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Humor Is an Online Activist’s Best Defense

By March, the backlash to Invisible Children’s "Kony 2012" video, already the most viral piece of content in the history of the internet, was in full swing.

A number of think pieces had led the way, questioning the motives of so-called low-commitment ‘clicktivists’; the viability of assisting a military and government with a questionable human rights record of its own; and the value of capturing Joseph Kony, a man who by most accounts is greatly diminished in his power and almost surely no longer in Uganda. Jason Russell’s public breakdown a few days later eroded even more of the sympathy for Invisible Children and its mission.

Clearly, if the Kony 2012 campaign was to somehow maintain its considerable momentum, Invisible Children would have to abdicate the role of middle man.

Around this time, Josh Begley, James Borda and I were sitting in Clay Shirky’s “Political Uses of Social Media” class at New York University, attempting to unpack Kony 2012 as a piece of media, an online phenomenon, and an international activist campaign. James had a thought: “If this many people are willing to put up money just to raise awareness of Kony, why not use that money to hire Blackwater to capture him?”

As Professor Shirky told Wired, a hush fell over the room. Why not take the idea a step farther, I asked, and build a crowdfunding platform that would allow users to directly fund private militia intervention in military conflicts?

In order to answer that question, we decided to actually build Kickstriker, a satirical crowdfunding platform for military and intelligence missions. As we brainstormed, we thought about the unique form of privilege that invites Americans to intervene in conflicts overseas, the increasing privatization of warfare, and our own proclivity as technologists to buy into techno-utopianism—the belief that every problem can be solved through the creative application of technology.

Our primary goal was to raise these issues in a way that forced viewers to interrogate their own biases. We figured that dark humor would be a useful way to communicate these ideas to a group of people outside of our immediate circle.

Josh and I designed and built the Kickstriker website over the course of a week. We decided to mimic the visual language of the Kickstarter website as closely as possible, without using any of their actual code—Kickstarter had become so successful that by merely borrowing that site’s layout and aping its logo, we could effectively communicate the idea of crowdsourcing without having to explain it. This raised a number of legal questions, though, especially after we decided to skewer a few other organizations and private companies, including the Heritage Foundation, Invisible Children and Academi, the security contracting company that became notorious under its former name, Blackwater.

Before attending graduate school, I worked for a number of years as a digital rights activist, often informally advising artists on how to take advantage of “fair use,” a carve-out of copyright law that allows for the re-use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holder.

We believed our site stood a very good chance of being interpreted as fair use by a court because its purpose was to criticize and comment on those aforementioned organizations. We also knew that fair use had never stopped rights holders from filing takedown notices and sending out subpoenas simply to silence their critics. Almost certain that our site would receive a bogus takedown notice—a kind of legal bullying that forces a web host to remove the content in question—we worked to create a mirror of Kickstriker on servers operated by NYU.

We launched Kickstriker on the night of Thursday, May 3. We sent it to Professor Shirky first, and he immediately tweeted it to his 200,000 followers, netting us an audience immediately. We also sent the site to a few tech publications, hoping that one or two might see fit to shoot a link our way. That Friday, Spencer Ackerman at Wired published a feature on Kickstriker, pulling in a much larger audience.

Two weeks after launching, the site has been viewed by 14,000 people in 110 countries, and has been written about in at least four languages. It's even been endorsed by the likes of Arianna Huffington and science fiction author Bruce Sterling. While we’ve yet to see much discussion online about the implications that crowdfunding might have for military conflicts, we remain hopeful that Kickstriker will help encourage just such a conversation.   

Curiously, we’ve yet to receive a single takedown notice or even an informal nastygram from any of the organizations we targeted with our parody. At this point, the “they just haven’t seen it yet” explanation seems unlikely. Rather, it seems like something else is preventing these organizations from taking action.

A few weeks after our Kony 2012 discussion, Professor Shirky brought Andy Bichlbaum in to speak to our class. Bichlbaum is best known for his work in The Yes Men, a band of brand-jacking political pranksters about whom two documentary films have been made.

Following a string of performance art pieces in which the Yes Men successfully impersonated representatives from various organizations and companies in order to deliver pointed political critiques of their policies, Bichlbaum and his partners in crime founded Yes Labs in the hopes of providing an incubator for similar activities. When asked by a member of our class why the Yes Men had never been sued, Bichlbaum replied, “We’ve never been sued because suing people isn’t funny.”

Humor, in Bichlbaum’s view, provides a kind of shield when speaking truth to power—one that prevents the target of the joke from suppressing the critique, lest he or she appear to not possess a sense of humor. I’d like to think that Kickstriker benefited from this same principle, one that allows three graduate students to play a practical joke on some extremely powerful, if largely unfunny, institutions. 

Photo courtesy of Kickstriker

Pet Diaries: The Joint-Custody Dog Who Taught Me to Move On

Introducing Pet Diaries: Life lessons we learned from our pets. This five-part series explores the ways pets have a positive impact on our lives. It's brought to you in partnership with Purina ONE® beyOnd®. Check out more stories at GOOD Pets.

When Kevin and I broke up nine years ago, we sold the Eames couch we bought together from a vintage shop in San Francisco. We couldn't agree on who would get custody, so selling it and splitting the $1400 seemed like the best way to keep things fair. My half would go toward the security deposit on a new apartment. I was moving out.

More difficult to divvy up was Chauncy, the 5-year-old bulldog mix Kevin and I had adopted together. But we did our best to split the dog down the middle, too. I found a new place right across the street. It was the best apartment I had seen, and hey, I liked the neighborhood, I told everyone. But really, I liked that Chauncy wouldn’t need to adjust to new sidewalks and parks and neighbors, and he’d be close to Kevin, too. I gave Kevin a spare set of my keys. He would come over every afternoon to walk Chauncy, and take him in when I was out of town.

Kevin and I started dating in college, then built a happy life together in San Francisco. On my 21^st birthday, Kevin arranged to fly in a little puppy from an Alabama farm. We met him at the airport and named him after a member of an R&B group. Then, we moved to New York, and everything unraveled. We fought about spending too much money and not enough time together. Couples therapy failed to save the relationship. We thought we could stay best friends or, at least, close ones. Sharing Chauncy would help maintain the bond.

Most people thought our dog agreement was unusual. My therapist told me I was replicating the joint custody my parents had of me after their divorce. We thought it was weird, too, but Kevin and I were proud of ourselves for making the effort. And at first, it was really nice. I liked being able to make small talk with Kevin, and having my afternoons uninterrupted for writing at home. I also, I admit, liked vaguely keeping tabs on my ex. This mostly involved inferring details from his brief appearances in my life. How had his clothes changed—was he dressed up to go on a date? Did he seem tired from going out? Did he seem busier than me? Was he more successful at dating than I was? Was he lonely, too?

Sometimes, Kevin would text me on a Sunday at noon, asking if I wouldn't mind walking Chauncy that day. I would spend the whole day crying, assuming he was with a new girl. Once, at a party, a strange redheaded girl told me she knew my dog, which was a polite way of saying she had been seeing my ex. Whenever I heard Kevin was dating someone new—and there seemed to be a lot of them, girls whose names I’d never learn—I'd begin to rethink our arrangement. I’d practice the speech in my head. I’d tell him he simply couldn't come over every day anymore.

But while I was sometimes miserable, I knew that Chauncy was thriving. He had two owners who adored him. He never saw the inside of a kennel. Kevin had a car, and would drive him to far-off dog parks or whisk him to the country for the weekend. It seemed important for Chauncy to keep a link to Kevin. The arrangement stayed.

But my own link to Kevin was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. I started avoiding him, both socially and inside my own apartment. I skipped parties. I headed to the gym or out to lunch when he was due to come over.  He had a serious girlfriend now, I heard, an art dealer. Every time I imagined her playing in the park with my dog, I felt like giving Chauncy a bath and washing her influence off.

Eventually, Kevin found out that his apartment—the one we once lived in together—was getting refurbished, and no leases would be renewed. He began scouting dog-friendly apartments across town. He could still have Chauncy for a week here or there, but the days of daily apartment visits were over. While he was feeding Chauncy one afternoon, I asked him how the house hunt was going. He said he found a railroad apartment in Greenpoint.

