SEPTEMBER 15, 2013
DO WE STOP ASKING THE BIG QUESTIONS AFTER COLLEGE? BY JAWEED KALEEM
KILLING FOR A LIVING THE CARBON QUANDARY M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN
09.15.13 #66 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Pausing on Syria... The Big Apple Reveal JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: What’s in Your Bug Spray? Q&A: M. Night Shyamalan HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE
Voices BOB COMIS: Killing for a Living
FROM TOP: COURTESY OF BERNARD REGINSTER; AP PHOTO/ANDY WONG
HAVE WE NO HUMANITY? “We no longer have writers widely discussing how you measure a life.” BY JAWEED KALEEM
DANIEL WAGNER: Why Syria’s Offer Is Unlikely to Work QUOTED
Exit STYLE: Google Glass, Now a Fashion Accessory THE THIRD METRIC: Change Your Breath, Change Your Life EAT THIS: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? TFU:
ETERNAL EMISSIONS Why can’t we figure out how to keep carbon in check? BY TOM ZELLER
FROM THE EDITOR: The Big Questions ON THE COVER: Photo Illustration
for Huffington by Troy Dunham
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
ART STREIBER
The Big Questions I
N THIS WEEK’S issue, Jaweed Kaleem looks at the state of American conversation around “the big questions,” as students return to college campuses across the country. In dining halls and dorm rooms, as students come together with people of vastly different backgrounds and perspectives, they’ll continue the typical college traditions of late nights, long conversations and self-discovery, Jaweed writes. And when they graduate,
they will face a challenge much steeper than any college exam or doctoral dissertation — carrying that spirit of inquiry with them into the real world. In other words, after graduation, what happens to those discussions? As clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle puts it, “we have stripped away so many of the conditions that make conversations like these flourish. And the condition that makes it flourish, in many cases, is the uninterrupted full attention to each other.” Technology, in part, is to blame. The more connected we are to our devices, the more we engage
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Join the conversation on Twitter and Facebook
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
in superficial interactions that create the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship, as Turkle puts it. Jaweed also speaks with David Brooks, who has written extensively in The New York Times about the decline of the “humanist vocation,” and a shortage of people asking the enduring questions. As Brooks puts it, “People are hungry for a certain kind of writing about these issues, but we no longer have that kind of group of writers widely discussing how you measure a life.” It’s a change that is reflected across college campuses as well, where only 7 percent of graduates major in the humanities — half the number from 50 years ago. Elsewhere in the issue, we feature the voice of New York farmer Bob Comis, who reflects on his own humanity in a haunting piece about killing for a living. He charts his personal evolution from someone who felt deeply the death of every farm animal he slaughtered to one who has become inured to death and dying. As he puts it: “after taking part in the deaths of nearly 2,000 ani-
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
mals, death has become a shadow of what it once was to me.” Bianca Bosker explores the cultural significance of Google Glass’ presence in the pages of Vogue’s September issue. “Its placement in
The more connected we are to our devices, the more we engage in superficial interactions that create the ‘illusion of companionship’ without the ‘demands of friendship.’” a high-fashion magazine alongside a $1,545 mohair sweater, $2,300 turtleneck and $4,490 teal coat is a step toward positioning the wearable device as a status symbol,” Bianca writes, comparing it to how Apple has elevated gadgets to the level of fashion accessories. Finally, as part of our continuing focus on The Third Metric, we look at the many ways changing your breathing can change your life for the better.
ARIANNA
POINTERS
AP PHOTO/EVAN VUCCI, POOL
Enter
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
1
‘TOO EARLY TO TELL’ In a speech to the nation Tuesday night, President Obama said that he has
asked the Senate to delay a vote on a resolution authorizing the use of force in Syria. He said the U.S. might be able to avoid a military strike because of Russia’s proposal for Syria to hand over its chemical weapons to the international community. “It’s too early to tell whether this offer will succeed,” he said. “But this initiative has the potential to remove the threat of chemical weapons without the use of force, particularly because Russia is one of Assad’s strongest allies.” The president spent most of his speech explaining that Syria must face consequences for its actions. “If we fail to act,” he said, “the Assad regime will see no reason to stop using chemical weapons.”
Enter
FROM TOP: AP PHOTO/KATHY WILLENS; JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/ORLANDO SENTINEL, GARY GREEN, POOL
2
POINTERS
THE RESULTS ARE IN
In New York City’s elections on Tuesday night, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio took a commanding lead in the Democratic mayoral primary, earning slightly more than 40 percent of the vote. He will avoid a run-off with the second-place finisher, Bill Thompson, if that total holds after a recount. Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner received less than 5 percent of the vote. In the Republican mayoral primary, Joe Lhota defeated John Catsimatidis. Eliot Spitzer, who resigned as governor over a prostitution scandal, lost to Scott Stringer in the race for city comptroller.
3 IT’S HERE!
4
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Apple fans can finally breathe a sigh of relief now that the tech giant has announced the newest iPhones. The iPhone 5S will ship with the newest operating system, iOS 7, and comes with a built-in fingerprint sensor called Touch ID, which can be used for unlocking the phone and for other functions like authorizing iTunes purchases. Apple’s senior VP of worldwide marketing said its central processing unit and graphics are twice as fast as those on its predecessor. Apple also introduced a cheaper version of the phone, called the iPhone 5C, which is made of plastic, comes in five bright colors and costs $99 for 16GB.
ZIMMERMAN IN SPOTLIGHT AGAIN
The wife of George Zimmerman, who was recently acquitted of second-degree murder in the killing of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, called police Monday to report that Zimmerman had battered her father and was threatening the family with a gun. She later said Zimmerman broke apart an iPad she had used to record the confrontation. Zimmerman claims his wife’s father attacked him and that she hit him with the iPad. Police said it’s unknown whether they’ll be able to retrieve video from the destroyed device, and the investigation is on hold.
Enter
5
POINTERS
‘DISAPPOINTING LEARNING EXPERIENCE’
In the latest issue of Esquire magazine, Today host Matt Lauer lashed out at the media over the way he was covered when Ann Curry was ousted from the show. “The way the media treated what happened with Ann Curry was a disappointing learning experience,” he told the magazine. “I was disappointed by the laziness of the media, the willingness to read a rumor, repeat that rumor, and treat it as a fact. And yet, what were my options?” Lauer’s reputation took a severe hit after Curry’s firing.
NADAL AND WILLIAMS FOR THE WIN
6 FROM TOP: PETER KRAMER/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE; AP PHOTO/DARRON CUMMINGS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Rafael Nadal made quite the comeback from his knee injury and a less-thanstellar performance at Wimbledon, beating Novak Djokovic in four sets Monday night at the U.S. Open. “Very, very emotional, no?” Nadal said. “Probably only my team knows how much (this) means for me.” In the women’s finals Sunday night, Serena Williams beat Victoria Azarenka in three sets for her 17th Grand Slam championship.
THAT’S VIRAL EVERYONE WHO’S DIED FROM A MARIJUANA OVERDOSE, EVER
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
THE WORLD’S LARGEST CAVE IS OPENING FOR TOURS
THE BEST OBITUARY YOU’LL EVER READ
THE VIDEO THAT FOOLED THE ENTIRE INTERNET
THIS IS LOVE
JOHN NOWAK/CNN (C) 2013 CABLE NEWS NETWORK. A TIME WARNER CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Enter
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
JASON LINKINS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE NEW CROSSFIRE WILL BORE YOU TO DEATH N MONDAY NIGHT, CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker made good on his threat and returned Crossfire, the show that Jon Stewart famously and accurately described as “hurting America,” to CNN’s lineup. And I have good news for every-
O
one! This show is not going to hurt America. In fact, it’s mostly harmless. Unless of course, you are easily bored to death and lack access to a heavy object you can throw at your teevee in an emergency. In that rare instance, the show is deadly. This revamped Crossfire, of course, wasn’t supposed to make its bow so soon, but in an act of comical arrogance, it was decided
Crossfire hosts Stephanie Cutter (middle and Newt Gingrich (right) debate a possible Syria strike with Sen. Robert Menendez (left).
Enter that events in Syria made returning CNN’s famously fusty panel show to the airwaves critically important for the good of the nation. And so, CNN gathered two hosts and two senators to offer some tranquilized jabber at each other about the day’s developments in the Syria saga. The results were astoundingly dull. In fact, the most hilarious moment of the show — literally, the only interesting thing that happened in a half-hour that seemed to leach all coherence from space and time — came when host Newt Gingrich bumbled the name of the show and called it Ceasefire. Part of the problem here is the way the show is staged. The producers, for whatever reason, have decided to place the show’s hosts — in this case Obama flackturned-Bank Of America lobbyist Stephanie Cutter and failed presidential candidate Newt Gingrich — at the center of the tableau, practically sitting in one another’s laps. I guess it was done this way to get both hosts in a single shot, but as the show went on, CNN deployed these stark and uncomfortable side-shots, which meant you got close-ups of one host’s profile as the other host was talking. And the weird closeness all but ensured that
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
no real sparks would fly. Instead of argument, you got Cutter giving Gingrich the side-eye, and Gingrich side-eyeing her right back. But Monday night’s hosts were terrible in their own rights. Cutter is shockingly bad at television. She has no feel for the role of host, and struggled all night long with the basics of reading the auto-cue and hitting her camera marks. Then, she spent most of her time
... in an act of comical arrogance, it was decided that events in Syria made returning CNN’s famously fusty panel show to the airwaves critically important for the good of the nation.” busily and pointlessly interjecting and interrupting whenever her guests — in this case Sens. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.) — were speaking. But this is how Cutter apparently decided to “win” at Crossfire. And, wow, I can’t even imagine what the suits at CNN are making of Gingrich’s performance. Remember, Gingrich is the guy who wanted to do Lincoln-Douglas debates, be-
Enter cause he’s so terribly confident in his own ability to speak extemporaneously for hours on end. Well, I can only posit that at some time between the 2012 presidential campaign and the premiere of Crossfire, Gingrich fell out of love with the sound of his own voice. The sheer number of minutes that Gingrich sat on the teevee, not saying things, was simply staggering. I could not fathom it. The best explanation I can offer is that he has come to the show during a period of his life where his goal is to underachieve, and he sees “winning” at Crossfire as just sitting there and saying as little as the show’s producers will allow. Neither host, however, seemed to know how to push the conversation along so that it went anywhere. Both hosts, in fact, managed to ask their guests the same question twice, allowing them ample opportunities to keep repeating their positions, over and over again. Cutter and Gingrich followed suit, repeating their own positions, over and over again. It was like watching four people try to filibuster CNN. And the show’s hosts didn’t seem at all ready, or even interested, in contending with the assertions their guests made. This led to an
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
extraordinary moment in the second half of the show, when Gingrich finally summoned the energy to ask an interesting question of Menendez: “If, in fact, you go ahead with votes in the House, and if in fact the president loses decisively, is he then constrained from acting? Having come to the Congress, is he bound by the Congress?” Menendez responded, “I think the president — that’s a decision
... in an act of comical arrogance, it was decided that events in Syria made returning CNN’s famously fusty panel show to the airwaves critically important for the good of the nation.” the commander in chief has to make,” adding, “He’ll have to determine that question.” You know, it’s not every day you see a high-ranking member of Congress go on teevee, aggressively cast himself as a nonentity, and essentially say, “Oh, I don’t expect the president to consider what we say or abide by it.” And yet, here you had Gingrich — a guy who used to be the
EDWARD M. PIO RODA/CNN (C) 2013 CABLE NEWS NETWORK. A TIME WARNER CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Enter
speaker of the House, who made his name tangling with a president of another party — and he doesn’t even bat an eyebrow at Menendez confessing that it is okay with him if Obama opts to just ignore Congress if it ends up not granting him the authority to use force in Syria. Nevertheless, Crossfire didn’t achieve the apotheosis of stupidity until the end of the show, when Cutter and Gingrich returned to make good on a promise to present “something we agree on.” I kind of thought the point of
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
Crossfire was to sow disagreement at every turn, but I decided to stick it out, in genuine interest of finding out where Cutter and Gingrich had found common ground. It was not worth getting excited about. Here is a list of the things upon which they agreed: 1. “Today’s development with Russia is a great development.” 2. “The president has a big mountain to climb in terms of getting Congress to approve his resolution.” 3. This is a “tumultuous period of change.” 4. “The last 48 hours, so many different things were happening.” 5. “It’s going to be interesting to
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Former U.S. senators Joe Lieberman and Rick Santorum joined hosts Van Jones (left) and S.E. Cupp (middle) on Crossfire.
