Althouse

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• "The Battle Over Gender Therapy/More teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them."
• "There is something compelling in the idea that women shouldn’t have to prove their economic worth or intelligence as a way of arguing for their self-worth and independence."
• "I think on its face, the ice cream that Walmart attempted to sell at best feels performative and exploitative..."
• "Don’t start by saying 'no' to everything... [Try] your first 'no' on someone you’re most afraid of telling 'no,' such as a parent or partner."
• "A sex party organizer in New York asked invitees to check themselves for lesions before showing up. And the organizers of the city’s main Pride celebrations..."
• "Alaska kids served [floor] sealant instead of milk at school program."
• "As part of this educational philosophy, [Charter Day School, a public charter school in North Carolina] has implemented a dress code to 'instill discipline and keep order' among students."
• "It’s nuts. It’s something so simple. It’s the standard, in my eyes, and it’s gone everywhere."
• "I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful."
• What a soft and gentle sunrise this morning.
• I've got 7 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best.
• "The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Wednesday, its biggest move since 1994..."
• "I’m not sure how great the sexual revolution was... It made us more available, I suppose, for sex... but I don’t know. It also introduced something else..."
• "In the fall of 1961, [Yoko] Ono gave a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall.... Onstage, twenty artists and musicians performed different acts—eating, breaking dishes, throwing bits of newspaper."
• "Britt Ruggiero and Justin Giuffrida bought a 2002 Bluebird school bus in February 2021, with plans to convert it into a 30-foot home on wheels."
• "Until the late 1990s, most researchers believed human brains were physically fixed and inflexible after early childhood."

"The Battle Over Gender Therapy/More teenagers than ever are seeking transitions, but the medical community that treats them is deeply divided about why — and what to do to help them." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 09:40 AM PDT This is an excellent article by Emily Bazelon in The New York Times. I'm not going to try to summarize it. If you're not a subscriber, I think it's worth one of your "free reads."

"There is something compelling in the idea that women shouldn’t have to prove their economic worth or intelligence as a way of arguing for their self-worth and independence." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 09:15 AM PDT "In its most interesting form, bimboism also makes a connection between the ideas of pleasure — sexual pleasure, pleasure in clothes, pleasure in simply existing as a woman in the world with a body on display — and political gains that would make it more possible, like universal health care, student loan debt cancellation and abortion rights.... For [TikTok-er Chrissy] Chlapecka, her bimbo persona is a bit, but it's also a bit serious: She really does want us to look at her boobs. It's performance of a version of her personality at high octane, one that she invites her audience to participate in themselves — have you considered that you, too, could be a bimbo, and that it might be fun?" From "Meet the Self-Described 'Bimbos' of TikTok" by Sophie Haigney (NYT). Quote from Chlapecka that begins the essay: "Are you a leftist who likes to have their tits out? Do you like to flick off pro-lifers?" I don't remember seeing the word "bimboism" before, but, googling, I can see it has currency. Here's Vice from back in February — "Bimbofication Is Taking Over. What Does That Mean for You?/'Are you a hyperfeminine woman? Are you really hot?'"  The modern-day bimbo is a fresh approach to intersectional feminism. There is, actually, careful thought behind bimbology, and it could be a way to reach true liberation....  [Chlapecka] answered the question: "Who is the Gen Z bimbo?" "A bimbo isn't dumb. Well, she kind of is, but she isn't that dumb! She's actually a radical leftist, who's pro sex work, pro Black Lives Matter, pro LGBTQ+, pro choice, and will always be there for her girlies, gays and theys"....  The idea of weaponised unintelligence isn't new – the trope is intertwined with the canon of "old Hollywood" bimbos over the years....  [F]or many feminists whose coming of age was centred around girlbossification – constantly hustling for rights and recognition, accepting eking "progress" on the never-ending crawl up the hypothetical ladder – it represents a shift towards finding empowerment by simply refusing to participate.... While girlboss feminism says, "I may be a girl, but I can climb the status quo's ladder and succeed in capitalism just like any other man!" Bimboism says, "I am literally just here to vibe. Either vibe with me or leave me alone."

