Obesity Research and Commentary: Today's Roundup

Harvey Weinstein and the Economics of Consent

Brit Marling

The blunt power of the gatekeeper is the ability to enforce not just artistic, but also financial, exile.

When the Harvey Weinstein story broke, I thought of something my mother told me when I was a little girl. She said: To be a free woman, you have to be a financially independent woman. She wasn’t wrong. I studied economics in college and went to New York to become an investment banker. To be blunt, I wanted the freedom money can buy.

I had a sudden change of heart while working at Goldman Sachs as a summer analyst. I decided that if the world required me to sell the hours of my life in exchange for access to what had long ago been free—food, water, shelter—I wanted to at least be doing something that stirred my soul. This is, granted, a privileged position. But as a young woman that was the conclusion I came to.

Fuse / Getty / Tanner Boriack / Peter Kleinau / Nicolas Barbier Garreau / Rachel Lees / Unsplash / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

On Safari in Trump's America

Molly Ball

The country’s elites are desperate to figure out what they got wrong in 2016. But can they handle the truth?

It was the hippies who drove Nancy Hale over the edge. She had spent three days listening respectfully to the real people of Middle America, and finally she couldn’t take it any longer.

She turned off the tape recorder and took several deep breaths, leaning back in the passenger seat of the rented GMC Yukon. The sun had just come out from behind a mass of clouds, casting a gleam on the rain-soaked parking lot in rural Wisconsin.

Hale, who is 65 and lives in San Francisco, is a career activist who got her start protesting nuclear plants and nuclear testing in the 1970s. In 2005, she was one of the founders of Third Way, a center-left think tank, and it was in that capacity that she and four colleagues had journeyed from both coasts to the town of Viroqua, Wisconsin, as part of a post-election listening tour. They had come on a well-meaning mission: to better understand their fellow Americans, whose political behavior in the last election had left them confused and distressed.

Four people and a dog are silhouetted against a sunset or sunrise. — Mark J. Terrill / AP

A Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness

James Hamblin

Find the right environment, and very little effort is necessary.

Happiness is an active process, not something you get by sitting back and waiting. It’s something to be grabbed by the horns or more vulnerable areas and then conquered. At least, this is the gist of the message from Tony Robbins and gurus of his ilk.

Many also say happiness is not something we can buy, or steal, or work too hard to acquire. If you work too hard at it, you end up obsessing over your own state of mind—Am I happy? ... Really though? And like love, if you have to ask, the answer is no.

So what’s the right way to think about effort and happiness? Should I be trying for “happiness” per se—or something more magnanimous, like purpose or meaning?

Or money? Is happiness actually all about money? That would be a real twist.

Myeshia Johnson kisses the casket of her husband, Sergeant La David Johnson. — Joe Skipper / Reuters

Trump Attacks a Grieving Widow’s Account

David A. Graham

The president reescalated the ongoing debate over his condolences to Gold Star families by contradicting the widow of a fallen Special Forces sergeant.

“You know, when I was a kid growing up, a lot of things were sacred in our country,” White House Chief of Staff John Kelly said Thursday. Among those were Gold Star families: “I just thought—the selfless devotion that brings a man or woman to die on the battlefield, I just thought that that might be sacred.”

But Kelly acknowledged that might no longer be true: “Gold Star families, I think that left in the convention over the summer.”

Then on Monday morning, Kelly’s boss decided to prolong a feud with the widow of a fallen American soldier:

I had a very respectful conversation with the widow of Sgt. La David Johnson, and spoke his name from beginning, without hesitation!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 23, 2017

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

Jean M. Twenge

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

Alexander Koerner / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

Harvey Weinstein's Statements Have Taken a Striking Turn

Megan Garber

First came the denials. Then came the apologies. Now, the mogul is claiming “a different recollection of the events.”

“Brit Marling is a super talented actress and writer. Mr. Weinstein has a different recollection of the events.’’

That was Harvey Weinstein’s spokesperson, Sallie Hofmeister, offering a statement to The Atlantic in response to Marling’s essay that shares her experience—an invitation to shower, an offer of a massage, in a form now eerily familiar—of a 2014 encounter with Weinstein.

The statement is nearly identical in wording to the one Weinstein’s team offered in response to the op-ed Lupita Nyong’o published in The New York Times late last week—one describing predatory behavior playing out over a series of discrete interactions she’d had with Weinstein early in her career. Here was a Weinstein spokesperson, replying to Nyong’o’s essay through a statement given to E! News:

A Catfishing With a Happy Ending

Jeff Maysh

Emma Perrier was deceived by an older man on the internet—a hoax that turned into an unbelievable love story.

Emma Perrier spent the summer of 2015 mending a broken heart, after a recent breakup. By September, the restaurant manager had grown tired of watching The Notebook alone in her apartment in Twickenham, a leafy suburb southwest of London, and decided it was time to get back out there. Despite the horror stories she’d heard about online dating, Emma, 33, downloaded a matchmaking app called Zoosk. The second “o” in the Zoosk logo looks like a diamond engagement ring, which suggested that its 38 million members were seeking more than the one-night stands offered by apps like Tinder.

She snapped the three selfies the app required to “verify her identity.” Emma, who is from a volcanic city near the French Alps, not far from the source of Perrier mineral water, is petite, and brunette. She found it difficult to meet men, especially as she avoided pubs and nightclubs, and worked such long hours at a coffee shop in the city’s financial district that she met only stockbrokers, who were mostly looking for cappuccinos, not love.

Cartoonish figures interact with the world through code. — Lynn Scurfield

The Coming Software Apocalypse

James Somers

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

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The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

Pro-independence protesters wave Catalan flags — Gonzalo Fuentes / Reuters

Why Aren't There More New Countries?

Krishnadev Calamur

Catalonia and Kurdistan show demands for self-determination aren’t enough.

What is a country? Is it a place like the United States that is recognized by all other countries and is a member of the United Nations? Is it, like Kosovo, a place that is recognized by most of the world’s powers but isn’t a UN member? Where does Taiwan, which has its own government and its own military despite being claimed by China, fit? And where does all this leave places like Catalonia and Iraqi Kurdistan, many of whose citizens have voted to secede over the objections of the countries they’re currently part of?

“Really, when we’re talking about a country, we’re talking about a political territory with a population, a government, and legally recognized boundaries that indicate or grant sovereignty,” Rebecca Richards, a lecturer in international relations at Keele University in the U.K., said in an email. “They are the legally determined shapes on a map.”

A buck licks the head of a small island fox in a grass clearing — Chris Lowe / California State University Shark Lab

Why Is This Deer Licking This Fox?

Paul Bisceglio

A cuddly island mystery

When Chris Lowe first saw the buck stoop to lick the small, silver-speckled fox, he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. He’d just gotten back from a run on Santa Catalina, a remote Southern Californian island where he studies sharks, and came upon the two animals in the scrub. Mule deer and island foxes, the rascally miniature descendants of gray foxes, are everyday sights on Catalina’s grassy hills. But to see them nuzzling was downright weird.

Was the buck simply nibbling on a plant behind the fox? Had the fox happened to hop in front of the buck’s face? Lowe dashed into his apartment to grab his camera, and made it to the window to catch the deer taking another lick. The fox, docile in the shade of its antlered friend, wasn’t just tolerating the apparent cleaning, Lowe realized. “It looked like it was actually enjoying this,” he says.