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10.13.13 #70 CONTENTS
Enter POINTERS: Yellen Makes History... Nobel Prizes JASON LINKINS: Looking Forward in Angst DATA: Who Makes the Minimum Wage?
ON THE COVER: DDRCCL/STOCK.XCHNG; MAGICMARIE/STOCK.XCHNG; RENACUAJE/STOCK.XCHNG; DREAMPICTURES/ GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK /LESPALENIK; THIS PAGE FROM TOP: CHERYL ZIBISKY/COURTESY OF THE BENJAMIN; HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Q&A: Adam Scott HEADLINES MOVING IMAGE
Voices BILL MAHER: Conservatives Must Come to California
GOLDEN SLUMBERS These hotels are in the business of a good night’s sleep. BY GREGORY BEYER AND ELEAZAR MELÉNDEZ
JOANNA ZELMAN: What You Don’t Write in Postcards QUOTED
Exit LIFESTYLE: 23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing THE THIRD METRIC: Welcome to Internet Rehab EAT THIS: How to Pickle Anything DOG EARS: Born in October TFU
LESS WORK FOR ALL Would a shorter workweek fix our unemployment problems? BY ARTHUR DELANEY
FROM THE EDITOR: Battle of the Beds ON THE COVER: Photo-Illustration
for Huffington by Troy Dunham
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
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Battle of the Beds N THIS WEEK’S issue, Gregory Beyer and Eleazar Meléndez spotlight a trend in hotel service across the country: ensuring that guests enjoy a better night’s sleep. As hotels vie for supremacy in what some industry insiders refer to as the “battle of the beds,” many are rethinking their priorities, knowing that the difference between a good and bad night’s sleep could — and should — tip the scales when it comes to where
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a guest chooses to rest her head. At The Benjamin in New York City, guests can browse a pillow menu, with a choice of pillows filled with buckwheat or satin. At the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort in Avon, Colorado, the hotel restaurant’s menu includes desserts and drinks that promote sleep, while VIP guests are provided with “slumber kits” in their rooms, complete with eye mask and ear plugs. “People carry their sleep issues to the hotels they stay in,”
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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
says Nancy Rothstein, a sleep consultant who has worked for Hyatt. “You can get the best bed in the world, but if you don’t provide people with additional resources, they’re not necessarily going to get good sleep.” Elsewhere in the issue, Bill Maher advises conservatives to come to California if they want to see real American exceptionalism in practice. He argues that the “failed” California, which pundits were eulogizing not too long ago, was ushered out when the state elected Jerry Brown as its governor. “We are moving the country’s largest economy into a place where we can all be health-insured, clean air-breathin’, gaymarried, immigrant-friendly citizens who don’t get shot all the time,” Bill writes. “California has been setting the trends in America for decades, from Silicon Valley to silicone tits, and it’s not going to stop now.” In our Voices section, Joanna Zelman opens up about a feeling that is rarely owned up to in postcards: the loneliness of traveling. “Are you tired? No, you just finished your second café latte...
HUFFINGTON 10.13.13
You’re not hungry and you’ve been walking in the shade,” Joanna writes. “Could you be — no, you won’t even let the word slip into your frontal lobe, because once it has, like a couchsurfing friend,
People carry their sleep issues to the hotels they stay in. You can get the best bed in the world, but if you don’t provide people with additional resources, they’re not necessarily going to get good sleep.” there’s no way to know when it will leave. Too late... It is here, deep in your belly, that Loneliness has set up shop.” Finally, as part of our continuing focus on the Third Metric, we take a look at America’s first inpatient treatment center for one of society’s newest and potentially most debilitating ailments: Internet addiction.
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OBAMA: NO MORE EXTORTION As the government shutdown nears its two-week mark, President Obama on Tuesday sternly reminded Congress that “we can’t make extortion routine as part of our democracy.” He said he will negotiate with Republicans only after Congress passes a short-term bill to fund the government and raise the debt ceiling. The government is set to breach the debt limit on Oct. 17. “Think about it this way: The American people do not get to demand a ransom for doing their jobs,” he said at a press conference. “You don’t get a chance to call your bank and say I’m not going to pay my mortgage this month unless you throw in a new car and an Xbox.” Later Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner said the ongoing shutdown would not be resolved without negotiations.
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YELLEN MAKES HISTORY
President Obama nominated Federal Reserve Vice Chairwoman Janet Yellen to be the Fed chair on Wednesday. If confirmed by the Senate, Yellen would be the first female chair in history. She would take over from current Fed Chair Ben Bernanke in January. “She is a proven leader and she’s tough — not just because she’s from Brooklyn,” Obama said. “Janet is exceptionally well-qualified for this role.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had been seen as a top contender for the nomination, but he took his name out of the running amid harsh criticism.
12 YEARS, AND UP TO $6 TRILLION
AND THE NOBEL PRIZE GOES TO…
Monday marked 12 years since the war in Afghanistan began, and at least 2,146 U.S. military members have died. The full withdrawal of troops has been delayed because Afghan President Hamid Karzai says the U.S. and its allies have violated the country’s sovereignty, and the U.S. wants a deal that will allow a continued presence past the 2014 scheduled pullout. A study this year revealed that the combined cost to taxpayers for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars is between $4 trillion and $6 trillion.
Francois Englert and Peter W. Higgs won the Nobel Prize in physics for their research on the “God particle,” formally known as the Higgs boson particle, which explains why matter has mass. Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel won the prize in chemistry “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” The Nobel Prize in medicine went to James Rothman, Randy Schekman and Thomas Sudhof for uncovering key findings about the cell’s transport system. “My first reaction was, ‘Oh, my God!’” Schekman said in a statement. “That was also my second reaction.”
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‘NINE MONTHS OF HELL’
Elizabeth Smart, who in 2002 was kidnapped from her home outside of Salt Lake City, Utah, at the age of 14, reveals the details of her ordeal in a memoir released Monday. In an interview with NBC’s Meredith Viera, Smart, 25, said she was raped daily for nine months and held down with chains. Her captor, Brian David Mitchell, is serving two life sentences. “I want people to know that I’m happy in my life right now,” she told the AP. “I also, even more so, want to reach out to people who might not be in a good situation.”
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The U.S. announced it will slash aid to Egypt in response to the ouster of democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi. The State Department did not reveal how much of the $1.5 billion annual aid will be cut, but a spokeswoman said the U.S. won’t provide some military systems and cash to Egypt until there is “credible progress” on creating a government through fair elections. The U.S. will continue to help fund counter terrorism efforts and border security, and give money toward health and education.
THAT’S VIRAL KARMA ISN’T ALWAYS A BITCH, SOMETIMES IT’S WONDERFUL
A selection of the week’s most talked-about stories. HEADLINES TO VIEW FULL STORIES
GRANDFATHER OF THE YEAR/ DECADE/ALL-TIME
JON STEWART: WHEN THE GIANTS LOST, THEY DIDN’T SHUT DOWN THE F**KING NFL
WHICH IS BETTER? OBAMA-CARE OR THE AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE ACT?
SO THAT’S WHAT HAPPENED TO MEG RYAN...
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LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
JASON LINKINS
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HOW THE GOP CAN EASILY DEFUND OBAMACARE WITHOUT STAGING ANY MORE CRISES S I WATCHED last week’s round of legislative ping-pong end in a needless government shutdown, I thought about whether any of this mishegas was actually necessary for the GOP to achieve its desired result. And all it once, it hit me like a bolt from the blue! Of course the GOP can
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get rid of Obamacare — without a government shutdown or a debtceiling crisis. The party can do so through a very simple process, one undertaken by Republicans on a regular basis. According to several sources, in 2016 there is going to be this thing called a “presidential election,” in which a Republican may contend. Here’s how it works: Beginning in about January 2016, there will be a series of “primaries,” held
Enter in multiple states in which lots of Republican candidates can vie to be the “presidential nominee.” If any one contender achieves, through the primary process, the right number of delegates, he or she goes on to contend in the “general election” against nominees from other parties. Beginning in January, any or all contenders are allowed to stake out a platform of getting rid of Obamacare. The media will even point television cameras at the contenders and put the things they say on the news and stuff. From there, all the Republican nominee would have to do to get rid of Obamacare is prevail in the “general election.” To do so, he or she (but let’s face it, probably “he”) would simply have to win a combination of states with a total number of “electoral votes” equal or exceeding 270. (You can learn more about how the “electoral college” works here.) The good news is that Republicans have over 1,100 days to get ready for this. That’s a lot of time to raise money and perfect their messaging. (Try: “If elected, I will get rid of Obamacare” and season as you see fit.) Chances are, if the Republican
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candidate is sweeping to victory in the presidential election, voters will likely choose a majority of Republicans for the House and Senate, too, which will make getting rid of Obamacare even easier. And if I read the Republicans’ basic take on Obamacare correctly, it seems they’re pretty con-
According to several sources, in 2016 there is going to be this thing called a ‘presidential election,’ in which a Republican may contend.” vinced that the law is going to be a huge disaster: Taxpayers won’t like it, it will drive costs up, it will cause the quality of care to go down, and it will do harm to the economy in terms of growth and unemployment. If all of that turns out to be true, a GOP presidential candidate who promises to get rid of the health care law is going to have a strong position in the race. If I were in the GOP’s shoes, I’d gamble on being correct about how the roll-out of Obamacare is going to go, then stop trying to end it by provoking crises
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and just let it fail naturally. Remember, in the general election the inevitable Democratic candidate will have to “own” Obamacare, as the media likes to say. This eventual Democratic opponent may have even cast a vote in support of Obamacare. At the very least it’s likely that he or she will have said something in public in support of Obamacare. A GOP presidential candidate could put this statement in what’s known as an “attack ad.” Man, that attack ad would sure make the Democratic candidate look dumb, I bet!
LOOKING FORWARD IN ANGST
In summation, it sure looks like this “2016 election strategy” is the way to go. It maximizes the GOP’s opportunities, confers key advantages and can, in the end, produce an inarguable “mandate” for getting rid of Obamacare. Best of all, it neatly provides a way around all of the crisis-raising strategies currently being used to get rid of Obamacare. The public really hates government shutdowns, but Americans are remarkably OK with Republican people running for president. Few, if any, object to this. So, there you have it. I fixed this for you! Now go and pass a clean continuing resolution, boys — chop-chop!