"I think on its face, the ice cream that Walmart attempted to sell at best feels performative and exploitative..." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 08:40 AM PDT "... in part because Juneteenth is a holiday that signals celebration of liberation, and this feels like an empty symbol rather than a meaningful gesture that companies the size of Walmart could have made to the Black community across the United States in celebration of Juneteenth.... I think that it's really in the spirit of Juneteenth to ensure that they are doing things that are meaningful for the advancement of both their Black employees and their Black consumers and also where there are avenues for that—even investments in small Black-owned businesses. Juneteenth was once an obscure holiday... As it's getting renewed attention and visibility, I hope that companies will find ways to mark the historic significance of the holiday and not larger performative gestures like what we are seeing here with Walmart and other companies." Said Timothy Welbeck, an assistant professor of instruction in the Department of Africology and African American Studies and acting director of the Center for Anti-racism Research at Temple University, quoted in "Learning from Walmart's Juneteenth marketing mistake/Timothy Welbeck, acting director of the Center for Anti-racism Research, believes companies must develop more meaningful ways to observe the occasion rather than capitalizing off the holiday commercially" (Temple Now). Making Juneteenth a national holiday was itself a performative gesture, and now that it is a holiday, commercial entities will try to do things that mark the occasion, and holidays tend to be celebrated with foods and decorations and other superficial things. But it's a holiday related to slavery. I don't know what flavor the "Juneteenth-themed" ice cream was, but you can see a photo of the packaging at this CNN article, which also quotes a professor who uses the vogue word "performative": Stephanie Leonard, an assistant professor of management at Howard University who specializes in workplace diversity, equity and inclusion... called it "tokenism" when companies rely solely on one or two Black employees to decide how Juneteenth should be marked.  "It's tough for organizations to put forth an ice cream or watermelon salad without having done the prior work," Leonard said. "Because it just comes off as performative, as a last-ditch effort. It does not come off as this organization values its Black employees or values its Black customers." ADDED: I see at MarketWatch — "'Shameless performative act': Walmart's Juneteenth-themed ice cream leads to backlash online" — that the flavor is red velvet and cheesecake.   AND: This makes me wonder why LGBTQ people are accepting rainbows. ALSO: Buzzfeed has a "cheat sheet" on what white people should not to do for Juneteenth. Shorter Buzzfeed: Whatever you come up with is almost certainly a bad idea. PLUS: It is a new holiday. Is it like Martin Luther King Day, a day to note but do nothing, or is it like Thanksgiving, where we look at the historical occasion and derive some things to turn into a tradition? Tell me 5 things that could be elements of a Juneteenth celebration — things that white people could do that would be respectful and appreciated. If it's too hard to do and fraught with faux pas, then it will not be celebrated. AH: Here's a PBS article that has exactly my "5 things" approach: "5 Ways to Celebrate Juneteenth With Your Family." This author, who appears to be black, recommends "red food and drinks like red velvet cake or strawberry soda." Based on the Walmart experience, I don't believe that white people eating red velvet cake and drinking strawberry soda will be appreciated.  HA HA: "Another issue with Walmart's Juneteenth ice cream was the fact that a trademark symbol appeared beside the holiday's name on the package" (Food & Wine). Celebrating ending the owning of slaves with an attempt to own the occasion of celebrating ending the owning of slaves.

"Don’t start by saying 'no' to everything... [Try] your first 'no' on someone you’re most afraid of telling 'no,' such as a parent or partner." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 07:10 AM PDT "Instead, try to say 'no' or voice your opinion in situations with lower stakes, and observe the results. 'We tend to, in our heads, build up these huge fears about what's going to happen'.... By finding small ways to change how you would typically behave, perhaps you'll see that 'you can have a disagreement with somebody or you can express your opinion and they don't run away'...." From "How to know if you're a people-pleaser and what to do about it" (WaPo). I found that interesting even though the problem under discussion is just about exactly the opposite of mine. My instinct is always to say no. I have to experiment with not saying no. If I'm worrying about "what's going to happen," it's going to be what's going to happen if I say yes. The demands will never cease! I want my freedom. I want my time.