Enter see what his speech is like tomorrow night.” Terrific. Cutter and Gingrich both agree that “Syria...hoo, boy, I don’t know, seems pretty tough.” The general verdict on Twitter was that it is up to the show’s other two hosts, S.E. Cupp and Van Jones, to rescue this endeavor from suckdom. They might be up to the task. Cupp’s gotten a lot of cable teevee panel show seasoning as a host of MSNBC’s The Cycle, and could be hungering for an opportunity to free herself from the confines of the show’s strictly-enforced collegiality. And it’s a genuine surprise that Jones was included in this project, because he is a rarity on cable news panel shows — a bona fide liberal. By which I mean he is genuinely to the left of most “liberals approved by the Democratic donor class” who are the more traditional features of these kinds of shows. What Cupp and Jones should do, in fact, is shrug off the “left versus right” paradigm of the show and see themselves as partners in the battle against the weaksauce hackery and flackery to which Cutter and Gingrich are limited. They have the oppor-
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
tunity to be really interesting, argue their points of view with electricity, and even challenge the show’s set dynamic. But in this, I am probably being way more optimistic than is warranted by the threadbare junk that was allowed to air Monday night. In fact, the best thing I can say about the debut of Crossfire is that it may find the same success that Liz Lemon’s Dealbreakers
Both hosts... managed to ask their guests the same question twice, allowing them ample opportunities to keep repeating their positions, over and over again.” show found in the universe of 30 Rock — as something that can be played on the teevees in the background of other teevee shows. So, if in two years time, you see the new Crossfire playing on the monitors of HBO’s The Newsroom, this will be an extraordinary achievement because it means that there will still be enough people watching The Newsroom to keep it on the air in 2015.
Q&A
FROM TOP: LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES FOR NICKELODEON; AP PHOTO/CHRIS PIZZELLO
Enter
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
M. Night Shyamalan on ‘Roadblock’ Teachers “The very bottom group of teachers... are doing so much damage that it takes so many good or medium teachers to overcome that that they’re pulling the whole system down.”
Above: Director M. Night Shyamalan speaks at the Nickelodeon 2010 Upfront Presentation in NYC. Below: Shyamalan arrives at the Devil premiere in Los Angeles.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
DATA
Enter
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
SOURCES: ENVIRONMENTAL WORKING GROUP, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL DIVISION OF TOXICOLOGY AND HUMAN HEALTH SERVICES, REUTERS, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY. PHOTO: TROY DUNHAM. ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAN DIEHM. MODEL: EVE BINDER
What’s in Your Bug Spray?
You’ve probably been to your fair share of BBQs and days at the beach this summer. And that means you’ve slathered on some bug spray. But if you’re careful about the cosmetics and sunscreen that you put on your skin... what about sprays that are designed to repel living things? Enter the Environmental Working Group. The consumer health advocacy group took a deep look at bug sprays, finding that the majority are not only safe but effective in protecting against insects that carry disesases like West Nile virus and Lyme disease. — Meredith Melnick TAP FOR INFO
OIL OF LEMON EUCALYPTUS / PMD PICARIDIN
WHAT IF YOUR REPELLENT ISN’T A SPRAY?
PERMETHRINTREATED CLOTHING Although tempting because it isn’t applied directly to the skin, the insecticide is considered more toxic then the active ingredient in sprays.
REPELLENT CANDLES Aside from being ineffective, these candles can produce an inhalation hazard.
CLIP-ON REPELLENTS These use pesticides that are more toxic then spray ingredients – and there’s some evidence that they aren’t as effective.
DEET
IR3535
MORE DANGEROUS: BUG BITES OR REPELLENT?
WEST NILE VIRUS Illnesses: 5,674 in 2012 Deaths: 286 in 2012
LYME DISEASE Illnesses: 23,364 in 2011 Deaths: 114 between 1999 and 2003
SKIN EXPOSURE TO DEET Illnesses: Seizures, the most common reported adverse effect, occured in one per 100 million users. The EPA said it wasn’t possible to confirm the DEET repellent as causal.
AP PHOTO/EVAN VUCCI, POOL (PEACE GETS A CHANCE); AP PHOTO/SANA (BOMB ME MAYBE?); AP PHOTO/J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE (MCCAIN PLAYS POKER DURING WAR HEARING!); WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES (NO ‘QUAGMIRE’)
Enter
HEADLINES
09.10.13 09.07.13
09.05.13
09.03.13
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
The Week That Was TAP IMAGE TO ENLARGE, TAP EACH DATE FOR FULL ARTICLE ON THE HUFFINGTON POST
KENZO TRIBOUILLARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Auvers-sur-Oise, France 09.04.2013 Maryam Radjavi, president of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, throws rose petals over the portraits of the victims killed in the Acharaf refugee camp in Iraq. Fifty-two people were killed in the camp, which houses Iranians in exile, on Sept. 1, 2013. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
Enter
DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES
London, England 09.03.2013 An employee stands in front of “Image I Revise White” by Bridget Riley at Sotheby’s auction house. The piece is part of “The New Situation” exhibition featuring British art from the 1960s, including paintings by David Hockney and Bridget Riley. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
ANDREW BURTON/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Detroit, Mich. 09.04.2013 Members of the Detroit Fire Department fight a two-alarm fire in an abandoned building. There are an estimated 78,000 abandoned buildings scattered throughout the bankrupt American city. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Enter
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
Inverness, Calif. 09.04.2013 A Drakes Bay Oyster Company worker uses a power tool to break apart freshly harvested oysters. Drakes Bay Oyster Company produces approximately 300,000 oysters each year, reportedly 85 percent of the shellfish grown in Marin County. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Douaumont, France 09.03.2013
AFP PHOTO / JEAN-CHRISTOPHE VERHAEGEN
Christian and Muslim graves at a World War I military cemetery. Of the 16,142 graves of French soldiers, 592 graves are of Muslim soldiers, placed in the direction of Mecca.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
PETER MACDIARMID/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Sheerness, England 09.05.2013 A woman practices yoga on the beach in Southern England. The weather in the area peaks at about 86 degrees in early September before rain and cooler temperatures usher in autumn. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
RIZWAN TABASSUM/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Karachi, Pakistan 09.06.2013 Air Force cadets participate in a ceremony at the mausoleum of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, to mark Defense Day. Defense Day commemorates the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 fought against neighboring India over the contested land of Kashmir. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
JEFF PACHOUD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Saint-Genis-Laval, France 09.04.2013 A scientist works on the MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) instrument in the Lyon Spatial Observatory, created in 1878. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
FREDERICK FLORIN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Enter
Bischoffsheim, France 09.06.2013 Horticulturists work in a field of painted heather in Northeastern France near the German border. Painted heathers are a popular autumn flower in Europe. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Enter
ULET IFANSASTI/GETTY IMAGES
Boyolali, Indonesia 09.05.2013 Villagers carry tobacco leaves in Stabelan village. The town is located less than 2.5 miles from the top of Mount Merapi, one of the worlds most active volcanos, where tens of thousands of Indonesians live. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Enter
MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES
Cornwall, England 09.08.2013 Belly boarders participate in the World Belly Boarding Championships. The annual charity event started in 2002 to celebrate the origins of British surfing. The original surfers of the 1920s laid belly down on the wooden boards — they didn’t start standing until 1929. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Enter
CHINAFOTOPRESS/GETTY IMAGES
Wuhan, China 09.03.2013 A local salvages dead fish from the Fuhe River in Hubei province. Approximately 25 miles of the river was covered with 1.3-1.5 feet of dead fish due to excessive ammonia and nitrogen density in the water. Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
MOVING IMAGE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Voices
BOB COMIS
GETTY IMAGES/PERSPECTIVES
Killing for a Living WHEN I STARTED farming, I had never killed anything — except maybe insects. I wasn’t one of those kids that ran around with a BB gun shooting birds and other little critters just for fun. In fact, when I was with any of my friends that were doing that, I always looked at the death of the animal as a sort of mini tragedy, a transgression of the sanctity of life. And, even though I did it all of the
time, I actually felt bad when I killed insects. Then I became a meat animal livestock farmer, who is, of course, a person who raises animals — sentient, expressive animals — for the sole purpose of killing them so that we can eat their flesh. Initially, and still to a large degree today, this was something of a challenge for me. My feelings about life were, and are, in direct contradiction to my actions in regards to the lives of those animals, or, more specifically, to their deaths.