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Q&A
FROM TOP: QUANTRELL COLBERT; CHRIS PIZZELLO/INVISION/AP
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Adam Scott on What Happens in His Recurring Dream “I’m on the run for a horrible thing I did years and years ago... the thing I did was so long ago that it’s a faint memory in my dream, but I’m remembering it as I’m on the run.”
Above: Adam Scott as Carter in Stu Zicherman’s A.C.O.D. Below: Scott appears at the A.C.O.D. premiere at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival in January.
FOR THE FULL INTERVIEW, VISIT HUFFPOST LIVE
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DATA
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SOURCE: BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS
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Who Makes the Minimum Wage? For most low-wage workers, the federal minimum wage, which stands at $7.25, isn’t enough to make ends meet. Even in Hanson County, South Dakota, America’s cheapest county, a single full-time worker needs to earn $10.20 per hour – nearly $3 more than the federal minimum wage – to afford basic needs.
That’s why many of these workers have been the subject of battles in the streets of New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles, the halls of Congress and more. But many Americans don’t actually know who they are. Here’s a look at who actually earns the minimum wage. —Jillian Berman
HEADLINES
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The Week That Was
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Tokyo, Japan 10.02.2013 A rainbow forms behind “Tokyo Skytree,” the world’s largest radio tower, after typhoon Sepat passed through the metropolitan area. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Madra, Czech Republic 09.30.2013 Visitors look at fish through the transparent walls of a tunnel under a lake in Madra. The 26-footlong tunnel is located 10 feet beneath the lake, giving visitors a window to the sturgeon, carp, catfish and other creatures that live in the lake. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Seoul, South Korea 10.01.2013 Two-year-old Jung Ha-yoon sits in a ceramic container while playing in the traditional sports square during the “Taste Korea! Korean Royal Cuisine Festival” at Unhyeon Palace. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Toronto, Ontario 10.01.2013 Kim Passero feeds her newborn Yorkshire terrier puppy who, at .35 lbs, may be a Guinness contender for world’s smallest puppy. Because its mouth is too small to feed from its mother like the other .88 lb puppies born in the same litter, Passero’s puppy has to be fed with a syringe or spoon. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Munster, Germany 10.02.2013 Soldiers of the Bundeswehr conduct annual military exercises for the media at the Bergan military training grounds. Bundeswehr is transitioning to a professional army for Germany since the country recently ended its mandatory military service. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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al-Malkiya, Bahrain 10.03.2013 A Bahraini woman stands in front of a graffitied wall during an anti-regime rally. The rally is being held in solitary with 37 jailed Shiite activists who are being held for up to 15 years for carrying out “terrorist crimes” in the kingdom. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Saffron Walden, England 10.05.2013 A “zombie” soldier jumps out at a runner at “Zombie Evacuation Race,” one of Britain’s biggest horror events. The race has thousands of participants attempt to complete a three-mile run while avoiding “zombies” who are trying to grab the three lifeline strips hanging from the runners’ waists. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Toronto, Ontario 10.05.2013 A pile of chairs rise to form “Garden Tower” at Nuit Blanche in Toronto. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Auburn, Alabama 10.05.2013 Auburn College football players celebrate their 30-22 win against Mississippi during a NCAA college football game. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Bhubaneswar, India 10.04.2013 A decorated elephant stands in Nandankanan Zoological Park as part of Wild LIfe Week, an annual celebration in India. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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New Delhi, India 10.04.2013 An artist adjusts an electric bulb in preparation for the annual Durga Puja festival. The five-day festival commemorates the goddess Durga’s defeat of Mahisha, the buffalo demon, marking the triumph of good over evil. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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Trincavini, Peru 09.25.2013 A girl plays in a bed of coca leaves in a small village in Peru’s Pichari district. According to the United Nations, 56 percent of Peru’s coca leaves, the basis for cocaine, come from Pichari. Tap here for a more extensive look at the week on The Huffington Post. PHOTO OR ILLUSTRATION CREDIT TK
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New Rule: Conservatives Who Love to Brag About American Exceptionalism Must Come to California NEW RULE: Conservatives who love to brag about American exceptionalism must come here to California, and see it in person. And then they should be afraid — very afraid. Because while the rest of the country is beset by stories of right-wing takeovers in places like North Carolina, Texas and Wiscon-
sin, California is going in the opposite direction and creating the kind of modern, liberal nation the country as a whole can only dream about. And not only can’t the rest of the country stop us — we’re going to drag you along with us. It wasn’t that long ago that pundits were calling California a failed state and saying it was ungovernable. But in 2010, when other states were busy electing
Gov. Jerry Brown, savior of California?
Voices whatever Tea Partier claimed to hate government the most, we elected a guy who actually liked it, Jerry Brown. Since then, everything Republicans say can’t or won’t work — gun control, immigration reform, high-speed rail — California is making work. And everything conservatives claim will unravel the fabric of our society — universal healthcare, higher taxes on the rich, gay marriage, medical marijuana — has only made California stronger. And all we had to do to accomplish that was vote out every single Republican. Without a Republican governor and without a legislature being cock-blocked by Republicans, a $27 billion deficit was turned into a surplus, continuing the proud American tradition of Republicans blowing a huge hole in the budget and then Democrats coming in and cleaning it up. How was Governor Moonbeam able to do this? It’s amazing, really. We did something economists call cutting spending AND raising taxes. I know, it sounds like some crazy science fiction story, but you see, here in California, we’re not just gluten-free and soy-free and peanut-free, we’re Tea Party free! Virginia could do it, too, but
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they’re too busy forcing ultrasounds on women who want abortions. Texas could, but they don’t because they’re too busy putting Jesus in the science textbooks. Meanwhile their state is so broke they want to replace paved roads with gravel. I thought we had this road-paving thing licked in the 1930s, but not in Texas. But hey, in Dallas you can carry a rifle into a Chuck E. Cheese, cause that’s
California is... creating the kind of modern, liberal nation the country as a whole can only dream about.” freedom. Which is great, but it wasn’t so great when that unregulated fertilizer plant in Waco blew up. In California, when things blow up, it’s because we’re making a Jason Statham movie. California isn’t perfect, but it is in our nature from being on the new coast to be up for trying new things — and maybe that’s why the right wingers are always hoping we fail. On the campaign trail last year, Mitt Romney warned that if we didn’t follow his conservative path, “America is going to become
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like Greece, or... Spain, or Italy, or... California.” And that was a big laugh line with Mormons, because Greece, Spain and Italy have some art and poetry and theatre, but nothing like Salt Lake City. Yes, Mitt sure hates California, which is why he moved to San Diego. To the house with the car elevator. What conservatives fear about California being a petri dish for the liberal agenda is well-founded. For example, as Obamacare gets implemented here much more successfully than predicted, the movement to just go all the way to a single payer system is gathering steam. It actually passed the legislature
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twice, but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger, who argued it didn’t go far enough to cover the children of that natural, beautiful love between a man and a cleaning lady. In lots of areas, California seems to have decided not to wait around for the knuckle-draggers and the selfish libertarian states to get on board. They can mock “European style democracies” all they want, we are building one here, and people like it — the same way when Americans come back from a vacation in Europe they all say the same thing: “Wow, you can see titties on the beach!” But they also remark on the clean air, the modern, first world infrastructure, the functioning social safety net, and bread that doesn’t
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Same-sex couple Cosgrove Norstadt (right) and Jeff Foote (left) embrace during their wedding at San Francisco’s City Hall in California on June 28, 2013.
Voices taste like powdered glue. And they wonder, “Why can’t we get that here?” Unless they’re Republicans, in which case they wonder, “How can people live like that?” Well, swallow hard, guys, because California is eventually going to make all Americans live like that. Why? Because we’re huge. The 12th-largest economy in the world, the fifth largest agricultural exporter in the world, and of course number one in laser vaginal rejuvenation. There’s 40 million of us — so, for example, when California set a high mileage standard for any car sold in this state, Detroit had to make more fuel-efficient cars; we’re just too big a slice of the market, and it would be too expensive to make one car for us, and another for shit-kickers who want something that runs on coal. It’s so ironic — the two things conservatives love the most, the free market and states rights — are the two things that are going to bend this country into California’s image as a socialist fagtopia. Maybe our constipated Congress can’t pass gun control laws, but we just did. Lots of ’em. Because we don’t give a shit about the NRA. Out here that stands for
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“Nuts, Racists, and Assholes.” So while the rest of America is debating whether it’s a good idea to allow guns in bars or a great idea to allow guns in bars, California is about to ban lead bullets. Which is a no-brainer, because bullets don’t need lead, and lead kills birds and gets into the food supply of people who hunt their own food. Which explains why Ted Nugent is such a raving lunatic.
The bottom line is that we are moving the country’s largest economy into a place where we can all be healthinsured, clean air-breathin’, gay-married, immigrantfriendly citizens who don’t get shot all the time.” While other state governments are working with Jesus to make abortion more miserable — because otherwise women would use it for weight loss — California is making it easier. We actually have a guy dancing on the street corner dressed as the Statue of Liberty spinning a big arrow that says, “Abortions!” And a new law will even let nurse practitioners per-
Voices form abortions. And dog groomers can aid assisted suicides by Skype. California was the first state to legalize medical marijuana, our minimum wage is almost three dollars higher than the national rate, and in 10 years a third of our electricity will come from renewable energy and 15 percent of our cars will be electric. And while Republicans in the rest of the country are threatening to deport every immigrant not named Ted Cruz, California just OK’d driver’s licenses for undocumented aliens. That’s right, we’re letting them drive cars — just like white people! You Red Staters may ask, “How come they’re lettin’ Meskins drive?” Well, it’s because they have to get to their jobs. You see, here in California we’re embracing the modern world — we can’t be worrying about all the nonsense that keeps Fox News viewers up at night when they should be in bed adjusting their sleep apnea mask. Our state motto is, “We’re Too Busy for Your Bullshit.” The bottom line is that we are moving the country’s largest economy into a place where we can all be health-insured, clean air-breathin’, gay-married, immi-
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grant-friendly citizens who don’t get shot all the time. And my message to the rest of America is: do not resist. Kneel before Zod! California has been setting the trends in America for decades, from Silicon Valley to silicone tits, and it’s not going to stop now. We say jump — you say, “Please sell me new exercise clothes for jumping.” We said put cilantro in food, and dammit, you did, you put cilantro
California has been setting the trends in America for decades, from Silicon Valley to silicone tits, and it’s not going to stop now.” in food, even though neither one of us knows what it is. Almond milk? We just had some extra almonds and thought we’d fuck with you. The enormous earlobe hole? You’re welcome. We also invented the genius bar, where the kid with the enormous earlobe hole takes your MacBook in the back and fills it with animal pornography. Bill Maher is the host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
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What You Don’t Write in Postcards
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EEP INSIDE TRAVELERS lies a dark secret that you don’t write about in postcards. ¶ It presents itself innocently enough, just a twinge as you’re walking a foreign street, a slight ache that’s probably just a little fatigue or hunger or maybe sun poisoning? ¶ You check yourself like you’d check a baby: Are you tired? No, you just finished your second café latte (you would have preferred plain coffee with milk, but can’t figure out how to order it). You’re not hungry and you’ve been walking in the shade. Could you be — no, you won’t even let the word slip into your frontal lobe, because once it has, like a couchsurfing friend, there’s no way to know when it will leave. ¶ Too late. You were distracting yourself by snapping photos of funky trees, and tricked your hands but not your gut.