"Isn't that an awkward layout for a roommate?"

"Oh," he said, "I'm not moving in with a roommate, I'm moving in with Elaine."

I realized then that I wasn’t sharing Chauncy just with Kevin, but with the whole life Kevin was building apart from my own. I had to accept that by committing to joint custody, I would need to get used to another girl cuddling with my dog. It had been years since we broke up—Kevin wasn’t even my most recent boyfriend anymore!—and yet I had never fully accepted it. 

It’s funny—all those years of seeing each other every day didn’t make us better friends. Instead, it kept us in a kind of perpetual state of breaking up. Only when Kevin stopped turning up in my apartment each afternoon was I able to understand that putting someone else’s needs first—the dog’s—required me to more closely monitor my own needs, too. Chauncy still got ridiculously excited every time he reunited with Kevin. I didn’t need to do the same.

Recently, Kevin and I took Chauncy to the vet. There in the waiting room, we exhausted all talk of how the dog had been doing. I realized we had almost nothing more to say to one other. The silence came as a relief. Finally, Chauncy was the last bond between us. We took Chauncy in together, made sure he was doing ok, then went our separate ways.

How Cherokee Is Real Cherokee? Mixed-Race People Discuss Elizabeth Warren

If you thought that a white Senate candidate running for office against another white candidate could never become embroiled in a racial battle, think again. And turn your eyes toward Massachusetts, where that's exactly what's happening.

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for a Senate seat against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, claims she is one-32nd Cherokee Indian, a claim that, for a time, was supported by the New England Historic and Genealogy Society. This week, however, the society revised its original finding, saying, "We have no proof that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent."

For the most part, it's a stupid argument. A lot of kids have parents who tell them familial legends about distant Native American ancestors—who cares if Warren fell for a tall tale passed down from generation to generation? Alas, the story went from family fable to point of contention when Warren reportedly classified herself as a minority when she went to work at Harvard Law. According to reports from the Boston Globe, Warren, citing her Cherokee heritage, listed herself as a "minority professor" in the Association of American Law Schools desk book, a well-respected reference text for legal scholars, from 1986 to 1995. Warren now says she claimed minority status "in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am." She also says that when so such invitation materialized, she stopped checking the minority box.

Though she hasn't provided evidence to prove it, if Warren actually is part Cherokee, that gives her as much Cherokee blood as Bill John Baker, the latest principle chief of the Cherokee Nation. Still, her Republican opponents aren't having any of it; they're accusing her of concocting a minority story to help sneak into her job and Harvard, and to curry favor with "real" minorities.

Of course, that the GOP would harangue Warren is obvious. More interesting is how other mixed-race Americans feel, particularly mixed-race Americans who could, based on their looks, pass as being fully white, like Warren. So I asked a few of them.

Adam Serwer is a political reporter at Mother Jones who was raised by one black parent and one Jewish parent. At the beginning of our email interview, he wanted to establish that he believes Warren's Cherokee controversy to be "a dumb non-controversy with little relationship to what matters in a Senator." That aside, he says his own racial identification has been about what he knows culturally more than what's in his blood. "I have a Cherokee great-great-grandparent, but I don't identify as Cherokee because it's had no impact on my life," he says. "I've never been to a reservation, I have no close Cherokee relatives, and no cultural ties whatsoever to the Cherokee nation. … I don't really know what my DNA says about how black or Jewish I am, but I was raised in those communities and that's the perspective I've lived my life with." In other words, if Warren had spent years in close contact with other Cherokee to learn the culture and its traditions, as, say, Chief Baker did, there may have been no issue.

Serwer says that though he finds Warren listing herself as a minority is "a bit strange," ultimately he thinks it's not a big deal. "As long as she wasn't trying to pass herself off as Native American, it doesn't bother me."

Christopher Davison, a small business owner in Tucson, Arizona, agrees that an attachment to the culture should be paramount when one is considering how to racially label oneself. Though Davis is one-quarter Japanese, he says he never considered himself anything other than white until watching a documentary about World War II in high school. "I remember when I found out about the Japanese internment camps, and i found out that I would have gone to one of those," he says. "That's kind of when I really started to feel Japanese." But although Davison's late-blooming interest in his Asian heritage led him to study the Japanese language and Japanese cooking, when it came to filling out college applications, he never checked the box marked "Asian." "Mainly because I don't look it at all," he says. When his cousin, who is also 1/4 Japanese, started identifying himself as Asian on all of his college and scholarship applications, Davison says it made him a little upset. "He didn't know how to speak Japanese or cook any of the food or anything," he says. "To claim the culture but not really know it is strange, and I could do origami and reproduce my grandmother's recipes and speak to her in her language. I definitely felt more Japanese than him."

So if Warren wasn't really steeped in Cherokee tradition, as Davison was with Japanese tradition, should she be so eager to claim Cherokee? According to Jessica Reed, a graduate student in Los Angeles who is one-32nd black and one-32nd Native American, she should. "I'm sure Elizabeth Warren is, on the one hand, trying to capitalize on her being part Native American so she has greater appeal to non-white demographics," says Reed. "But if I were in her position, I'd not only claim my heritage, but make the case that non-white voters can see me as an ally, and that their concerns will always be my concerns. I don't think that's pandering. I think that's progressive."

One voice has been noticeably absent from discussions of whether Warren is Cherokee enough: that of actual Cherokee people and their descendants. So I got in touch with Steven "Stone Bear" Phillips, principal chief of the United Cherokee Nation, an organization of Cherokee descendants, people much like Warren herself claims to be. "Only Indians, dogs, cats and horses are registered and have a blood quantum requirement," he says. "Research Native people and you will find that the registration requirements and blood quantum issue is divisive amongst the people and was installed by the very government that tried for hundreds of years to genocide the Cherokee and other Native peoples."

Phillips compares Warren to Obama, who is also famously mixed race. "Our current President is mixed blood, including some Cherokee blood, but self-identifies as an African-American. I don’t believe he has to have a [letter from the government] to prove it," he says. "In turn, neither should I, nor you, nor Ms. Warren, be required to prove to any other person or government, who we are and what blood quantum percentage we have."

Phillips closed his email to me this way: "My prayers to the Creator today are for my Cherokee sister Ms. Warren."

Photo via (cc) Flickr user mdfriendofhillary

Humor Is an Online Activist’s Best Defense

By March, the backlash to Invisible Children’s "Kony 2012" video, already the most viral piece of content in the history of the internet, was in full swing.

A number of think pieces had led the way, questioning the motives of so-called low-commitment ‘clicktivists’; the viability of assisting a military and government with a questionable human rights record of its own; and the value of capturing Joseph Kony, a man who by most accounts is greatly diminished in his power and almost surely no longer in Uganda. Jason Russell’s public breakdown a few days later eroded even more of the sympathy for Invisible Children and its mission.

Clearly, if the Kony 2012 campaign was to somehow maintain its considerable momentum, Invisible Children would have to abdicate the role of middle man.

Around this time, Josh Begley, James Borda and I were sitting in Clay Shirky’s “Political Uses of Social Media” class at New York University, attempting to unpack Kony 2012 as a piece of media, an online phenomenon, and an international activist campaign. James had a thought: “If this many people are willing to put up money just to raise awareness of Kony, why not use that money to hire Blackwater to capture him?”

As Professor Shirky told Wired, a hush fell over the room. Why not take the idea a step farther, I asked, and build a crowdfunding platform that would allow users to directly fund private militia intervention in military conflicts?

In order to answer that question, we decided to actually build Kickstriker, a satirical crowdfunding platform for military and intelligence missions. As we brainstormed, we thought about the unique form of privilege that invites Americans to intervene in conflicts overseas, the increasing privatization of warfare, and our own proclivity as technologists to buy into techno-utopianism—the belief that every problem can be solved through the creative application of technology.

Our primary goal was to raise these issues in a way that forced viewers to interrogate their own biases. We figured that dark humor would be a useful way to communicate these ideas to a group of people outside of our immediate circle.