"A sex party organizer in New York asked invitees to check themselves for lesions before showing up. And the organizers of the city’s main Pride celebrations..." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 06:57 AM PDT "... posted a monkeypox notice Sunday on their Instagram account... The virus, long endemic in parts of Africa, is now transmitting globally, and, while it can infect anyone, at the moment it is spreading primarily through networks of men who have sex with men, officials say.... 'Without meaning to make light of this, we have once again have been caught with our pants down by a global pandemic that we were not prepared for,' said Mark Harrington, the executive director of the Treatment Action Group and a long time AIDS activist...  The C.D.C....recently put out a sex-positive fact sheet on social gatherings and safer sex, which, rather than telling everyone to stay home, contains specific tips for avoiding monkeypox such as keeping clothes on during sex and not kissing... ... [Joseph Osmundson, a microbiologist at New York University] and other activists have also been working through their own channels to educate the L.G.B.T.Q. community about the virus — for example, by crafting messages that sex party promoters can distribute to attendees that include photos of monkeypox lesions.'When I talk to my friends in the queer community, we want intervention,' Dr. Osmundson said. 'We do not want monkeypox. The spaces where we meet for pleasure and companionship, we don't want those to be shut down, number one. And we like going into those spaces with as little worry, and as little risk, as possible.'"  From "As Monkeypox Spreads, a Campaign to Warn the Public Gains Urgency/Be aware but don't panic, say health officials and advocates as cases of the disease tick upward in New York and around the country" (NYT). Just as I'm creating a "monkeypox" tag, I'm seeing "WHO to rename monkeypox after scientists call it 'discriminatory'" (WaPo). Discriminatory against who? I haven't read the article yet, and I can't work it out in my head. They can't be worried about insulting monkeys. We have swine flu and so forth, so naming the animals is standard. Does it have something to do with insulting black people? Gay men? Okay, now I've read it. The problem is that the disease is endemic in parts of Africa, and the media therefore tends to use pictures of African patients, and the word "monkey" in photo captions is susceptible to misreading.

"Alaska kids served [floor] sealant instead of milk at school program." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 06:07 AM PDT AP reports.  [Juneau, Superintendent Bridget] Weiss said the milk and the floor sealant, which is also a milky, white substance, both come in large plastic bags that are stored inside cardboard boxes. For the milk, the pouch is removed from the box and placed inside the dispenser to serve with meals instead of in cartons.  Both the milk and sealant were stored at a district commodity storage site off campus. Weiss said that somehow, boxes with sealant in large pouches were "stored or moved on the same pallet as large pouches of milk that were also in cardboard boxes. We don't know how that happened, but they were all put on the same pallet... That pallet was delivered, and the assumption was that it was milk because that's what we thought was being delivered."