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Voices It is here, deep in your belly, that Loneliness has set up shop, shakes out a blanket on the futon, makes a copy of your key and settles in. Crossing the world seeking adventure comes at the cost of routine comforts and organic friendships. Sports meetups and sponsored bar crawls can buy you some GMO friends, artificially grown over the slightest of familiarities: “You like watching soccer?! I like watching soccer!” and “You arrived through the airport, too?!” These fast connections can be invaluable, uniting strangers of various backgrounds over the common desire to understand different worlds while satiating that companionship craving. For some, these friendships last a lifetime, but others find that while clinging desperately to each other like two freshmen on their first night at college, the relationship is fleeting and at the end of the day, has an expiration date printed on your plane ticket home. You debate whether to synthetically stuff your void with food or souvenirs. You select a restaurant’s sidewalk table so you can vampire bits of life from the cheerful passersby. You hope the waiter will ask how you are, but it turns out that
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here you order at the counter and they’re too busy for void-filling during the lunchtime rush. Gauge still on empty, you meander with leaden legs. You pause at a bakery window, for there sits an elephant ear pastry that reminds you of your childhood. You never particularly liked the treat, but the rest of your family ate so many that the unappetizing sweet squirmed it-
It is here, deep in your belly, that Loneliness has set up shop, shakes out a blanket on the futon, makes a copy of your key and settles in.” self into your glorified memories. You enter the bakery. What was adventurous yesterday — hunting down the ticket machine to wait in line, locating the counter for ordering and then the different counter for payment, translating price numbers in Spanish (back in high school you didn’t see any reason to learn numbers past 100) — today is burdensome. You rabidly unwrap the pastry on the street, but the sweet crunchy texture you craved is abruptly re-
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placed by a strange softness, a bitter sugar, THIS ISN’T THE ELEPHANT EAR I REMEMBER HOW DARE THEY! You want to hurl it to the ground, but you don’t know where to find the energy from your sapped body, so you cram it in and swallow it all, hoping at the very least to ride a sugar high for a few glorious minutes. Instead, you find yourself clomping heavily back down the street, shielding your eyes from the blinding sun and sharp blue sky, furious the weather could be so misaligned from your heart.
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You glare at the happy family laughing over luncvh and catch eyes with the mother. She laughs more and is she — is she taunting you?! You funnel all that loneliness into anger for an empowering 17 seconds, but she turns away because in her fulfilled life, you have too little worth to even be of a bother to her. You estimate the cost of a sameday flight home — it must be a same-day ticket, for by tomorrow you’ll regret the purchase. You slip into flashbacks with family and friends: nothing extravagant, it never is the birthdays or holidays you remember, but rather you glorify the mundane, the irritating: your dogs barking at the door despite
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Voices knowing full well how to use the doggie door; waiting in line at The Bagel Shop (though not the official name, it’s the only bagel shop in your world); complaining before the daily roommate run; falling asleep on the couch to infomercials. You find yourself trailing two girls because you’ve seen people wearing similar jackets back home, they walk like New Yorkers, and maybe, just maybe they actually speak a familiar language that doesn’t require brainpower to translate, and your ears are straining and now it’s been two blocks and it’s bordering on creepy and your pace has quickened and finally within earshot you can hear them speak: “Si! Si es muy divertido!” Your pulse drops and your legs don’t just slow but stop altogether; you stand rigid for fear your knees will just give up right there in the street, and you realize it’s time to go where you swore you never would venture abroad, back in the days (two hours ago) when all you yearned to do was embrace the beauty of local cultures. As your pace quickens to the nearest Starbucks, you find yourself hoping they’re playing Christmas music, because even though it’s September and you’re Jewish,
JOANNA ZELMAN
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wouldn’t that just be lovely? You know that tomorrow is another day. You will see dazzling sights that prove “jaw dropping” is a real physical phenomenon; you’ll relate to strangers who remind you just how small this world is; you’ll sample foods that tingle taste buds you didn’t know existed; you’ll grow wiser from reflecting on the imperfections of the society in which you were raised. But for now
For some, these friendships last a lifetime, but others find that while clinging desperately to each other like two freshmen on their first night at college, the relationship is fleeting and at the end of the day, has an expiration date printed on your plane ticket.” you’ll sip another café latte, jotting your thoughts in the margins of your copy of The Motorcycle Diaries, because scribbling notes about Loneliness on a napkin just seems way too sad. Joanna Zelman is a front page editor at The Huffington Post.
Voices
QUOTED
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“ This is [the] most closed, control-freak administration I’ve ever covered.”
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: MIKE MARSLAND/WIREIMAGE/GETTY IMAGES; WILLIAM PLOWMAN/NBC NEWSWIRE/GETTY IMAGES; GREGORY OLSEN/GETTY IMAGES; AP PHOTO/REBECCA BLACKWELL
“ If anybody even tries to whisper the word ‘diet,’ I’m like, ‘You can go f*ck yourself.’”
— New York Times writer David Sanger
said in a report by the Committee to Protect Journalists on the effect of the Obama administration’s war on leaks on investigative journalists
— Jennifer Lawrence
on her intolerance of the pressure to lose weight in Hollywood, in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK
“ The biggest threat to human existence? Ignorance. Nothing else even comes close.” — HuffPost commenter MarsAmbassador
on “Yahya Jammeh, Gambia President, At The UN: Homosexuality One Of ‘Biggest Threats To Human Existence’”
“ Note to Men who would take advantage of an intoxicated woman: You’re no man.”
— HuffPost commenter Ivan_Kutchiakokov on “Boston College Confessions Post About Sexual Assaults Grabs Police Attention”
Voices
QUOTED
It’s very hard to negotiate with the Republicans when they can’t negotiate with themselves. — Nancy Pelosi
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“ I’ve never walked the carpet with anyone, so they wonder: What does she do with her vagina?”
— Michelle Rodriguez in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, on ongoing gay rumors
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ALEX WONG/GETTY IMAGES; FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/CULTURA RF; WEBPHOTOGRAPHEER/ GETTY IMAGES
on why no progress has been made toward ending the government shutdown
“ People complain when women wear make up. People call women ugly when they’re not wearing makeup. We’ll never win.”
— HuffPost commenter h3ll0meganx
on “Before’ And ‘After’ Makeup Photos Spark Debate On Reddit”
“ It is just far too easy for people to cheat than to work on their current relationship.”
— HuffPost commenter dapperdeveloper on “Cheating Survey Finds That People Cheat With People Less Attractive Than Their Spouses”
NY DAILY NEWS VIA GETTY IMAGES
10.13.13 #70 FEATURES
DREAM SERVICE WITH LIBERTY AND LEISURE FOR ALL
“So long as there is one who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of labor are too long.” — Samuel Gompers (pictured), leader of the American Federation of Labor until his death in 1924
DREAM SERVICE How Hotels Are Engineering a Better Night’s Sleep
BY GREGORY BEYER AND ELEAZAR MELÉNDEZ
When guests come into the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort And Spa after a day of skiing the western Colorado slopes,
MARTIN GEE
the number one priority for staff is to make sure everyone gets a restful night’s sleep. ¶ “We’re in the business of sleep,” Robert Purdy, the hotel’s general manager, told The Huffington Post, explaining how that mantra permeates nearly every aspect of his operation. ¶ The hotel restaurant’s menu, for example, features an after-dinner “sleep elixir” with chamomile and apple cider, advertised as helping promote relaxation and sleep health. A dessert of banana oatmeal cookies, containing ingredients that aid guests’ transition into sleep, is a house specialty.
@ 2013 ALLEE PHOTOGRAPHY (2)
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Back in their rooms, VIP guests are provided “slumber kits” — also available for purchase in the hotel spa — that include an eye mask, ear plugs, and a CD of ambient music. On TV, guests can flip to channel 46, the “Sound Sleep Channel,” and set a sleep timer that plays music composed by Dr. Jeffrey Thompson, an expert in the field of neuroacoustics. In the hallways, quiet time rules are reinforced by mounted signs declaring “family quiet time” between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. And employees are ready to offer additional help for guests with insomnia, such as special glasses that block out blue light, which can disrupt natural sleep cycles. Not every hotel goes to such lengths to ensure that its guests sleep soundly. But as sleep quality has grown in the public consciousness as a key measure of health, creativity and productivity, the hotel industry has taken note. To the trained eyes of hotel managers, designers and the growing ranks of for-hire sleep consultants, a hotel room contains countless potential distractions that can inhibit sleep and taint a guest’s experience — a lumpy mattress, the bright light of a bed-
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side clock, a wall-mounted flat screen TV that the inconsiderate guest in the adjacent room left on all night. There’s also, of course, a considerable financial incentive for tending to guests’ unmet sleep-related needs. And so, in ways big and small, implicit and explicit, hotels are striving to create the conditions that allow for that elusive experience: the perfect night’s sleep. If there is a starting point to the modern era of the hotel industry’s focus on sleep, it would probably be 1999, when Westin Hotels & Resorts introduced its line of
Above: “Slumber Kits,” available for purchase in the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek Resort spa, include an eye mask, earplugs and a CD of ambient music. Below: A special “sleep elixir” tea is available to ensure restful sleep.