Josh and I designed and built the Kickstriker website over the course of a week. We decided to mimic the visual language of the Kickstarter website as closely as possible, without using any of their actual code—Kickstarter had become so successful that by merely borrowing that site’s layout and aping its logo, we could effectively communicate the idea of crowdsourcing without having to explain it. This raised a number of legal questions, though, especially after we decided to skewer a few other organizations and private companies, including the Heritage Foundation, Invisible Children and Academi, the security contracting company that became notorious under its former name, Blackwater.

Before attending graduate school, I worked for a number of years as a digital rights activist, often informally advising artists on how to take advantage of “fair use,” a carve-out of copyright law that allows for the re-use of copyrighted material without permission from the rights holder.

We believed our site stood a very good chance of being interpreted as fair use by a court because its purpose was to criticize and comment on those aforementioned organizations. We also knew that fair use had never stopped rights holders from filing takedown notices and sending out subpoenas simply to silence their critics. Almost certain that our site would receive a bogus takedown notice—a kind of legal bullying that forces a web host to remove the content in question—we worked to create a mirror of Kickstriker on servers operated by NYU.

We launched Kickstriker on the night of Thursday, May 3. We sent it to Professor Shirky first, and he immediately tweeted it to his 200,000 followers, netting us an audience immediately. We also sent the site to a few tech publications, hoping that one or two might see fit to shoot a link our way. That Friday, Spencer Ackerman at Wired published a feature on Kickstriker, pulling in a much larger audience.

Two weeks after launching, the site has been viewed by 14,000 people in 110 countries, and has been written about in at least four languages. It's even been endorsed by the likes of Arianna Huffington and science fiction author Bruce Sterling. While we’ve yet to see much discussion online about the implications that crowdfunding might have for military conflicts, we remain hopeful that Kickstriker will help encourage just such a conversation.   

Curiously, we’ve yet to receive a single takedown notice or even an informal nastygram from any of the organizations we targeted with our parody. At this point, the “they just haven’t seen it yet” explanation seems unlikely. Rather, it seems like something else is preventing these organizations from taking action.

A few weeks after our Kony 2012 discussion, Professor Shirky brought Andy Bichlbaum in to speak to our class. Bichlbaum is best known for his work in The Yes Men, a band of brand-jacking political pranksters about whom two documentary films have been made.

Following a string of performance art pieces in which the Yes Men successfully impersonated representatives from various organizations and companies in order to deliver pointed political critiques of their policies, Bichlbaum and his partners in crime founded Yes Labs in the hopes of providing an incubator for similar activities. When asked by a member of our class why the Yes Men had never been sued, Bichlbaum replied, “We’ve never been sued because suing people isn’t funny.”

Humor, in Bichlbaum’s view, provides a kind of shield when speaking truth to power—one that prevents the target of the joke from suppressing the critique, lest he or she appear to not possess a sense of humor. I’d like to think that Kickstriker benefited from this same principle, one that allows three graduate students to play a practical joke on some extremely powerful, if largely unfunny, institutions. 

Photo courtesy of Kickstriker

Pet Diaries: The Joint-Custody Dog Who Taught Me to Move On

Introducing Pet Diaries: Life lessons we learned from our pets. This five-part series explores the ways pets have a positive impact on our lives. It's brought to you in partnership with Purina ONE® beyOnd®. Check out more stories at GOOD Pets.

When Kevin and I broke up nine years ago, we sold the Eames couch we bought together from a vintage shop in San Francisco. We couldn't agree on who would get custody, so selling it and splitting the $1400 seemed like the best way to keep things fair. My half would go toward the security deposit on a new apartment. I was moving out.

More difficult to divvy up was Chauncy, the 5-year-old bulldog mix Kevin and I had adopted together. But we did our best to split the dog down the middle, too. I found a new place right across the street. It was the best apartment I had seen, and hey, I liked the neighborhood, I told everyone. But really, I liked that Chauncy wouldn’t need to adjust to new sidewalks and parks and neighbors, and he’d be close to Kevin, too. I gave Kevin a spare set of my keys. He would come over every afternoon to walk Chauncy, and take him in when I was out of town.

Kevin and I started dating in college, then built a happy life together in San Francisco. On my 21^st birthday, Kevin arranged to fly in a little puppy from an Alabama farm. We met him at the airport and named him after a member of an R&B group. Then, we moved to New York, and everything unraveled. We fought about spending too much money and not enough time together. Couples therapy failed to save the relationship. We thought we could stay best friends or, at least, close ones. Sharing Chauncy would help maintain the bond.

Most people thought our dog agreement was unusual. My therapist told me I was replicating the joint custody my parents had of me after their divorce. We thought it was weird, too, but Kevin and I were proud of ourselves for making the effort. And at first, it was really nice. I liked being able to make small talk with Kevin, and having my afternoons uninterrupted for writing at home. I also, I admit, liked vaguely keeping tabs on my ex. This mostly involved inferring details from his brief appearances in my life. How had his clothes changed—was he dressed up to go on a date? Did he seem tired from going out? Did he seem busier than me? Was he more successful at dating than I was? Was he lonely, too?

Sometimes, Kevin would text me on a Sunday at noon, asking if I wouldn't mind walking Chauncy that day. I would spend the whole day crying, assuming he was with a new girl. Once, at a party, a strange redheaded girl told me she knew my dog, which was a polite way of saying she had been seeing my ex. Whenever I heard Kevin was dating someone new—and there seemed to be a lot of them, girls whose names I’d never learn—I'd begin to rethink our arrangement. I’d practice the speech in my head. I’d tell him he simply couldn't come over every day anymore.

But while I was sometimes miserable, I knew that Chauncy was thriving. He had two owners who adored him. He never saw the inside of a kennel. Kevin had a car, and would drive him to far-off dog parks or whisk him to the country for the weekend. It seemed important for Chauncy to keep a link to Kevin. The arrangement stayed.

But my own link to Kevin was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. I started avoiding him, both socially and inside my own apartment. I skipped parties. I headed to the gym or out to lunch when he was due to come over.  He had a serious girlfriend now, I heard, an art dealer. Every time I imagined her playing in the park with my dog, I felt like giving Chauncy a bath and washing her influence off.

Eventually, Kevin found out that his apartment—the one we once lived in together—was getting refurbished, and no leases would be renewed. He began scouting dog-friendly apartments across town. He could still have Chauncy for a week here or there, but the days of daily apartment visits were over. While he was feeding Chauncy one afternoon, I asked him how the house hunt was going. He said he found a railroad apartment in Greenpoint.

"Isn't that an awkward layout for a roommate?"

"Oh," he said, "I'm not moving in with a roommate, I'm moving in with Elaine."

I realized then that I wasn’t sharing Chauncy just with Kevin, but with the whole life Kevin was building apart from my own. I had to accept that by committing to joint custody, I would need to get used to another girl cuddling with my dog. It had been years since we broke up—Kevin wasn’t even my most recent boyfriend anymore!—and yet I had never fully accepted it. 

It’s funny—all those years of seeing each other every day didn’t make us better friends. Instead, it kept us in a kind of perpetual state of breaking up. Only when Kevin stopped turning up in my apartment each afternoon was I able to understand that putting someone else’s needs first—the dog’s—required me to more closely monitor my own needs, too. Chauncy still got ridiculously excited every time he reunited with Kevin. I didn’t need to do the same.

Recently, Kevin and I took Chauncy to the vet. There in the waiting room, we exhausted all talk of how the dog had been doing. I realized we had almost nothing more to say to one other. The silence came as a relief. Finally, Chauncy was the last bond between us. We took Chauncy in together, made sure he was doing ok, then went our separate ways.

How Cherokee Is Real Cherokee? Mixed-Race People Discuss Elizabeth Warren

If you thought that a white Senate candidate running for office against another white candidate could never become embroiled in a racial battle, think again. And turn your eyes toward Massachusetts, where that's exactly what's happening.

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for a Senate seat against incumbent Republican Scott Brown, claims she is one-32nd Cherokee Indian, a claim that, for a time, was supported by the New England Historic and Genealogy Society. This week, however, the society revised its original finding, saying, "We have no proof that Elizabeth Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith either is or is not of Cherokee descent."