"As part of this educational philosophy, [Charter Day School, a public charter school in North Carolina] has implemented a dress code to 'instill discipline and keep order' among students." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 06:35 AM PDT "Among other requirements, all students must wear a unisex polo shirt and closed-toe shoes; '[e]xcessive or radical haircuts and colors' are prohibited; and boys are forbidden from wearing jewelry. Female students are required to wear a 'skirt,' 'jumper,' or 'skort.' In contrast, boys must wear shorts or pants... In 2015, plaintiff Bonnie Peltier, the mother of a female kindergarten student at CDS, informed [the founder of the school, Baker A. Mitchell, Jr.] that she objected to the skirts requirement. Mitchell responded to Peltier in support of the policy, stating: 'The Trustees, parents, and other community supporters were determined to preserve chivalry and respect among young women and men in this school of choice. For example, young men were to hold the door open for the young ladies and to carry an umbrella, should it be needed. Ma'am and sir were to be the preferred forms of address. There was felt to be a need to restore, and then preserve, traditional regard for peers.' Mitchell later elaborated that chivalry is 'a code of conduct where women are treated, they're regarded as a fragile vessel that men are supposed to take care of and honor.' Mitchell further explained that, in implementing the skirts requirement, CDS sought to 'treat[] [girls] courteously and more gently than boys.'" Wrote the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Peltier v. Charter Day School. That case is discussed in The Washington Post in "A school made girls wear skirts. A court ruled it unconstitutional." This was an en banc decision, and there are 3 judges dissenting and 3 judges dissenting in part. Let's just take a look at the dissenting opinion, by Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, which begins at page 84:  The majority misses the whole purpose of the development of charter schools.... It is essentially dismissive of what charter schools might have to contribute, prejudging them as miscreants that must be brought to heel....  The very idea of a different model of schooling has drawn the ire of the public education establishment. As this case shows, any challenge to prevailing educational convention is met by circling the wagons....  Student dress codes in particular are unsettling to those who believe, as plaintiffs do here, that they connote feminine inferiority. See Majority Op. at 28. The codes are founded upon ideals of "chivalry," a word which to the majority suggests male condescension toward women and the need of women for male protection, which in turn robs women of their dignity and independence. Id. at 28–29.  As Justice Brennan said some years ago, such "romantic paternalism" can "put women, not on a pedestal, but in a cage." Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U.S. 677, 684 (1973) (plurality)....  I understand and respect this view. But the view is not universal. And the "cage" is one of imprisonment in our own perspective, a reluctance to recognize that across the great span of America, there are views that differ from the judge's own.  To a great many people, dress codes represent an ideal of chivalry that is not patronizing to women, but appreciative and respectful of them. Far from being a pejorative term, chivalry is symbolic of the tone that CDS wishes to set. "Chivalry" harkens to the age of knighthood, defined as "[t]he brave, honourable, and courteous character attributed to the ideal knight." Chivalry, Oxford English Dictionary (2d ed. 1989). What the knights bestowed upon their ladies fair at the end of a tournament has become the bouquet of roses extended on stage at the close of an opera.  The majority seeks to portray the age of chivalry as a brutal time. See Majority Op. at 28. But that is hardly the point. CDS uses chivalry in an aspirational sense, not to recreate an earlier time in all of its particulars, but to capture the contemporary connotations of a chivalric order as one in which women are due from the very inception of schooling the greatest measure of respect.  Whether a more chivalric order would in some way enhance mutual respect between the sexes, I hardly know. But one need only look to sexual assaults of women on campus, sexual harassment and belittlement of women in the workplace, sexual degradation of women on the internet, sexual trafficking of young women here and abroad, and spousal abuse of women in the home to know that all is not well. Views legitimately differ on the remedies for this condition. But CDS's chivalric approach should neither be legally banished from the educational system, nor should it be legally imposed. For CDS, the dress code is an adjunct to an altogether lawful and legitimate view of education that relies upon a "classical curriculum espousing traditional western civilization values." J.A. 80.....  The advent of new possibilities need not extinguish more traditional gender roles which lend stability to home and family and ultimately to society itself. Indeed, many women embrace and balance both modern and traditional elements in their lives, to the benefit of the worlds of both work and family life....  So what if certain charter schools or private schools reside at the more traditional side of the spectrum? I'm okay; you're okay. There is room for all in an educational system worth its salt. The crucial question is one of student and parental choice. North Carolina has designed a system that allows parents and students to choose among varied options, and charter schools seek to preserve precisely that choice While some of these options espouse value systems with which the majority may disagree, that is no reason for it to stretch the Fourteenth Amendment to stamp out the right of others to hold different values and to make different choices....  It is said that dress codes are themselves coercive and antithetical to student choice. That misses the point. Preserving variety is the very reason to have a menu. You need not eat, or even like, everything on offer, and others' tastes may well differ from your own. Castigating the chef for including salmon as an option (or a fellow customer for ordering it) makes little sense when you can order steak for yourself. So too here. No one is forced to go to a charter school, and certainly not to CDS....  But it is there for those who want it, and their choice is due respect. The majority fails to offer even that much. Does it not see the irony of mandating uniformity by striking down CDS's uniform mandate? That is a shame.... ADDED: Now, that's a kick-ass dissent. You may wonder what The Washington Post said about it. Answer? Not a damned thing. It doesn't even mention that there is a dissent. AND: I went to public school and graduated from high school in 1969. The entire time, I was required to wear a skirt. Looking back, I regard this as grossly unfair. Imagine recess with swings, slides, and jungle gyms and boys making a game of pulling up your skirt and gleeful exclamations about seeing underpants.