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Heavenly beds. In the years that followed, competitors and imitators rolled out made-to-order mattresses covered in layer upon layer of overstuffed comforters, igniting what hotel insiders refer to as the “battle of the beds.” “The Heavenly bed changed the way that other hotels looked at innovation,” said Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer specializing in hotel development and design at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. “What Westin did that was so smart, they recognized very early that they needed something that would set them apart and give them a marketing edge. They also recognized that the bed was something that was really being ignored across the industry.” Steve Tipton, vice president of hotel mattress company Simmons Hospitality, said many hoteliers turned “back to the basics” of providing restful sleep in early 2009, when the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression forced many to move away from marketing strategies that exalted opulence. Those strategic shifts are only materializing now, Tipton said, noting that “when you change a mattress for a whole ho-
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tel chain, it’s a five-year project.” In an age where customer reviews on sites like TripAdvisor and Yelp are real forces in the hospitality industry, hotels can’t afford to overlook even the smallest detail. Some top tier luxury hotels are even eliminating services that might be seen as anti-sleep. Turn-
Competitors and imitators rolled out made-to-order mattresses covered in layer upon layer of overstuffed comforters and pillows, igniting what hotel insiders refer to as the “battle of the beds.” down service at the Four Seasons, for example, may include a room attendant dimming the lights, adjusting the temperature, turning on soothing music and drawing the curtains. But — even at rates that can exceed $1,000 a night — it does not include a chocolate on the pillow. That’s because Isadore Sharp, the hotel company’s founder, believes that eating sugar before bed could get in the way of a good night’s sleep. Which is to say, when it comes to a hotel’s ability to woo new guests and wow them to the point that they simply must return (and tell their friends), the quality of
@ CHERYL ZIBISKY
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the bed is only the beginning. “People carry their sleep issues to the hotels they stay in,” said Nancy Rothstein, a sleep consultant who has worked for Hyatt, Procter and Gamble, Sleepy’s and other corporate clients. “You can get the best bed in the world, but if you don’t provide people with additional resources, they’re not necessarily going to get good sleep.” Robson, from Cornell, adds that hotels are gradually catching up to changes in technology, especially the widespread use of smartphones as clocks and alarms. Many in the industry, she says, are currently weighing whether it
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At The Benjamin, rooms feature only analog clocks. Guests can peruse a pillow menu that includes pillows filled with buckwheat or satin. makes sense to continue to place an alarm clock on every bedside table. By eliminating clocks, hotels would be able to cut an expense and relieve employees of setting and resetting them. And Robson, whose work requires her to pay attention to hotel guests’ most common complaints, sees an additional benefit. “A lot of people find it hard to use the darn thing anyway because there’s no consistency with the controls,” she said. “And sometimes people find the light from
COURTESY OF BROCK CLINE
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it really disconcerting. I’ve been known to turn it to face the wall.” Rebecca Robbins envisions a time, not far from now, when every guest who steps up to the front desk of The Benjamin hotel in New York City will be greeted with the words, “Welcome to The Benjamin. Here we make your sleep a priority.” Robbins, the coauthor of Sleep for Success! and a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell, began working as a sleep consultant for The Benjamin this summer. She has led sleep sessions for the hotel’s employees to help them make sleep a priority, with the hope that their sleep practices will trickle down to the hotel’s guests. In developing a sleep program, Robbins took her inspiration from a very specific demographic: children. “Kids have a bedtime,” she said. “They get ready for bed.” Adults, she said, should mimic their bedtime rituals — a consistent bedtime, a bath or a shower, some light reading — to ease the body and the mind into sleep. “In our society, more than ever, we have a very on and off culture,” she said. “But all of the evidence says that you need to create a sanctuary for sleep.” Some hotels are going to great lengths to create those sanctuar-
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ies. At The Benjamin, rooms feature only analog clocks. Guests can peruse a pillow menu that includes pillows filled with buckwheat or satin, with names like “Swedish memory” and “Lullaby.” Children arriving at the hotel are given a stuffed owl named Winks, complete with a printed backstory about what happened when he did not get a good night’s sleep. And guests can arrange for a “workdown call,” in which the concierge rings them up an hour before bedtime reminding them to stop working and put away their electronic devices. The Four Seasons, for its part, keeps a record of its guests’ pillow preferences. Last December, Brock Cline
After staying at uncomfortable budget hotels on their crosscountry road trip, Brock Cline and Bre Garvin longed for a better way to sleep away from home.
DREAM SERVICE
and his wife, Bre Garvin, set out from their home in Atlanta on a cross-country road trip. Along the way, the couple stayed in various hotels, mostly seeking budget accommodations at familiar chains. At every stop, after 10-to-12 hour days on the road, they encountered obstacles to a good night’s sleep — uncomfortable mattresses, flimsy pillows, window shades that let in too much light. “It made the trip worse than it had to be,” Cline said. As they drove, they talked about how badly they’d slept, vowing not to stay in the same hotels on their return trip. Cline, who works as a manager of a Dick’s Sporting Goods store in Atlanta, said that customer service is a big part of his job, and he found himself wondering why none of the hotels he and his wife visited went further to meet their sleep needs. At each hotel, he looked for comment cards with which he might suggest sleep-related improvements, but found none. When he got home, he considered engaging with the hotels’ social media accounts, browbeating them for their shortcomings, but decided against it. “Since I handle customer service in my job,” he said, “it irks me a little bit.”
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The experience of Cline and Garvin, and countless other travelers, illustrates the extent of the opportunity available to hotels wishing to cater to a more sleepsavvy populace. Last month, in a TripAdvisor survey asking if visitors take sleep quality into consideration when choosing a hotel, 55
“ People carry their sleep issues to the hotels they stay in. You can get the best bed in the world, but if you don’t provide people with additional resources, they’re not necessarily going to get good sleep.” percent of respondents said they look for online hotel reviews that address sleep quality, compared with 27 percent who don’t, a company spokeswoman said. Eighteen percent said they look for hotels that offer special sleep amenities. As Robbins, the sleep consultant, puts it, “This is a win-win. It’s good for the guests and it’s going to drive the bottom line. I’m not asking people to spend another hour on the treadmill, or eat only tofu, or drink only green juice. I’m just asking them to get one more hour of sleep.” Gregory Beyer is the deputy features editor at The Huffington Post.
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WITH LIBERTY AND LEISURE FOR ALL A BRIEF HISTORY OF AMERICA’S SHORT WORKWEEK MOVEMENT BY ARTHUR DELANEY
FOR NEARLY TWO YEARS, TOM ALLEN CLOCKED INTO HIS JOB AT A DEFENSE HARDWARE PLANT IN LANSING, MICH., in the afternoon to start a 12-hour shift, usually operating a metal lathe machine. The hours were long, but the overtime pay was welcome. Still, at the end of the week, Allen said, he’d get home Saturday morning at 5:30 a.m. so tired he’d sleep until dinnertime. “By Sunday night you felt pretty good,” Allen, 63, said in an interview. “Then it started all over again.” But when the company, Demmer Corporation, told him he had to work on Saturdays and Sundays as well, Allen refused. “I literally told them, ‘I’m not going to have a heart attack and die in the traces just so you guys can make a little extra money.’”
COURTESY OF TOM ALLEN
Defense hardware plant worker Tom Allen.
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Demmer fired him in December 2010 and has appealed his unemployment claim, saying he had no proof he’d been promised only 60 hours and he had no right to skip shifts. In August, a Michigan court sided with Demmer. Eighty-four hours per week — that’s the kind of schedule Americans worked more than 200 years ago, back when there was no cure for “consumption” and happiness was a revolutionary pursuit. Americans fought and fought to get those hours down. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, workers went on strike thousands of times and bled to death in the streets in the struggle against long hours, which they argued were dangerous and inhumane. They demanded “time to eat, time to live, time to be happy, time to be a person,” as one union worker put it in 1919, using terms that ring no less true today. Back then, labor advocates linked the problems of the overand under-employed, arguing shorter hours would reduce joblessness by spreading work around. The argument applied whether it justified reducing the workweek from 72 to 60 hours or 40 to 30. Samuel Gompers, leader of the
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American Federation of Labor until his death in 1924, put it this way: “So long as there is one who seeks employment and cannot find it, the hours of labor are too long.” For more than a hundred years, workers successfully pushed for shorter and shorter hours as productivity kept increasing. In the early 1900s, progress appeared unstoppable. Soon, it seemed, people would hardly have to work at all. “By 1933, observers were predicting that the 30-hour week was
“I LITERALLY TOLD THEM, ‘I’M NOT GOING TO HAVE A HEART ATTACK AND DIE IN THE TRACES JUST SO YOU GUYS CAN MAKE A LITTLE EXTRA MONEY.’” within a month of becoming federal law,” labor historian Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt has written, “and that the ‘progressive shortening of the hours of labor’ was an inescapable economic fact of life and the dominant political trend.” Yet the movement for shorter hours has fizzled. Since the passage of the landmark Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, which established the minimum wage and the 40-hour workweek, the idea that shorter hours could reduce
TOPICAL PRESS AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES
unemployment and lessen misery has been largely forgotten. Today, two-thirds of American workers are on the job at least 40 hours per week, with 25 percent working longer and nearly 7 percent putting in more than 60 hours, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The entrepreneurial spirit is our holiest ghost, and slacking is downright unAmerican. And whereas technology was supposed to make work easier and give everyone more free time, for some people, bedside smartphones have made work relentless. Studies have shown that overwork leads to excessive stress and devastating health problems.
Meanwhile, the benefits of shorter hours to workers and society have never really been discredited. The concept is so powerful that it inspired both Karl Marx and, even though its members don’t realize it, today’s Republican Party. If more time off could benefit both individual human beings and the broader economy, why don’t we have more long weekends? Why isn’t every Monday a Labor Day? The basic logic of shorter hours has always been simple. As technological advances keep making workers more productive, fewer people are needed to get the same amount of work done. If overemployed people worked less, underemployed people could pick up the slack. “If you think of the economic problem we’re facing now, it’s kind
Samuel Gompers, labor advocate and president of the American Federation of Labor.
