“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhuman”*…
Why are health care costs so high in the U.S.? Harvard public health scholar John McDonough chalks it up to a “wrong turn” in 1980, and the consequences that have ensued…
“What happened in 1980?” John McDonough wondered every time he looked at the numbers.
After 1980, U.S. healthcare became far more expensive than care in peer nations such as France and Germany. In 1980, the U.S. was at the top of a tight pack of industrialized democracies. After that, the cost of American healthcare soared. By 2024, U.S. spending as a percentage of GDP was about 50 percent higher than that of peer nations.
“In the early 1980s, we can see a significant upsurge,” McDonough, professor of the practice of public health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in an interview. “All of a sudden, we jumped from the rest of the crowd and were now in a category by ourselves. Over the following 40, 45 years, the distance kept growing.”
McDonough knew what he could rule out: Any suggestion that Americans get more for their money. On the contrary, millions of U.S. citizens are uninsured; out-of-pocket costs and medical debt are high; and even people with insurance have trouble getting appointments. Meanwhile, physician satisfaction is low, leading to early retirements and migration to nontraditional models like concierge care.
When the pandemic hit, McDonough had time for a deep dive into the issue. This month, after a five-year “labor of love,” he’s presenting his answer in a new book, America’s Wrong Turn: US Health Care in the Neoliberal Era [here]. In it, McDonough links increases in healthcare costs to a new political and economic era dominated by a belief in an unfettered free market, tax cuts, deregulation, privatization, smaller government, increased immigration, and free trade.
This trend in U.S. policy — “Reaganomics” before it became “neoliberalism” — included tax, spending, and regulatory overhauls instituted during President Ronald Reagan’s eight years in the White House. But McDonough, a Democrat who served 13 years in the Massachusetts House of Representatives, isn’t just interested in Reagan. Over the next 40 years, some presidents adhered to neoliberalism’s tenets but even those who didn’t were influenced by its deep penetration into the nation’s political and economic ecosystem, he says.
McDonough found a guide in the writings of Yale University political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who suggests that presidents should be measured by the durability and influence of their ideas and values well beyond their terms in office. Skowronek identified only five singular and decades-long eras in U.S. history, those of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
While Reagan was the first president to espouse neoliberal political and economic philosophy, the core ideas date back decades, fostered by Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, who became a key economic adviser to Reagan.
“There was a New Deal-FDR era between 1933 and 1980,” McDonough said. “The neoliberal era that Reagan kicked off saw itself as the corrective to the pro-government prior era. Important dynamic consistencies persisted among Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and even Barack Obama. There were sets of beliefs with a Republican conservative flavor and with a Democratic flavor that were surprisingly consistent.”
When describing the U.S. healthcare system under neoliberalism, McDonough, who worked with U.S. senators on the Affordable Care Act, cites several major effects, chief among them a permissiveness toward corporate mergers and consolidations that reduces competition, and an unleashing of private equity.
Since the 1980s, U.S. healthcare has become increasingly consolidated, dominated by fewer and larger organizations. The two largest dialysis centers have 92 percent of the U.S. market, for example, while the two largest providers of intravenous solutions control 75 percent of the market. The two largest syringe manufacturers have a 69 percent market share.
Consolidation extends to physician and hospital markets, with 90 percent of hospital markets, 65 percent of physician specialist markets, and 74 percent of health insurance markets considered highly concentrated, McDonough writes.
One argument for larger organizations is the potential for cost saving through both efficiencies and a greater ability to negotiate savings, but the cost-saving record of larger organizations in healthcare is poor, McDonough says. He cites a 2022 RAND study that indicates that price increases of between 3 percent and 65 percent accompany hospital mergers.
Private equity’s focus on generating profits to maximize shareholder value conflicts with improving patient care, McDonough argues. When private equity firms target businesses, enhance their operations, and quickly resell them at a profit, critics say the value extraction from the deals creates harmful operating cuts and dismantling rather than business improvement.
McDonough reviews other key forces in the evolution of U.S. healthcare in recent decades, including fragmentation leading to high administrative costs, low spending on public health and preventive care, unequal access and uneven quality of care, and cost shifts onto consumers via copays, coinsurance and other cost-sharing mechanisms, which result in high levels of medical debt.