"It’s nuts. It’s something so simple. It’s the standard, in my eyes, and it’s gone everywhere." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 04:57 AM PDT Said a high school boy named Eric Fila, quoted in "High school catcher baffled by attention for his 'simple' act of sportsmanship" (WaPo). Video of a walk-off single in the 10th inning of a Virginia state quarterfinal baseball game went viral last week — not because of the clutch hit but for the reaction of the losing team's catcher in the wake of a season-ending defeat. Mitch Maurer's walk off single to win state quarterfinals for Herndon High School baseball! @MitchMaurer_04 @HHornetBaseball @LSBR11 @NoVAHSBB pic.twitter.com/WvhzWFY9iL — Steven Beasley (@stevebeasleydc) June 8, 2022

"I was terrified of becoming pregnant. I was terrified of putting my life on hold for two-plus years. I don’t want to lose opportunities. I don’t want to be resentful." Posted: 16 Jun 2022 04:46 AM PDT Said the actress Jamie Chung — she's in "Dexter: New Blood" — quoted in "An actor's use of a surrogate raises radical-feminist questions," a WaPo opinion piece by Alyssa Rosenberg.  Chung, 39, acknowledged that people might assume she was "vain"... [S]urrogacy essentially offloads the discomforts and incapacities of pregnancy onto another woman. Yet there's something galvanizing about hearing a woman bluntly rage against the limits of biology and the costs it imposes on half the population...  [In 1970, Shulamith Firestone wrote] "Women were the slave class that maintained the species... to free the other half for the business of the world — admittedly often its drudge aspects, but certainly all its creative aspects as well."... Firestone believed that 'artificial reproduction'... was imminent.... If Firestone were alive today, she might acidly condemn surrogacy as an example of a "servant class" liberating a few more privileged women from "the tyranny of reproduction."... Jamie Chung is proof of how uncomfortable it is to confront the unfairness of biological reality head-on.... Fifty years after Firestone dreamed that women might be freed from the prison of biology, we're still judging women who try to bust themselves out — rather than the systems that constrain them. The systems? Rosenberg briefly mentions what she calls our "cynically libertarian system." That refers to the lack of support for those who bear and raise children — people whom Rosenberg, like Firestone, calls women. You might question how libertarian our system is and how cynical libertarianism is. I'd say we're far from libertarianism, and libertarianism is actually not cynical. It's too optimistic.  But is biology a prison?  That's at least a point of view — a metaphor to choose. But if you do choose that metaphor, how does it work? Can you "bust out" of biology? Where can you go? You have to live this life in a body, though you are free to regard your own body as your prison. You can hate it and want out. You can do radical things to it. And going through pregnancy and childbirth is one of those radical things that can happen to a body. You can love that or hate it. You can seek it out, and you can take big steps to avoid it. One of the big steps you can take is to spend a lot of money to get someone else to do it for you. Is anyone a "slave" here? "Slave" is Firestone's word. Rosenberg never repeats it. We don't use slavery as a metaphor these days. Rosenberg vaguely grasps at the notion that our "cynically libertarian system" makes slaves prisoners out of women. Or was it nature that made us prisoners, prisoners of biology? That's a beef against life itself. I suspect the answer Rosenberg would give is that she loves life in general but wants technology and government to work diligently to eliminate all the bad parts.