AP PHOTO/ EVAN VUCCI
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of absurd. We’re basically able to make too much stuff,” Dean Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, said in an interview. “Why don’t we all just work a little less and let the people who aren’t working pick up part of that time?” There’s no question that some Americans would like to work less. According to the government’s Current Population Survey in 2001, 7 percent of Americans said they would be willing to work fewer hours, even if it meant earning less money. The government hasn’t asked the question since. Private surveys yield a wide range of estimates, and results depend on the way the question is asked. Fifty-two percent of respondents to a Center for the New American Dream survey in 2003, for instance, said they would be willing to trade one day off a week for an equivalent pay reduction. A 2002 survey by the Work In America Institute found 27 percent of non-union workers would take 10 percent less pay for 10 percent less work. A 2006 survey of working moms by CareerBuilder.com found 52 percent would take a pay cut to spend more time with their children. And in July, 18 percent of
respondents to a Huffington Post/ YouGov poll said that they would take the opportunity to work one less day each week and receive 20 percent less pay. If 18 percent of the working population wants 20 percent less pay for another day off, that’s 26 million people who favor a permanent three-day weekend. Of course, there are a lot of reasons we don’t all just work less. One major obstacle is our healthcare system. Though the percentage of employers offering health insurance has been declining for years, most workers still get their health care coverage that way. Working part-time could mean sacrificing the insurance. And from the employer’s perspective, continuing to offer the same health insurance at a fixed cost while getting fewer hours of work in return
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (RVA) believes the greatest threat to the 40-hour work week is Obamacare, which has seen employers cut workers’ hours to avoid having to provide mandatory benefits.
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is not a good bargain. We cling to the 40-hour workweek for cultural reasons as well. We valorize hard work and hate loafers. A shorter workweek? They surrendered to that idea in France. (Or at least they tried to — the French workweek still pretty much looks like ours.) In a 2007 paper, economists Lonnie Golden and Morris Altman summarized the myriad reasons research has shown workers don’t seek fewer hours: Employers use longer workdays to screen out less productive workers, while employees put in more hours to build up savings in case they’re fired. They also out-work their colleagues to try to win promotions or so they look good in the event of downsizing. And while some workers might be okay with less pay for more time off, others want to keep their income as high as possible in order to maintain their spending habits — and to keep up with the neighbors. High levels of unemployment can also make workers even more committed to long hours, as there are so many others eager for your job. Tom Allen said he witnessed a pattern of burnout at his company. “They would hang in there
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as long as they possibly could,” he said of his colleagues. “They would gradually not be able to hang on and end up getting fired.” Then they’d be replaced. In an interview, Golden, a professor at Penn State Abington, lamented that the U.S. government so closely tracks underemployment but ignores overemployment. “National policy ought to make it safe for people to use a wide range of reduced-time options,” Golden said, acknowledging that
“SO LONG AS THERE IS ONE WHO SEEKS EMPLOYMENT AND CANNOT FIND IT, THE HOURS OF LABOR ARE TOO LONG.” pushing such a policy would be pretty difficult. “It’s a different cultural standard. There must be something about Americans who think it’s not feasible.” And yet the idea of shorter hours is uniquely American. Most people in the colonies in the early 1700s had Sundays off but still worked from sunup to sundown the other six days of the week, according to Our Own Time, a 1989 history of the American working day by David R. Roediger and Philip S. Foner.
AP PHOTO
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The first strike for 10-hour days occurred in 1791, and it wasn’t long before workers connected long hours with seasonal unemployment. In 1827, striking carpenters in Philadelphia argued that 10-hour days would spread their work out evenly throughout the year, and “make a journeyman of nearly as much value in the winter as in the summer.” Employers did not appreciate all the strikes for more time off. “Before I will employ a 10-hour man
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my ships shall rot at the wharves — my half-finished buildings shall totally decay,” a New Bedford shipbuilder vowed in 1832, anticipating Ayn Rand’s fictional shrugging capitalists by more than a century. Still, laborers enjoyed scattered success prying shorter hours directly from businesses and favorable policies from the government. Hours declined steadily. After the Civil War, workers started demanding even shorter eight-hour days, sparking a national movement. “Out of the death of slavery a new life at once arose,” Marx wrote
Rep John Conyers (D-Mich.) pushed for a 35-hour week in 1979 that was backed by the AFL-CIO to deal with the economic downturn at the time.
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in 1867. “The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours’ agitation, that ran with the seven-leagued boots of the locomotive from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California.” By 1868, eight states had passed eight-hour laws, and Congress gave eight-hour days to federal workers — though Roediger and Foner write that these measures were largely ineffective. Most people still worked longer than 10 hours a day, and on Saturdays, too. Labor leaders called for a general strike on May 1, 1886, in support of the eight-hour workday, and local unions across the country pushed for the new limit. A Wisconsin official later wrote that eight hours “was the topic of conversation in the shop, on the street, at the family table, at the bar, in the counting room, and the subject of numerous able sermons from the pulpit.” Hundreds of thousands of workers joined days of strikes across the country. In Chicago’s Haymarket Square, however, things got ugly. On May 4, somebody — the person’s identity remains unknown — threw a bomb at police trying to disperse a crowd of peaceful protesters. Seven officers and at least four civilians died from the explo-
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sion and the ensuing gunfire. In the days that followed, police arrested hundreds of people, and eight were prosecuted for conspiracy and sentenced to death. The government
THE ENTREPRENEURIAL SPIRIT IS OUR HOLIEST GHOST, AND SLACKING IS DOWNRIGHT UN-AMERICAN. eventually hanged four of them. Today, international May Day celebrations mark the anniversary of the strike. But at the time, public opinion in the U.S. sided with the police. Labor activists considered the event a huge setback for the eight-hour movement, and largely moved away from mass strikes as a tactic for winning shorter workdays. Congress declared Labor Day a national holiday shortly after a similarly tragic crackdown on rail workers in 1894. NOT ALL ECONOMISTS and historians link the shortening of hours to labor agitation. In a 1995 survey of 178 members of the Economic History Association, a majority agreed that the shortening of hours was a result of economic growth. Some industrialists considered it good for business. Henry Ford,
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no friend to unions, adopted the eight-hour day in 1914 “because it so happens that this is the length of time which we find gives the best service from men, day in and day out.” In 1926, Ford also gave his workers two days off instead of one, something labor leaders had begun to demand. The five-day week didn’t catch on with most other business moguls, though, as Hunnicutt, Roediger and Foner have documented. John Edgerton, head of the National Association of Manufacturers, said in 1926 that it was “time for America to awake from its dream of an eternal holiday.” George L. Markland, chairman of the board of Philadelphia Gear Works, said that year that “any man demanding the 40-hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country,” adding that “the men of our country are becoming a race of softies and mollycoddles.” Elbert Gray of U.S. Steel cited the Bible: “Six days shalt thou labor and do all thy work.” But labor had God on its side as well. Jewish leaders pointed out that Saturday work violated the Jewish Sabbath. “I can see but one way to save the Sabbath for the Jew, and that is through
the establishment of the fiveday week,” Rabbi Israel Herbert Levinthal said in 1925. The early 20th century also witnessed new attitudes toward leisure, and workers couched their demands not only in practical terms but also in humanitarian ones. In 1919 for instance, Juliet Stuart Poyntz of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers union argued that workers wanted “time for rest, time to play, time to be human.” “[The worker] is not the slave of 50 years ago. He has something to live for. He is not a machine. He is a person,” Poyntz wrote. As
Auto manufacturer Henry Ford adopted the eight-hour day because he considered it good for business.
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such, what he wants most is time — “time to eat, time to live, time to be happy, time to be a person. … More education, more recreation, more pleasure, more rest, more time for himself.” An Italian immigrant steelworker fresh off a 24-hour shift, responding to the claim that people in his profession received good pay, put it this way that same year: “To hell with money! No can live!” Monsignor John Ryan, an economist and Catholic priest, argued in 1931 for shorter hours and against what he called a “new gospel of consumption” designed to justify income inequality and human suffering. “Just why a people should spend its time in turning out and consuming a hundred kinds of luxuries which minister only to material wants, instead of obtaining leisure for the enjoyment of higher goods of life is not easily perceptible,” Ryan wrote. “After all, neither production nor consumption is an end in itself.” As the Great Depression threw the economy into disarray, labor advocates set their sights on the 30-hour week — six hours of work per day, five days per week. In the early 1930s, Sen. Hugo Black (D-
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Ala.) introduced legislation calling for a 30-hour week as the “only practical and possible method of dealing with unemployment.” The Senate passed the bill, but it died in the House, as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration sig-
THE BASIC LOGIC OF SHORTER HOURS HAS ALWAYS BEEN SIMPLE. AS TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES KEEP MAKING WORKERS MORE PRODUCTIVE, FEWER PEOPLE ARE NEEDED TO GET THE SAME AMOUNT OF WORK DONE.
naled its opposition, partly out of sympathy to business. Instead, Congress passed the Social Security Act in 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. The former offered unemployment insurance and retirement benefits, which effectively shortened work over a lifetime, if not in an individual week. The latter established a minimum wage and the 40-hour week, with timeand-a-half pay for overtime. The arrival of World War II prompted some backlash against shorter workdays, and manufacturing hours rose to support
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the war effort. As the war’s end drew near, unions argued for the six-hour day as a way to reduce the inevitable unemployment of returning troops, but when the unemployment didn’t happen, the shorter-hours movement lost steam. Anti-Communist sentiment during the Cold War didn’t help. Calls for shorter hours have remained scarce in recent decades. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) pushed for a 35-hour week in 1979. “One of the chief methods of keeping unemployment in check during the Depression was the adoption of the 40-hour workweek,” Conyers said at the time. “During the past 30 years, however, the workweek has remained substantially unchanged, despite the frequency of massive unemployment, large-scale technological displacement of human labor, and considerable gains in productivity. We ought to look at reducing the working week and spreading employment among a greater number of workers, once again, as a means to reducing joblessness without sacrificing productivity.” The AFL-CIO backed the legislation, but Republicans said it would cause inflation, and it didn’t get much attention. As
Roediger and Foner have pointed out, dips in the number of working hours are now largely seen “not as labor victories but as omens of a deteriorating economy.” Conyers hasn’t revisited his proposal for shorter hours as a response to the current economic crisis. Instead, he recently supported taxing banks and using the money to pay for public jobs, a proposal partly modeled after the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration. “Since the depression, public policy has been designed to maintain ‘adequate demand’ and ‘full employment,’” Hunnicutt writes. “Government deficit spending, liberal Treasury policies, increased
Sen. Hugo Black called a 30-hour work week the “only practical and possible method of dealing with unemployment” during the Great Depression.