McDonough offers prescriptions, but recognizes that change will require political buy-in for things such as strengthened antitrust action to break up megacompanies and stronger regulation of prescription drug pricing, both difficult in an era of sharply divided politics. Government, along with industry, needs to reaffirm a commitment to patient care as the center of its efforts, he says, while also foregrounding equity, access, affordability, and population health.
“The damage to U.S. health and medical care from the 40-year neoliberal era has left considerable harm for patients and consumers, for medical workers at all levels, and for public/population health,” McDonough said. “It will take radical action to reinvigorate the values and principles of our health system that have been lost and eroded. An essential way to do this is to understand how we got to this position in the first place.”…
How we got here and how to respond: “How to fix U.S. healthcare? ‘Radical action’,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
For a case in point, see David Oks‘ “Why American ambulance rides are so expensive” (source of the image at the top).
And for a more straightforward, but somewhat more “radical” prescription than McDonough’s, see: “Universal Health Coverage Could Save $1 Trillion and 114,000 Lives Every Year, Yale Study Projects,” from the Yale School of Public Health: “A single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and still cost $1 trillion less than the system it would replace…”
Finally: this is the third (R)D in a row that focuses on (some of) the consequences of the unholy infection of government by business, largely in the U.S. (though, of course, we can see the phenomenon all over the world). The focus shifts with tomorrow’s post. But before we go, Dylan Riley‘s pithy diagnosis of “the chaotic obscenity of our current moment”: “The Thesis of Political Capitalism.”
* Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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As we actually make America healthy again, we might recall that it was on this date in 1793 that prominent Philadelphia physician (and Declaration of Independence signatory) Benjamin Rush alerted the city’s mayor that an epidemic of mosquito-borne yellow fever was fast emerging.
In the summer of that year, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, around 100 people were dying from the virus daily. Caring for the victims so strained public services that the local city government collapsed. Philadelphia was also the seat of the United States government at the time, but federal authorities simply evacuated the city in the face of the raging epidemic. Eventually, a cold front eliminated Philadelphia’s mosquito population, and the death toll fell to 20 per day by late October. By the time the epidemic ended, roughly 5,000 people had died.
Today, a vaccine prevents yellow fever in much of the world, though thousands of unvaccinated people still die every year from the disease.
“It’s very hard to buy a sports team and lose money.”*…
Just 14 months after agreeing to buy the controlling interest in the L.A. Lakers at a valuation of $10 billion, Mark Walter found himself in a spot of trouble and needed to sell. Joshua Kushner (who recently tried to buy a big stake in the World Cup) and Bob Iger stepped right up, and agreed to buy his share at a valuation of @$12.5 billion. Kushner is a bona fide billionaire; Iger is an almost-billionaire; together, their net worth is something like $6 billion. Under the NBA’s rules, Mr, Kushner’s investment vehicle, Thrive Eternal, cannot invest more than 20 percent in the Lakers; so, unless they get a waiver, it’s likely that Kushner and Iger will finance the balance of their purchase personally (and/or with funds from rich friends).
As Eben Novy-Williams observes, this transaction is just the latest in a long line of folks with relatively fresh fortunes buying into the big leagues…
Sports team sales tend to reflect what’s happening in the broader economy. During the dot-com boom, many of those newly-minted millionaires found their way to sports (Ted Leonsis, Mark Cuban, Paul Allen, Henry Samueli and John Moores). That gave way to the real estate boom, and those buyers followed (Stephen Ross, Stan Kroenke, Jimmy Haslam, the Lerners, the Wilfs). More recently, it’s been the finance, private equity and hedge fund titans (Josh Harris, Wes Edens, Marc Lasry, Tony Ressler, David Tepper, Tom Gores, the list goes on and on)… – source
And as the title quote (from Carlyle [and here] co-founder and Baltimore Orioles co-owner David Rubenstein) suggests, this make a very straightforward kind of mercenary sense– major professional sports franchises have historically outperformed traditional indexes like the S&P 500 over the long term. And it stands to reason: scarcity value, legal local monopolies, and lucrative media rights make for a heady brew.