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Voices I am never more than a thought or two away from remembering that I kill for a living. Over the years, more or less, I have been able to hold onto my discomfort, my uncertainty, my anxiety about raising animals to be killed. I have maintained, to some degree, that little boy’s visceral sense of tragedy in the face of death, at the sight, for example, of a little robin gasping its last breaths as blood pulsed out of the BB gun hole in its throat while my friend Joe, who had shot it, watched and spoke about it with an exaggerated sense of bravura as the small bird died. Nevertheless, over the course of the last year or two, something fundamental changed, gradually, and almost imperceptibly. A number of years ago, when Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me. But, then, as the number of animals increased on the farm, I loaded more and more of them onto the livestock trailer for the trip to the slaughterhouse, and first one and then another would occasionally die on the farm, of old age, of disease, of troubled birth. I have dragged the bod-
BOB COMIS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
ies of full-grown ewes and 100 lb. pigs into the bucket on the tractor and buried them in the compost. I have picked up dead newborn lambs, limp, and still slimy and warm, wrapped them in some hay, and dropped them in the wheelbarrow to also be buried in the compost. More than that, I have used a gun, though only once, to end the suffering of two lambs that were in
A number of years ago, when Izzy the Goat died, more or less in my arms, I bawled hysterically. I felt her death in the deepest parts of me.� the violent throes of what I was convinced was tetanus, which would have slowly, painfully, and viciously killed them over the course of a few days. The bright red blood oozing out of the holes in their heads onto the dark brown ground is emblazoned on my mind and the thunder of the shots still rings in my ears. All of this death and dying still confronts me as a challenge. But, and this is an important but, my relationship to it has changed. I
OMER SUKRU GOKSU/GETTY IMAGES
Voices still care, but I no longer feel it in my bones. I feel as if that deep, moving connection has been severed by the degree to which I need to dissociate myself from what I am seeing, doing, and experiencing in order to live through these often bloody, can-never-go-back moments. I have, as much as I hoped it would never happen, become inured by the sheer number of these disassociations, even if only slightly, to death and dying. The day I loaded the first two pigs I had raised, whom I had named Breakfast and Dinner to continually remind myself of their purpose, onto the trailer on a bone chillingly frigid February morning with my friend Zach helping me out, I noted my sadness, I noted my apprehension, I noted my sense of loss and longing, and declared that no matter what happened in my farming life, no matter how long I worked at it, no matter how many animals I had killed, killed myself, watched die, and found dead, I would never ever lose my lifelong sense of the transgression of the sanctity of life inherent in my actions. However, in spite of the strength of this desire, the dayto-day reality of livestock farming
BOB COMIS
has changed me. After taking part in the deaths of nearly 2,000 animals, death has become a shadow of what it once was to me. I now occasionally find myself meeting it with indifference, and even, once or twice, disdain. I have become, to put it bluntly, a killer, something I hoped to never be regardless of the fact that I kill for a living. Bob Comis is a writer and principal farmer at Stony Brook Farm in New York.
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Throughout the years, Bob Comis has only used a gun once, and it was to end the suffering of two lambs.
GIOVANNI DIFFIDENTI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Voices
G
DANIEL WAGNER
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Why Syria’s Offer Is Unlikely to Work IVEN THE DECADES of denials about the existence of a chemical weapons program by the Assad regime, the West’s first inclination to Mr. Assad’s offer to come clean about Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles, join the Chemical Weapons Convention, and turn the weapons over to international oversight for control and destruction is naturally to be skeptical. Only when backed into a corner, faced with the threat of overwhelming attack, and with no other feasible option at his disposal, is Mr. Assad agreeing to the proposal brokered by Russia. Yet there is good reason to believe that Mr. Assad
A man walks through a destroyed residential area of Saraquib, Syria, southwest of Aleppo, following airstrikes by Al-Assad’s government fighter jets.
Voices is serious, and that he will do his part to make the decommissioning of Syria’s chemical weapons arsenal a reality. But a number of things stand in the way of making this proposal meaningful. First, the international community cannot be certain that it knows where all the weapons are. Mr. Assad has changed the location of part of his arsenal in recent weeks and months, and while these movements have been monitored — to the extent possible — by satellites, there is no real way for anyone outside the Syrian government to know exactly where all the weapons are. By all accounts, Mr. Assad possesses thousands of chemical agents, and the rockets to deliver them. So it is indeed a leap of faith to presume that, a) Mr. Assad will declare every single agent, and b) that the international community will be able to detect every single agent. After all, chemical weapons are Mr. Assad’s real trump card and bargaining chip. Without them, he has no way to apply real leverage to his enemies and the international community. Second, even if “all” the agents are identified and the international community assumes con-
DANIEL WAGNER
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
trol of them in the short term, it will take years to destroy them, and their destruction needs to be done on site. The weapons are too dangerous and too numerous to move, and the destruction of such weapons has never been done in a war zone. The idea of moving them is out of the question. So how can the destruction of the agents be done safely and securely in the middle of a war?
Only when backed into a corner, faced with the threat of overwhelming attack, and with no other feasible option at his disposal, is Mr. Assad agreeing to the proposal brokered by Russia.” The likely answer is that they cannot be destroyed with the kind of safety and security required to have any degree of confidence that a breach, accident, or sabotage may not occur. That is a problem. Third, given Mr. Obama’s stated objective of wanting to do something to end the terrible bloodshed that has befallen the Syrian people, destroying these
POOL BENAINOUS/HOUNSFIELD/GAMMA/GETTY IMAGES
Voices weapons will not accomplish that. It will merely prolong the period of time the conflict will continue, because the threat of formal military intervention by the West will presumably have been removed in the short to medium term. In the absence of some other action, or series of factors, that would preclude a similar threat of military intervention by the West, the conflict will probably continue as a stalemate, in which neither side can achieve a military victory. Fourth, the war weariness and skepticism of the voters of the West is not going to change in the short or medium term. After a decade of war involving the international community in Afghanistan and Iraq, not only is there little political support for military intervention in the Syrian conflict, there are limited financial resources available to apply as a result of the “new normal” following the Great Recession, and even less desire among the general public to become embroiled in yet another Middle Eastern conflict. Many citizens of the West believe its engagement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya achieved little in the end, and was not worth the resources,
DANIEL WAGNER
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
It is indeed a leap of faith to presume that, a) Mr. Assad will declare every single agent, and b) that the international community will be able to detect every single agent.” blood, and effort. Every time in recent history that the West has stuck its finger in the Middle East, it has not turned out well. So what is the incentive to do so here, they ask. In the unlikely event Mr.
Assad’s agreement to diplomacy brokered by their ally Russia may stop possible U.S. airstrikes.
Voices Assad declares the location of all of his chemical agents and they can be safely and securely destroyed, this “diplomatic” solution to the current stage of the crisis in Syria may prevent a formal military response from the U.S. and one or two allies (which is not much of a coalition) for the time being. But it is unlikely to prompt Mr. Assad to the negotiating table, since the Syrian government currently has the momentum in the conflict, and Iran and Russia have reiterated their continuing support for the Assad regime. What is likelier to happen is that the military and diplomatic stalemate will continue for some time to come, exacerbating the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis and the suffering of the Syrian people, with no end in sight. It is troubling that Mr. Obama appears so willing to consider imposing military action without a UN mandate, and therefore in violation of international law. The use of chemical weapons, unpunished, of course sets a dangerous and unfortunate precedent, but so does the idea of bypassing international norms and standards, which the U.S. was instrumental in putting
DANIEL WAGNER
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
into place. In the face of overwhelming global opposition to attacking Syria without the sanction of the international community, it is regrettable that such an option has even been seriously considered by the Obama administration. Russia and China’s numerous and ongoing vetoes of UN resolutions regarding Syria should be ample reason to revisit the question of which nations should be consid-
The use of chemical weapons, unpunished, of course sets a dangerous and unfortunate precedent, but so does the idea of bypassing international norms and standards.” ered “permanent” members of the UN Security Council, and indeed, whether the members of the UNSC should be permanent at all. The current members remain a relic of the World War II era and not representative of the world we live in today. Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions, a cross-border risk advisory firm.
Voices
QUOTED
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
“ Okay to pass money to the rich kids, but not the poor ones!”
— HuffPost commenter canfemlib on “Nepotism In Canada: Chart Shows How Top 1% Use Hiring To Keep Wealth In Family”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: D DIPASUPIL/GETTY IMAGES FOR THE DAILY FRONT ROW; GETTY IMAGES/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC RF; AP PHOTO/RALPH FRESO
“ ... People are surprised they haven’t already destroyed me.”
— Lady Gaga
on her detractors, in an interview with the Guardian
“ Maybe we should legalize... I respect the will of the people.”
— John McCain
on marijuana legalization, during a town hall event in Arizona
“ There was once a time when all men believed in God and the Church ruled. This period of time was called ‘The Dark Ages.’”
— HuffPost commenter Robt_Christian on “Church Sign Has AMAZING Message For Christian Homophobes”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CARL COURT - WPA POOL/GETTY IMAGES; BRAD BARKET/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/ORLANDO SENTINEL, GARY W. GREEN, POOL; GETTY IMAGES/AURORA CREATIVE; OLIVIER DOULIERY/PICTUREGROUP/COURTESY OF COMEDY CENTRAL
Voices
QUOTED
Why is it never Dick Cheney?
— Talk show host Dick Cavett
on the passing of broadcaster David Frost, on HuffPost Live
“ We get our news from Comedy Central and our comedy from FOX News.”
— HuffPost commenter gnfldpark
on “Jon Stewart Through 15 Seasons Of ‘The Daily Show’”
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
“ George is all about George.”
— George Zimmerman’s wife, Shellie,
who filed for divorce from her husband last week, told Good Morning America
“ Jeez Bible Belt, save some porn for the rest of us.”
— HuffPost commenter kevinbr38 on “This Is How Much Time America Spends On Porn”
TOMOHIRO OHSUMI/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
09.15.13 #66 FEATURES THE BIG QUESTIONS
THE CARBON QUANDARY
M O O R S S A L S, , C D E U N F P I O M L Y A E C B D G ON THEALL ANSIN ANDF IT U M ATHNG EOEM DE ANEID KAL E MY JAWE
B
WENTY YEARS AGO, EVGENIA CHERKASOVA AND Elena Kornilov were doctoral students in their mid20s, living in the same housing complex at Penn State University. As they pursued their degrees — Cherkasova in philosophy, Kornilov in physics — both started families, and to take a break from studying they found themselves meeting for wine or tea, or watching their young children on the playground. As their friendship deepened, their conversations often veered into the Big Questions on their minds: How could they live a “good life” with purpose, happiness and success? What did those words mean?