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government payrolls, expanded public works projects, and increased military spending have usually been employed when the economy has become ‘sluggish.’” Shorter hours have simply not been part of the equation. BUT DON’T COUNT shorter workdays out. Some companies voluntarily shortened their workweeks in response to the Great Recession. A 2009 survey of 245 large U.S. companies found that 13 percent had decreased hours to prevent layoffs. Casino mogul Steve Wynn and steelmaker Nucor Corp., for example, cut hours and pay that year instead of firing people. A Nucor production manager told the Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel in 2010 that the shorter hours weren’t easy for everyone. “People were severely impacted from a pay standpoint, in terms of hours being cut and our unique bonus structure,” he said. “But everyone also understood that they kept their jobs and their benefits.” The recession has also triggered a slew of proposals for governmentsanctioned work-sharing, also known as short-time compensation. Under such a program, firms
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can reduce workers’ hours instead of laying them off, and workers can keep their jobs while collecting unemployment checks proportionate to the hours they’ve lost. Since the policy doesn’t cost much money, it’s appealing to Republicans wary of anything that might increase the federal budget deficit. This year, Republicans in the House of Representatives also
HIGH LEVELS OF UNEMPLOYMENT CAN ALSO MAKE WORKERS EVEN MORE COMMITTED TO LONG HOURS, AS THERE ARE SO MANY OTHERS EAGER FOR YOUR JOB. proposed changing the Fair Labor Standards Act so that instead of paying wage-earners time-and-ahalf for overtime, businesses could offer future comp time instead. Democrats countered that the bill, known as the Working Families Flexibility Act, would effectively let employers stop paying overtime. The family flexibility bill passed the Republican-controlled House but got no love from the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats. Hunnicutt, who has written several books on shorter hours, including one this year titled Free
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WITH LIBERTY AND LEISURE FOR ALL
Time: The Forgotten American Dream, said he’s not a Republican but he liked the proposal a lot. “The argument for it is this would be a way to reward people with time rather than money,” Hunnicutt said. “There is this pent-up consumer demand for leisure that’s out there. I was for it. I thought it was a great bill.” Of course, Republicans are not interested in deliberately shortening the workweek. The Affordable Care Act, they say, is forcing some employers to cut hours in order to escape the law’s insurance mandate for full-time employees. “The Working Families Flexibil-
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ity Act was designed to give moms and dads more choices as to how they balance their jobs and family time, and make it possible to better schedule doctor’s appointments and school events,” said Rory Cooper, a spokesman for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.). “The biggest threat to the 40-hour workweek in America today is Obamacare, which is quickly transforming our full-time workforce into a part-time workforce given the extra costs now associated with giving hardworking employees more hours, and that is shameful.” But Obamacare may also give some new freedom to the overemployed. The Congressional Budget Office reported in 2011 that the Affordable Care Act would reduce
In 2009, casino mogul Steve Wynn cut workers’ hours and pay rather than fire people.
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employment by the equivalent of 800,000 jobs in 2021 because new subsidies will make it easier for people to buy their own insurance, “which will encourage some people to work fewer hours or to withdraw from the labor market.” Unlike most other developed countries, including Canada, Germany and Italy, the U.S. does not have a national work-sharing program. But an increasing number of states have begun trying it out. In 2012, a bipartisan agreement led Congress to give states extra cash to promote and operate short-time compensation programs. Last year the U.S. government estimated the program saved some 60,000 jobs. In 2009 it saved 165,000. Economist Dean Baker, one of the foremost proponents of worksharing, is baffled by how little attention the concept has received, given its bipartisan backing. “It’s almost incredible, the lack of publicity,” he said. “We’ve been able to get almost nothing from the White House in terms of promoting it.” Germany’s short-time compensation program increased employment there by 250,000 to 400,000 jobs in 2009, according to the Urban Institute.
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Here, the scheme is available in only 26 states, with Ohio having signed up this year. “The appeal is that employees don’t have to have the conversation with their families that [they
ACCORDING TO THE GOVERNMENT’S CURRENT POPULATION SURVEY IN 2001, 7 PERCENT OF AMERICANS SAID THEY WOULD BE WILLING TO WORK FEWER HOURS, EVEN IF IT MEANT EARNING LESS MONEY. THE GOVERNMENT HASN’T ASKED THE QUESTION SINCE. are] laid off,” Bob Peterson, a Republican member of the Ohio House of Representatives, said in an interview in March. The Ohio General Assembly approved the work-sharing plan in July. Still, even as he sponsored the work-sharing plan, Peterson scoffed at the notion of a shorter workweek. “My background is I’m a farmer,” Peterson said. “I’m used to a 60-hour workweek. A 40-hour week sounds like a vacation to me.” Arthur Delaney is a staff reporter at The Huffington Post.
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23 Things Every Woman Should Stop Doing BY EMMA GRAY
T IS CONVENTIONAL wisdom that we’re our own worst enemies and despite the cliche, the idea rings true. We often drive ourselves insane striving for perfection in our experiences, relationships and selves, and honestly it just becomes exhausting. So we’re issuing a challenge to ourselves — and other women — to stop doing these 23 things. (Of course it’s all easier said than done, but to employ another cliche, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.)
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Apologizing all the time. Research has shown that women actually do say “sorry” more often than men. We’re all for taking responsibility when you make a mistake — but constantly apologizing for having your waiter split the check or asking a date to hang out on a different night or telling a friend about your problems, does more harm than good. There’s no need to qualify everything you do. Own your preferences and decisions.
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Saying “yes” to everyone else. Yes, I will meet you for coffee even though I’m exhausted and just want to go home and crawl into bed. Yes, I will edit your resume even though I’m swamped with my own work. Yes, I will go on a double date with you, your almost-boyfriend and his awful friend who’s in town. Stop saying “yes” when you don’t truly mean it. People actually respect you more when you set boundaries.
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Saying “no” to yourself. A lot of women spend a whole lot of time deciding what we can’t do or shouldn’t do or aren’t good enough to do. Don’t allow your insecurities and anxieties to make your decisions for you — you’ll only end up missing out on worthwhile experi-
ences. So go talk to that group of people you think you won’t fit in with, stay out late against your better judgment every once in awhile and treat yourself to that blowout even if you don’t really need it. Viewing food as the enemy. Women often receive the message that our ultimate worth lies in our looks. Our hair should be smoothed or perfectly curled, our makeup on at all times — but natural-looking — and our bodies bangin’ (read: thin). In the quest to achieve these impossible standards, it’s easy to see food as something to contend with rather than to enjoy. Be cognizant of what you put in your body — after
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all, it’s the only one you have — but try to do away with the guilt. Savor every bite of that gnocchi with gorgonzola or that Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream or those fresh cherry tomatoes. Food should not come with regrets. As Nora Ephron wrote, “I have made a lot of mistakes falling in love, and regretted most of them, but never the potatoes that went with them.”
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Body-snarking — out loud or in your own head. Stop putting your looks down, period. Nothing good will ever come of it, unless you’re working through body issues with your therapist. Feeling like an impostor when you accomplish something professionally. Women are more likely than men to feel like “impostors” at work, often doubting whether we deserve the successes we achieve. Start taking your accomplishments at face value. You got that new job or promotion or grade or public recognition because you were worthy of it.
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Obsessively untagging every “unflattering” photo of you that ever existed online. While it makes sense that you don’t want that photo of you blinking showing up all over your
Facebook profile, we probably cause ourselves more anxiety than necessary making sure every image that doesn’t show us in perfect lighting doing something totally amazing goes away. It’s not only just one more way for us to obsess about our looks — after all, people will post what they’ll post and we have little control — but online photo albums have largely replaced physical ones. You may not want to remember the unflattering face you made at your brother’s graduation party now, but down the line you might want to conjure the moment.
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Comparing your real life to someone else’s virtual one. Spending a ton of time obsessing over your own online life can be anxiety-provoking — but so can obsessing over
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Exit other peoples’ virtual personas. Research has shown that Facebook addiction is correlated with lower self-esteem. And who wouldn’t feel bad sitting in bed on a Monday night scrolling through your ex’s vacation photo album or the enthusiastic statuses your friend in the fashion industry posted during a celeb-filled party? Instead of playing a constant game of comparison, which studies have shown can actually magnify feelings of depression, just close your laptop and enjoy the present. At least it’s real.
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Holding on to regrets and guilt. “I’m pretty anti-regret,” Lena Dunham said at the 2012 New Yorker Festival. Guilt and regret are two emotions that usually serve to torture the person feeling them. Acknowledge your regrets and guilts, and then move on to the best of your ability.
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Judging other women’s sex lives. No woman deserves to be put down for who she sleeps with, how many people she sleeps with or how she chooses to express her sexuality. Next time you’re about to call another woman a “prude” or a “slut” just zip your lips. Even Miley
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No one needs to know your ‘number.’ And honestly, you probably care a whole lot more about what the sex you’re having (or not having) supposedly says about you than anyone else does.” Cyrus and her twerking shouldn’t be slut-shamed.
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Judging your own sex life. No one needs to know your “number.” And honestly, you probably care a whole lot more about what the sex you’re having (or not having) supposedly says about you than anyone else does. Trying to be “chill.” Maybe you truly are the “cool girl” who loves nothing more than kicking back with a six-pack and a movie. But for those of us who don’t possess the “chill” gene, let’s stop trying. Striving to be the mellow girl at all times keeps us from expressing our needs, desires and opinions.