In a recent Substack post, Derek Thompson takes stock of the situation. After his own review of the Lakers deal, he puts it into context…
… In an age of surging wealth inequality, where stock market valuations routinely outpace median income growth by surreal factors, there is a live debate over whether billionaires should exist at all. The strongest argument for their rightfulness is that some people amass ten-figure wealth by building companies; by working within free markets to invent new technologies that millions or billions of people choose to use; and by managing complex enterprises that create billions or trillions of dollars in consumer welfare and investor value. But even this steelman case for billionaires presents as a kind of taunting insult to what often passes for sports ownership today. Professional-sports ownership offers the already-impossibly-rich a unique opportunity to become vastly richer, not necessarily by working, building, inventing, or doing anything positive at all, but rather by merely sitting on top of an asset that American law has conspired to make absurdly scarce and luridly profitable.
A thought experiment. Imagine if a diabolical oligarchic elite wanted to build an efficient and low-risk machine for turning their already-elevated wealth into exospherically extreme wealth. What might such a devious group of self-serving plutocrats want?
- Unleash the forces of capitalism! you might think. But no, absolutely not. Capitalism is markets, and markets are ruthless. What you should want is legal permission to create a monopoly that builds a moat deep enough to keep all competition out. That way, you’ve got something much better than capitalism: artificial scarcity and pricing power without the risk of unwanted rivals.
- Get the government off your back! you might say. Wrong again. You know what’s nicer than getting the government off your back? Getting the government on your side. You should crave dependable government subsidies to pad your profits.
So say, for example, that you wanted to set up this money machine in American professional sports. Your devious plan: shield leagues from antitrust law so owners can enjoy monopoly profits; use that market power to extract money from local governments; and rewrite the tax code to hand sports owners special advantages.
Lo and behold, all of this exists…
[Thompson unpacks the particulars: sports leagues are basically legal oligopolies; labor law makes sports ownership even sweeter; sports stadiums have become legal ransom; and team-owner tax benefits put the cherry on top. He concludes…]
… People sometimes compare buying sports franchises to buying works of fine art—say, a Monet, a Calder, or a Rodin. In both cases, the simplest answer to the common question “Why is that thing worth so much?” is always “Because someone rich was willing to pay it.”
But there is an important difference between the factors that push up the value of Monet paintings and those of sports franchises. Think about why a Monet painting is so valuable. Setting aside the irresolvable debate about the ineffable nature of beauty and quality and artistic pleasure, the underlying fact is that a Monet painting is valuable because it was painted by Claude Monet, a famous individual who once lived, and is now dead. The finality and scarcity of the Impressionist oeuvre—the fact that one can buy a painting from Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series and not worry that he will paint 100 more tomorrow—is a function of his mortality. There is no scientific or technological means by which anyone can exhume and reanimate Monet’s skeleton, sit the zombie upright in a chair, hand him a paintbrush, an easel, and a cup of tea, and say, “Now that you’re all settled, I’d like 500 additions to the Rouen Cathedral series.”
But the scarcity of sports franchises emerges from the laws of mankind, not the laws of nature. It benefits from a set of rules, laws, and customs that we made up and that can be redrawn in a way that Rouen’s facade never will be.
I am not a fan of conspiracies, and I am not a socialist. But nothing makes me feel more socialist than the public, out-in-the-open conspiracy to buttress the value of sports assets, whose lush beneficiaries tend to be impossibly rich already. Solutions here are hard. Many fans like the weird, market-warping rules of professional sports, which often promote parity and competition and keep favorite players on long contracts; plus, I don’t think doubling the number of NBA or NFL teams is particularly desirable among most fans. But ameliorations are possible. Tax law could further restrict the ability to team owners to amortize. And honestly, I don’t know why some local governments shouldn’t own stakes in the professional sports teams that they often directly finance. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, and I’m sure that there would be some negative side effects of literally socializing the already-kinda-socialist dynamic of professional sports. But the status quo is vile enough to justify some experiments. What we have today is a handful of lucky, franchise-owning billionaires who get to sit at a poker table where every card they turn over has a face or an ace. I wouldn’t call it cheating. I wouldn’t call the legal structure of American sports cheating or corrupt. I would call it … the law. But the law is bad.
An out-in-the-open conspiracy to help a lucky few billionaires get much, much richer: “The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social.