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
COURTESY OF EVGENIA CHERKASOVA
THE BIG QUESTIONS
After graduation, Cherkasova and Kornilov went their separate ways, keeping in touch via letters and weekly phone calls, sharing the details of every aspect of their lives — their kids’ first days of school, their academic research, their relationship hurdles. On March 4 — Kornilov’s 48th birthday — her doctor called to tell her she had breast cancer. Even as she hid the diagnosis from other friends and some family members, Kornilov confided in Cherkasova, and the two went over her treatment options. Some, like chemotherapy, were physically intrusive, but would greatly increase the chance of remission. Others, like hormonal drugs, were easier to handle, but came with a higher risk of a tumor returning. Suddenly, the conversations and questions that guided their friendship over the years took on a new meaning. They weren’t just idle speculations; they were real, urgent, full of consequences, perhaps now even a matter of life and death. “We started talking about how you deal with these situations, especially when it’s a patient with a potentially terminal disease,” recalled Cherkasova, now a philosophy professor at Suffolk Uni-
Evgenia Cherkasova, a philosophy professor at Suffolk University, will teach a course next year titled, “What is the Meaning of Life?”
versity in Boston. “She told me, ‘it’s a question of the quality of life versus length of life. You have to decide: If you want to prolong your life, then what do you do it for? What am I doing in life at this point? What’s happiness?”
T
HIS FALL, AS THE LATEST
crop of freshmen arrives on university campuses across the country, many students will find themselves debating similar questions, and not only in early-morning 101 courses. In dining halls and dorm rooms, as they come together with
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
people of vastly different backgrounds and perspectives, they’ll continue the typical college traditions of late nights, long conversations and self-discovery. And when they graduate, they will face a challenge much steeper than any college exam or doctoral dissertation — carrying that spirit of inquiry with them into the real world. Statistical and anecdotal evidence suggests this is easier said
of France, often credited with incubating philosophical discussions that ushered in the Age of Reason, or the cafe culture, a backdrop for the Existentialist musings of Jean-Paul Sartre and his contemporaries. Of course, it’s much easier to measure TV-watching than America’s intellectual engagement and introspection. But for some time, scholars and observers have been
“ THESE CONVERSATIONS ARE WHAT COLLEGE STUDENTS ARE MISSING, THEY’RE WHAT PEOPLE AT WORK ARE MISSING, THEY’RE WHAT WE’RE ALL MISSING.” than done. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which takes an annual measure of how Americans use their time, the average person spends about 45 minutes daily “socializing and communicating.” Watching TV, meanwhile, accounts for nearly three hours of the average American’s day. And today’s laptopscattered coffee shops don’t seem to foster environments of conversation and debate, like the salons
documenting, often with alarm, a shift from a society structured around social gatherings to a culture of technology-driven individualism — or, depending on your point of view, isolation. Writing more than a decade ago in Bowling Alone, Harvard public policy professor Robert D. Putnam documented the erosion of Americans’ participation in community clubs — like bowling leagues and civic organizations — and the disengagement from society and the self that it fostered. More recently in Alone Together, Massachusetts
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
WILLIAM B. PLOWMAN/NBC/NBC NEWSWIRE/GETTY IMAGES
THE BIG QUESTIONS
Institute of Technology clinical psychologist Sherry Turkle, who studies the impact of technology on social relations, examined how hyperconnected-ness has created relationships where we have the “illusion of companionship” without the “demands of friendship.” In other words, we are moving toward a way of life that discourages the kinds of conversations that defined and sustained Cherkasova and Kornilov’s friendship. “We have stripped away so many of the conditions that make conversations like these flourish. And the condition that makes it flourish, in many cases, is the uninterrupted full attention to each other,” said Turkle, who has spent the three years interviewing dozens of people from various walks of life about what they talk about with friends and how they do it for an upcoming book called Reclaiming Conversation. “These conversations are what college students are missing, they’re what people at work are missing, they’re what we’re all missing.” In the midst of this shift, the American university system remains an oasis of sorts, a place where the Big Questions are freely and fiercely debated — in no small
“ ... WE NO LONGER HAVE THAT KIND OF GROUP OF WRITERS WIDELY DISCUSSING HOW YOU MEASURE —ANew LIFE. ” York Times columnist David Brooks part because many students are not yet dealing with the pressures of work and family. But there’s a shift on American campuses, too. Just seven percent of graduates major in the humanities, like philosophy and literature, while majors in largely career-oriented fields have increased as more
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
Americans pursue higher education. A half-century ago, twice as many students walked across commencement stages with humanities degrees. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has written and spoken extensively about the decline of the “humanist vocation,” began teaching a course at Yale University last spring about the
commencement speech — like David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water,” which was given at Kenyon College in 2005 and became a book after his death — makes its way into pop culture. But Brooks believes we need much more. “Back in the 1950s, you had Joshua Heschel and Reinhold Niebuhr; they were writing books devoted entirely to these issues,” he said.
“ ... CAN [WE] SAVE YOUNG PEOPLE LITERALLY DECADES OF WASTED TIME IN COMING TO THE CONCLUSION THAT ALMOST EVERYONE DOES GENERATION AFTER GENERATION: THE THINGS WE THOUGHT WERE IMPORTANT IN OUR YOUTH... REALLY ARE NOT.” history of character building. He said he believes there’s a shortage of people publicly asking the cosmic questions. “People are hungry for a certain side of writing about these issues, but we no longer have that kind of group of writers widely discussing how you measure a life,” said Brooks. On occasion, an awe-inspiring
Heschel, a rabbi who stood on the front lines of the Selma-toMontgomery marches with Martin Luther King Jr., also was known for penning provocative theological works, like Man Is Not Alone and God in Search of Man. The works of Niebuhr, a Christian theologian and professor at Union Theological Seminary, include Moral Man and Immoral Society and The Nature and Destiny of Man. “For anyone who goes to church, these are the questions they are
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
COURTESY OF BOB HOUGHTALING
THE BIG QUESTIONS
essentially grappling with via their faith,” said Brooks. Indeed, a measurable drop in religious affiliation and attendance at houses of worship may be a factor in the decline of a culture of inquiry and conversation. According to the Pew Research Center, 1 in 5 Americans identifies with no religion, including those who are atheist, agnostic or “spiritual but not religious.” But the Big Questions aren’t just for the faithful, and there are glimmers of hope for those who long for the days when it was easy to find souls loudly searching for what the Greeks described as eudaimonia, or the “human flourishing,” considered central to a person and society’s development. On Meetup.com, a website where people organize get-togethers around mutual interests in homes, restaurants or cafes, hundreds of groups focused on philosophy, spirituality and religion have launched in recent years. TED, the conference series with the slogan “ideas worth spreading,” has an independent affiliate that hosts weekly salons in a Manhattan apartment where attendees watch taped talks then discuss them (in August, the theme of each meeting was “courage”). And from suburban Columbus,
“ WE GO THROUGH THE PERFUNCTORY THINGS SO MUCH, PUTTING ON OUR SUITS AND TIES, AND PUTTING ON OUR TITLES, THAT WE DON’T GET TO TALK ABOUT HUMANITY AND LIFE. ” — Bob Houghtaling, founder of the Adult Philosophy Club Ohio, to Seattle, individuals and nonprofits have launched grassroots efforts aimed at getting Americans to talk about death and what they desire out of life; events include Death Cafes — monthly coffee shop-centered discussions on dying that can now be found in nearly
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
AP PHOTO/SCHALK VAN ZUYDAM
THE BIG QUESTIONS
every major American city — and Death Over Dinner, a coordinated series of meals that took place in hundreds of homes last month. The Adult Philosophy Club of East Greenwich, R.I., was launched just over three years ago by a drug addiction counselor who recognized what he called “existential crises” among his clients. Today, the group is open to the whole town. For 90 minutes each Tuesday in a community room at a police station, Bob Houghtaling, a 59-year-old counselor who studied philosophy as an undergraduate at Rhode Island College, leads a roundtable of a dozen citizens ranging from teenagers to retirees. Sometimes, they’re discussing a book, like Eichmann in Jerusalem, the examination of the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in which political philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil.” Or they’re going to museums and films, like the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Rhode Island and a showing of the feature film Lincoln. “What constitutes morality? Are we moral? Is what’s right something natural or is it something that we’re taught?” Houghtaling said, recounting
Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded the 2013 Templeton Prize for his work advancing principles such as love and forgiveness.
some of the club’s recurring themes. “People come in with strong convictions and religious views. It can get heated.” Oftentimes, the conversation spins off of the news. With international controversy over revelations about the National Security Agency’s extensive spying programs and amid increased tensions over the Obama admin-
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
istration’s threat to launch strikes against Syria, the discussion frequently turns to the role of the state. “What obligation does the state have? In a critical situation like a war, can the government suspend natural rights?” said Houghtaling. “Where’s the line?” As Houghtaling sees it, these are questions that can all too eas-
covery from the recession ahead, jobs and money have a way of taking precedence over any talk of higher purpose. When Gallup researchers asked an international group of respondents a few years ago to describe their “best possible future,” the responses leaned heavily toward “wealth” and “good health.” It was harder, on the other
“ WHEN YOU ARE DEALING WITH COLLEGE STUDENTS, MOSTLY WHAT YOU ARE DOING IS TRYING TO PLANT SEEDS SO THEY ARE FAMILIAR WITH DIFFERENT WORLD VOCABULARIES.” ily be swallowed by the activities and stresses of everyday life. “We go through the perfunctory things so much, putting on our suits and ties, and putting on our titles, that we don’t get to talk about humanity and life. It’s cathartic when you get to do it,” he said. “It’s tough to sustain yourself unless there are ‘whys’ and purposes.” Yet, there are plenty of reasons for putting off these questions. With high unemployment and economists predicting years of re-
hand, for people to describe what they considered good relationships and a sense of community, and how important they were.
G
IVEN THE CONSIDERABLE
evidence and widespread perception that we are drifting away from the Big Questions, more universities have committed to sparking conversations. Many classrooms and campus greens are being turned into experimental zones where students and faculty can explore what Greek philosophers called the quest for ataraxia, or “tranquility,” in life.