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Fearing the label “crazy.” There is no easier way to discredit a woman’s opinion or feelings than to accuse her of being overly emotional. “I don’t think this idea that women are ‘crazy,’ is based in some sort of massive conspiracy,” wrote author Yashar Ali in a blog for The
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Huffington Post in 2011. “Rather, I believe it’s connected to the slow and steady drumbeat of women being undermined and dismissed, on a daily basis.” Being scared of the label only encourages women to silence themselves. Plus, everyone has a little bit of crazy inside of them — regardless of gender. Wearing heels every day. Look at this terrifying infographic — and then tell me why it’s a good idea to force your poor feet into stilettos on a daily basis. We love a gorgeous pair of pumps, but embracing comfort (most of the time) will not only make your commute a whole lot more pleasant, but your feet a whole lot happier for years to come. Plus, flat shoes can be super stylish.
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WebMD-ing everything.Your glands may have been swollen for a week but it does not automatically mean that you have a massive tumor in your neck. Step away from the Internet doctor and go see a real one if you’re truly worried.
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Worrying that your life doesn’t look like Pinterest. You are not Martha Stewart. You will probably never make that DIY floating bookshelf. And your Eggocado
will never look as delicious as this one does.
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Fearing being alone. There are certain things you have control over — like trying to go on dates, and actively meeting new people — and others which you simply don’t. Finding a life partner (or even a temporary one) is one of those things. You can’t pinpoint when or where or how you’ll meet someone to spend your life with, so stop freaking yourself out over the idea that you never will. And there are far worse things than being alone. “The most profound relationship we’ll ever have is the one with ourselves,” Shirley MacLaine once said. Preach.
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Being in relationships for the sake of having a relationship. If you’re terrified of being alone, the worst thing you can do is
Exit jump into a relationship you don’t really want. Nothing good comes from tying yourself to a person who isn’t right for you simply because you feel the need to couple up. As Nora Ephron wrote when she launched HuffPost Divorce: “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.”
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Not taking advantage of your vacation days. More Americans than ever are forgoing their (already meager) paid vacation days — despite the fact that we know that people who take time off are more likely to be healthy, happy and productive workers. We swear, no one will die if you turn off your cell phone and head to the mountains for a long weekend.
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Holding on to toxic friendships. Banish any Regina George-like frenemies from your life ASAP. Life is too short to waste time with people who make you feel like crap.
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Spending time with people out of obligation. Just because you spent every waking moment of your elementary school days with someone doesn’t mean you have anything in common with her now. There’s no need to see every old
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friend and third cousin who passes through your city. Be intentional about who you spend your time with and allow yourself to let some relationships fade away naturally.
Being embarrassed about your interests. “I want to be a f**king feminist and wear a f**king Peter Pan collar. So f**king what?,” said Zooey Deschanel in Glamour magazine’s February 2013 issue. Take a cue from the actress and stop caring what you “should” look like/ care about/talk about. If you love girly things, love girly things. If you don’t, don’t. Embrace your lack of knowledge about music, your hockey obsession and your weakness for both Breaking Bad and The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. And if there’s a particular subject area you don’t know about but you encounter someone who does? Take the opportunity to ask questions.
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Setting deadlines for major life events. Don’t try to meticulously plan out when you should find love or have babies or get that dream job or buy that amazing brownstone. Enjoy the uncertainty of life and allow yourself to be overjoyed when you hit those milestones or pleasantly surprised when you realize you want to skip out on some of them altogether.
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Welcome to Internet Rehab BY CAROLYN GREGOIRE
HEY’VE COME from all over the country to be cured of one of society’s newest, and potentially most debilitating, ailments. After trying and failing to control their behavior, they’ve checked themselves into a cluster of gray-andwhite buildings located off of an interstate parkway in rural Pennsylvania, 80 miles south of Buffalo, NY, in order to reclaim their lives.
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Welcome to Internet rehab. It’s the first inpatient Internet addiction treatment center in the country, located in the Behavioral Health Services unit at Bradford Regional Medical Center in Pennsylvania. Many of us have joked at one time or another about being addicted to our email, iPhone or Twitter account, but as technology has penetrated nearly every domain of our daily lives, these addictions are becoming more real — and they’re being recognized by
Exit mental health professionals. Psychologist Dr. Kimberly Young has spent the past 18 years treating thousands of Americans who suffer from the very real, and increasingly common, affliction of being addicted to their digital devices. Young — who founded the Center for Internet Addiction in 1995 and has written five books on the topic since then — says she’s seen the problem increasing significantly in recent years, with more and more people asking about treatment options. In response to the overwhelming demand for Internet addiction treatment, Young created the 10-day inpatient treatment program, open to adults over the age of 18, which launched last month with 16 beds for patients and a full medical staff. Young’s program is founded in the principles of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — a form of talk therapy developed in the 1970s that focuses on a patient’s thoughts and beliefs, rather than his or her actions — complemented by special techniques and tools for Internet addicts to help them learn to interact with technology in healthier ways. Like many rehabilitation programs, the treatment
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starts with a full 72-hour detox, followed by a psychiatric evaluation. After the detox period, patients attend daily individual and group therapy sessions, educational classes, and family consultations, all while being gradually reintroduced to technology. “It’s like food addiction — you’re learning new ways of eating or new ways of using the Internet, rather than a full absti-
Many of us have joked at one time or another about being addicted to our email, iPhone or Twitter account, but... these addictions are becoming more real — and they’re being recognized by mental health professionals. nence, 12-step program,” Young tells The Huffington Post. Generally associated with features of impulse-control disorders, Internet addiction takes many different forms: A condition can arise from excessive time spent on gambling online, pornography, social media, and even eBay addiction. Young has seen it all, but says that she most often deals with online gaming
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addictions. Still, there’s no typical Internet addict — just as with drugs or alcohol, addiction can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender or socioeconomic status. “It could be anyone. It could be your grandmother, your 15-year-old son, your husband or wife,” says Young. “Like any addiction, it affects all of us.” But where is the line between a teenager glued to a smartphone and a full-blown addiction requiring medical attention? Signs of a serious Internet addictive
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disorder are comparable to the symptoms of any other addiction, including lying about one’s usage of technology, craving more time on the Internet, unsuccessful attempts to control behavior and increasingly poor performance at school or work. Young diagnoses Internet addiction with a comprehensive Internet Addiction Diagnostic Questionnaire that she developed using 20 questions (Do you feel restless, moody, depressed, or irritable when attempting to cut down or stop Internet use? Do you stay online longer than originally intended?) to assess attitudes and
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Exit behaviors around Internet usage. A patient must also have a dual diagnosis with another psychiatric condition such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression or anxiety in order to be diagnosed with Internet Addiction Disorder. Although the validity of Internet addiction as a legitimate mental health condition hasn’t always been agreed upon, it’s now being taken seriously by the mental health community, thanks in large part to Young’s pioneering work in the field. The most recent volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM-V), which consulted Young’s expertise on the subject, listed “Internet Use Disorder” and Internet Gaming Disorder as subjects worthy of further study. Now that more unified, accepted diagnostic criteria for these conditions are emerging, it’s likely that the conditions will be classified as clinical disorders in the next DSM revision, Young explains. Other countries, mainly in Asia, have already begun taking serious measures to address growing rates of dependence on digital devices. In China, Taiwan and Korea, as much as 30 percent of the population may be experiencing prob-
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lematic Internet use, according to the Center for Internet Addiction, and China’s hospitals began opening special units for the treatment of Internet addiction in 2008, the Telegraph reports. But even Internet users who may not have an addiction still frequently exhibit an unhealthy dependence on digital devices that could be interfering with their work, lives and relationships. The
It’s like food addiction — you’re learning new ways of eating or new ways of using the Internet, rather than a full abstinence, 12-step program.” average smartphone user checks their device every six and a half minutes (that’s 150 times a day) and 50 percent of people aged 18-29 say that they use their phone on the toilet, according to a recent HuffPost/YouGov poll. A 2012 study found that 66 percent of people are actually afraid to lose or be separated from their cell phone, while a University of Maryland study even found that college students forced to unplug from their devices for 24 hours
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experienced physical and psychological symptoms of withdrawal, similar to what drug addicts experience while trying to go “cold turkey,” the Telegraph reports. “Internet addiction opens up this debate of how much technology is enough? How young is it okay to start?” says Young. Children today are using technology from the age of three, according to a recent UK survey, and the long-term implications of early exposure to technology could prove to be significant as they grow up. Among young adults,
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excessive technology use has been linked with heightened stress levels, anxiety and depression. But in the technology-saturated workplace, even adults would do well to monitor and control their usage. “These forms of technology are as addictive as crack. Period. If you expose yourself to them continuously, they will pull you in the way a drug would — continuously, even when you know it’s not serving you well,” Tony Schwartz, CEO of The Energy Project and author of The Way We Work Isn’t Working, told The Huffington Post in July. “If that’s the case, you’ve got to move in and out of exposing yourself to them.”