For a peek at an Lakers ownership sideshow, see Giri Nathan‘s “The Buss Children Are Squabbling Over Their Remaining Lakers Stake.”
And for a different kind of context, see the source of the pull quote in the intro, “The Lakers Are a Massive Bet on AI Disruption,” in which Novy-Williams suggests that Kushner is “buying the Lakers because sports are relatively insulated from the economic havoc looming from the rest of his portfolio. That’s not a hedge against AI, it’s a doubling down.”
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As we play ball, we might recall that it was on this date in 1920 that the owners of the Canton Bulldogs, Akron Pros, Cleveland Indians, and Dayton Triangles met in Canton, Ohio, and formed the American Professional Football Association– which proceeded to add teams and, in 1922, renamed itself the National Football League– the NFL.
At the outset, the APFA/NFL was very different from the behemoth it would become:
This new organization did not resemble a league as we would know it today, but was more like a professional association whose sole functions were membership and articulation of some general principles. Perhaps the best modern-day analogy would be a weak form of the NCAA. As can be imagined, the league office had no influence on anybody. It set no schedules, leaving each team to arrange its own slate. – Pro Football: The Early Years: An Encyclopedic History, 1895–1959
Still, there were hints even then of what was to come. The owners who created the “league” agreed to introduce a salary cap for the teams, to refrain from signing players under contract with another team, and to hold a league championship competition.
“The lie has become not just a moral category but a pillar of the State”*…
A bracing essay from Adam McKay (director of Don’t Look Up, Vice, and The Big Short, among many other films), arguing that our acceptance of assurances that we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperature record…
Lies are a lot like gourds. They come in hundreds of different varieties, sizes, and bulbous, twisty shapes. Some are off-puttingly spiked and prickly, while others remind us of fall childhood memories.
Some lies, if prepared correctly like squash or pumpkin, can appear delicious and irresistible, concealing a dark reality: “I can’t believe you’re not a model! For five thousand dollars I can photograph you so you have a portfolio.” The central aim of most lies is to avoid consequences. When an untruth is especially desperate and self-serving, it can be unintentionally hilarious: “Yes I tried marijuana… but I did not inhale.”
Embezzling money or murdering someone for the insurance pay-out are part of a phylum of lies that cross into serious criminality. These deceptions’ sphere of influence often stays fairly localized. But sometimes covering up the initial lie can spawn lots of other lies that spread and spread, like with Watergate or Bernie Madoff. What started as a little decorative Thanksgiving-gourd-sized lie suddenly becomes larger and quite ugly. This family of lies strives to not only avoid consequences, but to gain status and resources, another common end game of many deceptions.
And then there are the large society-wide lies: hulking distortions and misrepresentations watered and tended to by leaders, mass media, culture, and industry.
This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions have led throughout modern history to wars, mass death, societal collapse, and the theft of humanity’s great treasures. “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.” “Oxycontin isn’t addictive because it’s time-released.” These county-fair, blue ribbon-winning prevarications tend to be driven by a myriad of short-term incentives, irrational manipulated fears, unexamined assumptions, convenient blind spots, and of course… the desire to avoid consequences and expand status and resources.
“People always pay their mortgages” became the half-true rallying cry used by Wall Street, news media, and politicians to collapse the world economy in 2007. Turns out when you change lending rules to feed an unregulated derivatives market by giving mortgages to people who can’t pay them… they don’t. “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction” (along with the subvariations on the central lie—“We want to bring democracy,” “If you don’t support the troops, you support the terrorists,” “Saddam orchestrated 9/11,” etc) killed a million people, devastated the entire nation of Iraq, and in many ways also gutted the United States, all while enriching oil companies, weapons manufacturers, big banks, juicing TV ratings, and expanding the power of the Bush/Cheney presidency.
However, there is one type of rare, gargantuan, towering lie that makes all the other mass lies throughout human history seem like frightened, scurrying, little adorable fibs.
It is a lie told worldwide by hundreds of thousands of institutions, elected officials, many universities, legacy news, some large non-profits and eventually—as the deception entered mainstream culture—even by ourselves, to ourselves, every single moment of every day. It is a constantly growing gourd that even as a baby back in the 1970s was the size of three aircraft carriers. These days it is so massive it is almost easier to refer to what isn’t part of it (Disneyland, a BLT, that green croc by the side of the highway) than what is.