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
COURTESY OF TOM KAPLAN
THE BIG QUESTIONS
Recognizing a yearning for “intellectual community,” the National Endowment for the Humanities has given $2.2 million in grants since 2009 to fund college and university courses that tackle the “enduring questions.” Cherkasova will teach one next year at Suffolk University in Boston called, “What is the Meaning of Life” (its syllabus includes Ecclesiastes and Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse’s philosophical novel about a young Brahmin’s journey of selfdiscovery during the age of Gautama Buddha). Among dozens of courses that the NEH has funded are, “What Is The Meaning of Happiness,” taught at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces; an upper-level class at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., titled, “What am I?,” and at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Penn., “What is Love?” To advocates, these courses are more than mere intellectual exercises and bull sessions. They pose questions intimately connected to the core of everyday life. “When you are dealing with college students, mostly what you are doing is trying to plant seeds so they are familiar with different world vocabularies,” said Brooks,
Tom Kaplan’s Recanati-Kaplan Foundation is funding the Ethical Inquiry program at Brown University, a series tackling Big Questions.
whose own course was not taught with a grant but is similar in some ways to the NEH programs. “You want it to be so that when they get older and encounter challenges, they know what to do, and have books and ways of thinking to help them tackle problems.” The West Conshohocken, Penn.based John Templeton Foundation, best known for its annual Templeton Prize, has spent tens of millions funding largely academic endeavors looking into the “basic
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
forces, concepts, and realities” of the universe and our place in it. They range from the esoteric, like a $5 million project to research immortality at the University of California, Riverside, to projects aimed at a wider audience, like Big Questions Online, a news site updated weekly with essays by academics and spiritual thinkers. At Brown University, the New
passed down instead of lost in the shuffle of everyday lives? “One of the things that interests me is whether we can save young people literally decades of wasted time in coming to the conclusion that almost everyone does generation after generation: The things we thought were important in our youth when the world was open to us, when it was our oys-
“ WE HAVE STRIPPED AWAY SO MANY OF THE CONDITIONS THAT MAKE CONVERSATIONS LIKE THESE FLOURISH. AND THE CONDITION THAT MAKES IT FLOURISH, IN MANY CASES, IS THE UNINTERRUPTED FULL ATTENTION TO EACH OTHER.” York-based Recanati-Kaplan Foundation began last year to fund a cross-departmental, interdisciplinary lecture and conference series on Ethical Inquiry. Its goal: to use Greek philosophies, among others, as a base to inspire students, faculty and the Providence community to explore the meaning of a “good life.” At the core of its attempt is another big question: How can the wisdom accumulated over the generations be
ter, when the future would bend itself to our will, really are not,” said billionaire natural gas and gold investor Thomas Kaplan, who started Recanati-Kaplan with his wife, Dafna Recanati. Kaplan’s own interest in philosophy was set off in high school when his mother gave him a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, a major Stoic text. “There are certain truisms. No man on his deathbed ever said, ‘I wish I spent more time at the office,’” Kaplan said, describing one of the many lessons he hopes to
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
COURTESY OF ISABELLE WIJANGCO
THE BIG QUESTIONS
impart through the nascent effort. One of the foundation’s launch events in 2012 was a two-day conference on the “Art of Living.” Hundreds of students, faculty and Providence residents listened to philosophers, psychiatrists, experimental psychologists and scholars of other disciplines examine the “good life.” Meanwhile, at Stanford University, there’s Sophomore College, a three-week intensive course series where students meet for several hours every day with the same class and live together on campus. Among its seminars, “The Meaning of Life” was taught by the university’s dean of religious life, and included field trips to houses of worship and readings of George Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara and Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. In another push, the Office of Religious Life hosts “What Matters to Me and Why,” a series of hour-long public discussions with faculty and administrators about “life questions.” Speakers are encouraged to discuss their personal struggles and reasons for pursuing their fields. The philosophy department chair spearheading the program at Brown, Bernard Reginster, ad-
Isabelle Wijangco, 23, said the “Meaning of Life” course at Stanford was one of the most important classes she’s taken.
mits the limitations of universities when it comes to changing conversations at the dinner table. The challenge, he said, is to take the questions “first, to students and faculty outside the confines of academic philosophy and second, to a wider public.” How could exploring philosophy, psychology and literature, for example, amplify the life
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
THE BIG QUESTIONS
COURTESY OF BERNARD REGINSTER
Brown University philosophy chair Bernard Reginster introduces the program, “Happiness: What Your Mother Did Not Tell You.”
and work of a future investment banker, economist or engineer? Isabelle Wijangco, who graduated from Stanford last year with a degree in human biology, is among those who took the Meaning of Life seminar in Sophomore College and said the course is part of what spurred her to want to focus on global women’s health issues when she attends medical school. “One of the big questions we grappled with in Meaning of Life was how to live every moment and be fully present while also being forward-looking and planning for
our hopes and dreams for ourselves and the world,” she said. Wijangco recalled that a fellow student described a way to strike that balance by repeating a bit of wisdom he heard from his father: ‘Lay each brick reverently. Lay a purposeful brick, but be in the moment of laying that brick. The house will form.’” She has carried that wisdom with her ever since. “It has helped serve as a metric for me in maintaining intentionality in every action,” she said, “for both present and future.” Jaweed Kaleem is the national religion reporter for The Huffington Post.
THE CARBON QUANDARY If You Bury a Problem, Does It Go Away? By TOM ZELLER
CARLA GOTTGENS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
Inside the offices of MIT’s Energy Initiative, a campus-wide program with the ambitious goal of helping to “transform the global energy system,” Howard J. Herzog, a senior research engineer, pulled out a fresh yellow legal pad and began sketching a line graph. He was responding to a straightforward question: In a world so addicted to fossil fuels, and yet so threatened by the planetwarming carbon dioxide they produce, why has one seemingly elegant and elementary solution — blocking that CO₂ from entering the atmosphere in the first place — proved so elusive? It’s a question Herzog has grappled with for some 25 years. The essential know-how for collecting carbon dioxide out of industrial exhaust streams dates back at least to the 1930s, after all. Yet, despite billions in government subsidies and a widely held view among many energy experts that climate change can’t truly be addressed without it, carbon cap-
ture and storage technology, or CCS as it is known, has struggled mightily to get off the ground. Herzog, who has headed MIT’s Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program since 1989, says that’s a policy failure, not a technological one. On his legal pad, he draws a vertical axis, which he says represents the cost of emitting carbon dioxide into the air. Extending along his horizontal axis are increasing volumes of the gas that might be captured instead. As he drags his pencil on a curve upward and outward from the axes’ origin, the plight of carbon capture and storage — and really, the plight of any clean-energy innovation — is laid bare: The more CO₂ you want to capture, Herzog explains, the higher the market price of emitting the gas has to be. “At the moment,” Herzog says, “the cost of emitting carbon, for all practical purposes, is zero.” The economic implications of that are straightforward: Government subsidies and other small-bore in-
COURTESY OF IEAGHG/GHGT10
THE CARBON QUANDARY centives may provide some marginal nudging, but it remains far, far cheaper to keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than to develop, test and nurture the sort of gargantuan captureand-storage systems that might put a real dent in the global warming problem. Yet, according to many energy experts, the costs of not developing technologies like CCS will continue to rise as the climate clock keeps ticking. Solar and wind power, they say, simply cannot be deployed quickly and widely enough to tackle climate change on their own. That leaves just two other possibilities, Herzog suggests: A rapid expansion of nuclear power, which has a low carbon footprint, but a dubious reputation, or rapid deployment of industrial-scale CCS. The Paris-based International Energy Agency has estimated that in the absence of CCS, the cost of addressing climate change may be as much as 70 percent higher by mid-century. And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the transnational body charged with assessing the scientific, technical and socioeconomic dimensions of the
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
global warming problem and its potential solutions, considers CCS an essential part of any effort to de-carbonize the planet’s economies over the next century. Not everyone buys these metrics, and many climate and clean-energy advocates routinely dismiss or downplay the potential role of CCS. They consider it hopelessly expensive, dangerously untested, and, under the rubric of “clean coal,” little more than an empty slogan embraced by an industry angling to preserve its grip on power production — or by lawmakers keen to appear friendly to
Howard J. Herzog has been the head of MIT's Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program since 1989.
THE CARBON QUANDARY the very deep-pocketed peddlers of fossil fuels. Tens of thousands of miles of new pipelines and other infrastructure would be needed to move the CO₂ around, these advocates argue. And while there are some potential markets for the gas — the food and beverage industry, for instance (think bubbly soda), or even by fossil fuel drillers, who have long injected CO₂ into waning underground wells to coax out more crude — commercial demand for captured CO₂ will remain minuscule compared with the tens of billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide we currently exhale into the ether every year. All of that would need to find safe and permanent storage underground — itself a worrying prospect for environmentalists. “I think it’s at least in part a way for politicians to show they’re not anti-coal,” says climate activist and author Bill McKibben. “But I’ve never met anyone who thinks [CCS] will actually play a serious part in dealing with our crisis. You can do it — but so expensively it makes no sense.” Herzog and others don’t dispute that CCS is costly, but they argue that every other potential
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
solution to the gathering climate crisis is equally if not more so. They also suggest that much of the skepticism surrounding CCS is unfounded, given the long history of capturing the stuff and a robust body of geological research and evidence suggesting that CO₂ can, in all likelihood, be safely and securely stored underground. But Herzog noted that until it becomes vastly more expensive to simply puff the stuff skyward — through a cap-and-trade scheme or a carbon tax, for instance, or tough government-enforced emissions limits — the technologies needed to tackle global warming will always remain out of reach. “You have to remember,” he says, “there’s really no such thing as a free lunch.”
A MASSIVE PROBLEM The scope of the challenge is immense. Carbon dioxide emissions come from lots of sources — cars and trucks, for example, or residential and commercial buildings. But heavy industry and electricity production, both of which rely to a significant extent on the burning of coal, natural gas or oil to do what they do, make for a highly polluting combination. According to the Energy Information Administration, the world currently spews a little less than 35 billion
MOHD RASFAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
THE CARBON QUANDARY
metric tons of carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere every year. About a quarter of that comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas for electricity and heat. Another 20 percent arises from large-scale industrial activity, including chemical, metal and mineral processing. Together, heavy industry, along with electricity and heat production — the prime targets for carbon capture and storage technology — account for roughly half of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Planet-warming pollution is
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
beginning to plateau in developed economies like the U.S. — mostly because of slackening demand and the current low cost, compared with coal, of marginally cleaner natural gas as an electricity fuel. But rich nations remain, in aggregate, the planet’s largest polluters. They have been so for the better part of two centuries. Meanwhile, China and India and other booming parts of the developing world are inclined — just as the rich world long has been — to gorge on the cheapest and most readily available energy sources to keep their economies growing and their standards of living rising. They are busy build-
A smogcovered Kuala Lumpur following heavy fires throughout Southeast Asia in June 2013.