What a soft and gentle sunrise this morning. Posted: 15 Jun 2022 05:39 PM PDT  At 5:11: At 5:30: Talk about anything you want in the comments.

I've got 7 TikToks for you tonight. Let me know what you like best. Posted: 15 Jun 2022 05:35 PM PDT 1. You know how Mom just loves to sit outside at the restaurant. 2. Vying for the title Best Ginger.  3. Singing all the parts. 4. "Can we play dead yet?" 5. The difference between the South and the Midwest.  6. That girl who just got engaged. 7. That fake Coke everyone's making.

"The Federal Reserve raised interest rates by three-quarters of a percentage point on Wednesday, its biggest move since 1994..." Posted: 15 Jun 2022 12:17 PM PDT "... as the central bank ramps up its efforts to tackle the fastest inflation in four decades. The big rate increase... has underlined that Fed officials are serious about crushing price increases even if it comes at a cost to the economy." The NYT reports.

"I’m not sure how great the sexual revolution was... It made us more available, I suppose, for sex... but I don’t know. It also introduced something else..." Posted: 15 Jun 2022 03:00 PM PDT "... which felt to me and feels to me now when I look back on it a little bit predatory and certainly, which led I think directly, to the sort of ladette Nineties, where women were supposed to be just like men. Now for me, feminism is not about women becoming more like men. It's not about that. It's about finding our space, enlarging our space, and the ways in which we work in the world in order to balance things out." Said the actress Emma Thompson, quoted in "Emma Thompson: Sexual revolution encouraged predatory behaviour" (London Times). Had I ever noticed the word "ladette"?  TV Tropes explains: She likes sports, beer, cars, swearing, fighting, and sex in a stereotypically masculine way. She is crude, rude, often hygienically challenged, and cheerfully ignorant and aggressive. If you are a guy, she'll probably challenge you to a fight or a drinking competition, win both and then take an aggressive lead in anything sexual that happens, before kicking you out the front door the following morning or teasing you mercilessly if she lets you stay some more. In short, she is a young woman with the personality of a Fratbro. She is the Lad-ette. Despite (or perhaps because of) their masculine personalities, Lad-ettes are generally heavily sexualised and are not likely to let any males in the company forget they are female. They usually disdain the hassle of highly elaborately feminine clothing/hair/makeup, but don't often dress in a truly cross-dressing way; Tank-Top Tomboy is a common Lad-ette style....   And here's a Vice article from 2017 — "The Rise and Fall of the Ladette/How women taking their clothes off and getting shitfaced were celebrated and shunned in the space of just a few years." A late-1990s and early-2000s phenomenon, it was an era in which women ruled supreme. A boisterous, bolshy, boozy free-for-all where you could get away with saying or doing pretty much anything... [T]he ladette was mouthy, up for a laugh, took her clothes off and could out-do any male companion in the drinking stakes.... "The 'ladette' liberated young women from the confines of a very conservative form of femininity because they could behave just like men," explains Professor Angela Smith of Sunderland University.... Nearly two decades later, ladettism eventually burnt itself out.... Post-2000, gender roles are much less likely to be set in stone. We perhaps therefore don't feel the need to define those who "act like men" as ladettes because, as Smith points out, "it's arguable there is a greater acceptance of different gender roles. It's much more acceptable to behave in a diverse way." That was 2017, remember. In 2022, gender roles have made something of a comeback.

