Good kids who went to good schools, the brassy, effervescent Barry twins, 24, always envisioned their young adulthood in New York City as a lush time of stimulating work, picturesque travel and a rich social orbit. But they graduated into a downbeat nightmare of a job market. According to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates under 27 so far this year averaged 7.1 percent, nearly double what it was in 2007 and the highest yearly average in the 30 years this data point has been tracked.

And so Kristy and Katie and most of their friends are forever hunting for jobs, both mundane interim work to sustain them and long-term positions that could mean a career. Many days, it is as if they are stalking something on the endangered species list.

2 journalism degrees, 17 months, no jobs

Mr. Safire called himself a pundit — the word, with its implication of self-appointed expertise, might have been coined for him — and his politics “libertarian conservative,” which he defined as individual freedom and minimal government. He denounced the Bush administration’s U.S.A. Patriot Act as an intrusion on civil liberties, for example, but supported the war in Iraq.

He was hardly the image of a buttoned-down Times man: The shoes needed a shine, the gray hair a trim. Back in the days of suits, his jacket was rumpled, the shirt collar open, the tie askew. He was tall but bent — a man walking into the wind. He slouched and banged a keyboard, talked as fast as any newyawka and looked a bit gloomy, like a man with a toothache coming on.

William Safire

Not everyone we can see will hear us, as they don’t necessarily follow us, and they may not dip into the stream in time to catch the evanescent ripples in the flow that our remark started. However, as our view is fo [sic] those we choose to follow, our emotional response is set by that, and we behave more civilly in return.

For those with Habermas’s assumption of a single common public sphere this makes no sense – surely everyone should see everything that anyone says as part of the discussion? In fact this has never made sense.

Twitter in theory

Meta Pirate Bay

Two years ago, the Cleveland Clinic stopped hiring smokers. It was one part of a “wellness initiative” that has won the renowned hospital — which President Obama recently visited — some very nice publicity. The clinic has a farmers’ market on its main campus and has offered smoking-cessation classes for the surrounding community. Refusing to hire smokers may be more hard-nosed than the other parts of the program. But given the social marginalization of smoking, the policy is hardly shocking. All in all, the wellness initiative seems to be a feel-good story.

Which is why it is so striking to talk to Delos M. Cosgrove, the heart surgeon who is the clinic’s chief executive, about the initiative. Cosgrove says that if it were up to him, if there weren’t legal issues, he would not only stop hiring smokers. He would also stop hiring obese people.

[...]

The question of personal responsibility, then, ends up being more complicated than it may seem. It’s hard to argue that Americans have collectively become more irresponsible over the last 30 years; the murder rate has plummeted, and divorce and abortion rates have fallen. And our genes certainly haven’t changed in 30 years.

What has changed is our environment. Parents are working longer, and takeout meals have become a default dinner. Gym classes have been cut. The real price of soda has fallen 33 percent over the last three decades. The real price of fruit and vegetables has risen more than 40 percent.

The case for a “fat tax”

The Council of Elders of the Miskito people has an extensive list of grievances. For as long local residents can remember, the federal government has allowed outside companies to exploit the raw materials in their jungle territory — everything from lobster to lumber to gold. Little benefit has come to the people who eke out a living here, they say.

Fed up, the separatists seized the region’s ruling party headquarters on April 19 and appointed Héctor Williams as their wihta tara, or great judge. Mr. Williams, a local religious leader whose thin black mustache stretches out toward his deep dimples, said the region suffered from a variety of woes — devastating hurricanes and rat plagues to a mysterious disease known as grisi siknis, which is marked by collective bouts of hysteria.

“We have the right to autonomy and self-government,” declared Wycleff Diego, the breakaway movement’s ambassador abroad, as he held up the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In Nicaragua, a Miskito separatist movement

My tastes, of course, changed as I got older. Sure I love a good dry-aged ribeye or slow-cooked pork loin, but now my favorite proteins come from the sea (and lakes). A new film, The End of the Line, contemplates a world without fish, which is a reality closer than you probably think unless we change our habits.

Bittman writes today about these modern perils of buying fish and reveals an interesting insight about people’s fish-buying habits in his blog.

Eating sustainable fish

Whatever Works

Full life-cycle emissions of train worse than plane

Joshua Wolf Shenk is, if we believe him, the first person to be given access to the records of the study and what it has revealed. Much of it is counterintuitive.

The study has yielded some additional subtle surprises. Regular exercise in college predicted late-life mental health better than it did physical health. And depression turned out to be a major drain on physical health: of the men who were diagnosed with depression by age 50, more than 70 percent had died or were chronically ill by 63. More broadly, pessimists seemed to suffer physically in comparison with optimists, perhaps because they’re less likely to connect with others or care for themselves.

Maybe most interesting are the excerpts from case files included in the article, some of which read like dystopian short stories about the privileged and East Coast elites.

In all Vaillant’s literature—and, by agreement, in this essay, too—the Grant Study men remain anonymous. (Even the numbers on the case studies have been changed.) A handful have publicly identified themselves—including Ben Bradlee, the longtime editor of The Washington Post, who opened his memoir, A Good Life, with his first trip to the study office. John F. Kennedy was a Grant Study man, too, though his files were long ago withdrawn from the study office and sealed until 2040. Ironically, it was the notation of that seal in the archive that allowed me to confirm JFK’s involvement, which has not been recognized publicly before now.

Just as interesting is the man who has been the long-time patron of the study, George Vaillant.

Indeed, the lives themselves—dramatic, pathetic, inspiring, exhausting—resonate on a frequency that no data set could tune to. The physical material—wispy sheets from carbon copies; ink from fountain pens—has a texture. You can hear the men’s voices, not only in their answers, but in their silences, as they stride through time both personal (masturbation reports give way to reports on children; career plans give way to retirement plans) and historical (did they vote for Dewey or Truman?; “What do you think about today’s student protesters, drug users, hippies, etc.?”). Secrets come out. One man did not acknowledge to himself until he reached his late 70s that he was gay. With this level of intimacy and depth, the lives do become worthy of Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.

George Vaillant has not been just the principal reader of these novels. To a large extent, he is the author. He framed most of the questions; he conducted most of the interviews, which exist, not in recordings or transcripts, but only in his notes and interpretations. To explain the study, I needed to understand him, and how the themes from his life circled back to inform his work (and vice versa).

“What Makes Us Happy?” is a bit long, but worth the time.

Gauging Happiness