THE CARBON QUANDARY ing hundreds of new coal- and gas-fired power plants, and are poised to keep nudging global warming emissions rapidly upward over the century to come. By some estimates, global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions are expected to reach 45 billion metric tons annually by 2040, according to data published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration in July. For some perspective, that’s approaching 200 times the amount of CO₂ naturally released by all of the planet’s landbased and undersea volcanoes combined in any given year. Given all of this, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have recently passed 400 parts per million, a milestone that many scientists consider worrying. Such concentrations of CO₂ have not been seen on Earth for millions of years, and the rate at which these levels have risen over the last several decades is almost unprecedented in recorded history. Given the planet’s continued reliance on fossil fuels, there is currently no indication that this upward trend will stop anytime soon. And while scientists remain divided over the precise character and timing of global warming’s finer impacts,
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
the odds of more severe, destructive and costly weather patterns increases inexorably with the rising tides of CO₂. “We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the doubleblack diamond run without having learned to ski first,” says Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climatologist and climate modeler at NASA’s Goddard
“ At the moment, the cost of emitting carbon, for all practical purposes, is zero.” Institute for Space Studies, referring to the 400 ppm milestone. “It will be a bumpy ride.” Tackling the problem can be achieved by any number of means. Some observers, assuming that humanity won’t soon abandon the convenience and energy density of fossil fuels, put their faith in geoengineering — a catch-all term for sci-fi solutions like seeding clouds or oceans with reflective particles to cool the entire planet. But these are untested and tend to have the air of a desperate, last-ditch effort that most experts hope dearly to avoid. Ahead of that, improvements in energy efficiency — stretching every kilowatt further — com-
AP PHOTO/MARTIN MEISSNER
THE CARBON QUANDARY
bined with the rapid deployment of solar and wind power, are at the heart of much current climate activism. But even assuming that such efficiency gains could be obtained in a reasonable timeframe (and setting aside a host of logistical and financial hurdles), energy experts say this would still require a substantial breakthrough in energy storage technology, given that these sources only deliver electricity when the wind blows or when the sun shines. A vast expansion of nuclear power could substantially reduce global CO₂ emissions. But these plants can require prohibitively expensive
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
outlays of their own — much as $10 billion in some cases — and the problem of nuclear waste, which at the moment has no long-term solution, remains. Cleaning up the transportation sector — with electric cars, for example — would make a significant dent in the problem by reducing tailpipe emissions of CO₂. But then, the added demand for electricity has to come from somewhere. And of course, such strategies will only be as successful as they are widely replicated by the entire community of nations — both rich ones and those now climbing steadily out of poverty. So far, that sort of global agreement on reducing carbon emissions has proved elusive.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen to its highest rate in recorded history, causing increasingly severe and unpredictable weather patterns and tides.
THE CARBON QUANDARY Such are the many reasons, advocates for the technology say, that CCS will prove vital in the battle to combat climate change. “Coal is an affordable and available source of energy,” says Victor K. Der, a former assistant secretary for fossil energy with the Department of Energy and now the general manager for North America operations at the Global CCS Institute, a trade organization. Developing countries in particular, Der noted, need affordable power to create industry and jobs, to improve sanitation and water treatment, to provide better levels of human health and higher standards of living as they climb out of the trap of poverty — just as the rich world did over the preceding two centuries. Der points to recent estimates that as many as 1,200 new coal power plants are currently in the planning stages worldwide. “How many of these actually will be built remains to be seen, but clearly the amount of new, unabated coal capacity will be very large,” he says. “And these new plants will require post-combustion capture sometime in the future in order to meet climate objectives.”
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
EASIER SAID THAN DONE Cleaning up the emissions profile of coal, by far the biggest contributor to global warming, currently takes one of three tacks. In some cases, developers have been able to exploit advanced alloys to build coal boilers able to withstand incredibly high pressures and temperatures — a boon for improving the efficiency of coal plants. Such plants, known technically as “su-
“ We are a society that has inadvertently chosen the doubleblack diamond run without having learned to ski first.” percritical” and “ultra-supercritical” coal plants, use less coal to extract each unit of electricity, resulting in lower overall emissions. Another promising technology converts coal into a synthetic gas, which in its most advanced form is also more efficient and less carbon-intensive than conventional coal combustion. Both of these methods remain in early stages, are wildly expensive, and represent a mere fraction of the global coal plant population, both proposed and existing.
... rich nations remain, in aggregate, the planet’s largest polluters. They have been so for the better part of two centuries.
MUNSHI AHMED/BLOOMBERG PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION VIA GETTYCREDIT IMAGESTK
Singapore's smog hit its worst levels in June 2013 as fires raged on the Indonesian island of Sumatra.
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
PAUL MAROTTA/GETTY IMAGES
THE CARBON QUANDARY For the most part, American coalfired facilities, like those in most of the rest of the world, rely on comparatively simple, decades-old pulverized coal technology that is highly polluting and inefficient. Further, only the very newest natural gas-fired plant designs could conceivably meet any meaningful greenhouse gas emissions standard for newly built power plants. Most older coal and gas plants — and even those using the most advanced super- and ultra-supercritical coal technologies — would fall well short. For these, the only options in a carbon-constrained world would be to shut down or endeavor to capture and then either use or store — or “sequester” as some definitions of CCS have it — CO₂ emissions. Capturing the stuff isn’t much of technological feat. Three primary methods are used: Pre-combustion, post-combustion, and “oxyfuel.” Post-combustion, the most mature of the carbon-capture methods, simply scrubs the CO₂ out of the exhaust stream after the fuel is burned — typically by injecting a chemical into the waste that absorbs carbon dioxide. This technique is well-developed and can be retrofitted onto most of the
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
standard coal-fired power plants operating around the world today. Pre-combustion — meaning the CO₂ is stripped out before the coal is burned — is a newer technique. But because it requires the fuel to be converted to a gas first, it’s really only an option for that tiny percentage of newer, high-efficiency, synthetic-gas coal plants, and perhaps natural gas plants as well. Like the postcombustion method, a so-called “oxyfuel” system strips out the CO₂ after the fuel is burned, but it attempts to simplify the extraction by burning the coal in a pure oxygen environment, leaving behind only carbon dioxide and water vapor. Condensing out the
In his 2009 book, Our Choice, Al Gore argues that CCS technology remains a pipe dream.
AP PHOTO/U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
THE CARBON QUANDARY
carbon dioxide is then relatively simple, but creating a pure oxygen environment is not cheap. Of course, that’s the challenge with all of these techniques. Each has advantages and disadvantages, depending on the application, but no matter the method, adding the CO₂-removal process to a power plant significantly saps its energy output, and that adds dearly to the cost of electricity production. Estimates of this socalled CCS energy penalty vary widely, ranging from 10 percent to 40 percent of total output. As such, CCS remains prohibitively expensive. In a 2010 report, the Department of Energy estimated that CCS technologies would make the construction of a new, conventional coal plant — which can cost as much as $2 bil-
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
lion even without CCS — as much as 80 percent more expensive. Newer data from the Energy Information Administration suggests that the premium has come down a bit, perhaps in the neighborhood of 60 percent. And plants with newer, more efficient designs would expect a 35 percent cost increase, the DOE analysis found. But several studies have also suggested that, as things stand, retrofitting the dozens of existing plants with carbon-capture systems could prove more expensive than scrapping them and building new plants with CCS. On top of these costs, there remains the question of what to do with all this captured CO₂. In some cases it will be sold and used by oil drillers, who use it in a process known as “enhanced oil recovery.” And soda will still need its bubbles. But these markets would be
An artist's rendering of a U.S. Department of Energy FutureGen power plant. Washington funded plans for the experimental, pollutionfree plant in Mattoon, Ill., in 2007.
THE CARBON QUANDARY dwarfed by the sheer volume of CO₂ that would need to be collected from coal-fired power plants, steel and chemical facilities and natural-gas fired power plants as part of any meaningful climate strategy. These billions of metric tons of C02 would be destined for deep underground reservoirs. That’s a scary proposition for many critics of CCS, who like to point out — with some foundation — that unanticipated environmental side effects tend to accompany mankind’s penchant for burying its problems. What happens if all that CO₂ leaks out later, or worse, escapes all at once in some sort of cataclysmic burp? A favorite anecdote among critics involves a massive, natural exhalation of carbon dioxide from beneath Lake Nyos, in the West African nation of Cameroon, in 1986. The eruption blanketed nearby towns and villages as they slept, killing nearly 2,000 people and thousands of livestock literally overnight. While the episode was quite real, CCS researchers and geological scientists have spent an inordinate amount of time and energy explaining the lack of relevance the Lake Nyos event has for car-
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
bon capture and storage. In CCS, the carbon dioxide gas is first compressed into a liquid, then injected into solid, porous rock located thousands of feet underground. As explained by the Environmental Protection Agency, the CO₂ becomes trapped in the pores of these rock formations and, over time, the gas “dissolves into the
How to ensure that the carbon dioxide is, in fact, staying put? Who is responsible for monitoring storage sites? How long does that responsibility last — 30 years? 100 years? Forever? pore water or may be transformed into solid minerals.” Such formations — which include commercial oil and gas reservoirs, unmineable coal beds, and saline formations — also sit well below thick layers of solid clay or shale or similar “cap rock” that is impermeable to carbon dioxide. The U.S. Department of Energy now publishes an annual atlas of suitable U.S. carbon dioxide storage areas. The current edition estimates the total potential storage capacity in the U.S. alone may be
ERIC BOUVET/GAMMA/GETTY IMAGES
THE CARBON QUANDARY
as much as 20,000 billion metric tons — far more than the total annual CO₂ emissions from all sources in the U.S., which are on the order of 6 billion to 7 billion metric tons per year. Although some enhanced oil recovery sites are located close to power plants where CO₂ might be harvested, most of the collected gas would need to be shuttled between plants and underground storage sites. Rail and trucks could conceivably handle a small percentage of this, but any realistic CCS system would require
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
large new pipeline networks to be feasible. Some studies have suggested that 15,000 to 66,000 miles of new pipeline would be needed over the next 15 years or so to accommodate the volumes of CO₂ that would arise from a widely deployed CCS program. According to the Global CCS Institute, there are only 36 CO₂ pipelines now operating in the U.S., transporting from 48 to 58 million metric tons of the gas — although the vast majority of that CO₂ is harvested from naturally occurring sources, rather than stripped from power plants and industrial sources. As it is, U.S. coal plants by themselves emit
The 1986 carbon dioxide eruption from Lake Nyos in Cameroon that killed more than 2,000 people and livestock gives supporters pause when considering underground carbon dioxide storage solutions.