This massive lie can best be summed up as “when it comes to climate change… we have more time.”
To be clear, we are not talking about the kind of total climate denial one would find on the extremist, lunatic fringe inhabited by the likes of Alex Jones or the current U.S. President. And we’re not referring to cartoonish hucksters and “climate skeptics” like Joe Rogan or Jordan Peterson.
Polling shows only 14.8 percent of Americans deny the basic sixth grade science behind global warming. To put that in perspective, as much as 10 percent of the population still believes the Earth is flat.
No, the monstrous, misshapen garden colossus lie we’re referring to is subscribed to by most of the U.S., has stopped and slowed climate action far more than outright denial, and keeps growing and growing. Every day this deception whispers seductively in the ears of mankind: “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.”
Less embarrassing than “climate change is a Chinese hoax,” but every bit as unscientific and ridiculous, it is the preferred lie of the ruling class, mainstream news media, and corporations.
Sir David King—former science advisor to the United Kingdom, professor at Oxford and then Cambridge, winner of too many awards to list and as establishment as they come—was quoted as saying that what we do over the next three to four years will determine the fate of humankind.
He said this… in 2021…
[McKay unpacks a chilling variety of examples of “the lie” in action, contrasting government/media/corporate messages with the reality to which the )ostensibly) refer…]
… Still have doubts? If you do, I don’t blame you. We live in a consumer culture hammering us daily with triggering political proclamations, sales pitches, and clickbait designed to spike engagement responses in the brain. “Immigrants are coming for your way of life!” “This new SUV is the best ever!” “Great White Shark Eats Porn Star!” Most of it is misleading, in one way or another, so there’s a natural tendency to assume that “Planet about to boil!” might be too.
But Big Oil and its PR agencies know this, and they’ve weaponized the healthy skepticism we’ve developed as a survival mechanism against those voices speaking the truth about the urgent state of the climate.
After all, who are you going to believe? The New York Times, an outlet famous for downplaying climate urgency, or some weird scientist saying crazy things? Even when a profession famous for dead-eyed, bottom-line risk assessment like insurance actuaries releases a statement about how serious the situation is, corporate news media turns it into what people used to call a “below the fold story,” framing it as just another minor environmental item—not headline news.
In service of the Great Lie, the government of the United Kingdom even tried to bury a climate report from its own intelligence agency before it was leaked. To my knowledge there aren’t many spies being called tree huggers, unless they’re undercover of course. But the MI5 and MI6 are clear-eyed about the danger that’s coming. The report warned that “global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”
No one wants to eat a raw pumpkin. It looks like a Dr. Seuss character’s brain, is full of seeds, and has no real taste. But like with any good lie, when the right sugar, spices, a buttery crust, and time in the oven is added, pumpkin pie becomes a cherished classic.
The same thing happens with the climate lie. The financial markets, massive oil companies, the banks that finance them, the travel industry, car companies, your career and job security, the people you’re having dinner with who don’t want to be bummed out, all of these incentives and forces don’t want you to know you are eating a big, weird gourd.
And as long as we go with their mendacious flow, hundreds of millions, and then billions will die well before “Net Zero by 2050” or “our great grandkids’ future” arrive. Because we are out of time. And we need to get to work immediately. There are a million things to do…
As Pope John Paul II said, “An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie, for an excuse is a lie guarded.”
Eminently worth reading in full: “The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate,” from @ghostpanther.bsky.social in @currentaffairs.bsky.social.
Oh, and meantime: “U.S. Declared An Energy Emergency, Then Paid $4 Billion For Less Energy.”
* Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
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As we face up, we might spare a thought for Blaise Pascal; he died on this date in 1662. A French mathematician, physicist, theologian, and inventor (e.g., the first digital calculator, the barometer, the hydraulic press, and the syringe), his commitment to empiricism (“experiments are the true teachers which one must follow in physics”) pitted him against his contemporary René “cogito, ergo sum” Descartes– and was foundational in the acceleration of the scientific/rationalist commitment to measurement (and the conclusions/actions they dictated).