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How to Pickle Anything VAN SKLAR/GETTY IMAGES
BY REBECCA ORCHANT
Exit ONFESSION TIME: I have been obsessed with pickles for my entire life. That’s not the confession yet, I’ll get to that. Some time around elementary school, my mother asked me what I’d like as my annual “big” Chanukah gift as we meandered up and down the aisles of Costco (undoubtedly gathering ingredients for a dinner party). My eyes landed on a two-gallon jar of sour dill pickles. “That,” I said. And then we just sort of progressed from there. The big confession is this: I never pickled anything myself until 2010, on the counter of a studio apartment in Brooklyn (yeah, duh, I know), after many self-pep-talks and weeks of research. Here’s the truth: It’s really not that hard. I made way too big a deal out of making my first pickles at home, and chances are that some of you are, too. The great news is that once you’ve pickled a few things, completely ruined a few batches and had some unexpected successes, you can pretty much pickle anything. So, let’s talk about how to pickle anything. First, what you really need is a spirit guide. If you don’t have a master pickler in your life (why
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Everyone always wants to start with cucumbers... In my experience, cucumbers are some of the hardest things to pickle... My best advice: start with some other stuff first.” don’t we all get to have one of those?), a book will do. I started with two, and they have rarely led me astray: • The Joy of Pickling: 250 FlavorPacked Recipes for Vegetables for All Kinds of Produce from Garden or Market by Linda Zeidrich • Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz The Joy of Pickling has become my pickling Rosetta Stone. Anytime I bring home some strange
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vegetable and decide to pickle it, I check to see if Ziedrich already has a recipe for it. If not, I browse through the pickle recipes I’ve already made, imagining the flavor combinations of the brine settling into the vegetable (or fruit!) in question. It is an excellent primer for beginners, and includes everything from legit fermented pickles in barrels outside, to refrigerated vinegar pickles that anyone can make in any size kitchen. Wild Fermentation, on the other hand, has so far been a mostly educational and aspirational book. Katz is committed to the cultivation and consumption of fermented foods of all sorts — from pickles to honey wine to tempeh and
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Once you’ve pickled a few things, completely ruined a few batches and had some unexpected successes, you can pretty much pickle anything.” beyond. What Wild Fermentation has taught me is that you are probably not going to make anything inedible, and that sometimes mold is our friend. I can’t recommend it enough. Once you have your spirit guides in order, it’s time to decide what to pickle first. Everyone always wants to start with cucumbers. They’re the pickles we’re most familiar with, and I don’t blame anyone who loves them for wanting to recreate them at home. In my experience, cucumbers are some of the hardest things to pickle... at least as compared to
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the deli spears, sour dills and (go ahead, admit it) bright green hamburger chips we all love. My best advice: start with some other stuff first. A few of the earliest, best pickles I ever made:
• Mushrooms (Polish style, with allspice and onions — they are an amazing addition to a cheese platter) • Cauliflower (seems almost impossible to screw up) • Brussels sprouts (see above note on cauliflower) • Asparagus (they are like sponges for brine) • Carrots (perfectly crunchy every time, no matter what)
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If you’re thinking, “I really want to make pickles, but canning seems like it’s a huge pain or I will give myself botulism.” I hear you. Nearly every pickle I have ever made has been stored in the fridge for both of those reasons. The truth is really that canning isn’t that hard, and there are excellent spirit guides out there for just this conundrum (check out Sherri Brooks Vinton’s excellent Put 'em Up. The most important thing we want you to take away from this is: Don’t let that stop you. Check out this great Eating Well primer on making fridge pickles, and start stocking your pantry and fridge with pickling ingredients, so you can pickle on a whim.
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Things like: VINEGARS
• Distilled, white vinegar • Bragg’s apple cider vinegar • White wine vinegar • Rice wine vinegar (if you want to make some Asian pickles — which... you should)
SPICES
• Black peppercorns • Dried bay leaves • Whole allspice • Red pepper flakes • Coriander seed • Dill seeds • Mustard seeds
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OTHER ESSENTIALS
• Pickling salt (different from iodized or kosher salt, ground fine so it dissolves quickly) • Garlic • Fresh dill • Chiles
Obviously, I could go on and on, but I’ll stop here. If you home-picklers out there (I know there are a ton of you) have any great tips for those just getting started, please let us know in the comments! We’re all in this together, guys. Now let’s pickle all the things.
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Dog Ears: Born in October In which we spotlight music from a diversity of genres and decades, lending an insider’s ear to what deserves to be heard. BY THE EVERLASTING PHIL RAMONE AND DANIELLE EVIN
MIGUEL CALÓ Tango bandoneonist, composer, and band leader Miguel Caló was born in 1907 in Argentina. Caló was a master of the violin and the bandoneon, a small accordion similar to the concertina. In the mid-’20s, Caló’s career began in Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra. By the mid-’40s, Caló reached great success in La Orquestra de las Estrellas (Orchestra of the Stars). His collaborations include pianist Carolos Di Sarli, singer Carlos Dante, singer Alberto Morel, and pianist/ conductor Osmar Moderna. Caló passed away in 1972 but leaves behind a seriously romantic legacy. Miguel Caló y Su Orquestra’s “Inspiración,” from the collection La Antología Noble de Tango: Sus Grandes Intérpretes & Compositores, is utopian. TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Tango ARTIST: Miguel Caló SONG: Inspiración ALBUM: La Antología Noble de Tango: Sus Grandes Intérpretes & Compositores
CLARENCE WILLIAMS Legendary composer, record producer, jazz musician, publisher, and sharpelbowed businessman Clarence Williams was born on Oct. 8, 1898, and grew up in a musical home in New Orleans, where his father was a bass player and hotel owner. The young Williams got his start performing in his father’s hotel. He co-wrote many jazz and blues standards, including “T’Aint Nobody’s Business If I Do.” His resume includes wife/blues singer Eva Taylor, Bessie Smith, Bunk Johnson, Fats Waller, Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Williams formed a publishing company in his late teens, ultimately selling the catalog of nearly 2,000 songs to Decca Records in the ’40s. Clarence Williams III (best known for his portrayal of Linc in The Mod Squad) is his grandson. Williams died in 1965 in Queens, New York, leaving behind an outstanding body of work. His “Whoop It Up,” from the album Quadromania: You Rascal You, is a classic. TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Blues/Jazz ARTIST: Clarence Williams SONG: Whoop It Up
NICOLE ATKINS Vocalist and songwriter Nicole Atkins was born and raised in Neptune City, NJ. By the age of 13, Nicole developed good old-school taste in music (Traffic, Cream), picked up the guitar, and taught herself to play. In the late ’90s, Atkins attended art school in North Carolina, where she calloused her fingers with the band Los Parasols before moving to New York and going solo. Atkins, who recorded two of her three albums in Sweden with producer Tore Johansson, is an ASCAP Foundation/Sammy Cahn Award winner and herself has judged the Independent Music Awards. Check out the well-dressed and winning “Party’s Over,” from Nicole Atkins’ 2007 album Neptune City, produced by Tore Johansson. TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Singer/Songwriter ARTIST: Nicole Atkins SONG: Party’s Over ALBUM: Neptune City
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DONNY HATHAWAY
FRANZ LISZT
MAHALIA JACKSON
Donny Hathaway leads as one of the great soul entities of the 20th century. Born in post-war Chicago and raised by his gospel-singing grandmother in St. Louis, Donny grew up in the church choir, singing from the age of 3, and went on to study music at Howard University. After college, Hathaway marked his early professional fingerprints as a producer, composer, arranger, and sideman (keys). His recording career took off in the early ’70s with “The Ghetto, Pt. 1,” long-player Everything Is Everything, and his classic ballad “A Song for You.” Genre-defining duets with Roberta Flack followed. Hathaway took the sound of soul to its greatest heights throughout the decade in a swell of vinyl. Collaborations include Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, The Staple Singers, Quincy Jones, Arif Mardin, Norman Lear, and Curtis Mayfield. The magnetar’s struggle with depression took its toll in 1979, when he dropped 15 stories to his death at New York’s Essex House. Remember the silverthroated greatness of “Giving Up,” from his 1971 Donny Hathaway.
Composer/conductor, master pianist, and golden boy Franz Liszt was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1811, son of a multi-instrumentalist. A gifted child, Franz began to compose at the age of 8. He went on to study in Vienna and there befriended Schubert and Beethoven. By his teens, he relocated to Paris, and before the age of 20, he made a name for himself, even counting Paganini as a fan. Years later, he would be credited with advancing the careers of Chopin and Wagner. Although Bartok landed on the forint, Liszt is noted as the greatest Hungarian composer to date. The maestro’s personal life was filled with passion and romantic intrigue, but in his final years he enigmatically retired to a monastic order. Much of Liszt’s work is torn between two souls, the perdition of the netherworld and the absolution of the divine. His magisterial works include Transcendental Etudes, Dante’s Symphony, Mephisto Waltz, Oratorio, Christus and Faust Symphony. Liszt bequeaths us so much overwhelming beauty for the ears. Liszt passed away in 1886. Revisit the virtuoso with “Zwölf Lieder Von Franz Schubert — Winterreise, S. 561bis: No. 10. Das Wirtshaus,” from the 1995 album Liszt: The Schubert Transcriptions III, Vol. 33, performed by Leslie Howard.
Gospel priestess and civil-rights activist Mahalia Jackson was born Oct. 26, 1911, in New Orleans. At the age of 4, she lost her mother and was raised by her aunt Mahalia. By 16, Mahalia moved to Chicago and struggled for years to make ends meet, singing in churches, working odd jobs, and recording with varying success. Her devotion to song bore fruit in 1954 when she became the voice of radio’s first-ever national gospel show, for CBS. In 1956, her performance on TV’s Ed Sullivan show gave gospel music its biggest audience to date. Jackson sang at John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Ball in 1960 as well as the 1963 March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Jackson also sang at Dr. King’s funeral in 1968; sadly, four years later, she passed away in Chicago. Her legacy is towering. The eternal “Trouble of the World,” first recorded in 1959, from The Essential Mahalia Jackson, spins with magnitude.
TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Soul ARTIST: Donny Hathaway SONG: Giving Up ALBUM: Donny Hathaway
TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Classical ARTIST: Franz Liszt SONG: Zwölf Lieder Von Franz Schubert–Winterreise, S. 561bis: No. 10. Das Wirtshaus ALBUM: Liszt: The Schubert Transcriptions III, Vol. 33
TAP HERE TO BUY: iTunes.com GENRE: Gospel/Soul ARTIST: Mahalia Jackson SONG: Trouble of the World ALBUM: The Essential Mahalia Jackson
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JASON MILLER/GETTY IMAGES (FANS); AP PHOTO/TONY GUTIERREZ (HOBBY LOBBY); GETTY IMAGES/FOODCOLLECTION (BACON); NICK BRANDT (DEADLY LAKE)
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HUFFINGTON 10.13.13
Indians Fans Wear Redface at Playoff Game
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Postal Worker Too Lazy to Walk Up to House Drives on the Front Lawn
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HOBBY LOBBY TO JEWS: WE DON’T CATER TO YOUR PEOPLE
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TGIF Employees Allegedly Trick Muslim Woman Into Eating Bacon
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Deadly Lake Turns Animals Into ‘Statues’
F. CARTER SMITH/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES (PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE); GUNAY MUTLU/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR RF (JELLYFISH); GETTY IMAGES/FLICKR OPEN (TWO-YEAR OLD)
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HUFFINGTON 10.13.13
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THERE’S ZERO PUMPKIN IN YOUR PUMPKIN SPICE LATTE
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Attempted Burglar Sentenced to Three Years of ‘No Love’
Now You Can Read ‘Dinosaur Erotica’
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Robots Are Now Killing Those Pesky TWO-YEAR-OLD Jellyfish Getting in the Way of Nuclear GIVES BIRTH TO HIS OWN TWIN Power Plants
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