THE CARBON QUANDARY about 40 times that amount. It’s these sorts of infrastructural hurdles, among other concerns, that have prompted even some of the most ardent advocates for aggressive carbon-reduction policies to remain skeptical of CCS. In his 2009 book Our Choice, the former U.S. vice president and tireless climate advocate, Al Gore, argued that, while the individual components of CCS have been proven in limited ways, bringing it all together at a scale that would be meaningful for curbing climate change remains little more than a pipe dream. That sentiment was echoed in an email message last month from Vaclav Smil, a professor at Canada’s University of Manitoba and one of the world’s most respected experts on energy and resource policy. “My feeling is that any commercial standalone CCS on a large scale — dozens of units in the U.S., the European Union and China — is about as likely as the third or fourth generation of new superior nuclear plants we have been promised since the mid1980s,” Smil writes, “or a massive adoption of fuel cell cars we were promised as recently as 2000.”
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
FUTURE OUTLOOK CCS would need to overcome significant headwinds on a variety of other fronts. Despite the protestations from geologists that storing carbon in deep underground reservoirs is essentially safe, other research has raised repeated questions that make even open minds drift quickly to Cameroon and Lake Nyos.
“ We’re not going to let the president wipe out the coal industry.” A 2012 study, for example, suggested that liquefied carbon injection underground runs a real risk of causing minor earthquakes of the sort that have been documented in other industrial processes, including hydraulic fracturing that’s used in modern oil and natural gas extraction. Of course, small earthquakes that aren’t lifethreatening happen naturally all the time. These minor quakes, while not necessarily hazardous to life and property, could well form fissures that might allow stored CO₂ to migrate upward from the formations identified as nominally “sealed” by CCS site analysis. This wouldn’t be likely to create
BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
THE CARBON QUANDARY
sudden clouds of asphyxiating gas, but it could, the researchers note, make all the time and expense of CCS ultimately not worth it. As might be expected, that study was quickly critiqued by a number of other researchers, who suggested its speculation wandered too far. Summarizing the criticisms, George Peridas, an engineer with the climate group at the Natural Resources Defense Council — one of a handful of large environmental groups that has fully endorsed the need for
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
CCS development and deployment — notes that selecting storage sites with low earthquake risk should and would be par for the course. “Jumping to the conclusion that a small induced earthquake would result in surface leakage is wrong,” Peridas wrote on his NRDC blog last summer. “That’s not to say that it cannot happen, but the problem with the authors’ assertion is that they then postulate that not enough sites for sequestration can be found that avoid this scenario to meaningfully deploy CCS at scale. Yet myriad hurdles remain. How to ensure that the carbon
U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz stated clearly that CCS — both for coal and natural gas plants — is a national imperative if the president’s goal of cutting national carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years is to be met.
AP PHOTO/CHARLES DHARAPAK
THE CARBON QUANDARY
dioxide is, in fact, staying put? Who is responsible for monitoring storage sites? How long does that responsibility last — 30 years? 100 years? Forever? How will both the safety of gathering, transporting and burying CO₂ be monitored and regulated? At the federal level? By states? And who is legally and financially liable if things don’t work out and carbon dioxide does begin leaking? These are vital questions — and they won’t likely receive suitable answers until industry and society is forced to grapple with them on a massive scale. And that simply won’t happen until the option of
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is taken off the table, either by making it prohibitively expensive, or flat-out illegal to do so. And these policies would need to have some measure of universality to be meaningful and effective. Global warming does not recognize international boundaries. As things stand, the International Energy Agency has estimated that about 1,500 commercial-scale CCS projects must be in place over the coming decade if there is any hope of keeping global average temperatures from rising more than 2-degrees Celsius over pre-industrial averages — a goal that scientists consider necessary to avoid the worst of what a warming planet might offer. To-
President Obama spoke about his climate change initiatives at Georgetown University in June 2013.
THE CARBON QUANDARY day, only 70 or so such projects are in the planning stages, and only a handful are actually under construction. Many of these facilities, including the beleaguered FutureGen project in Meredosia, Ill., have moved forward in fits and starts over the last decade, as whispers of tough new climate policies have come and gone, and meager government subsidies have waxed and waned. According to a catalog maintained by Herzog’s office at MIT, only one large-scale demonstration project, in Norway, is currently operational worldwide. Without a real price on carbon, that’s unlikely to change, Herzog says. “You really need to put a price on carbon and to raise it over time,” he says. “Let these technologies come in over time.” Speaking at Georgetown University in June, U.S. President Barack Obama did introduce a new plan for addressing climate change that included a call for tough new CO₂ emissions limits not just on proposed new power plants, but on existing ones as well. He also carved out $8 billion in new federal loan guarantees aimed at developing various advanced fossil energy technologies — including
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
CCS. This comes atop some $6 billion that has been appropriated by Congress since the 2008 fiscal year for carbon capture development, according to a Congressional Research Service report published
“ You really need to put a price on carbon and to raise it over time. Let these technologies come in over time.” earlier this month. The president’s newly appointed energy secretary, Ernest J. Moniz, has also stated clearly that CCS — both for coal and natural gas plants — is a national imperative if the president’s goal of cutting national carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 40 years is to be met. Whether this will actually happen is impossible to know. Critics of Obama’s climate agenda, which naturally includes deep-pocketed fossil fuel interests, have vowed to file legal challenges to measures they say would effectively strangle their livelihoods and drive electricity costs skyward. “We’re not going to let the president wipe out the coal industry,” declared Tim Phillips, president of the conservative group Americans
HEIDI WIDEROE/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
THE CARBON QUANDARY
for Prosperity, during a press conference ahead of Obama’s speech last month. Herzog says that for all of the continued static, he remains optimistic that reasonable minds will ultimately prevail in the climate wars — though he adds he’s not holding his breath for policy breakthroughs anytime soon. By way of explanation, he recalls the last wave of enthusiasm surrounding carbon-capture technology, as a newly elected Obama was entering the White House and promising a national effort to develop cleaner sources of energy, curb carbon pollution and aggressively tackle climate change. The
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
U.S. House of Representatives had passed a historic climate bill, the 2009 U.N. climate conference was in full swing in Copenhagen, and hopes were high that real progress on the climate problem — including an increase in CCS — was imminent, Herzog says. But the Copenhagen talks ultimately fizzled, the U.S. climate bill died in the Senate, and a crushing recession re-focused many minds on the bottom line. And once again, commercial development of carbon-capture technology was nudged further into the future. “We realized,” Herzog says, “this was going to take a lot longer than we thought.” Tom Zeller is a 2013-14 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.
The Mongstad oil and gas refinery near Bergan, Norway.
STEVEN KLEIN/VOGUE
Exit
STYLE
Google T Glass, Now a Fashion Accessory BY BIANCA BOSKER
HE MOST ICONIC photo of a Glass-wearer to-date is a picture of a 48-year-old man in the shower, naked save for a pair of Google’s high-tech specs. It’s a hard photo to forget, and one that didn’t seem to help Glass’ image problem (“I really didn’t appreciate the shower
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Model Raquel Zimmermann dons Google Glass for a futuristic vision of fashion in Tonne Goodman’s Vogue fashion shoot, “The Final Frontier.”
JASON KEMPIN/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES
Exit photo,” Google’s CEO informed the tech blogger who shared it). For the non-Silicon Valley crowd, the snapshot only confirmed that Google’s wearable computer was probably just some newfangled novelty for sci-fi nerds. But then Glass showed up in Vogue. This month’s Vogue — the vaunted September issue — carries a 12-page spread showing models prominently wearing color-coordinated pairs of Glass. Titled “The Final Frontier,” the shoot showcases a “futuristic vision of fashion” that’s “tailored for the brave and the bold.” Think Metropolis meets Gattaca, set in a technicolor Martian landscape. Though neither Vogue nor Google would confirm who first proposed featuring Glass in the glossy, the fashion shoot marks the latest boost to Google’s mission to portray Glass wearers as fashionable futurists, not geeks. Success in doing so would go a long way toward helping Glass become a mainstream hit when it finally launches. Every photo in Vogue’s September spread features Glass as the ultimate fashion accessory for the Space Age stylista. Architect Robert Bruno’s UFO-shaped house made of
STYLE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
The fashion shoot marks the latest boost to Google’s mission to portray Glass wearers as fashionable futurists, not geeks.” rusted steel serves as the backdrop for models decked out in minimalist Bottega Veneta, Gucci, Balenciaga and Google. In other words, it couldn’t be less like a guy photographing himself in the shower. According to Chris Dale, a Google spokesman, the artistic direction was entirely up to Vogue. The tech giant had someone on hand at the fashion shoot to ensure the devices were charged and to provide technical support, but “that’s about it,” Dale noted in an email.
Designers Yvan Mispelaere and Diane Von Furstenberg join Google co-founder Sergey Bin (right) in wearing Glass at the Spring 2013 MercedesBenz Fashion Week in New York City.
FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES FOR MERCEDES-BENZ FASHION WEEK
Google employed the help of Von Furstenberg’s runway show to “convince people it’s cool — or, at the very least, socially acceptable — to wear [Google Glass].”
Exit Although Glass isn’t yet available to the public, Google has been making a concerted effort to convince people it’s cool — or, at the very least, socially acceptable — to wear the funny-looking device. The company has made a point of planting Glass with people outside the tech crowd. Designer Diane von Furstenberg and a cadre of runway models were among the first public figures to give Glass a go, and Google’s Glass Explorer program invited “bold, creative individuals” to apply to be among the first allowed to buy a beta version of Glass. The Vogue spread marks the highest-profile instance yet of Glass being showcased as an aesthetic object. Google has told us Glass is functional. Vogue now shows us how it can be fashionable. “Having Glass in the Vogue issue is fantastic as it really shows the beauty and simplicity of the device’s design,” Dale said. “Everyone on the Glass team is over the moon with the issue.” But featuring Glass in Vogue does more than make it look lovely. It makes it look even more elite, high-end and upper class than the device (with its $1,500 pricetag) already is. Its placement in a high-fashion magazine alongside
STYLE
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
a $1,545 mohair sweater, $2,300 turtleneck and $4,490 teal coat is a step toward positioning the wearable device as a status symbol. Apple pioneered the idea of gadget as fashion accessory, transforming smartphones and MP3 players from something you had
Its placement in a highfashion magazine alongside a $1,545 mohair sweater, $2,300 turtleneck and $4,490 teal coat is a step toward positioning the wearable device as a status symbol.” to use into something you had to have. Though Glass might still look strange to some, Google may be embracing that same model. Some who leaf through the Vogue spread might come away thinking that Glass is the new black — the perfect companion to that Celine bag or Michael Kors gloves. But to others, it risks seeming even more science fiction or theoretical. As my HuffPostTech colleague Alexis Kleinman mused as she flipped through the pages, “It just looks even more out of reach than it already is.”
