B reak cold eggs into a ramekin or into small cups or measuring cups, one at a time.

Make sure not to break the yolks.

5. W ith a long-handled spoon, gently stir the water in a circular motion to create a gentle whirlpool. While the water is still gently swirling, carefully add the eggs to the water, cooking no more than 2 at a time. Slide them in, don’t plop them. Remember to be gentle! Cook for about 3 minutes, gently nudging the eggs with a spoon to keep the whites close to the yolk.

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Poached eggs can be stored in cold water, in the refrigerator, overnight!

Secret: It’s how restaurants do it.”

8. P lace the eggs on paper towels — they’ll wait here while you poach more eggs.

6. When the eggs are done, the whites should be firm, and the yolks should remain liquid and covered with a thin film. Once this happens, use a large slotted spoon. If you’re ready to eat them now, eat them.

7. I f not, remove the eggs to a bowl of cold water. This stops the cooking and removes the vinegar taste. Poached eggs can be stored in cold water, in the refrigerator, overnight! Secret: It’s how restaurants do it.

9. T o serve: Reheat quickly in hot (not boiling) salted water, and serve. ON EVERYTHING.

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TFU

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HUFFINGTON 06.23.13

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RANCH DRESSING SODA (WE TASTED IT)

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Study: Only Five Percent of People Know How to (Properly) Wash Their Hands

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German Bank Employee Falls Asleep on Keyboard, Accidentally Transfers 222 Million Euros

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TFU

HUFFINGTON 06.23.13

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Beer Ads Display What Happens When ‘Dumb Blondes’ Attempt to Open Bottles

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