"In the fall of 1961, [Yoko] Ono gave a concert in Carnegie Recital Hall.... Onstage, twenty artists and musicians performed different acts—eating, breaking dishes, throwing bits of newspaper." Posted: 15 Jun 2022 11:48 AM PDT "At designated intervals, a toilet was flushed offstage. A man was positioned at the back of the hall to give the audience a sense of foreboding. A huddle of men with tin cans tied to their legs attempted to cross the stage without making noise. The dancers Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown sat down and stood up repeatedly. According to the Village Voice, the performance finished with Ono's amplified 'sighs, breathing, gasping, retching, screaming—many tones of pain and pleasure mixed with a jibberish of foreign-sounding language that was no language at all.'... When conceptual artists hit the big time, at the end of the nineteen-sixties, her name was virtually never mentioned.... When Ono and Lennon married, she was a coterie artist and he was a popular entertainer.... She decided that condescension to popular entertainment is a highbrow prejudice. As she put it, 'I came to believe that avant-garde purity was just as stifling as just doing a rock beat over and over.' So she became a pop star.... When 'Imagine' was released, one of Ono's instruction pieces from 'Grapefruit' was printed on the back cover: 'Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put them in.'" Writes Louis Menand in "Yoko Ono's Art of Defiance Before she met John Lennon, she was a significant figure in avant-garde circles and had created a masterpiece of conceptual art. Did celebrity deprive her of her due as an artist?" (The New Yorker).

"Britt Ruggiero and Justin Giuffrida bought a 2002 Bluebird school bus in February 2021, with plans to convert it into a 30-foot home on wheels." Posted: 15 Jun 2022 09:52 AM PDT "At the time, diesel fuel prices in their home state of Colorado were averaging around $3 per gallon... [They] gutted their bus, which they've dubbed the G Wagon, created a kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, and installed plumbing and solar power. They also mapped out an ambitious yearlong, cross-country trip.... They got on the road this March, only to realize quickly that gas prices were not what they'd expected. 'We drove to Florida basically all in one weekend.... We were estimating it to cost about $200 [to fill the 60-gallon tank] and lately it's been about $300.' With... 8 to 10 miles per gallon... [the] first trip cost them nearly $2,000 on gas alone." From "When #Vanlife Meets the $300 Tank/Remaining in destinations longer, using gas apps and signing up for fuel cards allows nomadic travelers to stay on the road" (NYT). ADDED: At the comments over there: I vacillate between "good for them for following their dream" and "what did you think was going to happen?" It is a special kind of privilege to glorify and actively purse a lifestyle that is for many a last resort before becoming homeless. And the terse taunt: ...in a vaaaaan down by the river!  AND: The NYT does arithmetic: "With a 60-gallon tank, and fuel mileage of about 8 to 10 miles per gallon, the G Wagon needed gas every four hours."

"Until the late 1990s, most researchers believed human brains were physically fixed and inflexible after early childhood." Posted: 15 Jun 2022 09:08 AM PDT "We were born, it was thought, with most of the brain cells we would ever have and could not make more. But... studies using specialized dyes to identify newborn cells indicated that some parts of our brains create neurons deep into adulthood, a process known as neurogenesis... [F]or the new study... [researchers]  divided the volunteers into groups, one of which began a supervised program of stretching and balance training three times a week, to serve as an active control. Another started walking together three times a week, briskly, for about 40 minutes. And the final group took up dancing, meeting three times a week to learn and practice line dances and group choreography..... The walkers and dancers were aerobically fitter, as expected. Even more important, their white matter seemed renewed. In the new scans, the nerve fibers in certain portions of their brains looked larger, and any tissue lesions had shrunk. These desirable alterations were most prevalent among the walkers, who also performed better on memory tests now. The dancers, in general, did not. Meanwhile, the members of the control group, who had not exercised aerobically, showed declining white matter health after the six months, with greater thinning and tattering of their axons and falling cognitive scores." From "How Walking Can Build Up the Brain/Older men and women who walked for six months showed improvements in white matter and memory, while those who danced or did stretching exercises did not" (NYT). From the top-rated comment: "One aspect not addressed by this article: While walking, one is engaged in a kind if relaxed thinking. I walk a lot and constantly think about things - important and mundane things. I make plans, solve problems, talk to myself about issues - walking provides a kind of meditative state while you're doing it."

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