For the most part, it's a stupid argument. A lot of kids have parents who tell them familial legends about distant Native American ancestors—who cares if Warren fell for a tall tale passed down from generation to generation? Alas, the story went from family fable to point of contention when Warren reportedly classified herself as a minority when she went to work at Harvard Law. According to reports from the Boston Globe, Warren, citing her Cherokee heritage, listed herself as a "minority professor" in the Association of American Law Schools desk book, a well-respected reference text for legal scholars, from 1986 to 1995. Warren now says she claimed minority status "in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am." She also says that when so such invitation materialized, she stopped checking the minority box.

Though she hasn't provided evidence to prove it, if Warren actually is part Cherokee, that gives her as much Cherokee blood as Bill John Baker, the latest principle chief of the Cherokee Nation. Still, her Republican opponents aren't having any of it; they're accusing her of concocting a minority story to help sneak into her job and Harvard, and to curry favor with "real" minorities.

Of course, that the GOP would harangue Warren is obvious. More interesting is how other mixed-race Americans feel, particularly mixed-race Americans who could, based on their looks, pass as being fully white, like Warren. So I asked a few of them.

Adam Serwer is a political reporter at Mother Jones who was raised by one black parent and one Jewish parent. At the beginning of our email interview, he wanted to establish that he believes Warren's Cherokee controversy to be "a dumb non-controversy with little relationship to what matters in a Senator." That aside, he says his own racial identification has been about what he knows culturally more than what's in his blood. "I have a Cherokee great-great-grandparent, but I don't identify as Cherokee because it's had no impact on my life," he says. "I've never been to a reservation, I have no close Cherokee relatives, and no cultural ties whatsoever to the Cherokee nation. … I don't really know what my DNA says about how black or Jewish I am, but I was raised in those communities and that's the perspective I've lived my life with." In other words, if Warren had spent years in close contact with other Cherokee to learn the culture and its traditions, as, say, Chief Baker did, there may have been no issue.

Serwer says that though he finds Warren listing herself as a minority is "a bit strange," ultimately he thinks it's not a big deal. "As long as she wasn't trying to pass herself off as Native American, it doesn't bother me."

Christopher Davison, a small business owner in Tucson, Arizona, agrees that an attachment to the culture should be paramount when one is considering how to racially label oneself. Though Davis is one-quarter Japanese, he says he never considered himself anything other than white until watching a documentary about World War II in high school. "I remember when I found out about the Japanese internment camps, and i found out that I would have gone to one of those," he says. "That's kind of when I really started to feel Japanese." But although Davison's late-blooming interest in his Asian heritage led him to study the Japanese language and Japanese cooking, when it came to filling out college applications, he never checked the box marked "Asian." "Mainly because I don't look it at all," he says. When his cousin, who is also 1/4 Japanese, started identifying himself as Asian on all of his college and scholarship applications, Davison says it made him a little upset. "He didn't know how to speak Japanese or cook any of the food or anything," he says. "To claim the culture but not really know it is strange, and I could do origami and reproduce my grandmother's recipes and speak to her in her language. I definitely felt more Japanese than him."

So if Warren wasn't really steeped in Cherokee tradition, as Davison was with Japanese tradition, should she be so eager to claim Cherokee? According to Jessica Reed, a graduate student in Los Angeles who is one-32nd black and one-32nd Native American, she should. "I'm sure Elizabeth Warren is, on the one hand, trying to capitalize on her being part Native American so she has greater appeal to non-white demographics," says Reed. "But if I were in her position, I'd not only claim my heritage, but make the case that non-white voters can see me as an ally, and that their concerns will always be my concerns. I don't think that's pandering. I think that's progressive."

One voice has been noticeably absent from discussions of whether Warren is Cherokee enough: that of actual Cherokee people and their descendants. So I got in touch with Steven "Stone Bear" Phillips, principal chief of the United Cherokee Nation, an organization of Cherokee descendants, people much like Warren herself claims to be. "Only Indians, dogs, cats and horses are registered and have a blood quantum requirement," he says. "Research Native people and you will find that the registration requirements and blood quantum issue is divisive amongst the people and was installed by the very government that tried for hundreds of years to genocide the Cherokee and other Native peoples."

Phillips compares Warren to Obama, who is also famously mixed race. "Our current President is mixed blood, including some Cherokee blood, but self-identifies as an African-American. I don’t believe he has to have a [letter from the government] to prove it," he says. "In turn, neither should I, nor you, nor Ms. Warren, be required to prove to any other person or government, who we are and what blood quantum percentage we have."

Phillips closed his email to me this way: "My prayers to the Creator today are for my Cherokee sister Ms. Warren."

Photo via (cc) Flickr user mdfriendofhillary

The Missing Piece of the Diabetes Puzzle

Modern medicine operates much like a farmer who fixes his fences only after the horses or cows have broken out. Hence, most serious health conditions incubate for years before they are diagnosed. This is certainly true of type 2 diabetes.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a timely article in Life Extension magazine entitled “Glucose: The Silent Killer.” In addition to summarizing all of the really bad things that excess blood sugar can do to your body, the article documented an important fact: By the time you are diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, you’ve actually had blood sugar problems for years. (Note: Do not confuse type 1 diabetes with type 2 diabetes. They are really very different. Type 1 is an autoimmune disease, which begins in childhood and requires insulin. Type 2 diabetes, also called diabesity, is related to your diet and lifestyle.)

I certainly knew this to be true, and I have written about it in my books. But there is a new piece to the puzzle: We’ve set the range for normal blood sugar too high. Recent studies indicate that fasting glucose levels should be in the range of 70–85 mg/dL. Unfortunately, most standard labs give the upper limit of normal for a fasting blood sugar at 99 mg/dL. That’s too high!

In addition, blood sugar levels after a meal should not spike more than 40 mg/dL higher than your fasting level. This means that your blood sugar level should be in the range of 110–125mg/dL one or two hours after a meal.

After reading this compelling new data on blood sugar, I decided to test my own blood sugar on a regular basis to see how I was doing—to take my health into my own hands. Taking control of your health starts with knowing where you stand. You don’t need to wait! I sure didn’t. (I have a family history of cardiovascular disease, so doing what I can to keep my blood sugar normal is a good way to support my heart, and so forth.) The first thing I did was consult with my Facebook community. I have a lot of “experts” there — individuals with diabetes who regularly check their own blood sugar. After getting some opinions, I bought a One Touch Ultra Glucometer on Amazon.com, along with lancets and blood sugar strips. Ingenious, simple, and oh-so empowering!

I quickly discovered that my blood sugar never went above 120 mg/dL. Probably because I have pretty much quelled my excess sugar cravings over the years by focusing on lots of activities that bring sweetness into my life in other ways besides eating sugar. This includes dancing tango in close embrace, listening to good music, de-cluttering my house, doing work I love, and taking long baths while reading good novels or looking out the window at the river. I have created a personal paradise for myself. This process has taken a lifetime and began in earnest during perimenopause—the time of life when most women first develop blood sugar and blood pressure problems.

I encourage you to do the same. Be kind and gentle with yourself if you’re not there yet. (I realize that I am reporting from the front lines here!) Bringing sweetness of other kinds into your life will bolster your health, allow you to enjoy your life even more, and help you curb those carb cravings! Don’t get me wrong. I crave a gooey chocolate brownie, just like you might. So, from time to time, I indulge without going overboard and savor every bite. But I want to continue to flourish in the personal paradise I’ve created. And that means doing what I can to keep my blood sugar levels normal.

If you’re checking your blood sugar levels regularly, if you’ve figured out a way to curb your sugar cravings, or if you just like what you’ve read, please leave a comment here or on my Facebook page.

This information is not intended to treat, diagnose, cure, or prevent any disease. All material in this article is provided for educational purposes only. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you have regarding a medical condition, and before undertaking any diet, exercise, or other health program.

Photo credit: Steve Rothman

Finding the Happiness That Lies Beyond “Good Enough”

By Sophy Bot

What if you could quit your job? Forget the annoyances, leave the frustrations behind and proudly announce to your boss: “I quit.”

What if you could escape that relationship you’re so unhappy with?

Or move out of that lousy living situation?

What if you had the strength and the courage to get rid of everything that makes you unhappy and to shamelessly pursue your true happiness?

Not long ago, I had the kind of life that many people dream about. I was married, had a good job where I was steadily moving up the ranks, lived in a nice home and had plenty of money to do the things I wanted to do. In some ways, I had it all… except happiness. Happiness was something I’d lost along the way; something I’d forgotten about as I pursued the life I was supposed to live instead of the life I wanted to live.

But what could I do? After all, things weren’t so bad, right?

Hiding from Change

The easiest thing would’ve been to stay; to keep going down that same path and to make do with what I had, even if it wasn’t what I truly wanted. And indeed, that’s what my family wanted me to do. Nobody wanted to watch me go through a messy divorce or to be left penniless or without a home. Nobody wanted me to get hurt – but what they didn’t realize is that I already was hurting.

We’re so willing to put off change because we’re afraid of being hurt that we often forget how much we already are hurting. After all, making big changes in your life is hard, and who wants unnecessary complications? But what would the world be like if we were always willing to settle for “good enough” when, with a bit of effort, “absolutely perfect” could be right around the corner? I’d made my decision: something had to change.

Taking the Leap

I did it, once – that thing so many of us dream of doing. There my boss was, yelling at me for something that wasn’t even my fault, when I mustered up all of my courage and before I even knew what I was doing I’d already uttered the words: “I quit.” Unfortunately, I did this without having any sort of backup or savings. But it’s funny the things you notice once you start taking control of your life because, less than two weeks later, my marriage came to an abrupt ending when it suddenly dawned on me just how miserable we’d both become in it.

Unexpectedly finding myself jobless and single and in need of a place to move, something else occurred to me: I owned too much stuff. It was now holding me back, keeping me from moving out, and I realized I no longer wanted it anyways. So I got rid of it. All of it. And when I looked into my closets, I realized I didn’t like my clothing either, that I’d been wearing it because I thought that’s what people like me were supposed to wear. So I changed it. All of it. And when I looked in the mirror and realized I wasn’t happy with my hair, that I’d worn it that way only because my husband had liked it, I decided to cut it off. All of it.

Once you’re ready to truly take control of your life, you’re no longer willing to settle for “good enough.” That day when I quit my job, I had no idea that it was just the beginning of a total personal transformation. All I knew then was that “good enough” no longer was. I was ready to go for “perfect.”

The Rough Spots Are Worth It

My life was anything but easy in the months that followed. I was broke, yet I was no longer willing to take just any job – not when I’d fought so hard to win my freedom. My living situation was far from ideal. I rented small rooms in lousy neighborhoods and learned how to live without a husband. And yet despite all of the difficulties – and despite the fact that my whole family was out there telling me I was nuts – I’d regained something that I hadn’t had in years: my happiness.

Whatever I had to go through was inconsequential in the face of that happiness. Nobody ever said changing your life is easy, but the rewards you reap are more than worth the effort. My material belongings may have been gone but my happiness was back and, with it, I had no doubt that I could regain everything I’d left behind. Only this time, I would do it the right way and never – not for one second – forget about my own happiness.

Life doesn’t always go the way we expect it to. It doesn’t always give us what we truly want, and sometimes what it does give us isn’t what we wanted at all. But the beautiful truth is that life is flexible. The truly happy people out there aren’t the ones who got everything handed to them on a silver platter. They are the ones who refused to settle, even when that was the easiest thing in the world. They are the ones who were willing to take the leap; the ones who looked at life straight-on and said, “I am willing to change.” They are the ones who never stopped trying, no matter how hard things got. The truly happy people in this world are the ones who stood proudly and said: “I will not settle for good enough.”

Photo by Nicki Varkevisser

Facebook Doesn’t Need Your Money; Invest in Africa Instead

Today, Facebook will launch the largest initial public offering in history. Over the course of a few minutes, an eager public will invest $16 billion in Facebook’s 3,000-odd employees. Here in Nairobi, Kenya, where I live, the eye-popping figures produce passive astonishment: A single company will absorb the rough equivalent of half a year’s GDP for Kenya’s 40 million citizens.

Facebook will invest some of its windfall to create growth for its shareholders. But will the investment be productive? Facebook is being forced public by SEC regulations and the desire of some early investors to cash out; founder Mark Zuckerberg has made clear his company doesn’t need the cash. As such, financing growth for Facebook probably means investing in some combination of server racks in Oregon, lobbyists in Washington, and ergonomic keyboards, massage tables, and sushi in the California headquarters.

That contrasts greatly with the landscape in east Africa. As a financial adviser and consultant to small and medium-sized companies in the region, I meet daily with companies that can offer investors attractive returns—and provide market-based solutions to problems in sectors from energy to horticulture. We’re currently supporting a network of health care providers who will offer ordinary Kenyans low-cost, high-quality outpatient care. Most of the other companies we work with have revenue models that are simpler and, perhaps, lower risk than Facebook’s. Yet they can’t raise capital.

Investments in emerging markets like Kenya don’t get funding largely because our capital markets are weak. Entrepreneurs here have little access to the global pool of money—the investors of Silicon Valley or Wall Street, nor the amateur day traders flipping stocks over lunch. Local money tends to chase mega-malls and the slipshod apartment complexes you see rising in cities across the continent.

But those weak markets are the same reason investments in Africa offer such good returns. Companies often can’t finance the second-generation, highly productive investments they need. Imagine a clinic operating without an ultrasound machine, or a barley farm operating without a tractor. The fruit couldn’t be hanging lower. The first ultrasound and the first tractor are astronomically more productive investments than the furniture in the Facebook lobby.

Investing billions in assets that are not highly productive is normal—proof of human progress to be proud of. But it’s hard to make a productive investment in a capital-saturated economy. Financial markets learned this in 2008, when reality bit a generation of investors who binged on unwanted housing in the absence of better ideas. Facebook’s gaudy IPO reinforces this basic problem: The rich world is capital-saturated while the poor world has very little physical capital per member of the labor force.

So why isn’t the world investing in Africa? Part of the answer is that it is. The surprise of the last decade is how much opportunity there has been to invest in Africa, and how well Africa has weathered the recent financial storm. With growth rates around 5 percent annually, Kenya’s economy is expanding significantly faster than Western economies. Last year, private equity investors raised more than $600 million to invest in East Africa’s growth.

On the other hand, we are not past the sense that charity is the best way to send money to Africa. Aid-oriented grants and micro-loans are the world’s conventional offer to African entrepreneurs, and they are literally not taking care of business. The “middle market” in many emerging economies generates most new jobs, yet these small and mid-size enterprises are too big for the lauded microfinance revolution, and too small for traditional banks chasing real estate projects. The companies I work with don’t need $300—they need $300,000.

Another obstacle are continual fears about “risk”— a word often applied to earnest African businesses, but not to JP Morgan. A man I know has built a brand manufacturing lotions and cosmetics from local aloe vera plants, but because he’s based in the much-maligned Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s all but impossible for him to break through to investors and grow. Even companies in east Africa’s comparatively advanced tech scene have a hard time raising smaller amounts of capital. But they deserve the chance to be productive—remember, it only took $18,000 in capital to start Facebook.

Theory tells us capital should flow from capital-saturated countries to poor countries, where it will do more. My hope for the ever-flatter future is that people in rich countries begin to see that the companies who will best use their investment are not listed in New York. Maybe there’s a social network for that. 

Illustration by Dylan C. Lathrop

Sleep Better: 4 Ways to Manipulate Your Melatonin Levels #30DaysofGOOD

Things are easier said than done, or so the old adage goes, and we couldn't agree more. That's why we do The GOOD 30-Day Challenge (#30DaysofGOOD), a monthly attempt to live better. Our challenge for May? Sleep better.

If you've already set a sleep schedule, optimized your bedroom, and tried some of the sleep apps on the market, take things a step further and start meddling with your melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that's produced in the pineal gland and helps regulate your circadian rhythm. It's sometimes called the "hormone of darkness," because it's produced at night. Melatonin supplements were popular in the 1990s as a remedy for jetlag. Supplements still exist, but there are also a variety of natural ways to increase your melatonin levels.

Cherry juice: For a natural boost, try drinking cherry juice. A 2011 study by researchers at Northumbia University found that volunteers who drank cherry juice for a week experienced a roughly 15 percent jump in melatonin levels, which translated into less daytime napping, almost 30 minutes more sleep each night, and better-quality sleep.

Meditation: Research has also shown that meditation can boost melatonin levels. If you have a hard time falling asleep, consider spending 15 minutes before bed concentrating on your breathing and clearing your mind—it'll actually change your brain chemistry.

Tryptophan: The amino acid tryptophan is used to make melatonin. It's often credited (or blamed) for the post-Thanksgiving dinner coma. Indeed, tryptophan is abundant in turkey, but also in other poultry, dairy, fish, and eggs. Consider a glass of milk before bed.

Supplements: There is also a wide variety of over-the-counter melatonin supplements available. There are pills you can buy in drug stores, of course, but also newfangled products like Lazy Larry "supplement squares," which try to tap into the market for marijuana brownies. These products exist in a legal grey area and aren't without their drawbacks, though, so read up before scarfing one down.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user D H Wright

Facebook Doesn’t Need Your Money; Invest in Africa Instead

Today, Facebook will launch the largest initial public offering in history. Over the course of a few minutes, an eager public will invest $16 billion in Facebook’s 3,000-odd employees. Here in Nairobi, Kenya, where I live, the eye-popping figures produce passive astonishment: A single company will absorb the rough equivalent of half a year’s GDP for Kenya’s 40 million citizens.

Facebook will invest some of its windfall to create growth for its shareholders. But will the investment be productive? Facebook is being forced public by SEC regulations and the desire of some early investors to cash out; founder Mark Zuckerberg has made clear his company doesn’t need the cash. As such, financing growth for Facebook probably means investing in some combination of server racks in Oregon, lobbyists in Washington, and ergonomic keyboards, massage tables, and sushi in the California headquarters.

That contrasts greatly with the landscape in east Africa. As a financial adviser and consultant to small and medium-sized companies in the region, I meet daily with companies that can offer investors attractive returns—and provide market-based solutions to problems in sectors from energy to horticulture. We’re currently supporting a network of health care providers who will offer ordinary Kenyans low-cost, high-quality outpatient care. Most of the other companies we work with have revenue models that are simpler and, perhaps, lower risk than Facebook’s. Yet they can’t raise capital.

Investments in emerging markets like Kenya don’t get funding largely because our capital markets are weak. Entrepreneurs here have little access to the global pool of money—the investors of Silicon Valley or Wall Street, nor the amateur day traders flipping stocks over lunch. Local money tends to chase mega-malls and the slipshod apartment complexes you see rising in cities across the continent.

But those weak markets are the same reason investments in Africa offer such good returns. Companies often can’t finance the second-generation, highly productive investments they need. Imagine a clinic operating without an ultrasound machine, or a barley farm operating without a tractor. The fruit couldn’t be hanging lower. The first ultrasound and the first tractor are astronomically more productive investments than the furniture in the Facebook lobby.

Investing billions in assets that are not highly productive is normal—proof of human progress to be proud of. But it’s hard to make a productive investment in a capital-saturated economy. Financial markets learned this in 2008, when reality bit a generation of investors who binged on unwanted housing in the absence of better ideas. Facebook’s gaudy IPO reinforces this basic problem: The rich world is capital-saturated while the poor world has very little physical capital per member of the labor force.

So why isn’t the world investing in Africa? Part of the answer is that it is. The surprise of the last decade is how much opportunity there has been to invest in Africa, and how well Africa has weathered the recent financial storm. With growth rates around 5 percent annually, Kenya’s economy is expanding significantly faster than Western economies. Last year, private equity investors raised more than $600 million to invest in East Africa’s growth.

On the other hand, we are not past the sense that charity is the best way to send money to Africa. Aid-oriented grants and micro-loans are the world’s conventional offer to African entrepreneurs, and they are literally not taking care of business. The “middle market” in many emerging economies generates most new jobs, yet these small and mid-size enterprises are too big for the lauded microfinance revolution, and too small for traditional banks chasing real estate projects. The companies I work with don’t need $300—they need $300,000.

Another obstacle are continual fears about “risk”— a word often applied to earnest African businesses, but not to JP Morgan. A man I know has built a brand manufacturing lotions and cosmetics from local aloe vera plants, but because he’s based in the much-maligned Democratic Republic of Congo, it’s all but impossible for him to break through to investors and grow. Even companies in east Africa’s comparatively advanced tech scene have a hard time raising smaller amounts of capital. But they deserve the chance to be productive—remember, it only took $18,000 in capital to start Facebook.

Theory tells us capital should flow from capital-saturated countries to poor countries, where it will do more. My hope for the ever-flatter future is that people in rich countries begin to see that the companies who will best use their investment are not listed in New York. Maybe there’s a social network for that. 

Illustration by Dylan C. Lathrop

Sleep Better: 4 Ways to Manipulate Your Melatonin Levels #30DaysofGOOD

Things are easier said than done, or so the old adage goes, and we couldn't agree more. That's why we do The GOOD 30-Day Challenge (#30DaysofGOOD), a monthly attempt to live better. Our challenge for May? Sleep better.

If you've already set a sleep schedule, optimized your bedroom, and tried some of the sleep apps on the market, take things a step further and start meddling with your melatonin. Melatonin is a hormone that's produced in the pineal gland and helps regulate your circadian rhythm. It's sometimes called the "hormone of darkness," because it's produced at night. Melatonin supplements were popular in the 1990s as a remedy for jetlag. Supplements still exist, but there are also a variety of natural ways to increase your melatonin levels.

Cherry juice: For a natural boost, try drinking cherry juice. A 2011 study by researchers at Northumbia University found that volunteers who drank cherry juice for a week experienced a roughly 15 percent jump in melatonin levels, which translated into less daytime napping, almost 30 minutes more sleep each night, and better-quality sleep.

Meditation: Research has also shown that meditation can boost melatonin levels. If you have a hard time falling asleep, consider spending 15 minutes before bed concentrating on your breathing and clearing your mind—it'll actually change your brain chemistry.

Tryptophan: The amino acid tryptophan is used to make melatonin. It's often credited (or blamed) for the post-Thanksgiving dinner coma. Indeed, tryptophan is abundant in turkey, but also in other poultry, dairy, fish, and eggs. Consider a glass of milk before bed.

Supplements: There is also a wide variety of over-the-counter melatonin supplements available. There are pills you can buy in drug stores, of course, but also newfangled products like Lazy Larry "supplement squares," which try to tap into the market for marijuana brownies. These products exist in a legal grey area and aren't without their drawbacks, though, so read up before scarfing one down.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user D H Wright

Sampar Age-Antidote Eye Rule: Rule in Favor

There are factors that inevitably age the skin around the eye. Too many factors, in fact: Dermo-contractions, skin-slackening, dehydration, microcirculation, and urban pollution. Eye Rule by Sampar works to fight all these, with enriched formulation with the double-whammy power of swiveling roller-ball action. It increases circulation, and enhances the effectiveness of the anti-aging agents by penetrating deep into the dermis. This rolling action irons out wrinkles; in time, it will lift the eyes. And for immediate effect, there’s a cooling agent to offer freshness, which is especially good when you are tired (hungover and need to look good?).

Sampar’s roller has oils and peptides we’re all familiar with, but it’s also got Adenosine which reduces Dermo-contraction, so you don’t wrinkle as much when you smile and make faces. It’s like a mini-Botox treatment! The formula’s antioxidant shield is a complex of three ingredients: Shea Butter serum, mint endorphin, and pro-biotic sugar. Sounds crazy, but it’s all good for looking awake and energized.

Thankfully, there’s button at the end that releases the right amount of product onto the roller-ball. Just use circular motions to massage it all in, moving from the inner-eye to under the eye, then make a complete circle all the way around the lids. Be sure to give extra love to those wrinkles and prone-to-wrinkle areas. Finish the process off by tapping the stick lightly with your fingers to make sure everything is being absorbed.

I especially recommend storing in fridge – it’s great for waking up tired eyes at a moment’s notice. On Amazon for $94.44.

Companies Value Internships, So Why Don’t They Hire Interns?

As recently as the 1980s, internships were uncommon and certainly not required for entry-level jobs. Nowadays, they represent a rite of passage for three-quarters of the 10 million students enrolled in America’s four-year colleges and universities. And according to a recent study by Millennial Branding, Inc., the lion's share of employers expect students to have internships on their résumés; 91 percent of the 225 employers surveyed think students should have between one and two internships before they graduate.

Yet the study found that half of those employers haven't hired any interns in the past six months, revealing a fundamental disconnect between internship theory and practice. A couple decades ago, interns may have expected to at least get hired by the same company for whom they gave up their summers. But today, some companies apparently only want interns in the abstract.

The study's methods aren't exactly air-tight; the companies who answered the survey are the only ones of the 100,000-plus companies in Millennial Branding's database that chose to respond to the survey. And not all employers—nor all internships—are created equal. It would be helpful to parse out the industries or companies most likely to hire interns, or the ones who offer a stipend rather than demand students to work for free. (There have been efforts, like this 2010 CollegeGrad.com survey, to spotlight companies who routinely offer full-time jobs to interns.) There has been very little research done on interns, save Ross Perlin's 2011 book, Intern Nation and a few sketchy surveys like this one. But college career centers, especially the ones requiring their students to complete internships for credit, should be actively tracking the companies who reward their interns for their time.

Image courtesy of Millennial Branding.

The Past 12 Months Were the Warmest Ever Recorded

Data released yesterday shows that the last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded in the United States. In Texas, the droughts were so bad that some towns ran out of water. Wildfires burned millions of acres of dried-out land. In the Northeast, winter never really came. February felt like spring.

Some of this warm weather can be traced to a weather pattern called La Niña. And most climate scientists are still reluctant to blame climate change for causing any particular weather event. But consider the context: This is the 326th month in a row that temperatures across the nation have been above average. The last time a month's temperatures fell below global averages was February 1985.

Averages are tricky, of course. They don’t reflect our day-to-day experiences of basking in the sun, shivering in the wind, or staring at the window at freak snow storms. And these experiences—our decisions about how many layers to wear and whether to bike or take the bus to work—have a strong influence on our beliefs about climate change. It probably won’t be quite as warm over the next 12 months as it was in the last 12, although the temperatures from January through April are the highest on record again. And if the coming summer happens to be mild, if snow falls in massive quantities next winter, some of the people who are starting to worry about climate change will breath a sigh of relief and stop worrying quite so much.

But variation from day to day or even year to year masks the longer trend: the planet is steadily getting warmer. Climate scientist James Hansen, who began calling attention to the dangers of climate change before anyone even knew to think about it, is confident that there’s a connection between some of the heat waves we’re seeing now and global climate change. As he and a couple of colleagues wrote in a recent paper, “There is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010… it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.” And that means that hottest year ever won't be the hottest ever for very long.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user black18shirts

What’s Killing the Electric Car? The Price of Batteries

At last week's Electric Vehicle Symposium in Los Angeles, a consortium of automakers from the United States and Europe unveiled a speedy new standardized charger for electric vehicles.

Under the old system, a full charge would take two to three hours; with the new system, put together by Big Three American automakers Ford, GM and Chrysler and their German counterparts—Audi, BMW, Daimler, Porsche and Volkswagen—a vehicle could charge in as little as 15 or 20 minutes, while you’re in the grocery store or the doctor’s office.

The initiative represents a step toward an electrified automotive future, akin to agreeing on standard-sized railroad tracks to extend rail networks across the country. But there’s still a major obstacle standing in the way of mass adoption of electric cars: battery technology, and the price that comes with it.

Ford, which plans to have 10 to 20 percent of its products “electrified”—either completely electric or hybrid—by 2020, is rolling out its first all-electric vehicle, the Ford Focus EV, this spring, in conjunction with the charger announcement. 

The standard Focus, a sporty little hatchback, is being marketed to young people and retails new at $18,300. The electric Focus costs $39,950 before a $7,500 federal tax rebate and, in California, a $2,500 tax credit. Even after the tax incentives and the gas savings, that's’s still a big difference in price for fairly standard car, and that’s reflected in the company’s modest sales expectations—they hope to see about 2,000 roll off the lots this year in California, New Jersey, and New York.

With a 76-mile range on one charge, the Focus EV goes further than its main competitor, the Nissan Leaf. It's fun to drive and comes with a bevvy of unique features, including a heads-up display that turns efficient driving into a game and a mobile app that lets you analyze your driving habits and control your car from afar. But it’s still hard to imagine many people purchasing it at that price.

Mike Tinskey, Ford’s director of global vehicle electrification, says the rollout is something of an experiment for Ford—a chance to figure out what the market wants. Tinskey expects that EV buyers will be regular commuters who seek out the car to save money on gas in the long term, adopt the next wave of auto technology, or just do right by the environment. “Not one technology will fit all customers,” Tinskey says. “We should have everything from a battery electric vehicle to a plug-in hybrid to a hybrid to an advanced gasoline engine, and offer that across all of our products.”

Still, he admits that the price point might prevent people, especially young people, from buying the car. He notes that Ford’s standard offerings include a lot of in-car entertainment technology the company believes will resonate with young buyers, but that demographic also is interested in environmental ethics and populated with early tech adopters. “We really need to focus on getting the cost down, and we almost have a myopic view of continuing to do that,” he says.

While Ford is focused on doing that across a range of fronts, from manufacturing innovation to partnerships with electric utilities, the biggest obstacle Tinskey sees for Ford and other automakers is battery cost. Car battery technology has developed quickly in recent years, but balancing longer-lasting, faster-charging, lighter batteries with price is a tricky process. While part of the problem is technological, Tinskey points to economics as the central challenge. “In my opinion, it’s scale—how do you prime the pump?” he says. “You really need to get scale at these battery plant manufacturing facilities.”

That’s part of the logic behind standardizing public charging infrastructure—priming the pump to get more people on the road in EVs, which in turn will spur further innovation and cost-savings in the industry. “We could have a breakthrough, but we’re not planning for a breakthrough, we’re just assuming that we’re going to continue to be able to get costs out, and the next generation will be more affordable than this generation,” Tinskey says.

There are 1,000 engineers at Ford working on the problem, he says. With many thousands more at other companies and labs around the world, we may get a truly competitive green car yet.

Photo courtesy of Ford

Companies Value Internships, So Why Don’t They Hire Interns?

As recently as the 1980s, internships were uncommon and certainly not required for entry-level jobs. Nowadays, they represent a rite of passage for three-quarters of the 10 million students enrolled in America’s four-year colleges and universities. And according to a recent study by Millennial Branding, Inc., the lion's share of employers expect students to have internships on their résumés; 91 percent of the 225 employers surveyed think students should have between one and two internships before they graduate.

Yet the study found that half of those employers haven't hired any interns in the past six months, revealing a fundamental disconnect between internship theory and practice. A couple decades ago, interns may have expected to at least get hired by the same company for whom they gave up their summers. But today, some companies apparently only want interns in the abstract.

The study's methods aren't exactly air-tight; the companies who answered the survey are the only ones of the 100,000-plus companies in Millennial Branding's database that chose to respond to the survey. And not all employers—nor all internships—are created equal. It would be helpful to parse out the industries or companies most likely to hire interns, or the ones who offer a stipend rather than demand students to work for free. (There have been efforts, like this 2010 CollegeGrad.com survey, to spotlight companies who routinely offer full-time jobs to interns.) There has been very little research done on interns, save Ross Perlin's 2011 book, Intern Nation and a few sketchy surveys like this one. But college career centers, especially the ones requiring their students to complete internships for credit, should be actively tracking the companies who reward their interns for their time.

Image courtesy of Millennial Branding.