Relevantly to McKay’s piece, Pascal also advanced the philosphical argument we know as “Pascal’s Wager.” While he posed the exercise as a life-defining gamble regarding the belief in the existence of God, we can easily transpose it to apply to climate change action:
Pascal contends that a rational person should adopt a lifestyle consistent with the existence of God and should strive to believe in God. The reasoning for this stance involves the potential outcomes: if God does not exist, the believer incurs only finite losses, potentially sacrificing certain pleasures and luxuries; if God does exist, the believer stands to gain immeasurably, as represented for example by an eternity in Heaven in Abrahamic tradition, while simultaneously avoiding boundless losses associated with an eternity in Hell. –source
If the threat of climate change is, as “the lies” suggest, real but distant, then immediate action only costs us some short-term sacrifice. But if that threat is imminent, immediate action could preserve our way of life and the prospect of an improving future for us and our children and their children… while inaction is likely to end in utter disaster.
“The food of the true revolutionary is the red pepper”*…
… and a favorite of many others. Hannah Bentley explores the growing number of extreme enthusiasts– chiliheads– who are competing across the globe, devouring millions of Scoville units, and fighting off agonizing capsaicin cramps in the process…
“I’m not like normal people,” declares Stephen Curgan, better known in the chilli-eating world as Fiery Redd. “Not many people can say they’ve achieved world status at something.”
The 37-year-old corporate engineering manager from South Carolina currently holds the League of Fire’s (LoF) World Champion Belt Title – the highest honour in competitive chilli [the more common spelling of “chili” in the UK] eating. Last March, he travelled to Cape Town, South Africa and beat Gary ‘Scorpion Slayer’ Conar, revelling in the rapturous applause as he hoisted the red-trimmed leather belt above his head.
Achieving such a feat means enduring roughly 10 punishing rounds of chomping down on the hottest chillies on earth. Bouts usually begin with Carolina Reapers – which measure around 1.8 million Scoville Heat Units (roughly 300 times hotter than a jalapeño) – before escalating to even more brutal chillies like Pepper X (over 2 million SHU), and sometimes spoonfuls of concentrated chilli extract reaching as high as 16 million SHU.
During a match, competitors consume around 50 superhot chillies, many of which aren’t readily available to the public because of how dangerously potent they are. And to break a tie, the contest ends in a speed round, where whoever wolfs down the most peppers is hailed the winner. The LoF is the sport’s governing body, sanctioning professional matches and maintaining an international ranking system…
… But the sport comes with a serious occupational hazard: capsaicin cramps. Capsaicin, the compound responsible for a chilli’s heat, binds to pain receptors throughout the digestive tract, triggering violent muscle spasms as the human body tries to cope with what it interprets as a threat.
Competitors have compared the pain to ranging from a heart attack to childbirth, with each successive chilli only escalating the intensity. “I’ve broken my femur before,” Stephen says, with subtle terror flashing across his eyes, “but those cramps are the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.”
To stave off the inevitable reckoning, Stephen – like all pro athletes – sticks to a strict nutrition plan, lining his stomach with “lots and lots of mashed potatoes” before every competition. “I need something heavy and starchy to clog the pipes and hold those cramps off for as long as possible.”
And as an extra precaution, once that final pepper has been choked down, competitors scatter to the nearest bin or bathroom to make themselves sick, expelling the capsaicin from their systems and hopefully shortening the hours of agony that may follow. That’s assuming the chillies didn’t make a surprise reappearance on stage – vomiting means instant disqualification…
… “I really love the psychological aspect of the sport,” Stephen explains. “It shows you can achieve anything you set your mind to. I think pepper eating is a good way to test yourself and see how well you can set the physical aside and maintain focus.”…
… This show of “mental fortitude” is one of the reasons Shahina Waseem, the undefeated 97-time UK Chilli Queen, co-founded the League of Fire alongside her partner Paul Ouro and fellow British competitor Matt Tangent. After outgrowing the previously limited competition circuit, she wanted to build the chilli-eating scene into something bigger than simply novelty entertainment at food festivals.
Since its launch in 2019, the LoF has expanded internationally, hosting competitions across four continents, attracting sponsors and bringing together chilli growers, craft hot sauce makers and competitive eaters under a simple ethos: everyone is respected, recognised and welcome…
The League of Fire: “Inside the searing, strangely wholesome world of competitive chili eating,” from @huckmag.com.