DOUGAL WATERS/GETTY IMAGES
Exit
THE THIRD METRIC
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Change Your Breath, Change Your Life
BY CAROLINE GREGOIRE
Exit HE BEST WAY to calm down is so innate to our lives, we often take it for granted: Taking a breath. Focusing on your own breathing can have a significant impact on your well-being and stress levels, and can even create physiological changes like lowering your blood pressure. But for many of us, when it comes to improving our health, changing our breathing somehow doesn’t spring to mind as readily as changing our diet or exercise habits. “We take our breath for granted the way we take our heart beat for granted,” Carla Ardito, a breathing expert at Manhattan’s Integral Yoga Institute and creator of the Breathing Lessons app, told The Huffington Post. “The difference is we can work on our breathing.” And there’s plenty of precedent. For thousands of years, the yogic practice of pranayama (Sanskrit for “extension of the life-force”) has been used as a method geared towards reducing stress and healing the body and mind through targeted breathing exercises. Ahead, find seven big health reasons to pause and focus on your breathing.
THE THIRD METRIC
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
MUTLU KURTBAS/GETTY IMAGES
T
We take our breath for granted the way we take our heart beat for granted.” LOWER STRESS LEVELS If your breathing is shallow, your body is probably in “fight-orflight” mode reacting to stress, says Ardito. Taking a minute or two to sit quietly and focus on your breathing helps your body achieve a state of calm, shifting from functioning out of the sympathetic nervous system (characterized by drive, flight and ambition) to the parasympathetic nervous system, which puts the body in a state of “relax and receive.”
LUIS ALVAREZ/GETTY IMAGES
Exit
REDUCED TESTING ANXIETY A 2007 study published in the journal Teaching and Learning in Medicine found deep-breathing meditation to be an effective technique to reduce the perception of pre-exam stress among med school students. The students who practiced the deepbreathing exercises reported perceiving less anxiety, self-doubt
THE THIRD METRIC
and concentration loss than the students who did not practice deep breathing. ALTER GENE EXPRESSION A recent study found that mindbody practices like yoga, meditation and deep breathing exercises can trigger the body’s “relaxation response,” a physiological state of deep relaxation that alters the way it responds to stress. This state can counter the negative effects of stress for people with
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Exit health conditions like anxiety and hypertension, by actually altering the expression of genes in the immune system. Researchers were able to measure physical changes brought about by the relaxation response by looking at alterations in gene expression. “People have been engaging in these practices for thousands of years, and our finding of this unity of function on a basic-science, genomic level gives greater credibility to what some have called ‘new age medicine,’” Harvard Medical School professor Herbert Benson, the study’s lead researcher, said in a statement. STIMULATE BRAIN GROWTH When controlled breathing is used during meditation, it can actually increase the size of the brain. Meditation that involved focusing one’s attention on the breath has the capacity to increase cortical thickness, according to a 2005 Harvard study. ALLEVIATE ANXIETY AND NEGATIVE EMOTIONS Many of us have felt short of breath during times of panic or stress. This is the body’s natural reaction to a perceived threat,
THE THIRD METRIC
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
says Ardito. Focusing on breathing can help to alleviate anxiety, symptoms of depression, and other negative emotions. Last year, Australian researchers found deep breathing to be effective in reducing musicians’
When controlled breathing is used during meditation, it can actually increase the size of the brain. performance anxiety. That study showed that diaphragmatic breathing 30 minutes before a performance could reduce emotional stress. LOWER BLOOD PRESSURE Taking slow, deep breaths for just a few minutes a day could help to lower your blood pressure, according to Dr. David Anderson of the National Institutes of Health. While researchers have observed that slow, deep breaths can help to relax and temporarily dilate blood vessels, they don’t yet know precisely why deep breathing has the capacity to cause a lasting drop in blood pressure, Anderson tells NBC News.
Exit
EAT THIS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? WRITTEN AND PHOTOGRAPHED BY REBECCA ORCHANT
Cornmeal gives these zucchini medallions a nice crunch.
Exit T THIS POINT in our lives, we’re pretty sure we all have at least one vegan. Maybe a best friend. Maybe an in-law. We love these people, we know they are just like us, but — and we’re being brutally honest here — thinking about cooking a whole meal for them can strike fear in the hearts of us cheese/butter/bacon eaters. It’s okay. They know. But at some point, you’re going to have to cook them a meal, so it might as well be delicious for everyone. One of our favorite vegans, personal chef Emma Gonzalez, sat down with us to talk vegan food, and what to worry/not worry about when you cook vegan food. As an added bonus, she also fed us. I was first introduced to Emma’s cooking when she started doing a weekly vegan bar food pop-up in my neighborhood. Vegan bar food? The thought intrigued me. Week after week, Emma proved to a confirmed old cheese proselytizer like me that vegan food can not only be satisfying and delicious, but also totally decadent. Although Emma’s pop-ups are no longer happening, she’s begun to concentrate more fully on her at-home personal chef business. Yes, that means
EAT THIS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
A
We love these people, we know they are just like us, but... thinking about cooking a whole meal for them can strike fear in the hearts of us cheese/ butter/bacon eaters. she will come to your house and cook you delicious things. The vegan dinner party menu that Emma put together for us covers all your bases. It tastes great, looks beautiful, fills you up and even includes some indulgences like fried food and dessert. Check out Emma’s tips, tricks and recipes below, and know in your heart that you know what to eat when a vegan comes over.
Creamy parsnip and sunchoke soup with crispy mushrooms.
Exit
EAT THIS
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
HUFFINGTON POST: What do you wish people who invited you over to dinner knew? EMMA GONZALEZ: Food is such
a personal thing; don’t assume that because I’m vegan, I’m judging you! I eat more than salad. Also, a lot of the things you eat as a non-vegan, are actually vegan! Making plant-based food doesn’t have to be complicated or flavorless. Also, if you’ve made an effort to cook animal-free food, I’ll be so delighted, I’ll love whatever it is (as long as it’s not naked lettuce and three cherry tomatoes. Nobody likes that.)
HP: What’s the one ingredient you can’t live without? EG: Equipment-wise, a food processor is my magical key to deliciousness. You can completely transform ingredients by pureeing them. Also, check out nutritional yeast. In addition to providing B vitamins, it lends a savory richness. Thicken sauces, sprinkle on popcorn, or mix it with ground walnuts, salt, and onion powder for an awesome topping to use like parmesan.
HP: When you build a vegan menu, what are some things you take into consideration?
EG: Balance is the goal. So, a mix
of textures, flavors, temperatures and nutrients is important. A sprinkle of nuts or fresh herbs can turn a good dish into a great one. If something is too spicy, temper it with a little sweetness. Not that every meal needs to be superhealthy, but I do try to keep health in mind. Will people feel good when they’ve left the table? Will they have eaten protein, iron, vitamin C, etc.? Will they feel heavy and lethargic, or satiated and energetic? Maybe that sounds annoying, but I want guests to be up to a game of charades after dinner, so I need them in top form.
Smoky cauliflower casserole with a rich cashew sauce.
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
EAT THIS
Exit
HP: What do you think surprises people most about your food? EG: I don’t use mock-meats, which some think of as necessary to meat-free cooking. I think people are often surprised that my food is hearty and satisfying. They forget
it’s vegan! Also, preparing vegan meals doesn’t have to be totally restrictive. Instead of dwelling on what not to eat, celebrate all the wonderful, colorful, healthy things you have to work with!
Chocolate almond bites with chocolatedipped sweet potato chips make for a sweet and salty treat.
CHECK OUT EMMA’S DELICIOUS DINNER PARTY MENU: Creamy Parsnip and Sunchoke Soup with Crispy Mushrooms
Smoky Cauliflower Casserole with Rich Cashew Sauce (This tastes way more like mac and cheese than we were prepared for it to taste.)
Cornmeal Crusted Zucchini Medallions
Sweet and Tangy Greens
Crunchy Chocolate Almond Bites and Chocolate-Dipped Sweet Potato Chips
01
TOM WILLIAMS/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES (GOP STRATEGIST); LEON NEAL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (SKYSCRAPER); NEUSTOCKIMAGES/ GETTY IMAGES (DOCTORS); GREG NEWINGTON/GETTY IMAGES (CROCODILE); DAVID LENTZ/GETTY IMAGES (HEAT DAYS)
Exit
TFU
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
GOP Strategist Calls Female Senate Candidate an ‘Empty Dress’
2
Female Doctors Earn $50,000 Less Than Male Doctors
3
CROCODILE This TRAPS MAN ON Skyscraper REMOTE ISLAND FOR TWO WEEKS Melted a Car
4
05
Heat Days in Schools Are Becoming Almost As Common As Snow Days
06
PHILIPPE LOPEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (HONG KONG); KFC (DEEP-FRIED SOUP); RICH LEGG/ GETTY IMAGES (MORGUE WORKER); DON BAYLEY/GETTY IMAGES (STRANGER); MATT SAYLES/INVISION/AP (DAFT PUNK)
Exit
HUFFINGTON 09.15.13
TFU
Pollution in Hong Kong Is So Bad, Tourists Pose With Photo of a Fake Skyline
7
Deep-Fried Soup Is Here
8
MORGUE WORKER NOTICES CRASH VICTIM IS STILL ALIVE
9
10 New Experiment Shows Most Kids Will Walk Off With a Stranger
Electronics Retailer Makes Applicants Dance to Daft Punk During Interviews
Editor-in-Chief:
Arianna Huffington Editor: John Montorio Managing Editor: Gazelle Emami Senior Editor: Adam J. Rose Editor-at-Large: Katy Hall Senior Politics Editor: Sasha Belenky Senior Food Editor: Kristen Aiken Senior Voices Editor: Stuart Whatley Pointers Editor: Marla Friedman Quoted Editor: Gina Ryder Viral Editor: Dean Praetorius Creative Director: Josh Klenert Design Director: Andrea Nasca Photography Director: Anna Dickson Associate Photo Editor: Wendy George Senior Designer: Martin Gee Infographics Art Director: Troy Dunham Production Director: Peter Niceberg AOL MagCore Head of UX and Design: Jeremy LaCroix Product Manager: Gabriel Giordani Architect: Scott Tury Developers: Mike Levine, Sudheer Agrawal QA: Joyce Wang, Amy Golliver Sales: Mandar Shinde AOL, Inc. Chairman & CEO:
Tim Armstrong
PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK