This week another large study added to the body of known cardiovascular benefits of eating almonds. Every ounce eaten daily was associated with a 3.5 percent decreased risk of heart disease ten years later. Almonds are already known to help with weight loss and satiety, help prevent diabetes, and potentially ameliorate arthritis, inhibit cancer-cell growth, and decrease Alzheimer's risk. A strong case could be made that almonds are, nutritionally, the best single food a person could eat.
Almonds recently overtook peanuts as the most-eaten "nut" (seed, technically) in the United States, and Americans now consume more than 10 times as many almonds as we did in 1965. The meteoric rise of the tree-nut is driven in part by vogue aversions to meat protein and to soy and dairy milks, and even by the unconscionable rise of the macaron. But the main popularity driver is almonds' increasingly indelible image as paragons of nutrition.
This week's research, led by the eminent David Jenkins, professor and research chair in nutrition and metabolism at the University of Toronto, suggests that in addition to almonds’ idyllic monounsaturated fats, the cardiac benefits may be due to vitamin E, fiber, antioxidant phytochemicals (phenols, flavonoids, proanthocyanidins, and phytosterols), or arginine—and that’s just a partial list of almondic virtues.
This follows a massive study released last fall from Harvard that found eating nuts decreased mortality rates by 20 percent, and it builds on Jenkins’ work done more than 10 years ago which suggested, in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, “Almonds used as snacks in the diets of hyperlipidemic subjects significantly reduce coronary heart disease risk factors.”
That's all wonderful, but coverage of almond-nutrition research necessarily affords a narrow vantage on health. It seems like every day someone asks me to dichotomize a health trend: good or bad. Almonds are a great example of why I'm terrible at doing that.
It was around the time of Jenkins' prior study, and amid the broader "actually, fat isn't categorically bad" movement in the U.S. that almonds really got traction. We eat about the same amounts of other nuts as we did decades ago, but almond consumption singularly soared. (Pistachios are on the rise, but they are nowhere near almonds.)
The only state that produces almonds commercially is California, where cool winter and mild springs let almond trees bloom. Eighty-two percent of the world’s almonds come from California. The U.S. is the leading consumer of almonds by far. California so controls the almond market that the Almond Board of California’s website is almonds.com. Its twitter handle is @almonds. (Almost everything it tweets is about almonds.)
California’s almonds constitute a lucrative multibillion dollar industry in a fiscally tenuous state that is also, as you know, in the middle of the worst drought in recent history. The drought is so dire that experts are considering adding a fifth level to the four-tiered drought scale. That's right: D5. But each almond requires 1.1 gallons of water to produce, as Alex Park and Julia Lurie at Mother Jones reported earlier this year, and 44 percent more land in California is being used to farm almonds than was 10 years ago.
That raises ecological concerns like, as NPR’s Alastair Bland reported last weekend, that thousands of endangered king salmon in northern California’s Klamath River are threatened by low water levels because water is being diverted to almond farms. Despite the severe drought, as of June 30, California's Department of Agriculture projected that almond farmers will have their largest harvest to date. If more water is not released into the river soon, Bland reported, the salmon will be seriously threatened by a disease called gill rot. If there's one disease I never want to get, it's gill rot.
Even as almond production increases in California, demand is driving prices ever higher. Other producers are getting into the game. In England, for example, the cost of almonds has almost doubled over the past five years, and sales of almond milk increased 79 percent in a year. "The value of each kernel has gone up dramatically, and growers are looking for the best return on their investment, so they're still planting almond trees at an alarming rate," one farmer told BBC’s Peter Bowes. "If you decided to plant an orchard right now, you would wait two years for available root stock to actually plant."
The crop is so valuable in the U.K., Bowes reported in February, there had been a spate of thefts and missing almond trucks. He wrote, "Nut-nappers, as they have become known, have been making off with produce by the lorryload." A truck loaded with nuts can be worth more than $160,000.
Almond theft is not a major issue in California, but as almond skeptic Tom Philpott put it in Mother Jones, the ecological implications of almond farming during a drought are “potentially dire.” Over-pumping of aquifers threatens infrastructure like roads, which stand to collapse into sunken ground. Farmers can fallow vegetable fields during droughts, but almond trees need steady supplies of water.
California's almond industry is also completely reliant on honeybees to pollinate its almond trees. The industry requires 1.4 million bee colonies, according to the USDA, most of which are brought to the state from across the country. Because of colony collapse disorder, honeybees are a commodity. The almond farmers' requirements represent approximately 60 percent of the country's managed colonies. This year many of the mercenary pollinating bees brought to California died due to exposure to pesticides.
Anyway, when I buy almonds, I don't think about having a hand in killing bees or salmon, or getting someone's truck stolen or collapsing a road. It's just a jumble of what's "good for me," what I feel like eating, and how much things cost. Michael Specter’s feature on GMOs in last week's New Yorker gets into how seven billion people on the planet will be 10 billion by the end of the century, and feeding that population might well be the greatest challenge to humanity ever. Thinking about going easy on almonds is sort of analogous to GMO dilemmas or buying organic, where the point isn’t really nutrition, it's environmental consciousness and sustainability, which always come back to water. Thinking about that side of food makes it hard to write about nutrition in isolation. Anyway, almonds are good for our hearts.
James Hamblin, MD, is a senior editor at The Atlantic. He writes the health column for the monthly magazine and hosts the video series If Our Bodies Could Talk. | More
Yet even some conservatives who’ve had the billionaire lie to their faces trust his pledge to nominate originalist judges to the Supreme Court.
In February 2015, Hugh Hewitt secured a promise from Donald Trump. Before even hearing the details, do you have a guess as to whether his promise was kept or broken?
This week, Hewitt is trying to persuade his fellow conservatives that, if elected, Trump will nominate originalists to the Supreme Court. The conservatives are skeptical.
To persuade them, Hewitt has published a column asserting that Trump will too nominate originalists, like the ones on a list Trump submitted under pressure from the conservative movement, citing a transcript from their most recent radio interview together. “There you have it,” Hewitt writes. “If Donald Trump departs from his list of future Supreme Court nominees, Donald Trump has authorized Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans to block that nominee and enforce the list.”
The Republican nominee long used the media to project his fairy tale self-image but now blames the industry for his flailing campaign.
Long addicted to media attention, Donald Trump is like strung-out junkie, blaming heroin for his fall.
He will never recover, because he will never fault himself.
The self-professed billionaire and serial bankruptcy filer built his career on a singular strength: an ability to manipulate the media to project his fairy tale self-image. Never as rich or as smart or as powerful or as respected or (God forbid) as sexual as he projected himself to be, Trump now bashes the industry that made him rather than face the truth.
Like the hero of a Greek tragedy, his strength becomes his undoing.
"If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn't put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20%," Trump said Sunday in one of seven anti-media tweets.
The lonely poverty of America’s white working class
For the last several months, social scientists have been debating the striking findings of a study by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.* Between 1998 and 2013, Case and Deaton argue, white Americans across multiple age groups experienced large spikes in suicide and fatalities related to alcohol and drug abuse—spikes that were so large that, for whites aged 45 to 54, they overwhelmed the dependable modern trend of steadily improving life expectancy. While critics have challenged the magnitude and timing of the rise in middle-age deaths (particularly for men), they and the study’s authors alike seem to agree on some basic points: Problems of mental health and addiction have taken a terrible toll on whites in America—though seemingly not in other wealthy nations—and the least educated among them have fared the worst.
He was the first whistleblower charged under the Espionage Act—and his trial set the pattern for how the government treats unauthorized disclosure of classified information.
Jack Nickerson watched the papers burn. It was the afternoon of January 2, 1957, and an overnight cold snap had descended on northern Alabama, pushing daytime temperatures to near freezing. His neighbors would think nothing of the smoke wafting from the chimney of the large antebellum colonial he shared with his wife and four children. There weren’t all that many neighbors anyway. The house sat on an isolated corner of Redstone Arsenal, a sprawling Army base in Huntsville. A reservoir surrounded it on three sides.
Nickerson, a colonel, had good reason to avoid attention. For the past three hours, he had scoured his office and home for copies of the documents that now sat stacked next to the fireplace, growing shorter by the minute. The word “SECRET” crumpled and blackened before being consumed by the flames.
Jared Leto’s turn in Suicide Squad is the latest reminder that the technique has become more about ego and marketing than good performances.
Of all the stories surfacing about the new DC Comics film Suicide Squad—from the dismal reviews to the box-office reports—the most disconcerting are the ones that detail how Jared Leto got into his role as the Joker. Leto was reportedly so committed to the part that he gifted the cast and crew with a litany of horrible items: used condoms, a dead pig, a live rat. To get into the character’s twisted mindset, he also watched footage of brutal crimes online. “The Joker is incredibly comfortable with acts of violence,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was watching real violence, consuming that.There’s a lot you can learn from seeing it.”
Watching Leto tell one disturbing tale after another makes one thing abundantly clear: Method acting is over. Not the technique itself, which has fueled many of cinema’s greatest performances and can be a useful way of approaching difficult roles. But Leto’s stories show how going to great lengths to inhabit a character is now as much a marketing tool as it is an actual technique—one used to lend an air of legitimacy, verisimilitude, and importance to a performance no matter its quality. Leto’s Joker is the latest evidence that the prestige of method acting has dimmed—thanks to the technique’s overuse by those seeking award-season glory or a reputation boost, as well as its history of being shaped by destructive ideas of masculinity.
Researchers found that they bought into the trope that Asian Americans are more competent, and blacks and Latinos need to “work harder.”
Asian American students are “cold but competent.” Latinos and blacks “need to work harder to move up.”
At least, that’s how some of their white peers at the country’s elite colleges and universities see them, according to a new study by Baylor University researchers. The study uses data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen, a survey of 898 participants from 27 prestigious American universities in which respondents rated their opinions of Asian, black, and Latino Americans based on work ethic, intelligence, and perseverance.
Researchers set out to determine whether stereotypes of these minority groups are commonly believed and found their suspicions confirmed.
The arrival of Chinese international students comes at a cost to some.
When my father was a graduate student at Loyola University in Chicago, two distinct things marked his day: the “L” and instant noodles. It was 1998 in a studio apartment in Rogers Park below the Red Line. Every night, the sounds of the train woke him up. Every morning, he got up after a restless night and made himself some ramen. After those three years, he never wanted to look at instant noodles again.
At that time, it was almost unheard of for Chinese students to go to the United States for undergraduate study. Instead, everyone suffered through the dreaded gaokao, the Chinese college-entrance examination. For four consecutive days in June, thousands of Chinese high schoolers sat in stuffy classrooms with no air conditioning, sweating and exerting themselves in subjects like mathematics, physics, and English to get one single score high enough to earn a coveted spot at a top university. Most students who did go abroad were graduate students, and many of them stayed in the new country.
The Republican nominee says the U.S. needs to be tougher—on its enemies, immigrants, and the nations it invades.
If Donald Trump had been president 13 years ago, he insists now, the United States would never have invaded Iraq. But if he had launched the war—and mind you, he would not have, even though he supported it at the time—the U.S. would have lost a lot less blood and won a lot more treasure.
“We should have kept the oil,” Trump said during the middle of a 48-minute speech on radical Islam and national security that he delivered Monday afternoon in Youngstown, Ohio.
This might seem like a minor aside coming from Trump, a provocative little I-told-you-so from a man who loves to tell you so. The fateful Iraq decision happened so long ago now: Why would the Republican nominee want to muddle a key distinction between himself and Hillary Clinton that, at least according to his revisionist history, works in his favor? But Trump’s point about the oil was an important one—so much so that he repeated it three more times. “I was saying this constantly and consistently to whoever would listen. I said: Keep the oil, keep the oil, keep the oil,” Trump recalled. “Don’t let someone else get it.”
A few themes emerge among intellectuals on the right about what attracts them to the candidate: his campaign’s energy, his impassioned following, and his eagerness to call out the establishment.
Logically, Donald Trump should have less support among intellectuals than he had a year ago. That’s because over the past year, he has made statements that expose him as both ignorant of public policy and contemptuous of liberal-democratic norms. He has proposed banning Muslims from entering the United States, incited violence against protesters at his rallies, responded to The Washington Post’s critical coverage by warning that its owner is “getting away with murder” on his taxes and “we can’t let him get away with it,” declared a federal judge biased because he’s Mexican American, and twice revealed his unfamiliarity with the term nuclear triad.
Instead, more than a year after Trump announced his presidential bid, his support among intellectuals has grown. Of course, many prominent conservatives—from George Will to William Kristol to David Brooks to Erick Erickson—oppose him militantly. But another cluster of writers and thinkers have declared themselves supportive of, or at least open to supporting, Trump. Among Trump’s critics, the predominant explanation for this openness is opportunism: Supporting the Republican nominee can have professional benefits. But a deeper dynamic is at work. It’s just hard to recognize, because American intellectuals haven’t felt the allure of authoritarian, illiberal politics this strongly in a long time.
Chevrolet’s marketing campaign is the culmination of a truthiness-in-advertising trend.
During commercial breaks at the Olympics viewing parties I’ve been at in the past week, one company’s ads have consistently sent the room into a round of existential questions. What is reality? Aren’t we all actors? Just how excited can a normal person get about J.D. Power awards?
In Chevrolet’s “Real People, Not Actors” ads, focus-groups participants react enthusiastically to information about automobiles. Sometimes, this is accomplished with a high-concept trick, like when the moderator pretended to destroy the group’s cell phones to show the importance of having a ride with wi-fi. At other times the pitch is more straightforward, like with the spots running frequently during the Olympics that emphasize the accolades Chevrolet has earned. “Thanks for blowing our minds,” one participant says, and it’s not clear whether she’s referring to Chevy’s award-winning dependability or the enormous elevator that’s been hoisting cars into the air in front of her.
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