Pair with: “All Day I Dream Of Curry Fries“
* Mao Zedong (quoted in an article on the history of fiery peppers in Chinese cuisine)
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As we turn up the heat, we might celebrate peppers in one of their natural habitats, noting that today is National Fajita Day. While the marque ingredients are chicken or steak, sweet peppers, and onions, spicy peppers are the key…
“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”*…
First, internet search, then AI– we live in an age of ever-easier answers. But, of course, that bounty comes with two issues; most obviously, can we trust the answers we get? But as important as that is, it’s secondary to the other issue: what do we lose when we “outsource” the research? As Ben Franklin is reputed to have said (though it seems likelier to be a quote from he Xunzi, the works of Xun Kuang, a Chinese Confucian philosopher who lived the 4th century BC), “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
Librarian Hana Lee Goldin is here to help, with an approach to building a map of where knowledge lives, and advice on how to find our way through it…
Suppose we want to understand why a freeway was built through a particular neighborhood and what happened to the people who lived there afterward. A search engine can surface articles about the project, while a chatbot can summarize those articles into one response. Neither interface necessarily reveals the full range of places where information about that history may exist. City planning records may explain how officials chose the route, while census tables can show how the neighborhood changed. A local archive may preserve residents’ letters or photographs from before construction, while later scholarship can connect that history to broader patterns of transportation policy and displacement.
Finding those materials involves more than searching for the right words because different kinds of information are organized and made discoverable in different ways. A library catalog contains structured records for books, journals, media, digital resources, and other materials, and it may also link to or include records for archival collections. An archive may organize thousands of records according to the person or institution that created or accumulated them, then describe groups of records rather than every individual document. A government data portal organizes measurements according to categories such as geography or reporting period, while a scholarly database helps us find research distributed across many publications. Each system is designed around different kinds of information and discovery, which means we may need to search each one differently.
That difference becomes easy to miss when many of these systems can be reached through the same general interfaces. A search engine can return a library record next to a government report, while an AI tool can synthesize information drawn from several kinds of sources into a single response. The access feels flattened even though the underlying information is still organized according to very different rules. When a search produces weak results, we may keep changing the keywords even though the larger problem is that we’re looking in the wrong place.
Before deciding what to search, then, we need to know what we’re trying to find. If we want to understand how the freeway route was approved, we need records of the decision-making process. If we want to know how the neighborhood’s population changed, we need measurements that allow us to compare the neighborhood before and after construction. Once we know what kind of information could answer each part of the question, we can ask who would have created or preserved that information and which research system is designed to help us find it.
What we need, then, is a way to see that larger research environment as a whole: the different kinds of places it contains, the roles those places play, and the paths that can carry a question from one to another. An atlas offers a model for doing that. An atlas can bring together different maps of the same territory, allowing us to see features and relationships that no single map can represent on its own.
From that model comes the Atlas of Learning, a framework for mapping the research environment itself. Instead of geographic territory, it maps where different kinds of information can be found, how those places and systems organize what they contain, and how we can move among them as a question develops. One part of the Atlas might show where original records are preserved, while another shows the systems through which published research can be discovered. Other parts can include places for structured learning or people whose expertise helps us find our way through systems we don’t yet know.
The routes among those parts are part of the Atlas too. A planning document may give us the formal name of an agency, while a scholarly article may give us a citation to an earlier source. An archival record may introduce the name of an organization whose records are preserved somewhere else. Those names, citations, institutions, and other clues allow one source to generate the next search.
The framework isn’t meant to contain every research resource that exists. It gives us a way to recognize different kinds of resources, understand what each can help us find, and see how one can lead toward another. As we discover new places and learn how to navigate them, we can add those destinations and routes to the Atlas ourselves.
Before so much of research converged onto a common screen, the form and setting of a resource often revealed what kind of knowledge we were entering: a card catalog described and located materials, a statistical yearbook gathered institutional measurements, and an archival collection placed us among the records of a person or organization. Those distinctions can become harder to see when a government report, library record, and generated response arrive through the same interface. Many parts of the research world can now be reached from the same screen, but that ease of access can make those parts look more interchangeable than they are.