The Past 12 Months Were the Warmest Ever Recorded

Data released yesterday shows that the last 12 months were the hottest ever recorded in the United States. In Texas, the droughts were so bad that some towns ran out of water. Wildfires burned millions of acres of dried-out land. In the Northeast, winter never really came. February felt like spring.

Some of this warm weather can be traced to a weather pattern called La Niña. And most climate scientists are still reluctant to blame climate change for causing any particular weather event. But consider the context: This is the 326th month in a row that temperatures across the nation have been above average. The last time a month's temperatures fell below global averages was February 1985.

Averages are tricky, of course. They don’t reflect our day-to-day experiences of basking in the sun, shivering in the wind, or staring at the window at freak snow storms. And these experiences—our decisions about how many layers to wear and whether to bike or take the bus to work—have a strong influence on our beliefs about climate change. It probably won’t be quite as warm over the next 12 months as it was in the last 12, although the temperatures from January through April are the highest on record again. And if the coming summer happens to be mild, if snow falls in massive quantities next winter, some of the people who are starting to worry about climate change will breath a sigh of relief and stop worrying quite so much.

But variation from day to day or even year to year masks the longer trend: the planet is steadily getting warmer. Climate scientist James Hansen, who began calling attention to the dangers of climate change before anyone even knew to think about it, is confident that there’s a connection between some of the heat waves we’re seeing now and global climate change. As he and a couple of colleagues wrote in a recent paper, “There is no need to equivocate about the summer heat waves in Texas in 2011 and Moscow in 2010… it is nearly certain that they would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.” And that means that hottest year ever won't be the hottest ever for very long.

Photo via (cc) Flickr user black18shirts

What’s Killing the Electric Car? The Price of Batteries

At last week's Electric Vehicle Symposium in Los Angeles, a consortium of automakers from the United States and Europe unveiled a speedy new standardized charger for electric vehicles.

Under the old system, a full charge would take two to three hours; with the new system, put together by Big Three American automakers Ford, GM and Chrysler and their German counterparts—Audi, BMW, Daimler, Porsche and Volkswagen—a vehicle could charge in as little as 15 or 20 minutes, while you’re in the grocery store or the doctor’s office.

The initiative represents a step toward an electrified automotive future, akin to agreeing on standard-sized railroad tracks to extend rail networks across the country. But there’s still a major obstacle standing in the way of mass adoption of electric cars: battery technology, and the price that comes with it.

Ford, which plans to have 10 to 20 percent of its products “electrified”—either completely electric or hybrid—by 2020, is rolling out its first all-electric vehicle, the Ford Focus EV, this spring, in conjunction with the charger announcement. 

The standard Focus, a sporty little hatchback, is being marketed to young people and retails new at $18,300. The electric Focus costs $39,950 before a $7,500 federal tax rebate and, in California, a $2,500 tax credit. Even after the tax incentives and the gas savings, that's’s still a big difference in price for fairly standard car, and that’s reflected in the company’s modest sales expectations—they hope to see about 2,000 roll off the lots this year in California, New Jersey, and New York.

With a 76-mile range on one charge, the Focus EV goes further than its main competitor, the Nissan Leaf. It's fun to drive and comes with a bevvy of unique features, including a heads-up display that turns efficient driving into a game and a mobile app that lets you analyze your driving habits and control your car from afar. But it’s still hard to imagine many people purchasing it at that price.

Mike Tinskey, Ford’s director of global vehicle electrification, says the rollout is something of an experiment for Ford—a chance to figure out what the market wants. Tinskey expects that EV buyers will be regular commuters who seek out the car to save money on gas in the long term, adopt the next wave of auto technology, or just do right by the environment. “Not one technology will fit all customers,” Tinskey says. “We should have everything from a battery electric vehicle to a plug-in hybrid to a hybrid to an advanced gasoline engine, and offer that across all of our products.”

Still, he admits that the price point might prevent people, especially young people, from buying the car. He notes that Ford’s standard offerings include a lot of in-car entertainment technology the company believes will resonate with young buyers, but that demographic also is interested in environmental ethics and populated with early tech adopters. “We really need to focus on getting the cost down, and we almost have a myopic view of continuing to do that,” he says.

While Ford is focused on doing that across a range of fronts, from manufacturing innovation to partnerships with electric utilities, the biggest obstacle Tinskey sees for Ford and other automakers is battery cost. Car battery technology has developed quickly in recent years, but balancing longer-lasting, faster-charging, lighter batteries with price is a tricky process. While part of the problem is technological, Tinskey points to economics as the central challenge. “In my opinion, it’s scale—how do you prime the pump?” he says. “You really need to get scale at these battery plant manufacturing facilities.”

That’s part of the logic behind standardizing public charging infrastructure—priming the pump to get more people on the road in EVs, which in turn will spur further innovation and cost-savings in the industry. “We could have a breakthrough, but we’re not planning for a breakthrough, we’re just assuming that we’re going to continue to be able to get costs out, and the next generation will be more affordable than this generation,” Tinskey says.

There are 1,000 engineers at Ford working on the problem, he says. With many thousands more at other companies and labs around the world, we may get a truly competitive green car yet.

Photo courtesy of Ford

Why Can’t Doctors Be More Like Dogs?

I was sitting in the doctor’s office – 20 minutes early for an appointment that would be a half-hour late, thumbing through a six-month old magazine, when I came across an article on the amazing things being done with service dogs.

As I read about how these fantastic animals are changing and saving lives, it occurred to me that these canine helpers have a lot to teach the medical establishment. At the time, I was not exactly a fan of said establishment. I was waiting to see a third dermatologist about a problem the first two dermatologists couldn’t agree that I had.

I had used a cosmetic scrub — very nice, it smelled like brown sugar. Then I used a sunblock. Then I developed a nasty rash. Then the glands on the side of my neck turned into big, red, itchy lumps. My throat burned, and I had trouble swallowing. Prescription: steroid cream.

After a notable lack of improvement, I went to dermatologist number two, who said the cream, for what I had, was like telling someone with a brain tumor to take two aspirin. Big confidence builder, to say the least. Prescription: continue with the cream, but also add ingestible steroids.

I asked number two if there was any connection between my problem and the sunblock I had used. The rapid-fire response was “No” and “impossible.” My still swollen glands, she said, were simply a consequence of the skin condition.

So, with visions of getting arms like Barry Bonds, I was off to the pharmacy for more steroids, noticing on the way out that the sunblock I had used was for sale in the dermatologist’s office.

Feeling worse by the day, I tried dermatologist number three, who said the sunblock in combination with the scrub could, indeed, cause my reaction. But again, the gland problem was likely a consequence of the skin problem.

By this time, the sides of my neck looked like my body had been invaded by an alien life form. So I went to an internist, who finally and correctly deduced that the gland problem was being caused by a nasty upper respiratory infection. As for the dermatitis, he said, “I can refer you to a dermatologist for that.”

I know doctors save lives. I know articles like this get your face posted in the break rooms of medical offices across the country. But I still can’t help thinking about service dogs.

There are dogs trained to alert the deaf when the phone rings, help unfreeze Parkinson’s victims with the stimulating touch of a paw, turn on lights and pick up dropped objects for the paralyzed.

Some amazing work is being done to train dogs to alert owners to impending health problems. Seizure dogs can recognize a change in body chemistry 15 to 45 minutes before the onset of an epileptic seizure. Dogs are being trained to recognize low blood sugar in diabetics, even awakening from a sound sleep to, in turn, wake the owner. I know of one family where one trained dog shuttles constantly between two diabetic children.

The difference between these dogs and doctors, besides medical school, internships, residencies, proud parents and opposable thumbs, is total and absolute concentration on the patient. For service dogs, it’s what they do, why they’re here, how they’re trained. Their role in life is not about treatments. It’s about outcomes.

I know that is a lot to ask of doctors in a world where medicine is a business and third-party payers make the rules. Still, thinking back on my needless ordeals, these wonderful animals have something to share.

For more by this author, Peggy Drexler, PhD, author of “Our Fathers, Ourselves: Daughters, Fathers, And The Changing American Family,” visit www.peggydrexler.com.

Photo credit: green kozi