The Atlas restores that larger view. Instead of presenting every resource as another result arriving through the same interface, it makes the different parts of the research environment visible in relation to one another. We can see which places are built for which kinds of questions and how a discovery in one part of the Atlas can open a route into another. As more of our information environment is encountered through common interfaces or generated responses, that layered view gives us back a sense of the terrain we’re moving through…
[Goldin unpacks the Atlas; explains how to find “routes” within it (and what to “pack” for the different “terrains” we will traverse); and offers a strategy for those occasions on which one finds oneself “stuck.” She concludes by explaining that, in fact, there is no one “master,” but rather a multiplicity of use-specific atlases…]
… An Atlas of Learning can begin whenever there is something we want to understand beyond a quick factual lookup. Each inquiry creates its own terrain because the places we need to visit depend on the question. A health question may take us through medical literature and public health agencies, while a historical question may lead toward archives, newspapers, or census records. The Atlas gives that particular inquiry a visible research environment of its own.
Because the Atlas is organized around a question, that question becomes the compass. It gives the research direction as new possibilities appear, helping us decide whether a newly discovered resource is relevant to what we’re trying to understand and what it might contribute to an answer. And it becomes the point we return to whenever the terrain grows more complicated, helping us recover our bearing and decide what to pursue next.
The working Atlas can be extremely lightweight. A spreadsheet, Notion page, mind map, document, or another information-management tool can all serve the same purpose. At minimum, we need the question, the research destinations that become relevant to answering it, and a brief note about what each can contribute. The form matters less than being able to look at the Atlas and see, at a glance, where this particular inquiry can go.
The Atlas represents the research terrain for a single question. It keeps the destinations connected to that question visible together, giving us a way to see the terrain as it develops and maintain our orientation within it. Something becomes part of the Atlas when it materially advances the inquiry, either by helping us answer the question or by opening a direction we may need to follow next. The result is a record of the sources and destinations that have become consequential to the research, rather than everything we happened to encounter along the way.
Building an Atlas gives us practice locating a question within a larger information environment and recognizing how different parts of that environment can help answer it. We also learn to follow connections as new territory appears and to find our bearings when the direction becomes uncertain. Taken together, those abilities form a kind of information literacy we can apply when we enter subjects we have never explored before.
With that practice, entering an unfamiliar subject becomes an act of orientation as much as discovery. We may begin with little sense of how knowledge about that subject is organized or where its records, research, and expertise reside, but we know that those structures are there to be found. As they come into view, the subject begins to acquire a geography of its own, one that we can learn to read even though we have never traveled through it before.
The Atlas of Learning is something we draw as each question opens a new research terrain around us. The destinations will change from one subject to the next, and the route will develop differently each time. What remains is the ability to look beyond the interface in front of us and see a larger world of places we can learn to navigate…
Mapping where knowledge lives: “The Atlas of Learning.”
And because we will continue to use online search in our research, this earlier piece from Goldin: “Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here’s How to Use It.“
* Zora Neale Hurston
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As we do the work, we might take caution from the story of Paul Kammerer; he was born on this date in 1880. A biologist, he claimed to have produced experimental evidence that acquired traits could be inherited. Almost all of Kammerer’s experiments involved forcing various amphibians to breed in environments that were radically different from their native habitat to demonstrate Lamarkian inheritance. (This is the idea that learning one acquires during one’s lifetime is passed on to that person’s offspring: e,g, if you play guitar, your children will have nimble fingers; each generation builds upon the past and continues to improve.)
Several scientists tried– and failed– to replicate the results of his most famous (and striking) findings, from his experiments with the mid-wife toad; and Kammerer was accused of fraud. Suffering depression at the time, he shot himself. Arthur Koestler’s 1971 book The Case of the Midwife Toad, argued that while Kammerer’s results were incorrect, he had been the victim of Nazi sympathizers at the University of Vienna, who’d tampered with his results. But most biologists believe that Kammerer was a fraud and even the others, that he misinterpreted the results of his experiments.
(That said, it is worth noting that, while Kammerer’s results remain tainted, the notion of heritable learning has (re-)gained some steam, through the work of geneticists like Barbara McClintock and epigeneticists.)
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